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How Important Is Money To You? | Lots of my spiritually minded clients tell me that “money is not important to them” or that “they don’t want lots of money”.
Later in our conversation, they’ll tell me that they’re: “stuck in their business or in life and if they had more money they could do something different and it would all be better”.
Basically, they’re saying that they “wish they had more money to do the things they need to do”.
Do you see what I’m seeing here?
On the one hand they don’t care for money but on the other hand they want it…
The problem is that our mind listens to every word that we tell it. It doesn’t decide what is a good thought to have or a bad thought to have, it just listens to what we say and takes it all in.
Then it acts upon those words.
In cahoots with the Universe it sets things up for us to have the experience that we say we want.
If we say we want more money, the Universe sets the wheels in motion to allow that to happen. Maybe it will begin to bring new clients to us.
Unfortunately, not long afterwards we remind ourselves that money is not important to us and we wouldn’t want to be rich, so the only thing that the Universe can do when it hears that command is to slam the brakes on and make that client go somewhere else instead.
Does this happen to you? Just when you think things are getting better, it all falls apart again…?
Well I’m sorry to say that something in your powerful subconscious mind is responsible for creating that. The trick is to find what that is and change it.
Have you ever tried to drive a car with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake? You’d get nowhere very fast, plus you’d probably burn out a lot of things in the engine or the tyres or something at the same time too!
You’re giving your car mixed messages!
Go forwards.
Stop.
How is the car supposed to handle the mismatch of information and know what you really want it to do?
It can’t do both things at once and nor can your mind. It can’t act on two opposing ideas at the same time and nor can it hold two conflicting beliefs. All that happens is confusion and stuckness. Potentially even burnout. Does that sound familiar?
This is what many of us do repeatedly, every day, every week, every month. Sometimes for years on end.
We wonder why we’re stuck and we even blame others for why we can’t get ahead. “He did that to me. She did that to me” … Instead of taking responsibility for our own thoughts and actions, we go into full on victim mode and that’s really not a good vibe to be relying on the Law of Attraction to handle for you either.
What do you think it’s going to do with that? Quite likely bring you more of the same!
It seems so obvious why we can’t get ahead now, doesn’t it?
Well thankfully, this can all be cleared up really quickly with a bit of coaching or subconscious reprogramming work. (DM me if you need help with that — it’s what I do best).
But if you want to work on it, on your own… here’s a few quick tips to get you started.
Firstly, become aware of what you really think about money.
Secondly, become aware of stories that conflict with what you think you think about money. (ie the gas pedal and brake metaphor because we think we know what we’re thinking but sometimes we hold a conflicting story about the same subject).
Thirdly, choose which story you would rather have the Universe respond to and bring you more of (because that’s what it does through the Law of Attraction).
Fourthly, do everything to align with this story and never again utter the words, or have the thoughts, of the story that you don’t want to become a reality in your life.
Literally, stop giving your attention and energy to a story that you don’t want to experience.
You create your reality based upon the thoughts you have and the actions you take, so make sure that they are perfectly aligned to the best outcome that you can create — not the one you don’t want.
Think this way consistently and let the Universe go to work on your behalf.
When it presents you with an opportunity, recognise it and seize the moment! (Take the inspired action steps required to align you with your goals). Our mind is the creator of our reality.
Simple and yet profound, don’t you think?
If you’d like more tips and tricks on how to create the life you dream of, make sure to follow me on IG or sign up to receive my weekly blog posts via my website (link in bio). www.karenturpin.com
If you’re struggling to find the limiting beliefs that keep you stuck, write “STUCK” in the comments below and I’ll be in touch with you to let you know how I can help you. | https://medium.com/@karenturpin/how-important-is-money-to-you-ca4f092f4295 | ['Karen Turpin'] | 2021-04-12 05:02:59.881000+00:00 | ['Money Mindset', 'Manifest', 'Spirituality', 'Law Of Attraction Works', 'Abundance'] |
Artificial Intelligence –The Tech Superhero Of This Era | Different business verticals found sudden interest in AI and why not! In this tech era, AI eventually unfolding its high-performance abilities and features, which could salvage life.
Over the years, AI enabled automation in various sectors including business, banking, agriculture, marketing, and others. Practically, AI has become a push-up element for all the industries across the globe.
The recent trend in AI is somewhat different from how it worked so far. Researchers have found new pathways where AI emerged to be a lifesaver for humans. How you see AI and robotics enslaving humans in movies that is far beyond reality for now! Today, AI applications are featured to make human lives safer.
Here are some examples of AI applications that proved to be lifesaver for humans.
1. Autonomous vehicles to impede accidents
According to a published report, around 1.35 million people around the world lose their lives in roadway accidents. Although we have hi-tech advanced vehicles, still human lives couldn’t be saved from roadway crashes. The most vulnerable ones are bicyclists, pedestrian, and motorcyclists. It is too late to sensitize people for following road rules or minimizing the use of vehicles. Keeping this in mind, the automotive industry is all set to introduce AI-automated vehicles. This could prove to be a revolution for the mechanical industry.
These vehicles would have an in-built application to enable computer vision which could detect and prevent accidents on road. One such application is !iMPORTANT which is designed to minimize the risk of collisions with different vehicles like cars, trucks, buses, construction equipment, and autonomous vehicles.
2. Health applications to detect medical conditions
The world recently is suffering from a pandemic situation that is taking millions of lives around the world. Human-to-human contact is highly unsafe these days. The risk is more for frontline medical staffs and doctors. While delivering treatment, there’s always a risk of contracting the disease despite wearing PPE gears.
Medical institutions are desperately in search of an AI-automated system to deliver good healthcare facilities and reduce the need of human hand. Catalyst.ai and healthcare.ai designed by Health Catalyst are some of the lifesaving applications developed using AI. These applications had been developed on machine learning technology that can specifically identify patients with a great risk of readmission and provide clinical guidelines to address problems.
3. Collated data for drug production
Subsequent to the detection of health issues comes the treatment procedure. Proper medical attention and medicines are vital for curing any disease. Doctors need to be choosy while prescribing any drug to a patient as there are intervening side effects that can lead to other health risks.
To automate the process, Okwin is designing AI-powered pharmaceutical solutions using machine learning algorithm. The models have been designed for advanced treatment, prediction of disease evolution, and improve the way drugs are produced. Okwin receives data from hospital partners to find ways of helping patients improve drugs more quickly with fewer side effects.
Standing today with so many life risks, AI is emerging as a superhero in the technical world. If you want to bring innovation in your company, consider launching an AI-powered software that can save human lives. This is the best way to expand your business in today’s date. You can outsource to the best mobile app development company in India for better results. | https://medium.com/@magicmindtechnologies/artificial-intelligence-the-tech-superhero-of-this-era-a6d3aa91ac96 | ['Magicmind Technologies'] | 2020-09-02 14:39:50.062000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Science', 'Technology', 'Technology News', 'AI'] |
How to build daily work-from-home habits | How to build daily work-from-home habits
Gone are the days of commuting to work in traffic jams, or squeezing into that crowded subway car. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, over 40% of the U.S. workforce and over 60% of the U.K. workforce are working from home. About 25% of the workforce in France is working from home, up from 3% in 2017.
Chances are, you’re working from home too. While many embrace remote work, others find it more difficult. You may be struggling to create routine, organize your home office, or adapt to the loneliness that often occurs from remote work.
But there are specific actions you can take to build effective work-from-home routines. Utilizing them will guide you towards increased productivity and workplace satisfaction. It can take some purposeful planning and organization to start, so follow these key steps to build the right remote work habits.
1. Perfect your workspace
Working from home might mean your home office is actually just a corner of the living room. Whatever space you may have (a full room, corner or desk), make it your own. Separate this space from areas where you relax, socialize, eat, or sleep.
Do whatever it takes to make this dedicated space a comfortable working place. Invest in a supportive chair, a large screen, a standing desk, or whatever makes your office feel like yours. Personalize your space with items you love, like picture frames or plants.
If you can, choose an office space near a window. Natural light makes people happier — and it will help to properly see your computer. Investing in a good desk lamp is also a must.
Creating the right workspace also means investing in tech. Forming a functional space is just as important as comfort and aesthetics. Having a pair of bluetooth, noise cancelling headphones is essential. You may also need a microphone or ring lamp if you’re on virtual calls or remote meetings. Getting a VPN may be necessary if security is a concern.
Finally, once you’ve created your perfect home office, work there. Fight the urge to work from your bed or the sofa.
2. Structure your day with routine
Whether you’re a morning person or not, it’s important to create a routine. Your routine needs to be realistic, making it something you can easily stick with. After all, the best way to form a recurring habit is to make sure it’s something feasible, then repeat it.
Whether you’re a freelancer or full time employee, create a general timetable for your day and stick to it. Try to wake up, eat, and work around the same times each day. Consider doing the more important tasks during hours of the day when you’re most productive. For most people, this may mean a morning routine, but it really depends on your personality and work style. Leave emails, calls, and less-important tasks for afternoon, or whenever you’ve finished the more pressing tasks.
Set alarms if need be when it’s time to switch tasks or change gears. If a particular routine just isn’t working for you, change it up. Once you find a routine that works, stick to it.
3. Minimize distractions
Distractions can come in many forms. From Slack pings to social media to your own children crying, it can be hard to focus at home. Setting up the right home office space can help, but there are other things you can do.
Put your phone on silent if possible, or at least turn the screen away from you during key periods so you won’t be distracted from messages while trying to work.
Consider white noise to help you focus. Many apps offer different white noise options or music to help you concentrate. This is helpful to block out distractions you can’t control, like road construction, noisy neighbors, or traffic sounds.
4. Make to-do lists
Having a list of exactly what you need to do each workday will increase productivity and ensure you don’t forget about any key tasks or top priorities. Usually, putting the most important tasks first to get those done faster is a good plan (this helps you avoid procrastination). But, your list should depend on how you’re structuring your day and when you’re most productive. Some people prefer handwritten lists; others prefer digital.
You can also create a list at the end of the day for the following day. It doesn’t even have to be a full list — just a few key tasks you really want to accomplish tomorrow. Then, you’ll start the next day more focused with a plan already in place.
5. Get dressed
We know how tempting it is to work in your pajamas. But don’t. Dressing the part is always a good way to start the day right, prepare you for productivity, and get you into work mode.
And don’t even think about doing that Zoom call if you aren’t fully dressed. Just trust us on this one. You never know when things might go awry, and you want to maintain a professional appearance in front of your co-workers, boss, and employees.
6. Take breaks and stay social
Taking breaks when working from home is important if you want to keep your productivity high, not lose focus, and boost creativity.
Some people prefer to take a 20/30-minute break every few hours, while others benefit more from taking 5/10-minute resets once an hour. You can set an alarm, or simply take a break while you find yourself losing focus.
Stretch your legs, have tea or coffee, get some fresh air, take a power nap, or listen to your favorite podcast — anything to detach your mind from work. This will ensure you’ll return to your desk refreshed and ready to continue.
When it’s time for a lunch break, prioritize social interaction. A check in with others will help if working from home is making you feel isolated. This is especially important if you live alone or work for yourself.
Consider connecting physically, or with a phone call. Sometimes, only having digital interactions (with friends or co-workers) can actually increase loneliness. So try to meet in person, or pick up the phone.
7. Create boundaries
Not working on your sofa or in bed means you’re already setting boundaries: work is for your workspace. This is important for your mental health, and will also help you to work more efficiently.
But still, if you find yourself working longer and longer hours at home, you should set limits to avoid work creep. Work creep is when work slowly erodes into your personal life and upsets your work-life balance. You can avoid this happening by following the below tips.
Take the time you spent commuting and dedicate it to an activity you love (vs. working more).
Don’t turn your laptop back on post-work hours.
Shut your computer off at a specific time each day.
Pause Slack notifications and ignore emails during non-work hours.
8. Avoid Slack and Zoom burnout with effective scheduling
If possible, try not to schedule more than a few video meetings per day. Zoom fatigue is a real thing, and it comes from the mind trying harder to process visual cues and non-verbal signs via video, which is much harder to do than in-person. If your day is full of video calls, try to space them out in order to take breaks in between. Or, consider a good, old- fashioned phone call instead.
Creating boundaries for Slack will also help. Turn off your notifications after a certain time, and mute them if you’re working on something important. At minimum, turn off or down the sound, so you won’t be constantly distracted by annoying pings all day.
9. Set expectations with family members (or roommates)
Juggling professional and family responsibilities has never been easy for working parents. But for remote workers, it may be even more difficult. Even those with roommates may struggle when working from home.
The key is communication. Work with your partner, babysitter, parents, roommates, etc. to create a schedule or set ground rules. If both you and your partner are working from home, set up a system that allows you each to work when you’re most productive while still balancing other family or at-home responsibilities.
Make sure your office space is quiet or set apart from young children’s play spaces, and if you have teens, discuss expectations about if, how, or when they can enter your office space. With roommates, set noise expectations and discuss how to best utilize shared workspaces.
Your work-from-home habits will soon come naturally
Working from home has its pros and its cons, but if you learn some daily habits to stay productive, it can be a positive professional experience. Remote work is likely here to stay, so the sooner you can perfect that home office and form these WFH work habits for success, the better.
elocance is a productivity app and your audio superpower. Build productive habits and save time by listening. Save articles and PDFs etc., turn them to audio and learn on the go. | https://medium.com/@elocance/how-to-build-daily-work-from-home-habits-e3c014207a94 | [] | 2020-12-06 22:33:37.727000+00:00 | ['Worklife', 'Productivity Hacks', 'Startup Life', 'Daily Habits', 'WFH'] |
Life Lessons from Water | In attempts to get up to pace with humanity’s lift-off in technological and civil advancements, human beings are enshrouding themselves in the cacophony of self-help books, productivity blogs, educational YouTube videos, and personal development podcasts.
Raymond Tang, who spoke on a TED stage last year, felt the same way. He thought the relentlessly quick-shifting world was too much for him to grapple and he was practically drowning in his own self-consciousness. Then, he started reading self-help books. But the more he got into this habit — the more books he read — the more anxious and restless he became.
“It was like feeding my mind with junk food and I was becoming mentally obese”
Then, out of pure serendipity, as he was looking through the self-help shelf in a bookstore, he came across a small book called Tao Te Ching. It was a 2600 year old manuscript about the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao and its virtues. “It was by far the thinnest and smallest book in the bookshelf”, he said. “It had only 81 pages, and each page had a poem”.
One particular page in that book changed his life.
An excerpt from the Tao Te Ching, Passage #8
He was so profoundly moved after reading the short verse that he admittedly started reciting and practicing its principles on a daily basis. After years of actualisation, here are 3 things Raymond learned from the virtues of water.
Humility
“Water always stays low”
Water provides nourishment for plants to grow, it sustains the ecosystem of a vast biodiversity inside it, and it serves the billions of human beings that depend their lives on it. Water does all this, without drawing much attention to itself. In a world that emphasises the values of knowing the answers to everything, water teaches us to be okay with saying “I don’t know, I want to learn more, and I need your help.”
Water teaches us to shift our focus from me, to you — to redirect the attention from yourself to the people around you. Rather than promoting the success and glory of yourself, it is more satisfying to promote the success and glory of others. That way, life and the world becomes more exciting. | https://jonathanoei.medium.com/life-lessons-from-water-5dd124626771 | ['Jonathan Adrian'] | 2019-09-19 07:10:40.431000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement', 'Personal Growth', 'Self'] |
Week Nine In Review | Week Nine In Review
This was the week people got livid.
This was also the week that a number of companies including Twitter announced that employees could work from home indefinitely (although in some cases "indefinitely" was tied to the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic), which made me happy because it's what Maya Geryk and I advocated for in our podcast from last week. Listen to it here if you haven't already.
But this was the week that everyone was fed up with being managed poorly at home or with knowing they weren't managing as well as they could from home. With dealing with technology that promises everything but has huge gaps. With dealing with traumatized kids and with their own trauma. With having questions no one can answer. With having to do...this, or some form of this, for the foreseeable future.
It was overwhelming and it made us all brittle and angry and sharp.
There's nothing wrong with that. I think next week is going to be rough, too, with more losses becoming apparent and still not a lot of good news (especially in states that have opened up or are about to open up), and then after that we'll be able to start digging in to figure out how to manage this without constant pervasive anxiety.
While I usually have a few things for you to think about over the weekend to make next Monday better, today I only have one thing and it isn't going to have much effect on this coming Monday yet: What is one thing (big or medium), that, if you had a really solid handle on it or process for making it work, would lift that constant sense of being right on the edge or of actively failing from you?
Even when you have a whole bunch of small problems, there's usually one that takes up more emotional weight than the others. Figure out and isolate what yours is. You don't even have to start trying to fix it yet. That's too much for you in the middle of trauma. But figure out what it is. (If you can't figure out anything realistic that would remove the dread and fear, come up with something that isn't realistic that would save you.)
That's it. Oh, and let yourself be angry. You've lost a lot and you're still losing. Anger is a reasonable response here.
Love,
Magda
Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@hhh13 | https://medium.com/@magda.pecsenye/week-nine-in-review-376a16261013 | ['Magda Pecsenye'] | 2020-05-28 19:48:17.160000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Anger', 'Pandemic', 'Work', 'Week 9'] |
Neural pathway crucial to successful rapid object recognition in primates | MIT researchers have identified a brain pathway critical in enabling primates to effortlessly identify objects in their field of vision. The findings enrich existing models of the neural circuitry involved in visual perception and help to further unravel the computational code for solving object recognition in the primate brain.
Led by Kohitij Kar, a postdoc at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the study looked at an area called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), which sends feedback signals to the inferior temporal (IT) cortex via a network of neurons. The main goal of this study was to test how the back-and-forth information processing of this circuitry-that is, this recurrent neural network-is essential to rapid object identification in primates.
The current study, published in Neuron and available via open access, is a followup to prior work published by Kar and James DiCarlo, the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience, the head of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and an investigator in the McGovern Institute and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.
Monkey versus machine
In 2019, Kar, DiCarlo, and colleagues identified that primates must use some recurrent circuits during rapid object recognition. Monkey subjects in that study were able to identify objects more accurately than engineered “feed-forward” computational models, called deep convolutional neural networks, that lacked recurrent circuitry.
Interestingly, specific images for which models performed poorly compared to monkeys in object identification, also took longer to be solved in the monkeys’ brains-suggesting that the additional time might be due to recurrent processing in the brain. Based on the 2019 study, it remained unclear, though, exactly which recurrent circuits were responsible for the delayed information boost in the IT cortex. That’s where the current study picks up.
“In this new study, we wanted to find out: Where are these recurrent signals in IT coming from?” Kar says. “Which areas reciprocally connected to IT, are functionally the most critical part of this recurrent circuit?”
To determine this, researchers used a pharmacological agent to temporarily block the activity in parts of the vlPFC in macaques while they engaged in an object discrimination task. During these tasks, monkeys viewed images that contained an object, such as an apple, a car, or a dog; then, researchers used eye tracking to determine if the monkeys could correctly indicate what object they had previously viewed when given two object choices.
“We observed that if you use pharmacological agents to partially inactivate the vlPFC, then both the monkeys’ behavior and IT cortex activity deteriorates, but more so for certain specific images. These images were the same ones we identified in the previous study-ones that were poorly solved by ‘feed-forward’ models and took longer to be solved in the monkey’s IT cortex,” says Kar.
“These results provide evidence that this recurrently connected network is critical for rapid object recognition, the behavior we’re studying. Now, we have a better understanding of how the full circuit is laid out, and what are the key underlying neural components of this behavior.”
The full study, entitled “Fast recurrent processing via ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is needed by the primate ventral stream for robust core visual object recognition,” will run in print Jan. 6, 2021.
“This study demonstrates the importance of prefrontal cortical circuits in automatically boosting object recognition performance in a very particular way,” DiCarlo says. “These results were obtained in nonhuman primates and thus are highly likely to also be relevant to human vision.”
The present study makes clear the integral role of the recurrent connections between the vlPFC and the primate ventral visual cortex during rapid object recognition. The results will be helpful to researchers designing future studies that aim to develop accurate models of the brain, and to researchers who seek to develop more human-like artificial intelligence.
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https://www.swissholidaypark.ch/i/Video-ajax-6.html | https://medium.com/@footlive-top/neural-pathway-crucial-to-successful-rapid-object-recognition-in-primates-b33259fba23b | ['Footlive Top'] | 2020-10-21 17:43:18.997000+00:00 | ['Year In Review', 'Health'] |
Did Satoshi Steal My Blog Post? | I’m JP Richardson, co-founder of Exodus bitcoin/ethereum wallet and active JavaScript/Bitcoin developer (github). I, like a lot of you, got caught up into reading about Craig Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto.
I started poking around Craig Wright’s site and stumbled upon this gem: http://www.drcraigwright.net/generating-bitcoin-address/ (if link is dead/removed: PDF copy)
I thought it looked very similar to an old post I wrote in 2013: http://procbits.com/2013/08/27/generating-a-bitcoin-address-with-javascript using an ancient version of bitcoinjs-lib circa 2013.
Google for “Random number generation”+”is the basis of most cryptography”. Top two hits? My post is first, Craig Wright’s is second.
Here’s a screenshot:
Look at the code snippets. The variable names. The old bitcoinjs version. The ordering of the languages.
Coincidence? Could be.
Did Craig Wright steal my post? Or just maybe, I am Satoshi Nakamoto.
Thanks to Fluffy Pony for reviewing both posts. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/did-satoshi-steal-my-blog-post-76a68cdda4f3 | ['Jp Richardson'] | 2019-03-26 03:13:33.291000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Tech', 'Ethereum'] |
The True Story Of Biden’s Broken Foot | Blame the dog. Classic, Joe, classic. Dogs get blamed for farting, eating the last piece of pizza, and all manner of ill-mannered human behaviors. But I’m here to tell you Major is as innocent as any German Shepard.
If the president-elect didn’t injure his foot playing with his furbaby, what actually happened? The American people deserve to know. Afterall, the majority of us legit voted for him.
To get to the truth, let’s start with the lie. Here’s what CNN politics reported:
Three days after Thanksgiving this year, President-elect Joe Biden slipped and hurt his foot while playing with his dog, Major.
After debriefing with my top secret team I’ve uncovered the real story. It’s much less furry and a whole lot more scary. As most believable lies do, the advertised story has a nugget of truth in it. Joe was playing with his dog, Major, on the fateful night he fractured his foot.
However, Major was all tuckered out and napping under a tree when Joe sprung into action to chase an intruder. Apparently his security needs some beefing up because they’re leaving the 78 year old president-elect to fend for himself. Technically our future leader tripped over his sleeping dog’s tail in pursuit of a would-be, well, that’s the million dollar question.
Who was the mysterious intruder? A would-be thief, assassin, dog-napper, spy? The world may never know the intent of the real culprit in this tale of tail-tripping. That may be the very reason Joe lied about the injury. If the story of a security breach were to leak it would give Americans one more reason to worry and we’ve had it up to our necks with worry this year. Speaking of necks, thank goodness Joe only broke his foot. | https://medium.com/muddyum/the-true-story-of-bidens-broken-foot-86f83031959d | ['Rachael Ann Sand'] | 2021-02-16 04:02:36.854000+00:00 | ['Pets', 'News', 'Joe Biden', 'Humour', 'Humor'] |
OneMasjid.com is live now, Masha’Allah! | As’Salaamu Alaiykum —
After a year of hard work, finally, by the grace of Allah, OneMasjid.com is now available for the community and the Masajids to make use of.
The main mission of OneMasjid is to help improve the interaction between Masajids and the Islamic community.
We envision that by making it easy for Masajids to maintain quality websites that are rich in information that benefits the community, and by providing quality mobile apps the community can use to “follow” and keep track of all the Masajids they care to hear from, the communities and the Masasjids can be better connected, in this digital age.
Alhamdulillah, we spent almost a year now to get the website ready and we are now focusing more on the mobile apps. And we hope to have the mobile apps available soon insha’Allah. | https://medium.com/onemasjid/alhamdulillah-thats-a-launch-8e8b94ed283d | [] | 2017-05-20 16:52:35.805000+00:00 | ['Mosque', 'Onemasjid', 'Masjid', 'Muslim', 'Islam'] |
Starving For Attention | When I came out of my mother’s womb, everyone assumed I was crying because I was a normal and healthy baby. Really, I was crying because I was born at seven and a half pounds. My goal weight was six.
Childhood is measured in inches and pounds. “Look how much you’ve grown!” my grandmother would say, every time the top of my head surpassed a pencil mark on the wall. My reactions underwhelmed anyone excited about milestones like getting taller or needing bigger clothes. “Growing” disturbed me, so I fought hard to avoid it. Instead of playing marbles or learning to read, I spent every second of every day terrified of becoming overweight. As if fatness were something that could happen to me, a seven year old, suddenly and without my consent. Nobody noticed, but I was gifted- a starvation savant.
In second grade, a chubby boy named Brian had a birthday. His mom brought in a cake to share with the entire class. It was a kind of cake with plastic looking, neon blue frosting. When Brian’s mom arrived at my desk with a piece of cake, we both got distracted by the sight of her red faced son who had just sneezed. He looked pathetic with blue frosting chunks dripping out of his nose. I glanced at him, pitifully. Then, back at his mom. Between sips from my Scooby Doo thermos of iced black coffee, I said, “No cake for me.” With my free hand, I counted my ribs. I got to six, then flipped off Brian.
Post fifth grade graduation, my family got a home computer. The first time that my eleven year old hands instinctively typed “girl ribs” into Google image search, I was introduced to a community of malnourished personalities who existed to validate my compulsions. Rituals I had thought of as original were described so specifically that I wondered if I was being watched. Before my computer, I thought that I was the only person who couldn’t sleep if I was forced to eat with the big spoon instead of the little one. Putting every meal into the microwave until it was too hot to eat was a procrastination tool I was sure I had invented. Armed with the proof that there were other people who catered their lives around the fear of food, I wondered if this behavior could be normal. I decided that it probably was. Still, I deleted my search history and isolated myself from anyone observant enough to notice the panic in my eyes when a waiter put bread on the table.
If I was expected to go to a restaurant, the hours leading up to the meal were spent studying. The focus and discipline that adults begged to be shown was exhausted here, alone. I quizzed myself on the chosen location’s menu items and calorie count until I had them memorized to the spacing and punctuation. How many glasses of water would I fill up on before the meal? What kind of oil and how much salt did P.F. Chang’s put in their infamous Lettuce Wraps? Since I couldn’t drive, I was frequently dragged to restaurants without a warning. In these situations, I would make my best guess while ordering, and do the research to confirm once I got home. If I had eaten too many calories by mistake, I wouldn’t sleep. Entire nights would be spent doing sit ups or jumping jacks in my room. By the end of middle school, I got my period. Once.
In high school, I convinced my parents to buy me an Ipod touch by lying that I needed it for an app that would help me learn Spanish. Aplicaciones de conteo de calorías. Calorie counting apps. Gum. 5 calories. Banana, medium. 105 calories. Banana, large. 121 calories. If I wasn’t tracking, I was scheming. How could I burn off a medium banana while sitting at my desk? While my world history teacher lectured about ancient Mesopotamia, I nodded my head with an unnatural intensity. The nods did not come from interest. They came from a life threatening sense of urgency to burn the twelve calories that were necessary to counteract my afternoon rice cake. I tapped my leg seventy two times a minute and made sure to speed walk to and from the bathroom at least once during every class.
I felt like a tightrope walker. Through balance and control, I felt like I was pulling off something incredible and otherworldly. Tracking at the varsity level required one hundred percent of my time and zero talent, leaving me devoid of any meaningful hobbies or transferable skills. When daily recordings revealed that I had mistakenly consumed enough to keep myself alive, I would grind my teeth while I slept; burning calories even while unconscious.
By fifteen, I looked like a wire hanger wearing a skin jacket. Concerned parents and faculty had started to reach out to my mom. She was furious at me for subjecting her to so much judgement and embarrassment. “Why can’t you just eat?” Over and over, she screamed this question. Once, she screamed this question while angrily waving a biscotti. She threw the biscotti at my closed mouth, like my face was a carnival game that she had just blown her entire allowance on. I shifted the shape of my eyebrows to express disappointment when the biscotti fell onto the floor. As if I would have been thrilled to eat it otherwise. My concocted responses were just as outrageous as her parenting showmanship. I said things like, “I think I’m just naturally thin.” I even tried, “I love food!” Whichever words were used, I sounded hollow. As a final Hail Mary, I promised to eat. I promised to eat that night. In front of her.
Pasta. Shit. Of course she picked pasta. Before her DIY exposure therapy, my mom had never allowed herself to be in the same room as foods like pasta or biscottis. When the bowl was presented, I squealed in a voice that was not mine. “I love pasta!” Silence. I tried again. I licked my lips maniacally and said, “looks good!” while patting my stomach. My mom gripped her fork until her fingers turned white. She wanted to stab me. With my selfish antics, I had forced her into this position. She cared deeply about my health. When a mother cares deeply about the health of a daughter, she must pretend that, of course, she too could eat a bowl of pasta for dinner like it was no big deal. I knew that she wanted to stab me. I knew that she did not want to eat that pasta either. I was a bad daughter.
The two of us sat down at the dinner table, as though it were a place we would spend time together regularly. My plan to sell myself as “girl enjoying food,” was to imitate the way my mom was eating. My plan failed since she was just staring at me, waiting. The longer I made her wait, the tighter she gripped the fork. The tighter she gripped the fork, the more I wished that she would just stab me already so that I wouldn’t have to eat the stupid pasta. I clenched my jaw, and made an effort to coach myself through the steps of eating that my brain had long ago forgotten.
Smile. Take a bite. Chew. Swallow. Say something conversational. Ask her about her childhood. No. No, do not do that. Say something about Nordstrom’s Rack. No, just stay quiet. Okay, take another bite. Do not get up to use the microwave. Don’t forget to smile.
When I took the final bite, my mom loosened her grip from the fork. We sat in stillness; unsure of what to do, feel or say next. I pleaded with my brain for instructions, but it was blocked by carbohydrates. I gripped my fork from the top and dug the prongs into my palm. What did normal people do when they finished dinner? Would this be the right time to bring up Nordstrom’s Rack? What did normal people do when they looked down at the empty bowl and didn’t know exactly how many calories were in the bowl before it was empty? What did normal people do when the bowl was empty and the pasta that used to be in the bowl was now in their stomach and they didn’t know how many calories were in the pasta which meant that they didn’t know how many sit ups they would have to do before bed and how many meals they would have to skip the next day and they felt like they were going to die and they fucking hated pasta? I released my hand from the fork. The long line of stitches that had been holding me together were ripped out, with no warning or bandage. It was a normal portion of food.
Two hours later, I was in the emergency room. My hysteria was objectively high. I don’t remember what happened between the pasta and the hospital. Drawing from context clues, I think that the pasta made me feel full. A normal post meal feeling, sure. How was I supposed to know that? I hadn’t experienced fullness after a meal since I was breastfed. I was positive that my appendix had burst.
My mom agreed to take me to the emergency room. Not because she believed me, but because she needed unbiased validation. On our drive, she insisted that I sit in the backseat so she wouldn’t have to look at me. When we made it past the waiting room, I looked the doctor in the eyes and said, in complete earnest, “I think I’m dying.” When he asked for my age, I begged him to cut me open and remove my appendix. It was an emergency, I was sure of it. If he’s already taking out my appendix, I reasoned, he might as well get all of that pasta out too. My logic felt solid.
To nobody’s surprise, my appendix was fine. The physical pain I deeply believed in was only my mangled brain’s reaction to eating an almost large portion. I had eaten more calories in one sitting than I was used to eating in a week, and all circuits were misfiring. Rather than listening to this adult man with a medical degree, I turned up the hysterics. I theatrically doubled over in pain and screamed something about believing women. As his final Hail Mary, the doctor gave me an enema and I shit everywhere. My adrenaline began to fade.
If a dog takes a shit in the wrong place at the wrong time, they are capable of expressing some version of remorse. They run away. They hide their tail between their legs. For a human girl who had just shit herself after lying about knowing where her appendix was, shame would have been the appropriate emotion. Alternatively, I stared at my shit covered hospital gown and wondered. How many calories were burned using an enema while having a panic attack as opposed to shitting with a resting heart rate? My mom was humiliated.
I cleaned myself up, expecting to go home and brush off the entire episode. “Crazy, right? Okay, Goodnight!” The doctor was staring at me like I had just jumped completely naked in front of his moving car before trying to sell him real estate. My danger zone vitals and weight were recorded. I was tricked into disclosing that I still did not have my period and sometimes my hair fell out in patches. My secret was out. I did not have appendicitis. I was not naturally thin and I did not love pasta. As per this annoyed doctor’s professional opinion, I was ordered to “get it together” before I “lost my fertility.” As my mom sobbed at the words “loss” and “fertility,” I rolled my eyes. If the roles had been reversed, I would have personally chosen to use something other than pregnancy as leverage. Given that “deathly fear of weight gain” was the underlying issue. But hey, I’m not a doctor.
The next evening, my parents sat me down, business meeting style, with my inpatient rehab paperwork freshly printed and ready for me to sign. I threatened to kill myself. My parents looked at each other. I knew what they were both thinking. “We should risk it, right?”
Terms and agreements were summarized. Six months in a hospital. I would thank them later. Eyes glazed, I calmly walked up the stairs. From up above, I made eye contact with my mom and launched myself down the entire flight, full speed. My dad remained seated, unable to make any sense of what was happening around him. My mom walked over to the bottom of the stairs. When I saw her making her way toward me, I shut my eyes. If I kept my eyes closed long enough, I thought they might just let me sleep there. A hand grabbed the back of my hair and sat me up. I opened my eyes. I quickly shut them again when I processed the anger to annoyed ratio written on her face. “Get up. Throwing yourself down the stairs is not the same as killing yourself.”
My parents settled on a more affordable outpatient program, which forced me to skip school three times a week. The program was titled some variation of the three words “Mind, Body and Spirit.” My therapist was blonde. During our first session, she spoke patiently for one hour, hoping that I would be kind enough to give her the bare minimum. For sixty minutes, I sat there, unmoving. I counted the amount of times I blinked or took a breath. I stared at the wall behind her, imagining that she was a ghost. Again, my mom was humiliated when the therapist delivered my progress report. “Did not meet expectations.” In the waiting room, they conspired while I sarcastically flipped through an issue of Bon Appetit. In unison, they touched my shoulders too hard, and revealed my exciting new plan. To save my fertility, I was going to be put on psychiatric medication immediately.
They gave me Prozac. I loved Prozac. Prozac made me feel alive. It made me feel liberated. It made me feel like maybe, just maybe, I could eat a little bit more without dying. Responsive and engaged by Prozac, I attended group therapy once a week for eight weeks. The only thing I remember about the group is that all of us decided we wanted to go to Six Flags together, and our therapist told us doing so would be extremely inappropriate. Once I reached one hundred pounds, I stopped going to therapy and made being a “recovered anorexic” my entire personality. I spoke about my bravery to anyone who would listen. Simultaneously, I was careful to still remain lighter than one hundred and five pounds.
Conveniently, my phase of being a recovered anorexic lined up perfectly with the rise of the body positivity campaign. This movement taught us that self starvation is an epidemic to which every woman in America is highly at risk of. In what seemed like overnight, society universally agreed that dieting was over. To publicly express disdain for one’s beautiful and special body under any circumstances, was deemed to be not only unacceptable, but dangerous. Portion control or frowning at a chubby stomach was enough to qualify somebody for a formal intervention. The verdict was out. Calorie restriction equaled bad. Juicing, cleanses and veganism equaled good. For the next four years, being vegan was my religion, my personality and my eating disorder that I was allowed to talk about.
Vegans are healthy. Healthy people don’t need antidepressants. I had this thought one morning, and flushed my beloved Prozac down the toilet. One week later, I totaled my car by driving it into a parking garage wall and started sleeping eighteen hours a day. The small portion of the day that I wasn’t sleeping was spent out of control binge eating. Fast food, pints of ice cream, chips and entire loaves of bread. Even pasta. So much fucking pasta.
I was in shock. How could I, a vegan who hated eating, all of a sudden be eating to such a degree? When the binges happened, I would completely black out. I didn’t even get to enjoy the food. Not that I would have, but still. When I came to, all I knew was that in a miniscule amount of time, I had stuffed my body to the brim with years and years worth of the foods I had never allowed myself to even look at. If only I had a gag reflex, maybe my brain would have decided to go with bulimia for my final wave of a behavioral disorder. Binging, by far, is the most embarrassing and least rewarding of all the eating disorders.
I don’t remember when I got “better.” Nor what finally pushed me to do so. I had a few more years of seemingly significant weight gain and weight loss. A few more years of therapy accompanied by a will to live that came naturally with age. A quietly dramatic journey of meds, no meds and finally meds again. Now, I take Lexapro. I love Lexapro. Lexapro makes me feel normal. I move through the world like a normal person who enjoys meals, but is mostly focused on other things. I even have hobbies and interests that have nothing to do with food or weight loss whatsoever.
I was never overweight. As it turns out, my years of inexplicably infuriating behaviors actually had very little to do with weight gain or weight loss. I didn’t starve myself to lose weight. I didn’t starve myself because of society. I didn’t starve myself because of Hollywood or the patriarchy or a lack of curvy role models who could have encouraged me to love myself. I starved myself because my brain was sick. Digging for an answer that might be more eloquent or shocking would require time and labor that I don’t care to expend. When I was a child, if somebody would have told me to “love my body no matter what,” I would have starved myself even harder. As an adult, nothing makes me lose my appetite more quickly than somebody telling me to “love my body no matter what.”
“Body Positivity” is a very nice gesture. I appreciate the invitation, and politely decline. I am committed to protecting my constitutional right to never be positive about anything. Especially not my body. The crusade against unrealistic beauty standards is an easy cause to stand behind. Shining the light on the grave dangers of developing disordered eating habits is noble and important. Society coming around to the idea that those above a certain BMI deserve to exist, is an unarguably positive change. But in the secret and twisted part of my brain, I feel nostalgic for the time when “eating disorder” had more of a dangerous ring to it. As an anorexic adolescent, I felt that I was uniquely glamorous and tormented. Now, it feels like the most milquetoast mental illness that a person can sign up for.
Due to the paper trail surrounding my eating disorders, it seems as though I have outed myself for the rest of my life. If I had just been a bit more inconspicuous as a child, I would still be flying under the radar. I would exist humbly and successfully pass my disordered eating off as normal, just like every other woman with a pulse. Instead, I am never allowed to skip a meal and have it go unnoticed. I am not permitted to lose a small amount of weight in peace and quiet.
The worst part? To this day, my psychiatrist refuses to prescribe me stimulants because “given my past, it’s too dangerous.”
If I promised to love my body at any weight, I would be lying. Hypothetically, I could work towards an existence where I believed, with conviction, that my weight and appearance were not synonymous with value. Realistically, I know that such a goal is delusional. Restrictive diets have been relabeled as “plant based” or “intermittent fasting.” It’s more expensive, socially acceptable and remains locked in as a lifetime priority for most of us. When my pants feel loose, I feel happy. When my pants feel tight, I feel sad. The association is there, and I move on with my day. I believe the women who announce to the world that they do feel beautiful and fat at the same time. As for the women who are thin and loudly declare that weight does not matter? I believe them less. When I overhear my underweight coworker tell my overweight coworker to “stop dieting and just love herself,” I want to rip her detox smoothie out of her hands and challenge her to actually eat one of the doughnuts that are sitting in the break room. I can say with confidence and honesty that my eating disorders are dead to me. At the same time, I still think that being thin feels really fucking good.
And that’s the best I can do.
Now, will somebody please let me have an adderall prescription? | https://medium.com/@traumaqueengoldstein/starving-for-attention-c7d4b36186e1 | ['Sarah Goldstein'] | 2021-08-18 22:41:12.864000+00:00 | ['Mothers And Daughters', 'Dark Humor', 'Body', 'Eating Disorders', 'Narrative'] |
Kendrick Lamar & Kanye West | Activism Remastered For The 21st Century | How much do I indulge in before I’m considered un-Black? When have I become exorbitant, just too much to handle? When am I too powerful? How does a black become more than just another slave on the plantation, more than just a fly on the wall? How far is too far? On Yeezus, Kanye’s repeated use of perverting civil rights and his carefree attitude take full effect. Sempiternally unflinching and never backing down, Kanye, coming fresh off the masterful and beauteously constructed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus delights itself in a recklessly intense and splendidly alluring conveyance of character. Yeezus was riotous, boyish, brash and boisterous and an open armed welcome to all of Ye’s biggest opposers. His tone, once turned poetic, bleary eyed and wide on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is now more shorthanded, witty and snappy than ever before. West’s former use of religious and artful references in aesthetic are still very much so present on Yeezus, however here it’s not as masterfully crafted as before. Ye is sneering here, snapping angrily at his competition and those who still doubt him. Tracks like “I Am A God” are literally drenched in ego and lyrically it’s not really doing much, yet the message behind it is simple yet something to truly behold. In an interview with Zane Lowe, West is quoted as saying:
“…when someone comes up and says something like, ‘I am a god,’ everybody says ‘Who does he think he is?’ I just told you who I thought I was. A god. I just told you. That’s who I think I am. Would it have been better if I had a song that said ‘I am a gangster’ or if I had a song that said ‘I am a pimp.’ All those colors and patinas fit better on a person like me, right? But to say you are a god, especially when you got shipped over to the country that you’re in, and your last name is a slave owner’s. How could you say that? How could you have that mentality?””
But what does it mean to be God? God is a supreme being, one of extreme power. An unstoppable force, someone or something incapable of being topped, stopped or destroyed. It’s the ultimate, the infinite and everlasting. To say your a God…it’s sacrilegious. You, Mr. Kanye West, aren’t supposed to go that far. To place yourself on a pedestal above the white man, above the classism you so harshly look down upon…Who, exactly, do you think you are? To take the place and occupy the image and place of a God or high religious figure…that’s blasphemy. To reach so far up, just to bring the picture and idea of God down to simply one more nigga is sickening. It’s off-base. It’s insidious. It’s putrid. And the fact that this very same nigga is Kanye West; a self obsessed egomaniac, a pretentious asshole and one of the most publicly hated figures of the decade is saying this…it’s unacceptable. While these presentations and instances of West pulverizing the American idea of God down to simply one more of him brings out an expansive exhibit of negative sentiments in us; however how can it make the eternal feel? We know how we feel, but how does the almighty feel in the midst of these declarations? How does the infinite feel in knowing that this has happened and does it care at all? And most importantly of all, is this when Kanye West became too powerful? Yeezus packs its biggest punches in it’s delivery and simple to understand political messages. “Soon as they like you, make em unlike you”.
While West found himself as a restless experimentalist with something to prove to everyone in this broken planet, Kendrick found himself in a more wise and reflective tone on To Pimp A Butterfly. Unlike it’s hotheaded and reactionary younger brother, DAMN., To Pimp A Butterfly is a howling, angry and hot headed work of furious black protest art, rooted in paranoia, pride, fear, and anger. It’s a furiously conceived piece of absolute art that demands listeners to listen and feel the impact of every word he says. It’s an uplifting album, one of serial beauty and brings the listener to a crashing reality by it’s end. His firmly applied comprehension on the inner mechanics of morphology, advanced linguistic structure as well as vocabulary, multicategoriality showing him tackling topics like racism, slavery and societal uproar accentuates TPAB’s occasional yet brilliant vagueness upon the midst of it being a massive musical gathering and it enables him to perform at his absolute best. With his vast comprehension of dialect and and wide range of voices being fully premiered here, scrutinizing the underlying foundations of our personal current social statuses and inciting reconsideration of one’s political stances when it’s all said and done.
Rich in a sonic sense akin to The Roots, OutKast, De La Soul, The Fugees and the like, Dot underlined his deeply layered sentiments with astringent ruminations on fame, emotion and personal character that has never been seen before in Hip-Hop before, period. Groovy, complex and hard as all ever, To Pimp A Butterfly is a perfect encapsulation of black existentialism, a confounding and cacophonous collection of sound and sonic wizardry, an idiosyncratically perfect album in every sense of the word — and the best Hip-Hop album this decade to come since West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It’s brilliantly beautiful and amazingly constructed — a spellbinding experience to say the very least. Which is why DAMN. feels like such a natural continuation of TPAB’s sound to begin with and why Yeezus feels like such an update on what we can consider activism in the 21st century. If To Pimp A Butterfly is wise, wide eyed, and more ponderous in it’s approach before having our main character act upon something, DAMN. is more hefty, swift, breezy, agile and more vindictive in it’s reality. It’s still making searing hot political statements like it’s predecessor did; but this time Kendrick is less hesistant to raise his sword and more ready to draw blood and ask questions later.
If My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a wide angled, big lensed Hip-Hop Fantasy, complete with Ye playing the role of a grand orchestrator and puppeteering his collaborators to play within his key, Yeezus is more shortsighted and hasty in it’s approach, much like DAMN. Kanye has had enough. Enough of the fame. Enough of the media. Enough of the bloggers. Yeezus fires off like an irate migraine that always pulsates at the back of your head. An unrelenting pounding of sonic territory. Not only are Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West redefining sonic territories time and time again (especially this decade), these three records, DAMN., Yeezus, & To Pimp A Butterfly all serve as genre defying examples of what we can consider activism in the 2010’s.
People have long fought with oppression and their oppressors. We’ve tried reasoning with it, we’ve tried siding with it and acting in it’s vein for our own personal benefit. Hip-Hop is an art form; a brilliantly conceived idea that was played to the max by all it’s participators to make something larger than life. It serves as a shrill and powerful way to cut down barriers to those who wouldn’t want to hear worlds from the lower and poorer classes — it gives a voice to the voiceless and empowers those who are put down the most. Beats penetrate and break down all kinds of barriers, whether they be linguistic, cultural or financial ones. Between the futuristic and electronic buzz of the hypermanic Yeezus, The cacophonous swell of Jazz & G-Funk inspired sounds that take over To Pimp A Butterfly and the current sound of DAMN. all serve as great examples. Each project is linguistically and aesthetically grandiose, with every record excelling where another one simply can’t. But it’s silly to assume political and social activism began in Hip-Hop with Ye & Kendrick. Around 28 years ago, legendary lyricist KRS-One teamed up with a plethora of collaborators to create “Self Destruction”, a militant and deft proclamation of anti-violence statements in African, African American communities and the like.
The proclaimed ‘God MC’ Rakim was genuinely one of the first rappers to advocate for resistance to the first Gulf War, resulting in him releasing the track “Casualties Of War”, a brash yet wise political stance taken on wax akin to nothing any other lyricist has ever done, and he’s even referred to Iraq as “The Unwinnable War”. In “Casualties Of War”, Rakim is quoted as saying:
“A desert storm let’s see who reigns supreme / Something like monopoly / a government scheme / Go to the Army, be all you can be / Another dead soldier? Hell no, not me!”
Rakim’s history of political statements doesn’t end here either, with him later saying:
“For all the families and all the tragedies over there, it’s not worth it, and if you look at the economy, particularly when someone goes to war and they’re so called winning, beating a country that is full of oil, then you come back home and gas is $5 a gallon, you’re losing,” said Rakim, who also weighed in on the current political scene. “I hope my man Barack wins with flying colors and it’s not the color of his skin, it’s his ideas and his points of view — things are going to change, and that’s why everybody is riding with him. Hopefully this can get us as a people on track and wake up the government because what Barack is doing is big,”
In Rakim making searing hot political statements, you simply cannot speak about Political activism in Hip-Hop without mentioning the famed Tupac Shakur —an icon turned socially cognizant worksmith whose political validity and stance remained situated in his melodious and lyrical evaluations of (then) present day bigotry as well as he & his mothers participation within the Black Panther Party. Tracks of his like “Changes” showed 2Pac’s skill and passion for addressing racial and economic disparities within marginalized communities. “Changes” was his pointed meditation and commentary on police brutality, the war on drugs that waged in black communities, and the social injustices that plagued his time. A reflective state of mind shows itself on this track, finding the now deceased lyricist packing a mighty punch.
“The penitentiary’s packed, and it’s filled with blacks.”
Speed further down Hip-Hop’s rapidly expanding timeline and you get the the iconic Lil Wayne, on his classic song “Georgia…Bush”; finding Weezy giving commentary after Hurricane Katrina delivering a blistering blow to then one sided Louisiana and New Orleans commentary:
“Look at the bullshit we been through / Had our niggas sitting on top their roofs / Hurricane Katrina, we should’ve called it Hurricane (Georgia) Bush / Then they telling y’all lies on the news / The white people smiling like everything cool / But I know people that died in that pool / I know people that died in them schools”
Years later, Queensbridge legend Nas, someone who’s never been one to shy away from social commentary himself, delivered “Nas”; his newfound title after his previous title “N*gger” wasn’t accepted. Everyone knew the title “Nas”, sometimes referrer to as “Untitled” was merely a placeholder of a title, something that wasn’t meant to be held there at all — reflective of America’s penchant and uncanny consistency to erase and make attempts to try and hide it’s flaws as opposed to directly addressing them. On “Nas”, the Queensbridge MC turned dark and more politically militant than ever. He made a full charge against America, attacking it’s early mass genocide of Native American’s;
“Assassinations, diplomatic relations / Killed indigenous people built a new nation”
To his love of the black community, finding him declaring “I love y’all; pyramids to cotton fields”. It was a hot bombshell of a record at it’s time, but not the first time Hip-Hop has done it. There are near infinite of Sociopolitical activism in these tracks, ranging from 1988’s riotous “Fuck Tha Police” to 2000’s “A Song For Assata” by Common, a moving tribute and retelling of the trial of lobbyist and Black Panther associate Assata Shakur, one’s who’s case was exceptionally plugged and disputed everywhere; it was broadly trusted and believed that she was a large participant for the homicide of an officer. She later dodged jail & sought Political refuge in Cuba. Common is caught in the track saying:
“I read this sister’s story, knew that it deserved a verse / I wonder what would happen if that would’ve been me? / All of this just so we could be free”
But there’s even more. Lupe Fiasco’s 2011 statement “Words I Never Said”, he reaches outward and to his listeners instead of looking at himself. “I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit” he adds. “Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit.” He snaps. But he saves his hardest lines for later, seeing him add this bomb:
“Jihad is not holy war, where’s that in the worship? / Murdering is not Islam, and you are not observant.”
