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Reflections of a junior developer who changed jobs 7 months in | I’ve been a frontend developer for a over a year and a half and switched jobs 7 months into my first developer role. I’ve learned during this time that some of the anxieties I’ve had about my trajectory as a developer were common among my peers. I hope that by sharing my feelings and my actions that I can help alleviate some of these anxieties for other junior developers!
My first (understandable) mistake
I think your first developer job plays an important role in setting the pace and trajectory for your career (with a caveat that I’ll get into 😇). With that being said, I think it’s unrealistic to tell juniors to be picky with their first job (especially when you don’t know their situation). And frankly speaking, there’s a ton of really shitty first jobs.
There’s also many factors that go into making your first job fulfilling, many of which you can’t reasonably figure out during the interview process, especially if you don’t have a previous developer job to compare to. I’ve had interviews with several companies and did not interview any of them critically. I think this is natural for many juniors, there’s excitement and stress involved when you’re interviewing early into your career. It’s easy to forget you should be interviewing the company too. I felt thankful to be getting interviewed in the first place! I was desperate to get my foot in the door after being ghosted and rejected from over 80 companies and that hindered my ability to assess a company critically.
My first job as a developer
I accepted an offer from a company that looked great on paper. Frontend role — check. Good pay — check. Good benefits — check. The tech stack was quite outdated and I knew that when accepting the offer. A ton of companies (especially SaaS) have outdated tech stacks and as long as I’m learning and contributing meaningfully then I’ll be happy (and who knows, maybe I could help refactor the tech stack eventually!)
Unfortunately, a month into the job I felt unfulfilled and was becoming increasingly depressed. I felt like I was just pushing pixels and the work I was doing did not feel meaningful. I remember dreading every single standup. Every night before a work day, I would try to think about what I contributed and how that was helping the company and go to sleep feeling anxious. I felt like an imposter. To a certain degree this is natural, we put a ton of pressure on ourselves and imposter syndrome is rampant in our field. I would read countless threads about other people experiencing the same thing and I told myself this is normal. It can takes months for a junior to onboard and even a year until they contribute to the code meaningfully. But that wasn’t the case for me.
Quitting my first job, 7 months in
There were many factors that contributed to me entertaining the idea of looking for a new role so early into my first job. I kept reading about how I’d be looked down on for leaving a role in under a year and some even say 2 years. I told myself to stick it out for a year, that the longer I stay at this role the better I look on paper and maybe things will get better. I’d like to give a big (or small cause my hands are tiny) middle finger to those people for contributing to my (and many others) unhappiness. You do not owe a company anything, especially if it’s at the cost of your mental health. There is nothing wrong with leaving a role that is not fulfilling you.
3 months in, I was working on side projects almost every day after work. I knew I had to do this to be a competitive candidate. The work I was doing was not what was expected of frontend developers in 2020. The mentorship I was seeking was sporadic and only touched on HTML/CSS. I felt no ownership and I did not feel challenged. Some of my pull requests did not get reviewed for months, some were fixed by my mentor without my knowledge, and I was told to stop grabbing so many bug fix tickets because I was overwhelming our pull request process. What was suppose to feel like a safe environment to fail in, felt like an environment where it was safe to fail because I was not doing work. There was no roadmap, no goal setting, and no long-term plan for me and how I wanted to grow as a developer. Despite going through several people and voicing my concerns, they were ultimately ignored or forgotten about. A part of me knew this wasn’t ideal but at the same time this wasn’t a terrible job. I got paid on time, I became good friends with a coworker, and I had good work life balance. But I knew the longer I stayed, the more I was sabotaging myself as a developer and I was getting extremely burnout from all the side projects I was working on after work.
Interviewing (again)
I started actively interviewing 6 months in and I won’t lie it was awful. I was working, creating side projects, studying for tech tests and using my vacation days for interviews. I was burning out fast. I remember breaking down multiple times and being the most anxious I had been in years. I kept telling myself the same thing I told myself when I first graduated — this is temporary and future me will thank me. But current me was drowning. I honestly wish I had some advice to give here but I don’t. I’d love to hear how others managed interviewing again so early in their first job while juggling all of the above.
On a positive note, I had a much better idea of what to look for in a company and I knew what I wanted. I no longer saw companies with rose tinted glasses. I saw flags as red flags (thanks Bojack). I was able to be picky and I turned down interviews I thought were unreasonable (I’m looking at you full-stack tech tests that can take up to a week to complete) and I declined offers. I never thought I’d be in a position to negotiate and decline offers. I also asked a ton of questions. Prior to even interviewing at my current company, I recall asking 10+ questions to who would soon by my mentor. I knew I didn’t want to look for a job again (it really sucks lol). So I was picky, something I wish I was when I first looked for a developer job but I know ultimately is not always feasible.
When I mentioned earlier that your first developer job plays an important role in setting the pace and trajectory for your career — that was a half truth. The reality is, your first job most likely won’t be your best job because you don’t even know what you want and you don’t know what you don’t know. I knew nothing about processes and how wacky and outdated they were at my previous company. I sometimes think I spent more hours writing user stories than coding (but that’s okay because it pushed me to ask questions about processes and what sprint planning entails, something I never thought about when I first interviewed.)
What you do with that dissatisfaction is what will set the pace and trajectory for your career. So in a sense…your first job does play an important role in your trajectory because you’re learning about what you value and what to look for in your next role!
Current job and reflections
Going from my first job to my second job was a shock. There were so so many differences, so many adjustments and the vast majority of them were significant improvements. I’m thankful I asked so many questions before my interview because despite the shock, I knew in my gut during the first week that I made the right call changing jobs.
I joined a startup so I had an idea of what it would be like — more ownership, wearing different hats, and moving fast. It was extremely intimidating but it was also so exciting. My mentor at the time, did an amazing job of mentoring me and I could feel his passion for programming and dissecting his brain was some of the best learning and fun I’ve ever had at a job. The tech stack was more modern and I got my hands dirty in my first week. I saw my code live in our app in a week and it wasn’t just a small CSS bug fix. It felt amazing!
I remember my partner telling me how I seemed so bright and excited during my first few months at my new job. I remember feeling the joy of programming again and most of all I felt supported. During my first few 1:1s with my manager, she had me setup goals with her and I felt inspired by her (and I still do!) I felt comfortable voicing my concerns with her and I felt heard. Even in the first month, I felt like she was in my corner and she genuinely cared for my well being and learning. In 10 months, I shipped out so many features that I never thought would be possible. I never thought I’d learn so much in such a short amount of time. I went from having no work experience and an arguably basic understanding of React and React-Native, and absolutely no knowledge in Redux (minus trying to bulldoze through a tech test), Redux-Sagas, and TypeScript to shipping out small features in a month, medium features with help from my mentor in 3 months, and my first large solo feature at the 6 month mark.
There were definitely hurdles however, I had trouble disconnecting from work. I saw how passionate so many of my coworkers were and it resonated with me. I never wanted to disappoint even though it sometimes caused me immense anxiety and stress. I’m still navigating through these feelings and learning how to manage my time but this time around I have my coworkers and my manager supporting me.
Creating your own mentorship
I wanted to touch on one final point that I feel like a lot of juniors struggle with. I feel so blessed to have had the mentorship that I had and the mentor who onboarded me during my first 6 months. I wouldn’t have done it any differently. I think people who know how to “dumb down” technical content and teach it to juniors are rare in the tech industry. He knew when I was frazzled and always had the right thing to say. He knew when to let me struggle and was great at giving me breadcrumbs. He empathized with me and reflected on his own time as a junior and it lessened my imposter syndrome. I remember confiding in him that I felt disheartened reading the official documentation on Redux-Sagas and him telling me the documentation isn’t easy to reason about. He was passionate and cared about code quality as well as the work culture and that resonated with me.
When my mentor left the company, I was extremely anxious and felt like I was about to drown. I thought I was fooling everyone and soon people would realize I was an imposter hiding behind my mentor’s shield. It didn’t help that I had a large time-sensitive project looming. It truly felt like a sink or swim situation. This is where I realized that I can find my own mentorship. I went from having sporadic and unfulfilling mentorship from my first job to having the opportunity to dissect my coworker’s brain with scheduled pair programming sessions at my current job. Unfortunately, most junior developer roles don’t provide direct mentorship. From speaking with many peers, a lot of developers are stretched thin and teaching is not something everyone is cut out to do. But over the last 4 months since my mentor left, I knew I could still find mentorship — although not as direct. I started to utilize our frontend slack channel to ask questions, something I was scared of doing while my mentor was at my company.
At a certain point, I feel like I relied on my mentor too much and that to a certain extent may have hindered my growth. Although I grew so much in the 6 months he was mentoring me, I grew even more in the 4 months that I was struggling. I think struggle is the best way to learn (to a certain extent). I was still getting mentorship through peer reviews, I was still able ask questions and pair with other programmers when I was blocked for too long. And more recently, I’ve been putting a larger effort in understanding how my coworker’s implement similar components rather than just referencing them for my own work. I think about how I can refactor existing code and how I can make my own code more performant. I noticed I was getting the same comments about avoiding anonymous functions in component props and saw we’ve been implementing useCallBack() instead. I was so excited the first time I implemented it and spent the night before bed trying to understand the intricacies of all the React hooks.
This is word vomit to say that even if you’re not getting direct mentorship, it’s possible to find your own mentorship (with the caveat that you’re still being supported!)
Final thoughts
Whew, I did not expect to write so much. I think being a junior developer is such an interesting time and everyone’s experiences are unique but we share a lot of similar anxieties (I didn’t know how common it was to be anxious about standups!) I hope some of my advice and experience can help other juniors navigate through unfulfilling jobs and general first job anxieties. I’ll never regret switching jobs so early and I hope that becomes more of the norm for unhappy junior developers. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @negicodes (I’d especially love to learn how similar or different your experience has been!) | https://medium.com/@nuggetnegin/reflections-of-a-junior-developer-who-changed-jobs-7-months-in-484bf39a4a5e | ['Negin Melina S'] | 2021-07-22 16:45:57.179000+00:00 | ['Junior Developer', 'Web Development', 'Engineering', 'Bootcamp', 'Job Hunting'] |
What is portfolio rebalancing and why is it important? | We are answering our community’s Money Questions here on Medium and via email. If you have a question which we haven’t addressed yet, you can submit it here. To sign up to receive our emails visit https://www.unlock-ikigai.com/
Question: What is portfolio rebalancing and why is it important?
From our Investment Manager, Deirdre Rooney:
A survey of over 25,000 investors in 32 countries showed that typically 70% would make changes to their portfolio during periods of market volatility. Unfortunately, the changes they made left 51% of them unhappy with the results. Managing a portfolio isn’t easy — it’s a dynamic process that responds to change in financial markets. Rebalancing is an important part of that process which aims to maintain a desired asset allocation.
The mix and quantity of the different investments in your portfolio is referred to as the asset allocation i.e. how much of your portfolio should be invested in a particular asset. It’s important because over 90% of the returns obtained over time come from the allocation of assets within your portfolio. (see: Should I wait to invest at the bottom?)
Spreading your portfolio of investments across a variety of markets that respond differently to factors such as economic growth or contraction, inflation, and interest rates, reduces your risk of loss: You don’t have all your eggs in one basket.
But it’s important to stick to your asset allocation so that your portfolio doesn’t become more or less risky than you want. Too much risk in your portfolio means you may face higher losses than you can afford. Too little risk and you won’t see the growth you need to reach your investment goal. Imagine driving to a friend’s house along a road with lots of hills and bends. If you drive much faster than the recommended speed limit, your risk of an accident is increased. But if you drive slower than the speed limit, it’ll take longer to arrive.
Let’s look at an example: suppose you start with an investment of £1,000. The portfolio that matches your risk profile is made up of two assets: a stock and a bond in equal amount i.e. a 50% allocation of £500 to each asset. After 1 year, the stock has performed well and risen 20% but the bond hasn’t changed. The value of stocks in the portfolio is now £600 and bonds are unchanged at £500. Your portfolio asset allocation is changed to 55% stocks and 45% bonds.
If global stocks were to fall suddenly, your portfolio has a higher risk of loss than before because your allocation to stocks is greater than the original 50% allocation: You’ve now got more to lose in a stock market decline. To get back to your original allocation of 50% / 50%, you simply sell some stocks and buy some bonds. This activity is called rebalancing.
There are several important benefits that come from regular portfolio rebalancing:
Rebalancing is a form of risk management. Risk is a driver of returns from your portfolio and therefore it requires management. In the example above, rebalancing reduced the risk of loss in the stock asset and therefore reduced the overall risk of the portfolio. How often you rebalance depends largely on the costs of doing so because such costs eat into your returns. We recommend you check if your investment manager charges you for rebalancing. However, research suggests that in times of volatility, such as we’ve recently experienced due to the coronavirus, rebalancing more often gives better returns.
Risk is a driver of returns from your portfolio and therefore it requires management. In the example above, rebalancing reduced the risk of loss in the stock asset and therefore reduced the overall risk of the portfolio. How often you rebalance depends largely on the costs of doing so because such costs eat into your returns. We recommend you check if your investment manager charges you for rebalancing. However, research suggests that in times of volatility, such as we’ve recently experienced due to the coronavirus, rebalancing more often gives better returns. Prevents emotional decisions and behavioural biases. Everybody has biases: we make judgements about people, opportunities, government action and financial markets. We view the world through the lens of our own experience and knowledge which results in bias — an illogical preference or prejudice. Behavioural finance researchers have identified several investor biases which usually lead to selling at market bottoms and buying at tops. Financial market history has documented several bubbles and manias that provide useful insight into such irrational investor behaviour. Rebalancing your portfolio leads to “good” investor behaviour and discipline.
Everybody has biases: we make judgements about people, opportunities, government action and financial markets. We view the world through the lens of our own experience and knowledge which results in bias — an illogical preference or prejudice. Behavioural finance researchers have identified several investor biases which usually lead to selling at market bottoms and buying at tops. Financial market history has documented several bubbles and manias that provide useful insight into such irrational investor behaviour. Rebalancing your portfolio leads to “good” investor behaviour and discipline. Rebalancing typically reduces assets that have outperformed and increases assets that have underperformed. In this way, rebalancing harvests capital gains (see our response on portfolio taxes) by selling outperforming assets to keep their allocation at the right level. This enables you to make use of your annual capital gains allowance which expires each tax year if not claimed. As an example, imagine you had a portfolio that grew in value by exactly £1,500 each year. You held this portfolio for ten years so you’ve made a capital gain of £15,000. When you sell this portfolio today, you realise a capital gain of £15,000. After deducting your capital gains allowance of £12,300, you will pay tax at a rate of 20% on the amount in excess of your allowance or £540. Had you used prior year allowances, there would be no tax to pay. The larger your portfolio becomes through capital gains, the greater your need for a suitable tax strategy.
Please note that the information provided in this response is of a general nature. It is not a substitute for specific advice in your own circumstances. You are recommended to obtain specific professional advice from a professional accountant or tax adviser before you take any action regarding your tax situation or refrain from such action. | https://medium.com/@ikigai-money/what-is-portfolio-rebalancing-and-why-is-it-important-36f4924f33e0 | [] | 2020-06-08 10:44:19.551000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Money', 'Personal Finance', 'Portfolio Rebalancing', 'Risk Management'] |
Do Short Stories Deserve the Same Negative Label as Fast Food? | Do Short Stories Deserve the Same Negative Label as Fast Food?
A scientific comparison
Photo by Duncan Kidd on Unsplash
What do books have in common with food?
You can’t enjoy them during sleep by putting them under your pillow.
Eating and reading have more in common than most think. Size, taste and value are the qualities both share. We consume a good story with as much enjoyment as a delicious cake.
Yet, if you brought to me an encyclopedia-sized cake and told me to eat it all by myself, I would be full just by hearing your suggestion. No, thank you! One slice is enough.
When it comes to reading, I prefer shorter pieces. But when I write, I feel a necessity to write longer stories. I have the same relationship with food. I rarely cook fast food myself, but when I order, it’s unusual to go for a fancy meal. | https://medium.com/illumination/do-short-stories-deserve-the-same-negative-label-as-fast-food-5a3f7583ad41 | [] | 2020-12-14 11:49:45.602000+00:00 | ['Fast Food', 'Benefits', 'Writing', 'Stories', 'Reading'] |
Velo实验室2020发展路线图更新！测试网！ | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/veloprotocol/velo%E5%AE%9E%E9%AA%8C%E5%AE%A42020%E5%8F%91%E5%B1%95%E8%B7%AF%E7%BA%BF%E5%9B%BE%E6%9B%B4%E6%96%B0-%E6%B5%8B%E8%AF%95%E7%BD%91-40ff5ed62dcb | ['Velo Protocol Cn'] | 2020-12-18 09:07:46.245000+00:00 | ['Digitalpayment', 'Token', 'Crypto', 'Chinese', 'Blockchain'] |
How to Make Peace with Those Holiday Obligations | If you’re feeling burdened by too much obligation around the season this year — whether it be parties, gifts, or culinary contributions to events — here are a few guidelines to help you stay in your authority as you divvy up your resources and make choices.
1. Create a Needs Chart: Start with you. Ask “What are my needs for the holidays?” and write them all down — no holds barred. Then, create a chart and do the same for what you know and suspect each person you in your family needs. Look for the overlap. Then you can make clearer choices and compromises. If you and your partner need to rest, and your mother wants you and the kids to make the exhausting trip to her, you can go, and make plans to have her watch the kids for big chunks of time while you kick back. Or, if your needs truly trump attendance at a family or other gathering, you can decline with remorse and honor them by celebrating together at a later date.
2. Heed the Resentment and Axe the Guilt: Resentment and obligation do tend to go hand in hand, but that doesn’t mean obligation isn’t worthy. The question is, how much resentment? Those occasional years that I choose to disappoint my father, face my FOMO and do my own thing, are those times when my resentment will be too high to for me to be present if I don’t follow another path. Use your level of resentment as a signal.
Guilt and obligation are also partners, but most of the time, the guilt is really just masking anger about feeling obligated in the first place. Guilt tends to keep you feeling stuck and powerless to make a decision. When we are not aware of our guilt or underlying resentment, we tend to disappoint others in a way that leaks that hostility on to them, e.g. showing up too late, forgetting promised provisions, canceling at the last minute. Become aware of your feelings of anger and communicate responsibly, instead of acting out.
3. Locate the love: Obligation can co-exist with love. You can detest going to your in-laws and do it anyway because of the love you feel for your partner. This is not being a pushover. It’s acting on behalf of the relationship. All relationships have needs — attention, commitment and reciprocity for starters — that require them to survive. When you start to think, I have to do FILL IN THE BANK for INSERT FRIEND, RELATIVE, or ORGANIZATION HERE, it focuses on and exacerbates the sense of obligation, resentment, guilt. But when you act on behalf of the relationship, the negativity has a chance to subside. Locating the love is about doing the thing you feel obligated about for you — for your sense of integrity and contribution to a relationship, and out of respect for the connection. | https://medium.com/change-becomes-you/how-to-make-peace-with-those-holiday-obligations-f9e055c18cb9 | ['The Good Men Project'] | 2020-12-17 11:27:34.571000+00:00 | ['Family', 'Emotional Health', 'Stress Management', 'Holidays', 'Advice'] |
C# Design Patterns — Singleton. Providing one instance for the whole… | C# Design Patterns
C# Design Patterns — Singleton
Providing one instance for the whole application
Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash
Design patterns are common coding practices defined to solve common software development problems.
The Singleton pattern was developed to provide a common way of providing a single instance of an object throughout the whole application lifetime. So, as long as the application is not restarted, this instance must be the same regardless of how many times you instantiate it.
Usage and Drawbacks
Examples
Some examples of singletons are objects that need to share resources between classes or threads, like:
Global state management
Logging service
.NET Core AppSettings
And others…
Drawbacks
Sometimes, with poor implementation, the Singleton pattern can actually become an anti-pattern , the reasons are:
It is really difficult to test if you are not using Dependency Injection , because it is statically created, so you can’t manually control it, as a result, you can’t mock it.
, because it is statically created, so you can’t manually control it, as a result, you can’t mock it. It can lead to memory leaks if dependencies are not properly disposed after usage
Let’s build it
Let’s imagine that we have a service interface IGreetingService.cs :
Now it was required that this service should not change throughout the whole application.
The classic approach
There are many ways to implement the Singleton pattern in C#.
Here I’ll show you three approaches and which one I would use.
Double-Checked Locking
I didn’t consider showing this approach without thread lock because it is very unsafe to use in multithreaded applications that way.
Here we have
Two private variables: a static variable that is the service instance, a read-only object that is going to work as the thread lock.
instance, a read-only object that is going to work as the thread lock. A private constructor to prevent a new service from being manually instantiated.
constructor to prevent a new service from being manually instantiated. A public and static property that is how we can access our singleton instance.
You can note that we have two null checks. The inner check is to prevent the instance from being recreated and the outer null check is for preventing lock every time we need to access the instance, thus increasing performance.
Also, we have the lock for preventing this code from being run by more than one thread at the same time, making it thread-safe .
Now if you execute it like this:
IGreetingService service = DoubleCheckedLockingGreetingService.Instance;
IGreetingService service_2 = DoubleCheckedLockingGreetingService.Instance; service.Greet("Singleton");
service_2.Greet("Singleton");
You will get the same output for both methods.
Lazy<T>
A second approach is letting the instance be created for the first time it is requested.
.NET has the Lazy<T> class, which provides a lazy initialization of objects for us.
Now if you execute it like this:
IGreetingService service = LazyObjectGreetingService.Instance;
IGreetingService service_2 = LazyObjectGreetingService.Instance; service.Greet("Singleton");
service_2.Greet("Singleton");
You will get the same output for both methods.
Object Eager Initialization
In C# there’s an option of assigning the instance for the static variable, making it possible for the object to be initialized when it is first needed.
We can go even further and not use a private variable anymore and use Auto-Property , which assigns a value for the property if it doesn’t have a value yet.
Note the static constructor. This is needed so the C# compiler will not mark the type as beforefieldinit . This will guarantee the class laziness.
Now if you execute it like this:
IGreetingService service = SimpleGreetingService.Instance;
IGreetingService service_2 = SimpleGreetingService.Instance; service.Greet("Singleton");
service_2.Greet("Singleton");
You will get the same output for both methods.
Modern .NET Dependency Injection
Modern .NET/.NET Core applications already come with a built-in dependency injection mechanism that automatically injects services with the respective life-cycle they need.
Transient — Injects a new instance every time it is created and lives as long as the parent
Scoped — Injected once per request and lives as long as the request lives
Singleton — Injected once per application and lives as long as the application lives
So, in a .NET Core WebAPI, for example, you only need to register the IGreetingService with the GreetingService as a Singleton in the ConfigureServices method in your Startup.cs file. Like:
services.AddSingleton<IGreetingService,GreetingService>();
And for the implementation of this service we have:
Note that we don’t need an Instance accessor property to access our singleton. This happens because we delegate the job of assigning this instance to the framework, so all you need to do is inject the IGreetingService where you need it and .NET will provide you the only instance it created. For example:
public MyClass (IGreetingService service)
{
// Do something or assign to a class member
}
Conclusion
You could see how easy is to implement the Singleton pattern from scratch with C#. Even though it is a pattern and has its applicabilities, it needs to be used with care because it can lead to many system issues like memory leaks. Also, due to many drawbacks, it is often recommended to not use the Singleton pattern because it can become an anti-pattern.
Thankfully, with the .NET dependency injection mechanism, many drawbacks can be avoided, like the difficulty of implementing unit tests.
I uploaded the code for the normal implementation in this repository. | https://medium.com/swlh/c-design-patterns-singleton-36d746bd7b6e | ['Andre Lopes'] | 2020-08-05 16:32:18.660000+00:00 | ['Singleton', 'Dotnet Core', 'Dotnet', 'Csharp', 'Design Patterns'] |
Lojong Practice Journal: Don’t ponder others | “Don’t ponder others” may be a short slogan, but there is so much to unpack within these three words. It’s basically an instruction to mind our own business and not get so hung up on the motivations and actions of other people. Speculating about what others are or are not doing is a way for us to not own our minds and do the work we need to. As well as being a distraction, pondering others is a source of suffering.
When I first started contemplating this slogan, I thought of it in very lightweight terms. Mostly, I associated it with misunderstandings: Person A doesn’t get a reply from a text sent to person B. Person A begins to agonize over why person B has not responded. First, they worry they did something wrong. Then they get indignant that person B couldn’t just communicate clearly and has ghosted them. They spend days wondering about the motivations of person B, vacillating between different emotions, spinning out. Then person B texts, apologizing for the late response and explains that they had a family emergency. Their lack of response had nothing to do with person A at all. While this may sound familiar, and is certainly a time when not pondering others would serve well, it’s only a taste of the awareness this slogan has to offer.
When I think about this slogan in my own life, I think of how often pondering others has made me feel inadequate. I have looked to great leaders past and present and felt like I don’t have the same drive, the right charisma, or the platform they have. Pondering the monumental work being done by other people has made me think anything I do in comparison is pointless. Christina Feldman (p.93, Buddha’s Daughters) describes this as “inferiority conceit,” born of our perception that someone else, over there, is flawless, and we, somehow, are incapable of being just as “good.”
This perspective is rooted in individualism, perpetuated by whiteness and capitalism. Individualism falsely assumes that one person can achieve great things entirely on their own. It ignores that movements have never been about the actions of one person but about a community of people coming together, each offering what they can.
The flip side of pondering others in a social justice context is how we fixate on other people as the source of a problem without ever looking at our complicity in oppressive systems. This perspective is also rooted in individualism.
For years I thought of racism as a problem of other people’s regressive beliefs, rather than a systemic issue. I believed that racism was a problem caused by people with conscious biases who were overtly racist, entirely apart from myself. The problem wasn’t me, it was those white people, over there. This attitude of white exceptionalism prevented me from seeing that it doesn’t matter how “good” I think of myself, I am still racialized white in a white supremacist culture. I might not be consciously racist, but I am no less complicit than a white nationalist if my view is that white nationalists are the source of the problem, rather than a symptom. White nationalism isn’t an accident, and in order to understand that, I have had to turn my practice inward. I’ve had to look at how I am conditioned into and contribute to white supremacy.
Pondering others is a way to get out of taking personal responsibility in an interconnected world. As individuals, our choices matter, and learning to own those choices is what this slogan is pointing us to. We are the only one who can change our frame of mind and impact we have in the world. If we are white people who want to address racism, then we have to start with our own conditioning, rather than scapegoating. Examining our own biases will give us insight into the biases and radicalization of other white people, not the other way around. When we see how insidious white supremacy is in ourselves, we will see the work we need to do to change the culture.
Pondering others serves to solidify our ego either by thinking we are better than someone or thinking we are much worse. Both lines of thought cause undue suffering and are barriers to the potential we all have to wake up. There is a reason we instructed to start with ourselves and start where we are. We cannot change others, we can only change ourselves. Which I find to be a great relief!
To not ponder others is to let go of trying to “fix” or live up to someone else, and instead to take on a project that will have fruitful results: Pondering our own selves. Pondering our own mind gives us clarity and illuminates the agency we have within systems. When we change our own heart and mind, we change how we act, what we think, and what we say. Because the personal is social — because we are interconnected — these changes make a difference. They ripple out and serve in a way that pondering others never will. | https://medium.com/kaitlynschatch/lojong-practice-journal-dont-ponder-others-9791705bf293 | ['Kaitlyn S. C. Hatch'] | 2020-11-13 19:12:22.697000+00:00 | ['Lojong', 'White Supremacy', 'Commentary', 'series of posts', 'Social Justice'] |
11 Minutes | Photo by Igor Starkov on Unsplash
Minute 1: They’re in the corner of a coffee shop. A dad and his two-year-old son. The boy is awkwardly perched on a chair. The dad looks at his iPhone. The boy slips down from the chair and toddles to his father, grabbing a pant leg. The dad smiles affectionately and looks back at his phone.
Minute 2: A young man with a tattoo on his forearm that says Live and Let Live brings the dad a coffee and the boy a muffin. He kneels, eye-level with the boy, and says, “Need a lift?” The boy smiles and nods. The young man picks him up and perches him back on his chair.
Minute 3: The boy chews his muffin. He has crumbs on his face. He smiles at his dad and says, “Smuffin good Daddy!” in a moment that will never be again.
Minute 4: A young woman pushes a baby carriage up the wooden ramp to the front door of the coffee shop. The bell on the door rings as she opens it, and the young man behind the counter races over to help. The baby carriage is too wide to fit through the door. The young man suggests leaving it outside. The woman whispers that her baby is asleep. “We can leave the door open,” he says. The woman parks the carriage just outside and takes a seat by the window. Her back is to the front door. If she stands, she can look through the window and see her baby sleeping in the carriage.
Minute 5: It’s a glorious spring day. A cool breeze blows, picking petals off a cherry blossom tree. If you listen carefully, you can hear birds singing through the incessant din of traffic passing close to the ramp leading to the coffee shop door.
Minute 6: The boy is piling muffin crumbs into small hills. “Don’t play with your food,” says his dad. The boy grabs some packets of sugar and pushes them around the table. His dad, a patient man, places them back in the dish.
Minute 7: The boy slips out of his chair and looks up at his dad. The father looks at him for a second. “Don’t go anywhere,” he says lightly like it’s a joke. The boy takes one uncertain step away from the table and looks at his dad again. The young mother eyes the pair of them in the corner. She rises to check on her baby and finds her still fast asleep. She sits back down, sips her latte, and pulls a phone from her purse. She looks again at the father and son. The boy is just one step away from his dad. He’s still close enough for the father to reach out and grab him if he takes another step. The young woman opens her Instagram account on her phone.
Minute 8: An elderly man on a rolling walker, aided by a nurse, enters the shop. Winded by the effort of getting up the ramp, he shakes his head and smiles at the young man behind the counter. “Never get old,” he jokes. The young man laughs. The nurse helps the man into a chair. The toddler takes another uncertain step away from his father.
Minute 9: The young woman takes a selfie, showing herself, her latte, and her baby carriage through the window. She writes “Morning Bliss” and posts it on Instagram. The nurse orders a cappuccino and a decaf coffee with goat’s milk. “Let me see what I can do,” says the young man. He goes into a back room to look for goat’s milk. The nurse returns to the table and takes the elderly man’s walker.
Minute 10: The boy is standing in the shop doorway. No one notices him. A fresh breeze caresses his face and lifts the dark curls off his forehead. He squints into the sun. He looks so happy. The young man is still searching for goat’s milk. The walker is sticking, making it hard to close. The nurse curses under her breath as she fiddles with the handle. The dad frowns at something on his phone, swipes his finger across the screen, and then looks up, alarmed, to see his son isn’t there.
Minute 11: Heart in mouth, the father races across the shop toward the door, but it feels like he’s moving in slow motion. Now everyone sees the boy, shrieking with glee, as he races down the ramp toward the street. The boy is one step from the edge of the curb. The dad is too far away. A driver slams his horn and his breaks at the same time. No one can hear the birds anymore.
In the time it takes to click another news item, take a selfie, or add a clever post to Instagram, life as we know it can disappear.
But then the boy, miraculously, stops. He’s momentarily distracted by a cherry blossom petal spinning lazily overhead. He leaps up and claps the petal between his hands. As he does, his dad catches him. The man embraces and kisses his son. He hears birds singing. | https://medium.com/modern-parent/11-minutes-1a2a018b8217 | ['Stephanie Gruner Buckley'] | 2020-12-27 17:18:53.048000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Toddlers', 'Distraction', 'iPhone', 'Parenting'] |
Best E-mail Marketing System | Best E-mail Marketing System
The Secret Email System is a counterintuitive approach to creating an running an online business, specifically the freedom life-style business model, that allows you to build a sustainable and profitable long term business that gives you the freedom, fun and adventure. Nafis iqbal akil ·Dec 24, 2020
We achieve this by creating a “business machine” that works for you 24/7 where your only job is to oversee the system, not to create products, services where you have to chase new clients or deliver to them.
And as a result…this free’s you up to live and enjoy your life while the business works for you — this is the Secret Email System.
<<<Book Your Copy Now>>>> | https://medium.com/@helperhands/best-e-mail-marketing-system-953a04c6ff79 | ['Nafis Iqbal Akil'] | 2020-12-24 03:51:08.856000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Email', 'Business Strategy', 'Email Marketing Tips', 'Business'] |
My steps to find a great job fit | Nowadays I have been seeing an increased variety of jobs in Tech. With so many options and all those amazing job descriptions sometimes I get afraid of applying to a new role to find out, later, that it wasn’t what I was looking for.
When I mentioned that with my therapist we started working on my insecurities and all the disappointment I already faced in my 5+ years of experience. Because of that, I was able to come up with some key strengths that I value most in a company and what strategies I could follow to make sure that it would be a good fit for me.
As I realized already, I value informal workplaces where people enjoy their working days and companies in which the product has a good quality. With that being said, I came up with a few topics to check during the interview process and how to find the answers.
Positive feedback from employees
The first thing that I look at about a company is the work environment. Is it formal, or informal? What are the complaints about the managers and directors? Do people have fun working there?
I use to say that the tech world is small. Working as a Software Engineer in Portugal allowed me to meet many people from different places in the world. Some of them are Brazilians that worked with me in the past, or that we just talked once in a conference or even people that interviewed me for positions that turned out not to be a good fit. There is always someone that knows someone else who works for that company. Go on, hit send in that message to request feedback about the environment.
A good place to have a broader picture of the environment is Glassdoor.com. I look at all the cons from recent comments (last 3 months) for a pattern. Usually, companies with bad environments are marked with several comments about how bad the management layer is, about how the company values HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion), or the long hours that the employees have to make.
With feedback from both current and past employees and all the reviews from Glassdoor, you probably already have enough information to decide on whether to keep evaluating the company or not.
Strong engineering team and culture
Strong engineering culture is almost impossible to achieve when a company has a high employee turnover rate. You could search on Linkedin for people who work on a specific company, looking for someone who works in there for more than 1 and a half years. Use this search also to identify the work experience of the team. Talk with a friend about this company.
A different source of information is the company career page. Usually, they have videos and information about core values, benefits, and the environment. Sometimes you can even find a blog with more information about solutions for tech problems they had or information about the company’s growth and strategies.
One question that I started to ask in every interview is about the support for engineers to attend conferences. If there is no budget to help the team to attend good conferences, I don’t believe that the engineering will be using the best practices and tools. Attending conferences also helps disseminate the culture of sharing, which I consider to be very important.
A product that customers love
If you ever used a terrible product or service, you probably ended up cursing the company and speaking terrible things about it. Do you want to be the engineer behind it? I know I don’t.
The best way to know if customers love the product is to use it yourself. Download the app, create an account on the service, and explore it for a while. This approach probably won’t work for a B2B company, so try to look on its website for current customers to see if you know the brands that work with them.
A data-driven company
Being data-driven, to me, means that the work I’ll do has a high probability of being meaningful. I want to understand the problems I’m trying to fix and how it changes the customer’s life or work. To do so, a company must have a strong Data team and the decisions must be based on key metrics.
During interviews, ask about how the engineering team creates a backlog. Where does the work come from? If the conversation does not start with key metrics to guide the company and never mentions metrics at all, this is a red flag. Probably the backlog comes from top-down requests or the sales team. There are definitely exceptions on this, just keep in mind that if being data-driven does not show up in mid-term goals, it may never be prioritized at all.
Freedom to make technological decisions
What is the role of a Software Engineer in that company? Engineers works as executors (they just type code) or they act like owners? The second is usually associated with better tools and freedom to choose your battles.
This is directly related to the way I like to work. I’m not a lonely wolf, but I need to have some time on my own to analyze metrics and document flows to only then work with the team to propose a solution.
I want to be able to develop scalable and maintainable code whenever possible. To do so, an engineer must have the freedom to make decisions. Should we build a new service? Is there any part of the system that needs refactoring? Having a non-technical person telling the engineering team how to do their jobs will not give you time to reason about technical debts or quality.
On an interview ask about how they ensure code quality. I expect to hear about a CI that runs at least test and linting. Low test coverage is also a red flag, it tells me that the company cares more about delivering everything on time than delivering parts of it with good quality. If it is an old codebase, the team may not be worried about refactoring existing code.
Opportunity to make an impact on the business
By having data to support your ideas and the freedom to put them into practice you will realize, in the end, that you have the right conditions to cause some impact in the business. You will have a say in business decisions.
I usually find it very difficult to have an impact on a large organization, especially if your team takes care of such a small piece of the product. But working in a smaller scope gives you different opportunities. You’ll start working on scalability problems and performance.
This can be easily identified in an interview by asking about the team structure and their scope. You can also ask about the current challenges that this team is dealing with right now and what are the plans for the next 12 months. | https://medium.com/@leandro.gomes/my-steps-to-find-a-great-job-fit-a4e356a00e88 | ['Leandro Gomes Da Silva'] | 2020-12-22 21:29:22.893000+00:00 | ['Job Hunting', 'Careers', 'Technology', 'Software Development'] |
10 Deep Learning concepts one should know | 1. Activation Functions:
An activation function is a function added to a neural network to help the organization learn complex information examples.
For short, the linear activation function or ReLU is a piecewise linear function that will give the information straightforwardly with a little chance that it is positive.
Else, it will give zero.
The greatest advantage of ReLU is its dense gradient, which widely quickens the meeting of stochastic gradient descent, going against the sigmoid/tanh capacities.
Contrasting with tanh/sigmoid neurons that include costly tasks (exponentials, and so forth), the ReLU can be executed by basic thresholding a framework of initiations at zero.
2. Cost Function:
It is a function that indicates the presentation of an AI model for the given information. Cost Function evaluates the error between predicted values and expected values. Then, it presents it as a real number.
In AI, cost functions are utilized to evaluate how severely models are performing.
Set forth, a cost function is a proportion of how wrong the model is regarding its capacity to evaluate the relation between X and y.
This is normally communicated as a distance between the predicted value and the actual value.
3. Back Propagation:
Back-propagation is an important component by which neural networks learn.
Back-propagation is only a method of restoring the all-out mishap into the neural networks to know the amount of the issues each node is responsible for, and accordingly refreshing the loads, so that limits the problems.
It can be done by giving the nodes with higher error rates lower weights and the other way around.
Back-propagation is a short structure for “backward propagation of errors”. It is a standard plan for preparing fake neural networks. This strategy assists with computing the list of all difficulties regarding the loads in the networks.
4. Convolutional Neural Networks:
A Convolutional Neural Network is a Deep Learning calculation that can take in an info picture, lower significance to different viewpoints/objects in the picture, and have the option to separate one from the other.
CNN, or convolutional neural network, is a neural network utilizing a convolution layer and pooling layer.
CNN’s are fundamentally utilized for picture characterization and acknowledgment. The skill of CNN is its convolutional capacity.
The potential for additional employments of CNNs is boundless. It should be explored and pushed to additional limits to find everything that could be accomplished by this unpredictable hardware.
5. Recurrent Neural Networks:
Repetitive Neural Networks (RNN) are a class of Artificial Neural Networks that can cycle a series of contributions to deep learning and hold its state while preparing the following grouping of data sources.
A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of counterfeit neural networks where groups between nodes structure a coordinated diagram and a quick arrangement.
RNNs are widely used in the following applications; Prediction problems, Language Modelling and Generating Text, Machine Translation, Speech Recognition, Generating Image Descriptions, Video Tagging, Text Summarization, Call Center Analysis, Face detection, OCR Applications as Image Recognition, Other applications like Music composition.
6. Long Short-Term Memory Networks:
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are a repetitive neural network equipped for learning request dependence in arrangement forecast issues.
This conduct is needed in complex-issue areas like machine interpretation, discourse acknowledgment, and only the iceberg’s tip. LSTMs are a complex territory of deep learning.
Long short-term memory (LSTM) is a false and irregular neural network, engineering utilized in deep learning.
The LSTM successfully solves speech recognition problems, unconstrained handwritten recognition, machine translation, image captioning, parsing, and lately, predicting stock prices and time series prediction. (83)
7. Weight Initialization:
The point of weight initialization is to avoid layer activation yields from disappearing throughout a forward pass through a deep neural organization.
Ø If we initialize all the loads to be zero, at that point, all the neurons of the relative multitude of layers play out a similar figurine. It gives a similar yield and makes the entire deep net useless. If the loads are zero, the entire deep net’s unpredictability would be equivalent to that of a single neuron.
Ø The random initialization serves the cycle of symmetry-breaking and gives much better precision. In this strategy, the loads are introduced extremely near zero, however randomly. This aids in breaking balance, and each neuron are done playing out a similar calculation.
8. Batch vs. Stochastic gradient descent:
Batch gradient descent is a variety of the gradient descent system that computes every model’s mistake in the training dataset.
However, updates the model after all training models have been evaluated. One cycle through the whole training dataset is known as a training epoch.
In Stochastic Gradient Descent, we utilize just single training per epoch.
Mini-batch Gradient Descent lies in the middle of these two limits. We can utilize a smaller group of preparing information per epoch.
9. Hyper-parameters:
Hyper-parameters are the variables that regulate the network structure and the variables which govern how the network is trained.
Hyper-parameters are set before training. Some common hyper-parameters are:
Ø Model Architecture is a vast hyper-parameter consisting of numerous settings such as many layers, processing the data, and other components that command how the actual data analysis will be done.
Ø Regularization is a procedure to decrease overfitting. Percept lab now supports random dropout as a binary hyper-parameter in deep learning components, allowing or disabling this for the model.
Ø A Loss Function maps decisions related to costs and the Learning Rate defines how much to change the model based on the evaluated error when weights are reorganized.
10. Learning Rate:
The learning rate is a constructible hyper-parameter used in neural networks training with a small positive value, frequently in the range between 0.0 and 1.0.
The learning rate is a hyper-parameter that controls how much to transform the model in reply to the estimated error each time the model weights are updated.
The learning rate may be the most significant hyper-parameter when constructing your neural network.
Therefore, it is vital to know how to examine the effects of the learning rate on model performance and build a concept about the learning rate’s fineness on model behavior. | https://medium.com/@sanamalik2392/10-deep-learning-concepts-one-should-know-cb821cc993fe | ['Sana Malik'] | 2020-12-07 12:46:35.065000+00:00 | ['Information Technology', 'Computer Science', 'Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning'] |
UI設計筆記工具篇：Flow-神器！動態做好Code 就完成！ | Design, code and collaborate.
Framer is the best way to create interactive designs from start to finish. Design from scratch and then easily turn… | https://medium.com/as-a-product-designer/ui%E8%A8%AD%E8%A8%88%E7%AD%86%E8%A8%98%E5%B7%A5%E5%85%B7%E7%AF%87-flow-%E7%A5%9E%E5%99%A8-%E5%8B%95%E6%85%8B%E5%81%9A%E5%A5%BDcode-%E5%B0%B1%E5%AE%8C%E6%88%90-5d4e456a8b8f | ['Laura Lin'] | 2018-08-22 02:42:43.466000+00:00 | ['Animation', 'Design', 'Flow', 'Sketch', 'iOS'] |
Introduction to Terraform Enterprise and Jenkins | In this post, I will provide background information on using CI/CD with Terraform Enterprise, decision points to select the right Terraform Enterprise package, and finally a detailed walk through of an example Jenkins pipeline using Terraform Enterprise (TFE).
Terraform is the ubiquitous choice for infrastructure and cloud services provisioning. Organizations have built mature processes around the creation, review, and use of Terraform code to manage their infrastructure. One common integration point for Terraform is a CI/CD tool such as Bamboo, Circle CI, or Jenkins. The latter part of this post will focus on Jenkins, but other than pipeline code, the guidance is generally the same across other CI/CD tools.
CI/CD Interacting with TFE
The Tao of HashiCorp has 8 principles that are used to guide the company’s vision, roadmap, and product design. The first principle is Workflows, not technology as we focus on the end goal and workflow, not the underlying technology — because technology changes, but end goals stay the same. This workflow-first principle is very evident with TFE because you have the flexibility of using UI/VCS webhook, CLI, and REST API driven workflows.
high-level components of a basic CI/CD pipeline with infrastructure provisioning with Terraform
How are you using Terraform with your CI/CD today? Are there established processes or controls that need to be respected when considering TFE? These questions and more are used to establish the adoption pattern for TFE relative to your existing pipeline.
The actual migration can be accomplished with minimal refactoring of your pipeline code. This is the approach that most organizations take when implementing TFE where the goal is to focus on extracting value from enterprise features without disrupting established workflows. For example, you have use cases being lead by security and governance for Sentinel Policy as Code and TFE Audit capabilities; the existing workflow and pipeline code should not need to be refactored completely though there will be some minor modifications.
TFE Background
TFE provides features to support the three main teams within IT often interacting with infrastructure and cloud services; Development, Operations, and Security. A sample mapping of enterprise features by team includes API access to Terraform for Development; Team Management, RBAC, and Multi-tenancy for Operations; and Sentinel Policy as Code for Security.
HashiCorp has two consumption models of Terraform that can be purchased with annual or multi-year subscriptions: SaaS and private installation. Recently the offerings were rebranded as Terraform Cloud (SaaS) and Terraform Enterprise (private installation). Terraform Cloud is a viable option for teams looking for enterprise features without a requirement for a single-tenant, self-provisioned implementation. Terraform Enterprise (TFE) is most often deployed by enterprises with compliance, security, and/or scale requirements.
comparison of Terraform packaging and offerings
Which Terraform package is right for you? If you are just starting your journey with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and have not encountered collaboration or governance requirements, then Open Source is probably fine for the next 6–12 months as you mature your IaC practice. But if you are in search of collaboration or governance features you should be evaluating Terraform Cloud or Terraform Enterprise.
TFE has a few hierarchy constructs that are relevant to your pipeline configuration. The top-level is an organization which can be used as a boundary between business units, environment stages, or other multi-tenancy criteria that may be important to your enterprise.
Within these organizations workspaces are where your Terraform code will be executed and will contain your state, variables, and policy sets will be applied. VCS integration and Sentinel policies defined at the organization level are applied to some or all of these workspaces. Finally, users are assigned to teams that are created within the organization to provide one or more levels of access. Team or user tokens are generated and are used to interact with TFE via the API.
OK, Enough Talking…
I’m going to present a basic Jenkins job file that will demonstrate a CLI-driven workflow by interacting with TFE using a Remote Backend file. The Remote Backend file tells Terraform OSS to use a TFE server to execute the Run remotely. Variables used for the Run and associated state file will reside within the TFE workspace as mentioned earlier. The files referenced in the walkthrough are in this repo, TFE-Jenkins, along with bootstrap scripts.
The next sections are a step-by-step guide to executing a Jenkins job against Terraform Enterprise. Assumptions are that you have a Jenkins instance running on Linux, Terraform Cloud or Enterprise instance, access to a VCS repo, and around 15 minutes. I’ll start with an overview of the steps and then go through TFE and Jenkins configuration.
Overview of High-Level Steps
Terraform
Create a Workspace in TFE
Set the Workspace to auto-apply (to allow Run to auto-apply if it passes Sentinel checks)
Specify the desired TF binary version for the Workspace
Set cloud credentials as Workspace variables (AWS in this example)
Create repo as source of the Workspace’s Terraform code
Seed the code repo with a remote backend file (backend.tf)
Jenkins
Configure .terraformrc file on server
Define job
Run job
TFE Workspace Prep
Navigate in TFE: Workspaces > Jenkins Target Workspace > Settings > General
Apply Method = Auto Apply
Terraform Version = 0.11.14 (note, if you are using 0.12 compliant code, then select the latest release)
Save Settings
Workspace General Settings within TFE UI
Navigate in TFE: Workspaces > Select Jenkins Target Workspace > Variables
Environment Variables
Create the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY variables
Use the “sensitive” feature of TFE to obfuscate the value in the UI
Click Save Variable
Create the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY variables using secure variables feature of TFE
Terraform Code Prep
Store main.tf and backend.tf in a repo accessible to the Jenkins server, the repo URL will be specified in the job file as the GIT_REPO value
sample backend.tf file; populate the hostname, organization, and workspace name fields. note if you using a private Terraform Enterprise instance (not Terraform Cloud), the hostname will be your unique fully-qualified domain name.
Jenkins OS Setup
TFE .terraformrc file must be created and configured on Linux-based Jenkins server (see link for notes on configuring terraformrc for Windows)
If not, you will receive “Error configuring the backend “remote”: required token could not be found” in the Stage Log
Write file: sudo nano /var/lib/jenkins/.terraformrc
Install unzip: sudo apt install unzip -y
Jenkins Job File
Update GIT_REPO value to reflect your target environment
Example files are available at https://github.com/raygj/tfe-jenkins
simple Jenkins pipeline with 3 stages
Pipeline Setup from Jenkins UI
http://< IP or DNS of your server>:8080
New Item
<some name>
Pipeline
OK
Description
Pipeline
Definition = Pipeline Script
Script = paste Jenkins file from previous section
Leave all other items default/unchecked
Save
Pipeline Run from Jenkins UI
Jenkins > Build Dashboard
Click on “clock” to schedule a run of your pipeline
Click on the name to see the stages being executed
Jenkins Stage View of our Run
Success from Jenkins UI
Stage Log from Terraform Apply Stage
Success from TFE UI
Output of the Workspace run detail in Terraform Enterprise UI; note the Policy check passed — this is Sentinel Policy as Code running between the Plan and Apply stages
Conclusion
Using the components from this post you have what you need to interact with Terraform Enterprise using a CI/CD tool via Terraform OSS binary. A migration to Terraform Enterprise can be done while respecting your workflow and investments in accompanying pipeline components that may be north or southbound of Terraform.
The net result is that your organization will be positioned to take advantage of Terraform Enterprise features that could unlock new value or opportunities to increase the collaboration, governance, and stability of your infrastructure. | https://medium.com/hashicorp-engineering/introduction-a9c8530ce482 | ['Jim Ray'] | 2019-09-06 19:26:12.137000+00:00 | ['Jenkins', 'Hashicorp', 'Hashicorp Terraform'] |
3 Best Reasons to Use Voice Message Marketing | A personal connection with customers can make a world of difference in business growth and development. Ringless voicemails from Salesforce have made it feasible for businesses to add a humanized touch while interacting with audiences and take business interactions to the next level.
Significance of Ringless Salesforce Voicemail Services
For more personal contact, reaching out to customers through phone calls can drain a lot of time and effort of employees. This is where ringless Salesforce voicemail drops can help deliver messages right in the customer’s voicemail inbox without waiting for them to pick up the phone.
The best part is, Salesforce voicemail messaging lets you communicate or market silently, appearing in the form of a missed call notification.
Here are some best reasons to use Salesforce voicemail drops and head towards Salesforce voicemail marketing, sidestepping traditional marketing.
Improves Outreach with Sure-shot Connectivity
Compared to the traditional method of interaction, i.e., phone calls, Salesforce voicemail drop service is a much more effective means for sure-shot interactions. Many times, prospects and customers don’t answer phone calls from unknown numbers, which severely impacts the engagement rate. But recipients do listen to voice messages that are stored in their voicemail inbox. Thus, sooner or later, the voice messages are accessible by recipients, and they listen to what you want to say.
Enables Recipients to Access Voice Messages at their Preferred Time
The time you send messages to your audiences is not always an appropriate time to connect with them. They might be busy in important meetings, events, conferences, or any other vital tasks. Thus, with the help of Salesforce voicemail broadcast, you can convey vital information in such a way that it doesn’t lose its impact. When you send messages through voicemail broadcast service, you somewhere enable your audiences to access information whenever they get free or anytime they want to. This helps to keep customers happy.
