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Bed Bug Pest Control in Coral Springs | Are you looking for Bed Bug Pest Control in Coral Springs? Optimus Pest Control is the best option for Bed Bug Pest Control in Coral Springs.
A bedbug is a pest or insect that lives in your beds, clothes, and bag packs. Human blood is their favorite meal, the only thing they are fed on. They bite human skin and leave red rashes and red spots on it. They are very irritating and discomfort for people when they sleep or sit on their beds. They come from old or used furniture, decoration pieces, baskets and travels to your beds and sofas places. They hide at places like small holes in your bed and where you can’t reach or see them. They travel fast so it is not a problem for them to reach you. You may use a lot of chemicals and techniques to kill them but you can never kill them all. They have so much speed that they hide fast. It does not work to be done by a normal man but work that should be done professionally. For this job, bedbug pest control services are made. Bedbug pest service should do its job perfectly and neatly. Keep in mind that the bedbug pest control service is professional in its work and knows every important step and rule related to bedbug pest control service.
Are bedbugs offending you?
Optimus Pest Control will make you get rid of all the bedbugs in just some days. Optimus Pest Control is giving all king of Bedbugs control services in Coral Springs. Optimal Pest Control uses all the best and latest chemicals that will just kill the bedbugs and not harm you when you use your bed again. Optimus Pest Control has been treating bedbugs for a long time in Coral Springs. As there is a lot of bedbugs problem in Coral Springs due to the place and environment that coral spring has. Our goal is to satisfy our customers and give relief to their minds with our fantastic bedbug pest control service. Optimus Pest The control team knows what to apply and where to apply. We know the bedbug’s favorite places and we will attack them all. Optimus Pest Control is giving the safest pest control service all around Coral Springs. | https://medium.com/@optimuspestcontrol00/bed-bug-pest-control-in-coral-springs-a1359e18f5b8 | ['Optimuspest Control'] | 2021-06-02 08:18:34.419000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Blogging', 'Freelancing', 'Marketing', 'Médium'] |
Growing a Green Thumb | Do you have a brown thumb? Does everything living green thing you touch seem to wither and die? Are you all out of TLC to give after laying yet another houseplant to rest? Well, you’re not alone!
Many people struggle with knowing how to keep happy, healthy houseplants. Lucky for you, there is a solution that will turn your brown thumb green and fill your home with leafy plant goodness!
Do your research
Before you buy a plant, you need to do your research. Start with your situation. How much light do you have in your home? Do you have a basement apartment with one dimly-lit window, or a sun-room that gets hours of direct light a day? Are you good at remembering to water your plants, and can you even tell when they need water? These are all important questions to ask yourself that will help determine which plant is the right one for you.
Sunlight
One of the most important things that a plant needs is sunlight. We all remember learning about photosynthesis in high school and for those of you who don’t, sunlight gets turned into food for the plant. However, each species of plant has a different light requirement. Usually, when you purchase a plant, it will have a tag that describes the light and water requirements. Often, on plant tags you will see either ‘low light’, ‘medium light’, or ‘high light’ written on the back. But what does that mean?
Low light plants are usually plants that originated from the rainforest understory, where little sunlight is able to penetrate through the dense canopy above. These plants are perfect for basement apartments, mantle or coffee table decorations, and other places that don’t receive bright light. Just remember that low light doesn’t mean no light! If your low light plant looks like it’s taking a downhill turn, try moving it to a location that gets a little more light.
Medium light plants love bright, indirect light. Placing them near a west or southeast window will give these plants the rays they need to flourish.
High light plants require direct sunlight for most of the day. If you’re not sure what direct sunlight looks like, it’s probably the place where your cat hangs out to sunbathe. If not given adequate light, these plants will often stretch towards the light and become leggy and less compact.
Water
One of the trickiest things to get right for your plant is determining the right amount of water it needs. Once again, the best place to start is to look at the tag that came with your plant. It will often tell you if the plant likes moist soil or prefers to dry out between waterings.
One good rule of thumb is to do the finger test. Place your finger about half an inch deep in the soil of your plant. If you feel wet or moist soil, then you don’t need to worry about watering. If the soil is dry and stays dry the further you stick your finger in, then you need to water the plant.
The number one problem with indoor plants is overwatering. If you water too much, you can actually drown your plant by stopping air from getting to the roots. A good way to prevent this is to do the finger test and to use good potting soil. This potting soil works well for most houseplants, and this soil works great for succulents and cacti.