From Commons “Black America Again”, to Mos Def’s “Mathematics”, and even more presently to YG’s “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)” and J. Cole’s “High For Hours”, Hip-Hop has always been an inherently political landscape. We rose from the slums, from the bottom of the class pyramid and made something that could never be taken from us. A new form of art. Our art, something that couldn’t be shut down or taken away from us. Something that we owned and we controlled how it was being created and spread. A vast multitude of other blackcentric genres have a history of activism with their artists as well; see Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin On”, or Billie Holidays “Strange Fruit”. Other records that come to mind are John Coltrane’s “Alabama”, Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”, Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” but most importantly of all, Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”; a genuine 1970’s cultural touchstone of white hot activism, even having it’s title become a part of not only mainstream, but pop culture as well.
The R&B artist’s convivially mindful, mark, and masterful tune set the gregarious arousal of the Civil Rights time against American commercialization and consumerism and flipped it on it’s head, and against something else; pitting one of America’s most proud traits (Consumerism) and one of it’s more impactful times (The Civil Rights Era) in a forward clash of musical intrests. “The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner,” Gil Scott rapped, laying substratum for early Hip-Hop. First discharged as a powerful blast of music in 1970 as a sort of. verbalized, spoken word piece, the late Scott Heron’s most acclaimed and prominently featured track was later revamped as a cadence paced jazz tune including melodic accomplice Brian Jackson’s butterfly-like woodwind and included musical mastery. The tune was not unmistakably activist, yet it made it’s point even more clear.
In the 21st century, the presence of activism hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s simply adapted itself in a new manner. And in the 2010’s, our 2 greatest examples come in the form of Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West. But there’s more to examine out of the 3 albums I initially depicted. Didn’t you see it? DAMN. followed up To Pimp A Butterfly, while Yeezus followed up the calculated My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It serves as a bigger example in a larger picture altogether. When he try and attack our oppressors ideologies and not them as people via peaceful and conventional means, were railed against. Kendrick Lamar’s TPAB, despite is vast critical acclaim, was also met with some harsh responses, and the same goes for West’s Dark Fantasy. When we cannot reason with them through conventional ways, we lash out, like the red eyed Yeezus and the reactionary catharsis of DAMN. And if they do not listen to us after all that we’ve done, then we’ll continue the cycle forever. You can only prod the bear with the stick until it retaliates. We no longer have it as a mandatory demand to go out in the streets and protest, were able to do it in the comfort of our own homes and studios. Kendrick Lamar & Kanye West, while remastering what true activism is, are also shining examples of pushing genre boundaries.
We cannot, and will not be ignored. | https://medium.com/@TheRedBeingShot/kendrick-lamar-kanye-west-activism-remastered-for-the-21st-century-2358420c927f | ['The Red Being Shot'] | 2019-03-09 14:34:18.900000+00:00 | ['Music', 'America', 'Politics', 'Rap'] |
More Than Just Fake News: Propaganda and Political Campaign Advertising | Messaging is critical to getting your candidacy to stick in the minds of the voters. In the race for the highest position in America, who can begrudge the presidential hopefuls a little prevaricating?
Just like we’ve come to expect the white lie or two, we’ve also come to expect maps in our election analysis. Curious where presidential candidates were choosing to spin which yarn, I decided to map the locations Facebook ads aired.**
Screenshot of a Kamala Harris Facebook ad
In order to clearly convey the message of each ad, I classed ad language as one of seven propaganda types. Ads were assigned a secondary subtype only if they very strongly displayed more than one central message.
Propaganda Types
Transfer: Virtue by association (Used to connect to positive symbols)
Testimonial: Endorsements (Highlighting the good while often encouraging viewers not to look too closely)
Glittering Generalities: Virtue words (Use most often for policy statements: “I’m going to fight for our children’s future.”)
Just Plain Folks: Projecting an image of being down to earth. (I thought this would be the most common, but so far it has not been.)
Bandwagon: Join the crowd (I tagged requests for donations as Bandwagon, and so this has been the most common.)
Name Calling: Attaching to negative symbols (sometimes literal name calling: “The only thing Trump knows about the criminal justice system is the ‘criminal’ part.”)
Card Stacking: Half-truths (Used either to tear down the competition or build up the candidate. Kamala Harris ran a lot of ads claiming a “new poll” put her ahead of Trump. Since the ads did not specify details about the poll, I labeled them as Card Stacking, rather than Testimonial.)
Now let’s take a look at the candidates.
Andrew Yang | https://medium.com/isaac-atlas/more-than-just-fake-news-propaganda-and-political-campaign-advertising-118cdb92460 | ['Cecelia Isaac'] | 2020-12-15 07:09:09.447000+00:00 | ['Advertising', 'Propaganda', 'Mapping', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Kamala Harris'] |
The Truth about “Truth in Sentencing” in Florida: A Rebuttal to the Florida Sheriffs Association — Part 2 | Truth in Sentencing and “Judge-Imposed Sentences”
FSA’s first argument in defense of the 85 percent rule is that reducing a time served requirement to anything less than 85 percent undermines a sentencing judge’s power to impose an appropriate sentence. For example, the FSA report argues:
If a judge imposes a sentence, it should be served (with certain gain time considerations) and not gutted to put a convicted felon back out on the street early.[1]
Former FSA president and current Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri echoed this argument on behalf of the FSA:
If a judge sentences someone to ten years in prison after hearing all of the relevant facts of the case, knowing all there is to know about that person, then that person should not get out in six years. Ten years does not mean six.[2]
FSA’s reasoning is flawed and its conclusions are incorrect. Reducing the determinate minimum time served requirement from 85 percent to 65 percent does not undermine judges’ ability to impose appropriate punishments. Additionally, by recognizing that “certain gain-time considerations” are appropriate and consistent with “truth in sentencing,” FSA concedes the point they are trying to disprove.
FSA is correct that a judge imposes a sentence based in part on “knowing all there is to know about that person” — at the time of sentencing. Allowing people to earn additional time off a sentence recognizes the value of having a judge impose a sentence, but also recognizes that people grow, mature, and rehabilitate while serving a sentence. That is, it recognizes that there is more to know about a person after that person has served time in prison than what was available at sentencing.
For example, a person might earn additional time off a sentence by completing educational and vocational programs, drug treatment, and other programs designed to promote prosocial behavioral modifications, all of which would be aimed at preparing prisoners for effective reentry and approved by the Department of Corrections. Under the status quo, prisoners have no incentive to commit to rehabilitation. Under a reformed system, they are rewarded for changing their behavior in a positive direction.
FSA’s position assumes post-sentencing rehabilitation is impossible. That assumption is incorrect. Tens of thousands of people are released from prison every year and never return. Some serve short sentences and are deterred by the experience from reoffending. Others “age out” of criminal behavior. Still others learn the life skills that help them lead stable lives upon reentry. For whatever reason, these people leave behind their life of crime.
One such person is Matthew Charles, who was released from federal prison in January 2019 after serving two terms totaling more than twenty-one years. Georgetown Law Professor Shon Hopwood describes Matthew’s case:
Matthew was in prison because, at the age of thirty, he was sentenced to thirty-five years in federal court for distributing 216 grams of crack cocaine and illegally possessing a firearm. Matthew’s sentence resulted, not from the quantity of crack cocaine he distributed, but from his ugly criminal history that included: “kidnapping a woman on two consecutive days ‘for the purpose of terrorizing her’; burglarizing a home; and fleeing from a police interrogation, shooting a man in the head, and attempting to run off in the victim’s car.” When Matthew was sentenced, the sentencing judge explained that Matthew had “a particularly violent history” and had “demonstrated by his actions that he’s a danger to society and should simply be off the streets.”[3]
Few would argue Matthew’s sentence was unjustified given “all there was to know” about him at the time of his sentencing. However, as Hopwood notes, there would be more to Matthew Charles than the judge knew — or could have known — at the time his sentence was imposed.
But what the judge did not foresee was that Matthew would change. In the more than twenty-one years Matthew spent in prison, he never received a single disciplinary infraction. Matthew studied the Bible during religious services and the law while working as a law clerk in the prison law library. He received an education through college courses. And his focus wasn’t just on himself: he drafted legal filings for illiterate prisoners and explained to them the court orders issued in their cases. When he wasn’t helping illiterate prisoners understand the law, he was teaching GED classes. Matthew was determined to change his character, and he embarked on what the judge who resentenced him many years later called “exemplary rehabilitation.”[4]
Charles’ transformation was so remarkable that not only was he the first person released under the retroactive sentencing reforms in the federal First Step Act, he was also President Trump’s guest at the 2019 State of the Union. Since his release, Matthew has worked as a full-time criminal justice reform advocate, traveling the country meeting with legislators and Governors. By the FSA’s logic, Matthew Charles should still be in prison.
FSA’s claim that a 65 percent requirement would undermine judicial sentencing power is itself internally inconsistent. On one hand, FSA argues that a 65 percent standard would “gut” judges’ ability to keep an offender in prison for whatever amount of time the judge feels is appropriate. On the other hand, FSA concedes that under a 65 percent requirement judges would still determine the total time served. Speaking on behalf of FSA, one sheriff argued that under a 65 percent standard, “. . . judges would go back to sentencing defendants to some artificially higher number of years to ensure that these felons actually serve the time that the court determined appropriate.”[5]
It is impossible for both of these claims to be true simultaneously. If judges control time served under either an 85 percent standard or a 65 percent standard, then FSA’s claim that a 65 percent standard necessarily “guts” judge-imposed sentences is false. If FSA’s claim that a 65 percent determinate standard “guts” judge-imposes sentences, then the claim that judges will retain the power over time served by inflating sentence lengths “artificially” is false.
Current law allows most incarcerated people to earn “gain time” that makes them eligible for release after serving 85 percent of their sentence. By supporting the status quo, and recognizing that “certain gain time considerations” justify reducing time served to 85 percent of an imposed sentence, FSA concedes the principle that serving less than 100 percent of a judge-imposed sentence is consistent with that sentence. Unfortunately, the FSA report does not explain why release at 85 percent is tolerable and consistent with “truth in sentencing,” but release at a different fixed percentage is not.
For his part, Sheriff Gualtieri is correct that ten years does not mean six, but neither does it mean 8.5. The FSA report fails to explain why 85 percent is the minimum threshold that distinguishes “truth in sentencing” from its opposite. It is worth asking whether FSA would consider, e.g., an 84.99 percent time served requirement inconsistent with “truth in sentencing.” What about 80 percent? 75 percent? After all, determinate sentencing does not inherently require an 85 percent time-served requirement. The current standard is the standard only because it is the number President Clinton and state senator Crist chose. The FSA report offers no analysis or evidence that suggests 85 percent is the ideal determinate standard, and offers no analysis or evidence that some other standard would undermine public safety goals.
In fact, alternatives to the current 85 percent rule could almost certainly achieve the same public safety goals FSA wrongly suggests are unique to the status quo. For example, imagine a judge imposes the following sentence:
Ten years. However, if the defendant earns a high school diploma or its equivalent, nine years. If the defendant also completes two years of drug rehabilitation, eight years. If the defendant also completes anger management courses, and at least 50 percent of the required training to earn an occupational license, 6.5 years.
Is this sentence a “façade,” as FSA suggested it would be?[6] Is there no “truth” to it? Would giving a judge the option to impose such a sentence paradoxically “gut” the judge’s decision-making authority in a way that prohibiting the judge from imposing it wouldn’t? Would this sentence “threaten a victim’s right to have an offender appropriately punished”?[7]
Under current law, judges are powerless to impose this kind of conditional sentencing. Under a reformed law, however, proactive sentencing — which both protects judges’ power over sentencing and promotes rehabilitation — would be possible, and would create powerful incentives for people in prison to follow the rules and participate in positive behavioral programming that can lead to successful reentry.
[1] Truth in Sentencing at 3.
[2] Florida Sheriffs Association press conference, January 28, 2020. Available: https://www.facebook.com/floridasheriffsassociation/videos/2561469117234933/.
[3] Shon Hopwood, “Second Looks and Second Chances,” Cardozo Law Review, vol. 41 Issue 1, (2019). http://cardozolawreview.com/second-looks-second-chances/.
[4] Id.
[5] FSA press conference, supra note 2.
[6] Id.
[7] Truth in Sentencing, supra note 1, at 3. | https://medium.com/@gnewburn/the-truth-about-truth-in-sentencing-in-florida-a-rebuttal-to-the-florida-sheriffs-association-b81d457b1f2c | ['Greg Newburn'] | 2020-12-02 16:46:38.265000+00:00 | ['Florida', 'Sentencing', 'Criminal Justice Reform', 'Criminal Justice', 'Mandatory Minimums'] |
Useful Tools in Software Testing | Software testing is a really important part of the development process. Our skilled Quality Control specialists use a bunch of tools that support testing operations and significantly improve their effectiveness. In this blog post, we will explain what we use and why.
Before we begin, a quick explanation of what QC actually is.
Quality Control is a proper name for all testing processes happening inside a digital agency. Its main purpose is to find bugs in developed software and give feedback that helps to fix them.
So, what kind of tools can help testers with their daily work?
Types of testing tools
We can sort these tools into a couple of basic categories — based on their functionalities. These are:
Automation testing tools
Bug tracking systems
Test management tools
Performance testing tools
Manual testing tools
Let’s give them a rundown — see what their advantages are and why their help is invaluable.
Automation testing tools
Oftentimes, when it comes to complex and long-lasting projects we introduce test automation to make the processes more efficient and to reduce the cost of regression tests. Implementation of the automatic tests can also save time when it comes to manual, repeatable activities — and this way it allows for investing more into other types of testing, for example exploration tests.
Automation of routine work equals testing products the same way each time which means no human-factor is involved. That can be crucial for the results.
This type of tests can be created using different programming languages, but usually that’s C#, Python or Java. Thanks to their big popularity, but also lots of help from devs and testers when it comes to their advancement, these languages have many ready-to-use solutions and libraries supporting them.
Additionally, there are also tools that work by the rule of record and play — for example Selenium IDE — that are dedicated to everyone who is not experienced enough to write their own code. It is worth mentioning, that these tools can be more prone to application changes and expensive to maintain.
Bug tracking systems
Bug reporting is one of the tester’s main duties. Many useful tools were created to report them efficiently and transparently. They make the job easier for testers and programmers, too. Thanks to these systems, bug management and reporting is easy. Each team member can track the process of fixing them.
Test management tools
Testers do not only report bugs but they also have some other responsibilities to keep in mind. That includes creating:
Test plans
Test scenarios
Test reports
Doing all those things can be supported by test management tools. Most of them can integrate with the most popular bug tracking systems — so we can have all the needed data in one place.
Performance testing tools
Most tests for performance, load and stress are usually not possible to do manually or just unprofitable. Especially since there are many tools that can run scripts to simulate traffic of thousands of users in different time sequences or at the same time. It allows us to verify the system will respond regarding reaction time, maximum load or stress.
Manual testing tools
While performing exploratory testing in SBTM (Session Based Test Management) model, it is important to make notes during the session. The reason is that this approach — unlike testing based on test cases — we don’t report bugs while tests are still ongoing.
No matter which method you choose, reporting bugs should be very detailed. What’s most important is to deliver as much information as possible for each fault — so we often use screenshots or even video clips.
Sometimes we need to create accounts or fill out forms in the systems we test, which can be time-consuming. That’s why we use many tools that can make the job of a tester much more efficient.
Our favorite tools
Here’s a list of some popular testing tools, that we also use at iteo:
Selenium Framework : for end-2-end test automation for web apps. It supports most of the popular internet browsers. Using it we can write automated tests with well-known programming languages like C#, Python and Java.
for end-2-end test automation for web apps. It supports most of the popular internet browsers. Using it we can write automated tests with well-known programming languages like C#, Python and Java. Insomnia REST Client : it’s an open-source tool for API testing. Works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It has a user-friendly GUI and advanced options like code generator, authentication support and environment variables.
it’s an open-source tool for API testing. Works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It has a user-friendly GUI and advanced options like code generator, authentication support and environment variables. SoapUI : another open-source tool for API testing and efficiency testing. Mostly for web applications.
another open-source tool for API testing and efficiency testing. Mostly for web applications. Gatling : great for performance and load testing of web apps. Includes an advanced system for reporting test results. Generating HTML report with it has information such as: active users over time, response time distribution, response time percentiles over time, requests per second over time, responses per second over time. It supports HTML, WebSocket, Server-sent events and JMS protocols.
great for performance and load testing of web apps. Includes an advanced system for reporting test results. Generating HTML report with it has information such as: active users over time, response time distribution, response time percentiles over time, requests per second over time, responses per second over time. It supports HTML, WebSocket, Server-sent events and JMS protocols. Appium : another framework used for tests automation. This one is useful for native mobile applications, mobile web apps and hybrid applications for Android and iOS.
another framework used for tests automation. This one is useful for native mobile applications, mobile web apps and hybrid applications for Android and iOS. Postman : this tool assists in creating and testing API thanks to the possibility of sending different HTML requests (GET, POST, etc.). It cooperates with different programming languages (JavaScript, Python).
this tool assists in creating and testing API thanks to the possibility of sending different HTML requests (GET, POST, etc.). It cooperates with different programming languages (JavaScript, Python). Jira : a paid system for tracking and reporting bugs. Thanks to many different plugins it can be useful for test management.
a paid system for tracking and reporting bugs. Thanks to many different plugins it can be useful for test management. Rapid Reporter : a free-to-use tool for Windows and Mac that helps with exploring tests in SBTM (Session Based Test Management) model. It creates notes from each session.
a free-to-use tool for Windows and Mac that helps with exploring tests in SBTM (Session Based Test Management) model. It creates notes from each session. Rapid Paste : a tool for keeping predefined data with basic data generators. The app is dedicated for Windows and written by one of our testers.
a tool for keeping predefined data with basic data generators. The app is dedicated for Windows and written by one of our testers. PicPick: this is a fully functional software for snapping screenshots. An intuitive image editor with a probe and a color palette, a ruler, a protractor, area measuring and more.
To sum it up
As you might already know from our blog, testing is super important for every product designed by a digital agency. We always want to be sure that the mobile apps and websites we create work properly. That’s why we use the tools mentioned above — to make our work more productive and precise.
If you are looking for a company that always pays attention to details — throughout every part of the product development — let us know what you have in mind. We’re here to help! | https://medium.com/@iteo/useful-tools-in-software-testing-3d60d69c5098 | [] | 2020-02-21 11:46:51.136000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Web Development', 'Software Testing', 'Quality Assurance', 'Software Development'] |
I Fingered Ernest Hemingway’s Hole | I Fingered Ernest Hemingway’s Hole
The author ignoring Hemingway’s staring problem. Photo courtesy of author.
For years, Lake Michigan beaches, nearby ski resorts, and majestic sunsets have drawn my husband, Sam, and I to Northwest Michigan. The quaint shops, fabulous restaurants, and scenic drives add to the allure, but nothing gave me a bigger thrill than fingering Ernest Hemingway’s hole.
I found it by accident
Sam and I wandered into City Park Grill in Petoskey for a late afternoon lunch and a couple of cocktails. We sat at the empty bar. It was late-Autumn, after the colorful leaves had already fallen — a lull in tourism until the snow falls.
The middle-aged bartender made our drinks as I admired the dark wooden bar.
“That’s solid mahogany. All one piece. Thirty-two feet long,” he said. He went on to regale us with the history of the building constructed in 1875. It was one of the oldest in town and had started off as a men-only billiard parlor in the basement. It was part of the network of underground tunnels that bootleggers used to covertly distribute their product. Conveniently, there was an attached hotel.
As the information swirled through my head, I said, “Somehow, I’m having a hard time believing there were no ladies involved in this ‘male-only’ club.” I used finger quotes and wide eyes to make my point. “I mean there was billiards, illegal booze, and a nearby hotel. Come on!”
He smiled and said I was probably right.
Then, he told us about the resident ghost. A past owner who had hanged himself in the basement often made his presence known by opening and closing the front door or stealing objects only to return them later.
“What about Hemingway?” I asked. “There’s a sign outside saying he was a regular here?”
Hemingway couldn’t keep his eyes to himself
Turns out, Ernest Hemingway, The Nobel Prize winning author born on July 21, 1899, would stay summers at his grandparents’ home on nearby Walloon Lake his first twenty-two years. He became a regular at the bar, which at that time was called The Annex. Hemingway mentioned The Annex in his short story “Gentleman of the World.”
I glanced up at the picture of Hemingway behind the bar. It seemed like he was staring at me.
The bartender said, “He always sat in the second chair from the beginning of the bar. That’s why his picture is hung directly across from there.”
I spun my head toward Sam.
He already knew what I wanted and gathered our coats.
I wanted — no, had to — sit in Hemingway’s chair.
“Wow!” I said, settling in, spinning myself around in circles. “I love this!” I raised my glass to Hemingway’s image.
He was still staring.
It began to unnerve me.
Hemingway was a creature of habit
As the bartender kept talking, I learned Hemingway was kind of a prick. He sat in the second seat so he could see who was coming in the building, but no one described him as a friendly guy. He’d sit there with a stiff drink and a cigar, observing people. Maybe getting ideas for his next book.
The bartender nodded his head toward a bar mat to my left. “Go ahead and lift that up.”
Curious, I peered under the mat and found a circular hole about an inch in diameter and an inch and a half deep. I didn’t understand its significance and gave the bartender a confused expression.
I was horrified to learn Hemingway would grind his cigar into the beautiful mahogany bar instead of using an ashtray. He did it so often, in the exact same spot, it became a deep hole.
I stuck my index finger in his hole and while I felt my way around, I bored my eyes into his framed picture. Who’s being rude now?
He stared right back and didn’t flinch.
After lunch, I stuck a quick finger in the hole again and we took a short walk to the Ernest Hemingway statue in Pennsylvania Park. Based off a 1920 picture, it was of Hemingway about to leave Petoskey for a job in Toronto. Apparently, he had been in Petoskey for several months recovering from an injury from his time served in World War I.
The author and Hemingway. Where is her other hand? Photo courtesy of author.
Takeaway
Every time we visit Petoskey, we try to stop in to finger Hemingway’s hole. It’s become a tradition. On a girls’ weekend, I even got my prim and proper mother to stick her finger in his hole. The naughtiness of it delighted her.
We also try to get a picture taken with the statue.
That poor statue.
We’ve seen Hemingway suffering the fools who decorate him with bridal veils or pose lasciviously around him. Yet, he stands tall — as if silly antics would never break him.
I admit, I’ve given his butt a pat or two, and I’m just surmising here, but I’d say Hemingway has a big set of balls. And I bet they’re made of brass … okay, maybe bronze. | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/i-fingered-ernest-hemingways-hole-6aa618f69953 | ['Tracy Stengel'] | 2020-12-04 18:59:32.535000+00:00 | ['History', 'Nonfiction', 'The Bad Influence', 'Travel', 'Humor'] |
Tokenism and Representation: A Fine Line in Popular Media. | It’s the 21st century. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, comedy, and every other genre seems to be played out under the sun; being woke is a currency and diversification is key. Production houses seem to be bringing out show after show, milking on views of their target audience with clean-cut character-types that would fit their demographic. And while new scenarios and stories find their way to mainstream media, the people striving to bring these stories to the screen, find themselves balancing on the tightrope of building the lives of people on-screen.
For the average media consumer, the entertainment industry seems to have everything for everybody. Fantasy and sci-fi storylines stemmed from real-life disasters, political satires weaving their way into dramatic plotlines, common vices uncovered in feel-good family movies, deep-rooted societal issues bring reality to the horror genre, etc. Sociologists find that popular media in society could be understood as a reflection of its people.
Finding an original and creative niche, decades into popular storytelling, can be hard for writers, and thus, the building of characters, as any mainstream writer would find, isn't so easy when one's society has a problematic gaze. An easy look at the evolution of Hollywood could be a good indication of that:
The mainstream cinema-going audience forgets that while art imitates life, life also tends to imitate art, and thus by depicting particular views, one projects the stereotypes of the majority, onto the minority. And while these minority communities try to participate in society, they are forced to fit into these prejudicial boxes. These are milder versions of deep-rooted issues present in a society, like that of racism and colorism, patriarchy, and religious radicalism that also found a horrifying place in common society in those times. And as long as the lens was held in the hands of the silent majority, cinema would only exist as a window into privileged homes for afflicted minorities, rather than a mirror for the majority to rewrite it's normative.
Even as present-day activists would have hoped for another way, this had to slowly begin with the white nod to the black lens. This came from a promising place of a mutual understanding of personal narratives, and the passing on of the lens to the community. When minorities found themselves in the writer's rooms, collaborating with the majority to build their own cinematic histories, and eventually found themselves in the director’s chairs, narratives that depicted the normal lives of minorities came through. Narratives of their struggles, failures, victories, became synonymous with that of society. This could be seen in extremes like that of ‘12 Years a Slave,’ and in stories made for a general audience like ‘Marvelous Mr’s. Maisel,’ and in many others. Representation seemed to come through.
A still from the movie, ’12 Years A Slave.’
But consequently, even as these new characters come on screen today, the gaze could make or break the narrative. Mainstream movies like ‘The Help’ and ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ (both, adapted from books.) were popularly discussed as depicting important perspectives of minorities. Yet, at the grassroots level, it displayed problematic views, in turn, hurting the African-American, and LGBTQ+ community respectively.
A still from the movie ‘Blue is The Warmest Colour.’
The power dynamic of ‘The Help.’
Actors of the adaptations spoke out about the discomfort and the realisation of the impact of their portrayal, the ‘Blue is The Warmest Colour’ actors stating, that as lesbian lovers on-screen, they were worried that they were playing out a male fantasy due to the narrative. Hollywood actor, Viola Davis regretted her role in ‘The Help,’ as it played into a white saviour narrative. Interestingly, both of these adaptations were made by directors of the majority, for the depicted minority, to ostentatiously congratulate themselves for being ‘allies.’
This marked the early stages of regression, or what educated activists would call ‘Tokenism.’ Emboldened by the system, Tokenism could be considered the watered-down, diet version of the prejudices of the past, its impact creeping into communities under the cloak of allyship.
Minorities came to see themselves on screen, not under any prejudicial gaze, but as contributing to the storylines. The primary difference now is that writers found a way to slyly work around the creative mechanism, and try to liken it with diversity. For one, Hollywood remakes like that of ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Ocean’s 8,’ were branded as feminist films, even as the community recognised the harm of attempting to masculise femininity for global recognition, rather than celebrating femininity. The mere creation of these roles pigeon-holed these characters to fit into legendary roles written with men in mind.
Writers often get cornered into the ideals of writing a character with no specific sociological characteristics, so that any individual could fit into portraying that role.
The Doctor Who series franchise popular for The Doctor’s morality and experiences, in the early 2000s, saw a steep drop in views in Season 11, fans accusing the creators of attempting to blatantly tokenize its characters, when the entire cast was abruptly changed to include one individual from every minority group in the UK, seemingly to bring views to a franchise that was already dying. The problem could be best understood when, because of lazy writing, these individuals don’t seem to have any autonomy. They are driven by the momentary storylines, and don’t have any character depth beyond it, or that they are written to supplement the stories of a privileged majority.
All the Doctors from ‘Doctor Who.’
A simple run-through of popular films and shows today could reveal the underlying issue. The tropes of the ‘token black guy’ that exists only to die early in horror movies, the ‘trophy wife/bimbo girlfriend’ that seems to have no individual agency, the ‘gay best friend’ who only exists for shopping trips and boy advice; popular shows including characters like Kevin, the gay best-friend in the teen-drama show Riverdale, Raj, in the sitcom Big-Bang Theory, Stanley Hudson in The Office, all with different formulas of tokenism, should have been red flags from the beginning.
This is most prominent with the representation of females in popular media. According to Katha Pollitt, a popular media practice would be to include only one woman in an otherwise entirely male ensemble, where they were hyper-sexualized and existed only in reference to men like Princess Leia in Star Wars, Black Widow in The Avengers, Elaine in Seinfeld, etc. She coined it ‘The Smurfette Principle.’ These characters would consequently fail the Bechdel test, revealing deep-rooted gender bias. All of this was done for more views, without addressing societal effects. Needless to say, one could see how this could be problematic.
After the Oscars was boycotted half a decade ago under the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, they tried to rebrand themselves, and announced new rules of diversity this year, for films to be nominated, calling for representation on screen, in the crew, and at the studio. Yet many predict that filmmakers will take the easy way in and tokenise their characters and crew since the bar is set so low.
The only way to get out of lazy character sketches, and treading the fine line between diversity and tokenism, would be to bring systemic change. Only when minorities are brought into every sphere of creating content for the masses, will the sense of being tokenised be transformed into the essence of being empowered.
And finally, when communities have systems set in place that provide opportunities to own their perspectives, they’ll be able to drive change in how they’re seen in popular media and seen in society. This would, in turn, allow them to influence the direction of the production of media. Character depth and narrative matters, and only when popular media is able to portray that sensitively, is when representation will be commonplace. | https://medium.com/the-volume-collective/tokenism-and-representation-a-fine-line-in-popular-media-6fa803dc939b | ['Joanna Dias'] | 2020-12-05 15:27:34.566000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'Women', 'Hollywood', 'Representation', 'Storytelling'] |
How will the coronavirus affect access to safe abortion? | Officially known as COVID-19, a new strain of coronavirus has now been detected in 159 countries around the world and has been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). The illness has already caused thousands of deaths and will have a continued impact on global health systems and economies. One healthcare issue which will certainly be affected is access to safe abortion.
We already know that abortions happen every day, in every country of the world. Over half of all unintended pregnancies end in abortion, with WHO estimating that around 56 million abortions take place globally each year.
It’s possible that in places where people are required to self-isolate due to the virus, often without reliable access to contraception, unprotected sexual activity and therefore rates of unintended pregnancy could increase. Sadly, in times of crisis, and where people are forced into close contact, incidences of domestic violence and rape can increase, which may also lead to forced pregnancies and a need to seek abortion care. Those who are pregnant during these uncertain times may find that their decision about whether to continue the pregnancy is affected by factors such as loss of income, or other health concerns brought on by the crisis. Potentially more people will need abortions during this time, so how will they access them?
The Guttmacher Institute has produced a useful summary of the potential effects of the pandemic on people’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. They point out factors like a shortage of medication (contraception but also abortion pills) thanks to disruptions in global supply chains, with China being a key supplier of drugs. Resources and medical staff will also be diverted to deal with the crisis — in the most affected countries, we are already seeing a huge strain on health care services which may delay access to abortion. RPRV, a Safe Abortion Action Fund (SAAF) grantee partner in Georgia, where abortion is legally accessible but highly stigmatized, has told us there have already been delays caused by service providers going into self-isolation after returning from Italy.
Of course, in many countries where legal abortion is restricted, people are only able to access safe abortion care by travelling to another city/country or by purchasing abortion medication via the internet or pharmacies. They will, of course, be affected by quarantines, travel bans and the shutting of borders.
The Abortion Support Network (ASN) is part of a team of organizations in Europe called ‘Abortion Without Borders’, which is focused on supporting people in Poland who need to access abortions. Poland has one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe and those who need to access safe care will usually need to travel abroad or find abortion pills online. Worryingly, ASN has reported that “Poland has cancelled all flights and trains in and out of the country”. Poland is also stopping international postage, which is the main way people living there can have safe abortions — by ordering abortion medication to be posted to them.
As a global fund dedicated to funding abortion, SAAF is already starting to see the impact on the projects we support — from the actual provision of abortion services, and access to drugs and equipment, to the important work being done on education, advocacy and stigma busting. Many organizations are already reporting bans on public gatherings, and of course, advocacy meetings with health ministers are likely to be cancelled due to competing urgent matters. We’ve seen that a referendum planned to take place to change the abortion law in Gibraltar has now been postponed and our partner Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir Argentina has had to pause progress on a bill to expand the abortion law in Argentina, which will have life-saving consequences if passed.
Organizations are already showing resilience and dedication to supporting the communities they work with to stay safe — TICAH in Kenya has started online campaigns to engage artists while under lockdown, and their ‘Aunty Jane’ hotline continues to provide counselling and information to those who need it. Though there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Uganda, VODA is busy sensitizing staff and volunteers on safety protocols and helping to ready schools and churches for how this might affect women’s reproductive health needs moving forward.
So what can be done? We don’t yet know the full impact of the virus but it is already highlighting the problems inherent in many countries’ restrictive abortion laws. This acts as a stark reminder that we need to remove all laws, policies and practices which prevent access to contraception and safe abortion, with effects being harshest on the most vulnerable groups.
Many have pointed out the need to consider options such as telemedicine for expanding access to medical services during this time, and this method has been shown to be effective for abortion care. WHO has also stated the importance of expanding who can provide medical abortion, noting that “it is also possible for individuals to play a role in managing some of the components by themselves, outside of a health-care facility.” Many organizations and activist groups are helping connect those seeking abortions with the medication they need to do so safely, so we can all donate to abortion funds like ASN and Fondo Maria to ensure this important work continues.
As a global fund dedicated to abortion, we will work with our partners to ensure they can still reach those most in need, and we will be flexible to any change which may be around the corner.
We will continue to fund this important work because women and others have always needed abortions, and always will, and they deserve to have them safely and with dignity, whoever they are and wherever they are.
Words by: Laura Hurley, Programme Advisor, Safe Abortion Action Fund (SAAF) | https://ippf.medium.com/how-will-the-coronavirus-affect-access-to-safe-abortion-75cdbe66fcb | ['Ippf Global'] | 2020-03-18 15:22:29.964000+00:00 | ['Healthcare', 'Womens Health', 'Womens Rights', 'Abortion'] |
Post-Coronavirus — How we moved from Fear to Trust | Post-Coronavirus — How we moved from Fear to Trust
In the beginning of last year, Coronavirus affected each one of us — some more than others. This is a story of how we moved beyond Coronavirus and started to co-create a world that supports the wellbeing of the whole.
©Iina Santamäki
Looking back at the rates now, we can safely say that Coronavirus turned out to be less severe than we expected at the time. When we shifted from a state of fear to a state of trust, we realized that what was really causing the virus to turn into a pandemic was the fear that so many of us held. As said by Charles Eisenstein: The most dangerous virus is the virus of fear. When we shifted from fear to trust as a collective, the number of infections started to drop drastically. We started to see how our minds can make us sick if we believe every thought that arises. We started to see how unique a human body is — a system formed by interconnected elements that serve the very purpose of keeping us alive.
Although we were able to keep the death rates low considering the number of people who got infected, we started to feel deep empathy and care for those who were affected the most. We started to see each person as a member of extended family, regardless of the country of origin, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or any other factor that used to create a division between us.
Coronavirus provided a wake-up call for us in many ways, one being our dependence on external sources — for example in regards to food. We started to explore alternative (yet traditional) ways of becoming more self-sufficient as well as exploring alternative economies of gifting and sharing. We started to see the damages of capitalism and its profit- and growth-driven mindset. We realized that the wellbeing of the collective is one of the greatest gifts we can give and receive. That we feel more abundant when others around us feel the same. We realized that it does not matter if an individual is healthy and wealthy in isolation. Because that is not real wealth, it is only an illusion. Therefore, we started to consider global challenges as a collective matter, and instead of discussing what we should do — we started to act. We started to build bridges of compassion and respect, and reimagine a regenerative world for present, future, and beyond.
During the outbreak of Coronavirus, we had to start looking for alternative ways of working. Remote work enabled us to re-evaluate our time management, our motivation, and our relationships. We realized that remote meetings actually work and can provide the same value as face-to-face meetings. In fact, remote meetings made us more intentional in the air time used, the space we take, in meetings. We realized that deep listening, presence and intentional agenda enabled our remote meetings to flow. We asked ourselves: “Why did it take us so long to stop flying to another country for a half-day meeting?”
While we understood that remote work can sometimes be more effective, we still longed for physical connection. When we were able to return to our offices, visit our parents and grandparents, and participate in large conferences — we just wanted to give a big warm hug to everyone we encountered. We started to appreciate the inherent yearning for connection within all of us.
During Coronavirus, many of us returned to nature to seek safety and comfort. When we stepped into silence and were surrounded by vibrant, living nature — we felt alive and nurtured. We started to question why some of us have moved into a city where we can hardly hear how the wind touches the leaves or see a squirrel looking straight into our eyes. We started to realize how we are an inherent part of nature and our astonishing ecosystem. We started to see how our actions in the past have affected the most precious living beings on our planet. Therefore, we knew where to start — it was time for us to reconnect with ourselves, one another, and nature. | https://medium.com/@iina.santamaki/post-coronavirus-how-we-moved-from-fear-to-trust-950605f941a2 | ['Iina Santamäki'] | 2020-04-11 13:41:59.048000+00:00 | ['Systems Thinking', 'Collaboration', 'Connection', 'Futures Thinking', 'Coronavirus'] |
Lessons for the Loveless | Lessons for the Loveless
Pitfalls that may prevent us from finding love
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Sometimes, I feel as though I will remain single for the duration of my lifetime.
I certainly would love to find love. But the older I get, it seems as evasive as keeping a perfectly formed snowflake on the palm of my warm hand.
I keep mulling over some of the thought-processes that have resulted in not yet finding love and how I could possibly work on changing them. This exercise is rather unromantic at best — and demotivating at worst — but it does encourage some reflexivity regarding how I continue to trip myself up when it comes to my pursuit of love.
Here are my top 5 thought-processes…
Photo by Ben Rosett on Unsplash
1. I believe that Mr. Right actually exists.
He doesn’t.
(I told you this list could be unromantic)
My first major obstacle is that I cling to the notion that somewhere out in the world is an individual who will perfectly fit the contours of my personality, accept my idiosyncracies and celebrate my whackiness with great fervor. And of course, I will do the same for him.
Evidently, I grew up on a steady diet of Sleepless in Seattle and Notting Hill.
Real life explorations would suggest something somewhat different to this idealized version of a love partner. Instead of the perfect partner who is already completely formed to my exact specifications and waiting to be found, there will be a real person who is bruised, un-actualized and who also happens to be looking for love.
Mr. Right will only become Mr. Right through my interaction with him as he learns to love me and I as learn to love him.
Therefore, Mr. Right doesn’t exist; he is created.
2. I believe that I have to be Mr. Right for someone else.
I don’t.
Following on from thought-process №1, if my ideal partner comes into being through his interactions with me, it stands to reason that I do not need to be the ideal partner to begin with either.
This relieves a fair amount of pressure as it would be practically impossible to be the right person for any number of unknown people.
And this is precisely what single people have to deal with all the time: questioning our self-worth and how we measure up in relation to potential partners.
I guess that the lesson here is that I don’t have to have all my shit together when it comes to embarking upon finding love.
3. I believe that finding love should be serendipitous and effortless.
It might not be: a little effort and some planning go a long way.
I strongly harbor the belief that things that are meant to be happen easily, without much effort and that love is one of those things.
However, here the evidence seems to point in the other direction. Of course, finding love could be effortless but it doesn’t necessarily mean that this is always the case (it rarely is).
In reality, most individuals put in a concerted effort: many hours of swiping away on Tinder, feeling awkward in bars, countless bad dates and enduring some wrong relationships before finding love.
Finding love probably works much the same way other things in life do: it requires focused intention and effort.
4. I believe that there is a ‘perfect time’ to find a perfect love.
There isn’t.
While timing matters, there isn’t necessarily a perfect time to fall in love. When exactly would it be? In the Springtime when flowers are in bloom? When Mercury isn’t in retrograde?
All facetiousness aside, most people (myself included) usually mean a ‘perfect time’ in their life to fall in love — a time when they’re not dealing with countless other life challenges. A time when the planets metaphorically align in order to produce a love match.
This would be highly convenient but it simply doesn’t accord with how life generally works. A large part of adulting requires balancing multiple commitments. Thus, falling in love would have to somehow fit into the schedule of your life. This would probably make for a healthier relationship in any event: life goes on after falling in love and although your relationship may take a priority spot, there will still be other commitments.
In order to increase the probability of finding love, any day of the year would need to be a possibility.
5. I believe that if you want something badly enough, it’s bound to happen eventually.
It isn’t (at least, not without some of the effort mentioned under Thought Process №3).
While there is something to be said for being in the right state of mind and aiming to attract people and circumstances into our lives, desire or wanting has to translate into concrete action at some point. If merely wanting something resulted in a desired endpoint, we would have fewer unfulfilled people in the world.
Wanting also seems to imply not having or a sense of desperation. Neither of these are particularly conducive to finding love. Instead, wanting needs to extend to doing in order to create something tangible.
When it comes to finding love, many of us stubbornly cling to and identify with our feelings of being unfulfilled in the hope that the Universe will pay attention and meet this need. And then we silently begrudge those for whom finding love has been so easy while it is continually out of our reach.
This particular belief has tripped me up for a long time. But I’ve come to learn that it is the combination of wanting and doing that tends to create results. And while there are those of us who have had little (or no) luck in finding love, becoming overly-identified with this fact will not change it. | https://medium.com/lgbtgaze/lessons-for-the-loveless-d6781ce48213 | ['Krishen Samuel'] | 2018-10-04 19:20:05.182000+00:00 | ['Dating', 'Singles', 'Lifestyle', 'LGBTQ', 'Love'] |
Spatial Distance and Machine Learning | “Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance” — Charles Lindbergh
Distance metrics are essential in understanding a lot of machine learning algorithms and therefore resolution of real-world problems. There are numerous distance metrics out there and data scientists should be able to understand most of them to make models more meaningful.
For a geospatial data scientist, there is an added benefit to this exercise: the feature creation from longitude and latitude.
Longitude and Latitude, while represented as floats, are more similar to categorical or nominal data. Increasing or decreasing them in magnitude may not give you or your model something meaningful.
Location data, therefore, needs some additional feature engineering to produce valuable insights. These newly-engineered features will then be what we will be used as inputs in machine learning.
DISTANCE METRICS
The most important feature to derive from a set of geocodes (longitude and latitude) is distance. Many supervised and unsupervised machine learning models use distance metrics as inputs. Distance metrics measure the similarity between two or more objects.
Distance metrics play a crucial role in the development and resolution of real-world problems. For example, distance metrics are used for many computer vision tasks, sentiment analysis, and, even clustering algorithms.
It goes without saying that any geospatial analyst should understand the different types of distance metrics and what type of problem they solve.
Choosing therefore the correct distance metric can therefore be the difference maker between a successful and failed model implementation.
In this article, let us discuss some of the most used distance metrics apply some codes to implement them in python. There will be some mathematical discussions but one can skip and read the pros and cons instead. For each metric, we will discuss the pros and cons, some mathematical intuition, where the metrics are most appropriate, and the actual codes.
Euclidean Distance
Although there are other possible choices, most instance-based learners use Euclidean distance. — p 135, Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (4th edition, 2016).
Euclidean distance is the easiest and most obvious way of representing the distance between two points.
Euclidean Distance Formula
Because it is a formalization of the “Pythagorean” theorem, this is likewise called the Pythagorean distance.
By Kmhkmh — Own work, CC BY 4.0, link to reference
Pros: Euclidean distance is relatively easy to implement and is already being used by most clustering algorithms. Likewise, it is easier to explain and visualize. Finally, for small distances, it can be argued that the distance between two points is the same regardless if it lies on a flat or spherical surface.
Cons: It rarely seldom approximates the true distance between two objects in the real world. For one reason, distance on a lower-dimensional space, say 2D Euclidean space, becomes less applicable on higher dimensional space where the difference between the nearest and farthest data becomes more uniformly distant from one another.
While most distant metrics suffer from this problem, this is more pronounced for the Euclidean distance. Besides, since it is the smallest distance between the two points, it disregards structures in the 3D plane that lowers the accuracy of this distance measurement for geospatial problems.
When is it most applicable: Because it ignores structures in the real-world, Euclidean distance is best for emergency cases where helicopters can fly in a straight-line to places such as hospitals. Another documented case is for trip planning where you simply need to determine which landmarks are close to one another.
Code: As longitude and latitude are not really cartesian coordinates, we need to convert them, taking into account the spherical nature of the earth.
import numpy as np
import math #Origin latitude, longitude
origin = [14.5545901,120.9981703] #Makati Coordinates
destination = [14.1172947,120.9339132] #Tagaytay Coordinates def euclidean_distance(origin, destination):
#euclidean distance
distance = np.sqrt((origin[0]-destination[0])**2 +(origin[1]-destination[1])**2)
#multiply by 6371 KM (earth's radius) * pi/180
return 6371*(math.pi/180)*distance
Approximation using our formula: 49.15 KM
Distance calculated by Google Maps: 49.46KM. As one can see, euclidean distance is the shortest distance, ignoring terrain changes.
The Great Circle Distance
Unlike the Euclidean distance, the great circle distance considers the fact that two points lie on the surface of a sphere.
Google Maps Image Showing Distance on a Spherical Surface
Haversine Formula in KMs. Earth’s radius (R) is equal to 6,371 KMS.
To get the Great Circle Distance, we apply the Haversine Formula above.
Pros: The majority of geospatial analysts agree that this is the appropriate distance to use for Earth distances and is argued to be more accurate over longer distances compared to Euclidean distance. In addition to that, coding is straightforward despite the complexity of the formula’s appearance. Performance is faster in computing compared to other great circle distance formulas such as “Vincenty Formula”.
Cons: Slower compared to the “Spherical Law of Cosines Formula”. In addition to that, this may not necessarily produce the driving or walking “distance”, which may be the variable of interest. Read more about this.
When is it most applicable: Most geospatial analyst would argue that this should be the default and norm for calculating distances between two geographic points.
Code: Haversine distance is the basic formula I used for my distance calculations. While there are packages that readily calculate it, let us try coding it from scratch:
def great_circle_distance(origin_lat, origin_lon, destination_lat, dstination_lon):
r = 6371 #earth radius in KM
phi1 = np.radians(origin_lat)
phi2 = np.radians(destination_lat)
delta_phi = np.radians(destination_lat - origin_lat)
delta_lambda = np.radians(destination_lon - origin_lon)
a = np.sin(delta_phi / 2)**2 + np.cos(phi1) * np.cos(phi2) * np.sin(delta_lambda / 2)**2
res = r * (2 * np.arctan2(np.sqrt(a), np.sqrt(1 - a)))
return np.round(res, 2)
Manhattan Distance (Taxicab Distance)
The Manhattan Distance is a measure of the distance between two points that take into account the perpendicular layout of the map. It is called Manhattan distance because Manhattan is known for its grid or block layout where streets intersect at right angles.
Photo by Ged Lawson on Unsplash
The formula for a Manhattan Distance is as follows:
From Wikipedia. While the green line represents the calculation of Euclidean Distance, the blue line represents the calculations made by Manhattan Distance.
Pros: Because it takes into account the grid layout of locations, this is what most GPS use to calculate distances. This taxicab geometry is what we use in LASSO regression as well.
Cons: The application of the formula for geospatial analysis is not as straightforward using the formula. Because the earth is tilted, a correction factor is applied to produce more accurate results (28.9 degrees according to experts applying said formula)
When is it most applicable: If the variable of interest is that of driving distance, this is more appropriate than both Euclidean and Great Circle distances. This is why another name for this is the taxicab distance, as it is the distance more applicable to a taxicab driving around in a grid-layout location.
Code: The code for Manhattan distance requires us to rotate the grid we use in our base calculation. After doing this, we then proceed to apply the great circle distance (haversine formula) we coded earlier:
def manhattan_distance(origin_lat, origin_lon, destination_lat, destination_lon):
# Origin coordinates
p = np.stack(np.array([origin_lat, origin_lon]).reshape(-1,1), axis = 1) # Destination coordinates
d = np.stack(np.array([origin_lat, origin_lon]).reshape(-1,1), axis = 1)
theta1 = np.radians(-28.904)
theta2 = np.radians(28.904) ## Rotation matrix
R1 = np.array([[np.cos(theta1), np.sin(theta1)],
[-np.sin(theta1), np.cos(theta1)]])
R2 = np.array([[np.cos(theta2), np.sin(theta2)],
[-np.sin(theta2), np.cos(theta2)]])
# Rotate Origin and Destination coordinates by -29 degrees
pT = R1 @ p.T
dT = R1 @ d.T
# Coordinates of hinge point in the rotated world
vT = np.stack((pT[0,:], dT[1,:]))
# Coordinates of Hinge point in the real world
v = R2 @ vT
return (great_circle_distance(p.T[0], p.T[1], v[0], v[1]) +
great_circle_distance(v[0],v[1], d.T[0],d.T[1] ))
If we try to compute the distance we have using the original points and destination we have:
As noted, this is a much closer approximation to the driving distance as presented by Google Maps:
Google Maps Driving Distance from Makati to Tagaytay: 64KMS and 58.8KMS. The Manhattan Distance provides a much closer approximation compared to the Euclidean Distance (difference of around 20KMS) that we got earlier.