Strengthens your Brand Presence with Silent Marketing
Any marketing activity that disturbs or annoys customers hampers their experience with a brand. But ringless voicemails pave the way for more effective and silent marketing. You can send unlimited voicemail drops to reach out to customers at scale without disturbing them. This is because Ringless voicemails administer their quiet presence on the customer’s phone screens. Else, intrusive rings in the middle of crucial tasks can lead to the customer’s annoyance and drive them through unpleasant experiences.
Guaranteed Listenership and Increased Returns with Ringless Voicemails
The more customers you reach, the more response you get, and this is what ringless voicemails help with. Apart from silent communication, voice messages give you guaranteed listenership which helps to maximize returns. This is because when customers reach you back after listening to voice messages, they are already aware of the purpose. Also, they are interested to hear more from you. Thus, it becomes easy for agents to drive conversions without much effort.
360 SMS is an app loaded with numerous advanced capabilities, and one of them is multiple channel support. In addition to the best RVM service, it gets you five other interaction channels that you could use to connect with audiences at their channel of choice. With 360 SMS best ringless Salesforce voicemail feature, not only you can use pre-built templates but schedule voice messages at various intervals to cut back on manual work.
https://360smsapp.com/ | https://medium.com/@360smsappsalesforce/3-best-reasons-to-use-voice-message-marketing-eeb72857aec0 | ['Sms App'] | 2021-05-03 08:26:07.006000+00:00 | ['Business Development', 'Sales', 'Customer Engagement', 'Sms Marketing', 'Salesforce'] |
Bernie Sanders Unveils Free Child Care Proposal | Bernie Sanders speaking at a rally at the Durham Convention in Durham, NC, on Feb 14, 2020 Date: 14 February 2020 Source: Own work Author: Jackson Lanier
“We know that the first four years of a child’s life are the most important years of human development, so it is unconscionable that in the wealthiest country in the world, we do not properly invest in early childhood education.”
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, D.-Vt., unveiled a child care proposal Monday. He has become notorious for his calls for a wealth tax during the campaign and said it would be an avenue to generate revenue for social programs and healthcare. Sanders’ plan calls for allocating $1.5 trillion over 10 years for child care.
Wealth Tax is the Answer
His campaign detailed specifics of the idea, which includes children up the age of four and guaranteed access to pre-kindergarten programs at the expense of the nation’s wealthy, Juan Perez Jr. reported for Politico.
“Childcare must be guaranteed for every child regardless of their parents’ income, just like K-12 education,” Sanders said in a statement. “We know that the first four years of a child’s life are the most important years of human development, so it is unconscionable that in the wealthiest country in the world, we do not properly invest in early childhood education.”
Sanders had previously advocated for such a plan, but had yet to reveal specifics until the announcement Monday. Notably, his plan calls for programs to operate for 10 hours a day and also cater to parents who do not work a 9-to-5 schedule.
While Washington would pick up the tab for child care programs, pre-K would be “locally administered.” Sanders environs the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services (HHS) to oversee the implementation of federally-funded child care.
Disabled children are not to fall by the wayside either. Sanders’ plan would allocate more funding for the Institute of Education Sciences to research educational methods to serve children with disabilities.
Sparking Industry Growth
If implemented, the idea of free universal child care would potentially double the total number of childhood educators to 2.6 million, Politico reported. The federal government would set minimum education qualifications for childhood educators: a Child Development Associate Credential for those providing direct services, associate’s degree for teaching assistants, and a bachelor’s degree in childhood education or child development for pre-K teachers.
Paired with Sanders’ call for free university tuition and an elimination of student loan debt, a free child care program could open the door to new employment opportunities. Sanders would also raise the salary level of child care workers to “a living wage.”
“Everybody knows the future is with our kids,” Sanders said at a rally in Houston. “And millions of families cannot find high-quality, affordable child care. Together we change that.”
Child Care or Tuition?
The national average for childcare in 2018 was between $9,000 to $9,600, Fortune reported. HHS considers child care expenses of 7% of family income to be affordable. However, many families spend considerably more and costs fluctuate depending on state.
Massachusetts reported the highest costs of childcare with center-based infant care costing $20,415 per year. Assuming a married couple meet the state median income level of $121,607, the family would be spending 16.8% of its income.
Child care expenses in 28 states were in excess of a year of public university tuition, giving some context to the problem. ChildCare Aware America reported 60% of expenses are paid out of pocket, with the remainder coming from state and federal funding.
Other Candidates Support Increased Spending
The federal government began funding the Child Care and Development Block Grant in 2008 with $5 billion per year until an increase in 2018. President Donald Trump signed a budget increase of $2.9 billion for both 2018 and 2019, according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The grant helps 1.4 million kids receive access to services, but 84-percent of eligible children still do not receive any assistance due to a lack of funding.
Trump repeatedly made remarks in favor of more child care funding.
“My administration wants to work with members of both parties to make childcare accessible and affordable,” Trump said in February 2017.
Sanders’ plan would alleviate the issue entirely, but it would rely on the successful passage of a wealth tax. Doing so is likely to be an uphill, partisan battle and it will likely not be an immediate solution.
Four other Democratic candidates favor increased funding for childcare. The plan of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D.-Vt., most closely resembles Sanders’ by calling for a tax on millionaires, but stops short of providing free care for all children.
Pete Buttigieg advocated for a federal spending increase of $700 billion for “universal, affordable” care. Joe Biden only pledged to work with states to bring universal pre-K to all children while Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D.-Minn., simply called for a cost limit. | https://medium.com/citizen-truth/bernie-sanders-unveils-free-child-care-proposal-5517738b8609 | ['Citizen Truth Staff'] | 2020-02-25 00:23:57.094000+00:00 | ['2020 Presidential Race', 'Wealth Tax', 'Bernie Sanders', 'Childcare'] |
Google Colab 101 Tutorial with Python — Tips, Tricks, and FAQ | Introduction
Google Colab is a project from Google Research, a free, Jupyter based environment that allows us to create Jupyter [programming] notebooks to write and execute Python [1](and other Python-based third-party tools and machine learning frameworks such as Pandas, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Keras, Monk, OpenCV, and others) in a web browser.
📚 Check out our editorial recommendations on the best machine learning books. 📚
A programming notebook is a type of shell or kernel in the form of a word processor, where we can write and execute code. The data required for processing in Google Colab can be mounted into Google Drive or imported from any source on the internet. Project Jupyter is an open-source software organization that develops and supports Jupyter notebooks for interactive computing [4].
Google Colab requires no configuration to get started and provides free access to GPUs. One of the main functionalities of Google Colab is that it allows anyone to share live code, mathematical equations, data visualizations, data processing (cleaning and transformation), numerical simulations, machine learning models, and many other projects with others.
Why We Use Google Colab?
Google Colab has unique and critical features:
It provides a free Jupyter notebook environment.
It comes with pre-installed packages.
It hosts entirely on Google Cloud.
Users do not need to set up on servers or workstations.
Notebooks save automatically on a user’s Google Drive.
It provides browser-based Jupyter notebooks.
It is completely free of cost and offers GPU and TPU power (unless you need more resources and decide to go pro with Colab Pro ).
). It supports Python versions 2 and 3 (however, Google Suggests migrating important notebooks to Python 3 [2] [5]).
It provides two hardware accelerators:
1. GPU (Graphical Processing Unit).
2. TPU (Tensor Processing Unit).
Start Google Colab
Python code can be executed directly on the web browser by using Colab. We can launch it with the URL below:
The launch window opens with a popup offering many features:
Figure 1: Screenshot of Google Colab’s start page.
It provides options to create a notebook as well as to upload and select from different sources such as:
GitHub
Google Drive
Local computer
Uploading a Notebook from GitHub
Python code can be directly uploaded from Github by using its project’s URL or by searching the organization or user. The steps below highlight how to upload a project using a Github URL:
Launch Google Colab.
Select the GitHub tab from the popup box.
Figure 2: Screenshot of Google Colab’s upload code using a Github URL.
Enter the GitHub’s project URL and search it to fetch the code
Figure 3: Screenshot showing how to upload a Github repository with Google Colab.
It will upload the complete code with one click to the Google Colab notebook.
Figure 4: Screenshot showcasing the uploaded Github repository using a URL.
Similarly, the code can be uploaded directly from Google Drive by filtering saved notebooks by name, date, owner, or modified date.
Figure 5: Screenshot showing how to upload a notebook directly from Google Drive to Google Colab.
Uploading Data from Kaggle
Data from Kaggle can be uploaded directly into Colab for processing. An API token from Kaggle is required to accomplish the data import.
Steps to generate API token from Kaggle
Open Kaggle
Go to “My Account”
Scroll down to the “API” section
Figure 6: Screenshot of Kaggle’s website showing the API section.
Click on “Expire API Token” to remove the previous token if required.
Click on “Create New API Token.” It will generate a new token and download a JSON file named “ kaggle.json ”
” The “kaggle.json” file contains the username and key like:
Figure 7: Screenshot of IDE showing test API key for Kaggle.
Steps to upload data from Kaggle
Save the “kaggle.json” file on your local computer.
Install the Kaggle package
!pip install -q kaggle
Import packages:
from google.colab import files
Upload the local file “kaggle.json”
files.upload()
Figure 8: Screenshot of the output of the uploaded file “kaggle.json”
Check if the Colab notebook connects with Kaggle correctly.
!kaggle datasets list
Figure 9: Screenshot showing a dataset list from Kaggle.
Download any competition data from Kaggle (i.e., competition name — predict future sales)
!kaggle competitions download -c competitive-data-science-predict-future-sales
Figure 10: Screenshot showing the output of data downloads from Kaggle.
Data from Kaggle will be downloaded and uploaded in Colab, like:
Figure 11: Screenshot of Google Colab showing the uploaded data from Kaggle.
Read Files from Google Drive
Google Colab provides functionality to read data from google drive too.
Import packages
import globimport pandas as pdfrom google.colab import drive
Mount Google Drive
drive.mount('/gdrive')
This will ask Google to drive authorization code.
Figure 12: Screenshot showing Google Colab asking you to insert Google Drive’s authorization code.
Input box for the authorization code
Click on the link and generate the authorization code.
Read a CSV file from the drive.
file_path = glob.glob("/gdrive/My Drive/***.csv")for file in file_path:
df = pd.read_csv(file)
print(df)
Figure 13: Output from the test CSV file on Google Drive.
Setting up Hardware Accelerator GPU for Runtime
Google Colab provides a free cloud service with a GPU hardware accelerator. High configurations GPU machines are very costly and required in machine learning and deep learning to simultaneously process multiple computations. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/google-colab-101-tutorial-with-python-tips-tricks-and-faq-7689bd4d24b4 | ['Towards Ai Team'] | 2020-12-09 23:43:45.984000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Innovation', 'Technology', 'Education', 'Science'] |
Flower Power | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/flicker-and-flight/flower-power-633fccfe7b05 | ['Terry Mansfield'] | 2021-02-18 09:39:39.029000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Beauty', 'Flowers', 'Power', 'Poetry'] |
Google Will Surpass Supercomputing With New Quantum Computer | Google Will Surpass Supercomputing With New Quantum Computer
The latest news coming out of Alphabet’s Google is that its scientists have found a way to make quantum computing an everyday reality, with its latest quantum computer achieving ‘quantum supremacy’. Jamie Adams Sep 23, 2019·2 min read
The latest financial news and analysis from MyWallSt. Check out our stock market analysis or learn how to get started investing now
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
What is quantum computing? Well, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) may just make it available to all of us in the not-so-distant future, with its recently developed “Sycamore”, a 53-qubit quantum computer.
If you have ever seen Marvel’s ‘Ant-Man’ films, then you will probably have a very basic but somewhat misaligned idea of what quantum theory is. For those who are not fans of Paul Rudd’s superhero flick, then the simple answer is this:
‘Quantum theory explains the nature and behavior of energy and matter on the quantum (atomic and subatomic) level.”
Still with us?
Quantum computing works on this principle, and in theory would enormously increase a computer’s processing power, allow it to be in multiple states, and perform every task at-hand using all possible permutations simultaneously.
Find out Who Is Alphabet’s New CEO?
According to Google, its new Sycamore computer had the ability to solve complex mathematical equations in 200 seconds, whereas the same problem would take a supercomputer approximately 10,000 years to work out. Such a breakthrough would have a huge impact on Google’s AI driven initiatives which include both Cloud computing and Healthcare.
With the company in the crosshairs of antitrust regulators for potential breaches of data privacy and anti-competitive practices, the latest Google news has been clouded in much controversy and distrust, with calls in recent months for a break-up of Big Tech.
Find out why did Apple’s stock drop?
Google parent company Alphabet’s latest stock price has remained relatively flat following the news of this quantum breakthrough. However, if an official, peer-reviewed reveal of a new quantum computer should be made in the near-future, investors will surely need to keep an eye on Google’s stock prices. | https://medium.com/@jamie.adams_8487/google-will-surpass-supercomputing-with-new-quantum-computer-224b4bbf159c | ['Jamie Adams'] | 2019-12-13 10:26:52.407000+00:00 | ['Market Bites', 'Google', 'Science', 'Quantum Computing', 'Alphabet'] |
Hacks to an Unhappy Life | 1. Say yes to everything.
This is the easiest way to unhappiness, you don’t need a lot to do, just pronouncing this three-letter word, YES.
Say yes to that road trip, when you want to spend time with your family.
Say yes to that friend who wants you to go to the gym with him when you want to go to the bar for a drinking spree.
Just say yes to everything, even when you mean no.
2. Don’t bother about your sleeping pattern.
In short, deprive yourself of sleep. Instead of sleeping, work, do not waste time. If you can’t work, then watch.
At most, sleep for 4 hours in 24 hours.
3. Pay more attention to your cellphone.
I know you are so close to your phone, but please, stay closer. Never mind who is around you, concentrate on your phone, period!
Wait, I almost forgot, put on the earphones or headphones, so that you don’t get distracted.
4. Ignore your hobbies.
Do not bother to attend to your hobbies. Why should you? After all, some hobbies are costly.
If you like swimming, and it’s sunny, don’t go swimming. You have a whole series to watch, and a phone with hundreds of unattended messages, also, you can use that time to work to earn extra dollars. Think about it.
5. Do not help others.
Take this advice seriously, it’s very important. Selfishness is the key to unhappiness. Do not help people, it will make you feel good and satisfied. Let everything be about you. Sharing is expensive! Stay away from such good acts.
6. Build your self-esteem using social media.
Do you need some love? Attention? Therapy? You will get all these on social media. Dismiss your family members, friends, and the therapist, social media is the solution.
Post yourself on Facebook, Instagram, and any other social platform, and determine your worth by the number of likes you get. Take seriously the comments you receive, especially from your haters, they are right. | https://medium.com/muddyum/hacks-to-an-unhappy-life-a4576d7fc3ab | ['Nosh Komen'] | 2020-12-28 07:40:19.263000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Satire', 'Comics', 'Humor', 'Life'] |
Be 6-Feet Closer | Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
Though our mouths may be covered
Our actions speak freely and loudly.
Noses are hidden from sight.
Our minds are open to the world.
We are told to be six-feet apart.
We are told to be physically distant.
Yet, our actions hit much closer to the soul
Then even the warmest of hugs.
Our choices decide the nature of humanity.
Albeit, we have choices, but final judgments
Can be beyond control.
Hearts are laid out on the street
With some driving right over them.
Apparently, the driver knows their friends,
colleagues, and loved ones are safe
a few blocks over.
How does the driver know?
Streets layered with shards of glass and yet,
some believe they will never get a flat.
I hope they are at least six-feet
closer to a mechanic.
Otherwise, one’s engine can go silent,
permanently. | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/be-6-feet-closer-7d55235fce19 | ['Javon Goard'] | 2020-12-14 11:12:29.994000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Masks', 'A Cornered Gurl', 'Empathy', 'Covid 19'] |
The Power of Nostalgia | The Power of Nostalgia
Combat Current Lows With Past Highs
Photo by Dale de Vera on Unsplash
You can’t live your life in the past — be in the present moment. But what if the present moment is not so pleasant? Granted, it is not healthy to live entirely in the past, but how about just vacationing there for a little while? Taking a trip down memory lane can be psychologically soothing, and given that we are currently living in some pretty intense times; it is no surprise that we turn to the past for comfort. Enter nostalgia.
“Nostalgia is a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”-Oxford Languages
You may have heard it from your parents and especially your grandparents, “well back in my day…” They talk about the ‘good ole days’ when things were simpler. When there were no computers, no cell phones, no social media. Of course, every generation has their hardships, but flash forward to today. The world around us is currently in a state of chaos with the global pandemic, economic crisis, social injustices, natural disasters, divisiveness and an overall sense of helplessness. It has taken a toll on the mental health of many. I am not a psychologist and have no authority to be giving any mental health advice, but I do listen to others that are.
“It’s comforting to have a nostalgic feeling for the past that reminds us that although we don’t know what the future is going to bring, what we do know is that we know who we have been and who we really are.”-Krystine Batcho, Ph.D. and Professor of Psychology
A short visit to those ‘better times’ can actually do wonders for your present mental state. I have felt the positive effect nostalgia can have, especially recently. The pandemic had us shut our doors to the outside world. Many of us turned to our television to pass the time and make the isolation more bearable. With streaming services giving us full range to binge the shows and movies of the past, never had nostalgia been so easy to access.
I wrote this article after rewatching Game of Thrones. I convinced my sister, who had not seen it, that she was missing out on one of life’s essential experiences. After some intense resistance and several eye rolls, she finally agreed. Something extraordinary and unexpected happened to me in the process. Each time we pressed play and the ‘dun nun na na nun nun’ blared through the screen and Westeros and The Wall came into view, I was transported. Not to the seven kingdoms where dragons flew the skies and white walkers roamed the mountains, but to seven years ago in my apartment in Boston. Even though the show itself is filled with murder, mayhem and betrayal; it was the positive memories of watching it with friends and loved ones the first time that filled my head. It transported me to a simpler time, a happy time.
I had a similar experience when I recently introduced my nephew to Save by the Bell. Watching Zack plan his schemes to get the girl and get out of the test instantly made me smile. I smiled reminiscing of when I was a kid and my friends and I were deciding whether we were Team Zack or Team Slater. It was before the drama filled shows needed to address serious issues like school shootings and teen pregnancy. When Lisa spraining her ankle and not being able to compete in the dance competition was the epitome of a huge problem.
You see it everywhere these days — the throwbacks, the reunions, the remakes. We are grasping for reminders of those times. You could be a skeptic and say that we are just running out of fresh new ideas and simply rebranding old ones, but I would argue that we are seeking out something more. I believe we are seeking out a sense of safety, of security, of comfort. There is a reason that live-action versions of Disney Classics are coming to the screen, that Stranger Things was set in the 80’s, that Fuller House has been so successful, and TBT became such a wildly popular hashtag. We are all craving a bit of nostalgia.
Obviously it is important to live presently and make the most out of our current situation. But every once in a while, I also believe it is important to give our mind and our soul a little break. There is a reason that classics are classics. It is not because they were the most epic movie, song, book or other contribution of that generation; it is because they instilled in us a frozen moment in time. They trigger memories and experiences that bring us comfort.
“Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer.” -John Tierney, New York Times
So in this crazy time, when we are all searching for answers and asking ourselves what the future will hold; take a step back, a big step. Step back into the past and you just might find exactly what you were looking for. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-power-of-nostalgia-cb08942aec22 | ['Cassie Regan'] | 2020-09-30 18:12:15.004000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Life', 'Culture', 'Self', 'Psychology'] |
Getting Started with TensorFlow the Easy Way (Part 4) | Our target variable in this case is a string i.e >50K, <=50K. Unfortunately, TensorFlow won’t be able to understand strings as labels, we need to use pandas .apply() method to apply a custom function that converts them to 0s and 1s.
def label_fix(label):
if label==' <=50K':
return 0
else:
return 1
census['income_bracket'] = census['income_bracket'].apply(label_fix)
census['income_bracket'].unique()
The output should be either 0 or 1. Now, we are set to code out the tensorflow pipeline followed by splitting our data into train and test sets.
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split x_data = census.drop('income_bracket',axis=1)
y_labels = census['income_bracket'] X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(x_data,y_labels,test_size=0.3,random_state=101)
If you have followed through the previous parts you must have noticed that we didn’t use any sort of strings as features before. How do you think we can pass categorical features into a tensorflow model? There are actually two methods
Vocabulary List Hash Bucket
Vocabulary List
In the vocabulary list method, we do have to pass the column name and all the unique labels that exist for that column. This is feasible for encoding columns with 2–4 unique values.
Hash Bucket
In this method hash of all the unique values is calculated and replaced with labels. This is convenient when you have high cardinality columns where you cannot pass a list of all unique values.
For Gender let us, use vocabulary list method
gender = tf.feature_column.categorical_column_with_vocabulary_list("gender", ["Female", "Male"])
And, for high cardinal columns use hash buckets;
occupation = tf.feature_column.categorical_column_with_hash_bucket("occupation", hash_bucket_size=1000)
marital_status = tf.feature_column.categorical_column_with_hash_bucket("marital_status", hash_bucket_size=1000)
relationship = tf.feature_column.categorical_column_with_hash_bucket("relationship", hash_bucket_size=1000)
education = tf.feature_column.categorical_column_with_hash_bucket("education", hash_bucket_size=1000)
workclass = tf.feature_column.categorical_column_with_hash_bucket("workclass", hash_bucket_size=1000)
native_country = tf.feature_column.categorical_column_with_hash_bucket("native_country", hash_bucket_size=1000)
The continous numeric columns are easy and similar to the above tf.feature_columns.numeric_column
age = tf.feature_column.numeric_column("age")
education_num = tf.feature_column.numeric_column("education_num")
capital_gain = tf.feature_column.numeric_column("capital_gain")
capital_loss = tf.feature_column.numeric_column("capital_loss")
hours_per_week = tf.feature_column.numeric_column("hours_per_week")
We are all set. Now, just wrap all these features in a list object using the following line of code
feat_cols = [gender,occupation,marital_status,relationship,education,workclass,native_country, age,education_num,capital_gain,capital_loss,hours_per_week] input_func=tf.estimator.inputs.pandas_input_fn(x=X_train,y=y_train,batch_size=100,num_epochs=None,shuffle=True)
Now, that we have ready with data splits and also the features to use, let us train the model.
input_func=tf.estimator.inputs.pandas_input_fn(x=X_train,y=y_train,batch_size=100,num_epochs=None,shuffle=True) model = tf.estimator.LinearClassifier(feature_columns=feat_cols)
model.train(input_fn=input_func,steps=5000)
On successful training you should get loss and training scores for each step/epoch
Let us make pred_fn that holds our test dataset for making predictions with shuffle=False
Important Note: While training the model it is upto you to use shuffle=True . Usually its good to train the models using the shuffle. But, while making predictions make sure you have shuffle=False as with random prediction order you can never validate or measure your results.
pred_fn = tf.estimator.inputs.pandas_input_fn(x=X_test,batch_size=len(X_test),shuffle=False) predictions = list(model.predict(input_fn=pred_fn))
final_preds = []
for pred in predictions:
final_preds.append(pred['class_ids'][0])
The predictions are ready. The next step is to find out how our tensorflow model has performed.
from sklearn.metrics import classification_report
print(classification_report(y_test,final_preds))
Woah! A great F1-score for a vanilla baseline model. Now, let us have a look at the AUC metric for our model.
from sklearn.metrics import roc_curve, auc
fpr, tpr, thresholds = roc_curve(y_test,final_preds)
roc_auc = auc(fpr, tpr)
print("ROC AUC Score: {}".format(roc_auc))
plt.figure()
plt.plot(fpr, tpr, color='green', lw=1, label='ROC curve (area = %0.2f)' % roc_auc)
plt.plot([0, 1], [0, 1], color='navy', linestyle='--')
plt.xlim([0.0, 1.0])
plt.ylim([0.0, 1.05])
plt.xlabel('False Positive Rate')
plt.ylabel('True Positive Rate')
plt.title('Receiver operating characteristic')
plt.legend(loc="lower right")
plt.show()
We score acceptable AUC score of 0.738 too. To tweak the score we can either increase the epoch or do feature engineering like;
Create Categories using Age column Calculate Average hours for occupation Average Capital gain for education.. etc
I leave the rest of the tweaking to you. That’s all for this series. Congratulations on building your first classification model with vanilla TensorFlow. Great Job!
Do clap, comment and share your thoughts in the comments below. Follow Analytics Vidhya and stay tuned for upcoming exciting series of posts | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/getting-started-with-tensorflow-the-easy-way-part-4-b468d99b06 | ['Mohammad Shahebaz'] | 2018-12-12 11:56:11.573000+00:00 | ['TensorFlow', 'Classification', 'Deep Learning'] |
4 Tips for Stunning Social-Media Visuals (Infographic) | 4 Tips for Stunning Social-Media Visuals (Infographic)
Engage your social audience across networks with more compelling visuals.
Images are critically important in social media marketing strategies across just about every platform. While networks like Instagram and Pinterest are obvious, most of the other major networks have made changes to their platforms to make visuals more prominent and give images more space.
People process visual information 60,000 times faster than text, which explains why 93 percent of the most engaging posts on Facebook include images.
In fact, Facebook led the charge, with wider, taller images in their Newsfeed design, though Twitter and LinkedIn weren’t far behind.
Wherever you are on social, visuals are your opportunity to stand out and get noticed.
How can you make your social visuals more compelling?
The Media Octopus put together an information-packed infographic on the importance of social visuals. It contains a lot of great advice and creative ideas for marketers looking to up their visual game, including these four tips for visual social success:
Be consistent with color. Show personality through typography. Choose the right imagery and filters. Don’t overlook positioning.
Learn more about each of these tips in the full infographic below:
Image credit: The Media Octopus
Originally published in Inc.com
About The Author
Larry Kim is the CEO of Mobile Monkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. | https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/4-tips-for-stunning-social-media-visuals-infographic-b77c3f50630f | ['Larry Kim'] | 2017-04-30 16:22:34.087000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Graphic Design', 'Infographics', 'Social Media'] |
The Wildlife of Richards Town 3 | The Common Jezebel
As mentioned earlier the Lantana bush on Cookson Road in Richards Town attracts a lot of butterflies and one of the most colourful of which happens to be the Common Jezebel.
The Common Jezebel Delias eucharis belongs to the family Pierdae which has among its members some of the most familiar of butterflies. The name butterfly is derived from members of this family which are predominantly White and Yellow and are thus also known as “Whites and Yellows “. Butter (butter like wing colour) and Fly.
The Pierdae is one of the smaller butterfly families in India, only 109 species of this family are found here. This is only 7.26% of the total number of butterfly species found in India. They are found in all types of habitats from arid grasslands to thick wet evergreen forests. Most of them fly close to the ground at the level of shrubs where their food, nectar, is most abundant. Every rule has an exception and in this case it is The Common Jezebel which can also be found flying among the tree tops in the tallest of forests.
The Common Jezebel has a wingspan of 66–83 mm and the upper side of its wings is white. It has bright yellow underside with black veins and a series of orange red spots on the margins. The females are more heavily marked than the males. It is one of the most prominent butterflies that visit city gardens. The Common Jezebel is found only in the Indian sub-continent but is quite common wherever it is found.
The Common Jezebel prefers to be in the canopy of trees but comes down to feed on flowers and shrubs. Nectar from flowers being the only nourishment it relishes. It is assumed that because of this behavior pattern, it has evolved a dull upper side and a brilliant underside so that birds below it recognise it immediately while in flight and at rest. Its bright colouration is a signal to predators that it is unpalatable. The Common Jezebel has unpalatable alkaloids in its body tissue which are accumulated by the larvae from the host-plants. Because of this protection it usually flies in a very leisurely manner. This does not mean that it cannot travel long distances at a stretch.
The Common Jezebel is at its most active during noon and afternoon. During the morning they can be seen basking on outstretched branches of tall trees with closed wings. They bask with closed wings as all the dark markings which absorb heat to warm their bodies are on the underside of their wings. With their wings closed these dark markings are exposed to the sun.
The Common Jezebel lays eggs in batches instead of singly. This is quite unlike the other members of its family. Each batch consists of ten to twenty eggs and is usually laid on the underside of leaves. They are oval, shiny and bright yellow in colour. The eggs of each batch hatch simultaneously and the caterpillars stay together in a disciplined fashion. The caterpillars first make a meal of their eggshell and wander off to the nearest leaf-margin where they devour the leaf, side by side, and then move on to the next one .However each caterpillar has a different growth rate and thus pupation does not happen at the same time and therefore the butterflies emerge over a period of time.
The host plants of the Common Jezebel are various species of plant parasites. They belong to the showy mistletoe family. They are small hanging shrubs that grow on branches of trees. These plants grow strongly on ageing trees particularly somewhere in the middle of old branches. One of them is the Honey Suckle Mistletoe Dendrophthoe falcate or Badanike in Kannada.
The Temple Tree — Frangipani
Trees, plants and shrubs are all important parts of the urban ecosystem. Without them there would be very little urban wildlife. It is impossible to separate the animal from its habitat and Bangalore has the privilege of having many varieties of flowering and non flowering trees. These trees comprise of both native and non native species that were introduced into Bangalore. Some of these non native trees have been in India for long that we take them to be native, some have adapted and flourished so well that we now call them ‘naturalised’.
The Frangipani , Champa or Temple Tree Plumeria sp is one such tree that was introduced into India. It originates from the warmer parts of America, Jamaica, Guatemala and Mexico. It has been cultivated in India for ages and has acquired local names in different parts of the country. It has even been assimilated into the myths and religious beliefs of our country.
The name Plumeria is from the French traveler and botanist Charles Plumier, there are thirty one identified types of this tree but the commonest of these are the P.alba and P.rubra.
It is a medium sized, deciduous tree with a smooth grey coloured bark. When the bark is pierced a white milky fluid oozes out. This milky substance gives it a few of its common names — Frangipani which is derived from the French word for coagulated milk and the Sanskrit name Kshirachampa which translates as the Milky Champa.
During the leafless phase the tree looks pale, ugly and gouty. But once it flowers it is transformed into one of the most beautiful of trees. The leaves are large, about a foot long, and are tapered or rounded at the end depending on the variety. They grow in spirals at the end of branches. The flowers appear in the middle of the leaf clusters. They are five petaled large and waxy. Of the two commonest varieties in India — the Alba is white with a yellow centre and the Rubra is deep pink with white petals. The flower was the favourite of the Emperor Jahangir who describes it as “a flower of increasingly sweet fragrance, it has the shape of a saffron flower but is yellow inclining to white. The tree is very symmetrical and large, full of branches and is shady. When in flower one tree will perfume a garden”
The tree has the ability to bloom even after being uprooted. Because of this ability it has become a symbol of immortality and is planted by both Buddhists and Muslims next to the tombs of their dead. One of its common names is the Graveyard Tree. Due to it being a symbol of immortality the wood of the tree is used by Buddhists to carve the image of the Buddha.
In Hinduism it is considered to be one of the holiest of trees and is planted near temples (hence the common name the Temple Tree). The flowers of the tree are offered to the gods. It is sacred to Kamadeva the God of Love and it is considered inauspicious to cut it.
The tree is used widely by man, a perfume is distilled from its leaves, the root- bark is a strong purgative, and the milky juice is used in the treatment of rheumatism and skin diseases by mixing it with coconut oil. The bark is used in the treatment of diarrhea.
There is a legend associated with this tree. Long ago there was a King with two wives. The older wife was unable to bear children and conspired to kill all the children borne by the younger wife. She substituted a monkey for the new born children and over the years seven sons and a daughter met the same fate. All of them were buried outside the palace wall and the younger queen was banished from the palace.
As the years passed seven handsome trees with beautiful fragrant flowers grew outside the palace walls, along with these seven there was one smaller, delicate tree. The fame of the trees grew within the kingdom and it was quoted that only the younger queen could pluck their flowers. The King heard about this and asked his gardener to bring him some flowers. When the gardener returned empty handed the King along with the older Queen went to see them. As the older Queen approached the branches of the trees drew back sharply and the cry Murderer was heard. Astounded the King went up to the trees and their leaves nuzzled his face and they asked him to bring their mother to them. When the King enquired about their mother he was told the truth. The older Queen was banished from the kingdom and the younger Queen reinstated. The trees were brought up as their children. The large tree was the Champa and the delicate one Parul. | https://medium.com/@nanjappavikram/the-wildlife-of-richards-town-3-a3d3c13ed805 | ['Vikram Nanjappa'] | 2020-11-27 01:42:07.266000+00:00 | ['India', 'Bangalore', 'Wildlife', 'Urban Wildlife', 'Butterfly'] |
The Green Shoots of Social Change | We are in a moment that calls for metaphors — a structure tumbling to the ground, a wave of enlightenment that is wiping out outdated beliefs, a seismic shift in our culture, and one that I think fits best: the emergence of green shoots sprouting from the earth, and with it the promise of a bloom, a flourish and a bounty for America in the months and years ahead if it is nurtured properly.
Our shared moment of Black lives mattering is worthy of analysis and some historical perspective: Systemic racism has existed and endured in various forms for centuries. It has often been conflated with individual racism and dismissed as “cured” based on milestones of progress — civil rights legislation, the grudging acceptance of affirmative action or having a Black president. And yet racism has always remained, often simmering below the surface of our daily lives, unspoken but palpable, and most recently, thriving in the safe spaces granted to it by our current president and culture. Like Covid-19, it is a “dis-ease”, seemingly incurable, often asymptomatic, but prone to flare-ups that can cause great pain. The recent outbreak of tragic racism combined with the massive response to it raises a question: Is it possible that, as we go through the latest tribulations of this disease, we are acquiring the anti-bodies to achieve immunity from the worst forms of racism?
Parts of our culture that have long been infected by systemic racism are in the process of transformation, raising another equally important question: Is it real and sustainable? Is all the advertising in support of Black Lives Matter simply posturing to maintain market share — another opportunistic burnishing of corporate reputations — or will it be backed up by action and support for meaningful policy and organizational change? And what does it mean that three quarters of Americans now believe racism is a “big problem”?
We can imagine this movement going in one of several directions. It could be like gun control, in which a terrible tragedy happens, there is a massive outpouring of outrage and calls for change, and then it just fades away (again and again). Or it could be like Occupy Wall Street — another massive outpouring of outrage that eventually petered out because there was no concrete action tied to it.
Or it could be like same-sex marriage, in which the slow gradual enlightenment of a critical mass of Americans reaches a tipping point, and then literally overnight a Supreme Court decision becomes a cause for nationwide celebration. In this last example, there was no turning back: we will never revert to the same degree of discrimination against the LGBTQ community that we have in the past because we have experienced an empathetic awakening that has been, like a vaccine, injected into our culture. The groundswell of mass acceptance and understanding ultimately led us to recognize the moral injustice and even absurdity of discrimination.
For those of us who deeply believe in the cause of ending racial inequality, and especially for those who have experienced it, our instinct is to manage our expectations and do what we need to sustain the movement, but all indications are that this version of social change will follow the same-sex marriage model for two reasons: First, the raw brutality and injustice of George Floyd’s murder, and more recently, the senseless shooting of Rayshard Brooks, have forced unbelievers to confront what is to them a new reality via the horrific shared experiences of graphic videos. Second, the consequences of systemic racism can no longer be walled off from our sensibilities; it is a universal issue, impacting everyone at every income level in every corner of the country in some way.
The Floyd murder did something to us that had not happened up until now: It called into question our self-image as a country — our values and principles, and by extension, our patriotism, if we didn’t act to address it. But the most astounding and unprecedented feature of this moment in recent American history is that it has compelled us to question not just our country, but ourselves. As it relates to the problem of systemic racism, we, the White people of America, have collectively moved from a state of dismissal and indifference to one of acknowledgment and accountability. For the first time in our lives, we are recognizing this as a problem for which we are all responsible.
A critical part of our enlightenment has been the sudden understanding of what systemic racism is and our role in sustaining it. As part of a “system”, the claim that we are personally not racist is irrelevant because we are benefiting from a cultural and economic structure that is. Compliance with this system is at its worst in the increasingly desperate attempts to hang on to some form of supremacy through false equivalencies and cherry-picked “what-about-isms”. Less visible but no less insidious is our history of indifference; how easy it was for us to simply divide ourselves into racists and non-racists, vote for Obama, hope for the best and claim “not me!” The methods of absolving ourselves of guilt were easily accessible and socially approved. But no more.
While it is long overdue, I am inclined to praise the courage that this reckoning has brought to the fore, if for no other reason than to reward and sustain it. But in the spirit of empathy, we should acknowledge that wrestling with one’s demons is never easy; the courage is real, and it is being shored up as institutions, companies, governments, cultural icons and most importantly, regular people of all races, across the country and even around the world, come onboard and assert their belief in America’s vision of equality as a proxy for morality. This sudden unity of thoughts and actions is a validation that the cause is just, it is universal to humanity, and that we may be finally moving forward.
Of course, no vaccine is 100% effective, and our antibodies will probably never completely kill off the disease. Racism has not disappeared, and it won’t ever be completely eradicated, but it can be managed and marginalized effectively, and if it is, we will grow stronger as a nation. For many of the suddenly alienated racists who are running up against the transformation of so many of their friends, neighbors, family, and even NASCAR, this is more like a mass-intervention. They are being surrounded and confronted by the people and entities that once served as their reference points for their beliefs and enablers of their behavior, and it must be disorienting. But like a true intervention, we must combine harsh confrontation with support for progress because this is, after all, a national rehabilitation and we want to minimize the chance of relapse. We can do that by pulling as many people as possible along with us before we leave behind those who are beyond salvage.
We should also proceed with eyes wide open regarding the forces aligned against any kind of harmony. A cold hard reality is that divisiveness is profitable; there are interests at work in politics, the media and the private sector that will literally lose money and power in inverse proportion to the unity we achieve. They are determined to win the tug of war for the souls of the fearful and indifferent.
Well, at least they’re not White supremacists, right? Actually . . .
When we hear the words “White supremacy”, the most extreme and inflammatory images typically come to mind: KKK hoods, Nazi swastikas, confederate flags. But as we reflect on the reality of systemic racism, perhaps it’s time for us to establish a more “inclusive” definition of White supremacy — something like this: A pattern of behavior characterized by the inability — through resistance, denial, and/or indifference — to accept that there is a credible Black perspective and life experience worthy of thoughtful and equal consideration.
With that in mind, we can’t deny there are plenty of brushfires of White supremacy out there, as a random sampling of right-leaning social media that is fanning the flames of a BLM backlash would indicate. Antifa terrorists, All Lives Matter, George Floyd was a thug, they are all looters, they are trying to eliminate police, they are calling me racist (even though I have a Black friend), protesters are terrorists, What about the cop killed by the Black guy? What about Black people killing each other in Chicago? They’re tearing down statues, they’re erasing my heritage. They are all coming to get us! . . . and on and on it goes. These are the agenda-driven talking points flowing through social media feeds with the purpose of overtly crushing the pathways to unity and covertly maintaining the profitability of status-quo division.
The high level of susceptibility of a certain audience to these messages correlates with the shrinking group of our population who is unable to relinquish enough power — or more accurately, enough “supremacy” — to empathetically consider why someone unlike them might see things very differently. We might be able to extract a few actual facts from their word-salads of outrage and even argue against them with a presentation of context, but if we were to peel back the layers of their arguments, we’d discover that factuality is far less important than hanging on by their fingernails to the privileges they’ve inherited. Their avoidance or denial of a Black-originating counterargument is reflexive. More bluntly, it is an act of dehumanization that is characteristic of an obsolete worldview where — they might be ashamed to publicly admit — “everyone knows their place.” The good news is that massive numbers of protesters are succeeding in prying those fingernails loose, but we can’t lose momentum.
Social change is hard and often slow, and as we have recently seen, it can be tragic and painful. The arc of progress is not a smooth line — it tends to zig-zag, but the latest “zag” is clearly bending toward justice.
So, for all of us onboard, and all those willing to join, the virtues of courage, commitment, acceptance, strength and responsibility are needed to sustain our shared progress. The good faith act of continuous self-reflection, the calls and push for meaningful legislative action, and most importantly, the exercising of our right to vote in November — these are the ways in which we will nurture the green shoots of social change and move as one to the more perfect union that is worthy of our American ideals. | https://medium.com/the-national-discussion/the-green-shoots-of-social-change-525849b1dd8f | ['Kevin Donovan'] | 2020-06-19 02:42:11.514000+00:00 | ['George Floyd', 'Systemic Racism', 'Social Change', 'Black Lives Matter', 'Racism'] |
During the one-day “Outside the Block” | “Outside the Block”
🌐 Omanee brought together thousands of viewers and participants from around the world and over dozen different international companies with their representatives and speakers in one of the year’s biggest blockchain and fintech events towards Identity Blockchain.
During the one-day “Outside the Block” conference, we heard from founders and visionaries, business mavens, opinion leaders, and experts in finance investment, crypto to business, and technology.
✅ In addition to showcasing the latest developments in the blockchain and fintech industry, we hosted panel discussions and keynote presentations, not to mention a stream of noteworthy news, announcements, and content from the likes of Shreenath Iyer from DIFX, Zahid Ahmed from Ankots of Misteria, Kristina Berezina from Toscale, Bill Wang from Ankots of Misteria — part of LBank, Jodie Marie Rigby from Metastoric, Lauren Crabbe from Stornest, Valentin Preobrazhenskiy from Latoken, and more.
#OmaneeCorp #omanee #fintech #blockchain #technology #conference #idshare #welups #drnee #OTB #fintechevent #blockchainevent #financialtechnology | https://medium.com/@OmaneeCorporation/during-the-one-day-outside-the-block-4db6fbb4774c | [] | 2021-12-26 14:11:26.636000+00:00 | ['Expo', 'Blockchain', 'Dubai', 'Conference', 'Events'] |
The Funder Calls the Tune | If an organization receives funding, then it is the funder who tells the organization what to do with the money. An organization cannot take the funding and then not follow the wishes of the funder.
An organization has a choice — take the money and do what has been asked of you or don’t take the money and do what you want.
This is a stark division. It is possible that there is some negotiation back and for the between the funder and the fundee about how the funding could be deployed. If the funder is giving money to the group, there is a reason. There is some objective that the funder wishes to see achieved.
An example — when a service group gives money to a food bank, they would expect that the money goes to the operation of the food bank. If management of the food bank can show a relationship between the money being spent and the operation of the food bank then all is well. The wages of the food bank employees, the rent paid to the landlord where the food bank is located, these are examples of expenses that the funder would allow. What if the employees are being paid by the food bank but they are working on some project other than the food bank. What if the organization does a number of things besides the food bank, what if they run a drop in day care for children and for seniors and also provide employment counselling? The funder would need to be clear about whether they are funding the food bank or the organization that runs the food bank.
This type of confusion can lead to serious charges. If the funder intends for the money to be used for the food bank and only for the food bank, then the organization will need to be able to prove that. They will be asked to show that their books indicate that the food bank costs are at least as high as the funding received. If the books do not show that, and the money was spent, then an allegation of misappropriation of funds could be made. The group took the money and spent it on something else.
You can see the issue for the board. The board members must make sure that there are policies and procedures in place to allow them to supervise the spending of this money. How can they tell from their review of the financial statements that grant money is being properly spent? Does their financial system give them the data that they need? Have they made it clear to management the requirements that must be followed, as explained in the funding agreements?
Board members duty of care, will require them to ask the questions about funding agreements and to be sure that they understand any requirements in the agreement. Management should be able to explain the terms. There are some funders who, although they will pay for training events, they will not pay for alcohol. Including alcohol on the list of expenses would be a breach of the agreement and that could lead to loss of funding, which no organization wants to see.
For most organizations keeping their funders happy is a key aspect of success. Without funding objectives cannot be achieved. Board members and management should take care to understand the rules in the funding agreements to be sure that they can show they have complied. | https://medium.com/governance-guru/the-funder-calls-the-tune-52d52532677b | ['Debi Peverill'] | 2020-12-19 01:23:40.822000+00:00 | ['Governance', 'Board', 'Productivity', 'Meetings', 'Funder'] |
Continuous Integration for mobile and web projects | Greetings!
Today I want to share some knowledge about one commonly-known practice in IT development — Continuous Integration.
To make my text stand out from the regular wikipedia article I want to mention that our team had a task to create a unified process for all our projects. We have various mobile (iOS, Android) and web (services, sites, portals) projects.
Introduction
In the beginning let’s look at the term itself and see how it can be helpful.
According to Wikipedia continuous integration is a practise in IT development that automates the products’ adjustments for finding out the integration problems.
Speaking simply, — it’s just a way to have a ready build for your product (site, app) after one simple click on the button (or even automated completely).
How can it be useful?
First of all, your QA department will say you many thanks, because they won’t need to ask a developer every hour to have a test build for their needs. Secondly, you’ll have option to test your entire system. It will help you to find out all the integration mistakes in advance.
Thirdly, your client will be also grateful to receive one single link to a project that will be accessible all the time to see the stage of the development and find out where his money were invested.
So, the goal is to create a system for project builds for various platforms (web + mobile). Searching for an answer led us to a several solutions in this field:
Hudson
CruiseControl
TeamCity
FastBuilder
After looking carefully on every one of it and exploring all pros and cons we decided to go with Hudson solution. This instrument was the most flexible and the most supported by the developers around the world. Later we found out that there is a branch of it called Jenkins, but never transferred a project there ’cause Hudson was fine with us.
As a system to control the builds’ versions historically we had Git, with it help we store all the original codes and builds. Moreover, with the help of hooks we publish current versions of projects of test server.
Finally, the thing that we decided to create in the first place — unified corporate web-portal that corresponds to access of users to the builds, was created to storage the information about it and to log in, download and test all the builds and adjustments. We named it Publisher. It is a simple web-service that was written on Python (Django).
It looks like this:
Realization
Now it’s time to see how it all works together.
Right after the start of the new project the initial code and new project in Hudson is also being created. In the project settings we write the repository address and set it to be questioned every 5 minutes. In case of repository being modified, the new build creation starts automatically. There are many Hudson plugins that can automatically adjust various types of projects, but we wanted to create our own. In the end the process of adjustment we have is a one line command script.
The script itself varies based on the type of the project.
The simple one is the web project. In such case current version of repository is adjusted in one archive and published for people to access it. Android project is a little bit complex to adjust. In the beginning you need to update an ant scenario (in the default mode it’s supported by Android SDK) command, than we need to run the generated script of the build. For example, like here:
android update project — target 10 — name ProjectName
ant debug
In the result we’ll have ready apk file that you can download and install on your device. In this example we didn’t look at the scenario of project mentioning to publish it in GooglePlay. Still, it all can be made with a help of command line tools with SDK utilities.
Finally, the most interesting part is iOS adjustment. To use standard algorithm from Apple you need to adjust the app, than sign it with developer certificate and only after that you can install it (regularly it’s done through iTunes). We decided to simplify this process as much as we can. In the end we found such thing: with a help of xcodebuild utility we compile and adjust the project in app. Later with a help of xcrun utility we sign it with developer certificate (it’s accessible form builds’ server) and send the ready apk file to become accessible.
xcodebuild -project ProjectName.xcodeproj
xcrun -sdk iphoneos PackageApplication -v ProjectName.app -o ~/path/projectname.ipa -embed “~/path/provision.mobileprovision”
In such case we create that exact Target, that was installed in xCode of developer, but this parameter can be also changed manually.
In the end all adjustments (ipa, apk, zip) go to common access where it will be ready for users to check. There are no problems with web projects — they all have links to the test servers, Android apk file is can be downloaded with your phone where you can install it. The main difficulty is once again with iOS app. Ideally, user needs to go to the portal from his device, click on the link and install the app. And there is such possibility. After reading a pile of documentation and searching the internet we solved the problem. For iPhone user to be able to download an app by clicking the link it suppose to look like this:
itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=http://server/projectname.plist
By this address you can access xml file, which structure needs to be described in documentation for adjustment project in xCode by clicking the ‘check’ on Enterprise window when adjusting the app. The main fields can be found in this file:
<! — link to the ipa file →
<key>url</key>
<string>http://server/distribs/prokectname.ipa</string> <! — app identificator →
<key>bundle-identifier</key>
<string>ru.handh.projectname</string> <! — name of the app →
<key>title</key>
<string>ProjectName</string>
This file is generated automatically in our case. That is why after adjusting a new build and clicking the Install link we see the question for permission to install an app. Upon agreeing we can see as an app being downloaded and installed.
Conclusion
Right now every project user can access the portal, download the latest version of the project and test it. Right now we can publish there all different projects for various platforms (Web, iOS, Android). Later on we want to add there an ability to publish the results of Unit testing and various notifications about failed adjustments. | https://medium.com/the-mind-of-heads-and-hands/continuous-integration-for-mobile-and-web-projects-7537b5078b48 | ['Heads'] | 2017-01-19 15:08:12.190000+00:00 | ['Application Development', 'Continuous Integration', 'iOS', 'Mobile App Development', 'Web Development'] |
Ten Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me | FOUR: I DID NOT FEAR DEATH UNTIL I HAD CHILDREN OF MY OWN
After puberty, I became absurdly reckless. Nothing was too dangerous. I had no intention of living beyond my early twenties. It never felt like I had a death wish per se, but I didn’t fear dying the way my peers did and I lived quite dangerously. More than a handful of people called me crazy and admitted that I often scared them.
My father spent the majority of my childhood remodelling the old farmhouse that figures prominently into these recollections. When a job required someone to scale the roof or do the high ladder work, I was always the first one up there and the last one down. On one particularly hot day on the roof, I got lightheaded, fell, and started sliding off the edge. Fortunately, I still had my claw hammer in my hand and caught the corner of a roof panel with it just before going off the three-story edge. I don’t remember being afraid at the time, just worried I would survive the fall only to be paralyzed for the rest of my life.
Once, just to prove that I could, drove my friend all the way home from the movies on the wrong side of the road. He lived in the country, twenty miles outside of town. I drove through town, out of town, and all the way out to his house on the wrong side of the road. If I hadn’t been driving so fast, he would have tried to jump out and take his chances on the landing. As it was, he screamed the entire car ride for me to stop and let him out of the car. I never counted how many cars I ran off onto the shoulder of the road that night, and I never flinched.
This wasn’t the craziest thing I did. Just one of many. It was bad enough that I put my life in jeopardy like that, but I’m deeply ashamed of how casually I put the lives of others at risk due to my behavior. The thing is, I remember doing those things and what I felt like, even what I was thinking then, but I can’t relate to that person that I used to be, not even in the slightest.
I remember when it all changed. I was helping a non-profit organization erect a climbing wall and zip-line obstacle course at their summer campground for their youth retreats. I clambered up the ladders and scaffolding with my toolbelt strapped on my waist, and the safety harness draped over one shoulder. Up and further up I climbed, and when I reached the top, I could see out well above the tree canopy of the surrounding forest, over sixty-five feet in the air. The gentle breeze made the scaffolding sway wildly back and forth, tied off only on the two of the four posts we would be building the wall on. I had never been afraid of heights before and didn’t think anything of it until I looked down.
I don’t know how long I stood there, clutching the bars of that scaffolding, frozen. I’m sure my eyes were as big as saucers. “You OK there, boss?”, the crew leader asked me. “You said you weren’t afraid of heights, but I wouldn’t know it looking at you right now. Everything alright?”
I don’t remember what I told him. I don’t remember how long it took me to unwrap my fingers from the bars, nor how long it took me to strap the safety harness on. Hooking my safety harness line onto the safety cables did nothing to relieve my fear of falling, not even one little bit.