Buying your plants
Buying your plants from the right source can make a huge difference in the long-term health of your plant. Many places sell plants, but they don’t always provide the best care for each plant since they are hoping to sell them quickly. You want to buy a plant that looks healthy in every way. This means it doesn’t have yellowing leaves, leaves with brown edges, droopiness, or wilting. These are signs of an unhealthy plant that could already be on its way out.
Gardening centers are an excellent place to start looking for plants. They often have greenhouses that can support healthy houseplants all year long and these plants tend to be healthier. Another great thing about gardening centers is the staff are very educated on the plants they sell and can tell you if a specific plant will fit your needs and answer any questions you may have.
Once you get more familiar with different species of houseplants, shopping online is a great resource. You will often be able to find a larger variety of plants online that can ship to you from all over the country. I pay close attention to the reviews to make sure other customers have been satisfied with their purchases and the plants had arrived safely. My favorite sites to buy plants are Leaf and Clay Co. and ModestLeaf, as they have a great selection and deliver healthy and well-priced plants.
Good beginner plants
Now that we’ve talked about knowing how and where to select the right plant, let’s look at some excellent beginner plants!
Easy to grow
Let's talk about the easy-to-grow, hard-to-kill plants. These are hands-down the best plants to start with if you’re new to keeping houseplants. Not only are they easy to care for, but they will boost your confidence and make you feel like a houseplant master!
Philodendron
Pothos
Rubber plants
Mother-in-law’s tongue
Spider plants
Low light
Ahh…low light plants. I cannot say enough about how much I love plants that can sit basically anywhere in my house and still look beautiful. Plus, when all your windowsill space is taken up by other plants, you’re going to need to turn to these guys.
Pothos
Begonia Rex
Cast iron plants
Chinese evergreens
Swedish ivy
Low water requirement
These are some of the coolest plants around. I am obsessed with succulents and have spent lots of time hoarding every color I can get my hands on. Plus, if you are forgetful or travel a lot, having a plant that can go more than a few days without water is a huge bonus. Just remember, many of the plants that have low water requirements are desert plant species, which means they often have a high light requirement, so make sure you keep that in mind!
Cacti
Succulents
Jade
Kalanchoe
Aloe
Bromeliads
Embrace the new plant hoarder that you are
Once you learn how to care for houseplants, they can become very addicting. You might start with one, but soon you will have 25 and counting like me! Don’t worry though, not only do houseplants bring you joy, they actually have health benefits too!
So, go out and buy your 26th plant and put that newly grown green thumb to use! | https://medium.com/@macey.heck.camp/growing-a-green-thumb-8720906b65ca | ['Macey Camp'] | 2019-02-01 02:06:02.725000+00:00 | ['Gardening', 'Plants', 'Houseplants'] |
How well do you know your team? | After reading the article, I immediately wanted to facilitate this activity with my own design team. If nothing else, it would be a fun team-building exercise to learn more about my teammates. The Figma Design team couldn’t have made it any easier for others to participate in this same activity. They created a community Figma file to show off their own trading cards as well as provide a helpful template for readers to create their own.
After a year of wanting to do this activity, I finally got the chance to do so working at Clade Design.
The remainder of this article will review the benefits of this activity as well as how to facilitate this exercise on your own team.
So, why should my team do this?
The benefits of this activity are simple; it’s all about understanding your team. By knowing your co-worker’s preferred working style you can better communicate, collaborate, and ship great work. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, but knowing them helps to better pair people with the right projects or tasks.
For us at Clade, we get a lot of different projects that vary in the scope of work. When taking on new projects we take a look at the project’s deliverables and consider everyone’s skill set to determine who would be the best person for the job. To clarify, let's use an actual example.
Logan is really great at illustrations and visual design whereas Sara has a mind for user experience and journey maps. Say we have a client that would like a variety of spot illustrations for a new app and another client that needs a UX audit of their existing site. Although both Logan and Sara are capable of doing both jobs, they have their strengths and it makes sense to leverage them.
You may have guessed it but Logan would take on the spot illustrations and Sara would handle the UX audit. The point here is it’s important to have the right person for the job while making sure they enjoy the work as well.
This trading card activity helped to restate some of the obvious strengths and weaknesses as well as provide more insight into each other’s preferred working style.
How do I facilitate this activity?
As I said, the Figma team couldn’t have made this exercise any easier for you to conduct yourself. I wouldn’t even limit this activity to just designers or even a work setting. You could do this with your friends, your family, your book club, even your fantasy football league. There is a lot for anyone to gain from this activity. Not to mention it’s pretty fun to design your own trading card. As long as you have some understanding of how to use Figma, anyone can participate.