COSINE SIMILARITY
While not normally used for geospatial problems, some distance metrics are worth discussing as they can be pretty useful with complementary problems.
As a beginner, I often confuse this with the “Spherical Law of Cosines”, which is just another formula for the Great Circle Distance. Note, however, that these are two different and the cosine similarity is best known for applications in text analysis.
From Wikipedia
The cosine similarity returns -1 for least dissimilar documents and +1 for most similar documents.
Suppose you want to determine which documents are similar. Using other distance metrics would probably rank similar documents according to the size of the repeated words. This tends to classify longer documents as more similar, which may not be the case.
Pros: As it only measures the angle of similarity and not the size, it may produce accurate results especially when analyzing which subcomponent (lower size) is part of a larger object.
Cons: There may be cases where the researchers may actually define “similarity” as being synonymous with magnitude or size and in these cases, the cosine similarity may not be as useful.
When is it most applicable: Applications on text and image processing problems.
Code: For this, let’s use the one available in scikit. Let us have an example though using real-life examples.
The following examples are published documents by the CFA Institute. The first document is a small excerpt from a publication of the CFA Institute for Fixed Income. The third one is likewise from a different publication but on the same topic of Fixed Income. The second document, however, is from a publication but for Alternative Investments.
If we will be using euclidean distance, we may see that the second and third documents to be more similar as they have more in terms of the number of repeated words.
#Define the documents asset_classes = "Globally, fixed-income markets represent the largest asset class in financial markets, and most investors’ portfolios include fixed-income investments." alternative_investments = '''
Assets under management in vehicles classified as alternative investments have grown rapidly since the mid-1990s.
This growth has largely occurred because of interest in these investments by institutions, such as endowment and pension funds, as well as by high-net-worth individuals seeking diversification and return opportunities. Alternative investments are perceived to behave differently from traditional investments. Investors may seek either absolute return or relative return.
Some investors hope alternative investments will provide positive returns throughout the economic cycle; this goal is an absolute return objective.
Alternative investments are not free of risk, however, and their returns may be negative and/or correlated with other investments, including traditional investments, especially in periods of financial crisis. Some investors in alternative investments have a relative return objective. A relative return objective, which is often the objective of portfolios of traditional investment, seeks to achieve a return relative to an equity or a fixed-income benchmark.
''' fixed_income = '''
Globally, the fixed-income market is a key source of financing for businesses and governments.
In fact, the total market value outstanding of corporate and government bonds is significantly larger than that of equity securities. Similarly, the fixed-income market, which is also called the debt market or bond market, represents a significant investing opportunity for institutions as well as individuals.
Pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds, among others, are major fixed-income investors. Retirees who desire a relatively stable income stream often hold fixed-income securities.
Clearly, understanding how to value fixed-income securities is important to investors, issuers, and financial analysts. This reading focuses on the valuation of traditional (option-free) fixed-rate bonds, although other debt securities, such as floating-rate notes and money market instruments, are also covered.
''' documents = [asset_classes,alternative_investments, fixed_income ]
Importing Scikit for text analysis:
#SciKit Learn
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
import pandas as pd # Create the Document Term Matrix
cv = CountVectorizer(stop_words='english')
cv = CountVectorizer()
sparse_matrix = count_vectorizer.fit_transform(documents) # Convert to dataframe so we can view them
doc_term_matrix = sparse_matrix.todense()
df = pd.DataFrame(doc_term_matrix,
columns=count_vectorizer.get_feature_names(),
index=['asset_classes', 'alternative_investments', 'fixed_income'])
Turnin this into a dataframe:
After this, let us calculate the cosine similarity between the three documents:
# Compute Cosine Similarity
from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity
print(cosine_similarity(df, df))
Cosine Similarity determined that document 1 and document 2, both focusing on Fixed Income, are more similar with 0.42 (1 as the highest) despite document 1 having fewer words.
CONCLUSION
There are many more distance metrics but for now, let us focus on these four. Let me know what you think about them.
As we all saw, there are a lot of different distance metrics, each having different strengths and appropriateness for different problem types. For geospatial data scientists, it may be advantageous to try as many as possible and simply assess which ones are more relevant in the feature selection portion of the study.
Checkout the codes on my Github page.
References:
Four Types of Distance Metrics in Machine Learning
Why Manhattan Distance Formula Doesn’t Apply to Manhattan
Cosine Similarity — Understanding the math and how it works (with python codes) | https://towardsdatascience.com/spatial-distance-and-machine-learning-2cab72fc6284 | ['Francis Adrian Viernes'] | 2020-12-23 19:47:04.616000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Python', 'Analytics', 'GIS', 'Getting Started'] |
Six ideas to inspire your motivation | Are you finding it difficult to get or stay motivated working from home? Here are six ideas to help inspire motivation based on what I learned doing research for my book Essential Habits:
Get the fundamentals right. Eat healthy, sleep eight hours and be active every day. Keep your end goal in mind. Think about how great it will feel when you are finished. Find a way to reward yourself. Create a schedule. Find the routines and create a schedule that help ‘automate’ what you do and when you do it. This way, you do not have to decide what to do next. Take small steps. Motivation does not inspire action. Take action and then motivation will come. Take the smallest step towards your goal. Don’t feel like running on the treadmill? Run for one minute. Don’t feel like writing that book? Write one paragraph. Think positive. Fill your mind with positive thoughts. Don’t think that you are lazy or unproductive. If you cannot seem to take action, do not force it. Sleep early, get refreshed and then try it again the next day. Find accountability through friends. Check in with a friend or a co-worker on a daily basis. Ask them what they did that day. Make sure you have something to say. | https://medium.com/@wangyip/six-ideas-to-inspire-your-motivation-74c4bcba6136 | ['Wang Yip'] | 2020-05-09 00:26:09.291000+00:00 | ['Infographics', 'Habit Building', 'Habits', 'Motivation', 'Routine'] |
Challenging Convention is a Key Skill of a Data Scientist | If you’ve looked at some of the more ground breaking parts of data science. The parts that make you go “Wow”, such as being able to beat professional players at their own game, counting large crowds of people or detecting cancer. All of these are huge achievements when you think about it. Each of these tasks takes 100’s of hours of practice and for a machine to be able to replicate it and more importantly be easily copied is amazing.
But there is something else here at work and that is the ability to challenge accepted belief. Ten years ago if you had said that machine learning could do some of what it can do now people would not have been believing and its this critical eye that can be a key resource for a Data Scientist and may also illustrate the fact that we often suffer from the Illusory Truth Effect more than we realise. This effect can help hamper progress in machine learning fields.
What is the Illusory Truth Effect?
It is the effect where if you hear something enough and from enough sources you will innately believe it. Often this is without really questioning it. Don’t believe me? Well try this question?
What Planet Spends the Most Time Closer to the Earth?
Sounds simple and I bet your first thought was Venus. But if you think about it why would you think that? It’s because we are taught that Venus is nearer to the Sun than us and we’ve made the leap to thinking it therefore must be closest to us.
This question suffers from the Illusory Truth Effect because if you search online you will find many articles that state Venus is closest to the Earth under most circumstances or for most of the time.
Actually since I did this article around the 15th of March 2019 you’ll find a lot of these links are now lower as people have published many articles correcting this belief, but if you scan down the search results you’ll find a lot of these older belief links. Good for everyone, bad for my argument though! But it was valid up until a few months ago so bear with me.
Which Should Be Closer?
My first thought was Venus as well. But when you think about it at any point of time the closest distance is dependent at which point each planet is in its orbit. There will be times where Mars, Mercury or Venus is closer to the Earth than any other. But if we are thinking which one spends the most time closer to the Earth then we are thinking more statistical and want an average over time.
My first thought experiment was to consider these orbits.
Orbital Distance Thought Experiment (Credit: Author)
Looking at the figure above if we think of the circles each planet will draw out relative to the earth (I didn’t include eccentricity as that’s more maths than my head can hold internally). We draw a radius from the earth touching the closest and furthest radius of Mercury. These represent areas that Venus will always be closer (in the blue) and Mercury will always be closer (Green) and a grey area where either one could be closer but will probably average out the same. This gave me an intuition that since the area of the green was larger than the blue that Venus may not be closer most of the time than Mercury.
But to prove something as a Data Scientist (or regular scientist) you need facts. So I turned to simulation.
Basic Simulations
The way I worked it out myself was to do a “back of the envelope” calculation. I took the semi-major axis for each planet (I ignored eccentricity) and their orbital period in days. I programmed this in Python (in a Jupyer Notebook) into a simple solar system, lined them up and set them running for 100 years.
Simulation of planet orbits assuming no eccentricity.
I then calculated the distances from earth at each time point and calculated the median distance. I got:
Mars: 1.826 AU
Venus: 1.231 AU
Mercury: 1.073 AU
(An AU stands for Astronomical Unit, because the distances involved are so huge they use AU’s which is the average distance of the Earth from the Sun).
The reason I chose the Median is that the Mean can be pulled about by outliers and the Median represents the value at which half your data is below that value and half above. Therefore here it works excellently because if Mercury has 50% of its data points below the other two planets it must spend more time closer to the Earth than than the other two.
I also plotted an Empirical Cumulative Density Function and plotted the line at 50% which matches the values above.
Empirical Cumulative Density Functions for distances between earth and Mercury, Venus and Mars.
This ordering of distances is roughly in line with the answer from Wolfram Alpha (remember my model doesn’t include eccentric orbits, someone did something more sophisticated here). This seems quite counter intuitive, but if you think of the orbits, Mercury is close to the sun so cannot move far away (at most its orbital radius plus the Earth’s), whilst the others have a much larger range. If you’d like a nice graphic of these distances then Popular Mechanic has one here.
My take away? Don’t always take quoted fact as truth, do your own tests to confirm you believe it, you might be surprised how fake data propagates and becomes fact without ever being challenged or at least sanity checked. Often this is simply by being quoted often enough that people assume it must be correct (Illusory Truth Effect). A little bit of research can often indicate if something is realistic or not (be more Descartes basically).
That is great Data Science. | https://towardsdatascience.com/challenging-convention-is-a-key-skill-of-a-data-scientist-a694ce6ff3d7 | ['Paul May'] | 2019-04-13 12:21:57.304000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Popular Science', 'Science', 'Astronomy'] |
Health Goals | This would help me out my new goal of working out at least 5 hours a week or 300 minutes and not make it the same and boring. I started lifting big weights or benching sets three sets of 10 to get back into lifting since it’s been years since I used the equipment. Last I started to practice my Martial Arts forms that I remember from when I went to the dojo frequently. Incorporating that into my exercise so now I running at least once a week for 30 minutes, lifting my 15 pound dumbbell for 10 minutes each day for 60 minutes, lifting big weights for 2 hours a week, and practicing my forms in Martial Arts for 2 hours or more a week which is more than five hours a week and I will not get bored since its got verified I reached my goal! And it took five weeks in total. | https://medium.com/@michaelpablolopez1/health-goals-36d234a93d52 | ['Michael Lopez'] | 2020-12-21 02:22:39.731000+00:00 | ['Physical Health', 'Health', 'Health Recipe', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Physical Therapy'] |
‘Fake It Till You Make It’- Is It Sane? | ‘Fake It Till You Make It’- Is It Sane?
Dress for the job you want, forcefully smile for a couple of minutes till you’re smiling, mimic great leaders, pretend you know all the answers, fake confidence to gain it
Some people absorb in self-doubt when confronted with situations they feel incompetent for. The reason is they don’t feel satisfied enough on an interpersonal level. It’s a controversial phrase. Some people I was in conversation with argued, it’s terrible advice with negative impact. This behaviour is associated with being spurious and egoistic. It creates distance between people and the tragedy of it is that people don’t get to know the real you. Enacting these may provide momentary respite, but significantly affect long-term performance.
My stand is that if the phrase is elucidated positively then it can build up your confidence level and help you attain your goals. The notion is about reaching beyond your comfort zone and facing inconvenient situations for better. For instance, I was at a networking event last year. I was in a conversation with a scientist who was also the Co-founder of an AI firm. I was intrigued by his mind and intimidated by him. Since I lacked knowledge on certain issues, I was afraid to be embarrassed. Interacting in physics is not my comfort zone. I commanded my palms to stop sweating and adopted a sturdy posture. Having a better body language assisted in interacting confidently with him. Not only did the conversation flow naturally for another 30 minutes but he thought I was insightful too.
“There has been research conducted by professionals providing strategies for the phrase. According to Amy Cuddy, people who adopt a powerful stance display decline in stress hormone cortisol and an increase in dominance and confidence. She states that “our nonverbal govern how we think and feel about ourselves. Our bodies change our minds”. Researchers Yuna L. Ferguson & Kennon M. Sheldon demonstrated in their experiment that attempting to be happier can facilitate a genuine experience of happiness. Participants that listened to happy music reported a positive boost in their mood. In another instance by Herminia Ibarra, you can mimic leaders with desirable skill sets to become good leaders. By acknowledging that you are a work in progress, you can enhance your skills significantly this way. Thus, if you have the intention to learn and be better, it’s not inauthentic.”
The traps of it: The Impostor Syndrome. Where one is insecure about one’s triumph for the persistent internalized terror of being manifested as a fraud or deceitful person. Most successful people I discussed this with revealed that initially, they were victims of the phenomena. They interminably reminded themselves they were not forging their success. If your intentions are virtuous, then you’re emotionally positioning yourself to a path of success.
It is important to remember that faking may give rise to precariousness and indecision. Thus, this concept is not about embellishing your experiences and qualifications or deceiving someone of them, but to boost your confidence and subdue self-doubt. However, the only way they can work is if you ‘face it until you learn it’ then it embodies in you and you’re not an impostor. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/fake-it-till-you-make-it-is-it-sane-8a8b85683af1 | ['Shivangi Agrawal'] | 2020-07-13 18:46:41.389000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Development', 'Wellness', 'Leadership', 'Strategy'] |
What is Yocto Project and why you should use it for embedded Linux development | Introduction
Yocto Project :
can build toolchains,
can build bootloaders,
can build kernels,
can build root filesystems
can generate an entire Linux Distribution containing binary packages that can be installed at runtime.
Primarily, Yocto Project is a group of recipes using a combination of:
Python shell scripts
Yocto Project includes also a task scheduler called “BitBake” that produces whatever you have configured from recipes.
A bit of history
2003 and “OpenEmbedded”
Yocto Project’s started from OpenEmbedded whose objective was to port Linux towards hand-held devices. It was developed, and continues to be maintained by an enthusiastic community of programmers.
Yocto Project’s started from OpenEmbedded whose objective was to port Linux towards hand-held devices. It was developed, and continues to be maintained by an enthusiastic community of programmers. 2005 and “Poky”
Richard Purdie, at that time a developer at OpenedHand, created a fork of OpenEmbedded, which approached with a more conservative choice of packages for the purpose of maintaining stability over a longer period of time. Richard named his version Poky.
Richard Purdie, at that time a developer at OpenedHand, created a fork of OpenEmbedded, which approached with a more conservative choice of packages for the purpose of maintaining stability over a longer period of time. Richard named his version Poky. 2008 Intel purchases OpenedHand
2010 Open Embedded and Poky combines into a new project OpenEmbedded Core (OE-Core)
Components of Yocto Project
OpenEmbedded-Core
This is shared with OpenEmbedded. This is the core metadata.
BitBake
This is the task scheduler.This is shared with OpenEmbedded.
Poky
This is the reference distribution.
Documentation
This is composed by the user’s manuals and the developer’s guides for each component.
Toaster
This is a web-based interface to BitBake and its metadata.
ADT Eclipse
This is a plugin for Eclipse.
Why would you use Yocto Project?
Many System-on-Chip (SoC) vendors provide BSPs (board-support-packages) for their devices appropriate for Yocto Project. Meta layers can also be used to create extended or just different build systems. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/what-is-yocto-project-and-why-you-should-use-it-for-embedded-linux-development-72978ad0d09b | ['George Calin'] | 2020-08-06 18:30:29.270000+00:00 | ['Openembedded', 'Yoctoproject', 'Embedded Linux', 'Bitbake', 'Embedded'] |
The evolution of Feminism | Evolution of Feminism
The term feminism is used to describe a political, cultural or economic movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women. It also includes the political and sociological theories which are concerned with the issues of gender difference, movements that promote gender equality for women and campaigns for the rights and interests of women. Feminism has changed perspectives in several areas with our society, ranging from culture to law. Feminists activist around the world have fought and campaigned for the legal rights of women ( contract rights, property rights, voting rights), abortion rights, reproductive rights, from the protection of women and girls from domestic violence like sexual harassment, rape; workplace rights including maternity leave and equal pay; misogyny and various other gender-specific discrimination against women.
Although the terms “Feminism” and “Feminist” did not gain importance until the late ninety’s, they were already being used amongst the common people much earlier. The first instance of feminism can be drawn from 24 centuries back, when Plato argued for the political and social equality of women, advocating that they should also be the members of the highest class and should also be allowed to rule and fight for themselves. Another example dates back from the late 7th or 8th century when a female Tamil saint name Andal, who was well known for her writing, married Vishnu. This divine act of hers was regarded as a feminist act by some, as it allowed her to avoid the regular duties of a wife and gain self-government. During much of its history, most of these movements had leaders who were mostly middle-class white women from Western Europe and North America. However, after Sojourner’s Truth’s 1851 speech to American feminists, women of other races also joined in. This trend accelerated in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the downfall of the European colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean and other parts of Latin America and South-east Asia.
According to Maggie Humm and Rebecca Walker, the history of feminism can be divided into three waves. The first wave refers to the movements during the late ’90s and the early 20th century, the second one lasting from 1960 to the late 1980s and finally, the third wave extends from 1990 to the present.
Feminists activity during the early 19th and the early 20th century sought to win women’s suffrage, female education rights, better working conditions and to put an end to gender double standards. Before fighting for their rights, feminist leaders also campaigned for the national abolition of slavery and temperance in the United States. However, this activism was not only limited to the United States. In the mid-nineteenth century in Persia, Tahirih, who was a poet and a religious reformer, proclaimed the equality of women at her execution. Activists were protesting for women’s rights in Germany, campaigning for suffrage rights in Japan, protests were also going on in other parts of the world like South Australia, New Zealand, but the majority of them focused on women’s suffrage. Finally, the first wave of feminism in the United States ended with the Nineteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which granted white women the right to vote.
Second-wave feminism marks a period of feminist activity from the early 1960s through the late 1980s that saw cultural and political issues closely linked. Where the first wave focused on suffrage, second-wave feminists focused on other cultural equality issues such as ending discrimination. It was during this time when women in Chicago, got disappointed by the New Left and published “Voice of Women’s Liberation Movement” in 1968 which further led to the formation of Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in 1969. Bra burning, although fictional, also got associated with this movement. The rise of the liberation movement led to increased female enrollment in higher education, the establishment of academic women’s studies course and departments and feminist ideologies in fields such as politics, sociology, history and literature. This educational shift in interests questioned the status quo, its standards and its authorities.
The last wave began in the late 1980s in response to what young women perceived as failures of the initiatives and movements of the second wave. It also challenged the definition of the second wave of feminism which overemphasized the role of upper-middle-class white women. This phase mainly focused on the structural interpretation of gender and sexuality. It resulted in debates between feminists and those who believed that there was no difference between the sexes and the gender roles are a result of the social development which we go through.
So do we have a fourth wave also? I’d say YES !! This is not something which has been officially said, but the recent development in the feminist movement can be termed as the fourth wave of feminism. It is a wave connected through technology which combines politics, psychology and spirituality perfectly. Now feminism talks about post-abortion events, plus-size fashion, transgender rights, male feminism, sex work acceptance and many more. Petitions across social media have become so common nowadays which are concerned about different aspects related to the male as well as female society. “To shave, or Not to shave” also shows how the new generation of women is embracing body hair. All these are acts of feminism.
Feminism isn’t something which has grown overnight; it is a gradual process. From the point where people were fighting for women suffrage to now, where people are raising voices against pity issues and filing petitions for them, feminism has evolved a lot. I wouldn’t say that this is something terrible, and we need to keep a check on it, but there’s a saying: “Too much of everything is bad for health.” Feminism is growing day by day, and some people started to portray it in the wrong way. These are the things on which we need to keep an eye on, or else this would lead us to something which can, later on, prove harmful for our society. | https://medium.com/the-underdog-writing-project/the-evolution-of-feminism-7e68de256166 | ['Archit Singh'] | 2020-06-03 05:58:14.779000+00:00 | ['Feminist', 'Essay Writing', 'Equality', 'Feminism', 'Revolution'] |
iOS Sleep Baby App. 아이폰 위젯, 잠금화면, 제어센터 지원 | iOS Sleep Baby App
It is a well-known fact that a crying child can be soothed or sunk with White Noise.
I have definitely used it directly to my child. When a baby is in the womb of a mother, it sounds like white noise, so the newborn baby feels comfortable.
No matter how hard the baby cries, it can stop crying for a few seconds when it hear a vacuum cleaner, dryer, boiling water and so on.
View in the App Store : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-baby-widget/id1452015449?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2
However, it is not easy to find an installed app by holding the child with one hand and turning on the iPhone with the other hand. I quickly become embarrassed to appease my child.
Android phones can load apps on the desktop in the form of widgets, but the iPhone has a lot of limitations. The widget area of the iPhone is located at the far left of the screen that is being swiped. But it’s the fastest way to get there.
In order to allow parents to have their apps run quickly, this app can be registered in the widget area. (Important!) You have to register your app in the widget area by clicking ‘Edit’ as shown below.
Registered in the Widget Screen, Go2Sleep Baby App
However, when the iPhone screen is turned off, it is not easy to unlock and find this app. So you can manipulate this app as if you were manipulating the volume, play, and pause of your music on the lock screen.
Once you launch the app and lock the screen (or locked it over time), you can turn it on again, as shown below.
But what you see on the lock screen is one-time. If you use it, it does not disappear either.
So the fastest access area without unlocking the iPhone is the Control Center. If you register this app in the Control Center, you can find it the fastest (of course, the app should run once and play)
So far, as a developer, I have used some apps and created them myself. Please use a lot.
Download App: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-baby-widget/id1452015449?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2 | https://medium.com/@zauin09/ios-%EC%9A%B0%EB%8A%94-%EC%95%84%EC%9D%B4-%EB%8B%AC%EB%9E%98%EA%B8%B0-%EC%9E%AC%EC%9A%B0%EA%B8%B0-8ee19bce41fa | [] | 2019-02-15 18:26:20.781000+00:00 | ['White Noise', 'Baby Sleep'] |
Fast and stable MongoDB-based tests in Spring | If your Spring application uses MongoDB, there is one question you will have to answer at some point: how to set up a database instance for your tests. Until early 2020 there was not much choice and the default was to use ‘embedded Mongo’ — my team was no exception. At some point, however, we realised that embedded Mongo was turning our builds into a nightmare. This ultimately prompted us to migrate our code to a tool getting much hype recently — Testcontainers.
In this article I would like to share some of the problems connected with Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo and talk briefly about Spring tests to explain what causes those problems. I will also guide you through the setup process of MongoDB using Testcontainers, and offer some tricks to improve Testcontainers performance. Finally, I will talk about how sar and other Linux tools can be used to measure the load on your machine.
Introducing Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo
If you search the web for ‘test spring boot mongo’ or similar terms, you will very likely end up with instructions which may harm your codebase. Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo was immensely popular at some point and many tutorials were written about using it. Those articles still rank surprisingly high in search engines — things don’t just disappear from the Internet when they cease to be useful. In fact, Embedded Mongo is still recommended by the recent Spring Boot documentation.
At a first glance it looks fantastic: you don’t need to modify your production code, you don’t even need to configure anything, just add a dependency:
testRuntimeOnly('de.flapdoodle.embed:de.flapdoodle.embed.mongo:2.2.0')
…And voilà! Your tests connect to a database started just for the time of your tests being executed.
Under the hood, Spring Boot has logic detecting the presence of this library on classpath, and modifies MongoDB connections to point at an instance started by the library. The library itself handles downloading and caching MongoDB binaries suitable for your machine, and starting/stopping the server.
Our problems with Embedded Mongo
We have been following setup procedures as described in the Spring Documentation for some time. At some point, however, developers started complaining that when they executed unit tests, their computer fans started roaring and the machine became painfully slow to use. It wasn’t just a matter of perception: we found out that during tests multiple MongoDB instances were running, reaching a peak of 8 instances for a standard build or even 15 when gradle --parallel was used. Very often, after tests finished successfully, we found that embedded MongoDB processes were still running and consuming lots of CPU. It's not fun to work if 75% of your CPU is consumed by 'zombie' MongoDBs.
We started to experience random CI build failures: a pipeline that usually took around 15 minutes timed out after 40 minutes, it looked like unit tests never finished.
Finally, we found ourselves at a dead end. Adding a dependency on AWS S3 client library broke our tests. They never finished, but not just on CI server — they never finished on any machine. There was some kind of classpath conflict, preventing us from implementing a business feature. Everything broken by adding a single dependency:
implementation('software.amazon.awssdk:netty-nio-client:2.6.5')
and one Spring bean:
@Bean fun asyncHttpClient() = NettyNioAsyncHttpClient.builder().build()
What is wrong with Embedded Mongo
At the beginning of 2020 it became clear that the library is dead. You could not configure it to run a version of MongoDB newer than 4.0.2. Hardly anything happened with the library source code. Only recently, in October 2020, something started to change, but the newly released library version conflicts with all stable releases of Spring Boot, so still you are not able to test your code with MongoDB 4.2.
Another serious issue is that the library can make your tests extremely resource-hungry by starting a horde of MongoDB instances. And it’s a consequence of library design, not a mistake in the implementation.
The library integration with Spring Boot works by starting an embedded MongoDB instance when Spring context is started. Because it would take ages to execute tests with a context started for each test, Spring offers a caching mechanism. A started context is kept between tests and re-used. However, a cached context cannot be simply used in all situations — when a test expects a context with a different configuration, a fresh context has to be started. Now, the problem is that there are lots of situations where Spring considers a fresh context is needed, and these include things you do very often when writing tests:
you use a @MockBean
you enable a profile with @ActiveProfiles
you override some properties using @TestPropertySource
You can find a more comprehensive list in the Spring Framework documentation.
All in all, there will be many opportunities in your tests to start a fresh context, each holding its own MongoDB instance. What about ‘old’ contexts? They aren’t closed, Spring keeps them in case there is a test that will need them. If you don’t touch the spring.test.context.cache.maxSize property, Spring will keep up to 32 contexts. This means that potentially you can have 32 instances of MongoDB running simultaneously when you use Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo. Moreover, each test worker is an independent JVM, so if you have 2 subprojects and run gradle --parallel you can have up to 64 MongoDB instances, or 96 instances for 3 subprojects and so on.
MongoDB with Testcontainers
Testcontainers is a Java library allowing to start different services for use in tests. It uses Docker to fetch, start and stop those services. In our experience, this approach is way more stable than the one from Flapdoodle Embed Mongo — no more zombie processes eating CPU.
The library is a generic tool rather than a plug-in that will do anything for you under the hood, as it is the case with the Flapdoodle one. You will need a bit of code to connect Spring tests and Testcontainers. Here is how we approached this:
We have a context initializer that starts a Docker container with MongoDB when the context starts and replaces the connection URL with a one pointing at the container. To avoid starting the database for each test, we cache the container in a lazy Kotlin property (following advice from Best Practices for Unit Testing in Kotlin by Philipp Hauer).
We also defined an annotation:
which we use instead of @SpringBootTest in each test class:
Testcontainers performance
Simply replacing Flapdoodle Embed Mongo with Testcontainers makes tests execute much faster. In a small test project this makes a 30% difference.
We wanted to see if we can go even faster. One optimization opportunity appears in start time. By default, even if you cache the container between test runs, the container is stopped once all tests finish. So if you execute just one test from your IDE, each time you do so, you have to wait for the container to start. In this scenario Testcontainers become slower than Flapdoodle Embed Mongo by 2 seconds. It’s painful if you run your unit tests very often as you do TDD.
The situation can be improved by enabling container reuse. This mechanism marks a container as eligible to be picked by subsequent test runs and does not stop it after a test run finishes. If you go back to the code of MongoContainerSingleton, you will see the reuse feature is enabled there. This is however not enough: you have to additionally set testcontainers.reuse.enable=true in ~/.testcontainers.properties . We encourage our developers to enable it, but keep this option disabled on CI servers.
As you can see on the graph above, it improves overall execution time a bit (results with “-r” have container reuse enabled). Startup time of a single test becomes roughly the same as with Flapdoodle Embed Mongo. If you want to learn more about container reuse, check this article by Paweł Pluta.
One challenge when enabling container reuse is parallel build with multiple subprojects. If a test from project1 runs and a test from project2 is started, it will connect to the same reuse-allowing MongoDB container project1 uses. There is a danger those two tests will simultaneously write to the same collections. We solve this by making sure each subproject gets a separate database inside the same container.
We are very happy with the improvement in build stability. After moving the tests to Testcontainers, developers no longer have zombie MongoDB instances on their machines. CI builds fail much less often (well, they still do at times when Testcontainers fail to connect to Docker breaking the build). Additionally, the CI build time is much more consistent now.
Measuring the operating system load
When deciding whether to move to Testcontainers or not, we wanted to understand the consequences of switching. Some of the team members used Linux and others used MacOS. We knew that test execution time and the subjectively perceived machine load was different from person to person. There were multiple open questions:
Is the problem with too many Mongo instances repeatable?
What if Testcontainers are faster on Linux where Docker is a ‘native’ mechanism, but slower on MacOS?
What if Testcontainers make tests execute faster but eat all CPU and memory, so developers aren’t able to do anything while executing tests?
We decided to create a test script, assuring that performance is measured in the same way on different machines. Finding out how fast a build executes is easy: you can do it using the built-in time shell command.
However, it is not trivial to compare CPU and memory usage during test execution as there are multiple processes interacting with each other. Firstly, Gradle has a separate process executed from the command line, another one running tasks (Gradle daemon) and a separate test execution worker. Then there are processes for embedded Mongo. Testcontainers run not only MongoDB Docker containers, but also a separate container called ryuk, which is responsible for cleaning. We decided to measure the load of the whole operating system to have a big picture of the impact of the changes on the build process.
Linux has a great tool for such a purpose called sar available in package sysstat. It can collect a wide range of parameters on system performance in a reliable way, without adding much overhead. You can start it in background:
sar -o sar.binary 2 15 &
Here it will measure performance every 2 seconds, 15 times, and save results to a binary file. Then, after measurement is finished, you can extract data on CPU usage:
% sar -f sar.binary -u
12:36:05 CPU %user %nice %system %iowait
12:36:07 all 0,19 0,00 0,25 0,00
12:36:09 all 70,38 0,00 3,28 0,00
12:36:11 all 85,47 0,00 4,09 0,57
or memory usage:
% sar -f sar.binary -r | awk '{print $1 "\t" $4}'
12:36:05 kbmemused
12:36:07 1587988
12:36:09 1990692
With built-in shell tools it’s easy to quickly summarize data, for example by counting min, max and average:
cat memory.dat | awk 'BEGIN { min=99999999 } { total += $2; count++; if($2<min) min=$2; if ($2>max) max=$2; } END { print "Max\t" max "\tMin\t" min "\tAverage\t" int(total/count) }'
However, it’s hard to understand the big picture looking at the numbers alone. Visualisation can be a great help. We wanted to make the whole benchmark process fully automated, without manual pasting of data to spreadsheets. A ‘good enough’ approach was to make use of the venerable gnuplot .
If you have plain text data as columns separated by whitespace (as you can see in the awk call, we used tabs), it’s easy to feed the data into gnuplot.
cat cpu.dat | gnuplot -e "set yrange [0:100]; set terminal png size 800,600; set output 'cpu.png'" base.gnuplot
To avoid repeating same gnuplot options when creating CPU graphs and memory graphs, we extracted the common part to a separate file (base.gnuplot):
set timefmt "%H:%M:%S"
set xdata time
set style data lines
plot "/dev/stdin" using 1:2 with lines notitle
Here we define time format, inform that x axis shows time , use a solid line for plotting and finally use columns 1 and 2 from the input as x and y coordinates of each point.
Unfortunately, sar makes use of Linux kernel features and is not available on MacOS. We were able to work around this by measuring memory usage by calling vm_stat command, but we think results are very inaccurate and only show general trends. We could not find a reliable way to measure global CPU usage on Mac.
Summary
Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo is a very popular library for running MongoDB for tests. While still recommended by many tutorials, it is known to cause various performance and maintainability problems. It prevents testing your code against the modern versions of MongoDB, wastes computer resources by starting too many database instances and leaving zombie processes. In some circumstances, it can block your build infinitely if you add dependencies that clash in some cryptic way with it.
Testcontainers is a new tool with a similar purpose that gains much popularity. It is actively maintained and can be used not just for MongoDB but for a wide range of systems, like different SQL and NoSQL databases and even message queues. We recommend learning it as its broad usage means it may be useful not only in your current project, but also in future ones, even if they use a different persistence mechanism. It manages test databases reliably and does not leave zombie processes.
You can check my repository comparing the performance of Flapdoodle Embedded Mongo and Testcontainers. The two projects written in Kotlin along with shell scripts automatically measuring performance are available on GitHub: https://github.com/pkubowicz/embed-vs-testcontainers.
In general, we found that Testcontainers are faster by 30% on Linux and even by 45% on MacOS. You can run tests on your own machine or see the visualization of results we had: https://pkubowicz.github.io/embed-vs-testcontainers/. | https://medium.com/nexocode/fast-and-stable-mongodb-based-tests-in-spring-cd08e1238b79 | ['Piotr Kubowicz'] | 2020-12-07 14:56:33.886000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Performance', 'Spring', 'Testing', 'Mongodb'] |
Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones: How Racial Linguistics Can and Do Hurt Me | It’s funny how that mid-19th century phrase “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” still has a place in our memory today. Although meant to explain how physical harm is real and name-calling does not have the same impact, the idiom over time has been altered and often dismissed as being inappropriate and out of touch with societal mores. I never gave the expression much thought until I began my deeper journey and analysis into racial equity education. I didn’t pay that much attention to the power of language until I realized how actual words, not just tone and inflection, can be dehumanizing, confusing, and inappropriate when addressing matters of justice.
My first major wake-up call began when I was learning how to fit in as a new professor at an historically White institution of higher learning. (Note: “Fit” is the new “F” word for many people of color trying to navigate white spaces.) Yes, I was intentional in not describing these universities as PWIs. This nomenclature is an example of how words can dismiss accuracy and meaning. The phrase ‘Predominately White Institutions’ imply that Ohio State, UCLA or Yale and others were at one point in their history open to all races and ethnicities, when in fact they were exclusive to white people. We refer to historically Black colleges and universities as HBCUs, so why not fully describe their White counterparts as HWCUs?
HBCUs are greatly needed today. HWCUs can be challenging places for BIPOC to identify mentors, sponsors, and resources that understand and embrace cultural difference.
Now, back to my awakening as the only Black faculty member in my department. I was taken aback when White students would call me by my first name. In the Black community, it is nearly blasphemous to call elders and persons with earned titles by anything but their surname with a proper title. How could I navigate a white world whereby it became cool to break my own community’s taboo? As many Blacks have learned to do, we just “get in where we fit in,” gain more comfort over time, and say our apologies to our ancestors for being so offensive in the workplace. I must say it is a lot easier for some than others.
The racial linguistics list can be rather exhaustive, so here are a couple of examples of how words are used to block truths and history:
Deception: Minority
Veracity: BIPOC or People of Color
The root of the word ‘minority’ is minor, meaning less than. How humiliating and degrading is it to describe someone that way? Black, Indigenous and People of Color are no longer numerically in the minority in many states and locales. Although our skin color doesn’t accurately match the shade or tint of Black, White, and Brown, that’s the preferred way to describe people today. The word ‘Caucasian’ is also a misnomer and a false description for White people. It should be removed from our language as we should all know by now that Johann Blumenbach was completely wrong in his so-called scientific classification system of humans. He actually named some skulls found in the Caucasus mountains region as belonging to the most beautiful and intelligent peoples ever. Guess who got that prize? Europeans. Although his racist theories live today, his biased pride in whiteness have been refuted time and time again and even by himself!
Deception: Hispanic
Veracity: Latinx
Hispanic is another one of those words that was contrived for political reasons. It refers to European people connected to Spain and has come to be erroneously used to describe anyone who speaks Spanish. More recently, many people whose origin is in Latin America have chosen to embrace the word Latinx, which more accurately describes their ancestry. As more people learn the history of colonization in North America, I am hopeful that we move away from using these words interchangeably. In addition, it is sad that people will dismiss their heritage to claim a name that seeks to bring them closer to whiteness and its benefits. Is it any surprise then that there is a higher number of Whites residing in Puerto Rico than in the state of Idaho? And it is not because of the size of the land mass. Yes, having the ability to check white on the census form can create a reality that is detrimental to one’s mental health and economic status. It’s wonderful to know that there is a growing movement to educate Puerto Ricans about their African ancestry and to encourage them to identify themselves as non-white accordingly.
Some words aren’t necessarily as clear to being racial linguistics and may possibly be just my own pet peeves. For example, I cringe when I hear coaches and professors refer to young male adults as kids. I know it is meant to be endearing but as a woman seeking to build confidence and independence in Black boys and young men, the last thing they need is for a White adult to speak to them in this manner. In the Black community it is rare that you hear someone who is of age being referred to as a kid. It is a form of demasculinization, as the definition of a kid often describes a child who unable to function without adult supervision and guidance. Words have power. Let’s use them to build young people up and not keep them mentally locked in an early stage of growth and development.
Language meaning seems to be changing even faster as race-based tragedies are publicized more regularly. COVID-19 has even given us some new meanings to words such as essential workers. They used to be service workers with little respect and appreciation. As the country grinds to a halt they, who are often Black and Brown people, are now lifted up as those who are keeping our economy alive with their sacrifice. Sadly, the praise and attention to these newly expendable workers doesn’t manifest in increased safety standards, benefits, compensation, and better health insurance. And don’t forget that the phrases citizens arrest, stand your ground, and self-defense have new meanings for many BIPOC. They are now associated with death, injustice, and hopelessness.
During these dangerous health and economic times, we need to get real clear and intentional in our use of language. Other deceptive words that are sure to inflame conversations include inmate vs. person incarcerated; homeless vs. unhoused; and diversity vs. equity. The pace of the division that we see and feel between races and classes in our country is sure to foster increased hostility and violence. I wish name-calling were only harmless verbal stones thrown to gain attention for a brief moment. Sadly, they have become the poisonous tip of an arrow designed to harm and dehumanize “the other.”
Despite all of the racial challenges we face as Americans, I am glad that one word continues to keep its same universal meaning and power: Love. It still never fails, and it might be the only language that can bring us closer to healing and truth. | https://drstroman.medium.com/sticks-and-stones-may-break-my-bones-how-racial-linguistics-can-and-do-hurt-me-8a48ff1025f2 | ['Deborah Stroman'] | 2020-05-16 12:32:27.192000+00:00 | ['Latinx', 'Hbcu', 'Black', 'Language', 'Racism'] |
Programming with Databases in Python using SQLite | Photo Credit: Pixabay
If you are aspiring to be a data scientist you are going to be working with a lot of Data. Much of the data resides in Databases and hence you should be comfortable accessing data from databases through queries and then working on them to find key insights.
Data forms an integral part of the lives of Data Scientists. From the number of passengers in an airport to the count of stationary in a bookshop, everything is recorded today in form of digital files called databases. Databases are nothing more than electronic lists of information. Some databases are simple, and designed for smaller tasks while others are powerful, and designed for big data. All of them, however, have the same commonalities and perform a similar function. Different database tools store that information in unique ways. Flat files use a table, SQL databases use a relational model and NoSQL databases use a key-value model.
In this article, we will focus only on the Relational Databases and accessing them in Python. We will begin by having a quick overview of the Relational databases and their important constituents.
Relational Database: A Quick Overview
A Relational database consists of one or more tables of information. The rows in the table are called records and the columns in the table are called fields or attributes. A database that contains two or more related tables is called a relational database i.e interrelated data.
The main idea behind a relational database is that your data gets broken down into common themes, with one table dedicated to describing the records of each theme.
i) Database tables
Each table in a relational database has one or more columns, and each column is assigned a specific data type, such as an integer number, a sequence of characters (for text), or a date. Each row in the table has a value for each column.
A typical fragment of a table containing employee information may look as follows:
The tables of a relational database have some important characteristics:
There is no significance to the order of the columns or rows.
Each row contains one and only one value for each column.
Each value for a given column has the same type.
Each table in the database should hold information about a specific thing only, such as employees, products, or customers.
By designing a database this way, it helps to eliminate redundancy and inconsistencies. For example, both the sales and accounts payable departments may look up information about customers. In a relational database, the information about customers is entered only once, in a table that both departments can access.
A relational database is a set of related tables. You use primary and foreign keys to describe relationships between the information in different tables.
ii) Primary and Foreign Keys
Primary and foreign keys define the relational structure of a database. These keys enable each row in the database tables to be identified and define the relationships between the tables.
Primary Key
The primary key of a relational table uniquely identifies each record in the table. It is a column, or set of columns, that allows each row in the table to be uniquely identified. No two rows in a table with a primary key can have the same primary key value.
Imagine you have a CUSTOMERS table that contains a record for each customer visiting a shop. The customer’s unique number is a good choice for a primary key. The customer’s first and last name are not good choices because there is always the chance that more than one customer might have the same name.
Foreign Key
A foreign key is a field in a relational table that matches the primary key column of another table.
The example above gives a good idea of the primary and foreign keys.
Database Management Systems
The Database management system (DBMS) is the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and analyze data. The DBMS used for Relational databases is called Relational Database Management Systems(RDBMS). Most commercial RDBMSes use Structured Query Language (SQL), a declarative language for manipulating data, to access the database. The major RDBMS are Oracle, MySQL , Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL , Microsoft Access, and SQLite .
We have barely scratched the surface regarding databases here. The details are beyond the scope of this article.However, you are encouraged to explore the database ecosystem since they form an essential part of a data scientist’s toolkit.
This article will focus on using python to access relational Databases. We will be working with a very easy to use database engine called SQLite.
SQLite
SQLite is a relational database management system based on the SQL language but optimized for use in small environments such as mobile phones or small applications. It is self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration and transactional. It is very fast and lightweight, and the entire database is stored in a single disk file. SQLite is built for simplicity and speed compared to a hosted client-server relational database such as MySQL. It sacrifices sophistication for utility and complexity for size. Queries in SQLite are almost identical to other SQL calls.
Python sqlite3 module
SQLite can be integrated with Python using a Python module called sqlite3. You do not need to install this module separately because it comes bundled with Python version 2.5.x onwards. This article will show you, step by step, how to work with an SQLite database using Python.
Before starting I would highly recommend you all to install DB Browser for SQLite. The browser can be downloaded from their official page easily. DB Browser for SQLite is a high quality, visual, open source tool to create, design, and edit database files compatible with SQLite. It will help us to see the databases being created and edited in real time.
DB Browsers’ view
Since everything is in place, let us get to work.
Contents: | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/programming-with-databases-in-python-using-sqlite-4cecbef51ab9 | ['Parul Pandey'] | 2019-05-15 00:35:58.421000+00:00 | ['Database', 'Python', 'Sqlite', 'Data Science', 'Programming'] |
many times not | questions to think and act upon when developing reliable and safe medical devices and products | https://medium.com/@martymartens/many-times-not-54d11bd8aa32 | [] | 2020-12-22 13:34:31.867000+00:00 | ['Risk Taking', 'Risk', 'Product Development', 'Decision Making'] |
Pricing as a Marketing Tool | MARKETING
Pricing as a Marketing Tool
“Pricing is branding.” — Richie Norton
Photo by Anne Preble on Unsplash
In his book The Archaeology of Knowledge, French philosopher Michel Foucault discusses the idea that everything has origins and begins at a certain point in time. It’s an intriguing thought because it prompts one to consider how new ideas emerge at various moments in history that previously did not exist. Foucault’s proposition came to mind when I learned how recent the popular concept of the marketing mix came into being.
In the 1940s Neil Borden, a Harvard professor who taught advertising, began contemplating the notion that a marketing manager was “a mixer of ingredients.” The ingredients included the product, planning, pricing, branding, distribution channels, advertising, packaging, display and other aspects of the marketing machinery. It didn’t become a widespread buzzword though until his 1964 article “The Concept of the Marketing Mix” was published.
The 4 P’s of marketing actually first appeared four years earlier in E. Jerome McCarthy’s book titled Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. Today the four P’s concept — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — is one of the most well-known concepts in marketing, the four key pillars of the marketing mix. *
Pricing is something that applies to everyone in business, from moonlighting freelancers to multinational corporations. The aim of this article is to outline several pricing strategies and challenge you to think more deeply about the prices you set for your goods and services.
An 1833 Example
Tim Wu opens his insightful book The Attention Merchants with a story about a young entrepreneur named Benjamin Day. In 1833 the leading newspaper in New York was The Morning Courier and New York Inquirer, a four page daily with a circulation of roughly 2600 at a time when the population of the Big Apple was 300,000. (OK, it was still a little apple, but growing.)
Why weren’t more people reading the paper? It wasn’t because they were all illiterate. Rather, it was the price. The Courier/Inquirer cost six cents and was thus perceived as a luxury item.
The 23-year-old Day, owner of a struggling printshop, understood enough about the processes involved to throw his hat in the ring as a newspaper publisher himself. He wasn’t doing it for vanity, nor was he striving to become a civic reformer. Instead, it was a business venture, and he saw the lack of an affordable newspaper as an opportunity. Pricing was key. He sold his newspaper for a penny, which was less than what it cost to produce it.
His paper, The New York Sun, wasn’t really about selling news. It was about capturing eyeballs. To accomplish this he hired someone to go to court every day who would gather stories, both serious and humorous, to share with the public. Before long the readership was double the leading newspaper, which set in motion his real revenue stream, selling advertising.
What started as a mechanism for making a little money for himself became a prototype for newspapers and other media from then to this day. What’s television all about? Delivering eyeballs to advertisers. And Facebook? You bet.
Google became one of the largest companies in history by delivering accurate, fast search results free. There were dozens of search engines when Google entered the arena. How Google grew to become a 900-pound gorilla is itself a remarkable story.
Typical Pricing Strategies
There are numerous approaches to setting prices. Here are a few of the most common.
Cost-Plus Pricing
Figure out what it costs you to produce your product and add a markup.
One challenge here is determining your real cost, including overhead, returns and other hidden expenses. Another shortcoming is that it doesn’t factor in the value you bring to the customer.
Competitive Pricing
Setting prices based on what the competition is charging.
Once again, what are your competitors basing their price decisions on? Maybe they have lower overhead than you and they can undercut their competition while still making good money. Maybe they have a backdoor operation that helps subsidize the low-cost business they’re doing out the front door.
Value-Based Pricing
Setting prices based on perceived value by the customer.
Intentionally or unintentionally, your pricing will say something about your value. Smirnoff considered itself a premium vodka, but being timid about becoming too high priced they based their pricing on other vodkas. It wasn’t until they raised their prices that sales took off.
Penetration Pricing
Setting a low price to gain market share, then raising it later.
This strategy has a pair of risks to consider. First, will the low price be perceived as a signal of lower quality? Second, will the consumers you capture bail when you raise the price later for optimal profitability?
Freemium Pricing
Making your product or service free for a trial period, then charging full price.
We see this all the time in the digital age. Numerous successful gaming apps use this hook. America Online and other internet portals used to do this before the advent of the World Wide Web. It’s a useful way to introduce something so new that it’s difficult to explain, but easy to experience. The downside here is because people have been burned by services that require a credit card in advance, many are reluctant to sign up if it requires giving their credit card or too much other personal information.
A Chromaline Story
Around 1990 when I was at the Duluth-based Chromaline Corporation (now Ikonics) we introduced a new photostencil emulsion that we wanted to position as a higher end product. To enhance the perception of value we printed the labels on gold foil. The label cost 15 cents more than our regular ten cent labels. The price tag we set was 10 dollars more than our regular emulsion. This perception of value, both in the packaging and the price, garnered it rapid attention, ready acceptance and a second-place award as a best new product in the screen printing industry.
The 5th P
I began by noting the origins of the Four Ps of Marketing. Based on research gathered and analyzed by the Gallup organization I would like to suggest that there’s a fifth P equally as important to achieving your marketing aims, and that’s your People.
In his most excellent book Creativity, Inc., Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull wrote, “Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and the will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.” I think that’s sound advice for all of us. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/pricing-as-a-marketing-tool-7571b917a013 | ['Ed Newman'] | 2020-12-07 15:34:26.278000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Marketing', 'Business', 'Pricing', 'Marketing Strategies'] |
LATEST HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY NEWS TODAY | LATEST HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY NEWS TODAY
Vaccinations at Chicago-area hospital to resume after 4 workers experience adverse reactions.
LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. - A north suburban hospital is temporarily pausing coronavirus vaccinations after four workers reported feeling adverse reactions.