What I do remember is that I couldn’t get my newborn daughter’s face out of my mind the entire time that I was up there working. It was at that moment I think I finally realized what it meant to have something to live for. | https://medium.com/gwendolyn-saoirse-the-blog/ten-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-me-8988613d9b5e | ['Gwen Saoirse'] | 2018-09-18 03:35:15.064000+00:00 | ['Lists', 'Fun Facts', 'Autobiographical', 'LGBTQ', 'Transgender'] |
COVID-19 Overview in the United States | This is the fourth and final part in my series on the pandemic’s impact on the United States. The last three parts were top ten lists that highlighted different aspects of the pandemic, ranging from infections, to deaths, to unemployment. These lists took a look at some of the most extreme outcomes in the hardest hit places. Now, it’s time to bring all of this full circle. Rather than just take a tour of the country, we’ll be taking more of a bird’s eye view of the pandemic and the factors that contribute to it.
First, though, to wrap up loose ends from the previous three parts, here are the top ten states for each of the metrics examined.
Top 10 States with Highest COVID Incidence
10) Florida (3.8 percent)
9) Nebraska (3.8 percent)
8) Tennessee (3.8 percent)
7) Louisiana (4 percent)
6) Alabama (4 percent)
5) Mississippi (4.1 percent)
4) Wisconsin (4.1 percent)
3) Iowa (4.3 percent)
2) South Dakota (5.5 percent)
1) North Dakota (6.2 percent)
Similar to what we saw on the top ten counties list, the South and Midwest are the hotspots for COVID-19 cases. Four of these states are represented on the top ten counties list.
Top 10 States with Highest COVID Fatality
10) Louisiana (3.1 percent)
9) District of Columbia (3.7 percent)
8) Michigan (3.8 percent)
7) Pennsylvania (4 percent)
6) Rhode Island (4.1 percent)
5) New Hampshire (4.2 percent)
4) Connecticut (6.2 percent)
3) Massachusetts (6.4 percent)
2) New York (6.5 percent)
1) New Jersey (6.8 percent)
As expected, most of the states on here are in the Northeast, similar to the top ten counties list; however, only three states are actually represented on that other list.
Top 10 States with Highest March-April Unemployment Increase
10) New Jersey (12.2 percent)
9) Illinois (12.6 percent)
8) Rhode Island (12.9 percent)
7) Massachusetts (13.1 percent)
6) Vermont (13.4 percent)
5) Indiana (13.8 percent)
4) New Hampshire (14.5 percent)
3) Michigan (19.6 percent)
2) Hawaii (21.4 percent)
1) Nevada (23.2 percent)
Once again, the top ten states reflects the geographic breakdown of the top ten counties. All five states that were represented on the top ten county list made this list.
So on the whole, there aren’t too many surprises when we look at the hardest hit states for each metric. While the counties that made each of the lists are outliers compared to the rest of the country, the level of severity they face isn’t far off from the rest of their corresponding state. Even so, this exercise further emphasizes how the “hotspots” of the pandemic can be defined in multiple ways.
Economic Reopening Plans
One topic that I didn’t discuss in the previous parts is the various economic reopening plans implemented by the states since the pandemic began. Aside from the CARES Act and various guidelines issued by the CDC and other federal agencies, most of the pandemic response has fallen on the states. Given the differences in the political climate and the pandemic’s impact across states, there is substantial variation in the nature of these reopening plans and their effects on the metrics discussed in earlier parts.
While I didn’t find much use for them in the first three parts, I plan to incorporate the differences in these state plans for the analysis in this part. To do this, I will be using data on the reopening plans collected by MultiState, a public policy consulting firm.
MultiState assigns an “openness” score for each state based on eleven factors pertaining their pandemic response. These factors include whether residents are under a stay-at-home order, how broadly the state defines “essential businesses”, the extent to which various non-essential businesses may operate, whether the reopening plan is statewide or limited to certain regions, and whether local governments may issue stricter guidelines than the state. The score is on a scale from 0 (least open) to 100 (most open). For the purposes of this exercise, I will be using their ratings from October 6, about one month before the election.
I’ve provided the ten states with the most open protocols implemented. And as a general note for this article and my 2020 election analysis, I am excluding the state of Alaska as county-level (or boroughs, as they are called there) election data is unavailable.
Top 10 Most Open States
10) Kansas (86)
9) Indiana (86)
8) South Carolina (88)
7) Missouri (90)
6) Iowa (90)
5) Idaho (90)
4) Oklahoma (93)
3) Nebraska (93)
2) South Dakota (96)
1) Florida (96)
COVID Incidence
So what drives the level of COVID infections, or the incidence rate, at the county level? Based on the ten counties discussed in part one, the most impacted counties can be characterized as rural, solidly Republican (with a few exceptions), mostly white but also having sizable pockets of blacks or Native Americans, generally poor with few college graduates, and located in the South and the Midwest. But to what extent do these characteristics drive the infection rate? Which factors are more indicative than others? Which factors can be dismissed as coincidental?
To answer these questions, we will be building an OLS regression model using R. But first, we’ll discuss the variables in more detail.
First, there’s the pre-existing political leaning of the county. For this, we can choose between the county’s Trump vote share and its Clinton vote share. One would think that counties with more Trump support are less likely to take the medical side of the pandemic seriously. This in turn contributes to more relaxed social distancing and mask wearing, which could lead to higher COVID incidence. Despite this observation, first glances at the data don’t seem to support this. There’s very little correlation for either Clinton vote share (r=0.024) or Trump vote share (r= -0.007) for total incidence. However, when controlling for time, these vote shares move in opposite as the pandemic progresses. In the early months of the pandemic, the Clinton vote share (r=0.242) is positively correlated with incidence while the Trump vote share (r= -0.215) is negatively correlated. In the summer, each of these variables converge as infection hotspots migrate from the more Democratic friendly Northeast to the more Republican friendly South and Midwest (r=0.137 for Clinton vote share, r= -0.089 for Trump vote share). And by the fall, the Clinton vote share (r= -0.169) has become negatively correlated with COVID incidence while the Trump vote share (r=0.146) has become positively correlated. Considering this, there doesn’t seem to be an advantage between selecting one candidate’s vote share or another when looking at total incidence. For the purpose of this regression, I’ll use each of them in separate models.
Next, there are several demographic factors to consider. I’ll be using several variables for race/ethnicity that are correlated with total incidence, such as white (r= -0.226), black (r=0.202), Native American (r=0.137), and Hispanic (r=0.084). There will also be two age variables: Young and Senior. For this analysis, I will be classifying Young as the percentage of the county’s population between the ages of 20 and 29 and I will be classifying Senior as the percentage of the population over the age of 65. While the virus is often associated for its heightened threat among older subjects, the data indicates that the share of senior residents in the population (r= -0.203) is negatively correlated with COVID incidence while the share of young adults (r=0.154) is positively correlated. This observation is reinforced by the CDC, which reported that while the virus initially affected older people in the early months, by the summer, younger people were accounting for more infections and had become key drivers for transmission.
Other demographic variables include educational attainment, particularly the share of the adult population with less than a high school diploma (r=0.219) and the share with at least a bachelor’s degree (r= -0.127). As expected, educational attainment is negatively correlated with COVID incidence, as those with higher attainment are more likely to be in jobs that can be done remotely, thus limiting face-to-face contact with others. And the other two variables I’ll consider are the share of veterans in the population (r= -0.19) and the share of people with a disability (r= -0.05).
Next, I’ll be using two socioeconomic variables. One is median household income, which is negatively correlated with incidence (r= -0.136). For the purposes of this analysis, I have standardized income values by dividing them by the national average. That way, the regression won’t be measuring individual dollar changes across counties, which would yield a trivially small coefficient value. And the other variable is the poverty rate, which is positively correlated with incidence (r=0.205).
And finally, I’ll be looking at the reopening plan of the county’s home state. Because these reopening plans are developed at the state level, all counties within a given state will receive the same values for the variables in this category. The two variables I’m most interested in are the state’s overall openness score (r=0.213) and its level of local preemption (r=0.112). As expected, states with a higher openness score (i.e. less restrictions on businesses operating) are positively correlated with COVID incidence, suggesting that these relaxed provisions allow more opportunities for transmission to take hold.
The result of all these variables produces the following OLS regression equation:
Incidence= Intercept + 2016Trumpvotex1 + Whitex2 + Blackx3 + NativeAmericanx4 + Hispanicx5 + Youngx6 +Seniorx7 + Incomex8 + Povertyx9 + LessHSx10 + CollegeGradx11 + OpenScorex12 + LocalPreemptionx13 + Religionx14 +Veteranx15 + Disabilityx16 + Error
Now that we’ve established the variables, let’s run the regression. The coefficients can be found in Figure 1 below.
Several findings emerge from this exercise. One is the difference in effects between the Clinton and Trump vote shares. The Trump vote share (B=0.01) is positively associated with COVID incidence, meaning that counties with a higher 2016 Trump vote share are expected to have more cases relative to their population. Conversely, the Clinton vote share (B= -0.014) is negatively associated, meaning that counties with a higher 2016 Clinton vote share are expected to have less cases relative to their population. Both of these coefficients are statistically significant at 95 percent confidence. This finding is consistent with what we observed in part one, where most of the counties with the highest COVID incidence went for Trump by substantial margins in 2016.
Regarding race and ethnicity, non-white groups and Hispanics are powerful indicators of COVID incidence. Counties with large shares of black (B=0.046 in Figure 1; 0.052 in Figure 2) and Native American (B=0.062; 0.069) populations are especially vulnerable for infection, as are counties with large shares of Hispanic (B=0.016; 0.026). Each of these coefficients are statistically significant at 95 percent confidence. White population (B=0.022; 0.023) is also associated with higher infection; however, this coefficient is smaller than those for black and Native American populations and is only significant at 90 percent confidence.
Next, there’s age, which has some interesting findings. As expected from the correlation, there’s a positive, statistically significant relationship between the share of residents aged 20–29 (B=0.063; 0.053) and COVID incidence, suggesting that young adults are more susceptible to getting infected and possibly transmitting it to others within their cohort. Conversely, while there’s a negative correlation between the share of senior residents and COVID incidence, this doesn’t translate to a statistically significant relationship. Because we cannot reject the null hypothesis (that there’s no relationship at all), we cannot draw many conclusions about how the share of senior citizens affects the incidence rate.
Educational attainment also produces some interesting findings. The share of adults with less than a high school diploma (B=0.041; 0.02) is positively associated with COVID incidence; however, its statistical significance depends on which variables we’re controlling for. It’s statistically significant in Figure 1 (which controls for the Trump vote share), but not significant in Figure 2 (which controls for the Clinton vote share). Conversely, the share of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree (B= -0.019; -0.02) is negatively associated with the incidence rate and is statistically significant in both models. Overall, the evidence is mixed; however, it does indicate that counties with higher educational attainment are expected to have fewer cases relative to their population.
Next, based on these models, it doesn’t appear that socioeconomic factors, such as median household income or poverty rate, have much effect on the COVID incidence rate; however, much of this has to do with the specific variables included in the models. I experimented with multiple OLS models, each with different specifications, and I found that under most models, the poverty rate is a statistically significant indicator of COVID incidence while household income remains a fairly weak indicator. On its own, the poverty rate (B=0.079) is positively associated with incidence, and this statistically significant relationship holds when controlling for household income and most other variables, including educational attainment. But ultimately, it’s when all these other variables are included in the model simultaneously, as it’s done above, where the relationship falls apart. This suggests that the combination of race, age, and educational attainment explains most of the variation in COVID incidence that would be attributed to differences in the poverty rate.
Finally, there’s the state reopening plans. Now what’s interesting about this category is that while the state’s overall openness score (B=0.032; 0.034) is statistically significant and positively associated with COVID incidence, this relationship changes when we add additional specifications to the model. Below, I’ve included a regression model that only includes the variables pertaining to state reopening plans.
As you can see, the overall openness score becomes less indicative once we control for these other variables, which are correlated with the score. But we also see that certain aspects of the reopening plans have different effects on COVID incidence. For example, having fewer restrictions on restaurants and retail establishments does not increase the incidence rate. Conversely, having fewer restrictions on personal care facilities, gyms, bars, and large venues does increase the incidence rate. Given the nature of these different establishments in terms of the ability to socially distance, the ability to avoid physical contact, and the ability of air particles to bounce around, these differences in COVID incidence shouldn’t be too surprising. Furthermore, states that employ a more regional approach also experience higher COVID incidence as some parts of the state will likely have more lenient restrictions than others, which not only results in more infections, but can also undermine containment efforts in other parts of the state that employ tighter restrictions. But what’s interesting is that even if we incorporate all of these variables in with the rest of the model, most of them retain their respective relationships with COVID incidence along with their statistical significance, indicating that these relationships hold even when controlling for other variables.
One other question to answer is whether these relationships for different variables hold over time or whether there are seasonal effects. To answer this question, I ran these regression models several additional times, using the seasonal COVID incidence rates as dependent variables. I will be using the same three time periods as I did throughout the rest of this series: early months (before May 31), summer months (June 1 through August 31), and the early fall months (September 1 through November 3).
First, let’s look at the early months
During the early months of the pandemic, the political leaning of counties have the opposite relationship as the overall model. In this case, counties with a higher share of Clinton support (B=0.004) have higher COVID incidence while those that lean towards Donald Trump (B= -0.004) have lower COVID incidence. This makes sense, given that in the early months, the pandemic mostly affected the Northeast and major cities, which tend to lean Democratic.
Other demographic variables, such as race and age, have a much more modest effect during this time period as few of their coefficients achieve 95 percent confidence. One relationship that holds during this time period is educational attainment, where COVID incidence is higher among those without a high school diploma (B=0.02; 0.019) and lower among those with at least a bachelor’s degree (B= -0.007; -0.007). This is interesting, given that the Northeast and other areas affected in the early months tend to have a higher concentration of college graduates than the rest of the country. One reason why the infection rate may be lower for college graduates is, as I mentioned earlier, that college graduates are more likely to be in jobs that can be done remotely.
And for socioeconomic variables, median household income (B=0.006; 0.006) has a statistically significant positive effect on COVID incidence. Similar to political leaning, this effect is largely due to the geographic concentration of infections on the Northeast and major cities, where income tends to be higher than the South and Midwest, which are largely spared during these early months. The poverty rate, however, has a much more modest effect on the incidence rate.
Overall, the early period of the pandemic is driven largely by demographic factors that are more prevalent in the areas most heavily affected by the virus. In this case, we observe that the political split in COVID incidence involves Democratic counties experiencing more infections, as well as more affluent counties, which are disproportionately located in the Northeast, West Coast, and major cities affected by the pandemic early on.
By the summer, we notice that the relationship between COVID incidence and voting behavior reflects the total. In this case, as there are more breakouts in the rural South and Midwest, we see that the Trump vote share (B=0.012) becomes attributed to higher COVID incidence while the opposite is true for the Clinton vote share (B= -0.013).
We also start to see a stronger relationship between race/ethnicity and COVID incidence. In this case, counties with a higher share of black residents (B=0.034; 0.035) as well as those with a higher share of Hispanic residents (B=0.019; 0.019) experience more COVID cases relative to their population. On the other hand, age doesn’t have much of an effect on COVID incidence, or at least not at the county level. And as for educational attainment, we still see a strong, positive relationship for adults with less than a high school diploma (B=0.035; 0.037); however, there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship for adults with at least a bachelor’s degree. Even so, the general relationship holds that counties with higher educational attainment will have a lower incidence rate than those with lower educational attainment.
Finally, there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship between income or poverty and COVID incidence during the summer months.
Overall, the summer sees a large spike in COVID cases in the South and Midwest as public health guidelines are loosened. The trends observed during the summer months are largely a microcosm of the overall trend during the entire pandemic up until Election Day, particularly with incidence being higher in counties that supported Donald Trump, counties that are heavily black or Hispanic, and counties with low educational attainment.
During the fall months, there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship with Trump or Clinton vote shares. Similarly, there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship with the share of black or Hispanic residents. One reason for this is that during the early fall months, infection doesn’t seem to be heavily concentrated in one particular region. Rather, there appears to be a more precipitous rise in cases everywhere.
On the other hand, the major difference between the fall months and the rest of the time periods is age. Particularly, the share of young adults (B=0.039; 0.039) is strongly associated with higher COVID incidence. One reason for this could be the start of the academic year at universities, where many campuses allowed students to move into the dormitories. And while these universities have taken measures to prevent outbreaks, there have still been outbreaks on some campuses.
Overall, there isn’t too much to report on the fall months that hasn’t already been discussed, aside from the uptick in cases for young adults.
COVID Fatality
Next, we’ll analyze factors that contribute to the COVID fatality rate. I’ll be using the same model specifications for the first part, with the inclusion of one additional variable: the COVID incidence rate. Naturally, it wouldn’t make much sense to include the fatality rate when examining the incidence rate as we’d be suggesting that more deaths contribute to more cases; however, it would make more sense to find a relationship in how the COVID case load affects the fatality rate.
After all, one of the justifications for more stringent public health guidelines, such as stay-at-home orders, is that widespread infection would overwhelm hospitals and healthcare facilities. Resources would become overextended, leading to fewer patients receiving optimal treatment (or any treatment), meaning that more patients that otherwise would survive the virus would instead die from it. This rationale suggests that a higher incidence rate would also lead to a higher fatality rate.
But as we saw in parts one and two of this series, the counties with the highest incidence rates tended to have a below average fatality rate. And conversely, the counties with the highest fatality rates weren’t exactly major hotspots for infections (or at least not after the early months of the pandemic). Are these observations merely coincidence, or do we also see this relationship playing out across the rest of the country?
The OLS regression tables are shown for Figure 2 below.
As expected, the COVID incidence rate (B= -0.063; -0.061) is negatively associated with the fatality rate. This relationship is statistically significant at 95 percent confidence, meaning we can reject the null that the incidence rate doesn’t affect the fatality rate. This finding appears to contradict the assertion that higher COVID incidence would increase the fatality rate by overwhelming existing medical care infrastructure; however, there are several explanations for this. One is that in the months since the pandemic started, many places have improved their ability to conduct rapid testing and implement treatment for those with more severe cases. Hospitals have largely expanded their capacity to handle COVID cases (especially more severe cases), meaning that they can handle more cases without becoming overwhelmed. As a result, there are fewer fatalities stemming from the inability to offer at least some treatment.
But I think another critical reason is demographics. Age is a major one. While counties with a higher share of senior citizens do not experience an increase in COVID cases relative to population, these counties are highly vulnerable to fatalities among those that do get infected. Indeed, counties with more senior citizens (B=0.075; 0.072) tend to experience a higher fatality rate. This finding is backed up by the CDC, which notes that the risk of death from COVID increases significantly with age.
Other demographic factors that are statistically significant include the share of black residents (B=0.036; 0.035) and the share of Hispanic residents (0.009; 0.008). These trends are notable, as they reflect existing research indicating that blacks and Hispanics are not only at higher risk of getting infected, but also at higher risk of dying from the virus. The Brooking Institute notes that even when controlling for age, blacks and Hispanics die at considerably higher rates than their white counterparts. For example in the 35–44 age range, the fatality rate of blacks is ten times higher than that of their whites counterparts and for Hispanics, the rate is eight times higher.
Then there’s political leaning. Unlike COVID incidence, where we found a strong, enduring relationship for the vote shares of different candidates, no such relationship emerges here with COVID fatalities. This finding is interesting, considering there’s a bit of a correlation with both Clinton vote share (r=0.194) and Trump vote share (r= -0.142). But I think one reason for this is that while political leaning can predict attitudes on the virus’s severity and actions that can lead to infection, political leaning alone cannot predict the virus’s medical toll or the probability of survival. Instead, pre-existing health and demographic factors are much stronger predictors of one’s likelihood of surviving infection. And while certain demographic factors are correlated with political leaning, all that indicates is that to the extent to which a county’s political leaning is correlated with its COVID fatality, that correlation is driven more by the demographic composition of its Clinton and Trump voters than by any unique quality attributed to political leaning. So that end, that is another key difference between COVID incidence and COVID fatality.
Then there’s educational attainment where, similar to the incidence rate, there’s a negative relationship with the fatality rate. Counties with a large share of adults with less than a high school diploma (B=0.025; 0.028) are expected to have a higher fatality rate than those with a large share of college graduates. One reason for this is that in addition to being at greater risk of infection, counties with a large share of adults without a high school diploma tend to also have a high poverty rate (r=0.654) and be outside urban areas (r= -0.197). As a result, these people may have more limited options in terms of receiving treatment or other be less healthy to begin with.
As for the state reopening plans, there’s mixed evidence on their effect on COVID fatality. On one hand, the models indicate that the use of a regional approach (B=0.005; 0.005) is positively associated with the fatality rate while the overall openness score (B= -0.005; -0.005) is negatively associated. But on the other hand, a separate regression with each of the reopening variables paint a more complicated picture. In this regression, the overall openness score (B=0.024) is positively associated with the fatality rate while the use of a regional approach is not statistically significant. For the most part, individual provisions of reopening plans are negatively associated with the fatality rate, such as looser restrictions on construction sites, retail establishments, gyms, and bars. But there are still a few provisions that are positively associated with the fatality rate, such as looser restrictions on personal care facilities and restaurants. Overall, I think this is another indication of the difference between the incidence rate and the fatality rate. While the incidence rate may be driven more by specific behaviors and by one’s environment, the fatality rate is driven more by fundamental health and demographic factors that exist independently of these behaviors and environment.
Speaking of socioeconomic factors, what’s interesting here is that while the poverty rate doesn’t appear to drive COVID fatalities, median household income does. In fact, higher median household income (B=0.017; 0.018) is associated with a higher COVID fatality rate. Even more interesting is the fact that in other models with different specifications, the poverty rate is statistically significant and positively associated with fatalities along with median household income; essentially saying that both counties with higher median household income and those with higher poverty experience a higher fatality rate. This is a strange finding, especially considering that there isn’t a strong correlation between median household income and the fatality rate (r= -0.021), although it is consistent with the ten counties with the highest fatality rate, which have higher income levels than the ten counties with the highest incidence rate.
Still, I want to scrutinize this finding further, considering that it does contradict existing literature. For the most part, this positive relationship with median household income holds in other models, giving it a good degree of robustness; however, one specification concerns a variable I have yet to discuss: the Gini Index. The Gini Index is a measure of income inequality within a population (in this case, a county) and it ranges from 0 (complete equality) to 1 (complete inequality). Unlike the average household income, the median household income is largely unaffected by outliers, such as a multi-billionaire living in a predominantly middle class neighborhood. As a result, the median household income alone doesn’t provide much information on the level of economic inequality in a population that could potentially explain these pandemic metrics.
I first decided to run a regression with all the variables, including the Gini Index. The table for that is below.
As shown, median household income (B=0.018) is still positively associated with COVID fatality, but so is the Gini Index (B=0.035), indicating that counties with high income inequality experience a higher fatality rate. There’s actually some research that supports this claim, albeit at the state level. But I wanted to go one step further.
I decided to run an additional regression, this time including an interaction term between median household income and the Gini Index (referred to as “equal” in the table below).
This offers a more complex picture on how socioeconomic status affects COVID fatality. Counties with a high median household income do not have a higher fatality rate solely due to having more affluent residents. Rather, it comes from the interaction that income has with income inequality; “affluent” counties with high income equality will have a higher fatality rate than “affluent” counties with low income inequality.
But what’s important to note is that income inequality tends to be lower in counties with a higher median household income. Welch’s t-test results indicate that the Gini Index is lower for counties with a median household income above the national average (u=0.431) than for counties with a median income below the national average (u=0.449); this difference in means is statistically significant at 95 percent confidence. One reason for this finding is that areas with a higher median income tend to be more expensive than areas with a lower median income, meaning that it’s easier for less affluent people to get priced out of more “affluent” areas while more affluent people can still move to less “affluent” areas in order to save money. As a result, counties with a high median income likely have fewer residents making substantially less than that amount, leading to lower income inequality.
What does all of this mean? It means that while different regression models may indicate that median household income is positively associated with COVID fatality, that doesn’t mean that affluent people are more likely to die from the virus. Nor does it mean that a higher median income will necessarily drive up the fatality rate. Rather, the fatality rate tends to be higher in counties with both high median income and high income inequality. And given that income inequality is highly correlated with the poverty rate (r=0.521), this suggest that for these counties, poverty may be driving fatality more than affluence.
As a side note, I went back and reran the models for COVID incidence with the Gini Index and the interaction variable and it did not alter the fundamental relationships or ability to reject the null hypothesis with any other variables discussed in the previous section, including income or poverty. More importantly, neither the Gini Index nor the interaction variable were statistically significant with COVID incidence.
So after that long tangent, let’s take a look at how these relationships change during different time periods of the pandemic. First, there’s the early months.
For the most part, the early months see similar trends to the overall relationship with the fatality rate, particularly those with old age and educational attainment. And similar to the overall trend, political leaning doesn’t have much of a relationship with COVID fatality.
The biggest divergence is the strongly positive effect that COVID incidence (B=0.52; 0.5) has on the fatality rate during the early months. This makes sense, given that in the early months, little was known about the virus itself, testing was mostly limited to those with severe symptoms (meaning a greater percentage of cases were severe and potentially deadly), and hospitals were less prepared to handle the caseload. As a result, severe cases represented a greater share of the caseload during the early months, resulting in a higher fatality rate.
One other difference is that race and ethnicity were not as strong indicators of COVID fatalities during the early months.
Overall, the incidence rate is the greatest indicator of the fatality rate during the early months. Some of this can be attributed to the limited testing capacity during the early months, resulting in the more severe, deadly cases being more heavily represented in the reported caseload; however, it’s also indicative of the overall severity of the virus outbreak during the early months.
Next, there’s the summer months.
Regarding political leaning, we see an interesting divergence. Counties with a higher Trump vote share (B= -0.01) are expected to have a lower fatality rate while the opposite is true for counties with a higher Clinton vote share (B=0.019). This differs from the overall trend, where neither political leaning is associated with change to the fatality rate.
Aside from this, variables that are statistically significant follow the overall trend. COVID incidence (B= -0.195; -0.185), for example, is negatively associated with the fatality rate. While most race variables are not statistically significant, the share of Hispanic residents (B=0.022; 0.019) is positively associated with COVID fatalities. Furthermore, the share of senior citizens (B=0.085; 0.08) is also positively associated with the fatality rate while educational attainment remains negatively associated.
Overall, the summer months are largely similar to the overall trend regarding the effect of key demographics on the fatality rate, such as ethnicity, age, and educational attainment. The main difference during the summer months is the statistically significant, divergent paths that different political leanings take regarding their effect on the fatality rate, with higher Trump support being negatively associated and higher Clinton support being positively associated.
Finally, there are the early fall months.
Similar to the summer months and the overall trend, COVID incidence (B= -0.137; -0.14) is negatively associated with the fatality rate during the early fall months.
In an interesting twist, the relationship that different political leanings have on the fatality rate reverse course from the summer months. Now, counties with a higher Trump vote share (B=0.024) are expected to have a higher fatality rate while counties with a higher Clinton vote share (B= -0.023) are expected to have a lower fatality rate. This may suggest a more causal relationship with political leaning; however, similar to the overall trend, we see many demographic variables become statistically significant during the early fall.
Race/ethnicity variables, such as black (B=0.042; 0.043) and Hispanic (B=0.028; 0.027) are both positively associated with the fatality rate. While there is still an age gap, it isn’t as wide as both counties with a large share of young adults (B=0.064; 0.064) and those with a large share of senior citizens (B=0.105; 0.107) are positively associated with the fatality rate. And the education gap persists as well, with the share of adults without a high school diploma (B=0.033; 0.039) are positively associated with the fatality rate while the share of college graduates (B= -0.024; -0.026) is negatively associated.
Overall, the early fall months of the pandemic largely reflect the overall trend with a negative relationship between the incidence rate and the fatality rate as well as key relationships with different demographics. On the other hand, there are statistically significant opposing relationships concerning different candidates’ vote shares.
Unemployment Rate
Finally, we’ll be looking at the factors that contribute to the increase in the unemployment between March and April as well as the overall recovery as of September. I’ll be using the same model specifications for this as I did with the COVID incidence rate and the fatality rate, this time with the inclusion of both these variables as independent variables. This is to determine the extent to which the economic impact is affected by the severity of the virus or whether it stems from other factors. I will also include the Gini Index and the March unemployment rate in the tables below. And given the time-specific nature of these variables, I will not be breaking the model down by different time periods. To account for this, I will be using the incidence and fatality rates in the early months when measuring the unemployment spike and I will be using the overall rates when measuring the recovery.
First, let’s look at the unemployment spike.
Given the nature of the unemployment spike, the trends observed here will largely reflect the state of the pandemic in its early months rather than its entire span. And this is most evident in the political leaning variables. While counties with a high Trump vote share (B= -0.13) are expected to have a lower unemployment increase, counties with a high Clinton vote share (B=0.157) take a more substantial hit. This makes sense, given that in the early months, virus outbreaks and restrictive public health guidelines were largely concentrated in the Northeast, West Coast, and major cities, all places that tend to lean Democratic. This finding is further supported by a t-test, which finds that the mean unemployment increase of counties that Clinton won (u=0.092) is larger than the mean of counties that Trump won (u=0.074) and that this difference is statistically significant.
As for the pandemic metrics, the early COVID incidence rate is not statistically significant. While it’s true that incidence was higher in the areas with the largest unemployment spike, it’s important to note that the early incidence rate was still fairly small as there were fewer cases relative to the population. The fatality rate, however, isn’t necessarily lower just because there are fewer total cases; in fact, when there are fewer cases, one death matters more for the metric. As for this model, the early fatality rate (B= is positively associated with the unemployment increase.
On the other hand, the March unemployment rate (B= -0.19; -0.198) is negatively associated with the pandemic-induced increase. This makes sense, given that the March unemployment rate (r= -0.041) is negatively correlated with the change in the unemployment rate for April. One reason for this is that the pre-pandemic unemployment rate is an indicator of a county’s “natural” economic health. Counties that already had a high unemployment rate tend to have underlying economic problems that exist independently of the pandemic. Rather than being a shock to the economy, the pandemic was merely an extension of issues that were already present. Another reason is simply the fact that there’s less “room” for unemployment to grow when the unemployment rate is starting out from a higher position. This partly ties into the first reason in that for places that are less well-off, there’s less prosperity and fewer jobs to be disrupted. But it can also be a result of the timing that this variable established. Some places, for example, starting seeing their unemployment rise in March or February as the first warning signs emerged, meaning that the “starting” point of this variable isn’t exactly the lowest point. For other places, April isn’t the peak of unemployment due to either a lag in the economic slowdown or to a sustained downturn. For these places, the variable I outline doesn’t capture the full extent of the economic downturn. Despite this limitation, the observation holds that the change in unemployment, the economic shock, was the greatest in places that were faring pretty well before the pandemic.
Demographics paint a pretty interesting picture, especially with race. The county share of white residents (B= -0.127; -0.114), black residents (B= -0.202; -0.213), Native American residents (B= -0.191; -0.181), and Hispanic residents (B= -0.082; -0.086) are all negatively associated with the change in unemployment. Single variable regressions of the March unemployment rate point to distinct racial and ethnic disparities; the share of white residents (B= -0.015) is negatively associated with March unemployment while the shares of black residents (B=0.017), Native American residents (B=0.024), and Hispanic residents (B=0.023) are positively associated. Meanwhile, single variable regressions of the April unemployment rate paint a more muddled picture. The share of white residents (B= -0.012) is negatively associated with April unemployment, but so is the share of Hispanic residents (B= -0.035). Conversely, neither the share of black residents nor the share of Native American residents is statistically significant at 95 percent confidence. Finally, in a single variable regression of the change in unemployment, only the share of Native American residents (B= -0.047) and the share of Hispanic residents (B= -0.059) are statistically significant; both of them are negatively associated.
But I wanted to scrutinize these findings even further. So I experimented with some other model specifications for change in unemployment. After swapping out several education variables and trimming down the model as a whole, I produced the following result.
Indeed, under some circumstances, there can be a positive association between the share of black residents and the change in unemployment rate; however, this is model only explains about 4 percent of the variation in the model (low R2 score). Furthermore, it excludes some important demographic information, such as political leaning and age. So on the whole, this finding suggests two findings. One is that because the unemployment rate for non-white racial groups before the pandemic was higher than that of whites, there’s less “room” for the change in unemployment to grow. And the other factor is that while race is often associated with disparities in economic outcomes, in this case there are multiple variables at play.
On that note, there is also an educational gap in the change of unemployment. While the share of adults with less than a high school diploma is not statistically significant, the share of college graduates (B= — 0.107; -0.114) is negatively associated with the change in unemployment. This gap makes sense, given that those with at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely to be employed in jobs that can be done remotely and in jobs within sectors that are better insulated from hits in consumer spending (education, government, finance, etc.) As a result, areas with a high share of college graduates are less likely to lose a substantial number of jobs that would result in a large unemployment hit.
The other aspect of the economic impact is the recovery, which is defined as the difference between the April unemployment rate and the September unemployment rate, the last full month of data available before the election. For most counties, this will be a negative value as the unemployment rate went down during the summer months. The results of this regression are in Figure 4.
Similar to the April unemployment increase, there are mixed results on the effects of the pandemic’s severity on the economic recovery. On one hand, the summer COVID incidence rate is not statistically significant. On the other hand, the summer COVID fatality rate is significant and has a positive coefficient. Despite this, it’s important to remember that for the recovery variable, negative values correspond to a decrease in unemployment. Because of this, the regression indicates that a higher fatality rate works against the recovery by keeping the unemployment rate up. This is definitely an interesting finding, to say the least. One reason for this discrepancy is that while the incidence rate points to the virus’s spread, the fatality rate attests more to its overall threat. A higher fatality rate communicates that the virus poses more of a threat that requires intervention, thus resulting in stronger restrictions against the economy reopening.
Regarding political leaning, the regression points to a moderate gap, where counties with a higher Trump vote (B= -0.006) share experience a larger recovery (i.e. sharper decrease in its unemployment rate) while counties with a higher Clinton vote share (B=0.006) experience a more modest recovery. This is consistent with the finding in Figure 3, where there’s a similar gap in which counties have a larger increase in the unemployment rate. Furthermore, t-test results find that while the April unemployment rate is higher in counties that Clinton won (u=0.142) than in counties that Trump won in 2016 (u=0.121), there is no statistically significant difference for the size of the recoveries.
For race, while there all groups are positively associated with the size of the recovery, the share of white residents (B= -0.104; -0.104) has a stronger effect than the share of black residents (B= -0.052; -0.052), share of Native American residents (B= -0.093; -0.093), and the share of Hispanic residents (B=0.052; 0.051). This evidence is more consistent with the racial disparities noted in existing research. In fact, the share of Hispanic residents produces a positive coefficient for a dependent variable of a negative value, suggesting that this variable contributes to a higher September unemployment rate relative to the April unemployment rate.
The educational gap is more modest, where both the share of adults without a high school diploma (B= -0.053; -0.054) and those with at least a bachelor’s degree (B= -0.026; -0.026) are positively associated with the economic recovery. One reason for this is that, as indicated in Figure 3, counties with a large share of college graduates experience a smaller increase in their unemployment rate during April due to highly educated workers having better access to jobs that can be done remotely, meaning the recovery doesn’t need to cover as much ground.
Socioeconomically, the median household income is not statistically significant with the recovery; however, both the poverty rate (B=0.022; 0.021) and the Gini Index (B=0.055; 0.054) have positive coefficients, indicating a negative relationship with the size of the recovery. This makes sense, given that counties with a higher poverty rate tend to have fewer lucrative jobs available, let alone jobs that can be done remotely. Because of this, it’s more difficult for these counties to quickly rebound from economic shocks. Similarly, the higher income inequality is in a county, the more likely it is that the recovery disproportionately benefits those in jobs that can be done remotely. This leaves a considerable share of the population that are not in these type of jobs and have more difficulty working in jobs that require face-to-face contact, stifling the overall recovery.
Finally, there’s the effect of the state reopening plans on the recovery. The regressions in Figure 4 indicate that the state’s openness score (B= -0.017; -0.017) and its level of regional discretion (B= -0.008; -0.008) are positively associated with the economy recovery; the more open the state’s plan is, the sharper the reduction in the county’s unemployment rate. This makes sense, given that the lifting of restrictions allows businesses to operate and to retain jobs, particularly those that cannot be done remotely. But similar to the other pandemic metrics, I also included the other reopening plan variables into a separate regression, where the results are below.
This presents a more interesting picture. Similar to the regression in Figure 4, the state’s overall openness score (B= -0.171) is still associated with a larger recovery, or decrease in the unemployment rate; however, this relationship isn’t found with any of the other reopening variables. The most telling, in my view, is the fact that neither the state’s definition of “essential businesses” nor its treatment of “non-essential businesses” are statistically significant. Meanwhile, certain provisions, such as the openness of construction sites (B=0.085), personal care facilities (B=0.081), and large venues (B=0.045) are negatively associated with the recovery. This appears to argue that counties within states with more open plans do not have a lower unemployment rate as a result; however, a regression of the effect of these variables on the September unemployment rate suggests otherwise.
As indicated, the state openness score and most of the reopening variables are negatively associated with the September unemployment rate, suggesting that counties subject to more open plans are expected to have a lower unemployment rate in September. Furthermore, the state openness score is negatively correlated with counties’ April unemployment rate (r= -0.263). When all these pieces are put together, it appears that while the state reopening plans only had a modest effect on the recovery, part of this is because the counties in states that would adopt more open plans had a lower unemployment rate in April resulting from the pandemic than counties in states that would later adopt less open plans, indicating there was less of a shock to recover from.
Discussion
I’ll admit this was a lot of data to pore through. A lot of tables, regression coefficients, and conflicting evidence. But let’s try to pull it all together and make some sense of all this.
First, the 2016 election results was a powerful and fairly consistent predictor of the pandemic’s severity across the United States. Across the entire time period studied, we see that the Trump vote share is associated with a higher COVID incidence rate, lower April unemployment rate, and a larger decrease in unemployment by September, while the opposite relationships hold true for the Clinton vote share.
When broken down by time period, we notice how the nature of the pandemic’s severity shifts to different regions over time. In the early months, it’s the areas with more Clinton support that experience higher COVID incidence and a larger spike in unemployment, while areas with more Trump support experience the opposite. By the summer months, the script has flipped, with areas with more Trump support start seeing spikes in COVID cases while the areas with more Clinton support get their incidence rates under control. On the other hand, areas with more Clinton support see an uptick in their COVID fatality rate during the summer while the additional cases incurred in Trump-favored counties don’t necessarily produce more fatalities. And in the fall months, the script flips again, with the counties with higher Trump support seeing an uptick in their fatality rates. On the other hand, these Trump counties, many of which are in states with looser restrictions in their economic reopening plans, enjoy a stronger decrease in unemployment.
In an age of intense party polarization, it can be difficult for partisans to understand the worldview of the other side, let alone agree with them. At this point, it appears that the pandemic, a crisis that would seemingly bring us closer together, has also been polarized. The most defining point of disagreement is the extent to which policymakers should prioritize reopening the economy or containing the virus. These results offer some context to the nature of this polarization. Namely, the differences in which the two “Americas” have experienced the pandemic reinforce their worldviews regarding the severity of the virus’s threat and the necessity for restrictive public health guidelines. For many blue counties, the tone was set early and the virus became both infectious and deadly enough to warrant tighter restrictions on in-person gatherings and economic activities. Even during safer periods, these areas have become conditioned to prioritize the containing highly infectious, life-threatening virus. Conversely, many red counties were insulated from the virus during the early months and weren’t compelled to impose shutdowns or harsh restrictions due to the lack of urgency. And by the time the virus started creeping into their communities, the issue had become polarized, fueling a resistance against stricter measures, such as mask mandates or business restrictions. While political leaders and activists were largely responsible for this divergence, the different trajectories experienced in the two “Americas” enabled their messages to be received and reinforced.
And economically, the results demonstrate that the places with the largest increase in unemployment are not necessarily the places with the highest infection rate. This is consistent with the characteristics of the top ten counties discussed in part three of this series; however, this exercise demonstrates that this is representative of the rest of the country. Particularly, while infections early on were mostly concentrated in urban, Northeastern counties, the counties that took the hardest hit economically are those that are reliant on tourism or manufacturing, which only experienced mild outbreaks.
Furthermore, while the state reopening plans don’t appear effective at producing a large decrease in unemployment, much of that is because for many counties in states with more open plans, the initial unemployment rate in April was already lower than those in states that adopted less open plans. This also reinforces the differing political narratives on the pandemic’s impact. For states with more open reopening plans, such actions were viewed as a necessary return to normalcy. While COVID incidence spiked during the summer months in Trump counties, political elites had already established the argument that these infections aren’t deadly. The fact that these areas were spared from the early wave while experiencing less of an economic shock was enough for leaders and residents to conclude that they were on the right path and there was little reason to break off course. The opposite is true for Clinton counties.
Finally, we noticed a number of demographic disparities across the different metrics. For the COVID incidence and fatality rate, there were fairly consistent racial and ethnic disparities, where counties with large black populations experienced more infections, more fatalities, and a smaller recovery in unemployment. There was also an education gap, where counties with large college graduate populations experienced less infections, less fatalities, and a more robust economic recovery. And similar gaps apply for age as well, where younger counties experienced more cases, while older counties experienced more fatalities. To a large extent, these demographic disparities reflect differences in economic opportunity with respect to the potential for infection. For more well-off places, there are more jobs that can be done remotely, which not only drives down unemployment, but also reduces in-person contact that can lead to more infection. But with age, it demonstrates the different character that the virus can inflict on different populations. For younger, more well-off populations, the virus is a contagious, but not very deadly ailment. But for older populations as well as those that struggle to access quality medical care, the virus is a more serious, life-threatening contagion. Because of all these factors, it’s important to emphasize that the virus is not a one-size-fits-all experience for the population.
Conclusion
Overall, in a country as large and diverse as the United States, the pandemic has had a severe, although varied effect on its population. These divergences not only exacerbate inequities in socioeconomic status and access to quality medical care, but also enable political actors to craft conflicting narratives on the overall threat level of the pandemic and what response that threat commands. It’s often said that large-scale crises can unify populations under an atmosphere of struggle. Some might argue that the United States needs another Great Depression or World War II in order to invigorate people with a patriotic spirit and common purpose. But what this pandemic has demonstrated is that rather than reducing polarization or at least hiding it, the pandemic has become co-opted into existing attitudes that drive this process. To that end, we have learned that possible solutions to extreme polarization cannot be solved through great crises. Some may find this conclusion disappointing; however, it also expands our understanding of the nature of polarization and opens us up to additional ideas moving forward.
So that will wrap up this series on the COVID-19 pandemic. This served as both an introduction to the post-election analysis as well a fun project to do while the states finished certifying their election results. In the next installment, we will be starting the post-election analysis series, starting with the state of Michigan.
If you enjoyed this article, please give it a like, follow the Book Aisle on WordPress as well as Medium, and share it on your social media. Have a good day. | https://medium.com/the-book-aisle/covid-19-overview-in-the-united-states-3cbca6d8b23d | ['Adam Martin'] | 2020-12-09 22:03:50.112000+00:00 | ['Covid 19 Crisis', 'Pandemic', 'Covid 19', '2020 Presidential Race'] |
Would You Buy A Book For $117? Here’s How I’ll Sell It | Who would spend that much on a book? Nobody. But I’m not positioning this as a book. I’m selling hard to find information. Some of it cannot be found elsewhere. The book acts as the vehicle for delivering the info.
I’m selling it as a physical book only. $117 sounds like a lot of money for a book. I should also mention you can’t buy it on Amazon or at any bookstore. Plus, it appeals to a narrow audience. Only a few can benefit from the information.
None of this seems to make sense, right? It’s hard to find the product. It’s expensive, It appeals to a narrow audience. The format may not be convenient. What am I thinking? It all seems counter-intuitive. The truth is, to sell a book for that much money you need to do things different.
Some of it seems puzzling at first glance. Here’s why it works.
Narrow The Audience
Niche down to a smaller audience with specific needs and desires. You’ll likely find an under-served audience. This audience must feel passion or have a desperate need for what you are selling.
For example, let’s suppose you sell a course on dog training. You’ll compete with hordes of others. Most folks seeking out this information will find tons of options. It’s unlikely that you’ll offer something so earth shattering that you can charge a premium price for a book. You would need a different approach.
Now, let’s niche down and limit the audience to Catahoula Leopard dogs. You’re now facing a tiny audience. Though small, their passion for these dogs radiates. Only a few providers serve them. If you can fill that gap you hold more pricing power.
Narrow The Focus
Now we’re facing a handful of competitors. How could we narrow the focus and dive deep into a really specific part of Catahoula Leopard Dogs? What about training Catahoula Leopard dogs for competitive dog shows? Now we’re drilling down into a small but focused area of dog training. A small but fanatical crew of prospects exists. Our audience shrinks but the remaining prospects spend big dollars. That’s our opening.
Limit Availability
Scarcity drives up demand. Sure, that’s the first lesson in copywriting. If we offer our information in digital format it’s unlimited. A physical book you buy directly from the source screams scarcity. I can state that I’m printing only five hundred copies. Once I sell out they’re not coming back. It’s tough to sell that story on Amazon, even if it’s true.
The limited printing gives it a feeling of exclusivity. You’ll be one of only five hundred to possess this information. Your buyer feels a sense of prestige.
Oversize The Offer
The buyer gets more than just a book. The added bonuses increase the perceived value. You see, the book is just one piece of the overall offer. The onslaught of extras make the price a no brainer. I may even include some limited premium bonuses for the first twenty buyers.
Imagine crafting a sales campaign to owners of Catahoula competition dogs. See how specific we can get in our marketing message? You can drill down into the exact needs and challenges they face. Compare that to targeting all dog owners. There’s no way you can reach them on the same personal level.
There’s one more advantage of going higher priced with a small audience. I can send a handwritten thank you note to all buyers. Try doing that with a seven dollar ebook. | https://medium.com/writtenpersuasion/would-you-buy-a-book-for-117-heres-how-i-ll-do-it-68e7ee8eeb8d | ['Barry Davret'] | 2017-03-26 21:43:08.187000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Business', 'Persuasive Writing', 'Psychology', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Hope has Nothing to do With it | Nearly every person I know has a great, big shiny dream. They can envision themselves living the new life they will have when this dream becomes reality and often daydream about it happening “someday.’ Whether they want to start a business, live in a foreign country, adopt a child, go back to school or transform their health, most of us long for something we don’t have and believe our lives will be better, happier or more satisfying when we do. And the majority of us won’t ever see those dreams come true.
I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but I know a bit about human nature from having been a therapist and coach for well over two decades. I have spent literally thousands of hours with hundreds of clients talking about what they believed was wrong with themselves and their lives. Along the way, I stopped seeing any value in talking about the past, what went wrong and what isn’t working and always attempted to steer the conversation toward what is going well and what they want more of in the future. It’s one of the main reasons I stopped being a therapist and got trained to be a coach. But, I soon learned that talking about what we want in the future is not enough. While it’s true that we need a clear picture of our dreams and goals in order to move forward, it’s not enough.
There are plenty of people that believe we can make out dreams come true by having a crystal clear image in our minds, often facilitated by journaling, meditation, vision boards, and other techniques. Once our vision is clear, we set our intentions, align our energy with that of source and seek to manifest the outcome by drawing it to us magnetically. Now, I am not especially woo woo, but I don’t discount the spiritual entirely. I think of myself as half a woo, which means I believe that we are energetic beings and that unless we truly believe an outcome is possible and that it’s possible for us, it simply won’t happen. That being said, we can meditate, vision board and magnetize all we want, but I just don’t think it’s enough.
What’s missing in most cases, IMHO is a genuine commitment, consistent action, the willingness to fail and flexibility. These are both traits and skills and while they may come more naturally to some of us, all of us can develop what we have in each of these areas. Let’s start with commitment. I thought I knew what commitment was, but I witnessed it one day just a few years ago at a coaching workshop. The leader asked all of the trainees in attendance how committed we were to making money. Everyone raised their hands. Then she asked if we were willing to take any action in order to bring more money into our lives. This time, about 90% of the room raised their hands. Next, she asked if we were willing to put ourselves out there and declare our desire for more money, no matter what others might think of us. Fewer hands were raised and the tone in the room was starting to become more serious.
The final question was are we willing to take a risk, even when we had doubts. This time, only about 70% of the room had a raised hand. Every person there had paid a lot of money to this coach trainer, one of the highest-paid life coaches in the country. We all wanted to learn her secrets for making money as a life coach because, despite the popularity of the life coaching industry, a tiny percentage of life coaches are making a lot of money. The growing feeling of tense anticipation was evident. There was a hush while the trainer smiled and looked around the room. What happened next took me, and I suspect most of the room by surprise. This was by design. She pulled her handbag out from behind the podium. Drawing a crisp new $100 dollar bill from her wallet, she flung it into the air and it rose high, then floated quickly downward, just in front of the first row of seats, a few feet from the stage.
One of the attendees leaped out of her seat and grabbed the hundred dollar bill before most of the others in her row ever had the chance to even consider doing so, while the rest of us watched, trying to process what had just happened. The trainer smiled in acknowledgment and asked the young woman, now clutching the hundred dollar bill, looking quite triumphant to join her on the stage. The trainer invited the woman to introduce herself, using the microphone and asked her to share her thoughts about what had just happened. Her response was that she didn’t really think, she saw the hundred dollar bill in the air and she simply acted to grab it.
The trainer then told her it was hers to keep. They hugged briefly and the young woman took her seat. The trainer then spoke simply to the entire gathering, stating “THAT, my friends, is commitment.” | https://medium.com/@diann-wingert/hope-has-nothing-to-do-with-it-16877ef24c90 | ['Diann Wingert'] | 2021-01-15 18:56:13.163000+00:00 | ['Blog', 'Confidence'] |
Now is the moment to fund innovation for news equity | In 2020, journalism went from rapid economic disruption to a full-blown existential meltdown.
Already wracked by #MeToo scandals, major outlets found themselves failing to meet the political moment sparked by the killing of George Floyd.
These failures of perspective and inclusion don’t just affect communities that have historically been left out of the national debate, but they also have ripple effects for democracy. As I have said before, we cannot have a functioning civil society without racial justice. And we cannot have racial justice without real reform in newsrooms. The old ways of doing journalism simply aren’t working: we need true innovation if we want equity in journalism. Equitable news coverage — fueled by innovative new processes and the culturally-competent and empowered staff needed to produce it — is a powerful lever which can move civil society toward justice.
The Ford Foundation, where I work, has been in alignment with the overall mission of the Engaged Journalism Lab. We have worked on the launch of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy, along with Democracy Fund, the American Journalism Project, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Google News Initiative, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the News Integrity Initiative. The REJ Fund is helping to bridge the gap in funding and institutional support by supporting organizations such as Buffalo’s Fire, which is fighting for independent media and freedom of information while serving Indigenous communities that have been especially hard hit by the pandemic; La Noticia, a Spanish-language newspaper serving the information needs of over 300,000 community members in North Carolina; and MLK50, an award-winning Black-led newsroom whose investigation of flawed hospital debt collection policies in partnership with ProPublica led to the forgiveness of more than $11 million of debt.
We’d like to issue a challenge to other funders — not just to fund equity in news, but specifically to fund innovation to achieve these ends.