Here’s how to get started:
You can find the Figma template file here. Just duplicate it and share it with your team.
The template has pre-existing questions that we primarily used but feel free to customize them however works best for you and your team.
Next, block off some time with your team so people make time for the activity and it doesn’t feel like more work. Between 30 mins to 1 hour should be plenty. Allow enough time for participants to have fun with it, but not so much that they begin to overthink it.
Be sure to leave some time in the end for everyone to present their card to the team. Everyone needs to read all of the cards. You may be surprised by some of the results.
If people need more time to finish up, that’s okay too. However, the hope here is to finish these within the allotted time frame to avoid creating more work.
Lastly, don’t forget to have fun and keep an open mind!
Check out our designer trading cards here at the Figma community page and let us know how it was conducting this activity with your own team. | https://medium.com/cladedesign/how-well-do-you-know-your-team-a0cc831b69cc | ['Michael Kuhn'] | 2020-11-18 18:44:24.929000+00:00 | ['Team Building', 'Design', 'Teamwork', 'Culture', 'Agency'] |
Forgotten Japanese Whiskies of the 1980s and 90s | Suntory Q
Released sometime in 1983
This was the whisky that started the whole economization boom.
"It came in three versions,” Whisky Rising reports, “Q1000, Q500 and Q250 (40%abv). The number was a reference to volume (in ml). The presentation was designed to be everything that whisky wasn’t perceived to be: slick, hip and modern. It didn’t look like anything that their dads would have picked up, and that was the point, of course: reeling in young people. It was dirt cheap (Y2,200 for the liter version) and ‘light & smooth’ as it said on the bottle. Commercials on TV featured the band Duran Duran.”
And here’s a set of Q glasses that were part of the brand’s promotion:
Kirin-Seagram News
Released August 1983
Kirin quickly followed suit that August with News 1000, and 500. They copied Suntory’s numbering system, made their design uglier, and even put “Light & Smooth” on their bottles. “You can enjoy it on the rocks, with water or with anything you like,” said the label. “This whisky can create your new lifestyle.” That heavy-handed slogan is pretty on the nose. Whisky as a lifestyle sounds dangerous. Also, if I was 21 and reading that I’d think, Don’t tell me what to do.
Trying to one-up Suntory’s use of Duran Duran, Kirin got Jan Michael Vincent, from Airwolf, to appear on TV commercials:
And on print ads like this, from 1985:
For sale on ebay for $20! Is he asleep in a convertible? Sunning himself on a beach in a sweater? Tell me he’s not back in that jacuzzi.
After Vincent’s alcoholism became public, Kirin pulled his commercials.
Want a Kirin New keychain for $10? Me either.
Suntory 21
Released 1983
The 1980s were filled with many regretable trends: neon, rampant cocaine use, Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economics. Suntory 21 wasn’t as bad as those. Named for Japan’s drinking age, it wears its target demographic on its sleeve. I actually like the font Suntory used for it. 21 is Japan’s least dated, least offensive looking economization brand, even if 21’s contents did not taste as good as its exterior looked.
Suntory 21. Photo from Catawiki
Cool jazzy glasses. This advertising campaign featured a French piano duo named the Labèque sisters. I bought some because I like cats and piano jazz and, well, I’m insane.
A Zippo, part of 21’s big promotional push.
Look, a triangular serving tray for your glass and cigs. Random geonetrical motifs are very 80s. Photo from Buyee
Nikka Yz
Released July 1984
Would you like a bracing splash of after shave? Oh, sorry, this is whisky. Apparently, Nikka Yz tastes as much like whisky as it looks.
Poto from w.atwiki.jp
Nikka No Side
Released September 1984
Bottled at 35%abv, this line was, according to Whisky Rising, “made with malt, grain and spirits, it was sort of halfway between a whisky and a vodka.” 1,000 Yen got you 900ml, not that you’d want it. Still note sure what the name means, but here are some branded glasses:
Sanraku-Ocean MOO
Released November 1984
Although the name conjures pastoral scenes of cows nibbling grass, MOO was a play on the word “Smooth,” as in sMOOth. “It’s unclear whether the pun on the Japanese word mu (pronounced like ‘moo’ but shorter, and meaning ‘nothingness’) was intentional or not,” writes Stefan Van Eycken. “It cost next to nothing and tasted like it, too.” Jan Michael Vincent, from Airwolf, appeared on TV commercials. He was very popular back then. This whisky was not. Like all of these brands, it didn’t say on the shelves long.