Since Thursday, four team members at Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville experienced reactions shortly after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination. Their symptoms included tingling and elevated heartrates, the hospital said in a statement.
The hospital also noted that the four team members represent fewer than 0.15% of the approximately 3,000 who have so far received vaccinations across Advocate Aurora Health.
The hospital released a statement Saturday saying vaccinations will resume on Sunday, Dec. 20.
Three of the team members are now home and doing well, the hospital said. One employee is receiving additional treatment.
The hospital said the CDC and local health departments concurred with the decision to resume vaccinations.
"We have eight other vaccination locations in Illinois and three in Wisconsin and are continuing at those sites as planned with no disruption," the hospital said, noting that "reactions are an expected side effect of vaccination.
Lara Smith Publishers.
Ann Jones | https://medium.com/@studiosnirvana1/latest-hollywood-celebrity-news-now-3b45ebbcdd7e | ['Lara Smith Publishers'] | 2020-12-20 10:27:49.903000+00:00 | ['Latest News', 'Celebrity', 'Hollywood'] |
This ICO is disrupting the Financial Services Industry | Everyone wants to make money. But up until recently, only the high net-worth individuals could afford personalised advisory solutions that would manage the investment portfolios in exchange for charging high fees. These personal wealth manager would access sophisticated tools and specific information while the retail investor would end up on the “losing” side of the trade. Such information asymmetries were spotted by Mr. Bobby Bhatia during his private equity banking career of 25 years across J.P Morgan, AIG and O’Connor & Associates. 3 years ago, in 2014, he decided to venture out on his own and founded TrakInest — A virtual social trading platform that democratises investing. TrakInvest aims to empower the retail investor with AI tools that create a level playing field removing the information asymmetry that has plagued them for so many years.
Headquarted in Singapore, with operations in India, Thailand and Hong Kong, TrakInvest boasts of a strength of 100,000+ users. TrakInvest is the world’s first virtual social trading platform that crowd sources fundamental and social trading data to generate profitable trading signals and ideas. The Platform is available on web, mobile and facebook messenger providing users the ability to build virtual trading portfolios, share and learn on a peer-to-peer basis and gain certifications and employment opportunities in the financial services sector.
TrakInvest also provides automated advisory solutions known as robo-advisory, algorithm-based advice at nominal cost. As a result, the services of traditional wealth managers are being commoditized as retail customers gain access to wealth creation opportunities through websites such as TrakInvest, online, on-the-go anytime anywhere.
UnEmployability in Asia
Asia has the largest millennial youth population in the world and almost a third of it is unemployed. Young graduates are simply not qualified in the right skills for the jobs that are available in the market. As per a PwC study, about 48% of the CEOs complain of not being able to find the right talent. TrakInvest is solving this core employability issue with its ecosystem of niche certifications and placements. TrakInvest has partnered with key companies, universities and local governments across the region to execute this initiative
TrakInvest also plans to launch 250 ‘TrakInvest labs’ and ‘centres of excellence’ across universities in India, Thailand and Singapore over the next 18 months. This will not only promote investing as a life skill but also expose, train, and re-skill technical talent on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, as a way of giving back to the growing cryptocurrency community.
Move to Cryptocurrency
TrakInvest faced a rising demand from its community to move to blockchain and launch its own cryptocurrency. This currency known as the “TRAK” Token is based on Ethereum ERC20 standards. The token launch will introduce a reward economy where the producers of trading data, insights and sentiments will be globally rewarded in a transparent and frictionless manner. Backed by a powerful tech stack and the strength of Ethereum’s Open community network, the ecosystem has a strong technical foot holding.
“The concept of social trading and the concept of cryptocurrency came together nicely because now we could actually set an incentivisation and a monetisation model not only for TrakInvest but also for its users” says Mr. Bobby Bhatia, Founder & CEO, TrakInvest
TrakInvest Future Vision
TrakInvest will develop its current virtual equity trading platform to include virtual trading and simulation games for cryptocurrencies. TrakInvest will also launch AI powered Sentiment analysis tool for both equities and crypto-currencies. These act as social listening tools for crowdsourced asset sentiment to generate profitable equity trading signals and ideas. Essentially, the future of trading.
Founder Profile & ICO details
Bobby Bhatia has been an ex-private equity banker with 25 years of experience in J.P Morgan Asia, AIG Asia and O’Connor & Associates. The TRAK token will be made available through the Pre — ICO sale at a 23% discount beginning 16 December 2017. All details and whitepaper available on www.trakinvest.ai | https://medium.com/trakinvest-ico/this-ico-is-disrupting-the-financial-services-industry-e8e753b7b06d | [] | 2017-12-18 10:02:55.564000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Token Sale'] |
SpaceNet 6 Challenge Launch | Preface: SpaceNet LLC is a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating open source, artificial intelligence applied research for geospatial applications, specifically foundational mapping (i.e. building footprint & road network detection). SpaceNet is run in collaboration with CosmiQ Works, Maxar Technologies, Intel AI, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Capella Space, Topcoder, and IEEE GRSS.
The SpaceNet 6 challenge is officially live, and offering $50,000 in cash prizes to our top participants! In the SpaceNet 6 challenge, participants are asked to automatically extract building footprints with computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms using a combination of Capella Space synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and electro-optical satellite imagery from Maxar. The challenge will run from March 16th until May 1st. Top participants will be invited to share their work at CVPR EarthVision in Seattle, Washington on June 14th, 2020.
Register and compete in the challenge on TopCoder:
https://www.topcoder.com/spacenet
Learn more about SpaceNet:
https://spacenet.ai/
Win AWS Credits:
The first 30 participants to achieve an F1 Score of 0.2 on the public leaderboard (recall that the the SpaceNet 6 baseline (link: https://medium.com/the-downlinq/the-spacenet-6-baseline-3b8ae8068351) achieved a score of 0.21) will be eligible to receive an AWS credit worth $500 in compute time.
Download the dataset from our AWS S3 Bucket for free:
aws s3 cp s3://spacenet-dataset/spacenet/SN6_buildings/tarballs/SN6_buildings_AOI_11_Rotterdam_train.tar.gz .
Read about or try out the baseline:
We recently released a new baseline algorithm, which could be used as an example or starting point for SpaceNet 6 participants for extracting building footprints from SAR imagery.
git clone https://github.com/CosmiQ/CosmiQ_SN6_Baseline/
Important Dates:
March 16th — Challenge Launch
April 17th — Challenge Midpoint
May 1st — Challenge Ends
June 4th — Winners Announced
June 14th — CVPR EarthVision
What’s Next?
As always, stay tuned to The DownLinQ and check out https://spacenet.ai for more details on the dataset and challenge. | https://medium.com/the-downlinq/spacenet-6-challenge-launch-e67f97348832 | ['Jake Shermeyer'] | 2020-03-16 19:04:02.104000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Geospatial', 'Open Source', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning'] |
A Vaccine Has Arrived and the U.S. Is Still Screwing Up | A Vaccine Has Arrived and the U.S. Is Still Screwing Up
Photo: Christian Lue/Unsplash
Ireally don’t know why anyone is surprised by recent revelations about Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing and distribution snafus. For nine months, our government has failed to create working supply chains for both testing and personal protective equipment (PPE). We still lack raw materials, manufacturing capability, data on need, logistics, price supports, and equitable distribution. Why would we expect vaccines to be different?
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Back in March, many of us called out that the health care supply chain was broken. I wrote about it with Ashish K. Jha and Valerie Griffeth in the New England Journal of Medicine. Nothing that we talked about or called for has been fixed. Instead, the feds developed a mess of a system to meet our health care systems’ PPE, testing, and other supply chain needs — a “fumbling” effort by “inexperienced” people with no background in supply chain logistics, manufacturing, disaster preparedness, or health care.
We learned very early in this pandemic that our national strategy was one of bluster and photo ops — not one of doing the hard work to get supplies into the hands of those who need them.
Alarm bells have been ringing for months about the lack of strategy for vaccine manufacturing, distribution, and messaging.
In the face of immediate need for PPE, we set up workarounds — groups like Get Us PPE developed data networks and equitable distribution strategies. For testing, the country relied on public-private partnerships, like Rhode Island’s (and other states’) partnership with CVS.
But let’s be clear: these efforts are simply substitutes for a federal strategy.
They are in no way equivalent to a good, organized, 50-state, publicly funded effort — which brings me to vaccines. Alarm bells have been ringing for months about the lack of strategy for vaccine manufacturing, distribution, and messaging.
In September, Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit, and David Lakey, vice chancellor for health affairs at the University of Texas, wrote a piece for STAT imploring “Operation Warp Speed” to come up with a plan. Simultaneously, potential breakdowns in the cold-storage distribution chain were highlighted by Ed Silverman and others.
In October, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials sounded the alarm that they still had no funds and no federal guidance on strategy. As of November, despite knowing that multiple phase 3 trials were nearing the end, and despite earlier promises to release vaccines pre-election, there was still no central repository for distribution plans, according to Kaiser Health News.
Not to mention the fact that months on, few people in positions of authority are talking about how to handle long-standing, well-founded mistrust from Black and Brown communities.
Without trust, even the best supply chain is useless.
With consumer confidence in the federal government at an all-time low and misinformation campaigns at an all-time high, even health care workers have expressed hesitancy about the vaccine.
Meanwhile, the guy who is directing Operation Warp Speed can’t explain why President Trump is making certain executive orders or why we passed on buying an extra 100 million doses of the vaccine.
Let’s be clear:
More than 300,000 Americans have died.
Another 150,000 will likely die before inauguration.
A vaccine is the best chance we have at getting things back to normal, quickly.
But what good is a vaccine if it stays on the shelves?
So, to those who expect that a miracle will be wrought and Covid-19 will simply disappear? Sorry, not gonna happen. To those who expect that herd immunity will naturally come to pass? Also not gonna happen. Just look at Sweden or New York City. To those who think the states will magically figure it out without funding or clear national guidance? Nope.
For the next 33 days until the inauguration, we’ll just continue to bumble along through the goodwill of philanthropy, the forethought of a few great states’ departments of health, and the hard work of health care workers, pharmacists, and techs who have already sacrificed so much.
And we’ll continue to watch our number of preventable deaths grow.
At the end of the day, despite having sunk billions of dollars into the creation of a vaccine, our feds have failed to close the last-mile gap — just as they failed with testing and with PPE.
To fix it, we need investments in manufacturing and supply chain. We need investments in data architecture and equitable distribution. We need clear public health messaging, stat. Magical thinking doesn’t work to stop pandemics. | https://medium.com/@joedenly57868/a-vaccine-has-arrived-and-the-u-s-is-still-screwing-up-9b1f836c7f3d | [] | 2020-12-18 22:26:30.456000+00:00 | ['United States', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19', 'Health', 'Public Health'] |
The Tortoise and the Hare | One day, while wandering aimlessly in the wilderness, the young Hare bumped into the Lion. “I’ve finally found you child! Come to the mountains with me. I would like you to join a marathon. Anyone who finishes this marathon, regardless of their pace, would be awarded a valuable prize. The rules are fairly simple, keep your eyes on the prize, travel within the designated route to the finish line, be kind to those you meet along the way, and invite others to join the race”, said the Lion to the Hare.
“How long is the marathon? Is the route marked? Are there others?” asked the Hare. The Lion said, “The marathon is as long as it needs to be. The route is not marked, but you will be, as are all participants. You will be given a guidebook, refer to it often so you do not get lost. Countless others have completed it, and you may ask for guidance from other participants who have already started, and there are also marshals I’ve placed along the route. I myself will be with you as you run. The prize at the end is a treasure beyond compare, will you come?”
Looking into the eyes of the Lion, the Hare asked, “I am inexperienced, young and rather rash. Are you sure I am good enough?” The Lion then reassured the Hare, “Come as you are”. Intrigued, the Hare followed the Lion into the mountains to join the marathon.
Amongst those who were about to participate in the marathon, were a duckling and an alpaca. The three greeted each other warmly, and were excited to start the marathon. The Lion call them toward him, marked their foreheads with water and gave them each a piece of bread and a small jar of wine. “Now, be on your way”, he said. The Alpaca raised an eyebrow and asked, “Is that all you are giving us for sustenance for what I reckon will be a long race?” With a soothing smile, the Lion replied, “For some it will be a long race, for others not so. You can have the bread and wine daily, you simply need to approach the marshals for your ration. But, no matter your distance, I will provide all that you need. You will be neither hungry, nor thirsty. You have my Word.”
“Sir, why just the three of us, surely there must be many more who could join us.” asked the Duckling. “I, too, do wish there were many more. Along the way you may meet some of those who have stumbled upon the race path or are searching for me to ask to join the marathon. If you see them, do walk with them to seek the race marshals and myself.” The Lion answered. “Go on now children! At this rate, you’re never going to start!”
And with much enthusiasm, the three began their race.
The race was far less exciting these juveniles had expected. Aside from having to settle their basic needs like finding shelter and warmth, others who had joined the marathon earlier did not always welcome the three with open arms. Some marshals who gave out rations threw their weight and authority around, as did some of the marathon participants who were assisting the marshals. And there were also those who, having trod the marathon path for a longer time, walked with a sententious air. One such participant was the Tortoise.
The trio first met the Tortoise by a lake en route. With them, was a young squirrel that they had invited to meet the Lion. The group had wanted to cross the lake to continue the journey, and was discussing amongst themselves how they might best do so.
“I can swim with ease on my own, but I doubt I would have the strength to pull you three across the lake”, said the Duckling. “Perhaps we could build a raft of some kind, I could go gather material. You think acorns would work? How about hazelnut shells?” offered the Squirrel. Just as the Alpaca was about to speak, the Hare had spotted the Tortoise slowly walking by the lake. Very slowly.
The Hare approached the Tortoise, “Hey you! Let’s journey together, and with your help we can all get across the water!” The Tortoise widened his eyes and glared at the Hare “Do you expect me to carry you youngsters on my shell and swim across the lake?”
“Why not? It’s the shortest way to the next checkpoint. After you help us across the lake atop, Alpaca and I can help dry you off with some of our fur.”
“I know the right way to the next checkpoint, I will travel on my own. I’ve walked more miles than you could ever run. If anything, you should be following my footsteps. I don’t even know why some of the marshals try to suggest new paths to me, they ought to know that my way is the right way to finish the marathon.”
“But sir, we cannot make it across the lake without some help.”
“Your journey is none of my concern, my way is the right way,” retorted the Tortoise. He let out a scornful breath, turned, and left the youngsters on their own.
“What hypocrites!” cried the Hare, “I thought this community of marathon participants would be much more welcoming and helpful. I’ve had enough of the self-righteousness, entitlement and disdain! I’m not participating any longer!” And with that, the Hare began walking away in a huff. But the Lion emerged from a distance, and stood in the path of the Hare.
“Where have you come from and where do you think you are going?” asks the Lion. The Hare then told the Lion of all the unhappy moments during the race thus far.
“An invaluable treasure is what I pledged for following me. What I did not pledge was a comfortable race. Do you truly desire to return to the place I led you out of, and forgo the treasure I promise you?” probed the Lion.
The Hare looked down on the ground in remorse, for the Lion was faithfully true to His word throughout the race, all of their needs were indeed provided for, often in abundance.
Sensing the Hare’s wavering heart, he beckoned the group of youngsters to the lake “Come, follow me.” And with that, he began walking on the water. Each of the Lion’s footsteps caused the water to ripple gently. The youngsters were flabbergasted by what they saw, but carefully, they followed every step on the water. Midway, the Alpaca slipped and fell into the water, but with the help of the Squirrel, climbed back up. “Keep your focus, do not fear!” cheered the duckling.
Unbeknownst to the youngsters, the Lion had also spoken to the Tortoise. “Why do you reject the youngsters?”
“They are rude and disrespectful. They refuse to follow me.” answered the Tortoise.
“Like them, you were young once, Tortoise. And you were much faster. Over the years, you have slowed down. Because the weight you drag behind you has grown significantly larger.” said the Lion.
“Weight? What weight?” asked the Tortoise.
“Pride.” The Lion answered. The Tortoise looked down on the ground in remorse. Sensing the Tortoise’s wavering heart, the Lion beckoned him to the lake. “Come, follow me.” And with that, he began walking on the water. Each of the Lion’s footsteps caused the water to ripple gently. The Tortoise was flabbergasted by what he saw, but carefully swam into the lake, following the Lion. Midway, he caught up with the earlier group of youngsters. The Hare and the Tortoise greeted each other with a hesitant nod. And together, they all followed the Lion to the finish line. | https://medium.com/@fledglingpilgrim/the-tortoise-and-the-hare-a-retelling-of-the-classic-fable-96031e873766 | ['Michelle Joan'] | 2020-12-21 01:57:34.455000+00:00 | ['Faith Stories', 'Fables', 'Catholic'] |
Thanks for your detailed feedback Charles, I really appreciate your points! | Thanks for your detailed feedback Charles, I really appreciate your points!
“Development is not a limitation or a constraint as implied by the first question.” I’m not implying that development is a limitation! I’m saying that designers should take into consideration this “contributing factor”. In my experience, some designers tend to design in a “vacuum”.
And I completely agree with you: feasibility aspects are temporary, these can change throughout the project. However, being a great designer means that you are aware of both the business and the technical implications of your design decisions at any given stage of the product development process.
The “…and designers should not give instructions to developers on how to write their code” statement is of course exaggerated, I just wanted to underline that both professions should respect boundaries throughout the collaborative process.
As for your last comment: I know that it’s a great challenge to find the “right order” of operations, especially in agile / lean frameworks. Consider my list as a starting point, in reality it’s very hard to work together in such an ideal way. | https://medium.com/@krisztina.szerovay/thanks-for-your-detailed-feedback-charles-i-really-appreciate-your-points-21ea7f0021a0 | ['Krisztina Szerovay'] | 2019-02-15 16:08:00.365000+00:00 | ['Collaboration', 'Web Design', 'UX Design', 'Interaction Design', 'Product Design'] |
That Sadness | That Sadness
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
“brighten the colours now
it’s October.”
Heart says.
“add that cinnamon
in the tea, count the drifting leaves
and wait for December.”
but the poems they still
write about that sadness. | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/that-sadness-f73ce3e4f894 | ['Priyanka Srivastava'] | 2020-10-12 21:26:08.715000+00:00 | ['Fall', 'Writing', 'A Cornered Gurl', 'Sadness', 'Poetry'] |
A Mama Bear’s Message in a Bottle | It gleams
The smile plastered on your face
as you grip a pencil
scribbling letters to a boy
on colorful origami paper
In drifts a breeze of spring innocence
Sunlight flickers
a reflection
In ten years you’d be the same age
I met my first love — a boy
All hope I devoted to
writing page after page
A message in a bottle
I’d address to my past self
Hello, Earth to Tracy
once on top of the world
only to drop and discern
you knew nothing
A tight grip
twisted around a finger
Had me teeter between attachment and affection
Asking if it was genuine or an illusion?
May you love yourself enough to know the difference
It took me ages
Through the looking glass with thorns
I peer and see clearly
Fiery flutters and firsts of infatuation
warped the world in a kaleidoscope
but hindsight tells me it was tunnel vision
Promises and potential
present themselves as a gift
leave you entrapped with a neat bow
Examine the whole package
Relationships are magic
as is conjuration
bound to second chances
Even if his voice makes you melt
He can stick a kiss to your lips, over and over
and smear empty words
To hear a heart beat loud
like the ceaseless thumping of a drum
let what starts with “I” and ends with “You”
fall on deaf ears
Watch it unfold
spelled out through actions
Let side effects be a lesson
Love is a drug
potent enough to obscure your senses
Are you met halfway
and treated as a person?
Or like a trophy to be won
then left up on the shelf to collect dust
Don’t hope to see tomorrows together
if they make you question your worth
Your history
Your position
Yourself
Music to your ears
but does he inch closer to listen?
Do compliments drip with sincerity
or screech like a broken record?
As sweet as a candy necklace
with others strung along
A smooth talker is never wrong
and a familiar melody echoes to seduce
However colorful your days are
like origami paper
don’t bare your soul to someone
who can’t even paint white lies with the truth
Let your emotions guide you
but not get the best of you
Time will tell
and sift diamonds in the rough
After the inevitable ebb and flow
of relationship woes
you’ll drown in the throes
Learn the hard way how bouquets will wilt
in diluted waters
But, still, today
in drifts a breeze of spring innocence
I see you by the window
scribbling letters to a boy
with a gleaming smile plastered on your face
when the writing’s on the wall
One day, you may break and fall
You won’t know what you’ve been missing out on
until you have it all
What’s real will not go astray
And my hope is for you to meet a man
like Daddy someday | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/a-mama-bears-message-in-a-bottle-3e8d94e9cba | ['Tracy Luk'] | 2020-11-28 10:46:38.947000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Relationships', 'Mothers And Daughters', 'Parenting', 'A Cornered Gurl'] |
A/B TESTING AND UX ROADMAP, DASHBOARD TEMPLATE FOR MONITORING | Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash
Hello 🙋♀️
Some weeks ago I talked in a webinar about A/B testing and the tools I use to monitor my A/B tests. I hope it’ll help some of you struggling with their process !
As the only person in my (not so small) company managing the UX and the A/B testing process, I need to stay well organized and to make it easier I use different dashboards and tables to put all my data in.
The good thing about tables is that after a little amount of time creating it, you’ll gain so much more by just filling the column and lines. Also, you won’t forget any useful information and you’ll keep an history of your data and work process.
I made a template inspired of those dashboards, for you to duplicate and use it as you want 😀. You can find it here.
Monitoring UX inputs and A/B testing
(I tried my best to translate it well from french to english, but do not hesitate to tell me if something is not clear enough!). You can also use the process on another platform if you prefer like Trello or Notion, it’s up to you !
It’s really easy to use on a daily/weekly basis around your UX inputs and A/B testing. There is 3 tables :
The first one is about your UX inputs, what are you going to do, why and how.
The second one is about your A/B tests and how to monitor them.
Then the last one is about your tests result and keeping an history of it, easy !
You will find a use case in the template to show you the way I’m using it.
I hope you found this publication useful and wish you a very good day 😊 ! | https://medium.com/@greef-elisa/a-b-testing-and-ux-roadmap-tool-for-monitoring-e7913bb06b31 | ['Elisa Greef'] | 2021-04-12 12:20:30.707000+00:00 | ['Template', 'Ab Testing', 'Monitoring', 'Dashboard', 'UX Design'] |
What Every Developers & Programmers Need to Read in June 🔥🔥 | What Every Developers & Programmers Need to Read in June 🔥🔥 Keyul Follow Jun 10 · 2 min read
Hello Readers,
Staying at home gives you extra time. You have to utilize this time in the right direction. During this time, spend maximum of your time in learning new programming, tech stack or tool, build various projects, improve your overall skills.
You keep reading the amazing posts written by our developers & programmers. These are the best blog posts we have picked for you this month.
via — unsplash
Special thanks to our contributors Alyssa Atkinson , Raouf Makhlouf , Elvina Sh, Karthick Nagarajan, Tommaso De Ponti, Madhuresh Gupta
If you like this, please forward this email to your friends to share QuickCode publication or tweet about it. Help us to reach out to 10K members milestone. Thank you. | https://medium.com/quick-code/what-every-developers-programmers-need-to-read-in-june-cd7f2d7da4e6 | [] | 2020-06-10 04:39:52.248000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Development', 'Coding', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering'] |
How to do human-friendly code review | Doing code reviews is not an easy task. Doing a good code review is even more difficult and responsible job. It is not only a technical process but also a social one. In this article, I discuss a few techniques that may improve your code reviews and make them more human friendly to keep positive relationships with your colleagues.
Explain
You don’t always need to do it, but sometimes it’s appropriate to give a bit more explanation about your suggestions. It’s a good practice to explain both your suggested change and the reason for the change. This helps the developer understand why you are making your comment and there is a chance that the author of the pull request may learn something new.
If you can, provide a link to a section in your company’s style guide, to language or library documentation, or to the best practice you’re following. Make sure that the developer really understands how your suggestion improves code health.
Code can sometimes be just messy or written in an unintuitive way. Instead of formulating judgments like “This is bad” or “This line of code is unnecessary”, try to explain why this code should be refactored. You could write your comment in a nicer way, for instance, “I found this code hard to understand, what about splitting this complex function?”. Referring to the issue in this way helps the developer understand why you are making your comment.
By the way, try to encourage developers to simplify code or add code comments instead of just explaining the complexity to you, so those changes can be helpful also to future code readers.
Give guidance
It’s not easy to find a good balance between pointing out problems and providing direct guidance. Code review is an opportunity for developers to learn and protect themselves from mistakes. But giving a ready solution to a problem is just taking away that opportunity.
Instead, let developers explore, research, and make a decision. This helps them to learn. On the other hand, if you leave comments like this one “Can we simplify this complex function?”, you’re not actually helping much. So instead of only pointing out problems, you should also share some suggestions, instructions, or maybe even a code example.
Remember that a hidden goal of code reviews is also to improve developers’ skills so they require less and less guidance over time.
Do not judge
Code review comments should be written in a neutral language. You should never critique the author, instead focus on the code and possible improvements.
If you find something difficult to understand, ask for clarification rather than assuming ignorance or making judgments in comments, like “this can never work”. If you want to critique the code of a colleague, make sure to do so in a respectful way and always include some possible ways for improvement.
To make sure you’re not critiquing the author, avoid using the word “you” in your message. When the author sees “you” in a comment, they may take the criticism personally. Consider this sentence:
“You made this code hard to understand.”
A comment like this brings the focus away from the code, and the author can interpret it as a personal attack. Writing comments without the word “you” shouldn’t be hard, you have at least two options.
Replace “you” with “we”
“This function you wrote is hard to read. Can you simplify it?”
wrote is hard to read. Can simplify it?” “I find this function difficult to understand. Can we simplify it?”
Which comment would you prefer to receive as an author? I bet that you would prefer the second one. That’s because the second example brings focus to the code and the comment is not judging anybody.
Replace commands with requests
Another option is to omit the subject from the sentence. Look at these two examples:
“You should split this function into smaller ones.”
“What about splitting this function so the code is easier to read and debug in the future?”
The second example is not only formulated in a friendly way but it also brings reasoning to your comment.
Point out good work
Don’t limit your code review to only finding errors. Pointing out also good work definitely improves the team spirit and is a good motivator. Don’t forget to do it especially if you have learned something from this code or if you noticed a solution you wouldn’t have come up with yourself.
Everyone makes mistakes
Remember that we’re all humans and it doesn’t matter if it’s a beginner or experienced developer’s code, the truth is that everyone makes mistakes. It may be caused by a bad day, bad mood, lack of domain knowledge, or overload with duties.
I hope that my tips will encourage you to strive for a stress-free and developer-friendly code review. Let’s remember that good code reviews not only improve the merged code but they bring benefits to all team members. We can also inspire others and contribute to their self-development.
This article was originally published on my personal site mateuszjanusz.dev. | https://medium.com/@mateuszjanusz95/how-to-do-human-friendly-code-review-c98c3ec092cc | ['Mateusz Janusz'] | 2020-12-23 11:08:19.397000+00:00 | ['Code Review', 'Tips', 'Best Practices', 'Coding', 'Productivity'] |
The Women Who Dare to Write | The difficult truth about the unjust treatment and experience of women journalists
Casual sexism. Not-so-casual sexism. Online abuse. Harassment and violence. Even in 2020, women in journalism face these struggles on almost a daily basis.
In October this year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) released a report on online violence against women journalists. With responses from 714 women journalists across 113 countries, it is the most comprehensive and geographically diverse study ever undertaken on the subject of online violence. The report confirmed what is already the lived reality for many women: sexism in journalism is very much alive and kicking.
A staggering 73% of women who undertook the survey said they had experienced online violence, with 48% of them reporting harassment in the form of unwanted private messages. The difference in experience between male and female journalists is increasingly difficult to ignore. However, it most definitely is being ignored by those who have the power to change it. You might be thinking, ‘why are they receiving threats in the first place?’, and the answer is clearer than you think. In true patriarchal style, women are attacked for pretty much anything and everything — and having a public voice only makes online trolls’ lives easier.
It’s clear that women are subject to this unjust harassment simply for being women. But, there are particular topics that people respond to more aggressively than others. The UNESCO and ICFJ report found that the story theme that triggered highest levels of online abuse was gender (47%), closely followed by politics and elections (44%) and human rights and social policy (31%). Shock. Not only do these women dare to have a public voice, but they then use them to cover systemic injustices that affect them directly. How very un-ladylike of them. Jokes aside, these figures are very telling of the sexist society that we still live in today. It isn’t just matters of social concern that women are attacked for, though. Speaking about her own experiences as a journalist, Anne Helen Peterson describes being told by another woman to “die a slow and painful death” for having written a blog post about Kristen Stewart. It seems that the unfair treatment of women in journalism also comes in the form of internalised misogyny.
Journalist and blogger Imani Gandy says, “I don’t know how any woman of colour can have their DMs open”, with minorities and members of the LGBTQ+ community facing harsher abuse than white, cis, straight women. Gandy goes onto state that one man had devoted 2 years to creating new Twitter accounts with the sole purpose of harassing her. There is no accurate discussion of feminism without acknowledgement of the deeply-rooted systemic racism that enables disproportionate discrimination against women of colour. Likewise, it is crucial to acknowledge that the field of journalism is no exception to this ruthless treatment of minority groups.
While harassment against women is rife in journalism, only 25% of survey respondents reported incidents to their employers. This is not unjustified when considering that 10% of those who did report them received no response, and 9% were told that they should “grow a thicker skin”, “toughen up”, and other such comments. These figures are further validated by journalist Hannah Storm’s first-hand experience. Suffering from PTSD as a result of sexual assault by another journalist, Storm says she became “another silent voice in the media”. Even in her first few years as a journalist, she recalls being exposed to behaviour that made her feel unsafe and ashamed. It appears that the issue lies not only in that women are experiencing violence, but also in that they are silenced by those with a duty of care towards them.
Many women admit that they protect themselves from online abuse by self-censoring, or closing DMs and limiting interactions with people they don’t follow on social media. However, it’s not possible (or fair) for women to solve an issue that they have not created. There needs to be increased protection of women vulnerable to harassment from both people within their field, and externally, online. Until those who hold the most power are willing to enforce real, systemic changes to the field of journalism, women will sadly continue to face challenges that aren’t faced nearly as much by their male counterparts. | https://medium.com/@saraharomunoz/the-women-who-dare-to-write-84a916b1d3c8 | ['Sara Haro Munoz'] | 2020-12-23 18:52:15.475000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Sexism', 'Writing', 'Journalism', 'Workplace'] |
How did I manage my loan to get rid of the debt? | saving the money is the best remedy to get from the debt out.
Click here for Hindi
If you read the word ‘loan’ in reverse, It means ‘nalo.’ The meaning of this word in Hindi is don’t take.
Once, I asked my aged but rich relative about the loan, and what the gentleman replied me?
“Son, speak the word ‘loan’, again and again, your question will be answered automatically.
So I started cramming,
“Loan ….. loan … lo … nalo … nalo …nalo.”
And I released that gentleman’s advice is that you should not take any loan or any debt, and do such planning without any debt is better.
Though it was too late for me because I had been already trapped in the swamp of the loan, so I had gone to see him with the hope of financial help but couldn’t muster the courage to say anything after hearing his advice upon the loan, and returned home just like that.
Well, in a few years, I took great care and got rid of debt. To get rid of debt, I took the following steps.
What did I do to repay the loan?
I kept an advance deposit in the bank equal to one installment to miss no installment. If you miss a single installment of the loan, your condition will be like a fly caught in a spider web. The bank will charge the Late fee, surcharge, service charge (God knows what service they provide with such heavy service charge) of the bank, and finally GST like the hit of an ax from the Government. It will be such a mess that when the time comes to pay the second installment, you will find that some payment is left even after paying everything, no matter how modest it will be. Still, it will be deducted first, and then your regular installment amount will be declared as pending because you have deposited the amount only equal to the installment amount. Therefore, it is good to keep an amount equal to one installment or a little more (one and a half times would be appropriate). This practice is for is a defense.
The second thing was that I tried to increase my income. I looked for part-time work, and if not found, I started work at home. For this, I increased my skill. Took the tailoring and sewed the customer’s clothes at home.
I rented a part of my house.
My wife learned embroidery and weaving work and started to earn.
Boys and girls were studying, but they also used to sell some food items on holidays.
In addition to the loan installment, we started depositing some more amount in the bank by creating a recurring account.
I Increased the deduction of my provident fund from my salary.
Though there was a lot of trouble due to low income, my family members and I managed with a decreased income with though we suffered so much difficulty. We reduced the expenses of festivals, weddings, etc. We stopped thinking about what people would say.
I had availed the loan from a finance company which I transferred to a nationalized bank . Due to this, I benefited from the deduction of interest.
We left the shame and borrowed some amount from friends and relatives, which was an interest-free amount.
In a few years (in about five years), after depositing a lot of amounts, he paid the loan in full by settling with the bank, in which the bank gave a good discount.
Gradually, all friends and relatives also paid their debt. I started selling clothes and finished dresses along with sewing work, and soon we became financially capable.
I will always remember my honorable aged relative’s advice that ‘loan’ means ‘nalo.’
I intend to increase my skill, and my family members started some work, tried to save money, and be encouraged by the biggest thing, then it is not impossible to get rid of debt. | https://medium.com/@mgdumasia53/how-did-i-manage-my-loan-to-get-rid-of-the-debt-d67dc437e1da | ['Mg Dumasia'] | 2020-12-04 13:26:10.986000+00:00 | ['Banking', 'Money', 'Loans', 'Saving', 'Debt'] |
Business Model Canvas Re-imagined | Since the advent of Industrial age, people across the world have tried to find out the best ways to initiate businesses. While there is no one way of assured success, using models which have proved successful in the past does give confidence to an aspiring entrepreneur.
‘Business Model Canvas’, initially proposed by Alexander Osterwalder in 2008 has become one of the most used methods for developing new business models.
While it gives clarity to an entrepreneur about most of the building blocks of a successful business like ‘Infrastructure’, ‘Offerings’, ‘Customers’ & ‘Finances’, the current state of our world raises serious questions about the long-term impact & efficacy of our businesses and therefore exposes a gap in how we intend, plan and execute our businesses.
We are running fast towards a point of no return with respect to climate change, our industries & products are creating havoc on Earth, our businesses contribute heavily to social & economic disparity which in turn cause social problems with huge costs and the only measure of success is dominant market share (by subverting vendors. clients & competitors by hook or by crook).
Basis my experience in handling large businesses from a Revenue perspective, running my own small enterprise and now handling entrepreneurship & enterprises in an alternative education setup, I feel we can do much more while planning & executing a new business so that we are able to create businesses which are more in harmony with nature, with society & with each other.
The basics of Business Model Canvas are available on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas
One major component which should be added in the original model is ‘Impact’. To make sure we have a harmonious business model, it is important to study the impact of our business & inculcate changes to create a business model which can help reduce any negative impact & maximize the positive impacts of our model.
Business Model Canvas Re-imagined
While the 9 core building blocks are explained in detail on the wiki link above, I would like to touch in more details on the new block which is ‘Impact’.
Impact
Social Impact
· How are you engaging with the community
· How is the business impacting the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’
· Identify Social gaps & add activities to your business which counter those gaps
· The Cost Structure of the business should have provisions for social costs
2. Ecosystem Impact
· Knowledge sharing with Industry peers
· Help allied businesses develop & grow through partnerships
· The Revenue streams should have symbiotic client-vendor relationships of mutual benefits
3. Ecological Impact
· Use resources frugally
· Map out the environmental impact of usage of each resource
· Do value-stream mapping of the business to minimize ‘non-value adding’ activities & resources
· Do an impact-analysis of all your end-products & business wastes on Ecology & Climate and work proactively to minimize the impact
While this can be a starting point and we may need to add more aspects of ‘Impact’ as per different industries & businesses, this building block initiates a discussion in the board rooms & startup spaces about the need to study the impact of all our activities & reach a middle point on optimizing both profits, value & impact.
The first step to change is awareness and this step, if done diligently, will open the dialogue about the impact and make the entrepreneurs and leadership be cognizant of what impact (positive or negative) the business will create. | https://medium.com/@manishadlakha/business-model-canvas-re-imagined-143a764a682d | ['Manish Adlakha'] | 2019-05-17 08:08:08.815000+00:00 | ['Business Strategy', 'Innovation', 'Startup', 'Impact', 'Business'] |
The Shallow End — Not Just for Pools | The Shallow End — Not Just for Pools
Times When I’ve Prized Sexy Above Substance
Photo Credit: Angelo Pantazis via Unsplash
I was thumping along on the treadmill at the gym today when a man popped onto the machine next me wearing a criminal amount of cologne. Enough that I tasted it as I gasped for each mouthful of air. Total gym foul.
I was eyes forward leaning into my final mile when I glanced over at the offender assailing my nostrils.
Who happened to be drop dead gorgeous. And roughly 15 years younger than me. And who gave me a huge smile that touched his eyes. And a fist bump of encouragement.
So of course I decided his cologne tasted delicious. And felt like a very sweaty Mrs. Robinson.
Again. | https://mamaluscious.medium.com/the-shallow-end-not-just-for-pools-24aa6dbaddbb | ['Mama Luscious'] | 2020-02-23 18:43:55.059000+00:00 | ['Age Gap Love', 'Dating', 'Relationships Love Dating', 'Shallow', 'Relationships'] |
The Ignored Obvious of UX Design Interviews (and interviews in general) | #1 Do Your Research
Being a UX Designer, I use research to understand the problem at hand, know my audience, and gather enough context information to make an informed decision for further steps. Research is an integral part of my design process and I apply the same to interviews.
In most cases, especially UX Interviews, the recruiter would share details like- name and role of the interviewer, the team you will be interviewing with, link to products that team work on, and link to company information. This is a good starting point for your research. Let’s go into details for what you can research about.
Explore the company
This is the foremost aspect you should research about because you are first an employee of the company and then a part of a respective team within the company. Each company have their own set of products, their business domain, culture and values that are developed overtime. It is valuable for the interviewees to read about these aspects and have a deep understanding of the company. It shows the interviewer and the recruiter that you are interested, and you care about the potential company you wish to work for.
Strategy to research about the company-
Check the resources shared by the recruiter before the interview. This might include links to videos, articles and website.
Check recent news articles published online by and for the company. Get a sense of what is the buzz around the company right now.
Connect with existing employees, via LinkedIn or Twitter, and learn from them about what they admire about the company.
Connect with previous interns and ask about their experiences.
Know your interviewer
This too is a key step since the more you know your interviewer the better you know what to expect. It is not very different from the UX Design process which starts with empathizing with your users and this helps you design better for them. I employ the same approach to interviews.
Sansa insists that she can make a better strategy against Ramsey because she knows him very well! Copyright belongs to Game of Thrones
In most cases the recruiter will inform you in advance the interviewer for your interview. If not, you can ask the recruiter for details. Once you get the information, look them up on LinkedIn, Twitter, Dribbble, Behance and Medium. Check the past companies they worked for, what did they study and what was their career path. Identify their passion and personality as a designer.
To help with this, you can ask yourself the following questions-
Do they value visual design more than functional design or vice versa or both?
Do they focus a lot on the process?
Are they more interested in different tools and techniques used in the UX Design process?
What is their role and responsibility in the team?
Is there any recent podcast or interview where the interviewer was featured? If yes, go ahead and listen to it.
This will help you anticipate their goals for the interview and expectations from you. Since this is all based on secondary research, the predictions will be based on a lot of assumptions and your understanding of all materials. There will be missing dots but, it is ok! You can learn more about the interviewer during the interview and connect the dots on-the-go. But this will give you a head start to prepare for the interview.
For example, for my UX Design intern interview with Salesforce, my first interviewer had a visual design background and was currently working as a Senior UX Designer. So my focus while explaining the projects was on product design process and UI design. I tried and avoid any development jargons and explained everything related to development in a very simple manner. My next round of interview was with the Director of Software Engineering and Manager for the CX Tools team. Here, I knew I had to focus a lot on the big picture thinking, project scheduling and management, product strategy based on research, and finally convey how effective the solution was for users. I would say this strategy worked out pretty well for me and help me prepare strongly for certain aspects in respective interviews.
How will this help you?
Help you tweak your elevator speech and background information for the interviewer. You will know what key points to hit from your journey to get into design.
Help you identify the right project from your portfolio to discuss during the interview.
Help you tweak the project explanation based on interviewers interest.
Research the product
Once you know the interviewer, you should look into the product the interviewer works on. This might be a potential project that you will work on and it is good to have a sense of what you are getting into. Knowing the product will also give you an opportunity to ask questions and know more about the product during the interview. I will highly recommend reading as much as possible about the product.
Where can you look for product information?
In this era most products have some form of open source GitHub repo. Visit the repo and go through it’s documentation.
If there is a Twitter account for the product, skim through the feed to know the recent discussions.
Checkout any articles about the product and it’s documentation. This should give you a good overview of the product.
If you want to go above and beyond, try out the product and have feedback for the respective team member who is interviewing you. This will show that you are not afraid to take initiative to learn the product and share your perspective. But be very sure to mention the assumptions you have made to form your suggestions. Each team have to abide to respective principles, encountered challenges and are tied to constraints while constructing a product. These are hard to know without talking to them. Thus, be considerate and respectful while putting your feedback in front of them. Following is an example of a sketch I made to present my idea for redesigning Salesforce Status website. As I mentioned before, I detailed out all assumptions and considerations to accommodate the proposal, and it was taken positively by the interviewer. | https://uxdesign.cc/the-ignored-obvious-of-ux-design-interviews-and-interviews-in-general-f5f385b39168 | ['Nishant Panchal'] | 2019-01-05 05:45:13.750000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'UX', 'Jobs', 'Interview', 'Design'] |
What to Do? Do I Get the New Hip, or Not? Advice Needed… | Where’s my cane? I am NOT old enough to need a cane!! [Photo by The Lensemen on Unsplash]
The weird pain in my hip ramped up in 2008 after I’d spent several 12-hour days crawling around under and behind some ancient cedars in front of our house. My father and I had been building a dog run and cutting through the thick tangle of prickly branches, crouching, bending and squatting for hours as we hammered and pounded stakes, wired posts to tree trunks, threaded wire mesh in and through and around awkward corners to make sure everything was secure against escaping canines.
We’d built a ramp and a closing doggie door into the front hallway, all in a rush to meet the deadline of a departing plane I needed to be on. That’s why the date stamp that marks the beginning of the end of my hip is so clear in my mind. When I settled into my seat on the plane I was in agony. My hips complained for the duration of the entire 10-day trip to Europe, where I traveled with my publisher to attend an international publishing conference. We had added a few days to the end of the business trip to visit Florence and see a bit of Tuscany, but the pain did not abate even when I was roaming around places like the ancient hill town of Siena, marveling at how it is possible that Italian pigeons mooching for crumbs in the town square seem so much exotic than those pooping on statues back at home.
My pigeon photos have gone missing… the perils of cloud storage and no filing system. [Nikki Tate]
I thought perhaps I had injured something during all the crawling around in the dirt. But, in both hips? It seemed unlikely. The pain was deep, unrelenting and ominous. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t sit without pain. Couldn’t walk my usual, enthusiastic, ground-covering stride. By day 6, I had convinced myself I had bone cancer. I was 45.
It seemed a shame that I was going to die so young — I was barely getting started with my writing career. My daughter had still to be fully launched into adulthood. I had not yet lived long enough to see her future husband.
Photo by Einar Storsul on Unsplash
Weird symptoms and sleep deprivation make for a dark blend in a novelist’s mind.
As soon as I could get an appointment I went to see my doctor. That was the beginning of a series of x-rays, trips to physiotherapists, more x-rays and the bizarre and impossible (to my mind) conclusion that arthritis had come calling. There was no way I was old enough!
“Have you ever injured your left hip?” the doctor asked, noting that it was a lot worse than the right one.
“Well, there was that time I fell off a bridge… with a horse. Like, when I was 21.”
And, yes, at the time the doctor had said — well, he said various things. First, “You are lucky to be alive.” Then, “you could have broken your neck. Or your back. Or both legs. Or your skull.” And then, finally, “… chances are you will develop arthritis in that hip at some point.”
Considering the alternatives, I thought a bit of achiness ‘at some point’ wasn’t really that bad. I hobbled around on crutches for a couple of months while all the bone bruises healed up (I had no idea bones could bruise), and then put the whole incident out of my mind (it’s a good story, the bridge and the horse… I’ll tell it in another blog post).
Fast forward to 2019 — just the other day — when, after years of suffering from increasingly awful pain, I finally went in to see a surgeon. It was busy in the hip and knee clinic and sitting on hard chairs waiting my turn is the worst thing for the hip. It locks up. It whines and complains. As usual, I ignored it.
When my name was called I hobbled over to the surgeon who said, “Where’s your cane? You shouldn’t be walking without a cane.” I wanted to pop her in the nose. I am NOT of cane-bearing age.
“This is you.” She waved her hand at an x-ray. “That hip of yours is shot. No cartilage. That’s bone on bone.” She pointed to the round knob at the top of my leg bone where it sat grinding into the socket in my pelvis. “And, my — look at those bone spurs.”
Not my hip x-ray. I was too stunned to think of snapping a photo. WikiCommons to the rescue… [Hellerhoff [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Extra bits of bone stabbed into the black background of the x-ray. They looked nasty. When my hip locks and refuses to move I imagine those hooks are snagging on something inside my leg rendering me immobile until I find a curb or a step and stand on my good leg, shaking my bad one over thin air until things jiggle loose.
The surgeon shook her head. “This is bad news. Because you are too young for a hip replacement.”
What now? You’ve just said the hip is shot. I’m fit and would love to be more active except, you know, the whole moving thing…
“How bad is it? What do you do for a living?”
She asked a lot of questions, one after the other. I barely answered before she threw the next one at me.
“I’m a writer. I can’t sit for long before it locks up. Then I can’t stand up. It hurts to walk. Hurts to lie down. No — I can’t sleep- I can’t remember the last time I slept soundly through the night.”
“What do you take for pain?”
“I can’t take anything Aspirin-related. I’m allergic.” And, I won’t take opioids — that just seems like a bad idea. I don’t drink enough red wine to be helpful — either from its purported anti-inflammatory properties or its ability to render me unconscious. And, ever since that terrible Tylenol poisoning incident in Paris, I only give in and take one of those when I’m desperate.
All through my description of my ongoing on misery, she kept shaking her head. “I hear you. But if we replace the hip now —you’ll wear it out. And the second round doesn’t usually go so well.” Her eyes widened when she stated this in a look clearly meant to convey she was imparting a dire warning. What the hell did that mean? ….doesn’t usually go so well… Was she asking me to make a decision now about a surgery that I might need 15–20 years from now? When I’m actually old? Will it matter then if my second fake hip is a bit wonky?
Then she began the list of all the things that could go wrong. Infection in the bone (very bad news — hip needs to come back out and I’ve got nothing. Except, a wheelchair). It isn’t a good fit and I wind up not walking any better than I do now (ok… a limp, but would the pain stop?).
“What do you do for sport? Ski? You’d have to stop skiing — new hips don’t break nicely when you fall.”
Apparently, the new implant is too strong. If I were to fall, the new hip part wouldn’t break. Instead, the surrounding bone shatters. In my mind I heard it going, exploding into shards inside my thigh. Yeah, that would be bad. It would be like that moment when I heard both bones in my arm pop out of place when I had a fall (climbing, that time — not another riding incident) and double-dislocated my elbow. The noise was the first indication something nasty had just happened. The wave of mind-melting pain that followed three seconds later confirmed it. The only good thing about that incident was that I didn’t think about my hip for a few days.
The doctor was staring hard at me now, perhaps recognizing I was drifting away into the bleak land of memory and imagination. “I had to give up skiing when I had mine done,” she said. She gestured to one hip, then the other — her own pair of new installations.
“I don’t ski. I’m a climber.”
Climbing is my thing… that’s why I moved back to the mountains. [Photo: Fabio Lacentra]
“You’d have to stop. The risk of dislocation is too high. I know about climbers — how you contort yourselves into weird, twisty positions. And if it pops out once, chances are it will pop out again.”
“I’m not giving up climbing.”
Heading up a climb at Red Rocks in Nevada. [Photo: Fabio Lacentra]
She took a deep breath. “You climbers…”
Which is the point at which tears welled up and my throat closed and all rational thought abandoned me. Give up climbing? I had come to the office thinking I would be told the normal risks of surgery, get put on the list, and then be sent home again to wait my turn. Yes, there would be physio and it would take some time to recover and get back up to speed, but I know people who are climbers and who have new hips and who are my age-ish.
My world here in the mountains only exists because I came here to climb. I am engaged to a climber. I met him while climbing… well, trying to climb. [That’s a topic for another blog post]. The point is, climbing is not something I am going to give up.
“You’ll have to make some difficult decisions,” she said.
“What are my options here?” I asked, thinking maybe there was some angle to this conversation we had missed.
“Cannabis?”
“What?”
“No — not what you think. It’s not the young people who are telling me this stuff works. It’s my old cowboys. They swear by the stuff. You don’t smoke it. It’s an oil you put under your tongue.”
Her lips were moving and words were coming out. I had come in for a new hip and she was offering me marijuana? Wow.