Now, we’d like to issue a challenge to other funders — not just to fund equity in news, but specifically to fund innovation to achieve these ends. Innovation can take many forms, including taking more risks in funding; expanding the pool of who gets funded; rethinking how we assess impact and return on investment; and more. We invite funders to consider what equity looks like within our current funding systems — and what it might look like if we built something new altogether.
To support this exploration, the Ford Foundation has recently released three research papers:
Reconstructing American news: Investing in the transformation of journalistic processes and power relations to strengthen civil society, written by Katie Donnelly and Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio, takes on the question of how the journalism industry and the funders who support it can innovate in service of media equity. Until recently, much of the focus for funders in the journalism funding space has been on supporting innovation in terms of products and platforms. It’s now time to resource new people, processes, and power relationships instead. This paper explores the challenges we’re facing with regard to how equity-centered news is currently funded — and how possible interventions might work in practice, with insights from 10 individuals in the field on how they are adapting given the upheavals in the space caused by the pandemic. This analysis doesn’t focus on journalism philanthropy exclusively, but rather approaches the entire ecosystem with a particular focus on investment, philanthropy, and sustainability.
instead. This paper explores the challenges we’re facing with regard to how equity-centered news is currently funded — and how possible interventions might work in practice, with insights from 10 individuals in the field on how they are adapting given the upheavals in the space caused by the pandemic. This analysis doesn’t focus on journalism philanthropy exclusively, but rather approaches the entire ecosystem with a particular focus on investment, philanthropy, and sustainability. Gender equity in the news media: Analysis and recommendations for newsroom leaders is a companion report that found two major challenges that prevent gender equity from becoming a reality in newsrooms: gender gaps among content creators and those who make decisions about coverage, and slow progress in women’s representation in leadership roles. The report offers key solutions for organizational and newsroom leaders, including taking a public stance, appointing organizational catalysts, and creating incentives. Ford commissioned the report from two researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government — Ariel Skeath, a Master of Public Policy candidate, and Lisa Macpherson, fellow in the Advanced Leadership Initiative.
Investing in equitable news and media projects, a report from Andrea Armeni and Wilneida Negrón of Transform Finance, takes a deep dive into the investment space for equity-centered news and media projects, exploring three pivotal questions: Who is currently investing in equitable media (and why)? What are adjacent investing/investor spaces that could yield additional capital, and what would be needed to attract them? And what are the major pain points for current investors (and potential adjacent investors) and news and media entrepreneurs? There has been a dearth of research into the investment space outside of philanthropy for equity-centered news projects, and this paper fills in some very important gaps in understanding. Among other key recommendations, the report encourages foundations and private investors to “jointly explore the entire ecosystem of equitable media from a holistic perspective, rather than separating investment and grant funding.”
Taken together, these three reports point the path forward: current funders and investors must approach news equity in new ways, individually and together. They also highlight the need to educate and recruit a much broader array of funders and investors into this space. We hope you will use them to explore this work from multiple angles, and to continue to bring new funders and investors into the conversation. We’re excited to work with you to build a new, innovative and equitable journalism that strengthens civil society and finally truly serves communities in the U.S. and around the world. | https://medium.com/the-engaged-journalism-lab/now-is-the-moment-to-fund-innovation-for-news-equity-d1092bf436a | ['Farai Chideya'] | 2020-08-12 16:01:01.923000+00:00 | ['Equity', 'Philanthropy', 'Innovation', 'Journalism'] |
The Creator | The Creator
Digital Collage by Author, Copyright, All Rights Reserved
Life brings an infinite abundance of choices; some we create, others are created for us. The power of our voice is a choice. The acceptance of our path is an evolving terrain of choices. What speaks to us, what makes our hearts sing. Bringing our mind, body, and spirit into oneness, allowing our focus to soften till we can see the movements we sincerely desire — a birthing a dream into our reality, a walk with the divine. Creative design, the painter with brush and color to define the ripples that move us to our true center. At times in our lives, we feel we must accept the current situation as a truth. Belief drives a force that forms our focus. If we can soften our beliefs, allow them to evolve birthing into being something more than our minds could collectively define. Holding them lightly opens us to the infinite beauty that resides in our soul, our quantum field of existence. An evolution of our soul parts, what brings us to the here and now. What is our true purpose for this lifetime? What is it that speaks to your soul? | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/the-creator-4637de52fdba | ['Rhonda Skinner'] | 2020-10-03 15:18:19.943000+00:00 | ['Spiritual Growth', 'Spirituality', 'Abundance', 'Inspiration', 'Spiritual Secrets'] |
Cabinets Pt. 1, Day 12 | December 17, 2020
Story time: many a year ago, my father had a colleague that had some cherry trees that were felled after a strong storm. To make the best of the situation, his coworker called a lumber mill to come on site to cut the fallen trees into planks. Legend has it, he went on to refine that raw material and built a beautiful dining table. My father was then gifted three planks of the remaining cherry, with the plan of also constructing a dining table of his own. This gift, however, was tucked away for a decade and a half in our backyard shed.. not to see the light until today.
Raw cherry
The vision for these planks had changed from being made into a grand dining table to becoming the wood surfaces of our multi-purpose dining table and all our van’s cabinetry. In order to do so, they had to be further processed into workable material via specialized woodworking equipment — a planer and jointer. | https://medium.com/@the-magno-mobile/cabinets-pt-1-day-12-92d83efcf2bd | ['The Magno-Mobile'] | 2020-12-21 03:39:56.670000+00:00 | ['DIY', 'Conversion Van', 'Vanlife', 'Campervan', 'Projects'] |
Out of a Work? Sell Your Feet Pics! | Phil Autelitano
@philautelitano
(NEW YORK) — Sounds silly, right? But you’d be surprised by peoples’ kinks, and what they’re willing to pay-for and beat off-to online. Foot fetishes are one of the more popular (and milder) of the hundreds of fetishes available to the every day internet user. What’s your fetish? Wait–before you answer that, I don’t want to know.
The current Coronavirus pandemic is quickly becoming a gold mine for online porn. Trust me. Not to sound like Donald Trump, but as the owner of SCREW TV and The Screw Review, no one knows this better than me. Traffic to our streaming channel (on Roku) and our websites is up 10,000% the past few weeks and people are PAYING.
Whether you’re a full time model, a part time model or not even a model at all (but look pretty or have pretty feet), there is money to be made selling your photos and videos online. Best of all, you shoot your own photos and videos right from the comfort and safety of your own home or bedroom without ever having to deal with creepy photographers.
If you’re 18 years old and older, there’s money just waiting for you. Nude or non-nude. Simply sexy, elegant or erotic to full-blown hardcore. That’s right, you don’t have to get nude to make money with photos and videos — feet fetishes and other fetishes, sexy lingerie, tight clothes, pantyhose — there are so many fetishes out there, it’s easy to find one you’re comfortable with.
And best of all, no one even has to know your name, or where you live. You can do it all, for the most part, virtually anonymously.
If you’re looking to make some extra cash — or even a new career– as an online (adult) model, shoot me an email and let’s talk. I’d love to tell you about the opportunities available to you right now, with SCREW.
Established in 1968, SCREW is one of the oldest — and the most notorious–names in adult entertainment. We produce SCREW TV, one of the most popular adult subscription channels on streaming platforms, and The Screw Review, a new website that allows us to offer additional content to our viewers. I’m looking for lovely ladies to add to our collection of SCREW Girls, and there’s potentially lots of money in it for you!
Hit me up anytime at [email protected] or visit www.TheScrewReview.com and click on Models Wanted. | https://medium.com/business-marketing/out-of-a-work-sell-your-feet-pics-36087898abf1 | ['Phil Autelitano'] | 2020-04-12 04:33:07.683000+00:00 | ['Adult', 'Model', 'Pornography', 'Modeling', 'Porn'] |
Is Content Writing A Good Freelance Career Option ? | In a web-content oriented world, the scope and popularity of content writing is huge and ever-growing. As long as a business module requires an online presence, it takes on its identity through content. This has led to an impressive growth in quality content and content makers.
Although content writing is in no way a new concept, it has gotten a new lease of life and is here to stay for good. The digital transformation that has taken place over the years has created a brand new demand for talented content writers with many young professionals and fresh graduates aspiring to create a name for themselves in this field.
Content writers are responsible for everything we see on the web today. They play a vital role in making the digital world the one stop source for all information. They produce a variety of different content for websites, blogs, social media, technical documentation and many other platforms. It is a fulfilling path for those who wish to pursue a career in writing.
One aspect that adds to its appeal is that like most of the mainstream career choices, you don’t necessarily need a degree in a specific stream to become a writer. If you have a flair for writing, good communication skills, know how to put your thoughts into words and possess some knowledge of the digital world, you are good to go. This eliminates the entry barriers that deter individuals from pursuing it as a career. However, if you plan to take up content writing on a full time basis, it is recommended to be a graduate in any field.
Companies are on the lookout for those who can communicate with customers through well-written and appealing content. But working in a big corporation is vastly different to working in a start-up. A large organisation has more people and follows a well-defined structure, which makes it easier to share responsibilities.
The content writing industry in India is growing exponentially. There are many tech and e-learning companies that are offering opportunities to writers. If you are looking forward to a career in content writing, some areas that offer great opportunities are:
Blog Writing
Article Writing
Copy Writing
Technical Writing
Editing
Digital Marketing (SEO, SMO)
Whether you are a fresh graduate or an experienced professional, there is ample scope in content writing with growth prospects for the future as well. It is an interesting career option that could lead to a highly rewarding profession. | https://medium.com/gigs-for-me/content-writing-role-and-potential-b2470e29b743 | ['G Shrivastava'] | 2020-01-15 04:48:26.147000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Content Writing', 'Gig Economy', 'Freelance Writing', 'Content Marketing'] |
When White Privilege Shows You White Lives Matter More | I, later on, understood that security companies are always instructed to protect the higher-value asset or more senior employee first. Fred was indeed more senior, but the reality is that the security company never provided the full service to me from the start.
My life was not a priority to them — especially when they forgot to pick me up at the airport or didn’t inspect my hotel room. All throughout the trip, they made me feel — more than anyone has ever made me feel, that my black life didn’t matter — at least, not as much as the life of a white man.
I have since recovered from this traumatic event, but it taught me a lesson: to always keep in mind that regardless of what people would like you to believe, our lives are not all valued the same. Whenever I travel to high-risk countries, I carry that extra anxiety with me — what if something were to happen? I have learned to live with this dread, and now simply hope and pray for the best.
Thanks for reading my perspective. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/when-white-privilege-shows-you-white-lives-matter-more-3fe83dc89a36 | ['Rebecca Stevens A.'] | 2020-12-05 04:23:17.065000+00:00 | ['White Privilege', 'Equality', 'Racism', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Black Women'] |
Moving Beyond Small Talk to Smart Conversations | 7 Ways to Start a Conversation and Build Meaningful Connections at Work
These seven ways will guide you on how to have effective conversations at work that don’t involve small talk and add value to work without making you feel uncomfortable.
1. Ask questions that get the other person talking
People like to talk about themselves. A question framed with the right mix of curiosity about the person and their work can be a great way to start a conversation.
“Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival-to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated. When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving.” — Stephen R. Covey
While waiting for a meeting to get started, you notice Jon, who works in the analytics department. This is a great opportunity for you to connect with a person from another unit by asking, “Hi, Jon. I’m […] from […]. I’ll be working with your team to integrate our product with the new analytics system. Being the chief architect of the new system, you might be the perfect person to share the key highlights of your product. I’m curious to know what went into designing it.”
A new product manager Keith joins your team. Make that first impression count by asking, “Hi, Keith. I’m […]. I work on […]. What excites you about product management?”
Your boss’s boss, Julia, is in the elevator. Don’t miss the chance to connect by saying, “Hi, Julia. I’m […] from […]. We’re working on this new product […] that I’m excited about. You shared some great insights about our last product. Curious to know what you think about this one.”
Asking open-ended questions that show an interest in another person’s point of view and give them a chance to speak about themselves or their experience is a great way to start a conversation.
2. Do more listening and less talking
Epictetus, a great Greek Stoic philosopher said, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
Great conversations require the right balance between talking and listening. Active listening, though difficult, is the most effective medium to communicate and form a connection that inspires the other person to open up and share what they really think and feel.
“If you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments .” — Dale Carnegie
Start the conversation by asking the right question, but then listen intently to the other person with the desire to learn more about them. People can see when we’re genuinely curious and when we’re faking it.
Hijacking the conversation by speaking too much or shifting the focus of the discussion and making it about us can instantly kill the conversation.
3. Don’t engage with a victim mindset
Don’t start a conversation by putting someone or something in a bad light — our boss sucks, this is a crap presentation, this meeting is a waste of time, and so on.
It may be tempting to talk to others about things that you dislike or things that aren’t going so well for you with the assumption they feel the same way, but approaching a conversation with a victim mindset is the worst way to connect with someone.
It makes you look like a complainer and doesn’t give an opportunity for the other person to speak much.
Talking to people with a negative frame of mind can turn them off and cause them to avoid you in future interactions.
Take this advice from Olivia Fox:
“Aim to keep your questions focused on positive subjects because people will associate you with whatever feelings your conversation generates. Focus on questions that will likely elicit positive emotions. With your questions, you have the power to lead the conversation in the direction you want.”
Look for positive things to talk about that add personal value to you and the other person.
4. Know your boundaries
Different people are open to different levels of talking and sharing. Know when your question is getting too personal or making the other person uncomfortable.
Also, having a difference of opinion isn’t the same as imposing it. Share your disagreement but in a manner that doesn’t seem like an attack.
Starting a conversation with “This is wrong. I don’t agree with it …” will make the other person defensive.
However, if you start with the curiosity to understand them first by asking, “Tell me more why you think this way,” they’ll be more open to your disagreement when you share it later by saying, “My opinion is […]. What do you think about it?”
5. Accept vulnerability
Brené Brown talks about excruciating vulnerability. She says:
“It’s the idea that for connections to happen, we need to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.”
People feel shameful when they don’t know something and instead of showing curiosity to learn about it, they pretend to know the subject and nod in agreement. Such superficial conversations are pointless and don’t lead to building trust and connection.
Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not or pretend to know something you don’t. Accept you don’t know and say, “Oh, I don’t know about that. What’s that?”
Accepting vulnerability is the most powerful means to start a conversation and to build a long-lasting connection.
Start a conversation by asking, “I don’t know much about […]. Can I pick your brain to learn more about it?”
6. Keep it simple
We overcomplicate things in our mind by overthinking and obsessing about the perfect question and then end up killing the idea to talk to the person when we can’t seem to find one.
Conversations don’t always need a perfect start. We need to get started somewhere and then give it a direction.
When nothing else comes to mind, asking simple questions like these can get the conversation flowing:
What’s interesting about your work?
What keeps you busy?
What are you learning these days?
Who has had the biggest influence in your life?
What practices do you follow for continuous improvement?
What new skills are you focusing on?
What’s your advice on […]?
I am curious about […]. What resources do you recommend on this topic?
7. Be present
In today’s world, with a constant stream of distractions all around us, it’s difficult to choose a human connection over a digital one. But conversations where we’re constantly distracted don’t add value. Great conversations require us to be present, both mentally and physically, in the moment.
Celeste Headlee says, “We got all that terrible advice (that) we got to look someone in the eye and nod your head and say ‘uh huh.’ (It’s) just teaching you how to pretend you are paying attention — and that’s totally unnecessary if you are paying attention!”
And Olivia Fox talks about being fully present: “The ability to be fully present makes you stand out from the crowd; it makes you memorable. When you’re fully present, even a five-minute conversation can create a wow effect, as well as an emotional connection.”
Stop looking at your phone, and actually start paying attention to the person right next to you. Start a conversation by committing to being present instead of giving in to distractions.
Work life can be more meaningful if we can learn to connect with all the interesting people around us. Conversations that go beyond small talk into the desire to understand and learn from each other can be a powerful source of energy. | https://medium.com/better-programming/moving-beyond-small-talk-to-smart-conversations-b7f490dac3d6 | [] | 2020-10-20 21:28:49.718000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Programming'] |
Time Series Analysis with Python | A time series is a series of data points indexed in time order, normally with equally spaced points in time. Examples of time series are stocks’ prices, monthly returns, company’s sales and so forth. Time series can be seen as data with a target variable (price, returns, amount of sales…) and one feature only: time. Indeed, the idea of Time Series is that we can extrapolate interesting information by analyzing the behavior of a given variable throughout time. Then, if relevant findings emerge, it will be ideally possible to predict the trend of our value in the future.
Before starting the analysis, it is worth spending some lines about the models we are going to employ. They belong to the class of Autoregressive Moving Average, or ARMA models. The idea of ARMA models is that, given a time series Y, the value of Y at time t might depend on its past values (this is the autoregressive component) and on its past error terms, which are supposed to be white noise (this is the moving average component).
In general, every statistical model is estimated following a defined method (namely, Regression is estimated with the Ordinary Least Square method). In our case, ARMA models are estimated according to the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). The ground idea is very intuitive: the MLE of a vector of parameters of a given sample is the value for which this sample is more likely to be observed.
The fitting process of the model will return the estimated coefficients. However, we need to know the order (p,q) of that model. To do that, the first step of time series analysis (and I’d add, of any data analysis task) is studying and getting familiar with our data, inspecting them and formulating some first assumptions.
For this purpose, I’m going to use a free dataset available on Kaggle, which contains the monthly production of beer in Austria:
df=pd.read_csv('monthly-beer-production-in-austr.csv')
df.head()
Let’s have a look at the behavior of our data:
df['datetime'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Month'])
df = df.set_index('datetime')
df.drop(['Month'], axis=1, inplace=True)
df.plot()
As you can see, there was a clear upward trend between 1959 and 1979, then the production seemed to plateau and slowly decrease up to 1985: from here, it jumped upward again with some falls too, hence it is more difficult to identify a clear pattern.
Now, every time series can be decomposed into four main elements or components:
Level : it is the average value of the series
: it is the average value of the series Trend : it is the ‘direction’ of that value, which can be increasing or decreasing
: it is the ‘direction’ of that value, which can be increasing or decreasing Seasonality : it is a repeating short-term cycle in the series
: it is a repeating short-term cycle in the series Noise: it is a random variation in the series which cannot be explained by the available information
Note that all series have level and noise, while trend and seasonality are optional. To verify the presence of these optional elements, it is useful to split the series into these components, and we can do so by using some Python tools:
from statsmodels.tsa.seasonal import seasonal_decompose
result = seasonal_decompose(df, model='additive')
result.plot()
Here, I assumed that the model is additive. It means that the value of our variable is given by the summation of the components above:
Y(t)=level + trend + seasonality + noise
On the contrary, there are models which assume that the value is given by the multiplication of those elements, rather than the summation.
Now a further concept needs to be introduced: stationarity.
Ideally, we want to manage series which are stationary (that means, having constant mean and variance over time) in order to bypass the main concern of time series: the impossibility of observing, at a fixed time t, all the possible realizations of the target variable. Indeed, we only observe one path of realizations over time of any given variable.
There are different ways to make a time process stationary. One of these is simply taking its first difference, once subtracted the seasonal component:
import numpy as np
x=df-result.seasonal
diff=np.diff(x)
plt.plot(diff)
It now looks more stationary. Well, these interventions we made — getting rid of seasonality and taking the first difference — can be implemented directly into the model, building a so-called SARIMA (Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average). Indeed, the “integrated” component considers the dth difference of the series, while the “seasonal” component takes into account seasonality.
So, as I said before, the last step before training the model is deciding the number of parameters p,q and, in this specific case, d (order of difference we have to take to make our series stationary). A good way to proceed is inspecting the Autocorrelation Function and Partial Autocorrelation Function of our series:
from statsmodels.graphics.tsaplots import plot_acf, plot_pacf
plot_acf(diff, lags=10)
plot_pacf(diff, lags=10)
These functions tell us whether time series values exhibit some kind of correlations with their past values and, if yes, up to which time lag. These serial correlations can be computed taking into account all the correlations among values between t and t-n (ACF) or considering only the correlation between values at t and t-n (PACF).
How can one interpret these two plots? The basic recipe is the following:
Generally speaking, it is always a good practice to train more than one model and compare them according to given criteria (I will dwell on this concept later on). Luckily, there is a function in Python which will make this comparison in a few seconds, returning the best combination of parameters (again, we still have to define what “best combination” means).
Before employing this function, let’s train a very simple ARIMA model by choosing low values of p, q and d.
from statsmodels.tsa.arima_model import ARIMA
model = ARIMA(diff, order=(1,2,0))
model_fit = model.fit()
print(model_fit.summary())
The very first operation to be done once trained the model is inspecting its residuals. Indeed, it is fundamental, for our model to be accurate enough, that residuals are stationary, without a specific trend. Indeed, if there was a trend, it would mean there is still a pattern the model didn’t capture, there is some available information that has not been used. If residuals are not stationary, hence our model needs more (or a different combination of) parameters.
Let’s examine our residuals:
residuals = pd.DataFrame(model_fit.resid)
residuals.plot()
They might look stationary, but we need to test it. To do that, I will employ the Ljung-Box test, whose hypotheses are:
H0: The data are independently distributed
H1: The data are not independently distributed (hence, they exhibit serial correlation)
Let’s examine the output of this test run up to lag 10:
from statsmodels.stats.diagnostic import acorr_ljungbox
acorr_ljungbox(residuals, lags=10)
The second list in the returned array contains the p-values from the Ljung box test: since all p-values are below 0.05, you can reject the null of no auto-correlation between the series and each of its first 10 lags with > 95% confidence level. As you can see, the test rejected our first assumption of the absence of correlation. It means our model was not able to capture all the available information, which is comprehensible, considering we randomly set its parameters.
Now, as anticipated, let’s examine the best model using the auto_arima() function. It returns the best ARIMA model according to either AIC, HQIC or BIC value. These latter (in the red box in model’s summary above) are three different information criteria: they bypass the risk of excessive complexity that would emerge if we relied only on the MLE (which tends to increase the number of parameters to maximize the joint probability of occurrence). Indeed, these criteria penalize the MLE function when the number of parameters increases, following the “law of parsimony” that became a fundamental principle of statistical theory (to quote Williams of Ockham (1287–1347), ‘best models are those which are simple and fit the data well’).
So let’s first divide our time series into train and test set. Here, I’m going to use again the original, no-stationary dataset, so that you can see how the auto_arima() will try to fix it with a specific model.
train = df[:int(0.7*(len(df)))]
test= df[int(0.7*(len(df))):] train['Monthly beer production'].plot()
test['Monthly beer production'].plot()
Now let’s run our auto_arima(). To do so, you need to install the pyramid package via pip install pip install pmdarima on your console.
from pmdarima.arima import auto_arima
model = auto_arima(train, trace=True, error_action='ignore', suppress_warnings=True)
model.fit(train)
As you can see, the best ARIMA model is that with 1,1,1 parameters. Now it’s time to make some forecasts:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
forecast = model.predict(n_periods=len(test))
forecast = pd.DataFrame(forecast,index = test.index,columns=['Prediction']) #plot the predictions for validation set
plt.plot(train, label='Train')
plt.plot(test, label='Test')
plt.plot(forecast, label='Prediction')
plt.show()
As you can see, the model was able to capture (and exaggerate a bit) the slightly upward trend starting again after 1985. It is evident that our model interpreted the sudden decreasing of our beer production as temporary, forecasting an upward trend for the long run.
Finally, we can evaluate our results using the Root Mean Squared evaluation metric:
from math import sqrt
from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error rms = sqrt(mean_squared_error(test,forecast))
print('Root Mean Squared: {}'.format(rms))
To sum up, Python offers several tools for Time Series Analysis, and you can decide whether relying on auto_arima() or finding your best number of parameters with the aid of information criteria. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/time-series-analysis-with-python-f5ab388b865a | ['Valentina Alto'] | 2019-09-21 13:50:06.570000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Time Series Analysis', 'Statistics', 'Python', 'Data Science'] |
How to Set Up Your Content Creation Software Environment for Free | Hardware
We have to talk about the hard stuff first — hardware.
We are going to focus on free stuff, but we can’t do anything without a computer.
Hardware is not free so we have to assume you own some hardware already or are willing to invest in it. Some content creation, like vlogging or shows where you film yourself, requires more hardware. You will need a camera, light, sound, props, etc. If you are only recording your screen, it will be a cheaper experience for you.
Photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels
Computer
Luckily, most of the software we will use have online options. This means that the heavy lifting is not done on your computer. The only thing your computer needs to keep alive is the browser.
Do note that recording your screen and streaming is intense so you need at least a mid-end computer if you’re into that.
I have been blown away by the performance reviews we have seen on the entry-level MacBooks, like the Air, and the Mac Mini with the new M1 chips these days.
Hopefully, you have a computer that doesn’t need upgrading right away.
Camera
If you need to record yourself, you need a camera (or a phone with a camera), but if you only need to present the content you have on-screen, you can wipe that off your list as well.
Remember, you can start with something on the budget-conscious side and upgrade when you have the resources to do so.
The camera on your phone might be enough. A GorillaPod will help you get it set up where you want it.
If you don’t want to invest in any lights, use what you already have.
Microphone
Good sound is essential to step up to a more professional level. There are countless options out there. After weeks of research, I ended up with a Røde NT-USB Mini and I am really satisfied with the sound I get. It hooks up to your computer via USB so any beginner can pick one up and start using it right away.
The microphone comes with a stand so you can place it on your table, but a boom arm will help you avoid any accidental bumping into sounds and prevent picking up keyboard and mouse clicks. | https://bettermarketing.pub/how-to-set-up-your-content-creation-software-environment-for-free-2770bd3bb17e | ['Martin Andersson Aaberge'] | 2020-12-16 15:36:01.828000+00:00 | ['Free', 'Software', 'Content', 'Marketing', 'Creative'] |
Joke’s On Them. I’m Not From Anywhere. | I have fallen back in love with New York City. And not like in that Nora-Ephron-Magnolia-Bakery-I-See-Films-At-The-Angelika way (even if You’ve Got Mail is required viewing and I like those other things a lot, too). I am hopelessly and completely in love with New York.
To tell this romance adequately, I have to start at the beginning. My father was in the Air Force, and although we had longer stays in places than most military families, I never really had a hometown. We were lucky enough to put down roots in Northern Virginia before I started high school, but I never felt like it was my place. Living outside D.C. is fantastic, except for the whole living outside of D.C. thing.
When I moved to New York in the summer of 2011, I was essentially choosing my hometown, and didn’t even know it. My first home was a closet room on the top floor of a famous actor’s Chelsea brownstone, giving me unrealistic expectations about the finance-ruining leases and terrifying sublets to come. I spent my first night as a New Yorker too excited to sleep, staring up at the pink overcast sky and whispering, “I live here, now.”
It was love at first night. It was exactly how I had imagined it. It wasn’t Sex and The City, but it was mine. Not even stepping into a two-foot-deep sidewalk puddle in a snowstorm, or getting shit on by a one-legged pigeon could get me down!
For the first five years, I couldn’t pay my own bills, and took a number of month-to-month part time positions. One at Sur La Table. Another at a bar that has since been condemned. I cared for the children of wealthy Upper East Side families, and came home every night to two bottles of wine. I was single as hell. I struggled to get acting work, and watched my classmates debut on Broadway. In just a few years, I fell into the throws of alcoholism and crippling debt. I was also developing a number of anxiety disorders with well-known acronymic names.
My relationship with New York was sorely lacking. I had become resentful of how expensive my coffee habit was, and how unmanageable my two-transfer commute was. I would pick fights with tourists just to feel something. I moved apartments a seventh time, citing roommate difficulties again. It became clear that I was the one ruining my relationship with New York.
Don’t get me wrong. I would rather live an insufferable pit-of-despair existence in New York, than be happy anywhere else. I’ll take roaches in my cabinets over hiking The Canyon any day. But, there’s a point in every 20-something New York story where you are so depressed, so broke, and/or so lonely that you fall out of love with living here. This is typically the time when people move to Denver or L.A. or Philly, and have a wonderful life. They meet their one true love, and have a kid or two, and contribute to a 401K. Or, maybe that’s just how I’m imagining it. Regardless, this point of despair is a crossroads. Oprah or Frost. Take your pick.
After a couple failed attempts, I got sober and started putting my life back together. I made new friends, and traded the bars for the Lincoln Square AMC. My life was soon about getting my health under control and putting some happiness back in my cup. While pursuing sobriety and undergoing a double mastectomy (that’s a story for another time), I booked some theatre jobs, hosted brunches, and started riding around on CitiBikes. I was cautiously flirting with New York again.
Then, a pandemic.
It didn’t even occur to me to go elsewhere. Most people I knew left, but I would have been uncomfortable in any other place. I spent my days completely alone. I lost my job. I caught the virus. I left my apartment only to walk aimlessly around the neighborhood and wave at people from across the street. A neighbor screamed at me when I asked for six feet of distance to get into the front door of my building.
This couldn’t be the New York I first moved to. Where was the pink sky? Where was the sparkle? Where was the late night diner food? I kept thinking back to that first night in the famous guy’s house: You live here, now. It didn’t matter if this was the New York I once knew. It was the New York I knew now. And what a privilege. Even in her loneliest, scariest, deadliest days, she was still The Center of the Universe.
I made an effort to walk into a different corner of my neighborhood each day, taking note of a chipped façade, or a Black Lives Matter flag. It was quiet, except for the sound of sirens. I ambled past empty storefront after storefront, admiring businesses that no longer were. Conversations with neighbors moved past small talk for the first time in the nine years I had lived here. A new path was unveiled in the nearest park. I made homemade ice cream for my 75-year-old neighbor after she fell in our stairwell.
I was in love again. All-consuming love. Still single as hell, but in the most committed relationship I’ve ever been a part of. | https://medium.com/@clairemanship/jokes-on-them-i-m-not-from-anywhere-1c2ede19fbf3 | ['Claire Manship'] | 2020-10-08 00:33:48.347000+00:00 | ['New York City', 'Pandemic', 'Love Story', 'NYC'] |
Improve Linear Regression Using Statistics | As a fresher in the field of machine learning, the first thing that you learn would be simple univariate linear regression. However, for the past decade or so, tree-based algorithms and neural networks have overshadowed the significance of linear regression on a commercial scale. The purpose of this blog post is to highlight why linear regression and other linear algorithms are still very relevant and how you can improve the performance of such rudimentary models to compete with large and sophisticated algorithms like XGBoost and Random Forests.
Linear Regression- Line of Best Fit (Image by Author)
How to improve the performance of linear models:
Many self-taught data scientists start code first by learning how to implement various machine learning algorithms without actually understanding the mathematics behind these algorithms. By understanding the math behind these algorithms, we can get an idea about how to improve their performance.
The mathematics behind Linear Regression makes a few fundamental assumptions about the data that the model will be receiving:
No Hetroskedacity
No Multi-colinearity
Auto-Correlation
Normal Distribution
Linearity
Let’s dive deeper into a few of these assumptions and find ways to improve our models.
Linearity:
A linear model tries to fit a straight line through the data points given to it. It looks similar to the graph given below.
However, this kind of model fails to fit data points that are not plotted linearly. Consider a relation y = x² + c +- (noise). The graph for this function is parabolic. Fitting a line through this graph would not result in a good fit.
(Image by author)
We need to transform the independent variables by applying exponential, logarithmic, or other transformations to get a function that is as close as possible to a straight line.
What this means is that by changing my independent variable from x to x² by squaring each term, I would be able to fit a straight line through the data points while maintaining a good RMSE.
Thus we need to figure out whether our independent variable is directly related to each dependent variable or a transformation of these variables before building our final model.
No Hetroskadacity (constant variance)
Consider a situation where you are employed at a job that pays $3000 a month, while your living expenses total up to $2950. You are left with $50 every month to spend at your leisure. You could choose to spend this money or save it. In any case, it is not going to make a significant difference immediately. Your bank balance changes by a minimal amount (anywhere in the range of 0 to 50 dollars). 10 years down the line, you are now the CEO of a multinational company earning upwards of $100,000 every month. Your living expenses total up to $25,000. Now you can choose to either spend the rest $75,000 or just a fraction of it. The change in your bank balance at the end of the month can be anywhere between 0 — $75000. The range here is much larger as compared to 10 years ago. The variance between the least and most amount that you can save has increased with time.
Linear regression assumes that the variance between data points does not increase or decrease as a function of the dependent variable.
The graph should look more like this to fit a good linear model.
In this case, the standard error of the linear model will not be reliable.
How to detect this:
Goldfeldt-Quant test
This function returns the F-statistic and the p_value.
Breusch-Pagan test
This function returns Lagrange multiplier statistic, p_value, f_value, and f p_value.
No Multi-Colinearity
Consider a problem statement where you are asked the predict the cost of real-estate property, based on the length of the plot, the land area, and proximity to schools and public infrastructure. Here it is evident that 2 of the independent variables (the length and the area of the plot) are directly related. As the length increases, the area also increases. Such a correlation affects the performance of linear regression.
How to identify this:
Using Pearson-correlation.
Pearson-correlation heatmap [Image by Author]
How to fix this:
Drop one of the two variables
Create a function to create a new independent variable using the correlated features and drop the correlated features.
Normality of Distribution
This is one of the most important factors that people usually forget before building a linear model. It is important that the continuous variables in the dataset need to be Gaussian distributed.
Gaussian distribution It is a probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean. In graph form, normal distribution will appear as a bell curve.
The measure of deviation from a Gaussian distribution is known as skew. The skewness of a distribution can be calculated in python by using the scipy module.
Seaborn distplot graph [Image by Author]
In the above graph, the black line refers to the gaussian distribution that we hope to reach, and the blue line represents the kernel density estimation (KDE) of the given data before the transformation.
Fixing the skewness of data can provide a huge boost to the accuracy of linear models.
Transformations that can be applied to fix skewness:
Logarithmic Transformation: This works best if the data is right-skewed, i.e the distribution has a long tail on the right end.
Exponential Transformation: Raising the distribution by a power ‘c’ where ‘c’ is an arbitrary constant (usually between 0 to 5).
Box-Cox transformation: This transformation fixes skewness in at least 80% of the cases. This is easily the most powerful tool to fix skewness. Here lambda is the value that was used to fit the non-normal distribution to normal distribution. You will need this value if you want to perform the inverse box-cox operation to obtain the initial data
Reciprocal Transformation: Replace the values with it’s reciprocal/ inverse.
Autocorrelation:
The textbook definition of autocorrelation is:
Autocorrelation refers to the degree of correlation between the values of the same variables across different observations in the data.
Let’s try to understand this with the help of an example. The concept of autocorrelation is most often discussed in the context of time series data in which observations occur at different points in time, hence we will be taking the example of the stock prices of an imaginary company (XYZ inc.). The stock price of this company has been stable at around $50 for the past 3 days. From this data, we can infer that the stock price on the 4th day will most likely be around the same $50. However, this cannot be said about 2 months from now. Such type of data where data points that are closer to each other are correlated stronger than the considerably distant data points is called as autocorrelated data.
Impacts on Linear Regression:
This affects the goodness of fit of the line since autocorrelation affects the standard errors. However, the coefficients are left unbiased.
The statistical measures such as p-value, t-value and standard error will not be reliable in the presence of autocorrelation.
How to detect the presence of autocorrelation:
Durbin-Watson test: This is done by comparing the successive error terms to check if they are directly/inversely correlated with each other. Values between 1.5–2.5 would tell us that autocorrelation is not a problem in that predictive model.
Calculation of Durbin-Watson score using python
0–1.5 in the Durbin-Watson test refers to a significant positive correlation while 2.5+ refers to a significantly negative correlation.
However, this test fails to detect autocorrelation when exists between data points that are consequent, but equally spaced. (eg: Stock prices on every Friday is $52.50 +- $0.5).
Breusch-Godfrey Test: This is slightly more complicated than the previous test. Simply put, this test requires you to build a model, calculate the error terms for each of the data points, and try to predict the error term at time t as a function of all the preceding error terms.
This test can be performed using the statsmodels module as well. Check out their official documentation of this test at this link.
CONCLUSION
I hope you found this story informative. Wish you luck on your data-science journey | https://towardsdatascience.com/statistics-supporting-linear-models-bfc24fb9781f | ['Sandeep Ram'] | 2020-10-16 09:58:44.030000+00:00 | ['Regression', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Statistics', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Rock Steady | Rock Steady
Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash
She-mature orgasm
That’ll ruin the show
Marriage before fornication
Hon, who would even know?
Crocodile tears you fake
Boy, you’re just goin’ cray-cray
So, I whisper sweet nothings
Can’t we just do fun things?
Bend over and show me
That spec-muscular bootie
Rope you up nice and tight
As we cock steady all night.
Your leather to my lace
Not a race, just keep pace
Spill me some sugar
Come tickle my feather.
Call me or text?
Sure won’t wait by MY phone
Such sizzling sex but
Grab your pants, just go home.
~Well, this role reversal prompt could have taken many turns, but I couldn’t stop thinking about premature ejaculation, how this must REALLY suck for men, and that there is no way that a woman can even relate. Our sexual pleasure can be so covert and mysterious! ?We can fake it all night long! So, please don’t judge as this poem is a bit raunchy and silly. You can find J.D. Harms' Saturday Poetry Prompt by following this magnanimous link:
Ann Marie Steele | https://medium.com/scrittura/rock-steady-2a8f382d8e7 | ['Ann Marie Steele'] | 2020-12-30 01:43:15.612000+00:00 | ['Prompt', 'Rhyming Poetry', 'Boy Toy', 'Silly', 'Female Sexuality'] |
The Royal Heir Problem | The Royal Heir Problem
I shall resume the narration.
While Andelbert was in the kitchen baking bread for the King, a footman knocked on the door of my room.
“Yes?” I asked after opening the door.
“Baron Blastfurnace, Comte de Falkenstien wishes to see you in the royal gardens.”
“Lead the way,” I replied.
Trying to describe the gardens of Versailles is a hopeless task. The gardens stretch farther than the eye can see. There are separate gardens, or groves, enclosed by walls of hedges. Each of these gardens contains its own unique features such as waterfalls, fountains, and monuments. Everywhere you look, there are trees, bushes, and statues all in orderly rows or in decorative arrangements. They all surround a grand canal, which was dug over an eleven-year period.
The canals house a fleet of vessels for the King’s enjoyment. It is like a miniature Venice. I am told ice skating is very popular in the winter when it freezes. It brings back memories of the canal in Kapri. Surrounding the canals are forests and more gardens, plus royal residences with their own gardens. I am convinced a man could spend months here and not see it all.
The footman led me to one of the groves where Emperor Joseph was waiting by a fountain. There was no one else in the grove. The footman left, and I walked over to the Emperor.
“Good day, Baron.”
“Good day, Comte de Falkenstien.”
The Emperor chuckled. “Well done, Baron. I have been informed that the Queen has taken a liking to you. And you have talked with her at length.”
“Yes. The Queen learned that you awarded my Barony and was seeking news of your well-being. I believe she was pleased to have the company of a fellow Austrian. She gave me a tour of her hamlet.”
“Ah, the hamlet. I do not wish to discuss that bit of foolishness, but I do want to ask you about her relationship with the King. Did she mention it in any of your discussions?”
I hesitated before answering, “The Queen said the King was distant. Forgive me, Your Highness, I am uncomfortable discussing this.”
“There is no need. As you know, I am not only the Emperor, I am also the Queen’s brother. The primary purpose of my visit is to discern why the King and Queen have not produced an heir. As you must realize, it is a matter of great concern for both the French and Austrian Empires.”
“I understand.”
“I plan to meet with them together privately to discuss it, but I want to be as prepared as possible.”
“I wish I could be of more help. I sense the Queen feels like an outsider and unwelcome in the court. Perhaps this is straining their relationship.”
“The King and Queen did not marry for love. They both understand this. They also know it is their duty to produce an heir to the throne. Their relationship has nothing to do with it.”
“I understand.”
“Very well. That is all, then.”
“If I may be so bold, Your Highness, there is another matter I hoped to discuss with you.”
“Indeed? What is it?”
“It is about my brother.”
“You mean, Andelbert, the footman at my former Kapri estate?”
I was dumbfounded and stared at The Emperor.
The Emperor laughed and said, “Heavens, man, do you think I would not remember the man who bakes the most delicious bread I have had the pleasure of eating? Ease your fears. I already told the King of your secret after the Marquises de Lafayette announced his talent to the King. He found it quite amusing.”
“Thank you, Your Highness. That is a great relief.”
“Think nothing of it. Just be sure to have Andelbert bake some extra loaves for me.”
“I will.”
“Good day, Baron.”
“Good day, Comte de Falkenstien.” | https://medium.com/mark-starlin-writes/the-royal-heir-problem-9c4cab00966d | ['Mark Starlin'] | 2020-09-28 00:25:19.951000+00:00 | ['Historical Fiction', 'Novel', 'Problem Solving', 'Adventure', 'Baron Britpop'] |
Which Bach Flower formula is best for me? | What are Bach Flowers?
Bach Flowers are tinctures, mainly derived from wildflowers that grow in the English countryside. Bach Flower tinctures are natural, work by matching and raising our vibrational frequencies, and are incredibly effective as they address both symptoms and underlying causes.
Wild Rose — one of the Bach Flower tinctures
Bach Flowers are part of an effective daily self-care regime for optimal performance, parallel to exercising, eating nutritiously, and sleeping well. I take my Bach Flowers every day.
Bach Flower combinations or mixtures are formulas of up to seven different Bach Flower tinctures that synchronize in support of a specific goal, such as, for example, sleeping better, feeling less stress, anxiety, or guilt, increasing productivity, improving communication, or reaching goals more effectively. Bach Flower mixtures are divided into two different types: custom-formulated (or personally-formulated) combinations and pre-formulated combinations.
Custom-formulated Bach Flowers.
Custom-formulated Bach Flower combinations are created for you specifically, in connection with a specific situation or specific situations in your life, at this time. They are unique and formulated on a case-to-case basis.
When you want a custom-formulated Bach Flower combination, you begin with a Bach Flower consultation with me (remote or in-person) that lasts for up to an hour. During the consultation, you talk about what is going on for you right now, what you’d like changed or improved, and what your goals are.
Based on our conversation and what you are looking for, I create a special and unique Bach Flower formula especially for you. As each tincture is selected in support of you and your objective at this time, it is the most effective type of formula.
A custom-formulated Bach Flower combination
Pre-formulated Bach Flowers.
Pre-formulated Bach Flower combinations are mixtures of different Bach Flower tinctures created for a general condition or situation. They are an extremely convenient off-the-shelf solution when you fit the profile matching the particular formula.
A common example of a pre-formulated Bach Flower combination is Rescue Remedy, which helps most people in most situations of temporary stress or emergency. “Most” is an important qualification, for as Bach Flowers treat both symptoms and causes, and as no two people’s symptoms and causes are identical, no one in good faith or honesty can claim that a pre-formulated Bach Flower combination will help everyone in every situation.
However, when a pre-formulation is a good fit for your situation, it’s a great off-the-shelf choice. I offer pre-formulated Bach Flower combinations because they are fabulous under the right conditions. I wouldn’t provide pre-formulations if I didn’t utterly believe in them.
I offer the same qualification with my pre-formulated Bach Flower combinations that I do with all pre-formulations — they help most people, in most situations for which the formulas are intended. By their very nature, being pre-formulated, it is unrealistic to believe that they will help everyone. | https://medium.com/@sat-sung/which-bach-flower-formula-is-best-for-me-c51c0b7d0ce5 | ['Sat-Sung Kalman Hassid'] | 2020-12-22 04:10:13.267000+00:00 | ['Attorney', 'Israel', 'Lawyers', 'Bach Flowers', 'Stress'] |
Be Nice To a GRINCH and Be a Different-Day-Maker | Have you ever been around a Grinch? If you have, you know who I’m talking about. Someone who takes pleasure in spoiling the pleasure of others.
Is it possible to de-grinch a Grinch? Dr. Seuss thought so. And the citizens of Who-ville are proof that it can be done. But how?
How can those of us who are not as cute as Little Cindy Lou Who de-grinch the grinchiest of Grinches? I dare not attempt to wordsmith verse like the beloved G.O.A.T. Dr. Seuss. But I will offer my thoughts in ACRONYM.
G-R-I-N-C-H: 6 steps to de-grinch the grinchiest of Grinches.
STEP 4
NICE
What if you could change a Grinch’s day simply by being nice? Isn’t that a wonderful thought? You can. And the best thing is it won’t cost you anything but a little effort. You’ll not only be a difference-maker for someone but you’ll also be a different-day-maker.
Be nice to each other. You can make a whole day a different day for everybody. ~Richard Dawson
Quote graphic by the Author
Daily Doable: Look for opportunities to be nice to others. Don’t make this hard. Look for the simple things you can do. You will make a Grinch’s day different and you will probably make your own day different as well.
#DoWhatYouCanNow
Thank you for reading! This ACRONYM story was brought to you by:
Did you miss Step 1 in this series? No problem. Click the link below.
Before I go, I want to tag a few of my writer friends. Or as I call them, my CAPITAL Acquaintances. Discover great stories from these individuals.
Henery X (long), Amy Marley, Michele Thill, Trapper Sherwood, Timothy Key, Tree Langdon, Linda Halladay, Joan Kent, PhD, Maria Rattray, Jacquelyn Lynn, Dr Michael Heng, Jeff Herring, Karen Madej, Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Please allow me to introduce myself below
This story was originally published on my site at DoWhatYouCanNow.com
Also, connect with me here: Twitter — Facebook — Instagram — LinkedIn | https://medium.com/illumination/be-nice-to-a-grinch-and-be-a-different-day-maker-f025a98dc621 | ['Tim Maudlin'] | 2020-12-14 03:40:59.214000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Mindset', 'Content Creation', 'Template', 'Innovation'] |
How Restaurants Can Prepare for the Takeout Boom in 2021 | The demand for contactless delivery has gone through the roof in the last year. This has led to a dramatic increase in take-out and restaurants all over the world have had to make some quick changes. For starters, fine dining and cafes that heavily relied on in-house dining have now been forced to open their doors for takeout and curbside pickup, whilst providing the convenience of online ordering.
Given the current demand for a takeout, popular restaurant chains like Chipotle and Shake Shack have invested quite a bit in contactless drive-thrus. Sweetgreen, another famous American food chain plans to open a restaurant by the end of this year in Colorado that will offer take out as well a space dedicated solely to in-car dining. Panera Bread has been vocal about how the chain was able to make more sales by adding a drive-thru facility to their existing outlets.
As the need of the hour is to provide food to customers safely, it should not come out as a surprise if restaurant operators start expanding to other cities and states with just takeout and curbside offering. But setting up a takeout facility would require a lot of planning for any restaurant to succeed. If you’re planning to dedicate a small portion of your restaurant to takeout and curbside services, this article should help you get started.
How to Set Up Your Restaurant for a Take-out
If your restaurant is new to the world of take-out, we have some tips for you on how to make it easier and more effective. Let’s dive in!
Infrastructure
Initially, it can be a little difficult for a restaurant to set itself up for takeout. It is not the same as providing in-house dining and requires some extra effort. To begin with, you need to have ample space for providing take-out. As a diner enters the area, you should be able to track which order they’re here for. This can be done with the help of geolocation or mobile phones, as they help restaurants access a customer’s location from the moment they’ve placed the order, up till they arrive for picking it up. This saves a lot of time and the customer doesn’t have to wait in the long queue to pick up the food. A short wait time leads to lesser frustration and a happier customer experience, which further encourages customers to come back.
Make sure that the pickup location is labeled clearly so that a customer knows where exactly to drive to. Use big banners and arrows for easy navigation. If you have the space for it, you could also offer a dual-lane system so that more customers can be served at once.
The goal is to make the entire process as quick and seamless as possible, leading to satisfied customers.
Employee Training
When it comes to a take out, your employees need to exhibit a stellar level of efficiency. They need to be trained to process takeout orders efficiently. This is the area of restaurant operations that cannot afford any kind of mistake. Remind them to double-check each order to avoid errors, as it can be infuriating for a customer to reach home and find out that part of their order is missing. Your kitchen line needs to be polished and professional, always ensuring complete accuracy for each order. Remind your staff of the importance of constantly being in sync.
Packaging
With a take-out ordering, there isn’t exactly a lot of room for interaction with customers. So, it important to market yourself with the little space you have. Ensure that your food packaging has your brand logo, motto, and colors on it clearly.
At the same time, it is important that you use sturdy containers that keep the food warm and scrumptious for a good amount of time. It needs to be temperature controlled but also ensure perfect quality.
Try to use materials that are sustainable and offer less wastage. Don’t forget to add utensils, tissue papers, and condiments to each order, in case your customers plan to remain in their car while eating their food. This way, you show them that you care about their dining experience, whether in or out.
Efficient Online Ordering System
Effective take-out operations need a robust online ordering system. A customer would not appreciate waiting in long queues for a food order. In today’s technology-driven world, long queues are a big turn off. To avoid long queues, it is important to have an efficient online ordering system in place with a simple interface. Allow customers to place their take-out or curbside orders on your restaurant website or app. Once the order is placed, the customer should receive real-time updates as their food is prepared. You also need to ensure that you offer all modes of payment.
Summing Up
As millennials make up the prime demographic for marketing today, the restaurant industry needs to go out of its way to offer them higher convenience and efficiency with each order placed. To truly connect with the youth, it is of utmost importance for a restaurant to have technology-driven operations.
While a restaurant could have survived without online ordering and take out up till a few years ago, these features are no longer optional today. They make up for a huge chunk of annual profits and draw in more customers too. By optimizing your online ordering system, your restaurant can experience a much higher rate of growth in no time. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-restaurants-can-prepare-for-the-takeout-boom-in-2021-d3f8bfecae66 | ['Sonal Mishra'] | 2021-01-28 16:21:38.743000+00:00 | ['Takeout', 'Online Ordering System', 'Restaurant', 'Food Delivery'] |
Will There Be No Brexit Deal? | Photo by gOd4ather / Shutterstock.
Q&A with Christophe Crombez, a senior research scholar at The Europe Center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Written with Melissa De Witte. This article originally appeared through the Stanford News Service.
A no-deal Brexit — a possibility since the U.K. Parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal to withdraw from the European Union earlier this week — could lead to a slowdown in the global economy or a recession, says Stanford scholar Christophe Crombez.
Here Crombez shares his thoughts on the economic consequences if the United Kingdom withdraws from the European Union at the late March deadline without a deal in place. The split, or Brexit, is the response to the June 2016 referendum that saw 52 percent of British voters calling for a break with the European Union.
Crombez specializes in EU politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics and parliamentary government.
For the UK to leave the EU, Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty had to be invoked, which sets a two-year timetable for negotiating departure terms. With a March 29 deadline now looming, what’s next for Britain’s and Europe’s future?
That’s hard to predict. Nobody really knows. First, the U.K. could try to get another deal from the EU. Such a deal would be very similar to the deal that was rejected, though. The EU is unlikely to make any significant concessions. Second, the U.K. could hold another referendum. Depending on the question that is then asked, this could lead to the approval of the deal that was just rejected by the (House of) Commons, Brexit without a deal, or no Brexit. Third, inaction could lead to Brexit without a deal. In any case it seems quite likely that the March 29 deadline will be extended by a few months.
What has made the Brexit negotiations so challenging?
Christophe Crombez.
Mainly the fact that while the U.K. narrowly voted for Brexit in a referendum in 2016, those in favor of Brexit had very different ideas in mind about the future relationship with the EU. Theresa May’s government made no progress in the past two and a half years in articulating a clear vision for the future relationship, let alone in uniting people behind such a vision. To put it differently, the U.K. did not know what it wanted and that made it very difficult for the EU to negotiate with it. The underlying problem, of course, was that any new arrangement would be worse for the U.K. and the EU than the current one.