Kirin-Seagram Saturday 1 and Saturday 2
Kirin-Seagram released Saturday 1 and Saturday 2, its so-called “High Performance Whisky,” toward the end of the 80s. Clearly branding for weekend fun, Saturday 1 was labeled as “Light & Smooth,” Saturday 2 was the blend with “Mellow and Body.” Across both versions, the gendered marketing was the same: “Saturday is the high-quality whisky for the new age suitable for sophisticated men wishing to relax and express their desired way of life.”
Suntory Cobra
Late 1980s — early 90s
In 1989, Suntory released Hibiki, which would become one of the most beloved, iconic, and award-winning whiskies of all time. Imagine that legend existing in the same world as a Suntory brand named after a snake.
In one last desperate attempt to capture the youth market, Suntory bottled Cobra at 39%abv, priced it at 1,000 Yen for 500 ml, and painted its label with comic art style to attract young consumers. Its low abv was also designed to skirt a tax surcharge that Japanese law required from beverages 40% abv and above. You have to admit the label is cool: “Hi! What’s Up? Why don’t we get together and make a wild trio? Just you, me and Cobra! Cobra goes easy with soda. We’ll just relax and sip it, real slow. Cobra and soda wil make your night… and mine, too. Remember the name: COBRA! See ya!”
Image from Global Rakuten.
Now imagine that co-existing on liquor store shelves with this luxurious faceted bottle, the first Hibiki:
Drinkers in the US might know Cobra as the name of a cheap 40 ounce malt liquor, and as the enemy in GI Joe cartoons. Few probably remember Suntory Cobra, and Suntory prefers it that way.
Sanraku-Ocean 30–0
1989
In 1989, Sanraku-Ocean released a 30%abv one called 30–0. That, Van Eycken points out, was pronounced thirty-love, “as in tennis, a reference to the unusually low bottling strength.” It isn’t even listed in the Whiskybase database. Google images are non-existant. | https://aarongilbreath.medium.com/forgotten-japanese-whiskies-of-the-1980s-and-90s-20bc3dea3d13 | ['Aaron Gilbreath'] | 2020-01-27 18:08:45.025000+00:00 | ['Food And Beverage', 'Japan', 'Food And Drink', 'Alcohol', 'Bars'] |
Thinkific: Leading the Educational Renaissance | From left to right: Thinkific co-founders Miranda Lievers (COO) and Greg Smith (CEO). Image courtesy of Alana Paterson.
An entrepreneur’s most valuable assets are the knowledge and skills they have acquired through building their ventures. Thought leadership is a popular buzzword these days; a promising area to build a successful business is to take it a step further by sharing and selling skills or knowledge online. However, managing the operational side of sharing one’s expertise online can be cumbersome. Greg Smith, CEO and Co-founder of Thinkific, knows this all too well.
Greg graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from UBC Sauder in 2000 and then studied at UBC’s Allard School of Law. After being exposed to many CEOs while working as a junior securities lawyer, Greg was encouraged to start a business of his own. He had already been running LSAT courses on the side, and decided to take his classes online so he could reach more students. Although his brother, fellow UBC Alumnus Matt Smith, offered to build it for him, they found a lack of digital infrastructure to easily create online courses. That was when the idea for Thinkific was born. Eventually, the two brothers and a few other co-founders launched Thinkific to empower any person with any expertise to create, market, and sell their own online course easily.
The SaaS company is unique from other online learning platforms like MasterClass or Skillshare because they allow educators full autonomy in this way. It provides tools for educators to independently create and sell courses, enabling them to own their brand, customer relationships, and build a sustainable business. These educators are often entrepreneurs or established thought leaders in their respective industries.
Thinkific also has an enterprise arm, Thinkific Plus. Intel, Samsung, Shopify and many others have used it to successfully enter the online learning market. Thinkific has gained noteworthy support from fellow Vancouver based startups: Hootsuite’s famous Academy is hosted on Thinkific’s learning platform, enabling more than 450,000 people to achieve social media certifications. Further, Corporate Finance Institute has trained over 300,000 people predominantly outside of North America to become financial analysts, powered by Thinkific.