The end result of all this? The surgeon is sending a letter to my family doctor saying I am a candidate for a full hip replacement. All I have to do is let my doctor know what I want to do and then I can be scheduled, knowing that the new hip might pop out, cause the rest of my leg to shatter, become infected so the new hip has to be removed and I have to move into a wheelchair, or that the new equipment will wear out and leave me with a not-great-chance of a successful repeat. I’ll have to assess just what sort of climber I’ll be with the new hip… if I’ll continue to climb at all.
So, that’s where I sit, uncomfortably at my desk, mulling over my options and typing this post (it helps, when I’m sorting options, to put it all down in black and white). I suspect if you’ve read this far you might know someone who has been in my position, wondering whether the pain is bad enough, whether the risks are worth the potential benefits. Maybe you have been there yourself. Maybe you are there now. I’m gathering information and soliciting advice. Do tell… what would you do in my situation? And, if you know someone who has gone down the cannabis road, should I be visiting one of these new shops that have opened in town since Canada legalized marijuana and related products?
I’m in research and info-gathering mode now. Check back for updates… | https://medium.com/nexus-generation/what-to-do-do-i-get-the-new-hip-or-not-advice-needed-59f000726f14 | ['Nikki Tate'] | 2019-03-23 18:10:20.463000+00:00 | ['Middle Age', 'Climbing', 'Surgery', 'Health', 'Arthritis'] |
Data Beyond Perception | Image by statistics authority of UK
The quote “Data is everywhere” can’t be more true.We tend to see only what is presented to us, but we often overlook what information might be hidden inside each data.This article provides information about how we can find links and correlation between various features of a given data. Sometimes very important information which is vital for our analysis is hidden as a combination of individual features. Let’s jump in to the task at hand and find out the power of statistics and python.
Explore the Data
To illustrate my point, I have used the advertising data from the textbook “An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R” (Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani). The data can be found using the author’s website or the link: http://faculty.marshall.usc.edu/gareth-james/ISL/data.html
url = 'http://faculty.marshall.usc.edu/gareth-james/ISL/Advertising.csv'
ds = pd.read_csv(url,index_col=0)
Now to visualize the relation between the different features of our data set we can use pair plot() which gives us the scatter plot between two features and the histogram.
sns.pairplot(ds);
Pair wise plot for different features
Isn’t python amazing? Seaborn is an amazing data visualization library and you can use its various functions to utilize it to its full content.
Understand the data:
The pair wise plot above can be overwhelming if you are new to this but it is just a plot of two features taken one at time, hence the name pair plot. In our data the plot towards the bottom right is a scatter plot of sales against the budget of advertising for television. Now to quickly get a glimpse of how our data is related,you can use the following commands:
g = sns.pairplot(ds, kind="reg")
This will plot a linear regression line fitting all the pair wise plots.
Linear Regression fit to data
Another great function of seaborn library is that it tells us about the correlation of different data with each other, using just a line:
corr = ds.corr()
sns.heatmap(corr)
Heat map showing correlation
The heat map gives us the extent to which these features are correlated with each other and especially focusing on the last row which is the relation between the sales and the advertising budget.It is quite clear that the sales of TV is positively correlated to the budget of advertising while the correlation between radio and sales is decreasing and it decreases even further for the the sales of newspaper and the budget of advertising.
Fitting the Linear Regression Model:
Now to get into the Machine Learning part we have to fit regression model.We have to split the model into 70:30 train test data points. Then use different linear regression models to fit the data for different features.
train, test = train_test_split(ds, test_size=0.3)
reg_tv = LinearRegression().fit(train[['TV']], train['sales'])
reg_radio = LinearRegression().fit(train[['radio']], train['sales'])
reg_news = LinearRegression().fit(train[['newspaper']], train['sales'])
y_pred_tv = reg_tv.predict(test[['TV']])
y_pred_radio = reg_radio.predict(test[['radio']])
y_pred_news = reg_news.predict(test[['newspaper']])
We can observe how the linear regression model fits our training and test set using the following plots. The red blue points are the scatter plot for the training set while the green colored points are for the test data set .
Linear model for different features
By observing the above plots,anyone can say that the linear models are not good enough. We can definitely use other models belonging to different class to see how it fits our data but we often root to higher level models without exploring what the data has to offer. Even from this linear model we can roughly say that it fits the Sales against TV budget best. This can mean that on increasing the budget for advertising in TV entertainment we can increase the sales of that feature.
The Hidden Pieces:
There can be various combination of features which might give us a huge amount of information about how they are interconnected.For this purpose I have used combination like multiplying the budget of TV and radio , radio and newspaper , newspaper and TV and the combination of all three.You can do this using :
ds['news_radio'] = ds['newspaper']*ds['radio']
ds['tv_radio'] = ds['TV']*ds['radio']
ds['news_tv'] = ds['newspaper']*ds['TV']
ds['news_radio_tv'] = ds['newspaper']*ds['radio']*ds['TV']
ds
The above code will create new columns in your already existing data frame.All you have to now is to fit the linear model for the new set of features.
train, test = train_test_split(ds, test_size=0.3)
reg_news_radio = LinearRegression().fit(train[['news_radio']], train['sales'])
reg_tv_radio = LinearRegression().fit(train[['tv_radio']], train['sales'])
reg_news_tv = LinearRegression().fit(train[['news_tv']], train['sales'])
reg_news_radio_tv = LinearRegression().fit(train[['news_radio_tv']], train['sales'])
y_pred_news_radio = reg_news_radio.predict(test[['news_radio']])
y_pred_tv_radio = reg_tv_radio.predict(test[['tv_radio']])
y_pred_news_tv = reg_news_tv.predict(test[['news_tv']])
y_pred_news_radio_tv = reg_news_radio_tv.predict(test[['news_radio_tv']])
Visualize the data:
I used subplot function to generate different plots and for the sake of comparing between the individual features like the budget of TV, Radio and newspaper and the synthesized features I included the individual plots as well.
Linear model on training data
Linear regression fit on test data
It is quite evident that the combination of feature like TV and radio together and the combination of news, radio and TV follows a linear trend. Which means the the company might increase the sales if they spend more on advertising of TV and radio rather than increasing the budget for newspaper.
So it is not always necessary that the data available to you will best describe a model ,sometimes the information is hidden and we can make amends to our data to find a correlation between various parameters of a data. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/data-beyond-perception-c1ceef95b231 | ['Farhan Rahman'] | 2020-06-30 14:02:55.066000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Data Analytics', 'Data Visualization', 'Data'] |
Redis Nedir Nerelerde Kullanılır. | Introduction to Redis - Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker… | https://medium.com/kodcular/redis-nedir-b9f4dad5ce69 | ['Metin Ağaoğlu'] | 2020-12-27 16:13:21.584000+00:00 | ['Redis Nedir', 'Queues', 'Redis', 'NoSQL', 'Türkçe'] |
Is the Pierce Bainbridge Lawyer Representing Kyle Rittenhouse Attempting to Incite Violence? | John Pierce’s partners at Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht LLP left earlier this year for Hecht Partners LLP, Goldstein & McClintock LLLP, Bradford Edwards & Varlack LLP and more. Pierce formed Pierce Bainbridge P.C. thereafter and Kyle Rittenhouse became a client. Controversy continues to surround the Harvard Law School educated attorney; a suggestion that Pierce may have attempted to incite violence is the latest in a series of issues.
The suggestion arose from a tweets captured below that Pierce penned last night. One is in harmony with the recent “election fraud” tune of Pierce’s former client Rudy Giuliani; it dubiously claims that “Trump won in a landslide.”
Issues with Pierce existed prior to the mass partner exodus. In 2018, Pierce was referred to by one ex-partner as a “narcissistic sociopath,” and another as a “fu*king lunatic.” In 2019, his ex-wife expressed concern in a publicly filed declaration about Pierce’s mental well-being; she also obtained a second domestic violence restraining order against him. Pierce Bainbridge LLP was accused of “stonewalling” a subpoena for financial documents related to those proceedings. (The relevant filings are available at Superior Court of the State of California County of Los Angeles, Central District. CASE No. BD 639 740.)
Violence appears to be a theme, Pierce’s client Kyle Rittenhouse engaged in extremely violent conduct; and in 2016, Pierce lost his job at the K&L Gates law firm for physically assaulting a co-worker; he was also subject to a separate domestic violence restraining order. (The relevant materials are in the previously mentioned filings.)
Eye-popping tweets published last night by the Rittenhouse attorney are below, including one admonishing Pierce: “stop trying to incite violence.”
The tweets remind of one from Pierce a few months ago. It received immediate backlash and was deleted. It was even covered in a write-up on Snopes.com, which includes a preserved copy.
Was Rudy Giuliani’s “good friend” John M. Pierce attempting to incite violence?
“Time to dust off those Second Amendment Rights”?
“#DontTreadOnMe”?
“#1775”?
We leave it to you decide. | https://medium.com/@donlewis-2215/is-the-pierce-bainbridge-lawyer-representing-kyle-rittenhouse-attempting-to-incite-violence-ca1865601d8b | ['Don Lewis'] | 2020-11-13 09:15:16.788000+00:00 | ['Law', 'Politics', 'Corruption', 'Lawyers', 'Violence'] |
Is it too late to start building an Emergency Fund? Never. Let’s see how? | Life is unpredictable. You may have nasty surprises bumping on your head without alarming you in advance.
The ongoing pandemic- Covid 19 has reiterated many lessons to all of us: including the significance of having Emergency Funds in our hands and its value in our financial planning course.
Apparently, people have been striving to overcome the dropping economy of our country. On the contrary, those who had managed to create Emergency Funds have been subsisting with a smoother esprit.
COVID19 and its spread across the globe have threatened the entire mankind to accept the CHANGE. It made us realise that very little of what impacts our lives is actually within our control. One of the cases of this downfall is the involuntary job loss. No one’s job is protected today. Even managers who have been at the post for 10–20 years have faced the unemployment crisis during this pandemic. The country itself suffered more than 100 million job losses in 2020.
Financial Planners , Investment planners
Such disruption hurts even more if you do not have an Emergency Fund to plunge back on while your monthly cash-flows are ceased.
An Emergency Fund is the money kept aside for the unpredictable uncertainties; this money can be kept aside in very low-risk deposits or mutual funds that would be easily accessed in case of an emergency. Ideally speaking, it may include your 6–12 months of monetary liabilities or responsibilities such as your EMIs or rent.
A Contingency/Emergency fund needs to be:
★ Easily accessible at the time of emergency
★ Sufficient enough to meet 3–6 months of your expenses
★ Fully reliable for uncertainty periods
If you still don’t have that, you can plan to have it today despite your meagre income.
Tips to start building your EF from the scratch:
Tip #1: Evaluate your average monthly expenses
Tip #2: Multiply that figure by 6 and set it as your target figure.
Tip #3: Set aside a sufficient amount for the EF based on your earnings and affordability.
Tip #4: Place this amount in a separately: maybe in a savings account, a bank FD, Liquid funds or SIPs, that hold a good track history.
Tip #5: Keep supplementing this fund until you reach your target corpus that would aim to cover at least 3–6 months of your average monthly expenses.
Tip #6: Lastly and most importantly, do not touch this fund till an emergency strikes.
Investment planners , Financial planners
Conclusion:
Think about creating a personal Emergency Fund today. Set some rules that assist you in managing the funds properly. In simple words, manage to keep some cash in a safe but accessible place so as to use the same when you actually want it most. You’ll certainly be able to withstand any exorbitantly high expense that life may throw at you.
Still confused how to start an emergency fund? We are always there to help you. Take advice from domain experts today. For more info, visit: Fincart.com | https://medium.com/@fincart-financial-planners/is-it-too-late-to-start-building-an-emergency-fund-never-lets-see-how-89a7f23caa4f | [] | 2020-12-15 06:11:32.431000+00:00 | ['Financial Planning', 'Covid 19', 'Investment', 'Investing', 'Finance'] |
The Myth of Innocence | Painting by Maxfield Parrish
“The myth of innocence and violence is a dominant theme of the culture of the United States, innocence and violence and the constant movement back and forth between the two….
So we have an increasing volume of violence in the culture, no one can understand why, everyone gives sociological explanations of it, and they are all valid by the way, the poverty and the oppression and the racism and the decline of education, the sociological reasons are absolutely valid, I’m not decrying them, but there’s a myth also in here.
We came to America, the Pilgrims and the Puritans and all the rest because it was a new paradise, we came with innocence in mind, the innocence of the lamb, these are mythical motifs, and our movements were full of violence, the earth of the United States is filled with the blood of what we killed in order to make it our paradise, the buffalo blood, the tribal blood, the animal bloods, the bloods of the African American slaves, that’s what’s in the soil. And other peoples are very aware of what’s in the soil, but innocence keeps us from even looking at it, until very recently, we begin to look at it. Those of you who went to school in my generation, or at least lets say ten years less.. the story of the Indians was something you saw on TV.. you played Cowboys and Indians, ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’, and you know, it was built in, they were just irrelevant. That’s our ground, that’s our soil, and in the Greek perspective what’s in the soil is constantly working at you, constantly affecting you. They would call it “Blood Guilt.” — James Hillman
Leaving America, I was an innocent abroad for many years. I had been planted in Texas but my real growing up happened in Europe. It proved to be impossible to return to my original culture. I tried and failed more than once. My roots in my family of origin became more and more tenuous.
I was embarrassed to be treated like the clueless monolingual American that I was in my twenties, but I’m glad I was able to get the inevitable culture shock out of the way early. If you wait to leave the country until you’re retired, it’s probably too late. Your “innocence” is baked in. America seems to have an impenetrable bubble over it that prevents real news from entering. We’re very proud of our free exchange of ideas so we don’t see the range of things that are excluded. The system of exclusion is very effective.
The connection of innocence to violence that Hillman makes is astute. He puts his finger on the thing that is never visible to us Americans who swim in those waters from childhood. In one of my attempts to live in Texas again, I worried about the safety of visiting French friends who had no idea that people are armed and might shoot you if you come on their land without notice. They refused to believe it. The idea was just too crazy to entertain.
How will America grow up and grow out of these myths of innocence? The reality of life as a person of color is invisible to people who call themselves “white.” The secret life of America hides a lot of injustice and loneliness. We have a strange feeling of disconnection from each other and from nature. We think in terms of utility. The peoples and land we use to get ahead have a long history we’d rather not see. We go blithely on, ignoring our own implication in crimes that are building a heavy load of karma.
America has a personality, a character. It could use some introspection and some truth-telling. Growing up is hard to do. That unconscious innocence needs to be confronted because of its links to a violence that keeps growing. Keeping a lid on it is a failing strategy. Not only that, we export that violence around the world.
Caring is fundamentally different from seeing potential profit. If we see the world in terms of tools to make money, we’ll mistreat and decimate nature and the web of life. We are now close to the point of no return. It’s time to confront the cultural blindness we all participate in. We’re circling the drain. | https://medium.com/@davidprice-26453/the-myth-of-innocence-16680a7b6f7d | ['David Price'] | 2020-12-01 12:02:54.675000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Innocence', 'Life Lessons', 'Culture', 'Violence'] |
The making of the First Great Episode | Check Your Facts is up and running! After launching a 4-minute teaser last week, we published the (as Donald Trump would say) First Great Episode of the podcast on Thursday.
Since me and David Tvrdon first met each other in the Digital Journalism Rocks community, choosing our first guest was a no-brainer. And here’s what Lina Timm, founder of the DJR community, has to say about digital journalism, innovation, and communities for journalists:
“We journalists who are deeply interested in innovation and technology should collaborate more and exchange our best practices and views, because in this way innovation can accelerate and have a broader impact.”
That’s just one of many interesting insights shared by Lina (or should we call her Lean Left Him?) in the first episode.
We’re not going to spoil it for you — go check it out yourself if you haven’t already!
With that being said, let’s move on to the main topic of this story: the Whats and the Whys and the Hows.
Voice/video call application
Conceptually, we had already paved the way with the teaser episode (and, of course, many key decisions were made prior to that, but let’s save that for another story). Technically as well.
Neither me nor David Tvrdon is a fan of Skype, but it proved robust enough during the recording of the teaser. Therefore, we decided to stick with it for the recording of the first real episode as well.
Call recording software
When I managed a few podcasts at Aftonbladet (two as host and five as editor) some years ago, I used the software Soundflower with great results. However, the Soundflower software hasn’t been properly upgraded for a couple of years, so we decided to look elsewhere.
There’s a bunch of tools for recording Skype calls out there, and we considered both eCamm’s Call Recorder and Kanda Software’s Callnote. Of these two, the latter was a better fit since it lets you record both Skype, Google Hangouts, Facebook, and Viber.
Ultimately, we didn’t choose any of those two though. The winner, with quite a large margin, was instead Audio Hijack.
Audio Hijack is an extremely versatile software that allows its user to record any application’s audio,
including VoIP calls from Skype or FaceTime, web streams from Safari, Google Chrome, Opera Neon, or Vivaldi (the latter two being my personal browsers of choice), and practically anything you can think of.
Audio hardware
With video call application and call recording software being all set, we also needed a good hardware setup.
My microphone of choice is a Røde NT-USB, while David Tvrdon acquired a Samson Go Mic, which is a portable USB condenser microphone.
Lina Timm, on the other hand, had nothing but an iPhone headset at her disposal.
Audio editing software
Being an amateur musician, I had been using Apple’s Logic Pro for quite some time and was thus familiar with the application. | https://medium.com/check-your-facts/the-making-of-the-first-great-episode-d5b81d850d3d | ['Henrik Ståhl'] | 2017-02-19 09:56:52.680000+00:00 | ['Podcast', 'Audio', 'Donald Trump', 'Logic Pro', 'Journalism'] |
Where to fit in the strength work? | So if you’re a runner, cyclist, or triathlete, when is the best time to get some strength work in?
I think it’s worth acknowledging a few things.
First, your strength training will not, and should not, be optimal. You’re an endurance athlete. And as such your main focus should be running, cycling, swimming, or whatever discipline you choose.
If you’re doing it right, you’re either recovering from a difficult workout, or have recovered from said difficult workout…which probably means you’ve got another tough one on the horizon you’d like to be fresh for.
In an ideal world, to optimize strength development, you’d only lift only when your muscular and nervous systems are completely recovered. That just isn’t a reality for you.
This is probably a good time to qualify what I mean by “strength training.”
First, I do not mean core work, balance drills, foot strengthening, or other types of foo-foo thera-band exercises that all too often get lumped into the category of “strength.” That stuff is nice, and necessary, but you can kind of do that any time — it’s not true strength work.
I’m talking about lifting heavy and hard with the explicit intent of increasing maximum force output. Strength training requires focus and drive. It’s maximum or near-maximum effort. It’s taxing. It’s typically less than 6 reps. It should involve lot of rest between efforts. And it involves complex movements requiring a high degree of motor skill like squats, lunges, deadlifts, pull-ups, and pressing variations.
So now that we’ve got that covered, where do we stick the gym sessions? Save it for your easy days when you have more time? Prior to longer efforts to “pre-fatigue” the muscles”? Only do it in the off-season when you’re further away from competition?
Here’s the thing: Keep training polarized. Strength work can be thought of as just a more intense training session (Intensity being defined as a percentage of maximum effort, not as a measure of difficulty as is often done). Therefore in keeping with the principle of “keep you easy days easy, and your hard days hard”…it makes sense to bundle strength and speed/quality together.
But don’t lift right before the speed/quality workout. Doing so will screw with motor patterns and only lead to a suboptimal workout in your discipline of choice.
In an ideal world: Strength training after higher-intensity workouts provides the greatest opportunity for recovery before another difficult session.
If you aren’t a pro and can’t logistically pull this off, just do your best. Don’t let it interfere with key workouts, but protect your off days.
There are so many other points and “what if’s” to talk about with regards to this topic. But the main idea is to understand that true strength work is the ultimate expression of intensity, both metabolically and neurologically. Unless it’s the main focus of your training (which it likely isn’t), package that stuff together with your speed work, climbing, and other high-intensity sessions. | https://medium.com/endurostrengthtraining/where-to-fit-in-the-strength-work-f3bcb32b7dee | ['Eric Hagemann'] | 2020-12-17 12:36:18.598000+00:00 | ['Strength Training', 'Running', 'Endurance Training'] |
In the studio with artist XU ZHEN® | Chinese contemporary artist XU ZHEN® brings us into his studio and we discover how space influences his inspiration and creative process.
In 2000, I joined a not-for-profit art centre with other artists in Shanghai called BizArt. We worked as a team to create exhibitions and events. At the time, the whole art scene was quite underground in terms of ideology. But as the economy and the art market grew over that decade, we began to realise the importance of the commercial aspect of artmaking. So, in 2009 we created MadeIn Company.
As the company developed, we realised that having different departments — from creation to production and promotion of works — was very compatible with my way of working in the art scene at that moment. Most things are a business nowadays, so creating a company solves the conflict between art and business; the company brings together these aspects in a magical way.
Artist XU ZHEN in his studio, Shanghai, China, 2020
Our MadeIn Company headquarters are in a warehouse of about 3,000 square metres in the suburbs of Shanghai. The company includes MadeIn Gallery, XU ZHEN® and XU ZHEN Store, art-ba-ba website and
MadeIn Art Education. The MadeIn Gallery is in Shanghai City, and represents more than 20 artists.
There are about 40 employees at MadeIn Company and we work from 10am to 6pm every day. Because the company is art-oriented, yet operates as a corporation, it is extremely chaotic and very busy.
The best way to describe the difference between my current way of working and that of individual artists is the difference between a medium-sized company and a small private business.
My main job is art creation. Our philosophy is that if we want to make what we do more interesting, we must let ideas and the way of thinking in art collide with reality. So for me, artistic creation includes creating artworks, exhibition curating and planning, and the social practice of art (such as collaboration with brands, development of art villages, art media, limited edition creation, art education).
Artist XU ZHEN in his studio, Shanghai, China, 2020
We have a large team, including: Vigy Jin who is mainly responsible for company management, project management and gallery operations; and Ivy Zhou, who is responsible for gallery operations, marketing, and developing the relationships with artists and collectors. The company operates in different departments, including media, production, finance, design and various types of studios.
For many of our projects and productions, we work with external companies as much as possible. This can improve our creative efficiency and reduce our operating costs, as well as cultivate a variety of talents.
Installation view of XU ZHEN® ‘European Thousand-Armed Classical Sculpture’, 2014, glass-fibre-reinforced mineral and acrylic resin composite, marble grains, marble, stainless steel, White Rabbit Collection, Sydney in XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION
In 2013, I registered XU ZHEN® as a brand of MadeIn Company and all the artworks created since then have been under that name. Creating a brand has brought new restrictions around the quantity of work produced, as well as my way of thinking. However, the restrictions and relationships between art and business has opened up a lot of interesting questions. Usually when people think of artists they have a romantic notion, but when it’s a brand, perhaps it leads to an interesting misunderstanding, as this identity in society is quite different. The pace of life in China can make people quite anxious, particularly about the relationship between art and business. By combining them, I find new possibilities.
XU ZHEN®: ETERNITY VS EVOLUTION runs until 14 March 2021. It is presented with the support of Dr Judith Neilson AM and the White Rabbit Collection, Sydney.
This interview is an excerpt from an interview between XU ZHEN® and Peter Johnson, National Gallery of Australia Curator, Projects and was first published in the Spring 2020 edition of Artonview. Artonview is the National Gallery’s Member’s magazine. Become a member nga.gov.au/members | https://medium.com/national-gallery-of-australia/in-the-studio-with-artist-xu-zhen-658bfa63b7d9 | ['National Gallery Of Australia'] | 2021-01-06 05:08:10.064000+00:00 | ['Gallery', 'Contemporary Art', 'Xu Zhen', 'Museums', 'Art'] |
Help. My Halloween Party Started Days Ago and Hasn’t Ended. | I’m not sure how long I remained standing, rigid with only my ragged breath for company. But when I did dare to move, the hush was so thick I could hear my knees crack as I started to inch my way toward Polly.
She didn’t budge, not even a tremble of her glossy lips, which remained curved into the polite smile she wore. Her brown eyes remained open, seeming lidless in their refusal to blink.
I lost track of time then — the first time I ever did. I can’t say how long the silence lasted, only that there was darkness, and suddenly, not.
I’d found myself in the backyard having an awkward conversation, and then the next moment, under my duvet. My costume lay smoothed at the edge of the mattress, where I’d left it before the party, one foot peeking from the covers and my lungs full of wind as if I’d taken the breath used to launch me from my bed and into the chilly air (David insisted on keeping it cold. “When there are one hundred people in here you won’t be complaining,” he’d advised, cranking down the thermostat to arctic levels).
Then, the doorbell sounded and opened after some scuffling and the floomf of a cape snapping through the air.
“Happy Halloween!” said the guests.
Some too-loud laughter and, “This party’s gonna be a total rager!” was David’s response.
And it’s what they’ve said over and over again for the past three days, while that damned Monster Mash plays in the background.
I’ve tried to block the sounds by sealing my door, but “I was walking in the lab, late one night!” bleeds through. I’ve heard this line more times than I can count. It’s the only verse that will play now.
What does it matter?
If the news, before the blackouts started affecting broadcast stations, is correct in reporting the blackouts, like the ones here at my house, around the country are growing more frequent, we’re in the end game now.
The most recent bout of darkness lasted, according to my wristwatch, for eight hours this time. The one before? Three hours. And before that? Twenty minutes.
As for the skipping, the last scene played for ten minutes before repeating. Before that? An hour.
And there’s no help coming.
Maybe you already realized this in the worst way. I wouldn’t know. The news has gone static now when before I could devour any stories in bits between pauses.
I found out when I tried to make some calls. I tried the police first. Several officers are friends of the family. The ones who hadn’t come to the party were innocent. It was my fault they came. If I have to die soon, I’m at peace admitting their entrapment was my doing.
They came to the door (during one of the “normal” periods), and I started to rapid-fire recount all that’d happened, but then I noticed their eyes — how they drifted like Polly’s, but this time no one froze like a scratched disc. Instead, they said, “Trick or treat!” and Dave, who’d appeared from God knows where opened his arms wide to welcome them.
He pretended to bite their neck before slapping them both on the back and proclaiming, “this party is going to be a total rager!”
It happened with Uncle Lou from an hour away, any acquaintances I could think of. Posting on social media, when I could between blackouts, was pointless. When I say everyone comes to our Halloween parties, I mean everyone.
But I’m sure you know that now, too, though I haven’t received a response in hours. Or have I? It’s so hard to hold onto what’s happened and what hasn’t anymore. Each time I’m teleported back to my bed, with one foot on the rug, and my lungs bursting with breath, a new hole is drilled into my memory.
The last blackout, which just ended, lasted an entire day.
I had no knowledge of my own existence until I once again heard, “he did the mash! It was a graveyard smash! He did the mash! It caught on in a flash!” blasting through the towels plugging my door, shaking the headboard of the bed I lay in, yet again, tucked away in this memory I never wanted to make.
Do you remember what the newscaster had said? It’s not the truth. There’s nothing normal about these blackouts, and they’ve certainly interfered.
The real reports — the ones happening inside homes and Halloween parties across the country say the memory loss is contagious. Or at least this is what they were revealing until they, too, went dark.
“Happy Halloween!”
“He did the mash!”
Three days this time. Three days.
“This party is going to be a total rager!”
“Happy Halloween!”
“He did the mash!”
Five days — no more time, typing as fast as I can. I have one question for those of you — anyone — who might be out there still with the answer:
“This party is going to be a total rager!”
“Happy Halloween!”
“He did the mash!”
WHAT HAPPENS —
“This party is going to be a total rager!”
“Happy Halloween!”
“He did the mash!”
— WHEN THE SKIPPING —
“Happy Halloween!”
“He did the mash!”
— STOPS?
“This party is going to be a total rager!” | https://medium.com/nightmare-fuel/help-my-halloween-party-started-days-ago-and-hasnt-ended-438c4c9d3fc4 | ['Evelyn Martinez'] | 2020-11-06 14:01:49.093000+00:00 | ['Halloween', 'Horror', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Horror Fiction'] |
Broken Heart Syndrome | Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Broken Heart Syndrome
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is very real
“You can die of a broken heart — it’s scientific fact — and my heart has been breaking since that very first day we met. I can feel it now, aching deep behind my rib cage the way it does every time we’re together, beating a desperate rhythm: Love me. Love me. Love me.”
— Abby McDonald
Heart racing. Palms sweating. Stomach churning. Head spinning.
Breathing shortens. Chest squeezes. Neck tightens. Arms are heavy.
All the signs of a heart attack are present. But what if these signs, these symptoms, these tell-tale signals that you’re physically having a heart attack are real — too fucking real — but your heart is otherwise physically healthy? Your arteries aren’t clogged. You have normal levels of cholesterol, even. You have no history of heart failures, nor does your family. You eat well, you exercise regularly, you have normal blood pressure, and your heart is beating along to the rhythm of your life. To the rhythm of your life. Of. Your. Life. YOUR LIFE.
Maybe that’s the issue then:
YOUR LIFE is fucked up mentally or emotionally or spiritually or maybe a combination of any or all of the aforementioned,
so you have a heart attack.
Because your heart is beating along to the rhythm of your life. YOUR LIFE, man. YOUR LIFE is inducing stress to your heart, forcing it to behave as if being attacked. But see… it’s you who is attacking it — allowing the forces, the influences, the outsiders of your life to weigh you down to the point of exhaustion and depletion and submission. Submission to keep living the way you are, but it’s your heart who suffers when ignored, mistreated, denied the proper attention it fucking deserves.
Except, you aren’t ignoring it in a physical sense. Rather, in an emotional sense. A mental sense. A spiritual sense. But you still have the symptoms and feelings of those signalling an actual heart attack, despite it being healthy physically.
Why?
Because your heart isn’t happy, thus causing the rhythm of YOUR LIFE to speed up and intensify the beating of your heart. You’re stressed because your heart, albeit a healthy heart, isn’t happy, only following suit of your mental and emotional and maybe even spiritual state. But your body doesn’t know that on a cellular level — it knows not why you’re stressed or replete with sorrow, so it acts on the fact that you’re stressed and leaves it at that — so it feigns a heart attack until it actually becomes a heart attack, trying to wake you the fuck up, lest you die of a broken heart (a broken heart, not in the literal sense but in a metaphorical sense — obviously). But metaphors can become literal, if you allow them. Will you?
Haven’t you ever wondered why the term broken heart derived in the first place? According to Queensland Health, “your brain registers the emotional pain of heartbreak in the same way as physical pain,” so when people say their heart was broken, it’s because it feels that way, even if the heart isn’t literally breaking. The body hardly knows the difference.
So you were rejected. Your heart was snatched from the chest and stomped on, into a tiny million pieces, but you need your heart to live, so it was put back from whence it came and tries to keep beating, to match the pace of YOUR LIFE. But YOUR LIFE is a fucking mess, so it beats faster, causing you to sweat and have night terrors and feel the effects of suffocating, even if you have sufficient air in which to breathe. Your heart hurts so fucking bad that it might just explode, if you dwell on it for too long. So you try to distract yourself. You take up a new hobby, but you’re not fully present for it because your heart keeps telling you it’s failing, and you’re not caring for it. So you try to fix it yourself, but your dizziness keeps distracting you from understanding the severity of the situation. You then keel over because your stomach is mirroring your heart and is now churning itself silly, as if that might save your broken heart.
so you were rejected
Your heart was broken. Your heart is broken. Your heart is shattered. Your heart is on the verge of an attack. But who is ready to pounce on you, attacking your heart along the way? Is it your ex-lover? Is it work? Is it a loss of a friend? A denial? Death? Illness? Or is it you allowing your mental and emotional issues to reside inside your heart far too long, until they manifest themselves into physical issues?
Is it also you who neglects to see the difference between an emotional breaking heart and a physical breaking heart?
Maybe it’s time to start caring for yourself not just physically but also mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
There’s a name for this pseudo-attack because it is quite a serious condition and can actually arise complications or even lead to death, should people suffering from this condition not take the proper care they need — to heal, to cope, to survive. So researchers have come to call it takotsubo cardiomyopathy, otherwise known as: broken heart syndrome.
broken heart syndrome: a syndrome that can be caused by heartbreak, or more accurately, the stress of a heartbreaking situation
so you were rejected
we were rejected
I was rejected
How the fuck do I cope with a broken heart? How the fuck do I keep living, when it feels like half my heart is missing? How the fuck can I possibly sleep at night, knowing my heart is inducing stressors from that of an actual heart attack, though my heart is healthy physically (for now)? How the fuck do I survive this attack? This rejection? This broken heart syndrome? This thing called life? How?!
I heal. I cope. I talk. I listen. I care.
I heal my heart by filling it with love — the love stemming from my own damn heart, not from someone else’s.
I cope by denying the habits that used to give me comfort and instead drive my car toward passions and excitements and joys. Even if the joys are little joys, for the time being.
I talk to others so they can hug me when needed but also, so they can fully understand what I’m going through. How else would anyone know to be such a friend?
I listen. To myself. To others. To my heart. To what my body needs: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I listen to my heart beats until they become steady and strong and fierce again. I listen to other people’s survival stories, knowing full well I’m not alone. I’m never alone.
I care for myself but also others. I fill my heart with love so I can be a bright light in my community and in this world. I care for my heart by eating well still and exercising and acting out in happiness and love. I care for my life and my health and especially, my sanity. I start giving fucks again, even though not everyone gave a fuck about me, hence the feelings of my broken heart.
I heal. I cope. I talk. I listen. I care.
And then… I wait. I wait for my heart to slowly become itself again, but with stitches and cracks and bruises and scars. I wait for me to find myself again, searching for that identity that was lost along the way, once my heart was shattered and stomped upon until it was nearly unrecognizable. I wait for my mind to dissolve the boundaries of physical and emotional pain the way my body does on its own, knowing not why there’s stress but knowing that there is stress. And then, I act. I act to save myself. I save myself, from myself. From others. From stressors. From triggers. From killers. From thieves. And then I protect my heart, keeping it safe in the confines of my rib cage — isn’t that why it’s called a cage in the first place? Quite so.
So then — when my heart races, sending shivers down my spine and sweat beads to form upon my palms and twists in my stomach and spins in my head, I’ll know what to do. When my breathing shortens, my chest squeezes, my neck tightens, and my arms become heavy, I’ll know what to do. I’ll know that I’m not actually having a heart attack. I’m merely suffering from the syndrome of a broken heart.
But that’s okay,
because broken hearts heal themselves all the time.
And I’ve heard: what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.
So here’s to having a stronger heart, after it was broken but then, healed.
And here’s to having enough energy to sustain a heart that needs healed.
We all need healed. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/broken-heart-syndrome-7ffc0d75efec | ['Natalie Jeanne Maddy'] | 2020-06-12 22:44:26.501000+00:00 | ['Energy', 'Broken Heart', 'Science', 'Love', 'Healing'] |
2014 Edition of Texas Small Land Sales Report Released | 2014 Edition of Texas Small Land Sales Report Released
If you’re a Texas Veteran contemplating the purchase of Texas land, take a moment to look over the 2014 Texas Small Land Sales Report, recently released by the Texas Association of REALTORS® (TAR) and the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. This is the first edition of this publication.
The data in this report is an overview on small land sale trends across Texas and shows that this particular market is still on the upswing. The report shows the direction of land sales in each of the seven regions of Texas. Because of the various physical characteristics of the different regions, the terms “small” and “large” have somewhat different meanings, but generally 200 hundred acres or less is deemed to be a “small land sale.” Region 2, which includes the Far West Texas, Big Bend and Trans-Pecos areas, is atypical in that 500 to 8,000 acres can qualify as a small land sale.
The total number of small land sales in Texas in 2013 was 4,189, almost four times the number of small land sales in 2012. The median tract size was 77 acres in 2012, but decreased to 20 acres in 2013. The average price per acre statewide in 2013 was $4,849, this is more than twice the average price per acre for the general land market in 2012, which was $2,295.
“We’ve long suspected that trends in land sales may differ between small and large tracts and the findings in this report confirm that. Few buyers possess the resources required to purchase large tracts while many more have the capital needed to buy smaller properties. This higher demand often results in small properties exchanging for a higher price per acre than larger neighboring tracts of comparable quality” said Dr. Charles Gilliland, a research economist with the Real Estate Center.
The report details small land sale statistics and general data for each of the seven regions in 2013. For example, in Region 7, which includes Austin, Waco and the surrounding Hill Country, the average price per acre was $6,900. This region also had the highest sales volume of small land tracts with 1,392 properties sold which equals 33.23 percent of the small lands sales statewide. People are looking for smaller parcels of land for recreational use, or to have a second home in the country, away from the ever increasing urban populations of Austin, San Antonio and other cities growing along the IH-35 corridor.
According to George Clift, president of the REALTORS® Land Institute and a Texas REALTOR® active in land sales in Region 1, which includes the Panhandle and South Plains, the focus for many buyers is on income-producing land tracts that can be used as tax-deferred investments.
Whether you’re looking for land for recreational purposes or as an investment, the Texas Veterans Land Board can help you reach your goal with our Land Loan Program exclusively for Texas Veterans, military members and their spouses. To get started please visit TexasVeterans.com to fill out an online pre-qualification application. If you have any questions please contact our Texas Veterans Call Service Center at 1–800–252-VETS (8387) or send us an email. | https://medium.com/texas-veterans-blog/2014-edition-of-texas-small-land-sales-report-released-c8d2a1ead670 | ['Texas Vlb'] | 2017-07-17 22:31:15.225000+00:00 | ['Texas', 'Veterans', 'Land', 'Report', 'Property'] |
Performance Optimisations | In this post I want to share cheat sheet which highlights tricks that be used to increase throughput and decrease latency | https://medium.com/@sk-ranga/performance-optimisations-8777e7af0ee3 | ['Santosh Rangarajan'] | 2020-12-23 13:12:59.209000+00:00 | ['Latency', 'Performance', 'Throughput', 'Optimization', 'Application Development'] |
Newborn essentials to consider buying | The list is long, not everything is a must-have, but I decided to share all the things that I’ve tried so far, bear with me :). These are the thing that I liked (and disliked — another list in the end) during the first six months of taking care of a newborn:
Nursing:
Video tutorial «All about nursing», in several languages. Cute and old-fashioned but has all the essential information about nursing.
Book (in Norwegian) by Gro Nylander «Mamma for første gang» covers up all there is to know about postpartum time, «everything»(or just a lot) to know for mothers and about baby’s health and wellbeing.
Nursing clothes:
Feeding/pumping devices:
Hygiene/health:
Carave hydrating cleanser — Fragrance-free, very mild. Doesn’t lather up. Zero eczemas and or irritation.
Baby soap (sold in Norway) — super-gentle soap that can be used for baby washing (it use it on body bits that should be washed more properly). Very economic in use as you need a small amount to dilute in water. I loved it so much that I started to use it for regular handwashing (dilute it 1 to 2 portions of water for a hand soap).
Cerave moisturising lotion — perfect to be used on the scubs on the face, head, and body. Fragrance-free, has glycerin, dimethicone, ceramides.
Baby oil from Dr.Greve — recommended to the only fragrance-free. We don’t actually use it much as the baby’s skin is not particularly dry.
Bepanthen ointment — for irritated body parts (usually after diaper). Has lanolin, petrolatum, panthenol, almond oil.
Boogers suction from NäsFrida — to remove boogers, cheaper than OtriBaby. If you think you don’t need them, think twice. Normally, babies hate this thing but unfortunately, there is no other way to get rid of the boggers 😩.
Diapers from brands like Libero and Pampers — my tip is to just buy several packages from several producers with different qualities (e.g some can be softer while others absorb better). I would say that they are mostly all good, I prefer Libero as I feel they are not as drying as Pampers.
Diaper bucket from Tommee Tippee— definitely need a one.
Baby wipes (fragrance-free) — probably all are good, I liked Libero. I try to use them as little as possible but opt for dry wipes instead.
Dry wipes — multi-purpose drying wipes like all good, I have them from Dermica. Can be bought in huge quanta to save you money and trips to the store. My hack is to cut one cloth into 8 pieces and use it as a makeup remover (if soaked in micellar water).
Small washing towels — ok from Ikea to use while bathing.
Lemon soap — removes all the stains, which will be many of 🤫.
Paracetamol rectal pills 60mg — for fewer emergencies like bothersome fewer after a vaccination (use according to instructions)
Rectal thermometer — recommended being purchased just for use on the baby and properly each time after use.
More massive items:
Clothes:
Pajamas/full-body suit/socks- I prefer them to separate-body clothes. Everything with wool is a bonus. I really like brands like Joha, Haust, Polarn, Name it (but they are not exactly cheap).
Balaclava — super useful for winters as separate hats can easily fall off
Winter suit — full body, with zippers will save a lot of time.
Wool mittens — to use outside and as a barrier, so the baby won’t scratch his/her skin.
Baby swaddle — this is one of the most useful items we have and I feel like is the main why we were able to get sleep. Swaddles shouldn’t be too tight but prevent the baby to move hands too much and waken itself.
«Magic sleepsuit» — works as a thick swaddle. made with fleece.
Wool blankets — many as they will be washed all the time.
Multi-purpose cotton cloths — use as pads for feeding.
Not personally recommending: | https://medium.com/@katjanorstad/newborn-essentials-to-consider-buying-a2eb64f3ec2d | ['Katja Norstad'] | 2021-04-25 08:22:29.923000+00:00 | ['Baby Products', 'Baby'] |
A Case of Charlotte Beers and Management Advise | Beers was good in acquiring the ‘thirsty for change’ individuals to have her concepts and ideas, although she was not highly active in obtaining front line team and lower supervision to have the ideas of brand audit and brand stewardship. She had to get the whole company so as to appreciate the product stewardship philosophy. The cause of not having such individuals was because front line team was surprised when the customers acquired about the brand audit and brand stewardship during their discussion (Sackley & Ibarra, 1995). The main encounter was to have as a central organization and front line team so as to have campaigner zeal compared to what Beers did towards the expressive content of products. It does not mean that the team which was on the front line did not participate in sharing the substance of the products, most of them did it and one the company started gaining back its large number of customers the lower line team would inevitably get inspired about the organization.
Adjusting the structure to innovative priorities; Charlotte was hopeful that every member of the team would stretch to the roles, that Beers had assigned to each one of them. However, individuals forgot the primary objectives of the company because the business was more well-known as days went by and it fell back in the deception that it was previous specifically getting trapped up in the configuration (Sackley & Ibarra, 1995). Her work was to implement an HR strategy because though she inspired the company; she needed to increase the confidence of the employees she had not laid any work on the ground for permeating the visualization and passion in a top-down tactic. Her primary attention was on the expression of the products, and she did not place out precise strategies or structural course to instrument this.
Ensuring that there was a collaboration between Regional offices and WCS; Charlotte created the WCS offices that were obtainable of synch through the current assembly of O&M. The changes in the organization conveyed much resistance between WCS and native offices. At that opinion, the WCS was the solitary in custody for a global customer account, and native offices focus was on little native products. However, subsequently, WCS held more significant customers the original team from native offices ideal for grinding for WCS slightly than at native headquarters, which prime to movement of aptitude to WCS too besides native offices, observed undesirable from HR edge. From a physical setting, there was no perfect expert and outlines of accountability among native office and WCS. As of an administrative edge, it triggered struggle in some areas like costs distribution, income sharing, and coordination. From an ethnic frame, it thoughtful of double offices never occurred previously in the company. The key work now was in what ways to warrant teamwork among offices for the organizations’ significances.
Losing momentum is a major fear that many organizations face and has come true. For example, NASA after BHAG, after referring a man on the Moon and afterward taking him back was done, NASA has just worked as additional space action (Emanuel, 2013). Likewise, the piece as it indicates, Beers has not yet established the BHAG that will bear the organization for the next five to ten years, and it can end up in the company losing drive. What she could have done is to accept roughly trade-offs additionally, resolve for a gentler pace alteration, which can result in lengthier turnaround time. It was improper given the passion in the community state at the company. Hence she had to fix up WCS and organize all additional activities which were essential.
References
Emanuel, E. J. (2013). Going to the moon in health care: medicine’s big hairy audacious goal (BHAG). (18, Ed.) JAMA, , 310.
Sackley, N., & Ibarra, H. (1995). Charlotte Beers at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide (A). Harvard Business School. | https://medium.com/@ryanmutant/a-case-of-charlotte-beers-and-management-advise-a7b463aa0c66 | ['Brian Mutanda'] | 2020-12-12 18:42:20.574000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Management And Leadership'] |
Building a Book Recommendation System… | Recommending similar books based on Book Title, User-ratings, and more...
Source: Image by Unsplash
Which book to read next?
When we want to read a new book we generally ask our friends or classmates or may search all the books available in a library (as if we can). After all asking and searching we may still not find any book of our interest as not everyone has the same interests. For such situations we need a system which takes our interest into consideration and suggests us some good books.
“ A good recommender system has to consider how users interact with the recommendations.”
A recommendation system broadly recommends items to the user best suited to their tastes and traits. It uses the users previous data and other users data to give new recommendations.
Lets take a look at the recommendation models we have tried….
Dataset
The dataset we have used in this work is the Book-Croosing Dataset that comprises three tables: -
Books- It has 8 columns; ISBN, Book title, Book author, Year of publication, Publisher, and three columns for Book cover Image URLs representing three different versions (small, medium, and large). Users- Contains the user’s information. It consists of 3 columns UserID, Location, and age. Ratings- Contains the information on ratings of the books. It consists of 3 columns UserID, ISBN, and Book Rating.
Dataset Shape
Workflow of our project is:
Workflow
Pre-processing and Cleaning
All the pre-processing and cleaning we have done on the dataset is described below:
Books Table
Drop all three Image URL features. Check for the number of null values in each column. There comes only 3 null values in the table. Replace these three empty cells with ‘Other’. Check for the unique years of publications. Two values in year column are publishers. Also, three tuples have the name of the author of the book got merged with the title of the book. Manually set the values for these three above obtained tuples for each of their features using the ISBN number of the book. Convert the type of the years of publications feature to the integer. By keeping the range of valid years as less than 2022 and obviously not 0, replace all invalid years with the mode of the publications that is 2002. Upper-casing all the alphabets present in ISBN column and removal of duplicate rows from the table.
Books Table
Users Table
Check for null values in the table. The Age column has more than 1 lakh null values. Check for unique values present in Age column. There are many invalid ages present like 0 or 244. By keeping the valid age range of readers as 10 to 80 replace null values and invalid ages in Age column with the mean of valid ages. The location column has 3 values city, state, and country. These are split into 3 different columns named as City, State, and Country respectively. In the case of null value, ‘other’ has been assigned as the entity value. Removal of duplicate entries from the table.
Users Table
Ratings Table
Check for null values in the table. Check for Rating column and User-ID column to be integer. Removal of punctuation from ISBN column values and if that resulting ISBN is available in the book dataset only then considering else drop that entity. Upper-casing all the alphabets present in ISBN column. Removal of duplicate entries from the table.
Ratings table
Merged Dataset
All three tables are merged and for final dataset tuples having ratings as 0 are dropped.
Complete Dataset
The graph below shows the count of books rating given by users. We can see most of the books are rated 8 at the scale of 10.
Book-Rating count plot
Recommendation Models
We started building some basic recommendation systems and then implemented collaborative and content based filtering methods as well.
Input given for required models is:
Popularity Based (Top In whole collection)
We have sorted the dataset according to the total ratings each of the books have received in non-increasing order and then recommended top n books.
Popularity Based (Top In a given place)
We have filtered the dataset according to a given place (city, state or country) and then sorted it according to total ratings they have received by the users in decreasing order of that place and recommended top n books.
Books by same author, publisher of given book name
For this model we have sorted the books by rating for the same author and same publisher of given book and recommended top n books.
Books popular Yearly
This is the most basic model we have grouped all the books published in same year and recommended the top rated book yearly.
Average Weighted Ratings
We have calculated the weighted score using the below formula, of all the books and recommended the books with the highest score.
score= t/(t+m)∗a + m/(m+t)∗c
where,
t represents the total number of ratings received by the book
m represents the minimum number of total ratings considered to be included
a represents the average rating of the book and,
c represents the mean rating of all the books.
Correlation Based
For this model, we had to create the correlation matrix for that the dataset size had to be reduced. So we have considered only those books which have total ratings more than 50. Then from this data we have created a user-book rating matrix. For the input book using the correlation matrix top books are recommended .
Nearest Neighbours Based
To train the Nearest Neighbours model, we have created a compressed sparse row matrix taking ratings of each Book by each User individually. This matrix is used to train Nearest Neighbours and then to find n nearest neighbours using cosine similarity metric.
Collaborative Filtering (User-Item Filtering)
Collaborative Filtering Recommendation System works by considering user ratings and finds cosine similarities in rating by several users to recommend books. To implement this, we took only those books data which have at least 50 ratings in all.
Content Based Filtering
We have implemented a content-based recommendation system that recommends books by calculating similarities in Book Titles. For this, TF-IDF feature vectors are created for unigrams and bigrams of Book-Titles. For this, only those books data has been considered which are having at least 80 ratings.
Hybrid Recommendation System
We have built a hybrid recommendation system using both content-based filtering and collaborative filtering systems. A percentile score is given to the results obtained from both content and collaborative filtering models and are combined to recommend top n books.
These were the models we tried for recommending books. It can be seen that similar books have been recommended by our models for the given book.