The EU is preparing for a no-deal Brexit. What would that look like?
It would be a logistical nightmare at the borders. Goods would need to be checked at the U.K.-EU border, which would lead to long waits. It would mean going back to the 1980s. Trade between the EU and the U.K. would decrease as a result, leading to lower growth on both sides, or even a recession. Companies would need to reorganize their supply chains.
How would a no-deal Brexit impact the global economy?
The EU is one of the three main players in the world economy. If its economy is suffering, the global economy is affected as well. If at the same time we witness a slowdown in China and the U.S., the Brexit crisis makes it harder to get out of the slowdown.
Would a no-deal Brexit be better than a bad-deal Brexit? What would a bad-deal Brexit look like?
For the EU, a bad deal would be one that lets the U.K. pick and choose which parts of the single market it wants to be part of. That would lead to the unraveling of the EU and would make all member states worse off. That would be worse for the EU than no deal. For the U.K., no plausible deal is worse than no deal. The U.K. is in a very weak bargaining position. The EU accounts for half of its trade. For the EU that percentage is far lower.
What would a no-deal Brexit mean for American businesses?
It would complicate matters for its exports. It would now have to deal with two markets with different rules rather than one single market. On the other hand, a reduction in trade between the EU and the U.K. could lead to some extra export opportunities for American business. Overall it would, of course, suffer from a slowdown in the EU and U.K. economies.
What trade policies are economically important for a successful Brexit deal?
The closer the future trade relations between the U.K. and the EU, the better it will be for both. The best scenario would be that, even if Brexit occurs, the U.K. remain in the single market and customs union. That is not an objective that the current government has pursued, however, under pressure from the right wing of the Conservative Party.
Why has the backstop — an assurance there will not be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland — been such a sticking point during negotiations?
Understandably the EU has defended the interests of Ireland with respect to its border with the UK. Ireland does not want border controls and wants people and goods to move across the border unhindered after Brexit. The Withdrawal Agreement provides for a transition period until the end of 2020. During that time, the EU and the U.K. need to work out their future trade relationship. The backstop makes sure that Northern Ireland effectively stays in the single market and customs union if no agreement is reached during the transition period. The right wing of the Conservative Party wants to limit the backstop in time. They want no part of the U.K. to stay in the single market and customs union. They certainly don’t want that to be the fallback arrangement if no deal is reached during the transition period.
Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, posed this question: “If a deal is impossible, and no one wants no deal, then who will finally have the courage to say what the only positive solution is?” What do you think he meant by this?
I agree that the only reasonable solution is that the U.K. remain in the EU. However, I don’t completely agree with his analysis. It seems that the right wing of the Conservative Party in the UK prefers no deal at all. They deprived May of a majority in Tuesday’s vote preferring just that, leaving without a deal. At the same time many policymakers and even voters on the EU side want to put Brexit behind them and move on. They don’t look forward to the U.K. postponing or even canceling Brexit and continuing to absorb a lot of time and effort to attend to its special needs. | https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-international-studies/will-there-be-no-brexit-deal-925aff3b8e6c | ['Fsi Stanford'] | 2019-01-17 17:52:30.161000+00:00 | ['Theresa May', 'Brexit', 'Fsi Scholars', 'UK Politics', 'Fsi Features'] |
How a freight forwarder makes things easier for you. | Stress less. Build great products. Make more money.
Managing freight is an integral piece of an efficient supply chain. Fumbling this operation can set you back significantly. Handle it the right way and it’s one less thing you have to worry about.
Having your products manufactured overseas in countries such as China or India means you’ll be working with a freight forwarder. A freight forwarder manages the relationships between various carriers: air & ocean freight, trucking, trains, etc. They determine the best routes and prices to have your products shipped to the U.S.
Awesome freight forwarders, can do a lot for you as they can really help step up your international game. It’s important for you to not only know what they can do, but also the best way to take advantage of such an important relationship.
They help you identify and secure the best routes from the port of Manufacturing to the destination you desire. By arranging the type of transportation most suitable and economical for your particular situation, they make sure everything regarding these is squared away.
Their ability to do all of this will cut your costs and reduce stress and give you the mental room to think about other important aspects of your company.
They also help you with the paperwork regarding customs and pay any duties/taxes need to clear the path for shipment. A good partner has access to recommended insurance providers to provide the services you may need.
Even if you’re experienced in getting your products across the water, freight forwarders should be a valuable source of information regarding the entire operation and should have issue in educating you.
The partner you need.
Finally, a freight forwarder, like many other aspects of your logistics operation, should not something you just pay for, but a a reliable partner looking out for your best interests.
They’re an asset to your company and amazing resource for running your supply-chain. | https://medium.com/the-chain/how-a-freight-forwarder-makes-things-easier-for-you-eac8739b2514 | ['Akin Shoyoye'] | 2016-08-05 00:31:24.051000+00:00 | ['Subscription', 'Logistics', 'Freight Shipping', 'Tech', 'Fulfillment'] |
Sonos users can now double the boom in any room by adding a second Sonos Sub subwoofer | Sonos users can now double the boom in any room by adding a second Sonos Sub subwoofer Victor Dec 23, 2020·2 min read
Sonos builds an awesome subwoofer, but customers lucky enough to own very large home theaters and listening rooms—and the custom installers who cater to that deep-pocketed crowd—have long wanted the option of deploying two Sonos Subs. Today, Sonos released a software update that lets them do just that.
Mentioned in this article Sonos Sub (Gen 3) See it The Sonos Sub is not a conventional low-frequency-effects speaker in the sense that it can’t be connected to an A/V receiver or paired with just any soundbar. It must be deployed in conjunction with another Sonos speaker or a Sonos amplifier.
And those who want to deploy two Subs in the same system must have a Sonos Arc, Beam, or Playbar soundbar; a Playbase sound base; or a Sonos Amp. One of the Subs must be a Gen 3 model, which has increased processing power, and you’ll need to have the latest version of the Sonos S2 app, which is rolling out today.
[ Further reading: The best soundbars ] Union LA / Sonos Sonos has re-released the Sonos One SL Union LA Edition speaker.
In other Sonos news, the company is re-releasing the Sonos One SL Union LA Edition, a collaboration between Sonos, interior designer Sheila Bridges and the streetwear brand Union LA. The limited-edition speaker was created in partnership with Color of Change as part of the organization’s #TellBlackStories initiative. The speaker’s grille is printed with Bridges’ Harlem Toile pattern. You can read more about the collaboration in this Sonos blog post from 2019. The $249 speaker can be purchased at SheilaBridges.com and UnionLosAngeles.com.
Last week, Sonos announced the Arc SL Shadow Edition, a microphone-free soundbar that’s a Costco exclusive. You can read more about it in our earlier news story.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@victor29086757/sonos-users-can-now-double-the-boom-in-any-room-by-adding-a-second-sonos-sub-subwoofer-8b1dc9e5e3d1 | [] | 2020-12-23 20:01:19.285000+00:00 | ['Electronics', 'Home Tech', 'Streaming', 'Surveillance'] |
Mandy- | Mandy-
Your article is a testament to your understanding of what active listening really is.
In my not so humble opinion as a former oncology and hospice nurse and active cancer support group facilitator for over a decade, I can see by your choice of scene from “Inside Out” you really get it!
It’s a rare quality and I am grateful you are in the work.
I must also openly confess so others understand just how hard it is to do this work effectively, especially when you are positively wired like Joy, or ME…
Positivity is hard to turn on and off like a knob or light switch. However, if we are willing to slow down and take active control of our thinking, it’s possible.
You must be able to extricate your own beliefs and be willing to sacrifice the immediate desire to resolve the pain of another by understanding that resolution is an individual process without timelines or boundaries. Not safety boundaries, but physical boundaries like nature for example.
I recently read an article by a man who is slowly losing control of his body and how healing it was for him to get his scooter close enough to touch a tree.
We never know where the healing will come from but it surely won’t come from rushing to push past the pain or grief…
We feel for a reason. We cry for a reason.
Your article is professionally relevant and timely as many can benefit from reading and reflecting on your words before they attempt to help their friend or loved one “get over” their grief.
This was an anti “get over it” message and I am #Grateful you wrote it.
I could go on but I won’t.
So good!
Thank You! | https://medium.com/@bobby-kountz/mandy-cf7b02a4a87c | [] | 2020-12-24 01:30:55.279000+00:00 | ['Active Listening', 'Grief', 'Recovery', 'Inspiration', 'Grief And Loss'] |
Eye Tracking using OpenCV | Code Snippet
If you are trying in your own video the the scale factor and min Neighbors are the we need to tune to get the better result.
# import the necessary packages
import cv2 class EyeTracker:
def __init__(self, faceCascadePath, eyeCascadePath):
# load the face and eye detector
self.faceCascade = cv2.CascadeClassifier(faceCascadePath)
self.eyeCascade = cv2.CascadeClassifier(eyeCascadePath) def track(self, image):
# detect faces in the image and initialize the list of
# rectangles containing the faces and eyes
faceRects = self.faceCascade.detectMultiScale(image,
scaleFactor = 1.1, minNeighbors = 5, minSize = (30,30),
flags = cv2.CASCADE_SCALE_IMAGE)
rects = [] # loop over the face bounding boxes
for (fX, fY, fW, fH) in faceRects:
# extract the face ROI and update the list of
# bounding boxes
faceROI = image[fY:fY + fH, fX:fX + fW]
rects.append((fX, fY, fX + fW, fY + fH))
# detect eyes in the face ROI
eyeRects = self.eyeCascade.detectMultiScale(faceROI,
scaleFactor = 1.1, minNeighbors = 10, minSize = (20, 20),
flags = cv2.CASCADE_SCALE_IMAGE) # loop over the eye bounding boxes
for (eX, eY, eW, eH) in eyeRects:
# update the list of boounding boxes
rects.append(
(fX + eX, fY + eY, fX + eX + eW, fY + eY + eH)) # return the rectangles representing bounding
# boxes around the faces and eyes
return rects
So now we have create a class which will detect faces and eyes from a video. But if we are sending video of different sizes the parameter needs to be changed often. To overcome this we can do a preprocessing on the input image, such that the eye tracker class will be called after converting to a certain format.
# USAGE
# python eyetracking.py — face cascades/haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml — eye cascades/haarcascade_eye.xml — video video/adrian_eyes.mov
# python eyetracking.py — face cascades/haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml — eye cascades/haarcascade_eye.xml # import the necessary packages
from pyimagesearch.eyetracker import EyeTracker
from pyimagesearch import imutils
import argparse
import cv2 # construct the argument parse and parse the arguments
ap = argparse.ArgumentParser()
ap.add_argument(“-f”, “ — face”, required = True,
help = “path to where the face cascade resides”)
ap.add_argument(“-e”, “ — eye”, required = True,
help = “path to where the eye cascade resides”)
ap.add_argument(“-v”, “ — video”,
help = “path to the (optional) video file”)
args = vars(ap.parse_args()) # construct the eye tracker
et = EyeTracker(args[“face”], args[“eye”]) # if a video path was not supplied, grab the reference
# to the gray
if not args.get(“video”, False):
camera = cv2.VideoCapture(0) # otherwise, load the video
else:
camera = cv2.VideoCapture(args[“video”]) # keep looping
while True:
# grab the current frame
(grabbed, frame) = camera.read() # if we are viewing a video and we did not grab a
# frame, then we have reached the end of the video
if args.get(“video”) and not grabbed:
break # resize the frame and convert it to grayscale
frame = imutils.resize(frame, width = 300)
gray = cv2.cvtColor(frame, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) # detect faces and eyes in the image
rects = et.track(gray) # loop over the face bounding boxes and draw them
for rect in rects:
cv2.rectangle(frame, (rect[0], rect[1]), (rect[2], rect[3]), (0, 255, 0), 2) # show the tracked eyes and face
cv2.imshow(“Tracking”, frame) # if the ‘q’ key is pressed, stop the loop
if cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF == ord(“q”):
break # cleanup the camera and close any open windows
camera.release()
cv2.destroyAllWindows(
Reference:
OpenCV- Basics Bundle by Adrian
link to code: https://github.com/RamjiB/Eye-Tracking | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/eye-tracking-using-opencv-2f40cc09183c | ['Ramji Balasubramanian'] | 2020-12-27 12:35:32.394000+00:00 | ['Eyes', 'Facedetection', 'Opencv'] |
Why is Santa Claus Red? | Why is Santa Claus Red?
What are the true origins of Christmas’ most important character?
When we think of Santa, most of us immediately conjure up an image of a merry, white-bearded, plump old man in a red fur robe. This depiction is almost authoritative nowadays. In fact, many can’t imagine a Santa otherwise, and the “why” is usually never questioned. The more trivia-minded may interject, “Santa’s plump and red because of Coca-Cola!” But is this really true? Why does Santa look the way he does today?
A Brief History of Santa Claus
The real-life Santa Claus was a man named Nicholas, who was born in modern-day Turkey around the 3rd century C.E. Known for his good deeds, he eventually became a bishop and a saint. Saint Nicholas’ penchant for delivering gifts to children during Christmas first became cemented in Christian Europe around the late middle-ages (13–15th century C.E.). When European settlers started colonizing the New World, they of course brought with them their Old World Christmas traditions. However, it wasn’t until the 1800s that Santa truly became popular as a cultural icon. Before this time, Santa was commonly depicted as a skinny, old man in bishop’s robes riding a white horse, an image still prevalent in many European countries today. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century was when the modern-day image of Santa really started to develop.
Sinterklaas, the Dutch equivalent of Santa Claus. This is probably much closer to how Santa was depicted in the Middle Ages. Wikimedia Commons.
Santa Fought for the Union
The first depiction of Santa Claus that most closely resembles our modern-day rendition most likely comes from Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Here, Santa is described as “dressed in fur from his head to his foot,” “chubby and plump, and a right jolly old elf,” as well as riding a reindeer sleigh and coming down chimneys to deliver presents.
The next influential individual to really evangelize the modern depiction of Santa was Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist for the magazine Harper’s Weekly. He started working in 1862, right on the onset of the Civil War, where his annual illustrations of Santa gained a lot of popularity due to the magazine’s top distribution at the time. Nast’s Santa generally stayed in line with Moore’s depiction of a plump old man with a white beard, but often changed the wardrobe options ranging from suit patterns to hats and shoes. What made Nast’s Santa truly interesting, however, was the political nature of his illustrations. Nast was a staunch Union supporter, and therefore many of the Santa depictions conveyed pro-Union and pro-military messages.
“Merry Old Santa Clause” by Thomas Nast, 1881. This drawing of Santa might look normal at first glance, but is actually chock full of political symbolism. Nast was protesting government indecisiveness in addressing low wages in the military. Santa is carrying an army sword and backpack, and a clock hand that represents the urgency of the matter, just to name a few symbols. Wikimedia Commons.
Coca-Cola Santa
After Nast passed away in 1902, depictions of Santa Claus lost consistency for a number of years. At the turn of the 20th century, Santa became ever more important in commercial marketing, as demand for Santa ads and mall Santas increased, but it was hard to pinpoint a standardized depiction. Physical traits ranged from tall to short, skinny to round, and the suits even differed in color (although some traits may have been more common than others, like wearing red and having a white beard).
Coca-Cola started using Santa in its ads in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until 1931 that the company commissioned Haddon Sundblom to create the legendary Coca-Cola Santa Claus that we know today. Coca-Cola wanted to market its products more to children but couldn’t do so due to a stigma against the coca plant at the time (although Coca-Cola already stopped using coca as an actual ingredient). Santa was their answer to how they can more discreetly appeal to children and family values.
Sundblom was heavily inspired by Moore’s poem and Nast’s illustrations and created the plump, white-bearded, red-robed, jolly old man we all know and love today. Sundblom’s Santa was often depicted surrounded by children or delivering toys as well to conform to Coca-Cola’s sales agenda. Thus also did the propaganda value of Santa’s depictions finally morph from political to commercial.
The Coca-Cola marketing department came storming out the gates with the Santa campaign, finding ad-space in all major magazines, billboards, and retail counters. Sundblom’s Santa became an instant icon, and arguably became the de facto depiction of Santa Claus known in pop culture. Sundblom continued to iterate upon and release Santa illustrations for Coca-Cola until 1964. By then, his version of Santa Claus was more or less cemented in the people’s collective memory. The slew of Christmas books, movies, and other mediums to follow only further complimented this modern rendition of Santa Claus. | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/why-is-santa-claus-red-ebf3b45f36c4 | ['Derry Chen'] | 2020-12-26 22:13:04.329000+00:00 | ['History', 'Coca Cola', 'Santa Claus', 'Christmas', 'Holidays'] |
Teachers, Going to the ISTE Conference? | Teachers, Going to the ISTE Conference?
Are you going to the annual ISTE Conference (#ISTE20), being held virtually this week? The International Society for Technology in Education — better known as ISTE (“iss-tee”) — was delayed from being held in Anaheim, CA, in late June due to COVID-19. But true to its name, ISTE pivoted and is leveraging technology to connect educators globally on a custom-built virtual platform.
And you can visit their virtual Expo Hall for FREE!
That’s right — Simply register with ISTE to get an Expo Hall Pass for FREE this week, and then make sure to come find Classroom Champions. We are doing 10-minute demos at the top of each hour from 10am-3pm PST. Plus, we’re available for 1:1 chats to answer all of your questions about our social and emotional learning programs. And if that wasn’t incentive enough, we also are doing a daily raffle for those who share their email with us. Each day we will draw names to win:
1 virtual assembly with one of Classroom Champions’ Athlete Mentors
1 year-long SEL Foundations Curriculum membership (a $210 value)
membership (a $210 value) 3 $25 Amazon gift cards
The sooner you visit us, the more chances you may have to win! We know that this virtual format isn’t ideal, but we had a great time connecting with educators from all over the world today. If you can find time in your busy schedule, please do come join us this week and enjoy the camaraderie of educators celebrating what you all do the best — the art of teaching. | https://medium.com/classroom-champions/teachers-going-to-the-iste-conference-e0957ec63ddd | ['Darri Stephens'] | 2020-12-03 13:04:15.503000+00:00 | ['Teachers', 'Education', 'Professional Development', 'Conference', 'Technology'] |
How to Optimize Windows 10 Performance (Updated guide 2021) | Optimize windows 10 performance
Does your computer feel sluggish or Windows 10 not perform well after the windows update? System freezes or not responding at startup or take a long time to start or shutdown windows 10? There are many factors degrading the performance include compatibility issues and bugs, virus malware infection, hardware problems and more. But don’t worry, you can speed up and Optimize Windows 10 Performance following steps.
Perform a full system scan with the latest updated antivirus or antimalware to remove any virus malware infection that may hit system performance.
Press Windows key + R, type %temp% and click ok to access temp folder, select all the files using Ctrl+A. Clear off all the items by pressing the Del button.
and click ok to access temp folder, select all the files using Ctrl+A. Clear off all the items by pressing the Del button. Delete all files and folders that you no longer need, This is because unnecessary files consume extra space on the drive and result in a lag.
Right-click on the Recycle Bin icon present on the desktop. Select the “Empty the Recycle Bin” option. Click Yes to confirm the removal.
Also run system file checker utility, DISM command that helps fix performance issue if corrupted missing system files causing issue. And run check disk utility to check and fix disk error that might hit windows 10 performance.
Install Windows Updates regularly
Microsoft regularly releases, windows updates to address all key concerns reported by users. These updates designed to eliminate common bugs that may reduce system performance. And some of these just minor fixes make a massive difference which eventually speed up windows 10 performance. In addition, installing the latest windows updates brings device driver updates that help boost up the system performance.
Disable Auto-Starting Programs
There are a number of programs run silently in the background, and they are configured to start up when windows boots even you don’t immediately need them on startup. That not only slows down the windows 10 boot speed but also keeps eating up resources in the background unnecessarily. Disable all unnecessary startup apps or services save system resources and improve system performance or Windows 10 start time as well
Choose High-Performance Power Plan
As the name defines, this High-Performance Power Plan maximizes the responsiveness of your device. If you have a desktop computer Choose a High-Performance Power Plan to get the best out of the performance. Because it consumes the most amount of power it’s more appropriate for desktops, and its always better off on a laptop using a Balanced or Power saver plan.
Adjust visual effects
if your windows 10 computer run without a graphic interface it would become super faster, since it’s not possible but run your computer on the minimum visual effects settings boost startup and shutdown time and optimize windows 10 performance.
Update your drivers
Device drivers play an important role in system performance, which permits the operating system to have smooth communication with the hardware. There are chances, your computer is running slow because of a compatibility issue or a poorly designed driver. Make sure all installed device drivers are up to date or update them following the steps below especially the graphics driver.
Switch to SSD
In addition, If you are using an older HDD switch to Solid State Drives or SSD boost windows 10 performance. SSD are expensive compared to regular hard drives, but you will experience a massive improvement in boot time and overall responsiveness of the system along with file access times.
If you are experiencing Windows 10 slow performance while accessing the web (internet/visit web pages) from your device, make sure the web browser is up to date, remove unwanted extensions add-ons and toolbars that may be hindering the speed.
Source: https://howtofixwindows.com/optimize-windows-10/ | https://medium.com/@zcomtech/how-to-optimize-windows-10-performance-updated-guide-2021-43b1181237ba | ['Zcomtech - All About Technology', 'Troubleshooting'] | 2021-04-06 12:45:03.490000+00:00 | ['Windows', 'Microsoft', 'How To', 'Windows 10', 'Speed Up Computer'] |
【ioeX預售活動】帶有ioeX功能的X-Brain 智能管家 獨家預購 | ioeX is a decentralized peer-to-peer network blockchain ecosystem aims to free the internet to the world.
Follow | https://medium.com/ioexnetwork-cn/ioex%E9%A0%90%E5%94%AE%E6%B4%BB%E5%8B%95-%E5%B8%B6%E6%9C%89ioex%E5%8A%9F%E8%83%BD%E7%9A%84x-brain-%E6%99%BA%E8%83%BD%E7%AE%A1%E5%AE%B6-%E7%8D%A8%E5%AE%B6%E9%A0%90%E8%B3%BC-601c7682d004 | ['Ioex Network'] | 2019-05-31 10:13:10.920000+00:00 | ['Partnerships', 'Blockchain', 'Ioex', 'IoT'] |
My Year Violating NC’s HB2 as an LGBTQ Workplace Advocate | At the Human Rights Campaign Foundation my role is to provide consulting, training and educational support to America’s leading companies on how to make their workplaces more welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) employees. In that capacity, I spent a considerable part of this year flying around the country speaking to leading companies about LGBTQ workplace inclusion. My work is incredible: I watch companies support their LGBTQ workers as they come out as gay or lesbian or bi, as they transition gender on-the-job, or as they disclose they have LGBTQ kids. It’s great.
Unfortunately, however, this past year, we experienced an unprecedented wave of anti-LGBTQ bills across the country — from South Dakota and Mississippi, to Georgia and North Carolina. It just so happens that my major hub airport is in Charlotte, North Carolina — the state where lawmakers passed the discriminatory bill known as HB 2 earlier this year. I also happen to be a transgender man, so thanks to HB 2, every time I flew through Charlotte and used the men’s room at the airport, I was violating state law.
I wasn’t afraid really — I have a lot of privilege: I “pass,” I’m white, I’m usually professionally dressed for my business travel — but I was always reminded that there is a group of people so afraid of me and of who I am that they had to pass a law about what is ultimately a private matter and a non-issue. Every time I flew through Charlotte, I was also reminded of the thousands of transgender people for whom HB 2 is a reality every day at their offices, in their schools, and in the state they call home. But even as someone just passing through, I felt “othered” and undermined as the person I am.
All of this to say, my experience of repeatedly flying through HB2 territory while on my way to work with pro-Equality champions in the private sector certainly created an interesting contrast. Every time I had to experience even a momentary hesitation before entering the men’s room at the Charlotte airport, I was bolstered by the knowledge that increasingly LGBTQ inclusion is a key business imperative for our country’s largest and most successful employers.
I work with HRC Foundation’s Workplace Equality program which produces the annual Corporate Equality Index, a national survey and report benchmarking the LGBT-inclusive policies, practices and benefits of America’s largest companies and law firms. Just two weeks ago, for the fifteenth time since 2002, HRC released its 2017 CEI report where we have seen the largest increase in top-rated businesses in the history of the survey. 517 employers earned a perfect 100 score and the designation of “Best Place to Work for LGBT Equality” up from 411 just last year. In addition, this year saw the CEI’s largest jump ever in businesses offering transgender-inclusive healthcare coverage — from 511 last year to 647 this year.
You see, these businesses know that LGBTQ equality isn’t just the right thing to do, they know it makes them stronger in the global economy. In an industry as competitive as tech, companies know that to attract, retain and engage the very best workers they must create environments welcoming across the broad spectrum of diversity, including LGBTQ folks. A perfect score on the CEI reflects a company’s commitment to LGBT inclusion — from non-discrimination protections, to equitable and inclusive benefits, to internal competency and external engagement efforts. The index acts as a robust yardstick for measuring the progress of corporate America as ‘employers of choice’ for LGBTQ people.
The 2017 CEI report shows us that, in a climate where state lawmakers are looking to block and even roll-back the historic progress of our community, corporate America not only stood by their commitment to LGBTQ equality — they accelerated it. In addition to the growth in the CEI, companies weighed in on LGBTQ-related public policy like NC’s HB2 and MS’s HB1523. They know these discriminatory bills affect the lives of their employees, their employees’ families and their customers. Over 200 company executives — including many from tech leaders such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Symantec — joined HRC’s open letter calling for the repeal of North Carolina’s HB 2 — and business leaders spoke out in other states as well — from Mississippi, to Missouri, to Tennessee.
Unfortunately, we expect to see more anti-LGBTQ legislation in the coming 2017 state legislative sessions. HB2 still needs to be fully repealed (something that the new Governor Roy Cooper has pledged to support). For my part, you’ll find me packing a bag and flying through Charlotte on my way to work with the corporate leaders of LGBTQ inclusion. Together, we’ll be on the frontlines, beating back discriminatry legislation and fighting for LGBTQ equality. | https://medium.com/iamtech-series/my-year-violating-ncs-hb2-as-an-lgbtq-workplace-advocate-165171ea7805 | ['Beck Bailey'] | 2016-12-20 00:30:34.195000+00:00 | ['Workplace', 'LGBT Rights', 'Lgbtq Rights', 'LGBTQ', 'Politics'] |
The Sexual Miseducation of Jewish Summer Camp | From the ages of 11 to 22, I spent almost every weekend at Jewish youth group events in L.A., and summers at a Jewish summer camp in Santa Rosa, California. Once we entered high school, our youth group had a point system: The more hookups you had, the more points you got. The teens in leadership positions were worth more. I was never in youth group leadership, but I often found myself in the bed, backseat, or sleeping bag of a boy that was.
According to our point system I wasn’t worth much on my own, but every kiss, every blowjob, every sexual encounter with someone who was worth more than me increased my value. Sure, Jewish camp and youth group aside, some of this was my own desire to seek validation in order to feel whole. (Who doesn’t have family trauma that impacts their romantic relationships?) But it wasn’t all in my head. It was everywhere: tallied score lists kept by peers, the sexual gestures that boys made with props onstage during Shabbat skits that everyone laughed at, jokes about girls not being able to score points during Ultimate Frisbee games, counselors who looked the other way when campers returned after curfew from a hookup. Even the design on our retreat sweatshirts featured a hookup joke.
At every weekend retreat and summer session, there was always a group of boys that would have their pick of girls to choose from.
“Who will land the coveted role as Josh’s girlfriend this summer?”
“Will Dylan and I hook up again this weekend or will he choose (Sarah/Rachel/Hannah) instead?”
It was an honor to be chosen by the Joshes and Dylans of the Jewish youth group world — a world that was very much a boys’ club. A girl could only enter the inner circle of this world on the arm, lips, or down the pants of one of the guys.
As we grew older, the point system faded into the background, but the hookup hierarchy remained. As CITs (counselors in training), the goal was to get with a counselor. As counselors, it was landing an Israeli staff member, song leader, or unit head. The bigger the age difference, the greater the achievement. As a 21-year-old counselor, I competed for the attention of the Israeli soccer specialist. That same summer, one of my 17-year-old CITs got caught with a younger camper — a 14-year-old girl. The girl was sent home; the boy was suspended for two weeks but was allowed to come back and finish the summer.
That same summer my status reached a new level — recognition in the Israeli staff’s end-of-summer video. “Dani zoremet,” they called me in Hebrew — which means “goes with the flow,” as they joked about borrowing my car for a day off. But zoremet is also slang for “is easy.” The line between valuable and trashy was thin — and I had crossed it. If you were a girl who eventually earned too many points, you ended up losing. I walked around camp that last week of the summer second-guessing every smile or hello I received from my peers, especially the Israeli staff. Were they just saying hi? Or were they laughing behind my back about how “easy” I was the second I walked away? Meanwhile, Josh was on his third girl of the summer, his notoriety and desirability increasing for the years to come.
I studied abroad in Israel during my junior year of college. One of the popular boys from our youth group happened to also be living in Israel at the time, and wanted to hook up with me one night. It was the first time in my life that I remember wanting to say no. I remember feeling angry and disrespected — he had spent the evening with other friends, at a dinner I wasn’t invited to, but texted me when he was done, ready for a hookup, and came crawling into my bed late that night. I said no at first, but eventually gave in to his persistence, subtle manipulation, and the voice inside my head telling me I was lucky he even wanted me. This is how you prove your worth, I thought.
Now, though, the only thing that makes me feel worth less than I did that night in Israel is hearing people talk about him and other “Nice Jewish Boys” like they are God’s gift to women. It’s been a decade since my summer camp years, and I’ve only recently begun reflecting on how the culture has stuck with me — I still find myself wanting to rely on the attention of a man, preferably one that’s cooler, older, smarter, or in some way seems superior to me, to feel valued. We placed so much importance on hooking up that I never stopped to think about whether or not I even wanted to do it. I look back now and wish I had spent less time worrying about what men wanted and more time thinking about what I wanted.
Coming to these realizations took a lot of work: going to therapy, speaking more openly about my sex life on social media and through my writing, and engaging critically with my feelings amidst the #MeToo era. I am still unlearning a lot of this; my self-worth is still, at least in part, dependent on being wanted by a man. Last month I decided to take a break from dating, so that I can truly think about what I want from sexual relationships without it getting wrapped up in my urge to please a man. My therapist is proud and I’d like to think that the part of me that said no that night in Israel would be proud, too.
About a year ago, I stood on stage at a Moth storytelling competition in San Francisco and gave thanks to my experiences at Jewish summer camp for the extensive sexual “education” I received. I won that storytelling competition, and it is still one of my proudest life moments. I wasn’t being snarky about being thankful, either. I am thankful for some of it — for being comfortable with sexuality at a young age, for the sisterhood it created with women who are still some of my best friends. I am thankful for a few of the experiences, but I wish they felt like my experiences. I wish that looking back, they felt more like empowering choices and less like required currency. | https://thebolditalic.com/the-sexual-miseducation-of-jewish-summer-camp-e13fdc73a08e | ['Dani Mahrer'] | 2021-03-23 17:57:23.859000+00:00 | ['Summer Camp', 'Feminism', 'Jewish', 'Sexuality', 'Sex'] |
The day I let her walk away | Seemed Track Threshold Train Soft Travel Railway (Pixabay)
I let her walk away three times. The first time, she chose doing so. But I chose to suffer myself with the other two.
I remember seeing her face as I walked away and closed the door behind me. I turned away from her as I closed the door behind me. We didn’t have to talk. She looked me in the eye and knew exactly what was happening. I had to go. Time and fate had been cruel to both of us. I learned that day that sometimes one cannot do whatever they want. That sometimes we have to deal with the consequences of our actions. Choosing means renouncing. And by leaving her I thought I was doing the lesser of two evils.
It took us ten years to be together. She didn’t want me at first, and that’s solely on her. I still hear her voice saying: “if you only were more good looking…”. It hurt like hell back then. Honestly, I should have just left her on that moment. But I didn’t. I became a hostage of the moments that led us to that encounter. I tried to kiss her on that prom night. She dodged me and said that “something happened”. Ten years after she blamed it on being young, immature.
She haunted me. Her memory haunted me. Much of my self-image was in shambles because of that single comment. Even though we lost contact after high school, I was the one who went after her two more times. So it took me completely by surprise when she came back from London that she would even take her time to invite me to a party. From then on we started talking again.
And as the things went forward, I told her about everything that happened since we lost touch. Somehow, we connected once again. It didn’t take long for us to confess how we were in each other’s minds. We had to be together. And so we did.
I remember her leaving the gate of the airport. I saw her and went straight for her arms. I held her tight and kissed her on the lips with passion. It was really weird to kiss a woman you met in your teens as an adult, and for the first time, in an airport lobby. She confessed later that she was unsure if I would want her. As if I would be so vindictive to lure her in just to dismiss her. The thought never crossed my mind. I loved her for ten years. Everything that happened in between was a proxy. Or so I thought.
We had a mini honeymoon of sorts. And so we decided: we are together now. But there was a caveat to the plan: she was still living 2,000km away and had a previous relationship to work out. She was not misled, not at all. She was fully aware before she started talking to me. The thing was that I was living alone. I was, in fact, feeling alone, aside from being alone. But the other woman had made plans, left her job, and was in the process of moving in with me.
I felt a terrible agony. What should I do? Dump the woman I waited ten years to be together or just hold my word to the woman that employed all of her efforts to accompany me and make me succeed? I couldn’t decide. Wisely enough, when she was with me, she didn’t ask me to decide on the moment. Who knows what I would have done.
But time passed and the day of the move was inching every day closer and closer. So we decided to meet once more. And it was as perfect as it could possibly be. That was it. I imagined myself with her. But on the other side, what would the other woman do? Without a job, without a boyfriend, in a new city, without a house? No, that could not be done. I couldn’t be like that. My hands shake from remembering the scene. It is absurdly hard to type this part of the story. What I did took every ounce of strength I had in me: I got up from the bed, got my backpack and told her: “I have to go”. She glanced at me and didn’t say a word. She understood everything. She knew back then what it meant.
We wouldn’t talk or see each other for at least two more years. We unfortunately had people in common that loved to put us together. If they only knew the damage they were doing. I tried my best to be the best husband I could. I tried to make the woman that became my wife as happy as she could be. But the shadow wouldn’t leave. Not until I buried it.
At some point we agreed to meet. I was on a business trip in our hometown, and we agreed to have a dinner. She revealed that in the moments following the one that I left, she was told that her grandmother had passed away. She quoted me: “grandparents are fragile creatures”. I felt terrible.
She asked me why. I am sure that somewhere inside her, she just knew. But she deserved to hear from me. So I told her: “I decided to fulfil my end of the responsibility in detriment of my own happiness”. She nodded and grabbed my hand: “Are you happy now?”. I told her that I preferred not to answer. She understood once more. There wasn’t need for words. Looking in hindsight, it is one of the things that made her special.
As I understood that I was holding her back, and in many ways, keeping me grounded on her memory, I just let her go. Never emailed her again, didn’t text, anything. Excluded her contacts from everything I had. She needed to be free of me and I from her. It would be another eight years until I heard from her again.
When my high school colleagues threw a 20 years’ reunion party I showed up divorced with two kids. That is not the image I envisioned, for sure. Therapy was helping me to deal with a new relationship that was (and still is) taking the best of me, with the failed marriage, with the prospect of living away from two sons. That’s when I met with a former colleague that was a friend with common with her. She was thrilled to see me, and we talked about what happened ever since. At some point, she asked me: “you remember her, right? We see each other very often”. As if I didn’t know. She then asked me to take a photograph with her, the four of us. I immediately assumed that she was going to send her. Some gleam of hope lit up in me.
Throughout the years, there were many times when I thought about meeting her again, and who knows, that we would be together again. I always told myself that I wouldn’t get in her way. That only if she came after me, and if the conditions were perfect, that only then I would allow myself to dream about it. One cannot ruin another’s person life without thought. I had done that once, to two people. Not again.
But I couldn’t resist. I finally accepted her second invitation on Facebook. That’s when I found out that she was seeing someone. “Maybe they are not that serious”. A few days later her then boyfriend would post her ultrasound exams with a baby boy. Quite fitting, I thought. A couple of days after that they would update their status to married. Why I felt so bothered is hard to tell. But it was gut wrenching, heart wrenching. As if this was the final chapter of the story, the bitter end where the two main protagonists don’t stay together. I guess not every tale has a happy ending. As the song said: “All this time you were pretending, so much for my happy ending”. And then, as the credits rolled, she walked away for one last time. | https://medium.com/intricate-intimacies/the-day-i-let-her-walk-away-9a8b6f5d38bd | ['Johann Letzte'] | 2018-07-28 12:47:46.570000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Prose', 'Love', 'Heartbreak', 'Intimately Intricate'] |
Four Questions You Must Ask Your Smart Home Automation Company | Let’s face it, nobody wants to make an investment that they’ll regret in the future. When investing in your home it’s important to make informed decisions.
Deciding on a home automation system is no different. A good home automation company will evaluate your needs and give you a detailed proposal that outlines equipment and installation costs.
As you compare proposals be careful in choosing a company based on price alone.
Here are four questions that you must ask your home automation company before considering starting a project with them.
1. Are you certified by CEDIA and the Home Technology Association?
CEDIA is the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association, which is the professional association for the industry. It’s an essential credential for any home automation company, and it requires that members have proper insurance coverage and licensing where it’s needed.
Members also pledge to a code of ethics and take continuing education and training courses to stay current on technology and best practices. Ask any company you are interviewing if they are a CEDIA member.
The Home Technology Association Certification system is the first and only industry standard of excellence for home technology installation companies. In an industry that has no barriers to entry, the HTA has created a rigorous set of standards for home technology companies to adhere to. The firms that meet the 60+ points of evaluation criteria are granted certification status. Once HTA Certified, these firms must commit to maintaining the high standards of HTA Certification or risk losing certification.
Besides hiring a CEDIA and HTA certified company, make sure that every technician entering your home is an individually certified CEDIA technician.
2. Do you have client references?
You want to choose a home automation company that has experience in designing and installing systems that match the size and complexity of your project.
If you are building a 7000 square foot home in Coral Gables you may not choose a home builder that builds beautiful 900 square foot summer cottages in upstate NY.
Ask for references. Walk their projects.
At ioty, we’ve designed and installed extremely large and complex home automation systems. We’ve worked on new construction as well as retrofit projects.
Yes, we’d be more than happy to schedule a walk-through of a previous project.
3. What vendors do you work with?
You can get a better sense of a home automation company by the technologies and products they are associated with.
Does the company work with top brands in each category?
Are they an authorized dealer for those companies?
Some manufacturers have different tiers for their dealers as well. For example, ioty is a Savant Ambassador, as well as a certified Platinum Lutron dealer, and a Wisdom dealer — representing the highest tiers and the top names in the audiovisual industry.
4. What type of support do you offer after the sale?
The integrator should be willing to show you the ins and outs of using your system, as well as provide additional services like remote monitoring and diagnostics to ensure your system is running correctly and securely.
A great home automation company will be there for you many years after the sale.
In time, you may want to add new capabilities or technologies to your system, and that work should be something the company will be happy to do.
Do they stand behind their work and offer a long-term support package?
The answers to this question should give you a better sense of how a company views its long-term client relationships.
If you are considering a home automation system in Miami, ioty should be on the top of your list of companies to consider. Just ask us the questions above, and any others you may have.To learn more, contact us or just click below to be quickly connected to one of our home automation advisors — we look forward to serving you.
CONNECT WITH AN ADVISOR | https://medium.com/@ioty/four-questions-you-must-ask-your-smart-home-automation-company-df972de2ea68 | ['Ioty Inc'] | 2021-07-02 19:39:04.492000+00:00 | ['Home Improvement', 'Architecture', 'Smart Home', 'Automation', 'Interior Design'] |
Ek bangla banei nyara ( lets make one beautiful house) | So after that degree ,internships,job placements and that years of saving most of us go for that one big dream — Home.A lot of us find making our own home as an important leveling up in life. The more houses one owns , stronger is considered their economic hold .
And their is absolutely nothing wrong with that as everyone wants to measure their happiness ,sometimes in materialistic things.
The question is how do you build your houses ,
Is your dream of building a house in some way ruining your child’s future. Let us take a look
STATEMENT
If cement -concrete were a nation, it would be the third largest emitter of CO2 after US and China.
HOW
Concrete is made of limestone. Limestone is a fossil carbon made of millions of sea shells of tiny creatures over eons of time.We break apart these chemical bonds by burning fossil fuels , allowing them to achieve super high temperature and release CO2 in the air.
SOLUTION
Clays produce very reactive material when heated to around 800°C ,significantly lower than 1450°C ,used in previous method to produce cement (plus there is no CO2 emission from decomposition of limestone)
Now we take this heated clay(Calcined clay) ,add a bit of limestone without heating(so no CO2) and some cement and we call this. - "LC3"
This substance is equally strong as cement and produce 40% less CO2.
WHY
We have 10 years to flip this climate change story to save our civilization. Global pollution contributions by cement -concrete is 8% .If we continue our old ways of functioning in association to CO2 emission, we not will damage our lungs tissues and create serious threat to asthmatic patients but will also pose threat to national security, food security which in turn can lead to resource conflict.
Now i know that you are thinking that one person cannot change the entire market functioning and its not just housing but almost everything that is build around us , sure ,but if you just start demanding , asking question,
We will eventually start this change — first in thought process and then in our surroundings. | https://medium.com/@shrantuni-moon94/ek-bangla-banei-nyara-lets-make-one-beautiful-house-1abf5059d1a1 | ['Shrantuni Moon'] | 2020-12-05 16:06:26.746000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Global Warming', 'Concrete', 'Inspiration', 'Environment'] |
iB Hubs Year in Review 2019. 2019 has been an extraordinary year for… | 2019 has been an extraordinary year for all of us at iB Hubs.
Since our inception 3 years ago, iB Hubs has been on a journey towards a grand vision — becoming a global hub for Industry 4.0 technologies and making India a global leader in them. Over the years, we have executed many initiatives towards nurturing the culture of entrepreneurship and innovation in advanced technologies across India.
Last year, we made rapid strides towards laying stronger foundations, building systems, and refining approaches to charge ahead in 4.0 technologies.
In a nutshell, in 2019, iB Hubs and our associated companies have focused on:
Strengthening our Ecosystem to become the Global Hub for 4.0:
Spread our wings to 2 more countries — USA and South Africa
Announced 1130-acre iB Hubs Global Tech Valley in Santa Clara County, California, USA
Created a Knowledge Network for 4.0 Technologies
Strengthened ties with 2 more state governments
Established the first of our 20 planned iB Tech Parks across India for 4.0
Creating a Powerful Workforce for 4.0
500+ youngsters are training in a successful pilot of our Talent Accelerator Program
5300+ IITians enrolled in our specially crafted program 10xIITian
Initiated Masterclass Series from highly passionate industry 4.0 stalwarts from Stanford, Apple, Amazon, etc.
Offering End-to-end Assistance to Startups
iB Cricket: Strengthened their brand globally; received “VR Startup of 2019” from Entrepreneur India
CyberEye: Had a very happening 2019 with new products, pilots, partnerships, technology deployments, and trainings.
Make The World Wonderful: As the children are coming of age, the team is focusing extensively on carving out a bright career for them.
Startup Support
Provided extensive customised support to additional 30 portfolio startups who are progressing rapidly.
Nurturing the Culture of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in 4.0 Technologies
iB Hubs Startup School
iB Hubs IoT Bootcamp
StartUP Express
iB Hubs Super 30
Talks and Workshops
Sounds like a lot? Let’s go deeper and take a closer look at iB Hubs’ progress in 2019.
Highlight of the year — iB Hubs Global Tech Valley
First things first…we’ve announced “iB Hubs Global Tech Valley”, an 1130-acre campus in Santa Clara County, California, USA. Here, we’re building The World’s Largest Upskilling Center.
iB Hubs Global Tech Valley’s artistic impression was unveiled by Shri. Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary of I&C, ITE&C, Govt. of Telangana at The Things Conference India 2019.
*Artistic impression of the proposed layout. Subject to regulations. Around 30% variation can be expected.
** Construction of the shown layout will be carried out in phases.
iB Hubs — a Global Hub for 4.0 Technologies
iB Hubs is set out to become the global hub for 4.0 Technologies. With widespread and extensive applications, 4.0 technologies are impacting every domain. Just like the smartphone or the internet, these technologies will soon revolutionize the world and enhance the lives of billions.
At iB Hubs, we’re implementing a comprehensive approach to enable faster adoption of 4.0 technologies among individuals, organizations, and countries — as we enter the new era of opportunities and possibilities.
As we enter 2020 with high energy, here’s a look at everything we’ve done in 2019.
Strengthening our Ecosystem to become the Global Hub for 4.0:
We’re in 7 countries now!
In addition to India, UK, Australia, Singapore and Dubai, in 2019, iB Hubs and our associate companies spread our wings to the USA and South Africa. Across these countries, we’ve laid strong foundations to nurture the next line of talent in innovation and entrepreneurship.
Along with iB Hubs Global Tech Valley, we’ve also set up our US Headquarters, in a 4.2-acre space in the heart of Silicon Valley, in close proximity to the offices of corporate giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.
Creating a Knowledge Network for 4.0 Technologies
Along with our 500+ global mentor community, we’re creating a knowledge network with people who are on the frontline of research in 4.0 technologies. This powerful network consists of PhDs, post-doctorates, from the world’s top universities; and scientists, industry professionals, etc. from internationally reputed organizations and top MNCs. They have very happily joined us and are actively becoming a part of our programs and initiatives.
Creating a knowledge network for 4.0 with professionals and researchers from:
Strengthened ties with Governments
iB Hubs has been working with 5 state governments — Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand — to develop a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in the states. Adding more strength to iB Hubs’ association with the governments, this year we have started working with 2 more state governments through various programs.
Establishing iB Tech Parks across India for 4.0
iB Tech Parks are Centres of Excellence for 4.0 Technologies for
Creating Workforce for 4.0
Application R&D in 4.0 Technologies
Developing World-Class Products
Building Global Startups
With the refined approaches and robust systems that we built over the years, now, we’re scaling to accelerate the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies.
We’ve deepened our roots in India, with our first iB Tech Park in Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh, a 50-acre campus facing the Hyderabad-Bengaluru Highway with 3.15 lakh sq. ft. built-up area. We also identified 150 acres in Telangana.
With this as a start, we’re planning to establish 20 iB Tech Parks to take our initiatives to all corners of India to create a skilled workforce, to bring out many world-class innovations, and to build global startups that will impact billions of lives.
Creating a Powerful Workforce for 4.0
Talent Accelerator Program — Pilot
It is people who make ideas a reality. All the great things that 4.0 technologies promise to bring to our world become a reality only when we have a proficient workforce that makes it happen. At iB Hubs, we’re committed to creating a powerful skilled workforce for this new wave of 4.0 technologies
We’ve devised the iB Hubs Talent Accelerator Program to equip individuals with skills needed for 4.0 and accelerate their careers. In a pilot program at iB Tech Park Kurnool, we’re training over 500 youngsters in technical, managerial, and core personality skills.
This intensive program is based on a reverse-engineered curriculum in line with the upcoming 4.0 requirements. By the end of the program, the youngsters will be ready with in‑demand job skills to thrive in the dynamic world.
Here is an interesting point. We’ve taken these students in without any technical criteria or screening. Because we strongly believe that with a supportive platform that nurtures their strengths, every aspiring person can excel. Keen to know the outcome?
The core personality skills sessions combined with our methodologies and the distraction-free environment in the iB Tech Park, created a base for efficient learning and sustained motivation. Within 2 weeks, more than 70% of students in the first batch experienced great improvements in their confidence levels, and their desire to grow. This shift in mindset became a springboard for their rapid progress in the program.
We had noticed something even more interesting. The 500 youngsters who joined the program in three batches with around 1.5-month gap between each batch. As new batches’ students came in, the existing batch students joined forces with the program mentors to help and guide them.
This intensive training program is running very successfully with the students achieving new milestones every day. This pilot concretized the scalability of our culture and our methods to understand, assess and provide personal care to each and every individual.
“The training is really on par with international standards. And the amazing thing is that they start from level 0. We started as absolute beginners and learned to code with attention to every small detail. Thanks to the amazing trainers!” “After the sessions on core personality skills, I have noticed that I am able to communicate very clearly and effectively. I am now feeling closer to so many of my friends. My self-talk has improved and I am more confident now.” “I am taking up responsibilities. I’ve never volunteered for anything before, but with these trainings, I am becoming proactive and taking up more responsibilities. Now, I am looking for solutions to all the problems on my own without complaining.”
10xIITian
Under the Talent Accelerator Program, we’ve devised 10xIITian, a specially crafted program for the country’s premier students — IITians. This customized program comprehensively primes IITians for 4.0 technologies and makes them ready for the most lucrative careers — be it high-paying jobs, higher education from the world’s best universities or entrepreneurship.
Along with technical skills, the in-depth reverse-engineered curriculum builds the necessary 21st-century skills, mindset and thinking skills required to thrive in 4.0 world.
With 10xIITian, the students get a personal learning coach and AI-based insights for an ideal career choice. With accessible domain experts and opportunities to collaborate with real teams building products, this program is their perfect launchpad to a bright future in 4.0.
As a part of building awareness on 4.0, we talked to IITians from 19 IITs explaining them the scope and opportunities with 4.0. So far, 5300+ IITians enrolled for the program from across India.
Masterclass Series
To guide youngsters to set directions for their career goals in 4.0 and to inspire them to dream without limitations, iB Hubs introduced Masterclass Series. These special up-close sessions are being delivered by highly passionate industry stalwarts who have checked off key milestones in their life that are an aspiration for millions. Know more at: https://10xiitian.ibhubs.co/
End-to-end Assistance to Startups
With iB Hubs’ end-to-end assistance, startups can focus on their core competencies while we facilitate the rest. Here’s a brief look at the progress of these startups in the last year.
iB Cricket in 2019:
In 2019, iB Cricket team put an extensive focus on building and strengthening their brand image. The team introduced the world’s first VR cricket league with 12 international stars, which received 30+ million views so far and is still counting.
Before the waves settled, 5 teams joined hands with iB Cricket to enhance fan engagement during the IPL — iB Cricket is the official VR gaming partner of Chennai Super Kings, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Kolkota Knight Riders, Rajasthan Royals, and Delhi Capitals. They’re also VR gaming partner of Abu Dhabi T10 League 2019 that hosted some of the biggest cricket stars — Yuvraj Singh, Andre Russell, Zaheer Khan, Lasith Malinga, Eoin Morgan, Chris Lynn and many more.
Till date, more than 150 world-class cricket stars have been involved with iB Cricket through various events and partnerships.
With global events like iB Cricket World Cup Fan Tour, associations with movies like Super 30, Sarileru Neekevvaru, and ’83, iB Cricket has been bringing the world of cricket closer to fans. Growing rapidly, they have established 30 arcades across India. iB Cricket flew across the seas to 7 countries — the USA, the UK, South Africa, Australia, Sri Lanka, Singapore and the UAE. iB Cricket experience zones went to 80 corporates across these nations.
Recognizing their world-class innovation and rapid growth, iB Cricket was awarded ‘Startup of the year -VR technology‘ by Entrepreneur India. Read more about their progress here
CyberEye in 2019
In 2019, CyberEye set itself in a much more powerful position in IoT / LoRaWAN®️ and Cyber Security space with rich and extensive on-ground experience.