It is clear that Thinkfic has not only transformed educators’ lives but also the lives of students globally. Thinkific is contributing to the educational renaissance, leaning into the future of education by promoting Direct to Learner content, unbundling of education (you increasingly do not have to enroll in a traditional institution to learn or teach a skill), and lifelong learning.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trends, especially the last: with heightened job insecurity and a higher pace of innovation, upskilling more frequently is beneficial. It is likely that in the future, ever-changing technical skills required of jobs will be taught throughout life instead of just in college. Similarly, COVID-19 also pushed people to realize the feasibility of making a living by running a course online.
True to their mission to help entrepreneurs, Thinkific put forward a $1 million Entrepreneur Growth Fund in the midst of the pandemic. The initiative supported 2,000 entrepreneurs with the mentorship and funding needed to quickly create online courses. Many shifted their existing business — which previously had either no digital or online learning aspect — online. By being a low barrier to entry solution, Thinkific has enabled a class of knowledge entrepreneurs to emerge. Thinkific saw a 221% surge in users creating courses at the start of the pandemic. To date, Thinkific course creators have earned more than $650 million in revenue. The online course market was forecasted in 2019 to be worth $300 billion by 2025, but with Thinkific’s hyper growth that timeline may not be as long.
Thinkific will continue to fuel its growth with its Series A raise of $22 million in September, the third largest deal in Vancouver in Q3 this year. The raise was led by early investor Rhino Ventures, which NBR profiled on Pitch Deck earlier. Fraser Hall, Managing Partner at Rhino, was quoted in a TechCrunch article discussing Thinkific:
“Working with Thinkific over the past four years has been nothing short of exceptional. It’s no secret that its business model, user numbers, and ~ 150% year-over-year revenue growth is tracking, by stage, very closely to Shopify, which is now Canada’s most valuable public company. It’s a model that is undoubtedly shaping a new world of knowledge entrepreneurship and one that’s accessible to any individual or organization that wants to add education as a new revenue channel.”
Thinkific is emblematic of the recent uptick in momentum and mentorship within Vancouver’s startup scene. Beyond Rhino, it was supported by early stage Vancouver-based investors Ryan Holmes (Founder of Hootsuite), Jeff Booth (Founder of BuildDirect) and others — evidence that successful local entrepreneurs are keen to encourage and increase entrepreneurial ventures in the region.
Thinkific plans to use its latest funding to explore opportunities accelerated by COVID-19 and grow its team — it is currently hiring for more than 30 roles and is planning to hire 350 people over the next 18 months. NBR got to sit down with Dalena Nguyen, a Talent Branding Specialist at Thinkific. As someone involved in Thinkific’s human resources, Dalena provided insight into how Thinkific’s strong values guide every decision and form the ethos of the company’s strong culture. One of the values includes being “fanatical about customer success”. As a company focused on being accessible to anyone, Thinkific has found that having a diverse workforce has allowed them to build a better product by taking a wide range of perspectives into consideration, better reflecting its diverse customers. Notably, 51% of Thinkific’s leadership team is composed of women, which is uncommon in tech.
It’s clear that Thinkific’s rigorous hiring process, which uses the topgrading approach, has been successful in finding individuals who add a new perspective while still adhering to Thinkific’s core values and contributing to the company’s growth. Thinkific was named one of the Best Workplaces in British Columbia, made the Growth List of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies by Canadian Business (ranking 17th out of 415 companies), and was named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 all in this year alone. It is leading the way in not only building more resilient digital infrastructure for entrepreneurship but growing Vancouver’s startup ecosystem. We look forward to seeing Thinkific continue to revolutionize the way people earn and learn online. | https://medium.com/new-business-review/thinkific-leading-the-educational-renaissance-7f33db4f45d1 | ['New Business Review'] | 2020-12-15 20:13:30.623000+00:00 | ['Innovation In Education', 'Vancouver Startups', 'E Learning Solutions', 'Online Learning', 'Edtech'] |
A Guide to Buying a Vehicle in the USA | A few weeks ago I wrote a guide on finding the ideal next vehicle. This is a follow up article on the actual process of buying the vehicle.
New vehicles
Nearly everyone buys vehicles from dealerships. I have heard a few people skip the haggling process with salesmen and buy through a wholesaler like Costco.
Wholesale resellers
The wholesaler — Costco has tie ups with local dealerships and offers new vehicles at “a lower price” for their members. In essence, Costco does some of the haggling you would have done by yourself. If you are up for some haggling, you could definitely get a lower price from a dealership.
Dealerships
Buying from dealerships has been a tedious and/or unpleasant process for almost every single vehicle buyer so far. Manufacturers such as Tesla have completely removed the haggling process and let people buy their vehicle as though they were ordering any product from Amazon. However, all other manufacturers continue to sell through dealerships.