Contribution of each member
Ashima (MT19031):- Pre-processing (Books Table), Recommendation Systems (Popularity Based (Top In whole collection + Top In a given place), Books popular Yearly, Correlation Based, Nearest Neighbours, Content Based Filtering), Blog.
Ananya Tyagi (MT19114):- Pre-processing (Ratings Table) and Visualizations, Recommendation Systems (Books by same author-publisher, Average Weighted Ratings, Collaborative Filtering, Hybrid Recommendation System), Report.
Arun Abhishek Chowhan (MT19062):- Pre-processing (Users Table), Presentation. | https://medium.com/@ashima96/building-a-book-recommendation-system-a98c58a4f1bb | [] | 2020-12-20 16:10:16.885000+00:00 | ['Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Content Based Filtering', 'Collaborative Filtering', 'Machine Learning', 'Recommendation System'] |
Why We Invested: Eka Ventures | As Eka Ventures announces the close of its fund, we are delighted to share background on why we invested earlier this year.
Our mission is to grow the social investment market to improve people’s lives in the UK. One of the ways we do this is through our venture investments, supporting an ecosystem that nurtures and scales innovative ways of tackling social problems.
We believe it is possible for purpose-led startups to deliver strong financial returns and meaningful social impact. At the heart of this are values-aligned venture investors who are thoughtful about impact and bring deep expertise in venture investing.
Eka Ventures shares our belief that purpose-led startups can deliver social change, and is building its firm on the premise that impact and financial return can go hand in hand.
A strong track record in venture investing
Eka is a VC firm investing at Pre-A and Series A into consumer technology companies that are building a healthy, inclusive and sustainable economy. Founding partners Jon Coker, Camilla Dolan, and Andrew Richardson bring a wealth of experience in scaling early stage businesses and have invested and collaborated together extensively prior to forming Eka. Over the last decade, they have invested with companies including Elder, an elderly care platform helping people stay in their home for longer and Gousto, an online grocery business delivering healthy and affordable food through a low waste supply chain.
Thoughtful thesis
Eka’s investment thesis is built on ‘shared value’, whereby social and/or environmental impact is delivered in parallel with financial returns. They see a compelling role for this approach in preventative health care, inclusive financial services, and sustainable supply chain technology. High quality impact practice is at the core of Eka’s investment approach, as they look to assess both the impact potential and the ways in which impact drives value for each company they support. Their first investment, Urban Jungle is a great example of a startup that has a focus on impact and is seeing commercial value in taking this approach. Urban Jungle is a technology-enabled insurance provider, using behavioural data to assess an individual with factors that they can control rather than demographics. This helps them design affordable products that are more transparent, fairer and more effective at reaching and serving customers who need insurance most.
Eka’s strong team dynamic, expertise in venture investing, and compelling thesis for delivering both impact and financial returns makes them an exciting partner for our work in impact venture. We look forward to building an impactful relationship with Eka over the years to come. | https://medium.com/@bigsocietycapital/why-we-invested-eka-ventures-2129d8f8b58f | ['Big Society Capital'] | 2021-07-15 08:40:05.863000+00:00 | ['Investment', 'Startup', 'Venture Capital', 'Impact Investing', 'Tech For Good'] |
An Introverts Guide to Writing Better | An Introvert’s Guide to Writing Better
Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash
I used to think that being an introvert would severely limit my success in life. I’ve since discovered that the opposite is true. However, it took some trial and error to understand this.
Growing up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, PA, I knew most people in my community. As an introvert, this was a huge blessing for me socially. Making friends with, or even talking to, people is much more manageable when you already know someone. Eventually, I graduated from high school and was preparing for my first year at Penn State University. Situated in the middle of Pennsylvania, the university is home to more than 46,000 students — an intense step up from my 1,200-student high school.
I knew no one. After several months of worrying leading up to it, move-in day was incredibly stressful. While the actual moving itself was irritating, navigating a brand-new social structure was what really had me frazzled. Coming from a town where I knew pretty much everyone, making friends in this new environment was foreign. Pretty much every first-year student there was like me and knew no one.
However, as an introvert, I struggled to make the first move towards building a friendship. I frequently found myself lonely and sitting in my dorm room, waiting for someone to talk to me. Eventually, I did make friends due to some great extroverts that came and talked to me.
Regardless, I couldn’t help but think that being an introvert would severely limit my success in life.
Talking to people is such an essential part of being a human. If I couldn’t even do it with kids at school, could I ever do it? Would I ever find success?
Eventually you’ll learn what you’re really good at
As the years in school progressed, I joined a fraternity and met many great friends through that. My social life was flourishing, but at the same time, I found myself diving deeper and deeper into career paths that primarily required me and my computer.
I loved business and information systems, but what I loved even more was when I could put my head down and work on a problem — completely alone.
I hated it when the teacher would assign group projects or force us to do in-class group activities. I loved learning, however, I just preferred to do it alone. While I did okay in these group projects, I really flourished on the solo assignments where I could be alone with my thoughts—the projects where I could dive deep into a problem head-first and run away from everything else.
Ultimately, this habit where I excelled at working alone did well for me in college. I ended up graduating manga cum laude from Penn State with a 3.9 GPA, majoring in Risk Management with a minor in Information Systems. I don’t say this to humblebrag or show off, but rather to explain how I succeeded despite being an introvert. When I first arrived at college, I thought I would struggle because I was an introvert. However, this was the exact reason why I ended up doing so well.
Being an introvert is an advantage to be utilized
When I graduated, I finally understood that being an introvert wasn’t a weakness but rather an advantage to be exploited.
I loved working alone on problems to figure out a thoughtful solution. I loved being alone with my thoughts. I loved typing away on my computer, with music in my ears and no one to talk to.
Other people, extroverts, for example, often hated this. They needed human interaction in order to thrive. I, on the other hand, did just fine without human interaction. And that, the difference between extroverts and introverts, was my advantage. I was looking at the problem in the wrong way. I wasn’t doomed for failure, I was simply comparing myself to the wrong group of people.
Being an introvert gives me an inherent advantage of being alone with my thoughts. At thinking through problems alone and coming to a thoughtful conclusion.
Introverts are great at thinking and writing
I’ve since dropped the ideology that I’m doomed for failure just because I’m an introvert. That was such a silly notion, and a quick Google search helped me squash that belief in a few seconds.
Screenshot take by the author.
There are thousands of uber-successful introverts. From Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, it’s clear that being an introvert isn’t a disadvantage but rather a unique skill set to wield with power.
One specific field that is uniquely suited for introverts is writing. As New York Times bestselling author John Green once said:
“Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.” — John Green
Writing is perfectly suited for me as an introvert. I get to be alone, with my thoughts, thinking about the world. I get to tell a story that everyone loves to do, but I don’t have to do it in front of other people.
“The reality is that we often enjoy our time alone, thinking, and pondering the most profound questions of life.”, writes fellow Medium writer and introvert Matt Lillywhite.
Final thoughts
If you’re an introvert, you are not doomed to failure. Being an introvert is an asset to be utilized, not a liability. Some professions and activities are perfectly suited for the introvert skillset.
Writing is a perfect example of one.
Writing requires the strength to go deep inside. To be alone with our thoughts in a way that empowers us to carefully consider what’s going on around us. And then, to write about it all in a way that makes sense to other people.
The truth is, being an introvert helps us do this in a more impactful way. Because introverts prefer to be alone, we are perfectly suited to write and tell stories. | https://writingcooperative.com/an-introverts-guide-to-writing-better-eef46fbf3f27 | ['Devin Arrigo'] | 2021-03-03 01:19:15.110000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Growing Up', 'Society', 'Introvert'] |
Explaining the Medium Partner Program | Call this a one-year performance review, if you like.
I’m guessing it’s cool to put their logo here, given, you know, it’s also at the top of the page and all
I never expected to make a dime on Medium, and I’m thankful for any dimes I can scrape together from it. I’ve been fortunate enough to be featured once, and I never thought I’d get that, given my content is not infrequently critical of blue tribe narratives. But now that I’ve been doing this for a year, and accumulated a third of a million hits in the process, I figured I’d share what I’ve learned. Perhaps other writers can use this knowledge to best utilize the system, regardless of their tribal affiliation.
Basics
Medium provides statistics on the back end which are very different from what you see as a reader. As the reader you see a clap count, which is basically like a Reddit upvote or a Facebook like, except readers can clap as much as they like. Additional claps don’t necessarily earn the writer more money, because each reader only has a certain amount of their subscription parceled off to pay writers. The money is divided up by clap, so if you clap nine times for one article, and once for another, the nine-clap article rakes in 90% of the payout, and the one clap article rakes 10%.
How much of the monthly subscription is paid out exactly?
$2.50
(ish)
Half the money from everyone’s Medium subscription goes to writers, the other half goes to Medium. I’m almost certain this is the number, give or take a dime or two depending on how many weeks are in the pay cycle, by looking at my Medium Partner statistical histories. In prior months, I’ve had duplicate earnings for articles of $2.35 each, of $2.46 each, and of $2.85 each, and the statistical likelihood of those duplicate entries would be astronomical. Each of those duplicate payouts represent one person engaging with my article, and no other articles, over the amortization period. They aren’t exactly $2.50, though, because math:
Medium charges its readers by the month, and there are different numbers of days in the month. Medium pays out by the week, but does so in bundles of weeks which approximate a month, so sometimes the number of weeks in a Medium pay cycle will vary. This makes it confusing to nail down exactly, but after combing all the data, two and a half bucks seems correct. It also seems like the sort of number the guys who cooked up Medium would have put in their business plan. Nice round number off that five dollar subscription.
Now we know Medium keeps half the cash, and pays out half the cash. Don’t hate. That’s way better than Facebook, who pays you nothing and farms your life out to advertisers and the NSA and whomever. I dig it. We also know that clap count is a bad way of looking at it, which is okay for the writers because Medium gives us three metrics on the back end to look at — views, reads, and “fans.” Fans are unique engagements — “some dude or dudette clapped some number of times.” It counts heads.
Outside Traffic is Meaningless
You get paid nothing for views, and either nothing or next to nothing for reads. Proof inbound.
This article:
..has 37,000 views and 6,000 reads since it’s been published. It is by all objective standards a pretty popular article, but has only earned $37 total on the Partner Program as of today. That’s a tenth of a penny per view, and a little over half a penny per read, but 67 cents per unique engagement. Where does it get its traffic? Google searches, apparently.
Only 3% of its total traffic comes from sources within Medium, which would be targeted to Medium subscribers. The external views, reads, and such, don’t turn into unique engagements, (claps) so they don’t turn into money.
This article:
…was distributed by curators in both Religion and Politics, so it found its way to the front of many feeds of Medium subscribers. It only has 11,000 views, and only 2,400 reads, but 111 unique engagements, and made $89. That’s eight times more per view and seven times more per read than the racism article, but on balance it’s around 80 cents per unique engagement. The “per engagement” number is the only consistent one so far. Where did its traffic come from?
31% from Medium, owing to the curation.
This article:
…was distributed by curators in Gun Control, but was also featured on the main page, given free copy edit services by Medium staff, tweeted out by Medium, email blasted, the whole nine yards. (and for all that I am of course infinitely thankful) It also got some traffic from a Kurt Schlicter Angry Culture War Piece referencing it over on Townhall, and did well on Facebook and Twitter. 184,000 views, 72,000 reads, 858 unique engagements. That’s four tenths of a penny per view, a penny a read, and 95 cents per engagement. Again, engagement is the only statistic that’s remotely consistent. Posting the screenshot because humblebrag.
This 184k click beast could have made the same amount of money only receiving 47k clicks, were those clicks delivered by the same Medium traffic ratio as the second article.
Following the Blue Tribe Narrative is Helpful to Curation, but Not Necessary
Here are the Medium Curation Standards:
Quality: It (almost) goes without saying, but the most important factor is that your stories are insightful, considered, and interesting. They should tell a narrative, convey useful information, or thoughtfully share a point of view. The writing should be polished and free of errors. We recommend spending more time on stories of depth and meaning, rather than simply publishing as often as you can. Headlines: Write a clear and descriptive title and subtitle for your story. Headlines should accurately reflect what your story is about — please avoid profanity, misleading “clickbait” phrasing, and using all capital letters. (And if you really want to get into it: Standard headline styling is title case for the headline and sentence case for the subtitle. This isn’t required but is ideal.) Images: Include a featured image with your story. It appears when we preview your story for readers on our homepage or your profile. It should be an image that you have the rights to use. Free resources like Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash are great for sourcing Creative Commons-licensed images. Citations: Link facts (especially in the areas of science, medicine, health, statistics, etc.), quotations, and excerpts to their sources. Profile: Your profile on Medium helps readers know more about you and your expertise, so they can understand the perspective of your story even better. Edit your profile to include a clear picture of yourself, your full name, and a bio that describes your credentials. Proofreading: Avoid major typos, errors, or formatting quirks in your story so readers can focus on the piece itself.
What they don’t say here, is that the “Quality” bullet includes some ideological bias, and the relative amount of bias seems to have shifted midway through 2018. And that’s fine, I’m not complaining, I’m here as a guest of Medium just like everybody else. But as the only writer to ever make it to the number three spot on the Medium “Top Writers in Politics” list without ever saying the word “Trump,” a record that would have stood forever if I hadn’t just typed it there (doh!), I think I have a unique perspective on this.
Half my material is gun related, and can generally be described as “mathematically pro-gun.” I’m probably the leading writer on guns or gun control on Medium in terms of traffic, if not damn close, in the past year. That gives me a data pool of similarly themed articles to analyze, to see what does get curated, and what doesn’t. Let’s run down the list as a test case.
Distributed by curators in Politics and Gun Control:
These were both critical of blue tribe narratives, but they were also both published before May of 2018.
Distributed by curators in Gun Control:
Five curated articles, total. Only two after April of 2018. From May on, all curated articles were critical of red tribe narratives. The “lane” article was critical of the NRA. The “anatomy” article was probably the worst article I’ve written on Medium, but it was slinging mud at Townhall. It wasn’t even an article about gun control, really.
Not curated:
The article on buyback math was one of the best articles I’ve written. The “lying again” article was one of the funniest. The “solutions” article was the most deeply researched. These were not curated.
I’ve had several discussions with other Medium writers recently who have also noticed this ideological shift, especially in the run up to, and wake of, Kavanaugh. My Kavanaugh article was about using sociobiology to analyze the freakoutery, and although it got about 4,000 hits, it wasn’t curated. Which is fine, the number of Kavanaugh articles the poor curators had to chew through was probably in the thousands. But the ones they did pick were monolithically blue tribe, on an issue that the country was basically divided in half. I expect the writers on Medium break more blue than red, but I highly doubt that every single article worth curating, or featuring, was blue.
And that’s fine as well. It’s their business, and I’m happy they let me publish here, and they do occasionally curate blue narrative divergent articles. (SJCSR above) I do think it’s a strange business decision to curate in this way, because it opens a business opportunity for someone to build a Red Tribe Medium Clone, given Medium has chosen to only chase half the available market share. But the most important takeaway for you, the Medium Writer whose still surprisingly reading this article, is this. If you want to earn money, don the Blue Backpack. I bet umair haque makes bank.
This article won’t get curated, nor should it. It’s quite honestly only really useful for Medium writers anyway.
Summary:
I’m not actually worried about making money here, because I have a real job. But if you are, here are your tips:
1) Count fans, not hits or reads.
2) Get curated, because curation puts you in front of the people who pay you with their engagement. External traffic is fun, but it doesn’t matter. There’s some chatter that being in a publication is important.
3) If you’re going to write culture war stuff, Go Blue Tribe.
Hope this helps. | https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/explaining-the-medium-partner-program-ecbe84019569 | ['Bj Campbell'] | 2019-03-07 04:51:14.498000+00:00 | ['Guns', 'Random', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing', '“Top Writers in Politics” list'] |
Mink in the Hudson: A Region’s Pollution | By RJ Smith
A quick look at the Hudson River (photo taken by the author).
A mink in its natural habitat. Photo taken by Brady Dillsworth.
Mink are among many aquatic species that call the Hudson River their home. General Electric is responsible for dumping roughly 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson between the years 1947 and 1977. Mink feast on fish and insects that exist in the river’s ecosystem, something that acts as the mink’s primary exposure to PCBs. According to a study published on mink’s dietary exposure to fish in the Hudson River, mink experience lesions in the jaw. They can’t reproduce as well as they normally can. Their babies also have a higher chance of dying. In 2005, GE signed a decree from the EPA to dredge the Hudson in an attempt to remove some of the PCBs in the water and sediment.
The sun starts to set on the horizon. A chill breeze sweeps across the area next to the Hudson River. Alex Wolf, a scientist that works with Scenic Hudson, watches the tranquil river. The surface of the water glitters beneath the setting sun.
“It all starts in the ecosystem,” Wolf says. “An insect gets a lot of PCBs from the contaminated environment. Then a fish comes and eats that insect. Then a bigger fish comes and eats the smaller fish. A mink comes along and eats the bigger fish, accumulating a lot of PCBs into its body.”
A mink observing its surroundings. Photo taken from Shutterstock.
By nature, mink are solitary animals. Males and females typically only associate with each other during the breeding season, which occurs during the winter. Female mink become sexually mature after one year of age. While pregnant, they tend to make den sites in the cavities of tree roots, rock piles, brush piles, and log jams or beaver lodges. A mink’s most used den sites are in the bank burrows of muskrats and other animals.
A new life is born after only 51 days of pregnancy. On average, a female mink will give birth to between 1–8 offspring, with 4 being the average. Their offspring are born mainly between April and June.
Mink cannot see when they are born. Their bodies lack hair. Baby mink are weaned at 6 to 10 weeks. During this time, they are completely dependent on their mothers. The mink that depend on the Hudson for survival grow independent anywhere from 6 to 10 months of life.
Furthermore, research has found that mink are more abundant in areas beyond the Hudson River.
Wolf says PCB exposure means mink populations don’t thrive as well on the Hudson as they do on the Mohawk River, which is the Hudson’s largest tributary. . “We know that mink in the Hudson River are less abundant than in the Mohawk River,” Wolf says. “The Mohawk River is similar to the Hudson River in a lot of ways, but has lower PCB contamination levels. There were 108 mink found in the Hudson River, while 208 mink were found in the Mohawk River. You can infer that the Mohawk River is less problematic for mink, since they exist in a greater quantity there.”
A data visualization comparing the number of mink in the Hudson to the number of mink in the Mohawk.
Mink live throughout New York, as well as most of the United States and Canada. They stick to streams, rivers, lakes, and freshwater and saltwater marshes and coastlines. Mink are nocturnal. A lot of their time is spent feeding on fish, birds, small mammals, amphibians. They are most commonly seen close to streams and creeks the day after light snowfall.
Nonetheless, the pollution present in the Hudson River has had various uses.
Polychlorinated biphenyls, also known as PCBs, are industrial products or chemicals. They build up in organisms through a process called bioaccumulation, which involves taking in PCBs from the environment over time. Biomagnification is a comparison between the concentration ratio in tissue present in a predator’s body and its prey. PCBs biomagnify along the food chain. This leads to higher amounts of PCBs in organisms that are higher up in the food chain. Accumulation of PCBs starts in soil. “PCBs from the Hudson River build up in invertebrates in river sediments,” said Margaret Byrne, an Assessment and Restoration Manager for U.S Fish and Wildlife Services. PCBs eventually end up contaminating insects and birds and mammals. When mink consume these mammals, they are directly exposed to PCBs.
For once, a mink stands still. Photo credits: John Reynolds
Furthermore, mink move around quite a bit. Their diet depends heavily on what is available to them in their current environment. Though they depend on aquatic environments, they will roam far from the closest stream in their quest for food. “Mink really are a bridge between the aquatic and terrestrial environment,” says Sean Madden, a researcher that works for the New York State Department of Conservation. “They like cover, both for denning and for finding prey, so things like downed logs, undercut banks, rock piles, and shrubs can be important parts of their habitat. One of the real drivers of mink on the landscape, which can be equally as important (really they are linked) is prey availability. When mink are on the move, they are pretty much constant foragers, and they will opportunistically eat a lot of different things. If they find an easy and reliable food source, they will exploit it.”
The significance of mink to the region dates back several centuries, during Henry Hudson’s life. Mink fur can be considered an exotic item, particularly due to being an indication of wealth. “Mink were a historically important fur species and part of a thriving trapping and fur trade,” says Madden. “If you think about it, European settlement in New York was inextricably linked to furs. Only a few years after Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson, there was a Dutch fur-trading post around current Albany. Of course, beaver was the big draw, but there was a trade for all furs, including mink.”
Violence against mink is a problem that continues today. “At one time in this country, owning a mink coat was a symbol of luxury and wealth,” said Madden. “Mink are still trapped for their pelts, but trapping pressure really depends on fur market prices. Generally, mink prices have been down in recent years and there are plenty of farm-raised mink pelts to be had. Much of the fur market is now driven by overseas markets primarily Russia and China.”
PCBs exist in and affect food webs. It all begins with the sediment. However, PCBs don’t naturally exist there. The sediment present in the Hudson River is contaminated as a result of GE’s actions. “PCBs can be bound to organic material in the sediment, so organisms, like benthic macroinvertebrates, living and feeding in the sediment can have direct uptake of PCBs,” said Madden. “PCBs can also move into the water column through suspended sediment (like after high flow events) and some amount of dissolving. So, things living in the water column also take up PCBs.”
Fish are among the many organisms that take up PCBs. They’re often exposed to PCBs through their gills. “Fish can accumulate PCBs from the water column across their gills, but also will get PCBs from their diet,” said Sean Madden. What does this mean for the mink? Mink are carnivorous. They love to feast on things like muskrats, rabbits, mice, chipmunks, fish, snakes, frogs and birds. Their primary form of PCB exposure is through the consumption of fish. “Fish that eat at higher trophic levels will have higher PCB concentrations,” said Madden. “Since mink eat a lot of fish (in some cases nearly half their diet is fish) they have a lot of PCB exposure in the Hudson River.”
Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric dumped about 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River. The source of the PCBs was two manufacturing plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls. This is problematic because there are people who are part of communities that depend on the Hudson for their drinking water.
A look at the General Electric plant at Fort Edwards. Photo credits: Paul Buckowski
“When they take the sediment out of the river, it’s very wet,” said Manna Jo Greene. “It has to be filtered. The water has to be filtered before it can be discharged back into the river. It is fairly easy to filter PCBs out of water. Thank goodness, because there are people who take drinking water from the Hudson.” During the dredging of the Hudson, people had to find water elsewhere. “People had to be rerouted during the dredging,” said Greene. “They had to make use of a nearby reservoir. They couldn’t use the Hudson River’s water as a drinking source.”
Manna Jo Greene’s article dives into the origins of PCBs, which can be traced back to industrial use. PCBs were used industrially in mixtures that were trademarked Aroclors. They were first used in carbonless paper and in adhesives and caulking compounds. Because they are They are hydrophobic, meaning that they can be filtered out of water by sticking to sand and silt. They are also lipophilic, meaning that they are stored in fatty tissue and can be harbored in the body for a lifetime. Greene also wrote that PCBs are able to “bioaccumulate in the fatty tissue of top predators,” which is where they are found in orders of magnitude greater than in the blood.
Microorganisms are the members of an ecosystem that are responsible for breaking down PCBs in soil and sediment.
A quick look at the concept of bioaccumulation. Photo credit: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
Studies have determined the impact of PCBs on natural resources present in the region. “Natural resources continue to be exposed to the PCBs that remain unremediated in the river and on the floodplain, and will continue to be adversely affected as a result of that exposure,” said Meagan Racey, a spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, one of the trustees behind the mink research. “Trustees are looking closely at the PCBs remaining in the river and their effect on future injury to natural resources, as well as how they influence damages and restoration.”
One group is held responsible for the damage caused by the presence of PCBs in the Hudson River — GE. “Under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), GE is responsible for damages and the restoration of the natural resources that were injured or will continue to be injured by PCBs left in the environment,” said Meagan Racey. “At the Hudson River PCBs Superfund Site, damage assessment efforts are currently ongoing. The Trustees’ goal is to represent the interest of the public, by measuring how much harm has been caused by PCBs and determining how much restoration is necessary to address this harm.” The fact that the public is being represented by the Trustees should make people optimistic about the river’s future. It is clear that the Trustees are attempting to ensure the public that progress will be made, as well as show that efforts are being made to fix the issue.
A study has determined that women who have been exposed to PCBs have had trouble being able to conceive. The ability of sperm to move has been discovered to decrease as the presence of PCBs in men’s blood serum increased.
The presence of PCBs in the Hudson River is a huge issue for the mink. “Mink use both terrestrial and aquatic habitats, so they will use the river, the shoreline, the floodplains, the tributaries, and the wetlands near the river,” said Madden. “Mink are almost constantly foraging and very opportunistic predators. Some of our recent work confirmed that the major portions of their diet (fish, frogs, and small mammals) are all contaminated along the Hudson.”
According to Madden, the way forward is clear. “The dredging remedy was a good step. It removed a lot of PCBs from the Hudson River. But it also left a lot behind,” he said. “We need to continue to monitor PCBs in the sediment, fish, and other biota to figure how the river is responding to the clean-up and what else needs to be done.”
Madden said DEC officials are pushing for an investigation of PCBs in the lower river tidal estuary to better understand the nature and extent of contamination there. “We still need to work on a clean-up of the upper Hudson River floodplain,” he said. “PCBs are not the only contaminant out there. We need to pay attention to emerging contaminants, like PFOA/PFOS, and ones we may not even know of yet.”
Madden explained that humans in the Hudson Valley who eat fish from the Hudson River may face similar hazards from PCB exposure. “That’s a big question and a complicated one with varying perspectives. Some obvious impacts are the fish consumption advisories and regulations of the fisheries from the contamination,” said Madden. “The Hudson from Hudson Falls to the Federal Dam at Troy is take none/eat none fishery. You can fish there, but you can’t keep the fish.”
There is a process through which PCBs become harmful to mink. The effects of this process transfer to the mink’s offspring. “Toxicity to PCBs in mink is mediated through the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR). For mink exposed to PCBs, the risk seems to be worse for their offspring,” said Madden. “For example, female mink exposed to PCBs in the lab have litters with severe kit mortality. Mink exposed to PCBs in the lab, develop these severe jaw lesions, which eventually cause the teeth to fall out and jaw bone, although this has rarely been observed in the wild. Also, there is evidence of organ abnormalities with PCB exposure.”
How has the General Electric Company (GE) responded to all of this? Greene said the relationship between GE and the PCB cleanup process involves quite a bit of flip-flopping. “Their tune has changed to say, ‘What a great job’ they did,” said Greene. “They’ve said that there was no problem. They then went on to say that they’ve done a great job with the clean-up.”
Madden said more research is needed to figure out what difference the GE cleanup has made on the mink population and whether more dredging is needed in the upper Hudson.
The presence of PCBs in the Hudson River has led to a disproportionate impact on people. “Clearwater made a connection with our 1993 Angler survey,” said Greene. “By interviewing people fishing at the waterfront, we determined that people were eating the fish despite the health advisories, and also doing so with disproportionate impact on communities of color and low income.”
In Wolf’s office, a shelf positioned against the wall is lined with books. Wolf takes a moment to speak.
“One way to make an impact is to contact state and federal officials,” says Wolf. “I know that most of the valley’s elected officials — state and federal — as well as Governor Cuomo have taken a stand. I think it would be helpful for them to hear from local citizens about this being an issue that really matters. Bringing political influence to bear on the EPA will help make sure that GE continues its cleanup of the Hudson.”
What does the future hold? Recently, the EPA decided to issue a certification to GE. This certification was awarded to GE to denote that the company has completed activities that were components of the remedy selected for the upper Hudson River. This has not been met without resistance, since the state has pushed back against this decision. | https://medium.com/@smithr22_79989/mink-in-the-hudson-a-regions-pollution-65150b26bfe1 | ['Ronald Smith'] | 2019-05-13 17:32:33.237000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Pollution'] |
Use C# And ML.NET Machine Learning To Predict Taxi Fares In New York | I’m using the awesome Rainbow CSV plugin for Visual Studio Code which is highlighting my CSV data file with these nice colors.
There are a lot of columns with interesting information in this data file, but I will only be focusing on the following:
Column 0: The data provider vendor ID
Column 3: Number of passengers
Column 4: Trip distance
Column 5: The rate code (standard, JFK, Newark, …)
Column 9: Payment type (credit card, cash, …)
Column 10: Fare amount
I’ll build a machine learning model in C# that will use columns 0, 3, 4, 5, and 9 as input, and use them to predict the taxi fare for every trip. Then I’ll compare the predicted fares with the actual taxi fares in column 10, and evaluate the accuracy of my model.
And I will use NET Core to build my app.
NET Core is really cool. It’s the multi-platform version of the NET framework and it runs flawlessly on Windows, OS/X, and Linux.
I’m using the 3.0 preview on my Mac right now and haven’t touched my Windows 10 virtual machine in days.
Here’s how to set up a new console project in NET Core:
$ dotnet new console -o PricePrediction
$ cd PricePrediction
Next, I need to install the ML.NET NuGet package:
$ dotnet add package Microsoft.ML
Now I’m ready to add some classes. I’ll need one to hold a taxi trip, and one to hold my model’s predictions.
I will modify the Program.cs file like this:
The TaxiTrip class holds one single taxi trip. Note how each field is adorned with a Column attribute that tell the CSV data loading code which column to import data from.
I’m also declaring a TaxiTripFarePrediction class which will hold a single fare prediction.
Now I’m going to load the training data in memory:
This code sets up a TextLoader to load the CSV data into memory. Note that all column data types are what you’d expect, except RateCode and PaymentType. These columns hold numeric values, but I’m loading then as string fields.
The reason I’m doing this is because RateCode is an enumeration with the following values:
1 = standard
2 = JFK
3 = Newark
4 = Nassau
5 = negotiated
6 = group
And PaymentType is defined as follows:
1 = Credit card
2 = Cash
3 = No charge
4 = Dispute
5 = Unknown
6 = Voided trip
These actual numbers don’t mean anything in this context. And I certainly don’t want the machine learning model to start believing that a trip to Newark is three times as important as a standard fare.
So converting these values to strings is a perfect trick to show the model that RateCode and PaymentType are just labels, and the underlying numbers don’t mean anything.
With the TextLoader all set up, a single call to Load() is sufficient to load the entire data file in memory.
I only have a single data file, so I am calling TrainTestSplit() to set up a training partition with 80% of the data and a test partition with the remaining 20% of the data.
You often see this 80/20 split in data science, it’s a very common approach to train and test a model.
Now I’m ready to start building the machine learning model:
Machine learning models in ML.NET are built with pipelines, which are sequences of data-loading, transformation, and learning components.
My pipeline has the following components:
CopyColumns which copies the FareAmount column to a new column called Label. This Label column holds the actual taxi fare that the model has to predict.
which copies the FareAmount column to a new column called Label. This Label column holds the actual taxi fare that the model has to predict. A group of three OneHotEncodings to perform one hot encoding on the three columns that contains enumerative data: VendorId, RateCode, and PaymentType. This is a required step because machine learning models cannot handle enumerative data directly.
to perform one hot encoding on the three columns that contains enumerative data: VendorId, RateCode, and PaymentType. This is a required step because machine learning models cannot handle enumerative data directly. Concatenate which combines all input data columns into a single column called Features. This is a required step because ML.NET can only train on a single input column.
which combines all input data columns into a single column called Features. This is a required step because ML.NET can only train on a single input column. AppendCacheCheckpoint which caches all data in memory to speed up the training process.
which caches all data in memory to speed up the training process. A final FastTree regression learner which will train the model to make accurate predictions.
The FastTreeRegressionTrainer is a very nice training algorithm that uses gradient boosting, a machine learning technique for regression problems.
A gradient boosting algorithm builds up a collection of weak regression models. It starts out with a weak model that tries to predict the taxi fare. Then it adds a second model that attempts to correct the error in the first model. And then it adds a third model, and so on.
The result is a fairly strong prediction model that is actually just an ensemble of weaker prediction models stacked on top of each other.
With the pipeline fully assembled, I can train the model on the training partition with a call to Fit().
I now have a fully- trained model. So now I need to load some validation data, predict the taxi fare for each trip, and calculate the accuracy of my model:
This code calls Transform(…) to set up predictions for every single taxi trip in the test partition. The Evaluate(…) method then compares these predictions to the actual taxi fares and automatically calculates three very handy metrics for me:
Rms : this is the root mean square error or RMSE value. It’s the go-to metric in the field of machine learning to evaluate models and rate their accuracy. RMSE represents the length of a vector in n-dimensional space, made up of the error in each individual prediction.
: this is the root mean square error or RMSE value. It’s the go-to metric in the field of machine learning to evaluate models and rate their accuracy. RMSE represents the length of a vector in n-dimensional space, made up of the error in each individual prediction. L1 : this is the mean absolute prediction error, expressed in dollars.
: this is the mean absolute prediction error, expressed in dollars. L2: this is the mean square prediction error, or MSE value. Note that RMSE and MSE are related: RMSE is just the square root of MSE.
To wrap up, let’s use the model to make a prediction.
I’m going to take a standard taxi trip for 19 minutes. I’ll be the only passenger and I’ll pay by credit card.
Here’s how to make the prediction:
I use the CreatePredictionEngine<…>(…) method to set up a prediction engine. The two type arguments are the input data class and the class to hold the prediction. And once my prediction engine is set up, I can simply call Predict(…) to make a single prediction.
I know that this trip is supposed to cost $15.50. How accurate will the model prediction be?
Here’s the code running in the Visual Studio Code debugger on my Mac: | https://medium.com/machinelearningadvantage/use-c-and-ml-net-machine-learning-to-predict-taxi-fares-in-new-york-519546f52591 | ['Mark Farragher'] | 2019-11-19 15:11:07.808000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Deep Learning', 'Csharp', 'Data Science'] |
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IT’S JUST NOT A LOVE STORY :a tale of friendship and love . | IT’S JUST NOT A LOVE STORY :a tale of friendship and love .
By ESHA SINGH SISODIYA
The clock was showing 2’o clock on that dark , winter day.
But Ronit was awaken, smiling looking at the walls.. His crush spoken to him for the first time. , to whom he could never even wave or dare look back. He laughed , he blushed, was just lost in his own imaginary world with his Cinderella 💛.
Ronit, who was so shy and innocent...💓 was opening up for Riya... their talk increased, numbers exchanged . His day was began and ended by their greetings by few upcoming weeks.
It was 4th july, and Riya’s 18th birthday. RONIT HAD DECIDED BY THEN THAT’S WHAT HE WISHED NOW, to propose her, he collected all his savings, did all what he could and even broken his extends too to make her feel special.
That day,
Ronit dressed in black shirt and pant, just because he heard Riya saying , “ MAN IN BLACK DRESS is lit.”
He invested lot on her birthday that he forgot to buy himself a watch, lol no more money left...
Roommates are saviour, so was Ravi,
HELPED HIS ZERO FASHION SENSE FRIEND, TO LOOK Like Smarty...
Ready to rock.
He waited for Riya at the restaurant, never letting his eyes go off the door, with YELLOW TULIPS BOUQUET full of excitement and enthusiasm.
Riya arrived in 💛 yellow frock. Ronit eyes lit up, but confidence? NO more, he was sweating and nervousness occupied all his face..
Riya was surprised as the waiter was showing her the booked place, well lighted,all her cute pictures, few drawings too made by RONIT HIMSELF.
Instead of smiling at her, he wanna just hide .Anyhow he stood up and said, “Hey” and asked her to sit.
She laughed , seeing his face turning red.He just was trying to act normal, started asking the lame questions which sounded like silly jokes , she laughed again and this time he too laughed with her.
his brain stopped working at last he said... I don’t want anything in the world but u,
And then he just have no words but eyes full of dreams , shining like a kid.
Riya blushed and then said, “At least we are on the same boat then, you are not losed dear, You have already won me.”
Ronit and Riya just seemed exceptionally perfect to everyone. About one year of their relationship successfully completed and not a single fight , no misunderstanding! Nothing.
As much they love each other, people also loved that couple seeing together. Riya never demanded anything, but Ronit loved to see her that small cute face to sparkle and stunned followed by blushing, when he just bring small gifts . The price you invest matter nothing but the feel you have, small things are enough to make someone happy and to touch hearts.
RAINY days are considered romantic, but when you are with your soulmate , every season is romantic!!
It was late December winter, Riya standing in her balcony sipping the tea,and was busy with her own thoughts . Ronit didn’t talk much with girl leaving Riya and Sneha his bestfriend. Sneha was the mastermind and helping hand behind Ronit ideas💡. Riya too liked her. She thought about about their first sight, their talk, their first date, that first whatsapp message, how from being unknown to a soulmate life has changed. He was the best gift she ever got, she met him when she was going through lots of ups and downs, and his presence has made the things stable in her life, she was when angry like lava, his voice only could soothe her , calming her down.
The weather was foggy, cold winter winds, no sun rays, but deep down in her heart something kept enlightening that’s"love".
A message came from Ronit, she blushed like a baby girl, she read it out -" Hey my strength, love u, wishing a foggy good morning 🌄 ." Hearts meet ,then they read each other and eyes talks !!
She replied back -" hey, My love My morning is already good enough by Your message I love u Ronit!a bit more than myself ”.First year was about to end. Last day was still left of their session. Sneha the gang master and Ronit’s bestie has planned a small gathering just for their little gang of 10. It’s the realization that a small gathering with your loved ones is far more enjoying and satisfying than the grand party.
Planned mojito and vodka, also a night out on Dec 23.
Ronit was hesitant and excited both at the same time, so he packed things up , it meant he ate Sneha’s brain up, to choose the things what he shall take for night out.
In their gang of 10 there were 2 couples and 6 singles who had full on plan to not let their friends leave alone.
They left for their destiny Mansoori at evening 5 and reached by 8’0 clock. Cold winter winds, jackets and coats wrapped around their body, still their stayed warmth in the eyes of Ronit and Riya’s , they didn’t spoke a single word. Sneha smiled looking at her best friend, she was so proud of him how he handle the things, his loyalty. It always brought smile on her face looking Ronit’s smile .
They reached the hotel by 8 :30, it was a beautiful view there, mountains around and a peaceful silence. Boys and girls were divided in two rooms.They all sat in the hall , and the DJ started, all of them joined one by one. They danced till 2AM and could only eat beginner. All left , but Ronit and Riya stayed in the hall.
RONIT danced with Riya, glaring at each other, suddenly Riya felt migraine it was really strong one, she cried out of pain, Ronit panicked seeing her in that way, he took her up to the room , she felt dizzy and fell down even before he reached the door. He called out to Sneha, she woke up instantly and seeing him worried and Riya unconscious immediately called for the doctor.
They waited for the Dr. , Riya’s body temperature too raised.30 min later Dr. arrived till then Sneha has taken care of both of them, as Ronit too was faded half way and was sweating out of panic.
Dr. Checked and handed prescription 💊 and asked to leave the place, he found out that Riya was having allergy from such environment. And assured there was nothing to much worry about, and told Ronit also to have few pills.
As soon as Riya was gaining consciousness back , Ronit was concerned and that’s why he was angry too for the very fast time in their relationship of one year. As she opened eyes , he enchanted but then controlled and asked why she hasn’t informed about this allergy, meanwhile Sneha was relaxed at last seeing things to get back normol, or at least thought things were fixed.
Ronit waited for the response, 5min later she spoke - " Everything can’t be as perfect you think, it was years back when I was here with my ex , he came along with me, but our ways was diverted from then and we departured , and our ways never met. He left me somewhere alone and deeply hurted, and left with a girl he met only few days back, I was broken both physically and mentally. My health got detoriated and was led to this allergy, when you mentioned this place I was astonished and scared but wasn’t able to say you no and hence agreed. Sorry dear, I couldn’t tell this you earlier."
Ronit gasped at what he had heard, he never asked even if Riya had a past, anyhow he felt disappointed, he wanted to know everything and had right to know all this before, he not spoke anything and left her with Sneha.Sneha stood their in shock, how things got terrible like this, in just few minutes. She went to Riya gave her the pills and asked her to have a sound sleep and not think much, when her own head was full of dilemmas. THAT night , Sneha felt an awkward strange feeling, something so new, she was in love with her bestfriend.
She felt embarrassed, couldn’t even think of to face Ronit ever, she hated herself as she thought she can be a reason which can ruin her friendship! She felt as if she has been betraying him till now. And looking Riya infront , made things more harder for her, she too liked her.
Riya was weeping, how can she make upset the person who loved her most . She thought about how the day started, their dance, their connection and now this silence. She always wanted to tell Ronit about this, she tried many times, but could never gain enough courage and confidence to tell, as she was always scared that her past might not destroy her present. And this silence of Ronit was making her more scared. How could she rest when her heart had lost the peace.
Ronit was angry, he just don’t want to talk to anyone. He thought he knows everything but damn he didn’t and this thing was disturbing him, how cute face of her love, has turned into a painful one and then, hearing that she just came because he insisted, was hurting him more, he was going through different emotions, his anger on her , has turned to himself, why was he not able to make her comfortable enough that she could even share her darkest experience . He felt bad and helpless now, how will he be able to face her, when she needed him to be with her and listen ,he raged out her.
The night seemed a never ending one, every minisecond was felt by all three of them.
Darker the night was, Deeper their emotions were.
Continued in next part… | https://medium.com/@queenesha30/its-just-not-a-love-story-a-tale-of-friendship-and-love-95b563de0cac | ['Esha Singh Sisodiya'] | 2020-12-04 09:04:23.965000+00:00 | ['Teenagers', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Love', 'Friendship'] |
Should You Use Dependency Injection in JavaScript? | Originally published at https://fek.io.
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I have seen some posts on JavaScript and for other languages that dissuade the use of Dependency Injection. I even had a boss at one company I worked for tell his developers that we should never use Dependency Injection.
Dependency Injection (DI), sometimes referred to as ‘Inversion of Control’, is when an object receives other objects or functions it depends on for part of its functionality. This can be achieved by passing an object through object instantiation with a constructor or with a property setting. This is very common in the world of statically typed languages like Java or C#. There are many popular frameworks built specifically for managing dependencies in the statically typed object-oriented world.
DI allows specific functionality to be loaded at runtime. One of the advantages of being able to change the functionality of an object at runtime is to provide greater flexibility and make our applications more loosely coupled. A very common use case is using mocking during testing. There are some great libraries in Node.js like Sinon that make mocking very easy, but we can accomplish the same task by using DI.
Testing scenario
It is very common with testing to substitute code that communicates with a database or a network request with a mock or fake. This is because in a lot of CI/CD workflows the build or testing server may not have access to a database server or a network needed for the actual service. This is an excellent use case for DI to substitute an actual service with a mock or fake service.
There are many different reasons to use DI, but testing is one of the most common reasons.
Poor Mans DI
I have a technique that I have used throughout the years for configuring DI in my applications whether they are statically typed or duck-typed like JavaScript that I like to call ‘Poor Mans Dependency Injection’. With this technique, I usually create default dependent objects if a required object is not passed in on object instantiation.
Lets’ say we have a cart object that needs to calculate a tax rate for a certain location. In a lot of e-commerce systems that kind of data has to be calculated based on the location of the user, with the sales tax being different for every location. We can create a factory function that creates a shopping cart with an injectable function for calculating the tax.
If we look at the following example, we are creating an object with functions for adding items to the cart and calculating the totals and subtotals. We have a function that we can pass into our settings constructor object called taxrepository . We will use this function to calculate our taxes.
Lets’ create a test function for calculating our taxes. We will make this a pure function without any side effects.
function calculateMyTax(subtotal) {
return subtotal * 0.11;
}
When we instantiate this object with our factory function, we can just pass it into our settings object;
We can now get the subtotal and calculate the taxes.
Defaulting Behavior
All of the objects that I define, I try to create defaults for whenever an injectable behavior is not included in the constructor. That way if someone is using my object without passing in the needed objects, it will either get an error or a default function if it is missing from the constructor. We can modify the factory function to use a default if no taxrepository is passed in the settings object.
We also might want to have our factory function fail if the developer calling our function forgets to pass the taxrepository into the constructor.
Dependency Injection Frameworks
DI frameworks are extremely popular in the statically typed object-oriented world of Java and .NET development, but there are DI frameworks you can use for JavaScript. One of the frameworks is called di4js, and will work with either Node.js or plain old JavaScript in the browser. Here is an example from the di4js readme;
This example is from the di4js Github repo
Conclusion
Dependency Injection is a very powerful tool for configuring an application to use certain dependencies when creating objects. Whether you are using a “poor man's” Dependency Injection or a full-fledged DI framework, it can be a very useful tool for configuring different behavior in an application.
More content at plainenglish.io | https://javascript.plainenglish.io/should-you-use-dependency-injection-in-javascript-3751bdf3f198 | ['David Fekke'] | 2021-07-01 18:53:08.425000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Coding', 'Software Development', 'Dependency Injection'] |
- Adam Tabriz, MD | ”Inflationism is the state-sponsored monopoly, as it appears innocent to most, encouraging to few, defrauding to the mainstream, but dire to everyone's sovereignty.” Adam Tabriz, MD | https://medium.com/@adamtabriz/inflationism-e97d1a4410c4 | ['Adam Tabriz'] | 2020-12-23 07:39:08.944000+00:00 | ['Monetization', 'Quote Of The Day', 'Quotes', 'Inflation', 'Inflationism'] |
PREPARE FOR A LONG ROUND THE WORLD TRIP (PART 3: ROUTE) | The core and the most exciting part! This dictates everything else, that is why you must start with a plan. One the best suggestions we found when we were preparing, is to not even try to have a hard plan. For long trips changes are unavoidable. However, you need to have a draft to start with. You will clearly see why in the next chapters.
I will neither comment on our choice of destinations nor provide any recommendations. There are many articles on the Internet like “Places you must visit”. I would rather give you some thoughts to look at what you would desire. Start with mind-storming based on the points below. Do not be critical in the beginning, just dump everything that will come to your mind.
Start with your dreams:
What places you have been thinking about for years, maybe decades?
Are there any activities you would love to try, but haven’t had a chance yet?
Some of them may be unavailable or too expensive in your area, however there are countries where that may be possible.
What do you think about well-known events such as the Carnival of Brazil or Wave Gotik Treffen?
Any people to meet? Favourite writers, musicians?
Maybe visit old friends and family members?
Shopping for specific things that are not available or too expensive in your proximity?
What about so called culinary tourism?
Classic tourism like vising historical places and observing gems of the world culture.
Simply sunbathe and swim, why not?
Some of these ideas will require a lot of time; some may be as short as “see-and-go”. Doesn’t matter, put everything on paper. | https://medium.com/@haron.ru/prepare-for-a-long-round-the-world-trip-part-3-route-3ce8826a158a | ['Sergey Lovchev'] | 2020-12-25 04:35:58.600000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Dreams', 'World'] |
“Information, then, teaches you about the world. | “Information, then, teaches you about the world. Sometimes it does so by reducing your uncertainty about future events, and other times by enlarging your perspective”
— Thomas C. Redman, Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset | https://medium.com/datacrat/information-then-teaches-you-about-the-world-55b7323e7a56 | [] | 2019-01-04 15:26:15.851000+00:00 | ['Data Analysis', 'Data Driven', 'Data', 'Data Driven Decisions', 'Oracle Cloud'] |
Have you Backed Up Your 12-word Seed Phrase? | Bitpie reminds you to backup 12 words. Did you do that? What will happen if you don’t backup the seed phrase?
In the cases that the seed phrase is lost, the seed phrase is backed up inappropriately or the phone installed Bitpie is lost, the cryptocurrencies will not be restored, simply speaking, the cryptocurrencies are lost!
If the seed phrase is disclosed or acquired by others, it is very possible the cryptocurrencies get transferred. Bitcoin is irreversible and anonymous. Once bitcoins are transferred, the probability to recover the coin is basically zero.
…
What’s your Bitpie account seed phrase? While creating your account, it is required to back up 12 words, which are your seed phrase. It’s equivalent to your private key. Who has these 12 words, who owns your cryptocurrencies in your account.These 12 words is taken care by yourself. Once you lose them, you cannot recover them.
How could we take care of the 12-word seed phrase?
1.It’s better to write down the seed phrase. Make sure the writing is correct and clear. And store it in an extremely safe place in your home. See phrase cannot be stored through media such as photograph, software, email, cloud storages, etc.
2.Verifying seed: all users regardless of newbie or the experienced should verify the correctness of your seed phrase in the Setting-Verify Seed. Only ensure the correctness of your seed phrase can you continue the use of Bitpie.
3.For the account which has been installed in the Bitpie, please do not clear the data, recover the default setting, uninstall the Bitpie APP arbitrarily or format the cell phone. If you have cryptocurrencies in your Bitpie account, you should be more cautious.
4.Do not disclose your seed phrase to others. Do not expose your seed phrase to the media connected to the internet. For the account which seed phrase has been disclosed, do not store your coins in it. Anyone who ask you for the seed phrase is a scammer!
5.For the users who: lost the seed phrase, cannot pass the seed verification, did not take good care of seed phrase, please proceed as follows: find another cell phone, download and install Bitpie, back up the new seed phrase of the account, enter the Setting-Verify Seed to verify it, and transfer all the cryptocurrencies from the old account to the new account. From now on, do not use the old account for storage. However, do not log out the old account for you can receive forked coins.