To build a strong IoT / LoRaWAN ecosystem, CyberEye presented Asia’s largest LoRaWAN conference ‘The Things Conference India’. The second edition in 2019 hosted 60+ speakers from 10+ countries, 700+ delegates and 50+ workshops.
As a part of building a comprehensive technology ecosystem, CyberEye partnered with leading device makers, manufacturers, technology alliances and many more.
CyberEye has become an Authorized Design Partner for Microchip Technology Inc. — one of the world’s leading providers of semiconductors. And it’s working closely with The Things Industries (The Creators of The Things Network) for strengthening the LoRaWAN ecosystem on a global scale. Also, they’ve partnered with Browan (a Gemtek group company), one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers of LPWAN technology.
To accelerate digital transformation efforts of governments and organisations, and provide maximum RoI, CyberEye is extensively establishing Secure Private Networks in the domains of Smart Industries, Defence, and Governance. The company unveiled their LoRaWAN module at Microchip India Masters, December 2019. This module helps device makers to adopt LoRaWAN in a fast and secure way.
As part of their commitment to empowering governments in solving critical on-ground security challenges, CyberEye has been closely working with DRDO and the Telangana Government. This year, they have successfully delivered multiple projects to DRDO. Read more about their progress here
Make The World Wonderful
The children at Make The World Wonderful are progressing remarkably well in academic, moral and social aspects. As the children are coming of age, the team is focusing extensively on carving out a bright career for them.
The core team is concentrating on developing the necessary skills required for the children to become future professionals and support themselves and their families. The team is empowering them with skills required for employment through companies in the industry.
Startup Support
One size never fits all. Apart from our end-to-end assistance to the above-mentioned startups, we have provided extensive customised support to 30 portfolio startups.
Celebrating the 2019 successes of the startups at iB Hubs:
All the startups we supported in 2019 have been doing remarkably well. Just in 2019, they’ve bagged 15 awards in the national and international arenas and secured 5 incubations/fundings. Here are a few of those success stories.
Edunify , which ventured into the startup world with its flagship product, Uniform Application — a digitized platform that simplifies the application process for schools, has become one of India’s biggest school discovery platforms where more than 15,000 parents have found the best school for their children.
, which ventured into the startup world with its flagship product, Uniform Application — a digitized platform that simplifies the application process for schools, has become one of India’s biggest school discovery platforms where more than have found the best school for their children. Namaste Gaon , a startup with a mission to empower rural India by improving accessibility to local information & news through digitization , has received a viewership of around 3.5 lakhs from 5 rural towns on their platform just in one month — October ‘19.
, a startup with a mission to by improving accessibility to local information & news , has received a viewership of around on their platform just in one month — October ‘19. Heaven Solar Energy, which models effective engineering designs for solar plants , has served 80+ business clients so far and has delivered projects of 20 MW+ in detailed engineering design and 30 MW+ in solar pre-design.
which models effective , has served so far and has delivered projects of in detailed engineering design and in solar pre-design. Aatm Nirbhar , is a social entrepreneurship venture that aims to build a nationwide women-driven community that employs women from marginal families to help upskill other women to make every woman in India self-reliant . Aatm Nirbhar Learning has trained more than 250 women in riding a two-wheeler through 18 women trainers.
, is a that aims to build a nationwide women-driven community that employs women from marginal families to help upskill other women to make . Aatm Nirbhar Learning has trained more than in riding a two-wheeler through 18 women trainers. Arrow AI develops AI-based customer experience platforms that provide customized solutions for businesses .This year, they have upgraded their AI assistant and developed Aisha — an HR Platform; Elle — a retail assistant capable of handling omni channel customer experience; Finco — a financial assistant. These automated bots can handle different aspects of a business like gathering information, marketing solutions, support systems, etc
Nurturing the Culture of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in 4.0 Technologies
We believe that when individuals are equipped with the right mindset and skills, innovation and creativity will be a natural outcome. And providing a supportive platform to them will amplify the impact they create. As the impact and progress become visible, these individuals inspire others to create — In short, they become role models.
Here’s a brief runthrough of iB Hubs’ activities in 2019 towards nurturing this culture.
iB Hubs Startup School
Through our flagship program, iB Hubs Startup School, we nurture student entrepreneurs into role models for the student startup community. In the 2019 edition, we trained 23 budding startups with essential entrepreneurial skills to spread their wings in the startup world. 14 industry experts and 30+ partners engaged in the program providing key insights and directions to young startups. Through 8 editions of the iB Hubs Startup School, we’ve given wings to 79 student startups across India.
“To obtain the skills that I have acquired here in a month, I could have taken 5–10 years normally. It was a big value addition to learn from the experiences of Mentors and Alumni.” Vivek Khedkar,
Founder, KalaCircle,
Graduate of NITK Surathkal
iB Hubs IoT Bootcamp
The annual iB Hubs IoT Bootcamp enables enthusiasts to ride the wave of a smart future! Building the next generation of Makers in advanced technologies, iB Hubs IoT Bootcamp 2019 nurtured tech enthusiasts in IoT and LoRaWAN through bootcamps in 4 states to shape their ideas into smart Things.
“I am currently working on four innovative solutions and expecting results very soon. iB Hubs IoT Bootcamp triggered these multiple ideas and gave me enough motivation to start working on them.” Krishna Chaitanya,
Wipro Technologies
iB Hubs has joined hands with the UP government and is all set to sensitize 6000+ youngsters through 12 day-long boot camps covering the entire state of Uttar Pradesh. The sensitizations will be followed by training in industry 4.0 and entrepreneurship for selected participants.
iB Hubs is the Execution Partner for StartUP Express. The program was launched by Hon’ble Deputy Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Dr. Dinesh Sharma on 14th September 2019. The program is scheduled to commence in 2020.
iB Hubs Super 30
Teachers play a crucial role in guiding youngsters and shaping their dreams. India is full of amazing teachers who are relentlessly working towards developing the students and the country. We believe that when these teachers’ ideas are empowered, and their culture & values are transferred to every mind, our nation achieves its highest potential.
Joining hands with the film Super 30, we initiated iB Hubs Super 30 to honour inspiring teachers — for they stand as role models and kindle passion in several teachers to do more.
We’ve received 30,000+ nominations from across India bringing to us incredible stories. Of those, we’ve selected 30 teachers from across the nation in an inclusive approach. All the iB Hubs Super Teachers were honoured in a Grand Felicitation Ceremony at HICC Hyderabad.
The 30 super teachers who we selected are a representation of thousands of their likes. At iB Hubs, we’re coming up with initiatives, which will include all such teachers in India, to magnify their impact and initiate change right from a young age.
“This initiative will inspire many teachers from across India and will also spark a boost in us to work harder. I can see everyone at iB Hubs is bound to a single objective to build the nation.” Bijal Dimani,
Educator,
The Galaxy Education System
Talks and Workshops:
Along with several initiatives, iB Hubs has also become a part of various events across the country focusing on 4.0 technologies and entrepreneurship. Through expert talks and hands-on workshops in 22 events across India, 1150 enthusiasts were presented with knowledgeable insights. Few of the partnered organizations include DSME — Govt.of Odisha, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bhubaneswar, NIT — Trichy, Indus International School, Ashoka University, Bundelkhand University, Exseedu, etc.
For each of the activities, we’ve done numerous pilots across age, background and geographies. Till date, iB Hubs trained 25,000+ youth on entrepreneurship and innovation in 4.0 technologies. So far, we have nurtured 140+ startups through our various programs and produced world-class products like iB Cricket and CyberEye SPN.
And now, we’re scaling. 2020 is a pivotal year for us with exciting things set to happen!
An exciting future:
At iB Hubs, we’re committed to enabling growth in Industry 4.0 by fostering and enabling the rapid adoption of these technologies among individuals, companies, and countries. We are bringing together everything required to develop iB Hubs as a global platform to learn, experiment and build world-class applications in Industry 4.0, enabling human advancement and impacting billions of lives.
We’re planning to set up 20 iB Tech Parks across India. We have revamped our plans to establish 2500 centres (500 nodal hubs with 4 spokes around each) to the end of December 2020. These serve as the infrastructure where future workforce trains, and innovations & startups flourish.
We are excited to bridge the gap between emerging technologies and individuals/organizations to harness the power of 4.0 and benefit billions of people. We look forward to making 2020 a year of great progress and transformation for the world! | https://medium.com/@ibhubs/ib-hubs-2019-year-in-review-42388a5415fe | ['Ib Hubs'] | 2020-03-13 08:36:16.078000+00:00 | ['Year In Review', 'Ib Hubs'] |
The 8 Step Yoga | I was initiated at the cremation grounds at the age of 25. I spent 20 years in penance till the age of 45. I will now give this knowledge to the world. | https://medium.com/@anandibaba/the-8-step-yoga-cb81dcbf1f8a | ['Anandi Baba'] | 2020-12-24 07:20:32.971000+00:00 | ['Anandi Baba', 'Hatha Yoga', 'Yoga', 'The 8 Step Yoga', 'Hinduism'] |
9+ Questions That You Should Ask Yourself Before You Decide to Outsource | So, you are almost ready to outsource staff so that you can delegate secondary tasks to them. It’s your chance to get rid of a headache and focus on core business needs. Stop it right there! How about the final checklist, which will determine whether you are ready for such a step? Here are some of the questions to keep in mind:
Are you sure that you can manage your outsourcing relationship?
Will outsourcing be cheaper than your current in-house team?
What is your current budget and how much can you afford to spend on outsourced solutions?
How does the project fit into the overall company mission?
What kind of specialists do you need and why?
What resources do you require?
What is the project timeline? Can you afford to postpone it?
How quickly are you scaling?
Will the results be better than your own solution?
Also, do not forget about some technical aspects like:
Do you feel comfortable running and reporting phone and video meetings regularly?
Do you have any experience with any remote work software?
What content management systems or CMS do you prefer?
If you cannot make a final decision on your own, contact experts at UnitedCode. They will help you to realize which way is the best for you, as well as plan your further actions thanks to their impressive expertise and skills.
Subscribe to updates. I will regularly talk about Ukraine, the IT industry and UNITEDCODE. | https://medium.com/@o.horshkov/9-questions-that-you-should-ask-yourself-before-you-decide-to-outsource-2a5a1593b8e8 | ['Oleksiy Horshkov'] | 2021-11-26 13:08:36.361000+00:00 | ['Unitedcode', 'Before', 'Ukraine', 'Questions', 'Outsourcing'] |
The Power of Small Numbers for Your Online Business | A shockingly high number of online business owners I meet tell me they aren’t good with numbers. The truth is many of these people just don’t want to think about numbers. Some are still carrying around baggage about math from their school days. Others are worried that if they think too hard about things like profit margin, cash flow, and costs, they will get discouraged.
The good news is that to be a successful online business owner you don’t need to understand complex mathematics. You also don’t need a degree in finance. All you need is to understand the power of small numbers.
Online businesses are all about finding your small part of the population that you are best suited to serve. If you can serve a small group of people consistently, you can earn a great living.
You Don’t Need to Go Viral
It seems like everyone wants to go viral. Many believe this is the key to fame and fortune. But, building a business isn’t about fame and fortune. It isn’t about shortcuts. It’s about doing a small number of good things consistently.
You don’t need to go viral to make a lot of money online. You don’t need millions of views.
Did you know that it if you had a YouTube video with a million views, it is only worth between $1,000 and $3,000? That’s not a lot of money.
Some businesses that gross $450,000 a year only serving 1,500 people. You can potentially make a great living serving groups as small as 100 people.
Running a small business with small numbers doesn’t have to mean small profits.
Selling Your Services
There are thousands of different types of online businesses. But, they all are service-based, product-based, or a hybrid of the two.
I make most of my money selling my freelance writing services. I’m able to support my family without working all hours of the day. Some people may say that I’m kind of lazy when it comes to my freelance writing.
I only work with a small handful of clients, many of whom I do work for every month on a subscription basis.
With a service-based business, your income is limited by your time. You have to charge a premium price if you want to avoid working 80 hours a week. Charging higher prices also means you need fewer clients to be successful.
If you can average $300 an hour for the time you spend providing services you only need to work 333.33 hours a year to make $100,000. That works out to 6.67 hours a week, even if you take off two weeks a year for vacation.
Six hours a week is a small number. You don’t need thousands of clients to make a great living as a freelancer. You only need a small number of clients who have the budget to pay you a decent rate for your services.
Selling Products
Unlike service-based businesses, product-based businesses are scalable. Your income isn’t dependent on your time. You can create something once and sell it a thousand times.
However, many people make the mistake of trying to sell low-cost products. Why is this a mistake?
The lower the cost of your product, the more of them you have to sell. You aren’t Walmart. It’s hard to succeed as a volume seller. It’s much easier to sell premium products to smaller audiences.
If you sold a $300 course, you only need to sell 334 courses to make $100,000. If you sell a $5 course, you have to sell 50,000 courses. It’s often easier to find 334 people willing to spend $300 than it is to find 50,000 people willing to pay $5.
Of course, before you can sell high-priced items, you have to invest the time in creating something worth the high price.
Subscriptions
One of the most lucrative online business models is the subscription model. This is where you sell to the same group of people month after month.
I sell blog-writing as a subscription service. Clients pay me a set amount each month, and I write them a new post each week.
However, the real money is in product-based subscription businesses. If you ran a specialized paid newsletter that provided rare and valuable information to a niche market, you could charge as much as $97. With only 100 subscribers, you would have monthly revenues of $9,700 and annual revenues of $116,400.
According to the Side Hustle Nation podcast, Carol Tice’s Writer’s Den membership site has 1,500 monthly members. Membership is $25 a month. That means this business has revenues of $450,000 a year.
1,500 people is a small audience.
Succeeding Big by Going Small
The power in building a business for a small number of people is that it allows you to know and serve every one of your customers better. The better you are at serving your customers, the more money they will be willing to pay you for whatever you create.
It is much more personally and financially rewarding to sell to your true fans than it is to try and sell to everyone in the world.
If you’re building an online business, focus on making something for one true fan. If you can add one true fan every day, you will have enough customers to support you going full time in your business in a year.
But, it all starts with the smallest number of all, one. One true fan at a time. | https://medium.com/escape-motivation/the-power-of-small-numbers-for-your-online-business-cccde7a6a31b | ['Jason Mcbride'] | 2019-09-22 17:29:30.915000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Small Business', 'Business', 'Make Money Online', 'Online Marketing'] |
Next up in our Words to Know series, what does artificial mean or what is artificial? | Next up in our Words to Know series, what does artificial mean or what is artificial?
Artificial means made by humans. It does not occur in nature.
Street terms: fake
Example: Artificial plants. They look like plants. Some even feel like plants. But they are not plants. | https://medium.com/@TheJessicaBugg/next-up-in-our-words-to-know-series-what-does-artificial-mean-or-what-is-artificial-93d2063565d1 | ['Jessica Bugg'] | 2020-12-15 03:38:17.890000+00:00 | ['Trivia', 'Words To Know', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Definition', 'Short Form'] |
Check this before buying a new smart phone again & again. | Photo by NOAA on Unsplash
As of 2018, there are around 2.5 billion smartphone users in the world. If we broke open all their newest phones, which are just a fraction of the total that’ve been built, and split them into their component parts, that would produce around 85,000 kilograms of gold, 875,000 of silver, and 40 million kilograms of copper.
How did this precious cache get into our phones, and can we reclaim it?
Gold, silver, and copper are actually just a few of the 70 or so chemical elements that make up the average smartphone. These can be divided into different groups, two of the most critical being rare earth elements and precious metals.
Rare earth elements
Rare earths are a selection of 17 elements that are actually common in Earth’s crust and are found in many areas across the world in low concentrations. These elements have a huge range of magnetic, phosphorescent, and conductive properties that make them crucial to modern technologies. In fact, of the 17 types of rare earth metals, phones and other electronics may contain up to 16.
In smartphones, these create the screen and color display, aid conductivity, and produce the signature vibrations, amongst other things. And yet, crucial as they are, extracting these elements from the earth is linked to some disturbing environmental impacts.
Rare earth elements can often be found, but in many areas, it’s not economically feasible to extract them due to low concentrations. Much of the time, extracting them requires a method called open pit mining that exposes vast areas of land. This form of mining destroys huge swaths of natural habitats, and causes air and water pollution, threatening the health of nearby communities.
Precious elements
Another group of ingredients in smartphones comes with similar environmental risks. These are metals such as copper, silver, palladium, aluminum, platinum, tungsten, tin, lead, and gold. We also mine magnesium, lithium, silica, and potassium to make phones, and all of it is associated with vast habitat destruction, as well as air and water pollution.
Mining comes with worrying social problems, too, like large-scale human and animal displacement to make way for industrial operations, and frequently, poor working conditions for laborers.
Lastly, phone production also requires petroleum, one of the main drivers of climate change. That entwines our smartphones inextricably with this growing planetary conundrum. And, what’s more, the ingredients we mine to make our phones aren’t infinite. One day, they’ll simply run out, and we haven’t yet discovered effective replacements for some.
Despite this, the number of smartphones is on a steady increase; by 2019 it’s predicted that there’ll be close to 3 billion in use. This means that reclaiming the bounty within our phones is swiftly becoming a necessity.
So, if you have an old phone, you might want to consider your options before throwing it away.
To minimize waste, you could donate it to a charity for reuse, take it to an e-waste recycling facility, or look for a company that refurbishes old models.
However, even recycling companies need our scrutiny. Just as the production of smartphones comes with social and environmental problems, dismantling them does too.
Phone E-Waste
E-waste is sometimes intentionally exported to countries where labor is cheap but working conditions are poor. Vast work forces, often made up of women and children, may be underpaid, lack the training to safely disassemble phones. And be exposed to elements like lead and mercury, which can permanently damage their nervous systems.
Phone waste can also end up in huge dump sites. Leaching toxic chemicals into the soil and water, mirroring the problems of the mines where the elements originated.
A phone is much more than it appears to be on the surface.
It’s an assemblage of elements from multiple countries, linked to impacts that are unfolding on a global scale. So, until someone invents a completely sustainable smartphone, we’ll need to come to terms with how this technology affects widespread places and people. | https://medium.com/@janathapulse/check-this-before-buying-a-new-smart-phone-again-again-38ae95126310 | ['Koduri Sandeep'] | 2020-12-19 09:13:31.720000+00:00 | ['Smartphones', 'Earth', 'Metal', 'Environment', 'E Waste'] |
Key Takeaways from French Open 2019 | French Open 2019 concluded on 9th June with the familiar sight of Rafael Nadal holding the “Coupe des Mousquetaires” for the twelfth time at Stade Roland Garros as predicted in my previous article.
Let’s take few minutes to look back at the key talking points of the men’s tournament.
Rafael Nadal with the Coupe des Mousquetaires for the twelfth time (Source — https://www.nationalpost.com)
King of Clay continues rule in Parisian Clay
As usual, Rafa Nadal demoralized his opponents once again en route to his twelfth title only loosing 2 sets in the process.
Was this result ever in doubt at the start of the tournament?
Yes, there were major concerns about his confidence prior to his victory at the Italian Open. Coming back from string of injuries, Nadal struggled at Monte Carlo, Barcelona and Madrid losing at the semifinals of each tournament. His performance against Novak Djokovic at Italian Open can be considered as the moment that everyone realized that he is back to his unbelievable best at clay.
Did he have a favorable draw?
Positioning of Dominic Thiem was the biggest question mark prior to the draw. Avoiding him in a potential semifinal makes Nadal’s draw more favorable compared to Djokovic’s.
Can we anticipate a repeat in 2020?
It will be hard to look beyond the three time defending champion with a 93–2 (win percentage = 97.9%) record at Roland Garros. Eventually someone will end Rafa’s dominance at Roland Garros. However, going by the performances of this year, it would be difficult to assume that it will happen in 2020.
Philippe Chatrier court needs a retractable roof
It is understandable that tournament organizers can’t do much about weather conditions affecting the matches. Even though, weather related delays at the early stages of the tournament does not have a major impact on the final outcome of the tournament, interruptions at quarterfinal and semifinal stages can be detrimental for the affected players.
Dominic Thiem had to play his quarterfinal, semifinal and final matches on four consecutive days due to rain interruptions whereas Nadal had a day to rest before the final. Having a roof over Chatrier court could’ve ensured both players had equal time to rest and regroup before the final.
Same can be told about the windy conditions observed during the semifinal match between Nadal and Federer. Fans would’ve been treated with much more entertaining encounter between the two greats if the conditions were much better.
Windy conditions at Philippe Chatrier affected the blockbuster semifinal between Nadal and Federer (Source — https://www.sportingnews.com)
Thiem proves that he is not far away from winning it all
This is the fourth consecutive time he reached semifinals or better at French Open and all four times he lost to the eventual winner (2016 — Djokovic, 2017–2019 — Nadal). Even though, he hasn’t won any masters tournaments on clay, his consistency in French Open over the past 3 years is only second to Rafael Nadal.
The courage and mental strength he demonstrated against Djokovic in the semifinal despite multiple weather interruptions shows the depth in Thiem’s capabilities. Although the 25 year old Austrian seems to be destined to win French Open in future, whether he can do it by defeating Rafa in a final remains to be the big question.
Dominic Thiem reached his second consecutive French Open final beating Novak Djokovic (Source — https://www.india.com/sports/)
Magnificent Roger exceeds expectations
Most experts didn’t think Roger Federer will go beyond quarterfinals on his return to French Open after three years. However, 37 year old reached the quarterfinal without dropping a set and defeated a resurgent Wawrinka in four sets to set up a semifinal showdown against his arch rival Nadal. Even though, Nadal made short work of Federer in difficult windy conditions, the impressive showing at Roland Garros silenced most of his critics. In addition, his clay court run assured the following;
Federer can become the second seed in the Wimbledon 2019 with a victory at Halle Open
His performances at Madrid, Rome and Paris earned him 1080 points which enables him to overtake Nadal if he manages to win the 2019 Halle Open according to the surface-based seeding system used at Wimbledon.
Federer can become the second seed at Wimbledon 2019 (Rules from https://www.wimbledon.com)
Nine more wins added to his quest to overtake Jimmy Connors as the player with most ATP match wins
Roger won his 1200th victory at Madrid Masters and needed 75 more wins to overtake the Connors. While it is unclear how long Federer will continue to play, I believe he will do his best to take part in 2020 Tokyo Olympics to win the Olympic singles gold which has eluded him since 2000. If he plays a full season in 2020, there is no doubt that he will have a good chance of overtaking Connors. Therefore, the 9 wins at clay this year would become very important addition to his final tally.
Djokovic falls, but he will be back in Wimbledon
Dominic Thiem ended Novak Djokovic’s 26 match winning streak in Grand Slams, stopping him from completing the “Nole slam 2.0”. Djokovic was the favorite to win the title after capturing the Madrid Open and reaching the Italian Open final. However, he was outplayed by Thiem in a match that was interrupted multiple times due to rain.
Would this defeat hurt his chances at Wimbledon?
Not at all. In fact, defect will make him even more determined for success. He will enter the Wimbledon as the no 1 seed and the overwhelming favorite to retain the title.
Tsitsipas shines again, while Zverev and Khachanov finally show up
Tournament was a good advertisement for the Next Gen players as both Sascha Zverev and Karen Khachanov managed to reach quarter finals after struggling in early part of 2019. However, it was Stefanos Tsitsipas that impressed the most in this clay court season with a string of consistent performances which included his first clay court title at the Estoril Open and reaching the finals in Madrid after beating Nadal in semifinals. Even though, he lost a 5 set thriller to Wawrinka at the French Open he seems to be in good shape to make his first ATP finals appearance in November 2019.
That said, Next Gen players are yet to present a notable threat to the “Big Three” in slams, which is a worrying factor going forward.
Zverev, Khachanov and Tsitsipas did well at French Open 2019 (Source — https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis)
Did we witness the final “Fedal” on clay?
Thanks to an impressive performance by Federer and Nadal, Tennis fans were treated with the 39th edition of the great rivalry between these two legends. Even though, the match turned out to be a one sided affair in tough windy conditions, millions of fans tuned in to watch what possibly could be their 6th and final meeting in Parisian clay.
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal met for the 39th time in their illustrious careers (Source — https://www.sportskeeda.com/tennis/)
Given Federer’s age, there is a possibility of him skipping the clay court season again in 2020 to preserve energy for Wimbledon and Olympics. Even if he plays, odds of them playing again are pretty low. Therefore, I feel we witnessed their final meet up in clay.
Do you agree with these points?
I would love to know your thoughts. Leave a comment! | https://medium.com/the-sports-niche/key-takeaways-from-french-open-2019-762e9e7cbc68 | ['Indika Jayasinghe'] | 2019-06-20 14:34:33.887000+00:00 | ['Sports Analytics', 'Roger Federer', 'French Open', 'Tennis', 'Rafael Nadal'] |
数字货币指数及指数代币. 什么是指数及指数代币 ？ | DEX.top
News, updates and industry insights from the DEx.top team. | https://medium.com/dex-top/%E6%8C%87%E6%95%B0%E5%8F%8A%E6%8C%87%E6%95%B0%E4%BB%A3%E5%B8%81-ac1af5009ab1 | ['Vincent Ma'] | 2018-10-11 12:39:21.820000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto Index', 'Research Reports', '指数代币', 'Index'] |
How Two Developers Accelerated Pipedrive’s PHP-Monolith | Background
Pipedrive, like many startups, started with PHP-monolith which has since grown into legacy code that we are attempting to get rid of. It is harder to test & deploy on legacy code than with small node/go services and it’s more difficult to grasp, because of so many features that were written more than 5 years ago. Because of this, we have an informal agreement to not add any new functionality to this repo anymore.
Despite its faults, the PHP-monolith still serves the biggest chunk of public API traffic (>80%) and more than 20 internal services depend on it, making it critical for the business. The challenging part is to keep performance high as we make it more decentralized.
In a 2018 mission that I participated in, we finally “dockerized” it, but it still remained in PHP version 7.0, but at the beginning of 2019 the planets aligned and a Backend performance boost mission became possible.
Motivation
First, I personally wanted to get into the field of Performance Engineering so this was a great chance. Second, anyone within the company can pitch and launch missions so this was a good opportunity. Finally, as I later found out, our manager was also interested in improving performance.
The triggering moment happened when accidentally, during a debug of some endpoint, I decided to try blackfire to understand how function calls are made and I saw a dismal picture of translations taking a huge percentage of the total request. I thought it would be fantastic to rewrite this part and then learn how to lead a mission during the process.
Preparations
Since I was afraid of pitching a mission without any slides to a 100+ audience and because Pipedrive is a data-driven company, I had to start researching what metrics I could use for the mission goals.
What is the percentage of public API requests with a GET method that is slower than 400ms? What about POST/DELETE?
What’s the latency of requests for API that is used to add data in bulk? What if it isn’t average, but a 3-sigma coverage (99.7% of users)?
What’s the maximum time that an API call can wait? Why?
What’s the % of API calls that do more than 70 DB requests?
How many DB requests are there on average / 99% of users?
What’s the maximum number of DB calls that one API call can generate?
How many API calls are lost due to DB going down? Due to insufficient memory of the process?
How much memory does PHP process consume on average?
I won’t give you the exact numbers I got, but it was a grim picture indeed. Even though we had a pretty low average API latency (160ms), I still saw some of our clients with endpoints loading from multiple seconds up to several minutes (bulk API).
The main goal of the mission was to decrease the percentage of sluggish GET requests by 20% (from 5.2% to 4.1% of total request count).
The secondary goal was to decrease the number of insufficient memory errors by 80%. From a business side, the goal also aligned with a decrease in client churn rate.
The mission plan was to deal with the global speedup first and then work on individual endpoints.
Non-standard lightweight Trello + Teamgantt to plan the mission
First failure
I planned a mission for 4 developers, but only one brave soul volunteered and so we started our journey with just the two of us.
First I wanted to get an easy win and just get rid of these slow translations. The main complexity was that the gettext function loaded binary .mo files that were coming from a third-party translation system and unpacking them on every request. Or so I thought.
After a full rewrite, with a nice unit-test coverage, I got a 43% speed-up on my machine, but as it turned out, in production gettext loaded translations only on the first attempt and then used an in-memory cache afterwards. In the runtime, it was still fast.
It was a first-week failure with the only positive being a better understanding of the developer experience. | https://medium.com/pipedrive-engineering/how-two-developers-accelerated-php-monolith-in-pipedrive-df8a18bc2d8a | ['Artjom Kurapov'] | 2020-03-26 12:01:10.590000+00:00 | ['Project Management', 'Performance', 'Monitoring', 'PHP', 'MySQL'] |
Bringing Back Ancestor Reverence | Bringing Back Ancestor Reverence
By Dawn Osun Omilade
Your Ancestors Bring Unity, Peace, and Harmony to Your Life and Home
Our family is everything to us. We have connections with our family members we can’t even explain at times. Maybe you have a little brother who seems more like a grandfather (determined old man spirit) or a big sister that acts more like a distant aunt than a sister. Why do these things happen? We are returned souls to this experience and how assimilated into our family each time is different.
In the Yoruba tradition the dead are not buried in far away cemeteries. They are buried at home on their own land. Imagine being able to give your mother or father flowers whenever you wanted or knowing that you can go right there to ask for their guidance. The death of a loved one does not separate them from our life. Death is just a passage to another life called Atunwa. If we know we are coming back then we would prepare, live and leave this earth way differently than we do now.
My Aunt never said just goodbye on a phone call she would always say, “Bye for now”. In Yoruba culture if they are friendly with someone, they say Odabo — which means see you soon. My aunt has since transitioned to the realm of the ancestors, but I believe her “Bye for now” is just as poignant as the Yoruba “Odabo”. Odabo has its roots set in the meeting again sense and this meeting is not just physical. Meeting the person again may occur in dreams, imagination, prayer or a feeling of needing them to guide you. Reclaiming a part of lost heritage is also a call to bringing us back to reclaiming the memory and lives of our transitioned family members. Death does not set an end to anything! Death is a new beginning, a possibility to be born again.
The Pandemic of COVID-19 has brought death to the forefront of our minds. The need for us to heal our relationship with death is crucial. Here in the Western world death has been shoved into a closet for many generations over and now is staring you in the face. Most Western religions have done a true disservice to reverencing the dead. It leaves a huge gaping hole in families and healing grieving souls. The Christian Bible gives many references on giving reverence to our dead ancestors but yet in still Traditional Christian Churches frown upon it. Why? The British and Spanish Colonizers (many backed by Christian churches) began to rewrite doctrine regarding the word “worship and reverence” when the African slave trade and missionaries in Africa were setting the stage for chattel slavery. Thus attempting to remove all links back to Africa, breaking the slaves in, remodeling their minds and bodies and even causing epigenetics (gene changes)! Removing the very integral practice of ancestor reverence is like turning off the light in a section of your DNA in your very being, your very soul. Eventually spiritually you will be drained due to the lack of the spiritual ancestral link. You are left with a deep yearning for a connection that you are afraid will get you ostracized. But you are tired of just surviving and putting on a tough face every day. Your transitioned loved one needs you just as much as you need to turn on that light to see the truth. Ancestor reverence is your birthright. It was stolen from you as a kind of human experiment and disempowerment strategy.
Learning to mend your spiritual DNA (astral spiritual genetics) is a key practice. Death in Yoruba is called Iku. The word KU means “to die”. Death is a process of transitioning from one world into another. If you don’t acknowledge the existence of death, it is impossible for you to be freed from its imminent danger. Just like acknowledging gravity frees you from thinking you can fly and not get hurt. It is as simple as that.
The ancestors symbolize a part of your heavenly community, spiritual foundation — and thus spiritual development. They are symbols of unity, peace and harmony. You would invoke them to give you a better understanding of your direction in life, to be an intercessor for you and your family and your family interests. Reverence of your ancestors is especially important if you notice history is repeating itself: the same diseases, early deaths, infertility, inability to thrive in life, constant negative trials and tribulations. Your ancestors can help erase the problems of generations to come. How would you like to be the one that is known as the torch carrier that turned on the light in the spiritual DNA of your lineage? You can help prevent the passing on inherited negative spiritual traits to future generations.
Below are a few simple ways to give reverence to your ancestors:
You can set up a simple home “memorial” or altar to honor your lineage. Many cultures across the world do this; it is called a Jingili in parts of West Africa. This is one the most beautiful ways to invite peace and harmony in your life and home. Use a white cloth or an African print, picture(s) of only transitioned loved ones, candle, glass of water and anointing oil.
You can make an offering — the best way to do that is to give them what they liked the most while still alive. Even if that vice was their downfall. My dad smoked Marlboro 100’s in the red pack. For years I was against even the thought of putting a pack on the altar for him. Once I did it opened my approach to connecting with him, even made me laugh and remember things I had long forgotten.
You can prepare dinner at home for a group of people and dedicate it to your ancestors — this is called Sara(giving in honor of another) for the ancestors.
You may also have a priest who is versed in ancestor reverence prepare blessed items for your altar or even advise you on the set up of our altar.
Most people do not even think about their spiritual inheritance. Out of sight out of mind until you lose your mind trying to figure out what is wrong with you. Constantly staying in touch with your ancestors opens the telephone lines again. Once that line is open you start a positive circuit, a continuous flow of information- present (you), past (their spiritual knowledge), and future (improved outcomes and harmony). You have the right to go back and get it! Get their wisdom, get their knowledge, and get their understanding! Your astral-spiritual and physical-biological genetics are stored in your body and are with you wherever you are. Your ancestors are within you and with you wherever you are. You don’t need a special prayer or to speak in a foreign language. Pray to your ancestors in the way that you would if you were holding their hand or having that weekly phone call. No request is off limits to your ancestors especially ones that uplift the lineage of the family.
It’s time to bring back ancestor reverence, flip on the light, and see what you’ve been missing out on. No matter your ethnicity if you have been oppressed by the strategies of separation from your ancestors and disempowerment in any religion, then you should look into what your ancestors can bring to your life.
Dawn Osun Omilade is an ordained Priest of Osun
Ayurban Wellness provides coaching for Ancestor Reverence | https://medium.com/@omsimranjot/bringing-back-ancestor-reverence-6e3bfe2d6bba | ['Omilade Simranjot Kaur'] | 2020-12-27 17:04:46.420000+00:00 | ['Prayer', 'Ancestors', 'Church', 'Ifa', 'Spirituality'] |
Create a Dataset for Object Detection | Computer Vision
Introduction
The first step for most computer vision tasks such as classification, segmentation, or detection is to have custom data for your problem set. There are multiple ways of creating labeled data; one such method is annotations.
The annotation technique manually creates regions in an image and assign a label.
Now to keep things simple, we will be using two tools Pixel Annotation tool and Microsoft VoTT. You can read more about this tool, Pixel and Microsoft VoTT.
Pixel Annotation Tools
Installation for macOS.
Then update brew using brew update.
Next, you need to install a cross-platform application development framework such as qt.
brew install qt
Pixel Annotation tool uses a watershed algorithm to do image segmentation.
Readers can use this link to read more about the watershed algorithm in detail.
brew install opencv
In Mac curl is already installed, you can check it by using typing curl -V in the terminal.
Something like this will appear, else install curl using brew.
brew install curl
Pixel Annotation tool does not come up with a .dmg file or a Graphic interface, so you need to transform source code to a stand-alone form via build.
cd PixelAnnotationTool
Inside this directory create the build
mkdir build
cd build
Next, inside build use the following command:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=$CONFIG -DDISABLE_MAINTAINER_CFLAGS=off -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$(brew --prefix qt) -DQMAKE_PATH=$(brew --prefix qt)/bin
Finally,
cmake --build .
We are all set to run and use the Pixel Annotation tool.
Go to the spotlight and search for the Pixel Annotation tool.
Pixel Annotation Tool
Creating a Dataset.
Go to the File option at the top left and select Open a directory.
On the top right, see all file names.
Select one image, say ‘Sachin.jpg.’
Go to the color panel on the left side and select any color, let me set the sky.
Move your cursor around the person (Sachin).
Then select another color say ‘out of roi’ and move the cursor around the entire region except for a person.
Then click on the watershed option at the bottom left and press Command + S to save the image.
Finally, you will get this mask.
Result
Input
Output
This mask serves as input for any object detection model.
Microsoft Visual Object Tagging Tool (VoTT)
Installation for macOS.
Unlike Pixel Annotation Tools, VoTT comes with Disk Image(dmg) file.
You can download and install the tool from below link https://github.com/microsoft/VoTT/releases/download/v2.1.0/vott-2.1.0-darwin.dmg.
Go to the spotlight and search for VoTT and launch.
Tool Appears like this.
Click on New Project
Fill Display Name, say Cricketers in my case.
Add Source Connection, click on that a screen will pop up like
In Provider, select Local File System if your file to annotate is on the Laptop.
Select the folder where the images are and click on “Save Connection.”
Once saved, something like below will appear, from source connection drop-down select ‘Cricketers,’ which we have created.
Next, go to the target connection and add a connection.
Same as source, for target select Cricketers_annotations.
At the bottom, there will be Tags.
Enter the label you want, cricketers in our case.
Save Project
A screen similar to this will appear.
In the left panel, you will see an arrow mark (fourth row ), click on that below screen will appear.
From the Provider drop-down menu, select Pascal VOC and enter “Save Export Settings.”
Create a box around the player and select tag from right, then save it from the save option at the top.
Repeat this process for all images in the folder. Once done, we need to export the output.
At the top of the image, there is an Export project option.
Once exported, go to that folder.
In this blog, we learned how to create a dataset for object detection and segmentation. Next, I will walk through the conversion of this mask into polygon co-ordinates, annotations.
A directory Cricketers-PascalVOC-export creates at the target location provided earlier.
Enjoy! | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/create-your-dataset-for-object-detection-99f1ed04f2e5 | ['Pushkar Pushp'] | 2020-06-02 14:43:53.292000+00:00 | ['Object Detection', 'Programming', 'Computer Vision', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
How to do that animated ‘race’ bar chart | How to do that animated ‘race’ bar chart
Explore the all time best teams of English football and learn how to make one of those race bar charts that have become popular
In this article, we are going to analyze the all time performance of English football teams since their leagues began in 1888, and use that data to create an animated bar chart that cycles through each year and shows the total points accrued of the top ten teams throughout history. We will also use the title bar to provide a narrative about how the sport changed in England over 130 years. Here’s the finished product, and all code is on Github:
The abbreviated history of English football
Lets be clear on our aims before we start. Here’s what we want to do:
Generate an animation that cycles through each football season from 1888 to 2017 and show the cumulative all time league points for each team as of that year, displaying the top 10 teams. We will only consider points obtained in the top tier (top division) of English football (now known as the Premier League). Sprinkle occasional factoids into the title of the chart that helps tell a story about changes in football over time.
I’m not going to focus on styling and prettiness in this article, just the basic functionality that creates an animated graphic.
Preparing the data
Ideally what we need is a data set which tell us about league points obtained through history, but I was unable to find that set. Instead I found something much more detailed and awesome, which is a record of every single game played since 1888 and the result and score. I found it here in the form of an R dataframe object — so we will be doing this in R folks. Here is a quick snapshot of what the data looks like.
This dataset is fairly large, with almost 200,000 matches played in every tier since 1888. First we need to convert each match to a points allocation to a given team. Points are shared between the home team and the visitor (away) team as follows:
2 points to the winner before the 1981 season. From the 1981 season, 3 points were awarded to the winner in a change of rules to encourage more attacking play.
0 points to the defeated team.
1 point each if the game finished in a draw.
So lets load our data in and load up our tidyverse packages for standard data manipulation. We will use the result column to assign home points and away points, by creating two new columns using dplyr::mutate() as follows:
library(tidyverse) load("data/england.rda") # assign points to results (2 pts for a win up to 1980-81 season then 3 pts for a win afterwards) england <- england %>%
dplyr::mutate(
homepts = dplyr::case_when(
Season <= 1980 & result == "H" ~ 2,
Season > 1980 & result == "H" ~ 3,
result == "D" ~ 1,
result == "A" ~ 0
),
awaypts = dplyr::case_when(
Season <= 1980 & result == "A" ~ 2,
Season > 1980 & result == "A" ~ 3,
result == "D" ~ 1,
result == "H" ~ 0
)
)
Now we have our points allocated for each game, we will need to get the total home and away points for each team and each Season, remembering at this point that we are only interested in games played in the top tier:
# restrict to Tier 1 and assemble into total points per season home_pts <- england %>%
dplyr::filter(tier == 1) %>%
dplyr::group_by(Season, home) %>%
dplyr::summarize(pts = sum(homepts)) away_pts <- england %>%
dplyr::filter(tier == 1) %>%
dplyr::group_by(Season, visitor) %>%
dplyr::summarize(pts = sum(awaypts))
Now we can bind these two dataframes together and add up home and away points to get total points for each team by season:
total_pts <- home_pts %>%
dplyr::rename(Team = home) %>%
dplyr::bind_rows(
away_pts %>%
dplyr::rename(Team = visitor)
) %>%
dplyr::group_by(Season, Team) %>%
dplyr::summarise(pts = sum(pts))
Now we have a dataframe which shows the points earned by each team in each season. We want to manipulate this so that each season shows us the sum of all points earned up to and including that season. We can achieve this with a quick for loop:
# create rolling sums table <- total_pts %>%
dplyr::filter(Season == 1888) %>%
dplyr::select(Season, Team, Points = pts) for (i in 1889:2017) {
table <- total_pts %>%
dplyr::filter(Season <= i) %>%
dplyr::group_by(Team) %>%
dplyr::summarise(Points = sum(pts, na.rm = TRUE)) %>%
dplyr::mutate(Season = i) %>%
dplyr::bind_rows(table)
}
We have done enough to have the data we need for objective 1. For objective 2, I will edit the Season column to sprinkle in some important historical facts about the English football league. I will keep each fact displayed for around three seasons to allow it to appear long enough in the animation for viewers to read it. Let’s call this new edited column SeasonLabel .
# add some historic facts to seasons table <- table %>%
dplyr::mutate(
SeasonLabel = dplyr::case_when(
Season <= 1891 ~ paste(Season, "Football League is formed with 12 teams in 1888", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1892, 1895) ~ paste(Season, "Second Division introduced in 1892", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1914, 1918) ~ paste(Season, "League suspended during World War I", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1920, 1924) ~ paste(Season, "Third Division North/South introduced in 1920/21", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1925, 1928) ~ paste(Season, "New Offside Law introduced in 1925", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1939, 1945) ~ paste(Season, "League suspended during World War II", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1958, 1961) ~ paste(Season, "Regional Third Divisions amalgamated in 1958 to form Nationwide Third and Fourth Divisions", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1965, 1968) ~ paste(Season, "Substitutes first allowed in 1965", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1974, 1977) ~ paste(Season, "First match played on a Sunday in 1974", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1981, 1984) ~ paste(Season, "Three points for a win introduced in 1981", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1986, 1989) ~ paste(Season, "Play-offs introduced to decide some promotions", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 1992, 1995) ~ paste(Season, "Premier League formed in 1992, reducing Football League to three divisions", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 2004, 2007) ~ paste(Season, "Football League renames divisions in 2004 to Championship, League One and League Two", sep = " - "),
dplyr::between(Season, 2013, 2016) ~ paste(Season, "Goal Line Technology introduced in Premier League in 2013", sep = " - "),
1L == 1L ~ as.character(Season)
)
)
Lets take a look at our data now:
Now we have everything we need to code our animation. Let just save our dataset using save(table, 'data/table.RData') so we can open it up in a new file that we will use to create the animation.
Creating the animation
With the help of this StackOverflow discussion, we will use the ggplot2 package to design a static bar chart for this data, and then we will use the awesome package gganimate to generate a rolling animation that transitions through each SeasonLabel and updates the bar chart.
Let’s load the data and some packages we will need. Then, first, we need to rank each team in each season, as the rank will determine the order that the bars appear in the ‘race’ chart. We also create a relative value for each team compared to the team at the top of the ranking, as this will help with scaling the bars. Finally we create a label to draw the value from the Points column. We then restrict to the top 10 teams by rank.
library(tidyverse)
library(ggplot2)
library(gganimate)
library(gifski)
ggplot2::theme_set(theme_classic()) load("data/table.Rdata") # generate top n ranking by year group anim_table <- table %>%
dplyr::group_by(Season) %>%
dplyr::mutate(
rank = min_rank(-Points) * 1,
Value_rel = Points / Points[rank == 1],
Value_lbl = paste0(" ", Points)
) %>%
dplyr::filter(rank <= 10) %>%
dplyr::ungroup()
Now we have everything we need to plot the static bar chart— this only needs a string of fairly basic ggplot2 commands. I won’t go through these in detail but if you need to refamiliarize yourself with these then I recommend tidyverse.org as a starting point. The main points here are that we use rank as the x aesthetic, Points as the y aesthetic, we then assign Team and Points and then we flip the chart to make it horizontal rather than vertical.
# create static bar chart p <- ggplot2::ggplot(anim_table, aes(rank)) +
ggplot2::geom_tile(aes(
y = Points / 2,
height = Points,
width = 0.9,
fill = "blue"
), alpha = 0.8, color = NA) +
ggplot2::geom_text(aes(y = 0, label = paste(Team, " ")), size = 12, vjust = 0.2, hjust = 1) +
ggplot2::geom_text(aes(y = Points, label = Value_lbl, hjust = 0)) +
ggplot2::coord_flip(clip = "off", expand = FALSE) +
ggplot2::scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::comma) +
ggplot2::scale_x_reverse() +
ggplot2::guides(color = FALSE, fill = FALSE)
Now comes the main part of the animation. We give labels to the static plot for the title and the axes, but one of these labels is the one that we will use to animate the plot — ie SeasonLabel. This is known as the transition variable. So we tell ggplot2 that we want the title to print the current transition state — ie SeasonLabel as the title as it rotates through the animation. Finally we use ease_aes() to define the way values change as we move through the transitions — there are many easing functions which you can experiment with here, just consult the help file for details.
# set SeasonLabel as transition state and set to animate
title = "{closest_state}", x = "", y = "Total Points",
caption = "Source: Github(jalapic/engsoccerdata) | Top tier points only, does not include mandatory points deductions | Plot generated by
) +
ggplot2::theme(
plot.title = element_text(color = "darkblue", face = "bold", hjust = 0, size = 30),
axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
axis.text.y = element_blank(),
plot.margin = margin(2, 2, 1, 16, "cm")
) +
gganimate::transition_states(SeasonLabel, transition_length = 4, state_length = 1) +
gganimate::ease_aes("cubic-in-out") p @dr_keithmcnulty ) +ggplot2::theme(plot.title = element_text(color = "darkblue", face = "bold", hjust = 0, size = 30),axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),axis.text.y = element_blank(),plot.margin = margin(2, 2, 1, 16, "cm")) +gganimate::transition_states(SeasonLabel, transition_length = 4, state_length = 1) +gganimate::ease_aes("cubic-in-out")
So our animated plot is now saved in the environment as the object p . All we need to do now is render it as a output file. There are many devices that can be used to render the output in various formats, but the most common are:
gif output — which will produce an animated image file. This requires the gifski package installed.
output — which will produce an animated image file. This requires the package installed. mp4 video output — this requires ffmpeg to be installed on your machine.
In my case I am going to create a gif as per the image displayed earlier. You can adjust the speed of the gif by using the duration argument, and you can tailor the size and resolution of the image too.
# save as preferred rendered format gganimate::animate(p, nframes = 200, fps = 5, duration = 100, width = 2000, height = 1200, renderer = gifski_renderer("anim.gif"))
Depending on how you set the arguments in the animate() function, the file may take longer to render, but you can view progress in your console.
Further study
This was a short practical case study. It only covers a very small amount of the animation possibilities in R. I would encourage you to read up on gganimate more and then potentially try to use it to animate some of your own data. Time series data in particular lends itself well to good animation. The plotly package in R also has increasing animation capabilities which are worth a look.
Originally I was a Pure Mathematician, then I became a Psychometrician and a Data Scientist. I am passionate about applying the rigor of all those disciplines to complex people questions. I’m also a coding geek and a massive fan of Japanese RPGs. Find me on LinkedIn or on Twitter. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-do-that-animated-race-bar-chart-57f3a8ff27a8 | ['Keith Mcnulty'] | 2019-05-12 23:02:50.345000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Data Visualization', 'Sports', 'Data Science', 'Programming'] |
Autonomous Driving Dataset Visualization with Python and VizViewer | Introduction
As part of a recently published paper and Kaggle competition, Lyft has made public a dataset for building autonomous driving path prediction algorithms. The dataset includes a semantic map, ego vehicle data, and dynamic observational data for moving objects in the vehicle's vicinity. The challenge presented by Lyft with this dataset is to use this data to build a model that can predict the paths of moving objects and the path an autonomous vehicle (“AV”) should take based on the observations made by the AV sensors and perception stack.
In more specific terms, the challenge is, given a set of information about the current vehicle state and its surroundings, to predict the best plan — a set of actions and behaviors — for the vehicle to safely navigate autonomously.
Lyft provides a large volume of training data in the L5 Prediction dataset; tens of thousands of 25-second sequences of data are available in over 100GB. Along with the data, Lyft has also offered a set of tools for parsing and visualizing the data.
This article will explore the details of the L5 Prediction dataset with these tools and a novel data visualization platform called VizViewer (or “VV” for short). Utilizing the VizViewer platform, we’ll uncover insights about the data while discussing the benefits of the visualization techniques for dataset tuning and feature engineering. To wrap up, we’ll preview a lane prediction visualization that could be used to solve the general path planning problem.
Dataset Structure
Within the context of autonomous driving, there are two general subsets of data to consider: the static environment and the dynamic environment. The former would include data that mostly remain relatively fixed over time, such as the road network paths, the number of lanes in the current road, traffic signs and traffic lights, etc. The latter includes data about the varying driving conditions such as the location and speeds of pedestrians or vehicles nearby, or the color of an upcoming traffic light.
The L5 Dataset provides data for both of these data types. One form is a semantic map, sometimes referred to as an HD map [1], which encodes details about the static driving environment. The second is a voluminous “scene” database for dynamic time-series data. The L5 Kit provided by Lyft includes tools for extracting data from both these sources.
Semantic Map Overview
Within the dataset, the static environment is defined by the semantic map. This can be thought of as an environmental 2D map that has been densely annotated with information appropriate for the driving context. The semantic map offers a predefinition of the expected driving environment; without a semantic map, this static information would need to be continuously perceived and interpreted by the vehicle's sensors and CPUs. Thus, a semantic map is a powerful tool for pre-computing and offloading much of the work involved in AV planning and prediction problems.
Animation by author, Semantic Map Visualization — roads/lane lines (gray), parking zones (red), crosswalks (yellow), stop signs (red cylinders), traffic lights (gray cylinders)
The semantic map itself contains these various attributes:
a directed graph of roads and their lanes
the physical position of the lane lines of a road, down to the centimeter
the physical position of the stop lines, stop signs, traffic lights, crosswalks, and other traffic control elements
speed limits
the possible states for a given traffic light (e.g., red, green, yellow) and the lanes for which they control traffic (e.g., left turns, through lanes, right turns)
parking zones (specifically if they share a lane)
Scene Database Overview
The dynamic features encoded in the dataset include the spatial information of the “ego” vehicle (the AV collecting the data), the “agents” (freely moving observed objects), and the traffic light states (“red”, “green”, “yellow”). Each agent also has a “class” label, describing it as a set of probabilities of common object types such as cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. These three data sources are encoded and indexed separately into tabular form.