The exact same vehicle can be bought from multiple dealerships, often within the same town. The challenge is in finding the dealership that is willing to knock down the final / “On-the-road” / “out of door” price.
What exactly is the “final” price?
The price of the vehicle when purchasing from a dealership typically comprises of the following:
Cost of the vehicle itself
A “value add-on package” or “convenience package” consisting of trivial and/or cosmetic items of little to no value such as floor mats, stickers installed by the dealership (~ 10% of the cost of the vehicle)
Dealer “documentation fees” (~ 5% of the cost of the vehicle)
Promotions
State tax (~ 6–12% of the total cost)
Vehicle registration
Title fees and cost of number plates (~ $100 but varies by state)
Much like the closing costs that accompany the list price of a house, these “fees” and non-removable “packages” often come up to 10–20% (or even more) of the price of the actual vehicle. These unavoidable costs vary from dealership to dealership. Some may increase the cost of the vehicle but not levy a hefty value add-on package, etc.
Some dealerships and even manufacturers may also provide substantial discounts for things like:
new graduate discount
loyalty (to same brand and/or dealership) discount
military / armed forces discount
etc.
At the end of the day, what you, the buyer, need to be concerned about is the so-called “out of the door” or “on the road” price which is that amount you are responsible for.
You could manually search for new / used cars via search aggregators like Autotrader.com. These search engines generally look at the inventories of each dealership and do a good job of helping you look at what is out there.
The problem with any search engine like this is that they are simply do not know the final cost of the vehicle and only know whatever the dealership puts up on their websites. In many cases, dealerships often “list” their vehicle at absurdly low prices (by stacking all possible promotions, that one is typically not eligible for) but a phone call or email to the dealership for a quote would reveal that the final price is substantially greater than the amount quoted on their website. Therefore, I would recommend that you don’t pay too much attention to the exact price for the listing.
Long-story-short, search engines are mostly useless in determining the cheapest dealership to do business with since dealerships game the system. The only way to compare dealerships is by talking to them, haggling with them, and getting them to give you a formal quote.
Essentially, your goal is to find the lowest offer by (politely) playing one dealership’s offer against another.
Dealing with dealership salesmen
The profession — “car salesman” conjures an image of a sleazy unscrupulous human being who would sweet talk their way to closing their deal at the cost of making the whole negotiation process an incredible disgusting affair.
However, there is no way out. One really does have to deal with such salesmen or their manager.
I have discovered that salesman effectively ambush the buyer when one physically visits the dealership. The prospective buyer is often asked for their phone number, email address, copy of the driver’s license. These information are used to target advertisements, train their salesmen to hound the buyer multiple times a day over the phone and/or email, etc.
A friend of mine therefore recommended that prospective buyers start a temporary email account that you can use to contact multiple dealerships asking for the “on-road” price of a listed vehicle. Do NOT give out your phone number or your personal email address.
Quite often, dealers will attempt to upsell customers on a more expensive trim or model, extended warranty packages, “convenience packages”. You are therefore recommended to be very firm on exactly what you need. Salesmen love to look for the wiggle room in being able to upsell something you never wanted.
In some cases, some dealerships are willing to out-bid their competitor. In other cases, they politely refuse. There is a possibility one may have to travel a few hours from home to go pick up the vehicle.
Used vehicles
Vehicle History
Used vehicles come with a history. The goal is to get a vehicle with a good history. Most avenues (more below) for buying vehicles partner with establishments such as AutoCheck and CarFax, which track and provide detailed history of vehicles.
Note however, that not all events in the vehicle’s history are tracked. For example car rental companies service their fleet with their own mechanics and do not report maintenance activity or even damages to CarFax / AutoCheck. Even private individuals can choose to have their vehicle fixed without the repair showing up in the formal records of the vehicle.
Ideally, you want to look for a vehicle that satisfies as many of these conditions as possible:
Clean title. Walk away from vehicles with other kinds of titles especially severe damage or financing related.
No major damage — Avoid vehicles with current or past “Salvaged” / “Junk” / “Rebuilt” / “Fire” / “Flood” / “Lemon” status — vehicles that have been brought back to operational (often questionable) condition after major damage. The one exception is “Hail” — Generally, hail results in dents on the bodywork. Fixes to bodywork will indeed be expensive but the vehicle may be structurally acceptable if you are willing to make compromises / budget is extremely limited.