About Bitpie seed phrase: enter | https://medium.com/bitpie/have-you-backed-up-your-12-word-seed-phrase-d88d893318fc | ['Bitpie Wallet'] | 2018-03-16 09:00:22.206000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin Wallet', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Bitpie', 'Blockchain'] |
These Healthy And Easy Finger Foods For Kids. | Most guardians concur that kids are cranky eaters. Forcibly feeding your kids can failure to fire and make them loath to specific food sources as they grow up. It can likewise prompt certain dietary problems. To assist your kids with creating smart dieting propensities, you should allow them to eat all alone, almost immediately.
Kids hate greens. But they will love these cheesy spinach calzones!
You will require:
10 oz. new spinach
2 eggs
1 pack ricotta cheddar (15 oz.)
1 cup ground Parmesan cheddar
2 cups mozzarella cheeseburger
1 bundle frozen bread batter (32 oz.)
1 tbsp Italian flavoring
A touch of salt and pepper
How to make:
Preheat the stove to 400 F.
In a bowl, blend the three assortments of cheddar, eggs, Italian flavoring, and spinach.
Set up the bread batter and separation it into eight similarly estimated pieces. Fold each piece into an eight-inch wide circle.
Top one side of the bread batter with a spoonful of the spinach-cheddar blend.
Crease over the filled bread batter circles and seal along the edges.
Oil a heating sheet and spot these filled bread mixtures in it.
Prepare for 30 minutes, or until the two sides of the Calzones turn earthy colored.
2. Flapjacks
This is a sweet snack that you can pack in your kid’s lunch box or serve as breakfast.
You will require:
3 cups oats
½ cup margarine or spread
½ cup earthy colored sugar
¼ cup raisins
How to make:
Preheat the stove to 350oF.
In a pan, add margarine and sugar.
Keep on low fire and continue to mix until the spread and the sugar soften.
Add the oats and the raisins and mix totally, until the oats and the raisins are completely covered with the sugar syrup.
Empty this into an eight-inch preparing container. The spread ought not be in excess of an inch in thickness.
Prepare for 30 minutes.
Cut into squares and let it cool totally.
Eliminate from the dish and serve.
Planning Time: 15 min
Cooking time: 30 min
Servings: 10
3. Banana Bread
Banana bread is easy to make and one of the best ways to get the goodness of banana to your kid.
You will require:
2 cups flour
2 ½ cups crushed ready bananas
¾ cups earthy colored sugar
2 eggs
½ cup spread
1 teaspoon preparing pop
¼ tsp salt
How to make:
Preheat the stove to 350oF.
In a bowl, blend flour, preparing powder, and salt. In another bowl, join the spread and earthy colored sugar.
Mix in the crushed bananas, and eggs into the sugar cream. Blend them appropriately.
Mix in the banana blend into the flour and beat it into a smooth hitter.
Oil a 9×5 inch preparing container and empty this blend into it.
Prepare for an hour. Test it with a toothpick before you remove it from the broiler.
Allow the bread to cool prior to cutting it.
Serve warm.
Planning Time: 15 min
Cooking time: 1 H 5 min
Servings: 12
Yummy Finger Foods For Kids’ Lunch
While finger nourishments are the awesome wreck free eating in the vehicle or at parties, they can likewise be served for lunch in the event that you have a particular eater. Here are a couple of snappy and simple finger nourishments for a group that you can make for their lunch | https://medium.com/@ahmbhatti814/these-healthy-and-easy-finger-foods-for-kids-a2a4580a2f1e | [] | 2021-02-02 20:44:45.950000+00:00 | ['Food Trends', 'Finger Foods', 'Food And Beverage', 'Foodies', 'Foods'] |
Middle East invades the world — in a very delicious way. | “Middle East Meets West” insight report in collaboration with PAKT and Brand Genetics, 2019
Do you ever wonder why you began to see salad options with tahini dressing or za’atar on pizzas and flat breads? Why is everything you eat and drink turmeric flavoured? Why a tiny Scarface-wannabe butcher man from Istanbul has more than 22 million followers on Instagram?
Middle Eastern food culture is on the rise globally and it may be the most significant shift in global culture nowadays, which will continue to grow even more in the future. We have prepared an insight report, in collaboration with Brand Genetics, that aims to provide a cross-cultural outlook with five key trends to understand how Middle Eastern food culture is influencing how and what we eat in the world. You can download the report via this link.
I wanted to write a bit about the context for the report which are partly in the report and partly about the global context that we live in. So, below points are not directly reflecting the trends in the report.
Middle Eastern, not Mediterranean
One of the most significant outcome of this change is the liberation of the term “Middle Eastern” from its negative connotations. The term “Middle Eastern” had been almost synonymous with terror and violence since 9/11. Therefore, any food company or restaurant refrained from calling their food “Middle Eastern” and hid under the bigger umbrella of “Mediterranean” for long years. Now, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food has a distinction with their ingredients, use of spices, cooking techniques and taste. Therefore, we see brands and companies like The Halal Guys, Saffron Road, Nai Arabia Ice Tea, who proudly state that they are Middle Eastern.
Photo by Hari Nandakumar on Unsplash
Universally, food is the initial interaction domain between cultures. There are quite a few examples in history that interaction created some of the food and drinks you consume daily today. For instance, coffee was introduced to the West via the Ottoman Empire, and today, it’s one of the most consumed products in the world.
In recent times, falafel and hummus have pioneered the Middle Eastern cuisine to become mainstream in urban global culture and the vegan-vegetarian culture had a big influence on that expansion. This is not news anymore. Now, we see other recipes, methods, food and ingredients follow these pioneers and find their place on the tables and menus of the Western world.
Authentic superfood
Spices and ingredients of those cultures are entering our cupboards as functional food or superfood that are boosting our immune system, helping as antioxidants or making us less dependant on vitamin pills…
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Food as a social experience
Those food cultures are also influencing how we eat and serve our food. More platters to share, like mezzes, are making our tables more of a social experience rather than individuals eating their own food at the same table.
This also transforms that social experience into an occasion to be shared and communicated on new media platforms and the food becomes a part of online conversation. Also, one person’s knowledge in local food culture and taste is part of his/her cultural capital — and it enables him/her to gain reputation among peers and followers. Cultural capital on food culture is a merit for a person that’s paving the way to becoming an online influencer.
Photo by Callie Morgan on Unsplash
Food as communication
Similarly, showing cooking skills and interesting food on online media is a way for chefs and restaurants to open up to a global audience and introduce their food, which helped many Middle Eastern individuals to become celebrities. For instance, CZN Burak, who is the owner and chef of Hatay Medeniyetler Sofrası in Istanbul, now has almost eight million followers on Instagram. His followers increased almost one million since last month when I last checked.
Rising Star: Halal food
In addition, Islam is one of the most followed religions in the world with a population of more than 1.8 billion people today, according to The State of Islamic Economy Report 2018/19. It is expected to rise to more than 2.2 billion by 2030 according to Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life. Therefore, Muslim population has a strong presence around the world and that creates a bigger demand for Halal food and other Halal branded products and services. For example, London Halal Food Festival will take place for the fourth time this year with an ever growing number of guests and vendors. Halal concept is not only becoming a big thing for the Muslim community but also for consumers who are looking for cleaner, ethical and sustainable sources of nutrition and food.
Trust issues with big food companies
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
That brings us to another issue, which is affecting people’s perception of food and nutrition: trust in brands and products. In the last few decades, brands and companies have begun to modify and transform so much of the ingredients in food that people started to question if that food was actually healthy and good for them.
For instance, Adnan Durani, CEO and Founder of Saffron Road, has recently said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio that we’re in a crisis now in the food system according to “ a recent report that paints Big Food as the new Big Tobacco, linking the industry to a global obesity epidemic, malnutrition and climate change.”
Increasing rates of cancer, diabetes, obesity and other health conditions are partly related to unhealthy and modified ingredients used in food, which creates a loss of trust towards some brands and companies. The loss of trust against brands has also triggered a search for more natural, untouched, traditionally produced products. This search has a certain significance for Middle Eastern and Halal food to become more popular in the Western world.
As a summary, we can say that the Middle Eastern food culture is entering the global scene big time and there are so many opportunities for brands, companies and entrepreneurs in food and beverage industry. In this sense, we wanted to outline five key trends and insights that create a shift in global food culture and deliver a report that would be valuable even in the years to come.
We would like to hear your feedback so please do contact us either on social media or email us and let us know what you think.
Afiyet olsun! بالهناء و الشفاء | https://medium.com/paktagency/middle-east-invades-the-world-in-a-very-delicious-way-1d50686755ca | ['Serdar Paktin'] | 2019-06-05 11:45:15.846000+00:00 | ['Middle Eastern Food', 'Cultural Insights', 'Halal Food Market', 'Food', 'Food Trends'] |
Google Chrome: Things you should know about! | There are quite a lot of tricks, making one’s Internet surfing effortless. These all handy tips for chrome(one or two for google itself) would let you a smooth browsing experience! So, without any tick away, let’s have a look at them:
1. Chrome Flags -
You can browse flags just by typing ‘chrome://flags’ in the search bar. Flags contain features that are for experiment purposes or in the beta version, which are disabled by default. You just have to enable them!
Some of the best tools in chrome://flags, you can try right now are:
1.1 Force Dark Mode
Love Dark Mode? This feature will render all your web pages in the dark mode so that you can experience a great dark theme on your favorite website.
Does the site where you’re reading this have a dark theme?
1.2 Parallel Downloading
Instead of downloading the block of a file, parallel downloading enables the file download in smaller chunks(as the IDM downloader does), which highly accelerates the speed of downloading a particular file.
1.3 Tab Hover Card Images
This feature from flags allows the user to preview the whole page without landing on that tab. It’s really helpful when you’ve like tons of tabs open and want to land on the desired tab without any failure or when you want to compare two products on different sites.
2. Extensions -
Most probably, you’ll all know about the extensions in chrome and have a few extensions on your browser, they just add some new features to our browser.
You can enable any chrome extension by going to Chrome Web Store .
The best extensions you should have on your browser -
2.1 Chrome Remote Desktop
By using this extension you can control your desktop from other devices(phone, tablet, or any other desktop).
2.2 LastPass
Using this extension, you can save your important passwords for different websites in one place, securely.
2.3 AdBlock Plus
As the name suggests, this extension blocks the majority of the ads from websites as well as from YouTube, blocking viruses and malware.
2.4 Web Developer
This extension is for the developers. It shows a toolbar on every webpage for using different development tools(disable JavaScript or CSS, resize the image, etc.).
2.5 Google Docs Offline
The Majority of the content writers use Google Docs for writing content for others or for themselves. What if you can use Google Docs Offline? Yes, by using this extension you can use Google Docs for editing, creating, or updating a Google Doc file, without using the Internet.
3. Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button -
It’s not a new feature by Google, had since the year 2000.
Now, this feature is irrespective of the browser you are using, you just need to open the google search engine -
This feature has a lot of fun attached to it. You just need to type a keyword and instead of pressing the search button, you’ve to press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, you’ll see some crazy stuff going on there!
Try typing one of these and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button -
1. Google Gravity
2. Google Sphere
3. Do a Barrel roll
4. Google Mirror
There are a lot more…
What happens when you click the button?
4. Shortcuts -
Shortcuts while browsing on the internet lead to boost productivity and efficiency as well.
These shortcuts work only for the desktop-based web experience, as desktop-based browsing is most ideal for heavy tasks (IT NEEDS SHORTCUTS).
Some of my favorites and most useful are:
1. Windows: ctrl + shift + T
Mac: ⌘ + Shift + T
It opens up the recently closed tabs, so if you accidentally close one, you’ll get it back
2. Windows: ctrl + num keys(1–0)
Mac: ⌘ + num keys(1–0)
It makes you land to a specific tab. Say, if you want to open the third tab, you just need to press ctrl + 3. That’s it!
3. Windows: ctrl + W
Mac: ⌘ + W
It closes the current tab.
4. Windows: ctrl + T
Mac: ⌘ + T
Opens a new tab.
5. Windows: ctrl + J
Mac: ⌘ + J
To open the download page.
6. Windows: ctrl + F
Mac: ⌘ + F
Used to search any word on the page.
Which one is your favorite?
- Prakshal Jain
You can put your queries in the comment section below, would be glad to answer your questions! | https://medium.com/@prakshaljain18/google-chrome-things-you-should-know-about-e4df7940bb87 | ['Prakshal Jain'] | 2020-12-25 05:37:22.445000+00:00 | ['Google Analytics', 'Prakshal', 'Google', 'Tips', 'Tips And Tricks'] |
Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy | I love this book! Written by the experts, this book is more informative than “What to Expect When You Are Expecting”. I read both books during my pregnancy. Once my son was born, I read “The Mayo Clinic’s Guide to Your Baby’s First Year”, which was also very informative. The internet is dark and full of misinformation, but seriously, it is. If you want a reliable, well-researched source of information regarding conception, pregnancy, delivery, and post-delivery, this is a good place to start. It’s not a hard read; there’s lots of pictures, diagrams, and charts covering female anatomy, diet, and so on. I would recommend this book to anyone who’s never been pregnant before. I recommend anything written by the Mayo Clinic or the American Academy of Pediatrics. You can also find helpful information online…just search Mayo Clinic and the topic you are wondering about. I love that this book covers ALL options without judgement just facts. All Natural in your house to scheduled C-section in the hospital and everything in between. It was just updated and covers the most recent birthing options, exercises, lactation options, and labor education. I am reading with my first pregnancy. This book makes be feel better prepared and not as scared of what is to come. Thank you Mayo Clinic! Files.1893005607.PDF: http://bit.ly/2DBO1Un | https://medium.com/@extrawords/mayo-clinic-guide-to-a-healthy-pregnancy-c488a54e5426 | [] | 2020-12-25 12:31:34.842000+00:00 | ['Healthy', 'Pregnancy'] |
How to make relationship with JavaScript | Hello programmers, how’s going today? Are you fine?
Are you depressed in single life? Don’t worry. I am introducing a new cute girl with you. I am overwhelmed (ক্রাশ খাইছি ) seeing her . )
Her name.startsWith('J') && name.endsWith('t') her name is "Javascript” . So Let’s try to date with her 😀
* Her Info [History of my crush]
In September 1995, a Netscape programmer named Brandan Eich developed a new scripting language in just 10 days 🤯. It was originally named Mocha , but quickly became known as LiveScript and, later, JavaScript your crush 😎
How is her Characteristics ?
JavaScript often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that conforms to the ECMAScript specification . JavaScript is high-level, often just-in-time (JIT) compiled, and multi-paradigm. It has curly-bracket syntax, dynamic typing , prototype-based object-orientation , and first-class functions .
As a multi-paradigm language, JavaScript supports event-driven , functional, and imperative programming styles . It has application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures , and the Document Object Model (DOM) .
What will she make for You?
Sorry to say 😭 She won’t make Pizza for you . But She will make your life easier & smarter 🤓
She can make Single Page Applications `
` She can build Progressive Web Apps . (PWA is cutest sister of her )
. (PWA is cutest sister of her ) She can communicate with Server in background by Ajax
She can make Hybrid even Native Apps for You 😝 (Her Sisters: ` React Native , Ionic etc )
etc ) She can make Desktop Applications (By her elder brother : Electron JS)
She builds web application for you , works on server side too .
You can use MongoDB as NoSQL Database which uses JavaScript like syntax 🎃
as Database which uses JavaScript like syntax 🎃 She works so hard . She is used in Machine Learning too 🎃 Trust me & search Tensorflow.js
too 🎃 Trust me & search Even she is used in Internet Of Things (IoT) . & Robotics Platform (Don’t trust me . Check : http://johnny-five.io )
Now is it her weakness ,she can’t make Pizza for you?
Javascript has big community which is larger than The Pacific Ocean 😱
She has The World’s Largest Software Registry (Library) called NPM .
Day by day how much packages is being created you can’t imagine . It seems they will go ahead than population growth in Bangladesh .
* How to preparation proposing her 🤦♀️
She is not senior girls you like . She is a interpreted at the same time Just In Time compiled programming language.
You need browser for client side JavaScript . Or Node installed Computer/Mobile/Freeze/TV whatever you have 🧜♀️
( Setup Node Environment tutorial here)
& run this code in client & server side too.
console.log("Hello JavaScript , I love you. Will you marry me?")
If she runs correctly simply means she also loves you .Carry on man. It’s beginning of your relationship. Dive into deep. Congratulations 😊
* Give her cute name [String]
Name, Text is called String in JavaScript . People says text but you have to say String . Even you have to write string using Single Quotation '' or Double Quotation "” or backticks sign `` to impress her 😋
How much character needs to write your crush’s name ? run this console.log("Javascript".length); // 10
You decided your name’s first letter must be included in her name . otherwise you will do 0 million dollar break up with her .
Run this code:
let crushName = “JavaScript”;
let myName = “Samayun”;
let myFirstLetter = myName.charAt(0); //return 1st char of string
let haveMyFirstLetterMatched = crushName.includes(myFirstLetter) ; if (haveMyFirstLetterMatched) {
console.log("I will stay with her 😘 ");
} else {
console.log("Break Up. Break Up. 0 Million Dollar Breakup 😬 ");
}
How to rename your cute crush’s name?
let crushName = "Jerin Khan";
let myGivenName = crushName.replace("Jerin Khan", "Babu 😚");
console.log(myGivenName); // now ask her Babu Khaicho?
Call her shortly using substring method. Suppose her name is “Babui Pakhi” call her “babu”
let crushName = "Babui Pakhi";
let myGivenName = crushName.substring(0, 4);
console.log(myGivenName); // now ask her Babu Khaicho?
* Calculates marriage cost [Math]
After spending 2 years realationship you decided to marry her. But you are a junior developer . You need so money for marriage cost . Don’t worry javascript will help you calculate marriage cost . You don’t need any cashiar to compute these.
You wanna buy a Red Benaroshee Sharee for her . How is your budget? Shop manager asked 30450.500 . But you have 30450 TK . So use Math.floor(Number) method
let shareePrice = 30450.500
console.log(Math.floor(shareePrice));
You have million dollars , don’t have money problem . So you will buy unlimited sharee 😁 Calculate all sharee 🥻 price . Suppose you wanna bought 30 sharee for your wife , her sister , her sister , her nephew , her cousin etc.
You don’t need any assistant cashiar bro . JS will do for you.Run this program
let totalShareeCount = 30
let everyShareePrice = 25000.800
let totalCost = Math.round(totalShareeCount * everyShareePrice)
console.log(totalCost); // 750024
Make sure your wife’s sharee 🥻 is the most expensive . Your you will get million dollar divorce . So be careful. Dont’t worry JS will help you to make sure.
let jamiaShareePrice = 15000;
let lamiaShareePrice = 25000;
let dariaShareePrice = 25000;
let myWifeShareePrice = 35000; let mostExpensive = Math.max(jamiaShareePrice,lamiaShareePrice, dariaShareePrice, myWifeShareePrice); if(mostExpensive === myWifeShareePrice){
console.log("You will be a good husband 🤩");
} else {
console.log("🥵 You are getting divorced very soon 🥶");
}
* Baby Plan [Number , Array]
Did you plan about your baby names before?
Now just make an array of baby names you & your wife likes & run this program .You get your selected baby name 😀
let childNames = [ "Halima Sultana", "Turna Hatun", "Bala Hatun","Samia Parvin","Tasmiya Jahan", "Taha Tabassum", "Isabella"]; let randomIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * childNames.length); console.log(childNames[randomIndex])
We are not sure your baby will be boy or girl . I gave example of girl baby name. So is javascript capable to select a nice name for your any child however he/she is boy or girl doesn’t matter?
When the baby will came , just run this program . If don’t get proper result re-run program until you get your baby name 😃
let girlChildNames = [ "Halima Sultana", "Turna Hatun", "Bala Hatun","Samia Parvin","Tasmiya Jahan", "Taha Tabassum", "Isabella"]; let boyChildNames = [ "Salman", "Amir", "Shahrukh","Salahuddin Yusuf Ayubi","Nasir Jamshed", "Sakib Al Hasan", "Tarek Zamil"]; let allBabyNames = girlChildNames.concat(boyChildNames); let randomIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * allBabyNames.length); console.log(allBabyNames[randomIndex])
* The Endgame
You were single 🙆♀️ JavaScript made you mingle 👩❤️👨.
Now you have wife , childs 👩👩👧👦. Just Thanks to JavaScript & me.
Thank You ♥️ | https://medium.com/@samayunmc/how-to-make-relationship-with-javascript-e3e7c134dfe0 | ['Samayun Miah Chowdhury'] | 2021-05-05 15:20:19.750000+00:00 | ['Javascript Number', 'String', 'JavaScript', 'Javascript Math', 'Arrays'] |
What I Learned About Seizures When I Took Over My Son’s Treatment | My son has experienced a febrile convulsion at four years of age — a high fever seizure. It is (supposedly) an episode of brain contracting, caused by a high fever (above 39°C/102,2°F). I have witnessed doctors being very skeptical and timid about febrile convulsions.
According to our doctors — we ought to do everything possible to prevent potentially repeating febrile convulsions. They were sure that these appear as a result of high fever. As they did not want the temperature to rise above 38,5°C (101,3°F), they immediately administered the antipyretic.
I was a little skeptical about the therapy, having considered the sudden spikes in temperature to be a more viable reason to result in convulsion. Every time the antipyretic eased off, the body started to lift the temperature, causing a temperature spike, putting my son in danger to experience another seizure.
I explained my perspective, but doctors disagreed. They did not want to allow the temperature to rise above 38,5°C (101,3°F). So they continued to administer the antipyretic. Asking the doctors for a reasonable explanation remained unanswered.
Antipyretic for the fear? Whose fear?
I found an article about fever and convulsions in a national online medical journal. The Head of the pediatrics department, a respected university professor, expressed his concerns about the prevailing fear among medical society towards fever.
He described the highly probable adverse effects of administering antipyretics and high fever correlation with the convulsions. I particularly remember his appeal to medical professionals to recognize fever as the natural mechanism of our immune system — the ally, not the enemy — and not to mess with it.
I remember the poster on the local pediatric clinic door, only a week after our hospital experience, explaining how to let the fever do its job:
“Fever is your ally, not the enemy.”
The poster had to be designed and printed at least one month before. The article — and the appeal by the professor — was posted and spread among medical professionals at least ten years ago. How come our doctors were still so anxious about the fever a week ago?
After all, he explicitly appealed to professionals to consider the unjustified fear.
Questions that bothered me were: “Are febrile convulsions symptoms, side effects, or the cause for some illness or disorder?” and “What causes them?”
I did some research on febrile convulsions. Every medical study emphasized trying to stabilize body temperature. Seizures supposedly occur not due to high body temperature but due to its fast elevation. The brain can not handle that easily.
I was still in doubt about the inability of the body to tolerate its own mechanisms. But I left that one for another time.
Al natural organisms strive to optimize their energy consumption. When necessary, the organism triggers a rise in body temperature and wants to maintain it no longer than needed.
When using antipyretics, we paralyze our thermo-regulating system. After the effects of antipyretics diminish, our organism starts to regain that specific temperature as soon as possible. And our doctors did just the same.
Head of the pediatrics department
Disagreeing with them, I decided to contact the before mentioned professor directly to discuss and verify my perspective. I explained my impediments towards the reasons for febrile convulsions. I asked for his opinion. Professor fully agreed that sudden spikes in brain temperature — and not high fever itself — are the most probable cause for the seizures.
He also explained that for more than a decade, he wrote articles, lectured, and warned his colleagues about it, with little success. Fear of fever and potential damage is still pretty much present among medical professionals. And the fear mostly comes from a failure to understand this protective mechanism.
He mentioned that in his +40 years-long medical career, he has never experienced a (neurologically healthy) child to die of a high temperature, except for external heat sources (e.g., baby left in a hot car on a parking lot).
Antibiotics for a viral infection?
Similarly, the overuse of antibiotics is widely recognized and (still) a serious concern. Despite universal agreement that antibiotic overprescribing is a problem, the practice continues. (MDEdge, 2017)
Antibiotic overprescribing is most prominent in outpatient settings such as clinics and emergency departments. Most inappropriately for viral respiratory infections, such as viral bronchitis, otitis, and sinusitis. (CIDRAP)
Health professionals — well aware of the present-day overuse and risks associated with it — continually inform the public.
But in our case, doctors preventively prescribed the antibiotics. None of the routine tests showed any signs of bacterial infection. But they wanted to overtake the bacteria anyway — just in case it shows up later? What about the side effects and potentially permanent damage of just in case?
After four days, still no change in my son’s health? Their new diagnosis — atypical bacterial pneumonia. They concluded they need more powerful antibiotics. I disagreed with their diagnosis, and consequently, they discharged us from the hospital. They wrote in the discharge letter: inability to achieve progress because parents rejected diagnosis and therapy.
I mean, who are these people?!? Every check and test indicated against their diagnosis, but they still could not consider being wrong?
We went to the university medical center for a second opinion. We received a diagnosis of mild viral infection and got sent home.
How damaging is a fever?
I wrote in detail about fever and fever management in another article.
In short, a study (WJCP, 2012) concluded that the temperature does not climb up relentlessly and does not exceed an upper limit of 42°C. Within that limit, there is no evidence that fever is injurious to tissue. Febrile seizures are usually benign and do not cause brain damage.
If high fever spikes cause febrile seizures, treating the latter can not solve their cause.
Conclusion
I researched a lot of medical literature and concluded that medical professionals are, too, in an unenviable position. Their rigid system can not keep up with the pace of modern exponential growth of change, ideas, and technology. A general internist would need to read 19 articles per day, 365 days per year — to stay up to date with all medical advances.
What can one do in such turbulent times of growth and change? Stay awake and attentive; help medical professionals, do your due diligence, and be responsible for your health, instead of blindly relying on them.
I might be wrong. It feels very contradictory and often conflicts with the prevalent beliefs. What you take away from my thoughts is entirely up to you. Build your own perspective and understanding.
I am not a medical expert to give advice. I only collect research and studies from medical professionals, link them together, trying to understand. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/what-i-learned-about-seizures-when-i-took-over-my-sons-treatment-d851a0735330 | [] | 2021-02-18 06:59:57.782000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Children', 'Parenting', 'Body', 'Life Lessons'] |
How state agencies improved the digital experience to serve Washingtonians better | Charged with a mission to serve the public, Washington state agencies consistently strive to find new ways to deliver a more effective customer experience. Here are some highlights of how agencies recently restructured and changed the way they deliver services, offer information to taxpayers and provide a more user-friendly digital experience.
Health Care Authority
An estimated 150,000 school employees will enroll in the new School Employees Benefits Board Program this fall. To support employees in this shift to a statewide health benefits program, the Health Care Authority is offering innovative online tools.
This is a screenshot of what school employees will be able to see — the online benefits fair tool — starting Oct. 1 on the HCA website. (Image courtesy of HCA)
HCA built a “virtual benefits fair,” where employees can use their computer, tablet or smartphone to browse online booths and learn about medical plan options, among other things. The booths will offer videos, downloadable content, provider searches and other information to help employees choose the right plans for them and their dependents.
For those who want more guidance, HCA is offering an online benefits advisor tool that asks employees questions about their health care needs, then suggests which medical, dental and vision plans might make the most sense for them.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) launched a new website in March. With nearly 70 percent of its website users visiting on mobile or tablet devices, WDFW built its new website with a user-centered design philosophy in mind, emphasizing a mobile-first approach for improved user experience and accessibility. | https://medium.com/wagovernor/how-state-agencies-improved-the-digital-experience-to-serve-washingtonians-better-91e1706e0113 | ['Wa Governor S Office'] | 2019-09-13 19:42:03.730000+00:00 | ['Digital', 'Mobile', 'Government', 'Customer Experience', 'Design'] |
Exploratory Data Analysis of the Airbnb market in Chania | Balos lagoon, Chania
As an Airbnb host in Chania, Crete, I was always astonished by the increase in Airbnb rentals on my island. Below is my data analysis explanation to help understand how that market has evolved and what matters the most now.
Let’s take a look at the following questions:
● What are the different types of properties in Chania? Do they vary by neighbourhood?
● Which cities are rated highly by guests?
● What is the distribution of prices by neighbourhood?
● What are the characteristics of the listings which sell at the highest price?
● Factors that are correlated the most with Airbnb superhosts
Understanding the dominance of Airbnb in Chania, Crete
We began by looking at property type distribution and how that varies from city to city. Most of the Airbnb rentals in Chania are entire apartments, villas or houses (75%) primarily located in the city in the centre of the region. Check out the graph below.
Since 2012 Airbnb has increased in popularity as an alternative to hotels. It is now one of the world’s most popular platforms for short term rentals. Demand for Airbnb increased dramatically in 2016. In 2019 Airbnb peaked with more than 30k reviews.
Location is a major factor. Average Airbnb ratings for the Chania region are 4.85, with Gaudos and Kandanos doing even better at 5 and 4.9 respectively.
Which city can charge the most?
The average price per person is in the 25–35 euros per night range across all cities. Chania and Platanias are the two cities with most rentals outside of this range. This makes sense. Both are very popular with tourists and are close to famous beaches and landmarks. We looked at the average price per person, by property type, bearing in mind that villas and houses are more expensive but can accommodate more people.
What are the characteristics of the listings which sell at the highest price?
After identifying the price distribution of properties, we looked at the common attributes of the top rental properties. We fitted a simple linear model after removing multicollinear features that have a VIF score above 6.
As expected, the most expensive properties per person were villas and rooms in boutique hotels. These had excellent locations and a plethora of services from “Superhosts”.
Attributes correlated to Superhosts
Superhosts usually charge a higher rate per person (check the graph above). We looked at the most correlated factors associated with Superhosts. Hosts with the most reviews, fastest response rates, top overall ratings and highest review scores are most likely to achieve “Superhost” status.
Summary:
● Demand for Airbnb has increased dramatically since 2012. 2019 has been the best year so far.
● Most of the properties in the Chania region are apartments and villas located in Chania city.
● The average price per person ranges from 25–35 euros per night across all cities. Chania and Platanias have the highest range of prices above this.
● Superhosts that rent Villas or Rooms in Boutique hotels in Chania, Platanias or Kandanos cities tend to charge the most.
● To become a “Superhost’’ it helps to have lots of top reviews, a fast response rating, and a high acceptance level.
Data sourced from: InsideAirbnb website; http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html which hosts publicly available data from the Airbnb site.
This project is available on Github: https://github.com/vProto/DS_Projects | https://medium.com/@vangelisprotopapadakis/exploratory-data-analysis-of-the-airbnb-market-in-chania-f495f79b693 | ['Evangelos Protopapadakis'] | 2021-09-07 02:08:45.485000+00:00 | ['Airbnb', 'Data Analysis', 'Chania', 'Greece'] |
Announcing the Launch of AllianceBlock Liquidity Mining | If you’re reading this, you’re probably already aware of the numerous advantages of cryptocurrencies and digital assets when compared to their fiat equivalents. From enabling global money transfers in the blink of an eye to eliminating costly banking services, crypto, and digital assets quite clearly represent our future as a collective means of exchange.
However, the potential of digital assets to have this revolutionary impact on our daily financial lives has been treated with some skepticism from the broader public and traditional financial institutions. Not going to happen, they say; crypto assets are simply too volatile to be reliable as a means of exchange for goods and services. And, until now, they may have had a point.
Beneath the surface, however, there are a number of good reasons for the historical volatility exhibited by certain cryptocurrencies. And among those reasons, lack of liquidity stands out as one of the primary factors.
Liquidity — High and Low
A quick refresher on liquidity for those who are unfamiliar with the concept. The term “liquidity” refers to the extent to which a market permits assets to be bought and sold at stable prices. As a general rule, if a market is said to have “lower liquidity”, then it can be expected to be more volatile (especially when large orders are placed), with frequent and drastic price changes for assets. On the contrary, if a market boasts higher liquidity or is said to be “more liquid” then it is less volatile overall, with asset prices more stable as a result.
Lack of liquidity has been an ongoing problem in the crypto markets — and has acted as a primary contributor to price volatility and the inefficiency of accumulation and liquidation of tokens. Recently, though, exchanges and projects have circumvented the issue of lack of liquidity through a novel process known as “liquidity mining”. Put simply, liquidity mining is a network participation strategy in which a user provides additional capital to the market in return for liquidity provisioning fees and other rewards. By boosting liquidity, liquidity mining ensures that digital assets can be traded at a stable price. As a further bonus, liquidity mining also allows the general public to participate in the market making — contributing to providing liquidity to the markets — for the first time.
AllianceBlock Liquidity Mining
Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of AllianceBlock’s very own liquidity mining product that will be released on the 7th of November. The AllianceBlock Liquidity Mining product allows users to provide liquidity through a number of different protocols, starting with Uniswap, and stake their liquidity pool tokens for a reward in ALBT and later a potential additional reward from our strategic partners.
Fully audited by leading cybersecurity solution-provider, CertiK, the leading provider of end-to-end cybersecurity solutions, the solution integrates completely with Metamask, enabling participants to quickly and easily accrue rewards (Check out the CertiK report here — note that all issues mentioned in the report are solved, even the informational ones) .What’s more, all features from managing liquidity to managing rewards (claiming and withdrawing) will be presented to the users in a user-friendly UI. Following the launch of the product, a full description of the user journey, how the product will work and how it will be released will be made available.
“We are excited to be the official security provider for the world’s first regulated infrastructure provider for decentralized capital markets. Security is a top priority for AllianceBlock who is always in accordance with modern industry standards and CertiK security recommendations.” — Yvan Nasr, Global Head of Professional Services, CertiK.
Program Overview
75,000 ALBT will be released weekly to every pool over the coming month (amounting to 900,000 ALBT). Initial Liquidity Mining pools are as follows: ALBT/ETH and ALBT/USDT on Uniswap (and later also ALBT/ETH/USDC on Balancer) The release schedule for the next month will be released in 3 weeks and every month after that The liquidity mining program will run for 6–9 months, depending on the cryptocurrency market sentiments and needs. Rewards will be decreased gradually every month In our next product release that will take place very soon, users will be able to stake their reward and hence earn more reward or inject it back to the liquidity pool to benefit from compounded APY
Our liquidity mining partnership program will allow us to support multiple asset pool rewards on Balancer and we’ll be integrating with additional DEX protocols too. More info about the liquidity mining partnership program will be released soon.
We’re very excited to launch this and for our community to get involved and experience liquidity mining as they never have before. Over time, we’re focused on continuing to develop this solution to create the next generation of liquidity mining that will truly shake up the space, so stay tuned! | https://medium.com/@allianceblock/announcing-the-launch-of-allianceblock-liquidity-mining-dc8b8accee8e | [] | 2020-11-09 17:10:39.544000+00:00 | ['Defi', 'Liquidity', 'Albt', 'Allianceblock', 'Mining'] |
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! | Today the world is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day!
In light of this day of appreciation for the Emerald Isle, we wanted to present some of the ways in which Irish Studies scholars are attempting to reappraise the concept of Ireland and Irishness, sometimes employing a French lens, which is an important task in a world assailed by globalisation and a type of enforced uniformity, which the French have resisted better than most.
The space of Irish Studies is greatly expanding and new viewpoints and studies are continuously being portrayed touching on Ireland’s cultural, social and political development at this difficult point in time Exploring the concept of patrimoine, a French word used to denote cultural heritage, traditional customs and practices, we can seethe extent to which this concept impacts on France and Ireland. In terms of France, we might look at fashion, wines, gastronomy, literature, philosophy, regional specificities, architecture and café culture, while in Ireland the emphasis might be on the pubs, the writers (traditionally quite often to be found in said pubs!), the fighting spirit, the greenness, the historic struggle with our near neighbours, the beef, the Guinness. There are strong connections between the two countries and this is manifested in the way in which they underline and commodify their respective heritages. Both countries have a rich and diverse cultural legacy that remains essential and unique, and patrimoine forms part of culture, and is a means of mediating that culture.
While exploring Franco-Irish relations allows insight into one aspect of culture, scholars are re-examining Irish Famine scholarship, adopting a broader interdisciplinary approach that includes ground-breaking demographical, economic, cultural and literary research on poverty, poor relief and class relations during this devastating food crisis. Incorporating a comparative European framework, as well as exploring the issue of class in relation to the British and North American Famine diaspora, Marguerite Corporaal and Peter Gray have established a significant new stage for the study of Irish history. | https://medium.com/peter-lang/happy-st-patricks-day-95dede950764 | ['Peter Lang'] | 2019-03-17 10:01:00.637000+00:00 | ['Oxford', 'Irish', 'Ireland', 'Culture', 'St Patricks Day'] |
Separating Business and Personal Money | I’ve been self-employed for nearly six years, but I didn’t set up a business bank account until earlier this year.
There were plenty of reasons why I didn’t use one:
They’re not obligatory
As a sole trader, it’s legal to run a cash-only basis that doesn’t have a bank account. I’m not advocating this, but I saw a separate bank account as extra admin.
As a sole trader, it’s legal to run a cash-only basis that doesn’t have a bank account. I’m not advocating this, but I saw a separate bank account as extra admin. Cost
When I became self-employed, business accounts were expensive and my income fluctuated greatly. There are still plenty of expensive business accounts about, but plenty of newer banks offer free accounts with generous exchange rates.
When I became self-employed, business accounts were expensive and my income fluctuated greatly. There are still plenty of expensive business accounts about, but plenty of newer banks offer free accounts with generous exchange rates. Complexity
As I’d only ever used my personal account, I wasn’t sure how to consolidate everything in my accounting software and claim things like working from home expenses.
As I’d only ever used my personal account, I wasn’t sure how to consolidate everything in my accounting software and claim things like working from home expenses. Status quo
My system had worked for a long time and clients had my existing banking details: I didn’t want to upset the apple cart.
My system had worked for a long time and clients had my existing banking details: I didn’t want to upset the apple cart. Business name
This might seem trivial, but I hadn’t decided if I’d stick with my business name — using a personal account let me keep things flexible.
Getting serious
Despite my previous inertia, I decided to start looking into business bank accounts. I felt now was the time to set this up for a range of reasons:
A business bank account is the first step to creating some separation between my money and the business’ money.
It looks more professional
Since setting up bank feeds to my account software, I was more comfortable with how everything could be consolidated
Setting up a business bank account is cheaper and easier than ever
I’d learned that most personal accounts don’t allow for business use in T&Cs.
Choosing a provider
There are lots of business bank accounts on the market, many of which are free to set up. To whittle down the options, I created a set of criteria.
I wanted an account that:
Is an actual bank!*
Is free or very cheap
Have an app that notified of payments received
Integrate with my accounting software
Offer phone and email support
* NB: Many newer banks aren’t actually banks, so don’t offer the FSCS protection if the bank was to go under.
The results
After opening the account, I emailed my clients to let them know about the change of emails. Then began the unenviable task of changing the payment details for the apps, services and subscriptions I use in my business.
This turns out to be a good opportunity to cull some services I was no longer using. Emailing my clients also offered the perfect chance to introduce GoCardless for recurring payments.
Since opening this account, I’ve noticed a few benefits. As my business’ money is now separate, it’s easier to keep track of finances, save money for business projects I might want to invest in and get an idea of the cash flow at a glance.
It’s also much quicker to submit my tax returns. There’s still the occasional personal expense, but now I can quickly run through income and expenses from a single account.
Despite the time changing payment details and direct debits, opening a separate business bank account has been a worthwhile exercise. In the grand scheme of thing, a business bank account offers small benefits, but it’s absolutely worth it. | https://medium.com/work-notes/separating-business-and-personal-money-7319e29e868a | ['Dave Smyth'] | 2019-07-06 08:05:08.868000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Money', 'Freelancing', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Work'] |
Looking Back on Friends | When Friends premiered, there weren’t too many shows starring people in their 20’s who were still trying to figure out what to do with their lives. At the time, shows usually focused on older characters or those who had their careers more figured out.
That’s an essential aspect of understanding the show. Friends takes place during a significant part of one’s life; their 20s. Until this moment, it can feel like our lives are dictated by adults telling us how we should live it. They tell us what to eat, when to sleep, when we can go out, what we can do, and so many other things. It can start to feel like we have very little agency in our own lives. That is why when we finally leave the proverbial nest, it is such a momentous occasion.
When we meet them, the group is living in that sweet period of life when you finally have freedom and independence but haven’t yet acquired the multitude of responsibilities that comes with adulthood. The characters have left their family but haven’t yet started their own. During this time, our friends are who we tend to lean on the most and are effectively our families. And that is what the titular friends are. Joey, Chandler, Ross, Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel are each other’s chosen family. (Except Ross and Monica, who are actually family.)
Throughout the series, we watched these friends play the roles of surrogate family in each other’s lives. At the beginning of the show, we find Rachel at a place familiar to many. Unsure of what to do with her life, she decided to go from daughter to wife. She had spent her life being financially taken care of by her father and was getting ready for her — soon to be — husband to do the same thing.
But when she realizes that isn’t what she wants for her life; she turns to Monica, who takes her in. At that moment, Monica acts as a parent to Rachel and, along with the gang, becomes her family. Throughout the first season, we see the friends take care of Rachel how family often does.
They encourage her to rip up her father’s credit cards and, by extension, her dependence on him. They are often there to help her out financially. When they see how little she makes as a waitress, they, without hesitation, give her money in the forms of very generous tips. When she can’t afford to go back home for Thanksgiving, they all chip in to help her buy a plane ticket. | https://medium.com/fan-fare/looking-back-on-friends-54dd130b8e6 | ['Felix Quiñonez Jr.'] | 2020-09-29 23:03:39.707000+00:00 | ['TV', 'TV Series', 'Pop Culture', 'Television', 'Friends'] |
具有「中國特色」的東亞史──讀《火槍與帳簿：早期經濟全球化時代的中國與東亞世界》 | in Both Sides of the Table | https://medium.com/%E4%B8%8D%E6%98%AF%E5%9C%A8%E8%B2%B7%E6%9B%B8-%E5%B0%B1%E6%98%AF%E5%9C%A8%E8%B2%B7%E6%9B%B8%E7%9A%84%E8%B7%AF%E4%B8%8A/%E5%85%B7%E6%9C%89-%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B%E7%89%B9%E8%89%B2-%E7%9A%84%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%9E%E5%8F%B2-%E8%AE%80-%E7%81%AB%E6%A7%8D%E8%88%87%E8%B3%AC%E7%B0%BF-%E6%97%A9%E6%9C%9F%E7%B6%93%E6%BF%9F%E5%85%A8%E7%90%83%E5%8C%96%E6%99%82%E4%BB%A3%E7%9A%84%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B%E8%88%87%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%9E%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C-a7ea87be37e0 | [] | 2019-11-12 05:02:28.349000+00:00 | ['History', 'Book Review', 'China', 'East Asia'] |
White Box AI: Interpretability Techniques | While in the previous article of the series we introduced the notion of White Box AI and explained different dimensions of interpretability, in this post we’ll be more practice-oriented and turn to techniques that can make algorithm output more explainable and the models more transparent, increasing trust in the applied models.
The two pillars of ML-driven predictive analysis are data and robust models, and these are the focus of attention in increasing interpretability. The first step towards White Box AI is data visualization because seeing your data will help you to get inside your dataset, which is a first step toward validating, explaining, and trusting models. At the same time, having explainable white-box models with transparent inner workings, followed by techniques that can generate explanations for the most complex types of predictive models such as model visualizations, reason codes, and variable importance measures.
Data Visualization
As we remember, good data science always starts with good data and with ensuring its quality and relevance for subsequent model training.
Unfortunately, most datasets are difficult to see and understand because they have too many variables and many rows. Plotting many dimensions is technically possible, but it does not improve the human understanding of complex datasets. Of course, there are numerous ways to visualize datasets and we discussed them in our dedicated article. However, in this overview, we’ll rely on the experts’ opinions and stick to those selected by Hall and Gill in their book “An Introduction to Machine Learning Interpretability”.
Most of these techniques have the capacity to illustrate all of a data set in just two dimensions, which is important in machine learning because most ML algorithms would automatically model high-degree interactions between multiple variables.
Glyphs
Glyphs are visual symbols used to represent different values or data attributes with the color, texture, or alignment. Using bright colors or unique alignments for events of interest or outliers is a good method for making important or unusual data attributes clear in a glyph representation. Besides, when arranged in a certain way, glyphs can be used to represent rows of a data set. In the figure below, each grouping of four glyphs can be either a row of data or an aggregated group of rows in a data set.
Figure 1. Glyphs arranged to represent many rows of a data set. Image courtesy of Ivy Wang and the H2O.ai team.
Correlation Graphs
A correlation graph is a two-dimensional representation of the relationships (i.e. correlation) in a data set. Even data sets with tens of thousands of variables can be displayed in two dimensions using this technique.
For the visual simplicity of correlation graphs, absolute weights below a certain threshold are not displayed. The node size is determined by a node’s number of connections (node degree), its color is determined by a graph community calculation, and the node position is defined by a graph force field algorithm. Correlation graphs show groups of correlated variables, help us identify irrelevant variables, and discover or verify important relationships that machine learning models should incorporate.
Figure 2. A correlation graph representing loans made by a large financial firm. Figure courtesy of Patrick Hall and the H2O.ai team.
In a supervised model built for the data represented in the figure above, we would expect variable selection techniques to pick one or two variables from the light green, blue, and purple groups, we would expect variables with thick connections to the target to be important variables in the model, and we would expect a model to learn that unconnected variables like CHANNEL_Rare not very important.
2-D projections
Of course, 2-D projection is not merely one technique and there exist any ways and techniques for projecting the rows of a data set from a usually high-dimensional original space into a more visually understandable 2- or 3-D space two or three dimensions, such as:
Data sets containing images, text, or even business data with many variables can be difficult to visualize as a whole. These projection techniques try to represent the rows of high-dimensional data projecting them into a representative low-dimensional space and visualizing using the scatter plot technique. A high-quality projection visualized in a scatter plot is expected to exhibit key structural elements of a data set, such as clusters, hierarchy, sparsity, and outliers.
Figure 3. Two-dimensional projections of the 784-dimensional MNIST data set using (left) Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and (right) a stacked denoising autoencoder. Image courtesy of Patrick Hall and the H2O.ai team.
Projections can add trust if they are used to confirm machine learning modeling results. For instance, if known hierarchies, classes, or clusters exist in training or test data sets and these structures are visible in 2-D projections, it is possible to confirm that a machine learning model is labeling these structures correctly. Additionally, it shows if similar attributes of structures are projected relatively near one another and different attributes of structures are projected relatively far from one another. Such results should also be stable under minor perturbations of the training or test data, and projections from perturbed versus non-perturbed samples can be used to check for stability or for potential patterns of change over time.
Partial dependence plots
Partial dependence plots show how ML response functions change based on the values of one or two independent variables, while averaging out the effects of all other independent variables. Partial dependence plots with two independent variables are particularly useful for visualizing complex types of variable interactions between the independent variables. They can be used to verify monotonicity of response functions under monotonicity constraints, as well as to see the nonlinearity, non-monotonicity, and two-way interactions in very complex models. They can also enhance trust when displayed relationships conform to domain knowledge expectations. Partial dependence plots are global in terms of the rows of a data set, but local in terms of the independent variables.
Individual conditional expectation (ICE) plots, a newer and less spread adaptation of partial dependence plots, can be used to create more localized explanations using the same ideas as partial dependence plots.
Figure 4. One-dimensional partial dependence plots from a gradient boosted tree ensemble model of the California housing data set. Image courtesy Patrick Hall and the H2O.ai team.
Residual analysis
Residuals refer to the difference between the recorded value of a dependent variable and the predicted value of a dependent variable for every row in a data set. In theory, the residuals of a well-fit model should be randomly distributed because good models will account for most phenomena in a data set, except for random error. Therefore, if models are producing randomly distributed residuals, this is an indication of a well-fit, dependable, trustworthy model. However, if strong patterns are visible in plotted residuals, there are problems with your data, your model, or both. Breaking out a residual plot by independent variables can additionally expose more granular information about residuals and assist in reasoning through the cause of non-random patterns.
Figure 5. Screenshot from an example residual analysis application. Image courtesy of Micah Stubbs and the H2O.ai team.
Seeing structures and relationships in a data set makes those structures and relationships easier to understand and makes up a first step to knowing if a model’s answers are trustworthy.
Techniques for Creating White-Box Models
Decision trees
Decision trees, predicting the value of a target variable based on several input variables, are probably the most obvious way to ensure interpretability. They are directed graphs in which each interior node corresponds to an input variable. Each terminal node or leaf node represents a value of the target variable given the values of the input variables represented by the path from the root to the leaf. The major benefit of decision trees is that they can reveal relationships between the input and target variable with “Boolean-like” logic and they can be easily interpreted by non-experts by displaying them graphically. However, decision trees can create very complex nonlinear, nonmonotonic functions. Therefore, to ensure interpretability, they should be restricted to shallow depth and binary splits.
eXplainable Neural Networks
In contrast to decision trees, neural networks are often considered the least transparent of black-box models. However, the recent work in XNN implementation and explaining artificial neural network (ANN) predictions may render that characteristic obsolete. Many of the breakthroughs in ANN explanation were made possible thanks to the straightforward calculation of derivatives of the trained ANN response function with regard to input variables provided by deep learning toolkits such as Tensorflow. With the help of such derivatives, the trained ANN response function prediction can be disaggregated into input variable contributions for any observation. XNNs can model extremely nonlinear, nonmonotonic phenomena or they can be used as surrogate models to explain other nonlinear, non-monotonic models, potentially increasing the fidelity of global and local surrogate model techniques.