The spatial features of the ego and agents contain the “pose” of the objects (their x, y, z cartesian coordinates, and orientation) and for agents, their “extent” (size of the object). Each data sample has a timestamp, and all observations with a common timestamp represent a “frame” of data. A “scene” consists of a contiguous sequence of observation frames with respect to time. The scene links frames from each of the other three data tables using a list of indexes to each record in the table.
Image by author, Structural Diagram of the L5 Prediction Dataset
The motivation behind this scene-centric structure is important to note. In many machine learning problems, each time-based data sample is used independently as examples to train a model. However, in this dataset, the entire scene — as a collection of data samples — are the atomic units of data used to train a machine-learned model.
The reasons for this should be fairly intuitive; to make predictions about the paths a set of objects can take, the samples must be coherent and causally linked across time to build an accurate description of motion. If an amalgam of data samples from different scenes is used to generate a path, the resulting path would most likely be completely inconsistent; the objects would move in impossible ways from the ground truth. Given the need for coherency across time for accuracy in path planning, scenes are the building blocks of data that we will examine holistically using VizViewer.
So what is VizViewer?
VizViewer is a web application and platform for collaboration and visualization of complex, multi-modal datasets. It consists of a suite of communication, data processing, and visualization components bundled into an accessible and easy to use dashboard UI. VV provides tools for interpreting data and accelerating productivity in data analysis workflows. It achieves these goals through a cohesive, configurable, interactive, and versatile toolset for analyzing datasets of different modalities while interoperating with Python and the Jupyter Notebooks.
In short, VizViewer is a helpful extension of coding tools for data exploration and insights into dense datasets with different types of content. In the next sections, we’ll explore the characteristics of the L5 Prediction dataset using VizViewer to understand the data better, build improved training sets, and utilize it to debug and evaluate models. | https://towardsdatascience.com/autonomous-driving-dataset-visualization-with-python-and-vizviewer-24ce3d3d11a0 | ['Jose Rojas'] | 2020-12-10 05:08:18.063000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Visualization', 'Autonomous Vehicles', 'Autonomous Cars', 'Jupyter Notebook'] |
2020: Musicians, Artists & Pioneers we’ve lost. | We’ve had an exorbitant amount of death news this year and, amidst all the personal losses, I fear we might have gotten desensitised. So just wanted to devote my little corner at Undomondo this week to a tribute to these musicians, composers and sidemen that we have lost this year.
At 3 hours and 37 songs, this barely does justice to their back catalogue — Hell, just Morricone has around 200–300 albums on his own — yet, I sincerely hope this makes you take the red pill and dive in.
Rest in Peace, and big thanks for all the music!
Ennio Morricone, OMRI, 91, Italian composer, Maestro, Oscar winner who leaves behind more than 200 soundtracks, more than 70 million record sales and an Oscar. A Towering Figure whose discography could be a branch in musicology itself.
Tony Allen, 80, Nigerian drummer who is the co-originator of afrobeat alongside Fela Kuti with the namesake afrobeat rhythm, features a piece with Hugh Masakela whom we lost in 2018.
Florian Schneider, 73, Co-founder of Kraftwerk , pioneer of electronic music.
Little Richard, 87, founding father of Rock & Roll.
Mory Kante, 70, mostly known for his 80’s crossover hit Yéké Yéké, which single handedly put African music on the global pop map, but also an early member of Rail Band alongside Salif Keita. A Guinean powerhouse in World Music circuits.
Manu Dibango, 86, Cameroonian innovator and Afro-Latin star.
Mc Coy Tyner, 81, jazz pianist well known for being a member of the John Coltrane Quartet and his later solo work.
Neil Peart, 67, founding member of Canadian progressive rock gods Rush.
Eddie Van Halen, 65, guitar god and mainman of American hardrock band Van Halen.
Genesis P-Orridge, 70, co-founder of Industrial Music pioneers Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, lifetime agitator, performer, poet and artist.
Bill Withers, 81, American soul music composer, and three time Grammy winner.
Toots Hibbert, 77, namesake and mainman for Toots & The Maytals, defining reggae and ska band.
Hamilton Bohannon, 78, Leading disco and LGBT figure and Motown star from the 70’s.
Simeon Coxe, 82, Founder of Silver Apples, One of a kind American electronic music & psychedelia outsiders from 60's!!. A must check documentary.
José Padilla, 64, Cafe del Mar DJ & creator of the well-known mix series, Ibiza chillout music pioneer.
Andrew Weatherall, 56, legendary UK DJ, remixer, producer, trendsetter, zinemaker notorious for being part of the acid house scene & breaking down genre barriers.
Candido, 99, Afro-Cuban percussionist who helped establish Latin Jazz in America, dubbed the “Thousand Finger Man”
Harold Budd, 84, ambient music composer and lifetime collaborator of Brian Eno.
Andy Gill, 64, influential guitarist & co-founder of Gang of Four, UK’s premiere post-punk band.
Peter Green, 73, UK guitarist & co-founder of Fleetwood Mac.
Kenny Rogers, 81, Country, pop & easy-listening star.
John Prine, 73, 2 time grammy winner, American folk singer-singwriter.
Dame Vera Lynn, 103, the oldest on this list with 103 years, the iconic singer of We’ll Meet Again: UK war-anthem during WWII. Ref’d on Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
Johnny Nash, 80, 70’s American singer-songwriter in pop & reggae.
Mike Huckaby, 54, 1st wave Detroit techno legend nicknamed “The Teacher”.
Cristina, 64, post-punk newwave vocalist from NYC, part of the Ze Records clique.
Erkut Taçkın, 78, 60’s 70’s Turkish Anatolian rock & psychedelia icon.
Pamela Hutchinson, 61, of 70’s R&B girl group The Emotions.
Barbara Martin, 76, of 60’s Motown girl band The Supremes.
Betty Wright, 66, Miami soul and R&B star.
Trini Lopez, 83, American folk, Latin & rockabilly star.
Charley Pride, 86, 70’s Country star who was strangely a very interesting figure in Northern Ireland during the Troubles era.
Ricky Valance, 84, 60s’ Welsh pop singer.
Millie Small, 73, Jamaican singer famed for her 60’s UK hits.
Frankie Banali, 68, drummer & sideman of American hardrock bands Quiet Riot and W.A.S.P.
Riley Gale, 34, lead singer of Texas thrash metal revisionists Power Trip. Youngest on the list.
Sean Reinert, 48 & Sean Malone, 50, two members of American thrash metal pioneers Cynic.
Undomondo Discover Weekly, 2020 Losses edition
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Undomondo Discover Weekly Archives | https://medium.com/@undomondo/2020-musicians-artists-pioneers-weve-lost-cfa97d83facd | [] | 2020-12-30 20:22:55.061000+00:00 | ['Obituary', 'Spotify', 'Spotify Playlist', 'Playlist', 'Music'] |
Clean Coffee #5 | These are the notes from Clean Coffee #5 — the first one with organisers on two different continents! They may be a bit messy, and are mainly used as a stream-of-consciousness like set of notes to refer back to later for attendees, but they may be useful for you too.
Topics we talked about
There are so many (tech/digital) projects and groups of volunteer behind them trying to create useful tools to fight climate change. The result is that there are a lot of tools, most not working great and just add noise. Great passion doesn’t bring great products without funds. How to change that? — Andrea 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽 How can I gauge the impact/usefulness of a “project”? I have little bandwidth I’d like to allocate it to something that actually matters — Avishay 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽 The climate-active people I’m working with do not come from Tech. We have mismatched expectations (ex: Minimum-Viable-Product-and-iterate versus Why-Don’t-You-Just-Finish-a-Polished-App-Immediately). Fortunately this is by no means the first time Tech and non-Tech have interfaced. Suggestions on how to handle? — Denton 🙋🏽🙋🏽
🙋🏽🙋🏽 Is buying carbon credits actually a net positive, or does it just provide a feel-good escape valve while diverting resources to far-off goals? Are there better directions to encourage people to focus their $ first? — Alex 🙋🏽
Topics we didn’t have time to talk about
When discussing decisions about how you work in your team in terms of sustainability, what are your options? Can you bring it up in a retro? O you need sample policy? Is it a thing only mgmt can bring in? — Chris 🙋🏽🙋🏽
🙋🏽🙋🏽 How do you know what do ask when switching jobs to see how their actions match the severity of the climate crisis? Chris
Notes & links from the topics we discussed
Topic 1: There are so many (tech/digital) projects and groups of volunteer behind them trying to create useful tools to fight climate change. The result is that there are a lot of tools, most not working great and just add noise. Great passion doesn’t bring great products without funds. How to change that?
This ended up being a discussion about funding in the end — in many cases the projects mentioned that are started by people don’t progress very far because they run out of money. In that case, it’s similar to the rate at which small businesses fail, so it’s not surprising that few succeed.
If you are looking for funding options, they do exist.
Crowdfunding, and direct funding
There’s an exhaustive review of the options here in Snowdrift’s wiki.
Elsewhere Patreon and Opencollective are in use in other communities. Libreapay is another, very interesting, entirely open source, recurrent donations platform
Finding funding from grant making bodies
In the UK, groups like BeeHive Giving make it easier to find funds and apply based on what field you work in.
Increasingly, a number of organisations run flash grants, or adhoc versions. Examples would be Mozilla’s MOSS (Mozilla Open Source upport) grants or the Shuttleworth foundation Flash Grants. | https://medium.com/clean-coffee/clean-coffee-5-9ae62cb33359 | ['Chris Adams'] | 2019-07-01 18:31:27.898000+00:00 | ['Community', 'Sustainability', 'Climate Change'] |
Hop on Board | Recently, we received several emails about how to get started with iModel.js. Some people were new to TypeScript, some were new to React and some just wanted to write some good ole lines of code.
This reminds me of my first day at this job.
I was new to the industry and terrified of the learning curve. I secretly prayed that a future version of me would show up and tell me everything I needed to know.
Luckily, time has passed…and now I am a future version of me.
So I present to you: an iModel.js learning path.
First, let’s build a foundation.
Here are some prerequisites — I recommend watching these if you are new to developing with iModel.js:
Intro video: describes iModel.js mission. Typescript tutorial: short and quick. React tutorial: for conceptual understanding (JS-based). React tutorial: short TypeScript example.
Once you have the basics, the next step is to review some iModel.js specific material.
So we all have our boots strapped.
Overview video: iModel.js business value | developer perspective. The samples repo: contains code samples and apps. Code walkthrough: of an interactive app.
Once we have a basic understanding of an iModel.js app, next let’s stroll through the frontend samples. These samples showcase how to implement some powerful features.
^ a quick stroll ^
You can learn exactly how to do all of the above, right here.
What’s even better…there are more samples coming! We are always looking for new topics to cover. And who better to ask than you specifically :)
Feel free to post any requests you have in the comments below.
Lastly, let’s not forget these:
Important links for iModel.js developers. | https://medium.com/itwinjs/hop-on-board-31149fda07ce | ['Roop Saini'] | 2020-11-09 19:57:40.782000+00:00 | ['Help', 'Outreach', 'Tutorial', 'Getting Started', 'Imodeljs Sample'] |
A Sub-Perceptual Promise: Can Microdosing Solve Mainstream Problems? | A Sub-Perceptual Promise: Can Microdosing Solve Mainstream Problems?
Psychedelics have held a contested place in the collective cultural imagination for most of contemporary history. As a catalyst for the counterculture movements of the 1960s and subsequent culture wars that led to their outlaw, the perception of hallucinogenic drugs such as psilocybin, LSD, and peyote (to name a few) have fallen into two distinct camps: revered and reviled. For some, psychedelics have always been (and continue to be) dangerous substances that cause permanent damage to the brain. For others, they hold the potential to actually heal the mind, and treat some of the most prevalent mental and behavioral disorders.
Over the past few years, we’ve been lucky enough to see this stalemate shifting, thanks to the rise of the psychedelic renaissance — the resurgence of research into the healing potential of psychedelics. But even with a growing body of research, for many, the idea of widespread and unfettered access to these mind-expanding medications is a hard pill to swallow. Despite growing scientific support, the propaganda that cast psychedelics as dangerous left their mark. On top of that, many enthusiasts fear that one slip-up (a high-profile death or injury, perhaps) could effectively put the lid back on this burgeoning movement, leaving many to ask: At this crucial moment, what is the path to widespread societal acceptance of psychedelic use?
The answer may just lie with microdosing. Defined as the act of consistently taking sub-perceptual doses of (almost) any psychedelic, microdosing has been touted as a way to help treat the symptoms of depression, addiction, and anxiety, as well as boost creativity, productivity, spiritual connection, and overall wellbeing. And, perhaps even more than psychedelics in general, the practice of microdosing is steadily making its way into the mainstream.
From underground to above board
For years, microdosing was practiced quietly by a select group of self-experimenters in the underground psychedelic community. But after psychologist and psychedelic advocate Dr. James Fadiman published his 2011 book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, microdosing saw a major revitalization. This signal was boosted further when Fadiman appeared on investor and author Tim Ferriss’s podcast in March 2015, which prompted his large audience of self-experimenters to try it for themselves — and effectively set microdosing on the path to becoming a normalized, mainstream practice. Dozens of high-profile publications have since published exposés on the topic, and Silicon Valley self-optimizers have normalized its use in the workplace — and beyond. Consider, for instance, the GQ headline, “Micro-dosing: The Drug Habit Your Boss Is Gonna Love,” and The Guardian’s “‘It makes me enjoy playing with the kids’: is microdosing mushrooms going mainstream?”
With mothers and CEOs alike openly microdosing, this steady progression into the mainstream shows why microdosing could be paramount to the future of psychedelics: it can lower the barrier to entry. While it’s reasonable to assume there’s long been an overlap in the Venn diagram of tech workers and the psychedelic underground (after all, it’s well-known that Steve Jobs used psychedelics, and some have even credited the substances with the invention of the internet), it’s also possible that if Fadiman had recommended that Ferriss’s followers go out and take an ego-dissolving dose of psychedelics, many likely would have passed. By taking a sub-perceptual dose, however, people curious — and perhaps hesitant — about the benefits of psychedelics can find a gentle entry point into the larger world of their use.
A new standard of care
Getting the vast majority of people comfortable with taking large doses of psychedelics isn’t the point, of course; not everyone needs that. But getting people comfortable with the idea of psychedelic use is key to their widespread dissemination to those who do need it — psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy could become legal if popular opinion can override governmental trepidation. And getting psychedelics legalized could be vital in face of the world’s growing mental health crisis.
“It would be much safer if it was legal, so you could openly seek expert advice,” a mother named Rosie, who struggled with her mental health and a drinking problem until she discovered microdosing, told The Guardian. “I’ve taken antidepressants with lists of side-effects as long as my arm. Now I’m taking something with no known side-effects and it’s working… And I’m significantly happier as a consequence.”
Like Rosie, some 13% of the global population (or nearly 971 million people) suffers some kind of mental illness, according to the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation. In the U.S. alone, antidepressant use has gone up 60% since 2010, with 25 million adults now on antidepressants for more than two years. Suicide rates are rising, loneliness has become an epidemic, and feelings of meaninglessness are pervasive, suggesting that humanity may be in the throes of an all-out existential crisis. What’s more, the way we currently treat these mental health issues isn’t working. Antidepressants work less than 50% of the time, and people on these drugs are 2.5 times more likely to attempt suicide.
All of this makes one thing clear: when it comes to mental health, we are in desperate need of a new standard of care. Although it may sound like a high-handed statement, psychedelics could be a big part of the solution. On top of a lot of other promising research, a recent study of 27 people with major depressive disorder found that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy worked far better than standard antidepressants. Another researcher studying the efficacy of psychedelics compared to pharmaceuticals for depression even went so far as to call their preliminary results “game-changing.”
Seeding a social movement
That’s the good news. The bad news is, getting this game-changing care into the hands (or minds) of everyone in need is still a ways off. Which is why it’s more important than ever that microdosing gain widespread acceptance. While microdosing has been studied far less than “full” doses of psychedelics, some research does support the anecdotal claims of their efficacy. A study from the University of Bergen, for instance, found that the 21 male respondents reported improved mood, cognition, and creativity, and that these effects relieved symptoms of anxiety and depression. Another study from the Dutch Psychedelic Society found that microdosing psilocybin truffles could potentially enhance creativity, and yet another found that microdosing increased reported psychological functioning and decreased reported levels of depression and stress.
This isn’t just to show what microdosing can do though; it’s about getting scientific proof that proponents of the practice are not just looking for an excuse to be high all day, but are looking for true mental and spiritual wellbeing. After all, like CBD, the idea with microdosing is to not feel the effects of the drug, but rather the abatement of negative or unwanted feelings. And much like CBD opened the door to the widespread legalization of both medical and recreational cannabis, microdosing could lay the groundwork for widespread acceptance of psychedelic use.
It’s important to exhibit some caution here. Though many people have high hopes for microdosing, researchers have yet to prove out the myriad of claims being made about its life-changing efficacy — and we still don’t know the long-term side-effects, good or bad. It’s also speculative to say that microdosing will trigger a paradigm shift in how psychedelic use is perceived by mainstream culture. We just don’t know yet.
That said, the more of a grassroots groundswell there is, the less solid ground those interested in stamping out psychedelics altogether have to stand on. With more people touting the benefits of microdosing and pushing to end prohibition, the more pressure there is on the powers that be to make lasting change. | https://medium.com/@thethirdwave/a-sub-perceptual-promise-can-microdosing-solve-mainstream-problems-56d9032fdd3f | ['The Third Wave'] | 2020-12-27 12:52:37.250000+00:00 | ['Microdosing', 'Psychedelics', 'Marijuana', 'Ayahuasca', 'Cannabis'] |
What Matters | ‘You have the power to change the world’. This statement is not a generic, mumbo-jumbo of words, it is an actual representation of the fact that power is persuasive. It is the root of bringing the desired change. Voicing out opinions, standing against the wrong, speaking out one’s truth are all forms of it. Craving for power is universal. It indicates one’s individuality.
Youth is the backbone of any nation. It is a period when one is filled with unprecedented zeal, tolerance, enthusiasm and vigour. According to a paper, ninety percent of the teenagers across the globe have used social media, seventy-five percent report having at least one social media profile and fifty-one percent report using nine hours of it daily. Now counter-intuitively this sounds quite a waste of time. But is it?
Social media is not just a mere tool used for enjoyment and momentary satisfaction, it has exceeded far beyond one’s expectations. It has become an embodiment of human imagination.
Statistically generation Z has been found to be the the most avid operator of social media. Youth involvement in advocating social causes have skyrocketed with more and more of them being cognizant of the sensitivity regarding issues. The mere fact that youth contributes 1.4 billion out of 7.2 billion on the planet exhibits enough power to transfigure a major revolution. With popular social applications such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook flooding with seminars, workshops and internships organised by them speaks volumes regarding efforts to acknowledge the support.
Search the internet and you’ll find millions of ways on how to be happy and lead a stress-free life. We all seek some sort of a truism that can make our lives simple yet extraordinary. But we live in a world bound by time and space. Very familiar and amicable places retain an imperishable capacity to surprise us. You may be wandering down the street that you’ve known for years and the next thing you know, you are under hospital surveillance. Newness can explode comfort. If your heart misses a beat momentarily, things could be fatal. Trusted friends can deceive. All of this is present and real. Circumstances are sometimes unavoidable. A woman in her mid thirties could seem absolutely functioning one day, and the next day you know she could be diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. Mental illness affects everyone, even if you yourself are not mentally ill, there may be someone in your life who is affected by it and that in turn is affecting you. Keeping this in mind, we as a society do not pay much attention to it. We typically tend to believe that if one can get through the day, all is satisfactory but that’s rarely the case. According to the World Health Organisation, a person commits suicide every forty seconds. By the time you finish reading this someone, somewhere would’ve taken their own life. The reality is we cannot control mental illness, we can only control how to support the people in need.
The youth is like a storehouse of potential energy waiting to be explored. There are numerous examples of ‘youngsters’ who have not only shown a new direction towards a seemingly unattainable goal but also broken existing chains of age-old stigmas and systematic oppression.
Jaylen Arnold, a teenager who after being bullied for having the Tourette syndrome and Aspergers went on to create the Jaylen Challenge foundation, a community that stands against bullying and understands individual differences, Gabby Frost, a 20 year old at Drexel founded a suicide prevention app called the ‘buddy project’., Amanda Southworth, 16 went on to create a software that backs up the LGBTQ+ community after being diagnosed with depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies. These people have paved mini steps for bringing out a huge impact towards the greater hour of need. It has also been that youth hold broader definitions of gender and are likely to use gender-neutral pronouns while communicating. They are more sensitive and recognise the presence of intersectionality and mental health. In India itself, youth constitutes 65% of the total population. That’s a great amount of power if put into right usage.
We are all home sapiens, no matter how different. We react similarly to a vast range of activities. It is thus our responsibility to propagate and boost mental health not just for ourselves but the upcoming generation. That is real progress, that is what authentic power is all about and that is what really matters. | https://medium.com/@krittikachan224/what-matters-f3c9d9d861d9 | ['Krittika Chandhok'] | 2020-12-09 20:06:52.422000+00:00 | ['Revolution', 'Power', 'Change', 'Youth', 'India'] |
Games and Goals | Games and Goals
Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
Brazilian jiu jitsu is undergoing a renaissance. With the advent of YouTube and social media, new techniques are instantly shared and iterated on. The entire community is taking part in a massive refining process. The discipline and the sport, though, are two separate things.
Perhaps the most succinct definition of the discipline is elite coach, John Danaher’s:
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a grappling-based martial art whose central theme is the skill of controlling a resisting opponent in ways that force him to submit.
Danaher has played a huge hand in the recent evolution—he knows what a proficient grappler looks like. What’s the essence of grappling proficiency though? Is there an objective measure of how good any given grappler is in achieving these ends?
The short answer is no. There are practical limits to just how “real” any combat sport can be. The most effective way to control a person might actually be to gouge an eye out or to try to rip their ear off. We choose not to emphasize these techniques, though, for practical purposes (to put it lightly).
So because we can’t directlytest and measure the actual thing, we test and measure something close enough to it. A proxy for Danaher’s stated definition. We measure our progress by gamifying jiu jitsu and making it sport.
Sport jiu jitsu is our best “metric” for an athlete’s proficiency. Excessively violent or debilitating moves that would render an athlete permanently disabled have been removed to allow practitioners to train regularly. The ruleset encourages them to train in a sustainable way. It’s slightly off-center from measuring the true thing, but it’s close enough. The goal is to set up the rules in a way that ensures that an athlete who becomes a world champion is certainly among the best at controlling an opponent in a way that leads to submission. | https://medium.com/@gkjohns/games-and-goals-71e3842887b7 | ['Kyle Johnson'] | 2020-01-12 23:17:38.318000+00:00 | ['Metrics', 'Jiu Jitsu', 'Data Science', 'Analytics'] |
Fibery.io Chronicles #22. Accumulating $1M+ seed round in May 2020. | Product Updates
May was a productive month for us.
DONE
Whiteboard: Collaborators List and Cursors, Navigation Shortcuts, Text instrument and Text formatting
Now you can see all collaborators and what they are doing on a whiteboard.
Some shortcuts were added to Whiteboard:
“pan” mode. : Space + left mouse (change cursor to hand) click
zoom in/out : Ctrl/Option/Alt/Cmd + mouse scroll
duplicate object : Option/Alt + Drag:
delete object : Backspace/Delete:
It was impossible to annotate diagrams with text and select text formatting options: font, size, alignment. Now you can do it all.
Formulas: Logic and Today in formulas, New formula editor
It was hard to create formulas. Now it is easier. Formula creation becomes a pleasant experience with the new formula editor: large panel, autocomplete, inline help and some examples:
Today operators was added as well.
Cycle Time calculation example:
If([Planned Dates].End > Today(), ToDays(Today() - [Planned Dates].Start), ToDays([Planned Dates].End - [Planned Dates].Start))
Collapsible Headers in Text
Long documents are easier to handle with collapsible headers.
Back navigation
It was hard to get back when you navigate between open entities. Now it is easy. We’ve introduced Back action inside entities with a short history to quickly return to the desired entity. Duh! Hard to explain, just check the gif below:
Copy entity URL
It was hard to share a link to the exact entity. Now it is easy. Just hover an entity id and click to copy a clean URL:
Calendar and Timeline setup
It was hard to setup Calendar or Timeline View. It was not clear what dates to select, what fields have time, what is range and what is not. Now it is easy. Select a single option when it is a range and see all important information on date fields:
New Getting Started + Survey
We decided to pre-install some apps based on user interests. Lena Dorogenskaya designed a beautiful survey:
Usability Testing App
Plan and execute usability tests and customer research via brand new Usability Testing App:
IN PROGRESS
Bi-directional links for all mentioned entities
This feature is still in progress, but close. Hopefully it will be released in June. It will help you to use weak links to connect information. For example, you can mention some feature in a customer feedback document, and inside this feature you will have a back-reference to this document.
Whiteboard: map
Sometimes whiteboards become large and hard to navigate. We also have a funny, but nasty bug, when content scrolls away and you have to scroll ~100 pages to get it back 🤯.
Map component will solve it, since it will be possible to quickly navigate the whole canvas.
Performance improvements
Fibery performance is not great on large data volumes. We are working on several areas:
Board View
Table View
Entity View
Hopefully Fibery will be 30–50% faster in June.
Better import
There are numerous problems with import, like slow load and impossibility to import hierarchical data. New import will solve this.
Better permissions
Initial permissions implementation in Fibery was unrestrictive. For example, we decided to make id and name of all entities visible to all people (to simplify navigation and prevent confusion). However, in many cases it violates access restrictions and name can contain sensitive information. Now we are re-working permissions to hide names and fix quite many bugs.
Blog
We are going to migrate to our own blog. Medium is fine, but at some point we want to write posts in Fibery and publish them into the static blog (we use GatsbyJS for it).
Gallery View
This View is required for Product Teams case to accumulate design ideas, share design system, etc. We’ve designed it, but implementation is not started yet: | https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-io-chronicles-22-accumulating-1m-seed-round-in-may-2020-de84695bf2e3 | ['Michael Dubakov'] | 2020-06-04 08:22:50.419000+00:00 | ['Fibery', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Product Management', 'Productivity'] |
Parallel testing: get feedback earlier, release faster | Parallel testing: get feedback earlier, release faster
How to test your iOS apps with Xcode 10 effectively
As the only person responsible for testing the Azimo iOS app, I encounter problems of all sizes. When I started at Azimo nearly four years ago, testing was 100% manual. A full test cycle could take up to two days 😱. Some functionality wasn’t tested at all, let alone on different devices and operating systems.
These days, only 15% of our testing is manual. Automation has made us faster and more efficient. In 2018, we 99.9% of our users were crash-free. Due to the complexity of our application, however, a full test cycle took around eight hours. More than half of this time was taken up by automated tests. Given that we release at least once per week, we needed to find a way to reduce our test cycle even further.
Fortunately, on June 5th, a revolution arrived. At the WWDC 2018 conference, Apple announced support for parallel testing in Xcode 10. This reduced our cycle of 250 automated tests to around 55 minutes and made my life a lot less stressful in the process 😎.
Integration takes ~56 minutes on 5 simulators with 247 test cases — 98.38% passed
In this article, I will guide you through the benefits of parallel testing as we have experienced them at Azimo. I will outline what we test, how we configured our machine and the problems that we encountered. I will also provide some tips and tricks that will help you to get the most out of parallel testing.
Testing in parallel on 5 simulators
Parallel testing in UI Tests
Parallel testing was introduced for iOS devices in Xcode 9. Since then, we have been able to test different classes in parallel on different devices. The Xcode 9 version, however, required us to use the command line with appropriate parameters.
Xcode 10
The revolutionary feature of Xcode 10 is an automation tester — the ability to run different test classes simultaneously on multiple simulators directly from the Xcode level, with far less effort from a human tester. It’s as simple as enabling the feature:
How to enable parallel testing option
In this mode, Xcode creates several clones of the same simulator (e.g. if we use the iPhone X simulator, then Xcode creates simulated iPhone X clones). This only works for simulated devices. We will tackle parallel testing on physical devices later in the article.
Benefits:
Simple, intuitive configuration
Faster test execution
Faster feedback
Allows for more releases
Check the application server on multiple devices at the same time (request, timeouts etc.)
No need to create further test targets, to distribute test classes between them
Great integration with CI
Drawbacks:
In the case of an unstable back-end / application server the possibility of occurring timeouts (several requests at the same time may cause longer responses)
Plenty of processing power needed to keep simulators stable
Flakiness — if any of the above problems occur
Cloning the same device / system configuration, not being able to test at the same time on several different configurations (we must use the command line)
Assumptions:
The basic condition that must be met to use parallel testing is the independence of test cases. For example:
We cannot rely on test B starting only after test A is complete
A faster execution or result of test B cannot affect the results of test A and vice versa
Useful parameters:
maximum-concurrent-test-simulator-destinations NUMBER the maximum number of simulator destinations to test on concurrently parallel-testing-enabled YES|NO overrides the per-target setting in the scheme parallel-testing-worker-count NUMBER the exact number of test runners that will be spawned during parallel testing maximum-parallel-testing-workers NUMBER the maximum number of test runners that will be spawned during parallel testing
Effective division of tests
To maximise the advantages of parallel testing, we must divide the test cases into classes. Let’s use our international money transfer application, Azimo, as an example, and assume that our full test cycle contains five test cases.
The first option, which we definitely don’t recommend, is to create one large class containing all five test cases:
It is far better to create several smaller test classes:
In the first example, we have no way to test in parallel because Xcode assigns test classes to simulators: namely one free test class is allocated to one free device. Even if we have five devices available, only one can be used. In the second case, each class can be tested on a separate device.
If you have more classes than available devices, say six classes and only five devices, the first device that completes testing will receive the sixth and final class.
Run in parallel via command line
If we want to test in parallel on physical devices, we are forced to use the command line. There are several ways to do this.
For parallel testing using the command line, we need the ID of our devices. The first step is to display all connected devices and simulators together with their ID, using the following command:
xcrun instruments -s devices
Using the ID of a specific physical device, we can run the command responsible for running parallel testing.
In the project folder, we run the following command:
xcodebuild \
-scheme Azimo \
-destination id={deviceID1} \
-destination id={deviceID2} \
test
This command will run the same test classes in parallel on two different devices. This approach allows us to test on different devices and systems simultaneously, but doesn’t save us any time.
To speed things up, we can manually separate classes into devices. First we need to build our testing project with the following command:
xcodebuild -project Azimo.xcodeproj -scheme Azimo -destination id={deviceID} build-for-testing
Then we divide our test classes into the number of available devices. For example, with four test classes and two available devices, it is best to divide the two test classes into each device as follows:
xcodebuild \
-scheme Azimo \
-destination id={deviceID1} \
-only-testing: Azimo/login_tests \
-only-testing: Azimo/register_tests \
test-without-building & xcodebuild \
-scheme Azimo \
-destination id={deviceID2} \
-only-testing: Azimo/createRecipient_tests \
-only-testing: Azimo/createTransfer_tests \
test-without-building &
In the case mentioned above, separating the classes into devices saves a lot of time. The optimal solution would be to use four devices, one for each class, but this isn’t always possible.
Another way to divide test classes is to create a new test target, eg Azimo1, and to include there appropriate test classes other than in the Azimo Target.
Adding classes to the test target
Assuming that the Azimo target has different test classes than the Azimo1 target and vice versa, we run parallel testing on both targets on different devices by using the following command:
xcodebuild \
-scheme Azimo \
-destination id={deviceID1} \
test-without-building & \ xcodebuild \
-scheme Azimo1 \
-destination id={deviceID2} \
test-without-building &
The test execution time will be equal to the execution time using the -only-testing parameter together with the determination of the test classes.
As you can see, the above methods work but require some human effort (creating new targets, separating tests between targets, maintaining targets when adding new cases / test classes). Xcode 10 brought substantial benefits that help with this.
Continuous Integration
Since Xcode 9, Apple has supported a built-in Xcode server. Previously, we had to use an additional OS X server application. Creating and configuring an Xcode server is simple: go to Xcode -> Preferences -> Server & Bots, and create new Xcode server with the correct credentials.
After enabling and configuring an Xcode server, next we must create a bot to run integration with the given configuration. In our case, it’s a bot called UITestsDaily. The bot runs a full cycle of application tests at our local CI every day at midnight.
Command to force running tests on 5 simulators in parallel
Personally, by configuring the bot through parameters parallel-testing-worker-count with the value 5, I enforce running tests on five simulators at the same time.
At Azimo, we use an iMac (specification below) with Xcode 10 installed. This serves as our local continuous integration.
Why use the solution above?
Each bot has an integration history (screenshots, logs etc.)
On our personal computer we can implement / debug other test scenarios while integration is tested on CI
More resources (memory, processor) — while allows us to run more simulators in parallel testing
Continuous Integration specification
The above specification allows you to run parallel testing on five stable simulators. My MacBook Pro 15” (16GB RAM, Intel i7 2.2GHZ) allows up to 3 simulators. This allows us to save a lot of time.
Disadvantages:
Requires a dedicated, hi-spec computer
Large integrations use a lot of memory
No easy way to clean old and unnecessary data
No flexibility in bot configuration (for example, we can not set integration to start every 30 minutes)
Test reporting
After every integration started on our CI, we want to know what % of tests were successful. One option is to connect to the CI and enter a specific integration, then manually check. A better option is to use the Slack + Fastlane connection, which sends notifications to Slack immediately after completing the integration:
Notification on slack after integration 98.38% passed
As you can see, the above integration provides us with a lot of interesting information, including:
Branch on which integration was carried out
Name of the bot on which the integration was made
Number of tests in the integration
Number of failed tests
Percentage of tests completed successfully
Triggers
Each of the created bots has the tab Triggers. There we can determine what should be called before and after each integration. Properly written scripts can speed up debugging — searching for reasons for integration errors (eg, attempting to test for a device that does not exist, running a script from a wrong directory, etc.). On the example of integration of UITests Daily, it will show what we use to improve our work.
Pre-integration scripts — commands invoked before integration
Log information
Print of environmental variables
Print a list of all available simulators
Print all files in the current folder
Print the path to the current folder
Clean
Cleaning simulators before running the testing
Opening a folder with a project
Post-integration scripts — commands to be invoked after integration
Log information
Print of environmental variables
Print the path to the current folder
Send status
Opening the home directory so that we can benefit from sending status from integration into Slack
Print the path to the current folder
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 — setting locale in a terminal session export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH — adding a path to usr / local / bin to the path variable (in our case to facilitate access to the use of Fastlane)
echo: “…..:: all env variables ::…..”,
“…..:: send status ::…..”,
“…..:: simulators list ::…..”,
“…..:: list current folder ::…..”
the above printouts make it easier to search in the logs of the values we are interested in.
In future: testing in cloud
I hope that this article provided some useful information about the benefits of parallel testing. While parallel testing has saved us huge amounts of time and effort, it still has hardware limitations (you always need more devices/processing power). Our next step is to start testing in the cloud, where resources are almost limitless. I will write about this in my next article.
If you have any questions, feel free to post in the comment section 🤓. | https://medium.com/azimolabs/parallel-testing-get-feedback-earlier-release-faster-b66d4dd08930 | ['Paweł Zemsta'] | 2018-12-29 13:33:00.134000+00:00 | ['iOS App Development', 'iOS', 'Quality Assurance', 'Software Testing', 'Testing'] |
On being too clever to pick a side | “Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.”
“Women have no idea how much men hate them.”
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
What do these quotations have in common?
1. They’re all by women.
2. They’re all depressing.
3. They are all, let’s face it, a bit bloody crass.
Catchy though they are, such slogans are sorely lacking in nuance. Come on, Atwood, Greer, Angelou — don’t you want to sound a bit more mysterious? You don’t see Judith Butler or Julia Kristeva coming out with lines like this. Anyone would think you actually believed we live in a world of massive power disparities, in which dominant groups actually want to see vulnerable groups dead. Whereas, if you put your mind to being more humble and thoughtful (and ignored all the real-life slaughter), you’d see that — <strokes perimenopausal beard portentously> — things are a BIT more complicated than that.
Or — <strokes burgeoning moustache even more portentously> — ARE they?
One of the problems feminists have to deal with, time and again, is the sheer in-your-faceness of patriarchy. There’s nothing very subtle about rape, domestic abuse, child sexual exploitation, murder. At first glance, you might think this works to our advantage, at least in terms of making the case for why patriarchy is bad. Alas, it turns out, again, that it’s a bit more complicated than that. When male violence is so prevalent, yet also so everyday, so normalised, so excused in so many ways, it’s very hard to be the person who keeps on pointing out it’s happening at all.
I mean, yeah? We know, it’s obvious. Millions of baby girls missing, rape virtually decriminalised, 830 needless maternal deaths per day. Your point?
“Men keep threatening to kill — and in fact killing — women and girls” is just not very interesting or complex. On the contrary, it all sounds terribly basic. Aren’t there more fascinating debates to be had about language and symbols and whether in fact — hear me out on this, it’s counter-intuitive hence super-clever — female people are in fact complicit or even to blame for their own deaths, what with them weaponising their pain by performing being murdered within the cisheteronormative capitalist economy? Makes you think, doesn’t it? Whereas a plain, boring feminism that says “no, I don’t think you threatening to kill me with a machete offers us all a unique opportunity to explore why I am in fact The Man” doesn’t make you think at all. It sounds so painfully obvious it’s hard not to suspect there’s something you must have missed.
Herein lies the road to opportunistic both sides-ism. A close relation to victim blaming, it relieves us of the moral responsibility of bearing witness to the hurt done to others. It tells us we are too clever, too humble, too conscious of nuance, to fall for anything so simplistic as a straightforward victim-perpetrator narrative. On the contrary, it makes a virtue of our bystanding. Those women who are begging you to intervene? They lack your heightened sensitivity, your intellectual discernement, your ability to see shades of grey in a fist to the face.
We do not want to think very hard about the things men do to women and children. At some point, it all acquires the status of myth. Does anyone really believe in the prevalence of child sexual abuse? Or is it in fact some pearl-clutching, what-about-the-children moral panic concocted by radicalised Mumsnet witches? I know which story would play best on social media. I know which one would make me look like some daft hag who gets in a tizz about child protection because her brain has been turned to porridge by years of childcare, rendering her incapable of thinking the very hard thoughts in which her Brass Eye-loving student self once revelled. And I know how powerful the desire not to look stupid is, matched only by the desire not to recognise and challenge those who could really do us harm.
As Judith Herman wrote in Trauma and Recovery, “it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator”:
“All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”
The victim is rarely an appealing person. Anger, fear and hurt do not a winning disposition make, a situation which lends itself easily to the “both sides” narrative. The practical, rational desire not to intervene, because it is risky and upsetting, because it aligns one with the messy, disruptive victim, creates a need to see complexity where there is none. If you can position yourself as morally and intellectually superior to those basic types who still “take sides” (how childish!), then you have not only saved yourself the work of serious political engagement, but you can kid yourself that your conscience is clear. And — added bonus — it’s because you’re cleverer and kinder than everyone else!
Asking others for help, or even just validation, in the face of abuse becomes impossible when people perceive it to be an attack on their precious neutrality. The more proof you provide, the more you are seen to be demonstrating your aggression and lack of subtlety. Actual bruises are viewed as a kind of trump card that you shouldn’t be wielding. You are cheating by suggesting you have it worse, by bringing out all that unsubtle, uncomplicated evidence. You are making the people you turn to uncomfortable, bullying them with your infantile requests that they take sides while they — poor, innocent neutrals! — are caught in the middle. Even writing this feels immature. The mature view, the rational view, the nuanced view, is that no one can ever really say what really went on. Deny a person their nuance, and you are launching at attack on a person’s sense of themselves as a good person, as someone who most definitely would intervene if it were needed (but it wasn’t, otherwise they would have done so). How could you be so cruel?
I don’t want to be thought of as a simple, unthinking person who can’t approach topics in a nuanced way. I, too, want to be the clever person who indulges in impressive intellectual acrobatics, especially if it grants me the added bonus of never having to fall on the wrong side of the people I fear the most. I don’t want to be seen as a bully by people who consider themselves too fragile and intellectually refined to take cries for help at face value, instead translating them into personal attacks. I, too, would like us all to get along, but not at the expense of hearing and validating women’s testimonies. I am simply tired of not taking a particular position on an issue — especially, somehow, an issue relating to women’s rights — being treated as synonymous with being more intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful.
It is not hard to over-complicate that which is straightforward, not that intellectually taxing to make an abusive relationship look like some muddy, confusing, overwhelming mess that only a complete idiot would be arrogant enough to claim to understand. Often it is far more difficult and requires far more compassion not to be a bystander at all. | https://medium.com/@glosswatch/on-being-too-clever-to-pick-a-side-641f7a8fe535 | ['Victoria Smith'] | 2021-06-20 12:54:12.389000+00:00 | ['Bothesidesism', 'Violence', 'Feminism'] |
Old Trees | ( A poem from an unapologetic tree hugger)
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
The wonder of a tree I think is this:
It doesn’t seem to mind or keep close tabs.
The older it grows, the less it seems to miss
its slender arms, smooth bark, and tight tree abs.
Beauty in trees grows deeper with aging:
the fiercer the fight, the stronger the core.
Trees in their youth are constantly waging
a war for the right to grow — and change — more.
If only we humans could age with such glee —
Excuse me, I must go hug an old tree! | https://medium.com/crows-feet/old-trees-103689d3b18a | ['Deborah Barchi'] | 2020-05-06 20:34:53.913000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Nature', 'Self Improvement', 'Aging', 'Poetry'] |
Put your gauntlets on: it’s time to fight #momguilt | Someone asked me the other day about mom guilt. “Ugh, it’s the worst” she said. Raise your hand if you agree! I can sit here and easily come up with a list of half a dozen ways I’ve battled mom guilt in the last 24 hours. I bet we all can. After all, isn’t mom guilt just a part of motherhood?
Back in the beginning of December I got serious thinking about when and why I feel guilty, because I wanted to do something to change it. I realized that there are three scenarios that my mom guilt typically falls into, and they all have to do with my values. Once I figured out what was causing the guilt, I came up with a combat strategy for each of the scenarios. Ready mamas? Put your gauntlets on, because it’s time to fight the #momguilt.
#momguilt scenario 1: internal values conflict
Let’s say you have two things that are important to you happening at the same time, and you have to choose one of them. Choosing one means you’ll feel guilty about not picking the other one. When one or both of these choices has to do with your kids, that’s mom guilt. Another way to say this is mom guilt is when two of your values are in conflict with each other. Example: I value my health, but I also value my family. This past Saturday there was a gym class I wanted to go to, but I also wanted to spend time with C & M because I hadn’t seen them much during the week. If I pick the gym, #momguilt for not spending time with my kids. If I pick taking my kids to the park, #momguilt for not taking care of myself. WTH?!
Soooo… what’s my combat strategy? I remind myself that when I choose to live one value over another at any given moment, I’m not compromising my values. Instead, I know that all of my values work together in harmony towards what I want to achieve in life. I want to be fit and healthy, and I want to be close with my kids. Sometimes I’ll do one, and sometimes I’ll do the other. It’s not tension — it’s balance. The challenge with feeling guilty when your values are in conflict is that you’ll feel guilty (or worse, resentful) no matter what you choose. That’s just silly!
#momguilt scenario 2: external values conflict
Let’s say you want to do something important to you, but someone or something is telling you that you should be doing something else. Another way to say this is that your values are at odds with someone else’s. Example: this morning Moseah woke up at 5:45am. Early mornings are the only time I have to myself, and he usually sleeps until 7am. So, I let him fuss and cry for about half an hour until he fell back asleep. But I sat there feeling guilty because society tells me I “shouldn’t” let my baby cry that much. And, because some sleep-training experts say I “shouldn’t” let him go to bed at different times and I let him stay up a little late the last two nights. Argh!
What’s my combat strategy? I’ve learned to tell myself what Rachel Hollis learned to tell herself: “other people’s opinions are none of your business”. You know who knows my kids best? Me. You know who ultimately knows what’s best for them? Me. You know how I know I’m a great mom? Because I’m asking that question. The only person whose values I need to live are my own. I research the heck out of everything for my kids, and I can find experts that say the exact opposite things when it comes to just about any parenting strategy. There is no one right way; I can only do what I think is best given the information and resources I have.
#momguilt scenario 3: not living my values
Let’s say you have something that is important to you, but you’re tired, hungry, stressed, overwhelmed, you name it. You have every intention of doing the thing that’s important to you, but you just…. Don’t. Another way to say this is for whatever reason, you’re not able to live your values. Example: Positive parenting is one of my values. I always try to come from a place of love, understanding, and empathy when Cimorene has a toddler tantrum. But this past year — at the tender age of 2, right after Moseah was born — she decided that she was no longer going to nap. I was exhausted from having a newborn, and one afternoon I was desperate. I had tried validating her feelings, telling her about a time when I also didn’t want to do something… nothing worked. So, I threw my hands up, walked out, and shut the door. I literally stood there pulling the doorknob closed while she stood on the other side screaming and trying to open it. Oh man did I feel guilty after, because that doesn’t fit my parenting values!
What’s my combat strategy for this one? I give myself grace and appreciate that I’ve learned something about myself from this experience. If I just feel guilty and don’t do anything differently, that’s no good. But if I can understand why I feel guilty and then choose to behave differently next time, then it turns guilt into power.
Let’s start a new chapter for 2020, sans #momguilt
Do I still feel mom guilt? YES! But now I can notice it and say, ooooh, I know you. And I know exactly how to get rid of you. And I do. When Cimorene was born it seemed I was always feeling guilty about something. Now the feeling might pop up during the day, but most of the time it’s gone as soon as I notice what’s happening. I feel better, and I’m not wasting energy on an emotion that’s often unproductive.
These are the top three strategies that I use to combat mom guilt, but I’ve got a few more that wouldn’t fit in this post. Stay tuned for more next week…
www.begoodtomama.com | Weekly Goodness | https://medium.com/@rhiannon_51058/put-your-gauntlets-on-its-time-to-fight-momguilt-77e3e66cfaa3 | ['Rhiannon Menn'] | 2020-01-15 17:49:23.821000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Mom Guilt', 'Personal Development', 'Parenting', 'Moms'] |
Promoting a Free Educational App — Book Jar — for Parents of K-12 Children | We officially launched the free Book Jar app on the Apple Appstore and Google Play Store two weeks ago. It is meant for parents of kids in K-12 schools where children are encouraged to read books on their own by setting Accelerated Reader (AR) goals. The Accelerated Reader (AR) program is a commercial program that many schools purchase from a company.
It allows the schools to evaluate student reading comprehension using computerized quizzes. For example, if a student reads a book and takes the comprehension quiz for that book in the school, they can earn AR points. Each student sets their own AR goal per trimester, and if they achieve their goals, they often get rewarded by the teacher or their parents.
As a parent of two elementary school-going boys, I wanted to make it easy for me to choose the right books for them and track their AR goal progress. So I made a simple app for the parents who care about this specific niche area of their children’s education.
However, launching a free app for parents is one thing, and getting it in front of them is a different matter. I don’t want to “push” it in front of them too much. More importantly, there is not an advertising budget for this in my company. We already contributed all the engineering time and resources to build this and offer it as a free app. You can see more details about the app at:
https://bookjar.app
My initial plan to promote this app is as follows:
Word of mouth — I am going to meet anywhere from 10–20 parents in this school year and a few of them might be interested in Book Jar.
— I am going to meet anywhere from 10–20 parents in this school year and a few of them might be interested in Book Jar. Medium.com Posts — this very post is one of the attempts to talk about Book Jar, and I plan to write a few more posts about it from time to time.
— this very post is one of the attempts to talk about Book Jar, and I plan to write a few more posts about it from time to time. I nstagram Post and advertising — lots of parents and teachers are on Instagram. So, I could post to target this very niche audience who want to help their kids with AR reading goals.
— lots of parents and teachers are on Instagram. So, I could post to target this very niche audience who want to help their kids with AR reading goals. Reach out to online parents and teachers resources — this might be hard as sending an email or Facebook/Instagram messages to strangers are often undesirable by the recipients.
— this might be hard as sending an email or Facebook/Instagram messages to strangers are often undesirable by the recipients. Reach out to relevant YouTubers — this might also be difficult but needs to be explored.
Since school just started for my kids, I haven’t been speaking to parents yet. Soon we will have events, birthdays and play-dates, the usual school social activities. I will share the Book Jar app personally with some parents who might be interested.
Since my kids go to an outstanding public school, there is a good chance that I can speak to the Principal and other teachers about Book Jar. Perhaps, I can make a PDF flyer that they can share with parents. It will be a great way to introduce the app to their school. If this works, I can reach out to a few other schools through email and visits.
The medium.com posts are straightforward to write and publish, like this one. I will research some details on the pros and cons of the Accelerated Reading (AR) program and post a few relevant articles.
Finally, the Instagram post and a tiny advertising campaign seem very interesting to explore. So, I did a small campaign spending $100 for seven days. Here are some interesting insights that I learned from this tiny campaign.
I created a quick-and-dirty Instagram post using the online Canva software, as shown below: | https://medium.com/tech-for-home-and-work/promoting-a-free-educational-app-book-jar-for-parents-of-k-12-children-4610bc4b61d7 | ['Kabir', 'Ko-Bir'] | 2019-11-22 08:01:23.583000+00:00 | ['Apps', 'Hometech'] |
Finding Your Truth in Your Inner Self | I have met very few people, who do not recognize the space of truth within themselves, the piece of them that exists before form, that is always whole and perfect and never hurt by their thinking to the contrary or someone else's thinking to the contrary.
It can get difficult to hear that space sometimes since our ego thinking has the tendency to get so loud, trying so hard to protect us from something that is not. But that space is there nonetheless and most people recognize it, remember it when they are reminded.
In that space we feel good and we begin to remember who we truly are, before thought, before negative self-talk, before insecurity or opinions of others.
When we find that space again, become re-acquainted with it, we once again tune into our inner voice; and many people, maybe most people, recognize that space as G-d, or Mind, or Wisdom.
When we touch that space and we begin to listen there instead of to the loud voice of personal thinking to which we have become accustomed, we can see that everything comes from that space.
Answers, yes, and desires as well.
And then we know, for sure, that G-d, or Mind, or Wisdom, has always been there for us and we can let go and be there for G-d.
The ultimate act of letting go in order to be there for ourselves. ❤ | https://medium.com/less-stress-more-success/finding-your-truth-in-your-inner-self-cd68528e3bd7 | ['Deborah Baron'] | 2020-12-23 18:51:54.471000+00:00 | ['Inner Peace', 'Wisdom', 'Self', 'Wellbeing', 'God'] |
Child Abuse & Domestic Violence: Here’s My Story | I woke up with heavy eyes this morning. I had another nightmare about the green-colored house I was abused in. Thank God it wasn’t real.
In my dream, I was paralyzed from the waist down. I’m laying on the old wooden floor in the entryway into the house. I stare through the porch windows and could see the dark gray clouds rolling in. The sky is getting darker. The thunder, louder. Yet, inside the house, it was eerily quiet.
Maybe this was how I felt when I got abused. Stuck. Scared. Waiting for the dark days to pass. And living a life that was eerily quiet because I never talked about what was happening at home.
A few minutes pass by and I’m able to feel my legs again. I eventually find the strength to get back up to walk around the house. As I walked through the dimly lit rooms, I could only feel the negative energy and trauma that was left there. I start to remember what happened in each room. I get anxious. I could hear myself breathing heavily. I was alone and terrified. I scream. I’m crying. Then, I wake up.