No financing related issues — E.g. — “Repossessed” titles (indicates that vehicle was likely owned by someone who was irresponsible when it came to loan payments and also likely maintenance)
No major accidents. If you are confident and comfortable, you could potentially consider a vehicle with minor non-critical damage.
Fewest possible number of owners (e.g. 1)
Vehicle has undergone all routine maintenance on time (prescribed by the vehicle manufacturer)
Vehicle has undergone repairs / checks for all manufacturer recalls
Privately owned vehicle. Other alternatives are fleet / rental use
No color changes — indicates potential respray after major accident.
Avenues
I would say that there are three ways to purchase a used vehicle:
Flat-rates / no negotiation prices offered by an online sale such as:
Car rental companies like Enterprise Carvana (more later) CarMax (more later)
Car dealerships
Private sales:
On “social” networks: craigslist, Facebook Classifieds
Each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages:
Flat-rate offers:
Minimal hassle, no haggling over the price. Not necessarily the best deal though (e.g. Carvana and especially CarMax) You often get a short warranty from the seller, in addition to whatever is remaining on the original warranty from the manufacturer.
Car dealership
Vehicles from a variety of sources (auto-auctions, reselling fleet vehicles, junk / heavily damaged cars, off-lease vehicles, trade-ins etc.), so the quality varies wildly Very likely a BAD experience if you are not mentally strong / soft-spoken / do not know much about vehicles / did not do your homework If you do not possess the above qualities, you could find yourself a bargain. Some offer their own short-term (60 days / 1 year) warranty
Private sales
No assurances / buy-back from the seller It is your responsibility to either be knowledgeable enough to inspect the vehicle or take it to a mechanic to get ther assessment. Depending on where you find the deal, the seller may be shady. Often, a good but risky deal
Off-rental vehicles
If you are aiming towards the absolute cheapest used vehicles that are still in good / new condition, look at Hertz’s Rent2Buy or Hertz Certified program. Essentially, Hertz — the car rental company, sells their vehicles after 1–2 years of use for a very low price. Enterprise and Avis also do offer something similar, so consider looking at their inventory as well. Skip this section if you buying a vehicle used by hundreds of people (statistically rental cars are driven by about 50–60 drivers in a single year) before yourself is something you cannot stomach. Rental companies keep a young fleet of vehicles, no older than two years. Most vehicles are within their original manufacturer warranties and barely require any maintenance. Rental vehicles are said to be well maintained by their own mechanics. These rental companies claim that they sell on the best vehicles in their fleet and auction those vehicles with problems or ones that have been in accidents. Because these vehicles have been driven a lot more than a comparable privately-owned vehicle, some of them may have run out of the original manufacturer’s warranty. That being said, Hertz does offer their own short warranty that should offer some peace of mind. Most importantly, the vehicles are priced well below the KBB-suggested price. The drawback is that the selection (makes, models, trims) is often very slim and typically consists of the cheapest trims which offer minimal / no features. If you need certain features that are not available in the vehicles you are looking at in Hertz’s inventory, you may want to look elsewhere since most features cannot be added on to a used vehicle (at least not at an inexpensive price). Consider signing up for either the Hertz Gold or AAA membership — Hertz provides a $350 discount for each of them.
Online stores
The next place I would point people towards is Carvana.com for used vehicles — Think of this as Amazon.com for cars. Unlike Hertz, this website has a wide selection of vehicles to choose from. However, the vehicles will be priced higher than Hertz, but still at the low-end of the KBB price. Always check KBB before shortlisting a vehicle. Perhaps most importantly, you only get to see the vehicle virtually through photographs before buying the vehicle. Carvana is typically very transparent and forthright about the condition of the vehicle. They provide photographs of any and all major scratches, minor dents, scuffs, etc. when they list the vehicle so the buyer does not feel betrayed in any way. Upon clicking the right buttons, the vehicle will be delivered to your doorstep in a week. This is the first time you get to physically see / inspect the vehicle. That being said, they do offer a no-questions-asked 7-day return policy if you did not like the vehicle for some reason. If unsure (especially if the vehicle is past its original warranty), use this opportunity to have it inspected by a certified mechanic. Among all the places one could buy a car, Carvana is by far the most pleasant seller. Their prices are transparent and reasonable. One can often find a $500 coupon on reddit.com via a quick google search.