Monotonic gradient-boosted machines (GBMs)
Gradient boosting is an algorithm that produces a prediction model in the form of an ensemble of weak prediction models, typically decision trees. Used for regression and classification tasks, it is potentially appropriate for most traditional data mining and predictive modeling applications, even in regulated industries and for consistent reason code generation provided it builds monotonic functions. Monotonicity constraints can improve GBMs interpretability by enforcing a uniform splitting strategy in constituent decision trees, where binary splits of a variable in one direction always increase the average value of the dependent variable in the resultant child node, and binary splits of the variable in the other direction always decrease the average value of the dependent variable in the other resultant child node. Understanding is increased by enforcing straightforward relationships between input variables and the prediction target. Trust is increased when monotonic relationships, reason codes, and detected interactions are parsimonious with domain expertise or reasonable expectations.
Alternative regression white-box modeling approaches
There exist many modern techniques to augment traditional, linear modeling methods. Such models as elastic net, GAM, and quantile regression, usually produce linear, monotonic response functions with globally interpretable results similar to traditional linear models but with a boost in predictive accuracy.
Penalized (elastic net) regression
As an alternative to old-school regression models, penalized regression techniques usually combine L1/LASSO penalties for variable selection purposes and Tikhonov/L2/ridge penalties for robustness in a technique known as elastic net. Penalized regression minimizes constrained objective functions to find the best set of regression parameters for a given data set that would model a linear relationship and satisfy certain penalties for assigning correlated or meaningless variables to large regression coefficients. For instance, L1/LASSO penalties drive unnecessary regression parameters to zero, selecting only a small, representative subset of parameters for the regression model while avoiding potential multiple comparison problems. Tikhonov/L2/ridge penalties help preserve parameter estimate stability, even when many correlated variables exist in a wide data set or important predictor variables are correlated. Penalized regression is a great fit for business data with many columns, even data sets with more columns than rows, and for data sets with a lot of correlated variables.
Generalized Additive Models (GAMs)
Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) hand-tune a tradeoff between increased accuracy and decreased interpretability by fitting standard regression coefficients to certain variables and nonlinear spline functions to other variables. Also, most implementations of GAMs generate convenient plots of the fitted splines. That can be used directly in predictive models for increased accuracy. Otherwise, you can eyeball the fitted spline and switch it out for a more interpretable polynomial, log, trigonometric or other simple function of the predictor variable that may also increase predictive accuracy.
Quantile regression
Quantile regression is a technique that tries to fit a traditional, interpretable, linear model to different percentiles of the training data, allowing you to find different sets of variables with different parameters for modeling different behavior. While traditional regression is a parametric model and relies on assumptions that are often not met. Quantile regression makes no assumptions about the distribution of the residuals. It lets you explore different aspects of the relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variables.
There are, of course, other techniques, both based on applying constraints on regression and generating specific rules (like in OneR or RuleFit approaches). We encourage you to explore possibilities for enhancing model interpretability for any algorithm you choose and which is the most appropriate for your task and environment.
Evaluation of Interpretability
Finally, to ensure that the data and the trained models are interpretable, it is necessary to have robust methods for interpretability evaluation. However, with no real consensus about what interpretability is in machine learning, it is unclear how to measure it. Doshi-Velez and Kim (2017) propose three main levels for the evaluation of interpretability:
Application level evaluation (real task)
Essentially, it is putting the explanation into the product and having it tested by the end user. This requires a good experimental setup and an understanding of how to assess quality. A good baseline for this is always how good a human would be at explaining the same decision.
Human level evaluation (simple task)
It is a simplified application-level evaluation. The difference is that these experiments are not carried out with the domain experts, but with laypersons in simpler tasks like showing users several different explanations and letting them choose the best one. This makes experiments cheaper and it is easier to find more testers.
Function level evaluation (proxy task)
This task does not require humans. This works best when the class of model used has already been evaluated by humans. For example, if we know that end users understand decision trees, a proxy for explanation quality might be the depth of the tree with shorter trees having a better explainability score. It would make sense to add the constraint that the predictive performance of the tree remains good and does not decrease too much compared to a larger tree. | https://medium.com/sciforce/white-box-ai-interpretability-techniques-93ef257dd0bd | [] | 2020-04-07 13:46:54.408000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Deep Learning', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
You Knock on My Door Ep. 24 (Full — Episode) | ▶ Watch Sen Cal Kapimi Episode 24 | English Subtitle / Sub Espanol | Episode 1–2–3–4–5–6–7–8–9–10 (FREE)
▶ Full Watch Episode HERE!!! https://cutt.ly/Qh8u3Ry
You Knock on My Door (Sen Çal Kapımı) | Eda did not fall into the trap of Balca about the tender; However, the appearance of Semiha Hanım, shakes Serkan’s trust. Serkan immediately leaves the company. Eda chases after him and tries to tell him that she did not know the identity of the secret partner until that minute. Taking advantage of the absence of Serkan and Eda, Semiha Hanım, declares a state of emergency at the company. The next stop of this woman is the house of Ayfer and Eda. Eda eventually finds a way to get Serkan to listen. They both agree that their relationship is getting worn out. Serkan wants to make a brand new start with the new year. Though Eda wants to leave her grandmother in the past, her grandmother fell like a bomb in the middle of her life. Will the magic of the New Year be able to surround Serkan and Eda? Are brand new beginnings possible? When the clock strikes 12 a.m., they make a contract to let each other know their decision about their relationship.
📽 Episode Info
Show: Sen Çal Kapımı
Number: Season 1, Episode 24
Airdate: Dec 26, 2020 at 20:00
Runtime: 120 minutes
📽 Sen Çal Kapımı
Eda, who ties all her hopes to her education, confronts Serkan Bolat, who cuts off her international education scholarship and leaves her with high school diploma. Serkan Bolat offers Eda to give her scholarship back if she pretends to be his fiance for two months. Although Eda rejects the offer of this man as she hates him, she has to accept it when the conditions change. While pretending to be engaged, Serkan and Eda begin to experience a passionate, challenging relationship that will make them forget all they know right. Because love is difficult. And that’s why it’s amazing.
📽 Show Info
Network: Turkey FOX Türkiye (2020 — now)
Schedule: Saturdays at 20:00 (120 min)
Status: Running
Language: Turkish
Show Type: Scripted
Genres: Drama Comedy Romance
📽 Turkey FOX Türkiye
En güncel haberler, en sevdiğiniz diziler, en beğendiğiniz filmler FOX’ta! Hemen FOX’a gelin, ayrıcalıkların tadını çıkarın!
♚ I do not own this song or the Image, all credit goes,
It’s so Awesome. Subscribe and Share with your friends! to my channel. See for more videos!!. I want to say ‘thank you’ for being the friend!! Atelevision show (often simply TV show) is any content produced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a television set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are typically placed between shows. Television shows are most often scheduled well ahead of time and appear on electronic guides or other TV listings. A television show might also be called a television program (British English: programme), especially if it lacks a narrative structure. A television series is usually released in episodes that follow a narrative, and are usually divided into seasons (US and Canada) or series (UK) — yearly or semiannual sets of new episodes. A show with a limited number of episodes may be called a miniseries, serial, or limited series. A one-time show may be called a “special”. A television film (“made-for-TV movie” or “television movie”) is a film that is initially broadcast on television rather than released in theaters or direct-to-video. Television shows can be viewed as they are broadcast in real time (live), be recorded on home video or a digital video recorder for later viewing, or be viewed on demand via a set-top box or streamed over the internet.
✨ CREDITS ✨
The first television shows were experimental, sporadic broadcasts viewable only within a very short range from the broadcast tower starting in the 202055s. Televised events such as the 202055 Summer Olympics in Germany, the 202055 coronation of King George VI in the UK, and David Sarnoff’s famous introduction at the 202055 New York World’s Fair in the US spurred a growth in the medium, but World War II put a halt to development until after the war. The 202055 World Series inspired many Americans to buy their first television set and then in 202055, the popular radio show Texaco Star Theater made the move and became the first weekly televised variety show, earning host Milton Berle the name “Mr Television” and demonstrating that the medium was a stable, modern form of entertainment which could attract advertisers. The first national live television broadcast in the US took place on September 2020, 202055 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco was transmitted over AT&T’s transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets. The first national color broadcast (the 202055 Tournament of Roses Parade) in the US occurred on January 2020, 202055. During the following ten years most network broadcasts, and nearly all local programming, continued to be in black-and-white. A color transition was announced for the fall of 202055, during which over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later. In 202055, the last holdout among daytime network shows converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season.
💫 CREDITS 💫
Television shows are more varied than most other forms of media due to the wide variety of formats and genres that can be presented. A show may be fictional (as in comedies and dramas), or non-fictional (as in documentary, news, and reality television). It may be topical (as in the case of a local newscast and some made-for-television films), or historical (as in the case of many documentaries and fictional series). They could be primarily instructional or educational, or entertaining as is the case in situation comedy and game shows.[citation needed] A drama program usually features a set of actors playing characters in a historical or contemporary setting. The program follows their lives and adventures. Before the 202055, shows (except for soap opera-type serials) typically remained static without story arcs, and the main characters and premise changed little.[citation needed] If some change happened to the characters’ lives during the episode, it was usually undone by the end. Because of this, the episodes could be broadcast in any order.[citation needed] Since the 202055, many series feature progressive change in the plot, the characters, or both. For instance, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were two of the first American prime time drama television series to have this kind of dramatic structure,[2020][better source needed] while the later series Jujutsu Kaisenlon 2020 further exemplifies such structure in that it had a predetermined story running over its intended five-season run.[citation needed] In 202055, it was reported that television was growing into a larger component of major media companies’ revenues than film.[2020] Some also noted the increase in quality of some television programs. In 202055, Academy-Award-winning film director Steven Soderbergh, commenting on ambiguity and complexity of character and narrative, stated: “I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television. On January 20201, 2020202020202020, WHO announced an outbreak of a coronavirus new (COVID-20205) as a Concerning Public Health Emergency World. To respond to COVID-20205, preparedness and response is needed critical nature such as equipping health personnel and facility management health services with the necessary information, procedures, and tools can safely and effectively work. health workers play an important role in responding to outbreaks COVID-20205 and become the backbone of a country’s defense for limit or manage the spread of disease. At the forefront, power health care providers that suspect patients need and confirmed COVID-20205, which is often carried out in challenging circumstances. Officers are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-20205 in their efforts to protect wider society. Officers can be exposed to hazards such as psychological stress, fatigue, mental exhaustion or stigma. WHO is aware of their duties and responsibilities this big responsibility and the importance of protecting health care facility personnel.
💫 Aim
This material aims to protect health workers from infection and prevent it possible spread of COVID-20205 in health care facilities. This material contains a series of simple messages and reminders based on technical guidelines WHO is more comprehensive about infection prevention and control in facilities health services in the context of COVID-20205: “Prevention and control infection in health services when the new coronavirus (nCoV) infection is suspected “ (20205 January 2020202020202020). Further information can be found in the WHO technical manual.
✨ Readers of this material
This material is intended for health personnel and service facility management health and may be distributed to other health workers and to facilities health services. The Ministry of Health can provide this material to all hospitals and government health service facilities. Copy this material needs to be provided to private physician networks, medical associations, medical, nursing and midwifery to be shared and fitted accordingly necessity. The contents of this material can be adapted into local languages and placed in places in the service facility
💫 ALL CATEGORY WATCHTED 💫
An action story is similar to adventure, and the protagonist usually takes a risky turn, which leads to desperate scenarios (including explosions, fight scenes, daring escapes, etc.). Action and adventure usually are categorized together (sometimes even while “action-adventure”) because they have much in common, and many stories are categorized as both genres simultaneously (for instance, the James Bond series can be classified as both). Continuing their survival through an age of a Zombie-apocalypse as a makeshift family, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abagail Breslin) have found their balance as a team, settling into the now vacant White House to spend some safe quality time with one another as they figure out their Jujutsu Kaisen move. However, spend time at the Presidential residents raise some uncertainty as Columbus proposes to Wichita, which freaks out the independent, lone Jujutsu Kaisen out, while Little Rock starts to feel the need to be on her own. The women suddenly decide to escape in the middle of the night, leaving the men concerned about Little Rock, who’s quickly joined by Berkley (Avan Jogia), a hitchhiking hippie on his way to place called Babylon, a fortified commune that’s supposed to be safe haven against the zombies of the land. Hitting the road to retrieved their loved one, Tallahassee and Columbus meet Madison (Zoey Deutch), a dim-witted survivor who takes an immediate liking to Columbus, complicating his relationship with Wichita.
💫 ANALYZER GOOD / BAD 💫
To be honest, I didn’t catch Jujutsu Kaisen when it first got released (in theaters) back in 515. Of course, the movie pre-dated a lot of the pop culture phenomenon of the usage of zombies-esque as the main antagonist (i.e Game of Thrones, The Maze Runner trilogy, The Walking Dead, World War Z, The Last of Us, etc.), but I’ve never been keen on the whole “Zombie” craze as others are. So, despite the comedy talents on the project, I didn’t see Jujutsu Kaisen….until it came to TV a year or so later. Surprisingly, however, I did like it. Naturally, the zombie apocalypse thing was fine (just wasn’t my thing), but I really enjoyed the film’s humor-based comedy throughout much of the feature. With the exception of 520201’s Shaun of the Dead, majority of the past (and future) endeavors of this narrative have always been serious, so it was kind of refreshing to see comedic levity being brought into the mix. Plus, the film’s cast was great, with the four main leads being one of the film’s greatest assets. As mentioned above, Jujutsu Kaisen didn’t make much of a huge splash at the box office, but certainly gained a strong cult following, including myself, in the following years. Flash forward a decade after its release and Jujutsu Kaisen finally got a sequel with Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap, the central focus of this review post. Given how the original film ended, it was clear that a sequel to the 515 movie was indeed possible, but it seemed like it was in no rush as the years kept passing by. So, I was quite surprised to hear that Jujutsu Kaisen was getting a sequel, but also a bit not surprised as well as Hollywood’s recent endeavors have been of the “belated sequels” variety; finding mixed results on each of these projects. I did see the film’s movie trailer, which definitely was what I was looking for in this Jujutsu Kaisen 2020 movie, with Eisenberg, Harrelson, Stone, Breslin returning to reprise their respective characters again. I knew I wasn’t expecting anything drastically different from the 515 movie, so I entered Double Tap with good frame of my mind and somewhat eagerly expecting to catch up with this dysfunctional zombie killing family. Unfortunately, while I did see the movie a week after its release, my review for it fell to the wayside as my life in retail got a hold of me during the holidays as well as being sick for a good week and half after seeing the movie. So, with me still playing “catch up” I finally have the time to share my opinions on Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap. And what are they? Well, to be honest, my opinions on the film was good. Despite some problems here and there, Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap is definitely a fun sequel that’s worth the decade long wait. It doesn’t “redefine” the Zombie genre interest or outmatch its predecessor, but this Jujutsu Kaisen chapter of Jujutsu Kaisen still provides an entertaining entry….and that’s all that matters. Returning to the director’s chair is director Ruben Fleischer, who helmed the first Jujutsu Kaisen movie as well as other film projects such as 51 Minutes or Less, Gangster Squad, and Venom. Thus, given his previous knowledge of shaping the first film, it seems quite suitable (and obvious) for Fleischer to direct this movie and (to that affect), Double Tap succeeds. Of course, with the first film being a “cult classic” of sorts, Fleischer probably knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to replicate the same formula in this sequel, especially since the 5-year gap between the films. Luckily, Fleischer certainly excels in bringing the same type of comedic nuances and cinematic aspects that made the first Jujutsu Kaisen enjoyable to Double Tap; creating a second installment that has plenty of fun and entertainment throughout. A lot of the familiar / likeable aspects of the first film, including the witty banter between four main lead characters, continues to be at the forefront of this sequel; touching upon each character in a amusing way, with plenty of nods and winks to the original 515 film that’s done skillfully and not so much unnecessarily ham-fisted. Additionally, Fleischer keeps the film running at a brisk pace, with the feature having a runtime of 55 minutes in length (one hour and thirty-nine minutes), which means that the film never feels sluggish (even if it meanders through some secondary story beats / side plot threads), with Fleischer ensuring a companion sequel that leans with plenty of laughter and thrills that are presented snappy way (a sort of “thick and fast” notion). Speaking of which, the comedic aspect of the first Jujutsu Kaisen movie is well-represented in Double Tap, with Fleischer still utilizing its cast (more on that below) in a smart and hilarious by mixing comedic personalities / personas with something as serious / gravitas as fighting endless hordes of zombies every where they go. Basically, if you were a fan of the first Jujutsu Kaisen flick, you’ll definitely find Double Tap to your liking. In terms of production quality, Double Tap is a good feature. Granted, much like the last film, I knew that the overall setting and background layouts weren’t going to be something elaborate and / or expansive. Thus, my opinion of this subject of the movie’s technical presentation isn’t that critical. Taking that into account, Double Tap does (at least) does have that standard “post-apocalyptic” setting of an abandoned building, cityscapes, and roads throughout the feature; littered with unmanned vehicles and rubbish. It certainly has that “look and feel” of the post-zombie world, so Double Tap’s visual aesthetics gets a solid industry standard in my book. Thus, a lot of the other areas that I usually mentioned (i.e set decorations, costumes, cinematography, etc.) fit into that same category as meeting the standards for a 20205 movie. Thus, as a whole, the movie’s background nuances and presentation is good, but nothing grand as I didn’t expect to be “wowed” over it. So, it sort of breaks even. This also extends to the film’s score, which was done by David Sardy, which provides a good musical composition for the feature’s various scenes as well as a musical song selection thrown into the mix; interjecting the various zombie and humor bits equally well. There are some problems that are bit glaring that Double Tap, while effectively fun and entertaining, can’t overcome, which hinders the film from overtaking its predecessor. Perhaps one of the most notable criticism that the movie can’t get right is the narrative being told. Of course, the narrative in the first Jujutsu Kaisen wasn’t exactly the best, but still combined zombie-killing action with its combination of group dynamics between its lead characters. Double Tap, however, is fun, but messy at the same time; creating a frustrating narrative that sounds good on paper, but thinly written when executed. Thus, problem lies within the movie’s script, which was penned by Dave Callaham, Rhett Reese, and Paul Wernick, which is a bit thinly sketched in certain areas of the story, including a side-story involving Tallahassee wanting to head to Graceland, which involves some of the movie’s new supporting characters. It’s fun sequence of events that follows, but adds little to the main narrative and ultimately could’ve been cut completely. Thus, I kind of wanted see Double Tap have more a substance within its narrative. Heck, they even had a decade long gap to come up with a new yarn to spin for this sequel…and it looks like they came up a bit shorter than expected. Another point of criticism that I have about this is that there aren’t enough zombie action bits as there were in the first Jujutsu Kaisen movie. Much like the Walking Dead series as become, Double Tap seems more focused on its characters (and the dynamics that they share with each other) rather than the group facing the sparse groupings of mindless zombies. However, that was some of the fun of the first movie and Double Tap takes away that element. Yes, there are zombies in the movie and the gang is ready to take care of them (in gruesome fashion), but these mindless beings sort take a back seat for much of the film, with the script and Fleischer seemed more focused on showcasing witty banter between Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock. Of course, the ending climatic piece in the third act gives us the best zombie action scenes of the feature, but it feels a bit “too little, too late” in my opinion. To be honest, this big sequence is a little manufactured and not as fun and unique as the final battle scene in the first film. I know that sounds a bit contrive and weird, but, while the third act big fight seems more polished and staged well, it sort of feels more restricted and doesn’t flow cohesively with the rest of the film’s flow (in matter of speaking). What’s certainly elevates these points of criticism is the film’s cast, with the main quartet lead acting talents returning to reprise their roles in Double Tap, which is absolutely the “hands down” best part of this sequel. Naturally, I’m talking about the talents of Jessie Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin in their respective roles Jujutsu Kaisen character roles of Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock. Of the four, Harrelson, known for his roles in Cheers, True Detective, and War for the Planet of the Apes, shines as the brightest in the movie, with dialogue lines of Tallahassee proving to be the most hilarious comedy stuff on the sequel. Harrelson certainly knows how to lay it on “thick and fast” with the character and the s**t he says in the movie is definitely funny (regardless if the joke is slightly or dated). Behind him, Eisenberg, known for his roles in The Art of Self-Defense, The Social Network, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is somewhere in the middle of pack, but still continues to act as the somewhat main protagonist of the feature, including being a narrator for us (the viewers) in this post-zombie apocalypse world. Of course, Eisenberg’s nervous voice and twitchy body movements certainly help the character of Columbus to be likeable and does have a few comedic timing / bits with each of co-stars. Stone, known for her roles in The Help, Superbad, and La La Land, and Breslin, known for her roles in Signs, Little Miss Sunshine, and Definitely, Maybe, round out the quartet; providing some more grown-up / mature character of the group, with Wichita and Little Rock trying to find their place in the world and how they must deal with some of the party members on a personal level. Collectively, these four are what certainly the first movie fun and hilarious and their overall camaraderie / screen-presence with each other hasn’t diminished in the decade long absence. To be it simply, these four are simply riot in the Jujutsu Kaisen and are again in Double Tap. With the movie keeping the focus on the main quartet of lead Jujutsu Kaisen characters, the one newcomer that certainly takes the spotlight is actress Zoey Deutch, who plays the character of Madison, a dim-witted blonde who joins the group and takes a liking to Columbus. Known for her roles in Before I Fall, The Politician, and Set It Up, Deutch is a somewhat “breath of fresh air” by acting as the tagalong team member to the quartet in a humorous way. Though there isn’t much insight or depth to the character of Madison, Deutch’s ditzy / air-head portrayal of her is quite hilarious and is fun when she’s making comments to Harrelson’s Tallahassee (again, he’s just a riot in the movie). The rest of the cast, including actor Avan Jogia (Now Apocalypse and Shaft) as Berkeley, a pacifist hippie that quickly befriends Little Rock on her journey, actress Rosario Dawson (Rent and Sin City) as Nevada, the owner of a Elvis-themed motel who Tallahassee quickly takes a shine to, and actors Luke Wilson (Legally Blonde and Old School) and Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley and Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie) as Albuquerque and Flagstaff, two traveling zombie-killing partners that are mimic reflections of Tallahassee and Columbus, are in minor supporting roles in Double Tap. While all of these acting talents are good and definitely bring a certain humorous quality to their characters, the characters themselves could’ve been easily expanded upon, with many just being thinly written caricatures. Of course, the movie focuses heavily on the Jujutsu Kaisen quartet (and newcomer Madison), but I wished that these characters could’ve been fleshed out a bit. Lastly, be sure to still around for the film’s ending credits, with Double Tap offering up two Easter Eggs scenes (one mid-credits and one post-credit scenes). While I won’t spoil them, I do have mention that they are pretty hilarious.
💫 FINAL THOUGHTS 💫
It’s been awhile, but the Jujutsu Kaisen gang is back and are ready to hit the road once again in the movie Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap. Director Reuben Fleischer’s latest film sees the return the dysfunctional zombie-killing makeshift family of survivors for another round of bickering, banting, and trying to find their way in a post-apocalyptic world. While the movie’s narrative is a bit messy and could’ve been refined in the storyboarding process as well as having a bit more zombie action, the rest of the feature provides to be a fun endeavor, especially with Fleischer returning to direct the project, the snappy / witty banter amongst its characters, a breezy runtime, and the four lead returning acting talents. Personally, I liked this movie. I definitely found it to my liking as I laugh many times throughout the movie, with the main principal cast lending their screen presence in this post-apocalyptic zombie movie. Thus, my recommendation for this movie is favorable “recommended” as I’m sure it will please many fans of the first movie as well as to the uninitiated (the film is quite easy to follow for newcomers). While the movie doesn’t redefine what was previous done back in 515, Jujutsu Kaisen: Double Tap still provides a riot of laughs with this make-shift quartet of zombie survivors; giving us give us (the viewers) fun and entertaining companion sequel to the original feature. | https://medium.com/sen-cal-kapimi-episode-24-knock-on-my-door-2020/sen-cal-kapimi-episode-24-engsub-you-knock-on-my-door-ep-24-full-episode-4a7f57459e97 | ['Sen Cal Kapimi'] | 2020-12-26 13:21:08.063000+00:00 | ['Drama', 'Romance', 'Comedy'] |
How to use gRPC-web with React | For the past few months, my team has been working on a gRPC service. A few weeks back a new requirement came in: we needed a web portal to display some information. Since we already had a gRPC backend, the server side was sorted. But for the front-end, we had a few important choices to make.
1. Vue or React (We choose react)
2. REST or gRPC from the web portal
If you don’t know what gRPC is you can read about it here. Here are a few reasons that made us choose gRPC over REST.
One major factor for choosing gRPC was the fact that we already had protos that we used in our backend service. We could use the same protos to generate client-side code in javascript. Using gRPC would mean that we would not have to write any code for creating the client. Adding new endpoints would mean making changes to the proto and generating client-side code. We needed server-side streaming which is supported by gRPC-web. We already had a setup of envoy for loading balancing our backend service (more on this later).
Caveats
gRPC web-client won’t send HTTP2 requests. Instead, you need a proxy between your web-client and gRPC backend service for converting that HTTP1 request to HTTP2. gRPC web client has built-in support for Envoy as a proxy. You can find more information about this here. The teams at Google and Improbable both went on to implement the spec in two different repositories. We will be using gRPC web client provided by Google. You can find the implementation by Google here and by Improbable here. As of now, client-side streaming is not supported.
Now that we have some idea about gRPC web, below is a diagram depicting how the entire communication will take place. We are going to make a react web application that will send a Ping request and get a Pong response for it.
Front-end + Proxy + Back-end
Before starting make sure you have the following installed:
1. npm (Node package manager) - For generating react project
2. Docker - For running envoy locally
3. protoc - For generating code using protos
There are 3 pieces to this puzzle. We are going to tackle each of them one by one.
1. User Interface — Website using react
For creating a react project, we will use the create-react-app command.
create-react-app learn-react-grpc
Now that we have a sample project in place, let’s create a proto. This is what a ping pong proto looks like.
Sample ping pong proto
For subsequent commands to run, make sure that the proto is inside the src/ folder of the react project. For generating client-side code in javascript, run the following command:
protoc -I=. src/ping_pong.proto --js_out=import_style=commonjs:. --grpc-web_out=import_style=commonjs,mode=grpcwebtext:.
This will generate two new files: ping_pong_pb.js and ping_pong_grpc_web_pb.js, with all the generated code in it. We will use this code to make requests to our gRPC service.
First, let’s update our package.json with a few gRPC and protobuf related dependencies and then run npm install.
package.json
Below is the entire logic for building our website. You can use this code in your App.js file. It is a really simple website which contains a button, clicking on which creates a ping pong request and gets a response.
Now if you run the node server using npm start, you are likely to face this compilation issue. This is apparently an issue when using gRPC-web with a project created using create-react-app command line interface.
compilation issues when using create-react-app
However, this issue can be fixed by adding eslint-disable to all of the proto generated files. Make sure that you do this for all the files. Now if you start the server, everything should be working.
fixing compile issues
2. Backend — gRPC server in Node
Let’s create a simple node server. We will be using the same proto that we used in our react app. Let’s create a node js application node-ping-pong-server. Here is our sample server.js file.
gRPC server in node js
We can run the node server using the following command:
node server.js
3. Proxy — Envoy
As mentioned above, we will be using Docker for setting up envoy. Here is the docker file. As of writing, the latest tag points to Envoy version 1.11. Create a Dockerfile inside src/ folder of your react app.
Before running the Docker container, we need to make sure that we have a config file for envoy. Add this envoy.yml inside the src/ folder of your react app.
envoy config file
Let’s understand what this envoy configuration file does:
9901 is the port where envoy admin portal is running. You can use this portal to check envoy routes, health checks and a lot more.
9090 is the port where envoy is listening for incoming requests. Our website will make a request to envoy on this port.
Any request that matches the above prefix is routed to the ping_pong_service cluster. Since our node server (aka cluster) is running on the host machine (your laptop) and not the docker container, we need to route those request out of the container to the host. host.docker.internal does exactly this.
Now let’s build our docker image using the following command:
docker build -t mohak1712/learn-grpc-web .
Now let’s run the docker image:
docker run -d -p 9090:9090 mohak1712/learn-grpc-web
We need to forward host port 9090 to the containers port 9090 so that any request on port 9090 is forwarded to the docker container where envoy is running.
Final Output
Now that everything is set up, make sure that the website, node server and envoy container are running. You can run the following set of commands in case you still haven’t.
npm start -> start web server node server.js -> start node server docker run -d -p 9090:9090 mohak1712/learn-grpc-web -> start envoy
Now when you click on the button, it sends a Ping request and gets a Pong response for it!
That’s about it! Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the article.
You can follow me on Medium and Github :) | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-use-grpc-web-with-react-1c93feb691b5 | ['Mohak Puri'] | 2019-05-10 17:21:42.953000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Tech', 'React', 'Envoy Proxy'] |
Waterfall | Drifting down
In the river
I just stay
And let the water
Gently pull me away
Maybe I’ll approach
A waterfall
And coast
Down it like a slide
Or get swallowed
Up inside
And plunge
Into the water below
No way to stop
The freefall
And the drop
As I reach
The bottom
All is calm
Crystal clear water
Soothes me like a balm
The roar of
The waterfall seems
Like a distant sound
In the stillness
That’s all around
I climb out to
The grassy shore
And let the sun warm me
As I look at what’s to come
And what’s laid out before me
©HeatherAnn | https://medium.com/echoes-of-the-soul/waterfall-67a18832d807 | ['Heather Ann'] | 2019-07-11 20:08:38.404000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Poetry', 'Poem', 'Writing', 'Poems On Medium'] |
The Unexpected Analogy of Technical Data and Fictional Novels | I had written and self-published several fictional books by the time I participated at the S1000D User Forum in Seville at the end of September 2016.
So when I got challenged to explain what a data module actually was, I suddenly had an idea. I exclaimed, “Data modules are so much like scenes in a novel!”
Right after that, I couldn’t stop the flow of realizations.
“Just as scenes,” I said, “data modules have a start (for a procedural data module, it is preliminary requirements), the middle (the procedure itself), an end (close-up requirements), and one setting (a unit or assembly, where the operational or maintenance procedure takes place). And in a way, just like the scenes in a novel, they tell a concise and self-contained story, or a future short story, that is how the given procedure is to take place.”
This epiphany might also have been facilitated by a statement I made during the presentation I made at the same User Forum in Seville before the above discussion took place. During that presentation, I claimed that technical manuals were books, whatever format they are in or however interactive they might be.
The presentation and the discussions afterward only strengthened this flow of parallels between novels, books in general, and S1000D conformant technical publications.
After the User Forum, I jotted down a list of topics I could think of when relating S1000D and its constructs to storytelling, and I came up with at least seven of them immediately. Today, I guess that you can find an equivalent in a technical manual to any tool or construct the fictional writers use in their novels so artfully. | https://medium.com/technology-hits/the-unexpected-analogy-of-technical-data-and-fictional-novels-6745269b3cee | ['Victoria Ichizli-Bartels'] | 2020-12-17 11:14:22.002000+00:00 | ['Technical Publications', 'Technology', 'Serendipity', 'Analogy', 'Fiction'] |
Doing Service Design at the National Lottery Heritage Fund | Digital Service Design Weeknotes
June is here and we continue to work our way through the roll out of the new service, Get a grant for a heritage project. This week our weeknotes are written by Kerry, Abbie and Melanie with a strong mix of user-centred content design and cross-Fund collaborating. Without us all working across The Fund as a team, we couldn’t build a user-centred service. Here, we talk about how we’ve done it this sprint:
It’s been a long sprint this sprint. Three weeks to be exact. And we’ve been busy. We’ve built out the payment journey so that grantees can get paid. We’ve started to build out the legal agreement part of the service, that starts with grantees being awarded their grant, reading and agreeing to their grant contract and terms and conditions of contract.
We’ve also:
Collaborated with legal colleagues
We’ve worked closely with our colleagues in legal as we build out the legal contract part of the service. This has involved collaborating on shared documents and many Teams calls to work through the content together. In content design, we do something called pair writing, which is usually two brains — or more — working together to create content based on user needs. It often involves a content designer, and a subject-matter expert. This is how we worked with our legal colleagues to help to take the content in Permission to Start for small and medium grants and build it into the service. We worked towards making the content clear and easy to understand for our grantees. This involved us taking the current Permission to Start process and content and all the parts that make up agreeing a contract with The Fund and building an MVP (minimal viable product) version of this into the flow of the service. This is the part of the service where grantees receive and agree their grant contract, after they are awarded a grant.
Built payments into the service
This work involved the team taking an overview of the service flow for the payments part of the journey. We did this by looking at the flow created by our service designer, Rosa.
Snapshot of a Miro board showing sketches of individual pages of the payments journey
We agreed things like, what pages in the service need to be included, what the purpose of each page is, navigation, where users have come from, where they are going to next, what do they need, what does the organisation need. Once we knew the answers to these questions, content design worked closely with Jo, our user researcher, and Rosa to build out the content, thinking carefully about what we are asking people to do and what they need to know. Each page starts as a blank piece of paper — literally a blank piece of paper sometimes — and then, with the user need, or the purpose of the page, or content at the top, we start to build out what information is needed, and how it is presented and where.
We created a low-fidelity prototype in Miro, which consisted of each page in the payment part of the journey and marked it up for our developers Stu and Paul. This means that we noted what is a H1, H3, H3 for example, what content styles need to be, is it hint text, or normal text. In this way, when they build the pages into the service we can make sure that the content and design is accessible, consistent and clear.
Updated the website routing page for Small and Medium Grants roll out UK-wide
From Friday 28 May, applications for all Small and Medium grants across the UK started coming through the new service. As we open the service up to more applicants, we needed to make sure the website reflects the options users have so they can find what they need.
People will need to use the application portal if they already had funding from us for a project, so we still needed that on the routing page. However, we expect these numbers to reduce as people finish their projects, so it doesn’t need to be the top option.
We considered the readability guidelines to write the content and used HTML to mock-up an example of what the new page would look like once built into the website. We worked with the Welsh Language Officer, Liam, to offer the content in Welsh as well as English and made sure we linked to the relevant Welsh pages for those following the journey in Welsh.
HTML mock-up of the new routing page showing 2 navigation options. One to the new service, Get funding for a heritage project, and one to the application portal for previously funded grants
We worked with marketing and communications digital team to coordinate the updates for Friday 28 May ready for launch.
Said hello to our new interaction designer
We welcomed Kasturi (Kas) to the team. Kas will be developing the how of using the service; the link between the user having a task to complete and enabling people do the task in the smoothest and most efficient way. Before joining the Fund, Kas worked with the NHS on projects including developing digital infrastructure and flows to help people access different prescription services.
We’re looking forward to working together to build the Get funding for a heritage project service and adding another member of the user centred design part of the team. We asked Kas some questions to get to know her:
Why are you interested in the work you do?
I enjoy engaging both the creative and analytical parts of my brain. I love solving problems. Fuelled by my passion for people, places and new experiences, I would like to bring a level of empathy and attention to detail that’s critical to making intuitive user experiences.
I am a strong advocate of inclusive design. I want as many people as possible to access our services and use them. User-centred design techniques make this possible by understanding the reality of people’s lives.
I have previously worked in similar roles in the Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Services and the NHS. I believe my experiences will add to all the excellent work already being carried out by the Fund and enable more people to benefit.
What’s your favourite film & TV show?
I love films and TV shows which are fast paced, full of thrillers and suspense and are engaging throughout.
Do you have a hobby?
I love walking and listening to podcasts. And most times I do them both together. I am very lucky — I live near the Quayside, Tyne Bridge in Newcastle — so it is easy to convince myself to walk along one of the most beautiful parts of the country. I know I am biased!
Said hello to Alicia, our new senior developer
Alicia has been our contracted Salesforce developer since the end of 2020 and is very much part of the team. You might have even seen her in our show and tell videos explaining what Salesforce can do. Soon however, we will be saying goodbye to contract Salesforce developer, Alicia, and hello to senior developer at the Fund, Alicia! We asked Alicia a couple of questions to get to know our new (but not so new) colleague.
Why are you interested in the work you do?
Being a Salesforce developer is like being asked to solved puzzles all day for a living, sometimes it’s a riddle or crossword or Rubix cube. There’s always a new puzzle to solve, which is fun. Working at National Lottery Heritage Fund, it’s great knowing that all your efforts have wider social value. I recently discovered my local park has received Heritage funding as well as several other bigger projects in my hometown Preston!
What’s your favourite film?
Maybe it will always be my favourite film, I watched The Matrix as a teenager and it’s been my favourite ever since.
Do you have any pets?
A sweet little working cocker spaniel called Isla. She’s a bit camera shy but pretty much always sat next to me while I’m working.
Officially rolled out the large grants service
We launched the large grants service through Salesforce Experience UK-wide on 13 May. Whilst we were confident that the technical side of the service was working, we had to ensure that communications for staff and applicants were also ready, as the deadline for large grants application submission was 28 May. We created a three-step journey by email for the 41 applicants we were expecting to submit for this deadline, to access the new service and submit their application.
The first email we wrote was sent by staff to notify the applicant that we will create an account for them so that they can access the application form. The staff member then emailed our Product Owner, Jamie and Central Team Manager, Sinead, who created a new account for the applicant. The applicant was then sent an automatic email with a link to their account, an instruction to reset their password, and information on how to start the application.
Although this was a manual process as we needed a quick solution to enable access to the service, in future iterations we hope to automate and simplify this for applicant submission so that it is similar to how other grant level applications are received.
We also worked to make an accessible version of the application form questions, which helped staff to answer applicant queries, available on the Knowledge Hub. | https://medium.com/doing-service-design-at-the-national-lottery/11-may-1-june-ec9f96117b42 | ['Kerry Lyons'] | 2021-06-01 13:52:27.509000+00:00 | ['Content Design', 'Funding', 'Heritage', 'Product Management', 'Service Design'] |
Best Diet 2021 | i have been using this diet for so long its the best diet in my case
if any of u want to check it out go ahead
https://bit.ly/34MwjdU | https://medium.com/@devpatel44502009/best-diet-2021-6bc4a3d8948c | ['How To Pc'] | 2020-12-26 06:31:32.202000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Diet', 'Dieta', 'Weight Loss Diets', 'Nutrition'] |
How to Create and Set up Firebase for Android | In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to create a Firebase project and set up it with the android project. Before that, if you do not know what Firebase is and why we use firebase then go through my previous tutorial on Firebase.
All though, I give you a brief about firebase. “Firebase is a Backend-as-a-Service — BaaS — a platform developed by Google for creating mobile and web applications. Firebase is Google’s mobile application development platform that helps you build, improve, and grow your app.”
Want to know more, click here.
No, let’s see to create and set up Firebase for the android project
Part 1: Create the Firebase project
1. Go to the official page of Firebase (https://firebase.google.com/) and log in with your Google account. For Firebase you just need a Google account.
As you see here I logged in with my google account.
2. After logged in, click go to console to create a firebase project.
After clicking on the console, you see a button “Create a project”, click here to create a firebase project. After that, you need to give a name for your project and accept their terms and conditions.
Part 2: Setup Firebase for Android
3. After creating the Firebase project, you see an android button. Click here to setup the firebase for android.
4. First, you need to enter the android package name, which you will find in your applicationID in your app-level build.gradle file.
for SHA-1 certificate, go to your gradle button from right sidebar > app > android > signing report > SHA-1 certificate.
5. Then, download the google-services.json file and add to your app folder (android > app > google-services.json).
6. After that, add these code and dependencies in your android project (both in the app-level build.gradle file and project-level build.gradle file).
7. After adding the dependencies just click the NEXT button.
8. Now you can see your app in your Firebase console.
Just follow the steps and you will able to create a firebase project and set up with your android project.
Make sure you have a google account so that we can log into the firebase.
For more visit www.gbandroidblogs.com and show some love by clicking on the clap button.
Happy Coding!! | https://medium.com/@androidapps-development-blogs/how-to-create-and-set-up-firebase-for-android-2adb1196c51a | ['Golap Gunjan Barman'] | 2020-12-01 06:52:06.078000+00:00 | ['Android App Development', 'Android', 'AndroidDev', 'App Development', 'Firebase'] |
Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”: To the Past or Present? | Gil (played by Owen Wilson) walking in a Van-Gogh transformed Paris.
Imagine living in the best of both worlds, one of today, and the other of an era which inspires you the most. Woody Allen encapsulates this in one of his most enthralling movies, “Midnight in Paris”. Protagonist Gil — played by Owen Wilson — is a Hollywood screenwriter who is desperate to visit the “sizzling Paris of the 1920s”. Luckily, he gets to do just that (Berger). “Midnight in Paris” tells the story of Gil and his beautiful fiancée, Inez, played by Rachel McAdams, and their eventful trip to Paris alongside Inez’s parents. Gil and Inez seems to be the perfect couple, completely in love with each other, and a Malibu beach house already being planned for them to spend the rest of their lives in. But both start questioning themselves as Gil realizes that maybe what he really loves is Paris in the rain (Ebert).
The movie begins with the landscape of Paris, from the start of sunrise to the dim lights of midnight. While walking alone on one night, an antique car stops in front of Gil (Bradshaw), and he is invited in by the couple that turns out to be F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald. Gil immediately joins and they go back in time as the car continues to drive. Allen makes no attempt to explain how the setting changes abruptly, simply because none is needed (Ebert). There is no need for anyone to decide whether what is happening is logical or imaginary, because all is magic. Gil is swept away and plunged into a party where he listens to Cole Porter, and meets an intoxicated Ernest Hemingway in a bar near the scene. The night becomes more exciting to Gil when Hemingway promises that he would persuade Gertrude Stein to read the manuscript of a novel that Gil is working on.
So then every night, Gil leaves reality, enters the 1920s, and meets the legends that make the era as exhilarating as it is. He dances with Josephine Baker, meets T.S. Elliot, and falls in love in Picasso’s mistress, Adriana, who moved to Paris from Bordeaux in hopes to learn fashion from Coco Chanel. He also sits down and discusses topics of life with the surrealists of the time; Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Man Ray.
The movie often assumes that the audiences know all these lives and understand their paths, which can sometimes be confusing to those who do not (Berger). The key to what makes “Midnight in Paris” appealing is Owen Wilson, who also portrays Allen’s own characteristics. Gil is an enthusiastic, sincere, and wishful person who admires these icons of the 1920s, and a lot of viewers find a deep connection to him. One of them being myself. After watching “Midnight in Paris”, I fall in love with Europe and the Arts all over again. Just like Gil, one of my biggest dreams is to be able to live in a place that appreciates the culture of art, and to be able to meet artists from past movements, such as; Neoclassical, Romantic, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism.
In the movie, Gil and his newly found romance, Adriana, visits the Belle Époque, which Adriana finds as Paris’s Golden Age. There, they meet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas, who all believes that the Renaissance was the best era in Paris. Gil realizes that everyone may have different opinions on which era is considered to be the golden era, or the “dull” present. For Gil, the 1920s is what he considers the Golden Age, but he ends up thinking that he should be embracing the present for what it is. Adriana decides to stay in the 1890s and they part. As for Inez, both became aware of their incompetence amongst each other and finally break up.
Gil decides to stay in the present world, because life keeps moving forward anyways. Although he enjoys his time in the 1920s, what is important is to make the “dull” present meaningful and epic just like every other Golden Ages. Much like Gil, I find that the past will always have an impact on me as well as my art making skills, but it is also important to recognize how to make the best out of what we already have today. In the beginning of the movie, Gil feels that he is living in the wrong time. In a sense, Woody Allen is asking the audience; what would you do if you could go back in a time and place that you think is better than where and when you live now?
As for myself, watching Gil’s character reminds me of my own admiration of the Old Masters. Take Adriana, for example, who refuses to stay in the 1920s — where she belongs — and decides to live even further in the past. While some might agree with her choices, I believe that there is much to look forward to in the present and future, and although the world works in different ways now, the past will always be a part that shapes the now, the same way of how the older ways of making art will always shape me of who I have become as an artist. However, the present life that some of us find “dull”, also shapes who we are as a person.
Allen did not make this a movie that everyone can relate to. Some might not understand how exciting and intoxicating it is to feel like we are visiting our own Golden Age, because their Golden Age might be the present. “Midnight in Paris” is a romantic comedy that has a thoughtful idea in the middle, and a revelation that is not too heavy-handed. The movie itself is not hard to understand, because there really is not much to break down, other than the fact that reality and imagination comes hand in hand. Whether you will fall in love all over again with Paris, or you will swept up by the aches of the artists in the dreamy city of Paris. | https://medium.com/@priscindra/woody-allens-midnight-in-paris-to-the-past-or-present-76c77d539d69 | ['Priscilla Indrayadi'] | 2020-12-25 06:52:17.060000+00:00 | ['Paris', 'Movie Review', 'Woody Allen', 'Movies', 'Art'] |
3 Key Elements that will Make or Break Your Digital Ad Campaign | So, you’ve crafted your content and documented your strategy… Now, how do you ensure a successful campaign set-up? We’ve run thousands of content campaigns, and while we recognize that each one has distinct objectives, we’ve discovered that no matter the industry, there are three elements that significantly impact the success of your digital ad campaign. Make the most of your media dollars by following these best practices.
1. HEADLINES
Despite the age-old wisdom of David Ogilvy, headlines continue to be hastily thrown together without the time & thought they deserve. Your headline is your first impression, and there are no second chances.
2. IMAGES
Our brains process visual information about 60,000x faster than text. Images, therefore, not only enhance your content, they catch the interest of readers who scroll through mountains of content every minute.
3. DEVICE SPLITTING
As a savvy digital advertiser you’ll want to make sure you’re considering diverse user experiences and traffic behaviour across desktop, mobile, and in- app, and ensure you’re optimizing performance by creating separate digital advertising campaigns for each.
Following these simple best practices to maximize the success of your digital ad campaigns. To get started with StackAdapt, Request an Invite here! | https://medium.com/stackadapt/3-key-elements-that-will-make-or-break-your-digital-ad-campaign-eb7676c27289 | ['Maggie Clapperton'] | 2018-01-22 16:45:37.496000+00:00 | ['Content Marketing', 'Advertising Technology', 'Programmatic Advertising', 'Digital Marketing', 'Digital Advertising'] |
Burlington County looking for donations towards care packages for troops | Burlington County looking for donations towards care packages for troops
Burlington County Freeholders announced today that they are partnering with Operation Yellow Ribbon of South Jersey and Burlington County College to sponsor a county wide collection of items for care packages for our troops stationed over seas.
“We are collecting items for our troops that will hopefully bring them a little holiday cheer and let the men and women who fight every day to protect us know that Burlington County supports and honors them,” Burlington County Freeholder Deputy Director Leah Arter said.
Items will be accepted at selected County locations during normal business hours through noon on Friday, Dec. 6. Collection boxes will be in the lobby of the engineering building at 1900 Briggs Road in Mount Laurel and all county library facilities.
Operation Yellow Ribbon of South Jersey sends over 2,300 pounds of treats and personal notes each month to our brave women and men deployed to Afghanistan.
“This is a great way for residents to get into the holiday spirit this season by showing our appreciation for our U.S. Armed Forces,” Freeholder Arter said. “We are asking residents to help us collect items and also personal, unsealed notes of thanks and encouragement.”
Adults can include an address or e-mail if they would like a possible response from our recipients. Some of the troops will respond but some do not have e-mail access, so they might not write back. Children are encouraged to create or write their own holiday cards or notes to show support to our troops, but no last names, addresses, email addresses or phone numbers can be included.
“Burlington County residents have been so supportive of our food drives and toy collections in the past and I am confident that they will whole-heartedly join us in this effort as well,” Arter said.
The following items have been requested from our troops:
• Tastykakes, cupcakes or similar snacks
• Rice Crispy treats
• Sealed packets or bagged tuna and chicken
• Gum and candy
• Breakfast bars
• Roasted peanuts, mixed nuts or dried fruit
• Potato chips in cylinder or can
• Beef jerky or Slim Jims
• Crystal Light drink mix individual packets
• Powdered drink mix
• Ground coffee or tea
• Pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds
• Baby powder and foot powder
• Baby wipes
• Visine or Saline eye drops
• Chapstick and lip balm
• Tissues
• Small hand sanitizer
• Puzzle or small crossword books
• Batteries
• Hand held electronic games
Operation Yellow Ribbon of South Jersey will also be hosting a holiday cookie and baked goods drive to send to the troops deployed in Afghanistan and supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Items will only be accepted on Saturday, Dec. 7, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the 8th Legislative District Office at 176 Route 70, Suite 13 in Medford. For more, please contact Dave Silver at [email protected].
Volunteers will pack and box all donated items to be mailed to recipients on the care package mailing list. Besides baked goods, store bought cookies and treats will also be accepted and shipped.
Please put cookies in layers in large plastic zip closed bags or in lightweight disposable containers. Containers of any type will not be returned because they will be used to ship to recipients. | https://medium.com/the-mt-laurel-sun/burlington-county-looking-for-donations-towards-care-packages-for-troops-9f62879cef47 | [] | 2016-09-23 16:38:16.453000+00:00 | ['Families', 'Headlines', 'Burlington County', 'Burlington County College'] |
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