Maybe I went back to recollect the missing and broken pieces of my soul that I left there. I often felt helpless and afraid back then. I would scream, cry, and then find myself waking up the next morning. Living felt like a chore.
I don’t enjoy talking about my childhood abuse and my experience with domestic violence. In fact, I never talk about it with anyone other than my siblings; who also share the same pain and trauma with me. I never intended to share what I went through with anyone else, but I think now is an appropriate time to tell the story and how it’s still affecting me today.
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
Growing up, I always knew my family wasn’t “normal.” My younger self saw normal as having one dad and one mom. Normal would be playing, eating, sleeping, and living with mom, dad, and my siblings under one roof. Normal also meant my mom and dad would be there to support me and my siblings at school events, celebrate birthdays and achievements together, and going on fun family vacations in the summer. This would have been my idea of “normal” back then and what I wanted most as a child.
Here’s a photo of me when I was in pre-school. Credit to my cousin for finding and sharing this photo with me.
I was just three years old when my parents divorced. Their divorce happened a month before my fourth birthday. Considering I was so young, I didn’t know what was going on and what it meant for me or my siblings. One thing for sure was that we didn’t get to choose which parent we wanted to live with. If we could go back, I know we would have loved to grow up together. Even with our parents' divorce.
I don’t remember much from that time, only that some of us were left in my grandma’s care — someone who I’ll forever be grateful to have had in my life.
Starting from where I do remember clearly, my second oldest sister and I were on our way to the airport with our grandma. She told us we would be traveling to see our mom and little sister in Minnesota. I was so happy, I don’t remember questioning why our older brother and sister wouldn’t be coming along.
A few hours pass by, and we’re now boarding the Sun Country plane in Sacramento. My sister and I were excited but were also nervous. It was our first time flying. I remember us holding onto my grandma’s rough hands — from gardening and working so much — for comfort because of how loud and shaky it was when the flight took off. The worst part, however, was waking up from my nap during the flight and experiencing pain and pressure in both my ears.
Finally, we landed at the Minneapolis/Saint Paul (MSP) Airport. I knew the time we’d reunite with my mom and younger sister was getting closer. My little five-year-old heart was racing so fast because I hadn’t seen my mom in months.
As we exited the plane, I looked outside the big glass airport windows and saw how bright the sun was shining. It was confirmation that the day was going to be filled with love and light.
While making our way down the escalator to pick up our luggage from the carousel, my mom had been waiting for us at the bottom. I could see how happy she was to see us all. And next to her stood this guy I had never seen in my life before. I would grow up calling him, “Papa,” per his request.
After being picked up from the airport, we drove to our new home — an off-white colored duplex near 7th Street in Saint Paul. When we arrived, my mom had already made a room for me and my sisters, and we loved it. The house felt like home, just like my grandma’s house in California. Though, having my mom and grandma together in our presence, under one roof, made a house feel like home, again.
A couple of weeks pass by, my older sister and I stayed in Minnesota while my grandma left back to California. I was sad because my grandma was a mother-figure to me when my mom was still settling in with her new life in Minnesota. And while I love my mom, a part of me wished I could have returned with my grandma.
Then, months pass by and it was time for us to start school. I’d be attending kindergarten. In the early mornings before school, we would be dropped off at daycare while our parents went to work. Then, at 7 a.m., my two sisters and I would walk to school. This was our routine until I started fourth grade at a new school.
Life in Minnesota was not the same. We didn’t have many family members around. I would often call for my grandma whenever I was sad, but she’d be nowhere to be found. We also didn’t have big birthday celebrations that my sisters and I wanted to so badly to spend with our cousins and family in California. Essentially, this made us closer because we knew we only had each other. To play with. To talk with. To share with. And to grow with.
My sister’s and I also got used to calling our new dad, “Papa.” Yet, we missed our biological dad every day and wished we could see and talk to him. And just like my mom, our dad also got remarried and started a new life. I was happy. I was heartbroken.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
A couple of years pass and my ex step-dad begins to show signs of abusive behavior. He was an alcoholic and was often angry. He’d find every reason to drink and invite his friends over to gather and party. They were also alcoholics and toxic.
He eventually started to physically abuse my mom because he always had to be right. He would hit her, but only in their room so that we wouldn’t see it. Yet, my sisters and I always heard it because my mom would scream and cry for help. We’d feel hopeless every time because we didn’t have the strength to bust into a locked room to help her. As much as we wanted to help, all we could do was stand outside of their bedroom and painfully listen to what was happening.
This guy, who we called and saw as a “dad,” was a monster.
We were expected to be “good” daughters. Being a good daughter meant many things. We needed to obey him and make sure all of our chores were done before we could even start our homework. If we didn’t listen to him, we were bad daughters and would suffer the consequences later. We were afraid of him. So, as he wanted, we always listened. He was in control of all our lives.
The abuse got so bad. It was scarier than standing outside their bedroom door. Seeing our mom getting physically beat up in front of us became a norm after school. And during all those times, my mom would cry and tell us to go into our rooms. Even though we didn’t want to, we did. Although, not for long.
My sisters and I had enough. We didn’t care how little and weak we were. We were determined to fight back and make sure he wouldn’t be able to touch or hurt our mom again.
I don’t remember many of these painful days as I’ve suppressed many of the memories from this time in my life. I do, however, remember the one below clear as day.
It was 5 p.m. and my mom was still not home. My ex step-dad was getting angry because she wasn’t picking up her cell phone. My siblings and I were also wondering where she was but thought maybe she was stuck in traffic since it was snowing. He was getting more frustrated as each hour passed. He even lied and told us that our mom was out late cheating with another man and that she wasn’t a good mom. The truth was, she went to the store after work to relieve some stress. That was all. (And he was the one actually cheating.)
When she returned home that day — barely getting inside the house — he goes over and drags her by her hair and pushes her onto the old wooden floor. (The same spot I was laying in my dreams.) My sisters and I are sitting on the brown couch just watching all of this happen. We’re crying, helplessly. Then, we all decided that we’d jump in and try to protect our mom. It was our chance to help her. It was my chance to help her.
He doesn’t stop. He keeps on hitting her. He tells us to move over otherwise we’ll get beat, too. Of course, we refuse. We continue to cry together. We yell back and ask him to stop.
He proceeds to bring out his infamous black belt and starts whipping all of us. We’re crying because we didn’t know what else to do. Who would come to save us? We didn’t have family around. There was no hope. Not even a little. And we didn’t call the police because my mom told us not to. No one was there to comfort or save us.
Again, I would go to sleep with belt marks and small open wounds all over my body.
Many of my childhood nights were spent crying to sleep and hoping that the next day would be better. It wouldn’t get better until the end of seventh grade when my mom found the courage to leave. We were finally walking towards the light and making our way out of the dimly lit tunnel.
Photo by Yohei Shimomae on Unsplash
I’m so thankful we all made it out alive because who knows where we’d be if she hadn’t built the courage to leave. She didn’t care if she went against Hmong tradition or loss face. “Ua siab ntev” was killing her slowly. (“Ua siab ntev,” in Hmong, means to be patient and forgiving. In this situation, a Hmong woman should put her pride away and hope that her marriage will get better with time.)
I know a lot of people, including family, who have talked down about my mom. Sure, she has been divorced twice and remarried three times, but if only they knew she was physically and verbally abused by her first and second husband, maybe they’d understand why she chose to leave. And if they knew, they should have helped her. They should have helped us, too.
I used to be sad knowing that people would disrespect us and count our family out because we didn’t have a man in our household. To this day, if people — typically more traditional and older Hmong individuals— find out that my mom is a divorcee, they don’t respect me as much because I didn’t have a father in my life. It’s sad they judge us, and they don’t even know our story.
A woman and her children’s worth is not determined if she has a husband or if they have an active father in their life. (I’ll save the rest of this story for another time.) My hope is that people will learn to become more loving and less judgmental.
My mom is truly the strongest person I know. She doesn’t like to show or talk about her pain and trauma, but I always assure her that it’s okay to talk about it. She’s slowly learning to love herself more and tries to do more of what makes her happy. I’m proud of her growth and am glad to still have her in my life today.
I decided to share my experience about childhood abuse and domestic violence because I noticed it was starting to affect me as an adult.
I find myself flinching a lot when people touch me. I don’t like to be touched. Even by my husband. If people get too close, I get nervous. I don’t like it. I feel safer when they keep their distance. When people talk loudly to me, I sometimes ask them why they’re yelling at me. In reality, they’re not. I also hate staying in small rooms because it reminds me of those days. Small rooms make me feel trapped and suffocated. And I find it hard to believe that I’m beautiful somedays because, for years, my ex-step dad would call me “miss piggy” (in Hmong).
I have nightmares, sometimes back to back, about being in that house and being abused again — like the one I shared at the beginning of this story.
I am a crisis counselor and have had emotional breakdowns every time I had a live conversation with someone going through child abuse or domestic violence. I would ask myself, “Will they be safe? Will they make it out alive?” Thank goodness for having supportive supervisors and colleagues who helped me through each conversation to ensure the individuals were safe or received the help they needed. Nonetheless, they provided support and love by allowing me to debrief and get my feelings out.
I’ve not been active in my crisis counselor role for a while because I realized I needed to help myself before I can help others. It can be traumatizing to try and help others when past experiences are still haunting me. I’m also going through depression and anxiety, so until my mental health betters, it’ll be a while before I return to my role. I’m taking it day by day.
I didn’t realize how difficult and painful it would be to share my story. I wrote parts of this with tears rolling down and had to take breaks because the memories are still agonizing. I also discovered that I suppressed so much of what had happened to me until I started writing this piece. Memories that I forgot started flooding my mind.
I no longer want to keep them suppressed. I’m slowly learning to let go of those haunting memories. Let go of my anger. My pain. My sadness. My heartache. My fears.
I’m still finding healing, but writing and sharing this piece is the first step to overcoming this trauma and what I witnessed/experienced as a child.
If you or someone you know is experiencing child abuse or domestic violence, please don’t be afraid to seek help. And don’t be afraid to call 9–1–1. There are people waiting to help you or a loved one. I’ve also gathered a list of free resources and services below that you can reach out to for help. I’ll add to it as I find more resources.
Crisis Text Line
Text HOME to 741741
National Domestic Violence Hotline
Call 1–800–799-SAFE (7233)
Deaf or hard of hearing may use TTY 1–800–787–3224
National Child Abuse Hotline/Childhelp
1–800–4-A-CHILD (1–800–422–4453)
National Teen Dating Abuse Help
Call 1–866–331–9474
TTY 1–866–331–8453
Secure online chat at http://www.loveisrespect.org/get-help/contact-us/chat-with-us
Text “loveis” to 22522
National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN)
Call 1–800–656–4673 | Choose #1 to talk to a counselor
Secure online private chat at: https://ohl.rainn.org/online/
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
1–800–273–8255 (TALK) | https://medium.com/@alexisheuvue/domestic-violence-child-abuse-heres-my-story-ece1d1b46599 | ['Alexis Heu Vue'] | 2020-04-23 17:17:39.696000+00:00 | ['Domestic Violence', 'Domestic Abuse', 'Trauma', 'Child Abuse', 'Pain'] |
Fighting COVID-19 and promoting peace come together in Darfur | In the Darfur region of Sudan, with the myriad of internally displaced persons and nomadic communities, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has posed a significant threat to peace and security and further deteriorated the socio-economic situation.
The African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) — the peacekeeping mission that has been deployed since 2007 to protect civilians, facilitate humanitarian aid and help the political process in Darfur — has been adapting to these new challenges while continuing to implement its mandate.
UNAMID’s Governance and Community Stabilization Section (GCSS) works to address issues such as intercommunal violence and competition over limited natural resources, rights to land and the use of land. The proliferation of small arms, weakened traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, and the absence of the rule of law and effective state institutions has made a difficult situation even more complex.
“As Darfur grappled with these challenges, COVID-19 entered the scene,” said Zurab Elzarov, Chief of GCSS. “Preventive measures to fight the pandemic, including a nightly curfew, banning gatherings, and the closure of the international airport, markets, schools, and universities — all impacted the livelihoods and income of people in Darfur.”
Adapting to the common enemy: COVID-19
This situation prompted UNAMID to explore creative and nuanced ways to ensure it could continue its work promoting peace and reconciliation between communities and, at the same time, support the government and people in Darfur address the new threats and risks to civilians posed by COVID-19.
In mid-2020, the Mission began targeting rural areas of Zalingei, in Central Darfur, with a focus on locations where diverse groups from settled and nomadic communities are living together. Their goal was to spread messages on the importance of peaceful coexistence to address issues of mutual interest, including health.
UNAMID and its partners launched COVID-19 risk communication and community awareness projects targeting hot-spot areas, which featured peace and reconciliation messages that underscored the importance of leaving behind personal disputes and coming together, irrespective of tribal and community affiliations, to fight a common enemy: COVID-19.
The two-week project, in collaboration with the Central Darfur State Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO), was implemented with support from a national NGO called the Sudan Social Development Organization (SUDO).
Efforts were directed towards six villages and nomadic communities in the surrounding areas of Zalingei, namely Abata, Ourukum, Aarra, Waranga, Tamerball-Jemel and Hela Beida Gold Mine villages, targeting over 6,600 residents. | https://medium.com/we-the-peoples/fighting-covid-19-and-promoting-peace-come-together-in-darfur-585af3c458d4 | ['Un Peacekeeping'] | 2020-10-26 20:28:35.256000+00:00 | ['Darfur', 'Peacebuilding', 'Sudan', 'Peacekeeping', 'Covid 19'] |
Tips for Creating Social Media Content Including Must Dos | Do you want to create engaging social media content? Follow these tips for creating social media content including helpful must-dos!
Take a look at our article at https://chatter.digital/creating-social-media-content-must-dos/ | https://medium.com/@chatterdigital/tips-for-creating-social-media-content-including-must-dos-7895dc7671bb | ['Chatter Digital'] | 2020-12-26 06:25:14.430000+00:00 | ['Content Creation', 'Content Strategy', 'Audience Engagement', 'Social Media', 'Brand Strategy'] |
The gaming addiction for youth in a modern society | The story seems like a joke, and a fun experience to share. Obviously the situation that will be shared is based on a personal experience in life, and how it is affecting the personal daily life.
Started playing video games at a young age, happened to get more comfortable being alone and avoiding people, from this point on, my life was about having closed doors. From middle school until graduation with a masters degree my life was based about coming home and playing with my friends at night. Seems to be a fun life, yet the experience itself is a nightmare when you see people advancing in life and you are stuck between four walls and a screen.
Seems like going to work or studying are hobbies that filled my life. Not the other way around.
It is a negative effect on the youth, since the life became based on human interaction through a microphone, that eliminates the strength of a face to face interaction.
The future of societies are based on sitting in rooms and not being strong enough with man-labor jobs. An addiction exist and grows on daily bases from a young age and to eliminate it is to quit video games, yet it became a drug for me and many youth around the world. Coming in to adulthood seems like a strange way of interaction and incapable of dealing with it the right way.
China’s decision on banning video games for young children could be in their political advantage since their next generation seem to care about labor power and not staying at home. The western societies might lack such an ability, especially that the rights given to people in the western societies are way more than the ones in China or Russia. | https://medium.com/@abdulazizarakji/the-gaming-addiction-for-youth-in-a-modern-society-b27c9d0b3fbc | ['Abdul Aziz Arakji'] | 2021-11-22 14:19:30.683000+00:00 | ['American', 'Chinese', 'Videogames', 'Politics', 'Youth'] |
Getting on the Naughty List | I sent the photo elf off with my daughter to get a soda and burger. We went to sit down in the back of the booth and closed the door. When he turned around, I kissed him. Hard and fast.
“Fuck me,” I said.
“That was the Idea.”
“Just fuck me,” I unzipped my skirt and pushed it down. My monstrous panties with the playtex tummy control panel came next. They were the Spanx of the time, what can I say. I got on the counter and spread my legs for him. “Get your cock out.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“I need it in me, we have a half hour and I want it in me as long as possible.”
He pulled out that log of man meat, and I pulled him to me. I was wet as Niagara Falls. When I felt the head of his cock at my hole, I felt like I would cry for joy. It was that good. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Please.”
“Hey, Hey, babe,” He said lifting my face to his, “Take it easy. Relax.”
He kissed me, and I put my tongue in his mouth. He pulled me to the edge of the counter and pushed into me. I was back on that beach, on the blanket I lost my virginity on. I held him as he fucked me slow and deep. “Is it as good as the last time?” I asked. “Am I still tight for you. God, you feel so good.”
“Your pussy feels good, Hana,” He assured me and picked me up off the counter and held me by my ass as he fucked me standing up. His cock impaling me I felt so good in his arms. “God, you feel so good wrapped around my cock. You’re so wet and warm.”
I was flowing with bliss as I hung in midair getting fucked. My pussy stretched to the limit. He was nothing like my husband, my husband liked sex, but he wasn’t good at it. John knew how to take a woman. Hard and strong.
He had talked me and my two girlfriends out of our swim suits back then, and he proceeded to fuck each one of us. I rememebr watching him fuck Betty, how his huge cock split her pussy open like a ripe fruit. God it was sexy, He fucked my girlfriend, Hillary doggy, the look of bliss on her face. I got under them and sucked his swinging balls, and licked the shaft of his cock as he fucked her. He had pulled out, and I pulled Hilary down, imagining he had come in her, I ate her out. Betty masturbated to us as John took his place between my legs and took what was his.
He fucked me, and I fucked him back. I looking into those eyes and wrapped my legs around his ass. He knew I wasn’t going to let him go until he made me his woman. He came hard and filled my pussy with his come. I was born for his cock. Hilary had had enough, but Betty and I sucked his cock and fucked him the rest of the night.
Now I was his again. He felt bigger than I remembered, but maybe I was just more desperate. He panted as he fucked me and I felt an orgasm build. The only other one I had ever had was riding his cock, My husband never lasted long enough to get me off.
“Yeah, fuck, I’m going to come, make that pussy yours,” I said.
He fucked me faster now, and the rhythmic sounds of our lovemaking must have echoed through the mall. The little booth rocked. He set me down to really fuck me hard now, desperate to finish.
“That’s it, give it to me. Give it to me, fill me up,” I encouraged, The door popped open as I came and our fucking caught the eye of an old lady. John wasn’t far behind with his own orgasm. The little old lady watched as his cock thrust one last time into my sopping mess of a pussy. Unloading his balls into my cheating fertile womb. | https://medium.com/bella-cooper-books/getting-on-the-naughty-list-fc1e8246893 | ['Bella Cooper'] | 2020-12-21 19:54:15.479000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Erotica', 'Cuckold', 'Relationships', 'Love'] |
Restful webhook using Lambda + API Gateway— PART 1 | Lambda
Lambda essentially is a way to run your code on demand without paying or setting up any servers. So all the prerequisites that your code needs (apart from what is inbuilt) needs to be packaged with your code.
The packages we will be using are flask and flask-lambda.
Its a good idea to develop your code in a virtual environment and have all its packages installed in there. Makes your code cleaner and lighter.
To start with create a virtual environment:
> virtualenv — python=/usr/bin/python3.6 python36
After you have created a virtual environment; in this case named python36 you need to activate it.
> source python36/bin/activate
Notice the name of your virtual environment in the left most corner; which means you are now inside your environment.
Let the installation begin!
We start by installing flask-lambda using pip.
With flask-lambda installed you will not need to install Flask explicitly.
Lets now create the actual lambda code:
The code above is to not just say hello but is to send out a json object with some Transaction related information.
Now run this code to test it in your environment as flask-lambda will let you do so as if you were executing it on Lambda itself.
Once done; come out of the environment.
> deactivate
Lets start zipping your code and your dependencies. For this, head over to the location where flask-lambda package is installed. This would essentially be the python3.6 directory in your virtual environment base location.
In this case it will be:
cd python36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/
use the following to zip the contents of the folder:
zip -r /home/ec2-user/lambda/my-deployment-package.zip .
Now, move this zip folder to the folder where your lambda_function python code exists and add your lambda_function.py file to the zip.
The results of your zip should look something similar:
Zipping all dependency packages together with your code make its easier for the lambda function to load and execute them when referenced in your py code.
This is my resultant folder structure:
We were repackaging a missing dependency in the deployment package when this screenshot was taken.
Armed with the zipped contents; head over to the Lambda function in the AWS console and upload the code as a zip:
The zipped package might take a few minutes to upload based on its size.
Modifying Runtime Settings:
The Handler settings gives Lambda an idea as to which method it needs to execute once it is invoked. In our case lambda_function.app is suitable as this refers to our Flask application name.
Local Testing
Once done go ahead and test it by configuring a test event.
API Gateway test template will give you a skeleton of the test JSON object that will emulate a request if sent from an external API client.
Go ahead and add the url resource name you added in the Flak app. In this case it is /hello and httpMethod will be GET.
Save this Test Template and execute it.
The response Body seen here is the JSON object that was built and returned by your Flask app when it gets triggered.
Well!! With your business Logic in place its time to spruce up the front end.
Errors and Resolution:
Since we are packaging code; chances of missing a few dependencies is highly likely. This is evident by errors of this nature:
In such a situation try installing that package in the local folder and re add it to the deployment package manually.
pip install markupsafe -t ./ zip -r my-deployment-package.zip markupsafe-1.1.dist-info/
After you have re packaged the code you will need to redeploy the zip folder and perform a test. | https://medium.com/@christo-lagali/lambda-api-gateway-awesomeness-part-1-e13e7dca95be | ['Christopher Lagali'] | 2021-01-03 02:28:46.190000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'AWS Lambda', 'Api Gateway', 'Flask Restful'] |
Things you do for love | You may find thousands of reason to choose him over me. You may find him to be perfect for you. His acts of chivalry may be winning your heart over and over like holding the car door for you, giving you his coat when you feel cold.
He may be showing that he cares for you, and he will keep you happy every day. He may love you more every day, more than yesterday. He may be the one who will be making your life a fairy-tale. And maybe by this time you may have given up your heart to him and gave up on me.
Trust me, I am happy for you.
But just wanted to share what I was doing this all time.
I was trying to get better for you. I was fighting myself this all time to not to overthink, to overcome this anxiety that you will leave me and imagining what you would be doing this all time when you told me you would want to go out with him.
I know I am jealous. I am jealous because I know the truth. The truth that he is more successful than me. That he is the person who gets everything he desires.
Despite this I let you go because it was a challenge for me. Trust me I fought hard, I didn’t let my stupid possessive nature to get over me and ruin something we tried to build. I was trying to love the concept of unconditional love.
I was trying to let you live in your own fairy-tale. I was trying to let you fly as much as you want. I was trying to hold onto those three words you said to me. I was just not trying to love you. I was trying to trust you as I promised. I was trying to become perfect for you.
And you made me perfect — just for somebody else. | https://medium.com/scribbler-hut/things-you-do-for-love-3d41f7ab3882 | ['Scribbler Hut'] | 2019-04-12 20:50:00.553000+00:00 | ['Love Letters', 'Anxiety', 'Fairy Tale', 'Love', 'Relationships'] |
How I Built the Best Christmas Gift Ever With Twilio, AWS, and OutSystems | Where to Start?
Thinking about my master plan from a high level, it’s nothing more than a state machine. A simple state machine that will rain the fire of frustration on my brother on Christmas morning.
End to end, there were three components:
1. Sending/receiving calls and texts
2. State machine
3. File storage (for some soundbites I wanted to playback)
From an architectural point of view, it was a pretty basic flow:
1. A call or text comes in.
2. The details from the call/text get routed to a web service that manages state.
3. The service processes the message in response to the state and returns a message, sound, or a flag to follow up to get more information.
4. The message or follow up is returned back to the user.
Messaging
My decision for messaging was easy. There’s really only one answer when you’re a developer and you need to make a text or a phone call: Twilio.
Twilio has a design feature called Twilio Studio that lets you build workflows via a drag and drop user interface. It has specific routes for a call versus a text and gives you the ability to call into a web API for special logic. This is exactly what I needed.
I assembled a generic flow that passes in the contact type (call or text), phone number, and message into an API I was going to write. Based on the response, it will do one of three things:
1. Say/text a message from the response of the API
2. Play a sound
3. Ask a question and gather input from my brother
In lieu of going into specifics of the workflow, here is the JSON of the flow from Twilio Studio.
The Phone Numbers
Next, I had to acquire some phone numbers. I went to Twilio and purchased eight phone numbers, one for each gift. With Twilio, phone numbers only cost $1/month per number, so I felt like I was getting a steal.
After the numbers were purchased, I had to bind them up to my Flow. So, I went to the dashboard for each phone number, told it to use my Christmas Flow, and then boom. Done.
Messaging dashboard for the phone numbers
Online Storage
There were a few sound bites I wanted to play back when some phone numbers were called. I decided to go with AWS and use S3 (Simple Storage Service) to host the files. For the number of files I wanted to host, it wouldn’t cost a penny.
I uploaded the sound files to S3, made them publicly accessible, and took note of the URLs.
The State Machine
This was easily the most complicated part of the project. I wanted something that was elegant but as small as possible. And didn’t make a fuss when I went to deploy.
Enter OutSystems.
OutSystems is a company focused on low-code/no-code development that manages everything for you. They take away the hassles of deployment, writing extraneous code, and manipulating HTML by providing you with a rich experience through their service studio and designer. Plus, it’s free to use if you’re doing non-production development. Win-win!
This is definitely where you could veer off the path I took and go with a full AWS solution. I did consider that initially, but I wanted to keep my development time down to a minimum, so I opted for OutSystems instead.
Below is the entity-relationship diagram for the state machine.
Call — Used for tracking/humiliating my brother. This shows me every attempt he makes at trying to figure out which present to open. It was initially used for debugging purposes but ended up with a funny use so I can tell him how many times he contacted his presents. This is entirely optional.
NumberState — The response for each phone number at any given state. As the gifts get opened, the state progresses and the phone numbers change their responses and call/text preferences. This is the real meat of the state machine.
Number — The phone number assigned to a gift.
ContactType — Hardcoded list, CALL or TEXT.
State — Represents which gift my brother was on. This Christmas he was lucky enough to get eight gifts, so there were eight states.
Progress — This is a singleton that represents the current progress through the state machine. It was responsible for looking up the appropriate NumberState given the parameters passed into the service. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-i-built-the-best-christmas-gift-ever-with-twilio-aws-and-outsystems-6c6bc79c1c9d | ['Allen Helton'] | 2020-01-31 11:57:39.699000+00:00 | ['Messaging', 'Technology', 'Programming', 'AWS', 'Christmas'] |
Why We March: The Long Fight for LGBT Equality in the U.S. Military | “Tour of Duty,” was a 25-state, 32-city tour, March-April, 1993, featuring gay, lesbian and bi-sexual veterans in an effort to repeal the full ban that prohibited gays and lesbians from serving in the military (1941=1993
Forty-Five years ago I began coming out to myself while serving as a 19-year-old “slick sleeved” Private in the U.S. Army at Ft. Devens, Massachusetts. I was excited to spend my first weekend off base in Boston with a small group of women from “G” Company, under the command of the Army Security Agency training center.
I would make a fateful first visit to a gay bar called the “Other Side” in Boston that would alter the beginning of my Army career and ultimately reshape my values and shift the priorities of how I would live my life.
In this seminal life moment my identity as a lesbian was certainly not solidified as I was in the exploratory stages of acknowledging my attraction to women, something that had occurred to me when I was a sophomore at Indiana University in 1973. But when I was romantically approached by a woman on my dormitory floor, I was immediately frightened of my feelings, burying them almost instantaneously and I avoided this woman until I left.
Four months later when I stepped onto the dance floor at the Other Side to gay disco music, I was at the very beginning of a fragile realization that I might be a lesbian — I had kissed a woman for the first time in the laundry room of Charlie Company, Basic Training at Ft. McClellan, Alabama. But I would soon come to understand that the Army was a virulently anti-gay environment that possessed the power to absolutely destroy my life.
The “Other Side,” a Boston based gay bar, 1965–1976.
In historical context, it was only four years following the Stonewall Inn riots in New York City that kicked off a nascent national movement that was yet to celebrate its fifth Pride march. There was no Ellen DeGeneres program on television every day; there were no gay community centers or academic centers for gay and lesbian studies. Indeed, in looking up the definition of “homosexual” or “lesbian” in Webster’s Dictionary included references to Radclyffe Hall’s iconic novel A Well of Loneliness. considered the first lesbian novel, which doomed lesbian lovers to a tragic existence wrought with suicidal ideations. None of it was reassuring. It was a swirling mixture of a feelings that swung between the exhilarating realization of discovering who I truly was which gave way to a frightening sense of full blown fear that as excited as I was, I knew I could not share my thrilling self discovery with anyone because it could be used against me — ending my Army career with a pejorative discharge which would cause irreputable damage to my life.
Almost immediately upon my return to Ft. Devens, I was ordered to report to a security investigator’s office and was summarily read my rights, accused of being a lesbian and in violation of the military ban that prohibited homosexuals from serving in the military (1941–1993). I was charged in violation of Article 125, sodomy under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which was standard for anyone accused of being homosexual.
I would later discover that one of the women who went with us to Boston was an undercover agent, having been compromised by using drugs, she was now working for security investigators by employing entrapment against her fellow soldiers. This tactic underscores just how corrosive the full gay ban policy was and its implementation actively sought to undermine unit cohesion, an “old chestnut” rational used by critics who opposed lifting the ban. The truth was the policy itself was detrimental to unit cohesion because it compelled service members to lie about who they were, violating a basic principle of integrity and honor while serving in the military; and by extension, could expose a secretive, closeted gay person to blackmail by someone with nefarious motivations.
Ft. Devens would go on to become ground zero for arguably one of the largest lesbian investigations in the U.S. Army history. In the midst of a flurry of launched security investigations, the G company commander gathered us for a commander’s call and announced a believable threat: “If you are a lesbian, I will find out who you are and I will discharge you from the Army.”
Many women, when hearing these threats, readily turned themselves into security investigators, more than willing to forgo the vicious investigation tactics that were employed by the Army. Both heterosexual and gay women were investigated, humiliated, entrapped, threatened and discharged under less than honorable conditions. Many women began to drink heavily and others took drugs to numb the horror of our circumstances. Two women would bravely come forward and publicly announced they were gay: Barbara Randolph and Deborah Watson, although they were overshadowed by the celebrated Vietnam War veteran Leonard Matlovich who would come out to America on the cover of Time magazine in September 1975. Both Randolph and Watson would both be discharged with less than honorable conditions.
Having been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) during high school, I did not think twice about calling the Boston ACLU and sought legal representation for myself and other women who were also under investigation. I was the first soldier to obtain legal counsel during this witch hunt and would remain under investigation for almost 13 months. Despite the investigation, I continued to train and successfully completed my highly skilled immersion in Morse code and signal interception. My attorney, Jerry Cohen, would ably defend me and eventually I would be cleared of being “lesbian.” Without notifying my attorney, the Army administratively downgraded my top secret security clearance which was used as a pretext to prevent me from performing a highly classified job in South East Asia during the waning days of the Vietnam war. A final humiliation was availed to me by higher ups who permitted me to attend my graduation ceremony, although I would never be allowed to serve in this top secret position that I had successfully mastered. The Army swiftly cancelled my orders that had originally assigned me to an intelligence monitoring field station located in Udorn, Thailand.
Abruptly, I was reassigned to cook school, an apparent punitive action no doubt delivered as payback for resisting the investigation by obtaining legal counsel that was life saving measure. Investigators charged me as a “barracks lawyer” accusing me of advising others not to cooperate with the investigation (this assignment would not stand because I successfully lobbied Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Congressman Father Robert Drinan (D-MA) who convinced the Army to send me to train in a job that was more highly technical).
As “Captain Domi,” leading the Schofield Barracks Military Police Company in a company run. Circa 1988.
While I would later be investigated again when I was a Captain in the Military Police corps serving at Ft. Shafter and Schofield Barracks, Hawaii during my company command tour in 1988, my Ft. Devens experience had seared my soul and served as a life-long cautionary lesson that the U.S. government could literally destroy a person’s life. I was fortunate in that I did not suffer more dire consequences than that of many predecessors, peers and those who followed me. Although my body was wracked with anxiety from sustained and continuous investigations, resulting in a medical diagnosis of ulcerative colitis, I refused to be defeated by the government’s incursions into the most private aspects of my life. But because of colitis, I was able to leave my military career intact with a medical discharge, albeit most importantly, a honorable one. Somehow I had managed to survive the investigators, while paying a high price with my body and my soul.
James Darby (second from left), Gene Barfield (center) and myself in Lafayette Park, just moments after Gene and I threw our military medals over the White House fence, July 4, 1993.
I was not only inspired by Leonard Matlovich’s powerful coming out, who I met in 1975, but by the time I became a civilian in 1990 I was sufficiently angry to take action about the military ban itself. With other gay veterans, including Gene Barfield and James Darby, among others, together we formed the Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Sexual Veterans of America (GLBVA) in 1991, launching the first such advocacy group for former gay and lesbian service members in America, giving us a platform to network from and organize with gay and lesbian veterans across the country.
In 1992, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) gave me one of the best political platforms available to a gay veteran when I was hired as the director of Military Freedom Initiative to take on the fight to repeal the full ban as promised by Bill Clinton who would be elected president in 1992.
Working for NGLTF in the early 1990s enabled me to psychologically integrate my identity as a lesbian: out of the closet and unashamed, while advancing social justice work that was at the center of a national debate. I also experienced it as a thrilling experience of self empowerment that salvaged and healed my battered psychic from all the years of leading a closeted life in the Army, hiding from investigators and myself. In solidarity, my NGLTF colleagues taught and sustained me as I learned about the LGBT rights movement and its history. In this dynamic environment, only two years following active duty, I learned massive amounts of information, living “dog years” gulping down critically important details of politics as we scaled up to bring this fight to the American public.
Representing NGLTF as Director of the Military Freedom Initiative, circa 1993
In representing NGLTF I testified before the House Armed Services Committee in May 1993, the first such hearings in the history of Congress and traveled throughout the country with fellow veterans for the Campaign for Military Service that went on a national tour to 25 states and 32 cities by helping lead a national conversation about what it meant to be a member of second-class citizenry who were forced to hide from investigators while serving our country in uniform simply because we were gay and lesbian. From Fargo, North Dakota to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania we discussed the ban on talk radio, crisscrossing the country as we carried out the first national conversation about the lives of gays and lesbians and why the government’s policy to ban us from the military actually came not only at a financial cost, but also undermined military readiness, not withstanding the basic unfairness of the policy.
The Department of Defense had established a bigoted and cruel policy in 1941: “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” Psychiatrists had determined that homosexuals were mentally unfit to serve in the military during the draft buildup for for World War II. While the numbers are not precisely known, the policy most likely resulted in the discharge of thousands of homosexual service members who were issued “blue discharges” (until 1947) to those who were considered gay or lesbian. It is estimated that at least 68,000 service members, if not more, were discharged under this cruel system that was brutal in its implementation. These derogatory discharges destroyed many lives, forever marked as a deviant, denied them the GI Bill and other benefits afforded to veterans who were honorably discharged, resulting in life long deprivation, including dire economic consequences because many employers declined to hire them for moral reasons.
Despite all of our efforts, we lost the fight to overturn the full ban in 1993. It was a bitter and stinging defeat when Congress overwhelmingly voted for the Clinton compromise in September 1993, stopping short of overturning a WWII era policy.
The military battle for equality would be extended by the passage of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT)” that was negotiated between President Bill Clinton and openly gay Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass) allowing soldiers to serve while being gay, but gagged in silence, bound to the closet. If a soldier violated the speech ban, they would be be discharged. DADT was in effect for 17 more years before lesbian, gay and bisexual soldiers would finally be freed from the closet when President Barack Obama kept his word to end it in 2011 by signing the DADT revocation legislation that was fast tracked by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Democratic leaders of Congress. Before DADT was finally over, more than 13,000 Americans would be discharged.
New veteran groups emerged in the fight to overturn DADT which included Service Members Legal Defense Network (SLDN) that provided invaluable legal advice and advocacy led by Michele Benecke and Dixon Osborn who had worked at the Campaign for Military Service. By establishing SLDN, legal advocates who worked for years on this issue Bridget Wilson, a lawyer in private practice and Kathleen Gilberd, a specialist in military administrative law of the National Lawyers Guild, finally had an organizational partner in SLDN and helped guide and advise this new and important advocacy organization.
Civil disobedience returned to LGBTIQ politics in America for the first time since the days of ActUp! initiated by GetEQUAL a lose knit grassroots group that escalated pressure on the Obama Administration by staging arrests by veterans. Led by activist Robin McGehee, a lesbian mother radicalized by the defeat of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, banning marriage equality, joined forces with Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and Iraq war vet with other veterans and allied activists who raised hell by iconically chaining themselves to the White House fence in a series of actions garnering the attention of the country.
The next generation’s work to seek open transgender service was staked out in 2012 spearheaded by SPARTA,* a LGBTIQ military advocacy organization with a focus exclusively on open transgender service under the leadership of then-President Sue Fulton (a former Army Captain and a well known DADT activist) and trans military veteran activists Alyson Robinson and Brynn Tanehill. Despite initial successful efforts to finally authorize open trans service in 2016, the Trump Administration ended its nascent implementation in February 2018, a tragic casualty of the 2016 election results. This setback and remaining battle for equality and dignity needs to be formally embraced by the LGBTIQ civil rights movement more broadly, while there is no doubt that SPARTA,* the Modern Military Association of America and the Palm Center all seem to be settling in for a protracted battle.
This is why we march each year during June Pride month: the effort to advance equality never yields. The fight to protect transgender lives and create an uncontested space for them within our society is this moment’s clarion call — especially as the federal government is viciously targeting trans people which should serve as a wake-up call to everyone in the LGBTIQ community and their allies.
As military LGBT veterans we stand on the shoulders of those who paved a path forward from the earliest comings out of Leonard Matlovich, Barbara Randolph and Deborah Watson in 1975.
The heroes who successfully forged winning legal claims by the late Perry Watkins and Miriam Ben-Shalom during the 1970s-1980s.
The DADT heroes included Joe Zuniga, Keith Meinhold, Justin Elzie and Tracy Thorne-Begland in the 1990s.
The noble courage of Colonel (ret.) Margarethe Cammermayer who exposed the hypocrisy of the full ban when she refused to lie during her security clearance update interview. And Major (ret.) Margaret Witt, who brought a successful law suit challenging DADT reinstating her to active duty in 2010, just a few months before the policy was revoked.
The martyrs who we will never forget: Allen Schindler, a Navy sailor stabbed to death in a public toilet in Nagasaki, Japan in 1992 and Barry Winchell who served in the 101st Airborne at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky where he was murdered in his sleep by platoon members wielding a baseball bat, the first such casualty under DADT in 1999.
Until we are all free, equal and protected, none of us are ultimately free. This spirit animates every American generation. As we step off to march on June 29th, we LGBT veterans march with a proud history of loyalty to country that went unrecognized for decades. Unbowed, we embrace our history.
Fifty years into a global human rights movement we are aware of repressive tactics that are employed against our community here in America and around the world. But even in the darkest of circumstances, nothing has ultimately stopped LGBTIQ persons from coming out everywhere. March. Celebrate. Remember. Resist. #PrideMonth #Stonewall50
Tanya Domi served 15 years in the U.S. Army and later worked in the U.S. House of Representatives as a defense policy analyst and legislative assistant to the late Congressman Frank X. McCloskey, (D-IN) who was a member of the House Armed Services Committee. A human rights scholar, Professor Domi teaches at Columbia University as a faculty affiliate of the Harriman Institute and is also an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College’s Roosevelt Public Policy Institute. | https://tanyaldomi.medium.com/why-we-march-the-long-fight-for-lgbt-equality-in-the-u-s-military-db8f4b0484a9 | ['Tanya L. Domi'] | 2019-07-07 11:49:35.656000+00:00 | ['Military', 'Human Rights', 'LGBTQ', 'Transgender'] |
Hidden Opportunities for You on the Blockchain | Some part of me did regret for not investing in cryptocurrencies. But then I realised trading is not my thing. I want to do things where I have an advantage. I had invested in learning blockchain for the past few months. Now, I see opportunities that are no so obvious but rewarding. Since the field is emerging, only a few people understand blockchain to a deeper level. A majority understand it to the surface level. Some just heard about it and has no clue what it is. You can benefit a lot if you can gain deeper understanding of the technology. Blockchain For Business course on edX by the Linux Foundation is a good one. Blockchain Revolution is a recommended read. Once you have good understanding of the fundamentals you can teach others, bring in your own ideas or even launch them. Here are some opportunities you can benefit from.
Writing Stories
Credits : xkcd
There are a lot of articles with jargons about Blockchain, but stories are less. There is a good audience who is looking for simplified explanations. Since it’s an emerging market a lot of ideas are still to be imagined. You can write about Blockchain by thinking about its use cases in different industries. Eg. How will Blockchain impact the health industry? or the education industry? You can also write by combining ideas from different fields. Made to Stick is a great book that can help you explain topics simply in an understandable way.
Teaching with a Heart
Credits : xkcd
I explored a lot of Blockchain courses in Udemy, Blockgeeks, etc. Some of these courses are good. But, there is a room for improvement. It can be made much simpler, interesting and engaging. I recently came across CryptoZombies. It teaches you to write a smart contract by building a game. It was on top of HackerNews. There is a good demand for such courses.
Validating Ideas
Credits : xkcd
You have a startup idea. You know it works when you put it out on the market with a basic version of the product (MVP). Only when people pay you money you can be sure. Typically starting to accept payments can be difficult. You need to register a company, complete the legal process, etc. Cryptocurrencies help you prevent such hassles. You can create a wallet, set up the API and start accepting payments in no time.
Starting up
Credits : xkcd
It’s difficult for non-techies to use blockchain themselves. Startups like Coinbase are addressing this market. There are potential in ideas which can help non-techies take advantage of Blockchain solutions like generating a smart contract, managing ICO funding, etc. I was exploring ICO turnkey solutions, most of them are expensive. You have to raise a seed round to afford such solutions. An affordable solution is definitely a need.
Creating Open Source Blockchain Projects
Credits : xkcd
In the age of the internet, creating communities have become easy. When Vitalik Buterin’s ideas on Bitcoin was rejected, he started the Ethereum project with people who shared his ideas. If you don’t have ideas, I suggest going through the open source Blockchain based projects such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. Think of ways it can be improved, or combine its ideas with a different domain. Ethereum ICO feature is a combination of decentralised payment system + crowdfunding.
Contributing to Open Source Blockchain Projects
Credits : xkcd
A senior employee from the Linux Foundation addressed the problem that they need more contributors on their Hyperledger project. It’s rewarding to contribute to open source projects because it reflects your skill set. Employers value such open source contributions. If I want to hire someone, the first thing I do is to search for their Github profile and check for contributions.
Starting a Non-Profit
Credits : xkcd
The biggest problem the Blockchain solves is that it eliminates the middleman. Producers get reasonable revenue for the work. In India middleman has exploited the agriculture industry. Non-Profits are trying to use the Blockchain to connect consumers and farmers directly on the Blockchain. Find an industry you are familiar which is exploited by a middleman. Experiment ways you can use Blockchain to eliminate them. There you go, you have an idea for a non-profit.
Ethereum is one of the biggest social enterprises on the Blockchain. They have created a platform which can benefit programmers, entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, miners, etc.
Investors can fund the Non-Profits with the help of a smart-contract. This means if only certain milestones are achieved the funding will be released. This will make Non-Profits more responsible for the work they do. Blockchain also increases transparency to the system. You can find out who exactly benefits from your donation on the Blockchain.
Raising Funds
Credits : xkcd
It has been never easier to raise investments for your idea. The biggest problem ICOs solved is anyone anywhere could be an investor. You don’t have to go through the tedious process or generate a certain amount of revenue to be eligible. Scamsters has taken advantage of these. In the future probably there would be some mechanism to prevent fraud. If you have an idea. investment wouldn’t be your biggest hurdle. You just need to convey the idea to the right people to help you raise investments. Entrepreneurs usually have these skills in their blood.
Emerging market brings in a lot of opportunities. So does the Blockchain market. Investing money is not the only thing that can be rewarding. Investing in reading, writing, programming, teaching and developing ideas on Blockchain can be more rewarding. If you can invest in these hidden opportunities when the massive adoption of Blockchain occurs, you will become thought leaders. Claps Please 👏 😬 .
I will write 5 kickass stories for you in the coming days. Please help me reach my goal by buying me some coffees. Suggest me your story topics here.
You can also donate cryptocurrencies.
BTC
1NywHKugDFsM5kmxnkKmwe5zRE6Es9JbPg
BCH
16jU3FswL23sYFtyKbEh7gfUdXzJRFzYfx
ETH
0x847376BC3e7459B4324df33bc17b2335Aa14AF05 | https://medium.com/hackernoon/hidden-opportunities-for-you-on-the-blockchain-b110a1e5bbcb | ['Febin John James'] | 2018-02-01 20:51:46.623000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin'] |
Unfollow | photo by Lorenzo Ruj
Welcome to the 21st-century where people are more connected to others than they are to themselves. Joshua Fields Milburn, a co-founder of The Minimalists, has often stated “scrolling is the new smoking”, in fact, it’s even pinned to the top of his Twitter profile. We have become so intertwined with our devices we mindlessly scroll with little to no thought. Is it possible that we may know people we follow on social media better than ourselves?
The good news is no, but it's only because nobody posts their true self online for everyone to see. More than likely the typical person will be unwilling to open themself up to such judgment, scrutiny, or vulnerability. Social media has essentially created a digital mask for people to hide under. If you simply scroll through your Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook feed you will probably see a variety of different posts, which may portray people having the time of their life. Yet, this is nothing more than an illusion, a charade put on for other people. We attempt to curate every single little post to display we are the most interesting person in the world and have everything figured out. Why do we do this?
I’ve thought about this question and I have reached several answers on my own while also listening to others on the subject. One, we aren’t comfortable with ourselves. Maybe you think your life is boring and nothing you do is noteworthy. So, to combat this you try to paint a completely different picture of yourself on social media in an effort to make others think differently. Two, we never take a moment to detach and think of what we are doing. We blindly observe everyone partaking in this behavior online, so to fit in with the majority we follow the crowd. Take a second to contemplate why you even have social media in the first place? I bet there is no definitive answer and your accounts simply exist with little to no purpose other than having an online presence.
Social media quietly robs time and creates a toxic environment of comparison while also maintaining a consistent feeling of inadequacy about ourselves. There is still hope for these platforms despite the inherent problems. The solutions are simple but hard.
Solution one, unfollow everyone that does not play an immediate role in your life. If you have little to no contact with someone other than through social media it’s safe to say they are not playing any major role in your life and aren’t worthy of your time. If unfollowing doesn’t seem like a viable option to you for whatever reason, try muting unwanted people and add the people you do keep in contact with on a close friends list or group. These features are available on both Twitter and IG.
Solution two, utilize social media as a tool. Share your music, art, or other content you create and engage only with people doing the same. It’s a more productive use of time in my opinion and it also provides an opportunity to network with others interested in the same things as yourself.
Solution three, delete your online presence. This may be the most unpopular solution of the three but it may also be the most effective. For a couple of years, I had no online presence other than limited time on Reddit and Youtube. For the benefits that came with this time, I would be lying to say there weren’t any drawbacks. I honestly missed posting pictures of my family or keeping in contact with my close friends and the undeniable convenience that comes with having a social media presence.
Although social media is deeply flawed it still has an upside. If you stay disciplined and understand the platforms for what they truly are you can maximize the time you spend using these platforms. It seems simple but it may be difficult to stay consistent enough to break your “scrolling” addiction. Start by realizing that your time is far more precious than you think. Break the addiction and unfollow.
Thank you for reading.
Connect with me here: | https://medium.com/@erikkennedy11/unfollow-e4637a1e547 | ['Erik Kennedy'] | 2020-12-27 22:07:02.214000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Habbits', 'Addiction', 'Perspective', 'Social Media'] |
Choosing a Pediatrician | Often, when your baby is born, time moves at warp speed. You take them home from the hospital and before you know it, they’re crawling around! In order to help them grow as quickly as they do, having access to a good pediatrician is essential. Switching from prenatal to pediatric care happens abruptly, and it is good to know who your pediatrician is before that happens. To make sure you’re choosing the right provider in enough time, we’ve compiled some tips!
When should I look for a pediatrician…
Even though the pediatrician is your baby’s doctor, they often work to support the whole family, especially right after birth. To make a good connection with this doctor, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends finding a pediatrician about three months before your due date. Not only does this help navigate potential waiting lists, but many pediatricians offer prenatal visits [1]. This visit is a great way to start to build a relationship between you and your doctor, which can help with communication once your baby arrives. In addition, pediatricians look for warning signs of postpartum depression, and establishing good communication prior to the baby’s arrival can be very helpful for this. It is recommended that all parents participate in this prenatal visit, and it may be especially helpful for women with high-risk pregnancies, or with multiple babies on the way. Finally, oftentimes after labor, the hospital will ask who the baby’s pediatrician is. Finding one beforehand will be one less thing you have to worry about once your baby is finally here!
What should I look for in a pediatrician…
Ideally, a pediatrician will look after your child throughout childhood and adolescence. They come to really know your baby and your family. Knowing how to choose the right pediatrician for your child is important, since they will be influential in many healthcare decisions for years. The first step is to make a list of pediatricians in the area that you are interested in. If you’re able, ask friends and family about good (and bad) experiences they’ve had, to see if they have any recommendations for doctors. If they don’t have suggestions, the internet is your friend! Look up reviews, or use a search tool to find doctors in your area. Once you have a list, write out questions in order to find out more about both the doctor and the practice they are a part of. You can ask these questions during a prenatal visit, or over the phone. There are many different questions you can ask, some may be specific to your child and their needs. Here are some general questions to get to know the pediatrician [3].
Ask about their background, education, and board certification. They may have done a residency in family medicine or pediatrics, either are qualified to treat your child, but a pediatrician is more specialized. Inquire if they have a specialty, this could include adolescent medicine, gastrointestinal, or many more [4]. Which hospitals does the doctor have privileges in? This helps to know where the best place to go in case of an emergency may be. How can they be reached outside of the office’s hours? Does the practice have a nurse on call for questions? Are last minute appointments available?
There are many other things you can assess at the first appointment, like whether or not you feel comfortable expressing your concerns to them, or how seriously you think they will take any potential health problems in your child. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and if you have any concerns, don’t feel bad about going to a different provider who better fits your needs.
What should I expect at the visits…
For the first two years of your baby’s life, they will see the pediatrician fairly often, and complete a series of tests to ensure that their development is on track. The AAP recommends that children be seen by their pediatrician at 3–5 days old, 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 9 months, 1 year, 15 months, 18 months, and 2 years old [5]. The measurements and screening procedures that take place at each appointment will vary by age, but many attributes of physical and behavioral development are retested at each appointment. The pediatrician will measure length, weight and head circumference at each appointment for the first two years to ensure they are following their growth curve. They will do a psychosocial and behavioral assessment each time as well, and the first few months will also include a maternal depression screening to look for signs of postpartum depression. Each visit will also include a full physical examination and immunizations. Other testing such as for vision, hearing, or blood pressure may be done if the pediatrician feels it is necessary to check on [5]. Remember to ask any questions you may have and address any concerns with the doctor during these appointments.
Resources | https://medium.com/@simplifed/choosing-a-pediatrician-bc22a396c5cb | ['Claire Dowell'] | 2021-03-19 15:10:26.211000+00:00 | ['Children', 'Pediatrics', 'Vaccines', 'Doctors', 'Family'] |
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