CarMax
The last of the no-haggling sellers of used vehicles is CarMax. CarMax is infamous for absurd markups, which cannot be negotiated. Given that they offer the convenience of a large selection of vehicles (in their parking lots and online) that are locally accessible, inexperienced buyers often buy their vehicles from CarMax without knowing that they could have saved thousands of dollars. What is worse is that CarMax typically buys rental vehicles from Hertz and Enterprise and sells them on for massive profits. I personally would not recommend anyone to buy from CarMax. That being said, I would recommend physically trying out / test-driving a vehicle from their lot since they keep vehicles from all brands.
Financing
Dealers want more down payment, trade-in because they have immediate value. they want you to pay exorbitant interest rates and/or very long term loans. Some deals do come by though. Do the math | https://medium.com/@responsible-consumer/a-guide-to-buying-a-vehicle-in-the-usa-dbfe55bdaea0 | ['Responsible Consumer'] | 2020-12-24 00:42:41.908000+00:00 | ['Buying A Car', 'Credit', 'Loans', 'Cars'] |
Teach Me How to Love You Again | This was the best part of his day. This is what he looked forward to each day, his hour lunch break. He would sit, enjoy his food and think about happier times.
He would think of home, think of his family, of his life when he was a boy. He would reminisce on how much simpler life was back before he moved to this country.
For that hour he would get away from the tribulations of work, get away from the noise. For that hour he had his own corner of the world.
He had his life back.
But before that he had to conquer the microwave.
He took his newly bought Pyrex dish, which held his food, and placed it in the microwave.
He didn’t notice the fork still inside.
The microwave chirped at him as he opened the door. Closing it, he stared dumbly at the machine confused by all the buttons and pictures.
For a moment he wished for the old microwave. Back then it was only two buttons “Start” and “Stop” with numbers for the timer.
Defrost, deheat, reheat, recook. Dambele had no idea what these symbols meant.
Hesitating, he pressed “One” and hoped that it meant one minute. The microwave churned to life and he waited.
The pyrex plate twirled around like a ballerina. He stared at his reflection in the microwave. Looking back at him was a sad, tired, ancient body, with white hair, hunched over.
After about fifteen seconds, something popped in the microwave. The break room went silent. Everyone turned an eye to Dambele and the microwave, before warily continuing back to their conversations.
At the same time one of the managers came in, Bradley.
Bradley was a top director at the company. Handsome guy, fairly young and wore nice suits. Dambele liked him because even though he was a boss, he always made sure to say hi to everyone.
“Hey DB! What’s on the menu today?”
Dambele pointed at the microwave “Food from my country. My wife made it.”
Bradley smiled at Dambele.
“Smells good man. I might have to try some, your wife can’t keep spoiling you like this”
Dambele blushed at the showering of praise, slightly embarrassed but swelling with pride in his wife’s cooking.
There were twenty seconds left on the timer when Bradley walked out. As he left the breakroom, he looked into the microwave.
“Sure does smell good” he thought and walked out. Then he realized.
“Wait D did you leave your for-”
BOOOM
The microwave exploded, blowing Dambele back, throwing him against the wall, propelling him right out of his shoes.
People came rushing in to see what happened. They saw Dambele on the side of the wall.
His white hair was smoking, bewildered face charred, and his clothes slightly were burned.
Then they looked at the microwave and saw his food burned to a crisp, still smoking, and the fork he left, lying on the ground.
They all started laughing.
“Damn DB, you must really want that workers comp!!”
“Twenty years in and he finally had enough!!”
They laughed on the way out leaving Dambele alone.
He walked gingerly back to the microwave and looked at the mess. His food was ruined.
All that was left was a smoking pile of shit.
His last piece from home was gone.
And with it losing the only corner of the world he had left. | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/teach-me-how-to-love-you-again-a6600c4a3139 | ['Jesse Ya Diul'] | 2020-11-11 13:50:55.638000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Writing', 'Life', 'Immigration', 'Short Story'] |
The Ultimate Christmas Wish List | ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS
The Ultimate Christmas Wish List
Image screenshot from FunkyChristmasJumpers on Instagram
What do you dream of for this Christmas? What would be on your ultimate Christmas wish list? Have no fear, I’ve ripped off Twitter and compiled this ultimate list of 71 wishes for Christmas.
I admit, I thought a Christmas list from Twitter would be less altruistic, but I admire any man’s commitment to tacos! | https://medium.com/@reubensalsa/the-ultimate-christmas-wish-list-9ec0710b78f2 | ['Reuben Salsa'] | 2020-12-18 04:22:51.528000+00:00 | ['Salsa', 'Christmas', 'The Bad Influence', 'Trump', 'Covid 19'] |
Power of Maps and Maps of Power: How Design Re-Thinks the Dynamics of Dominance in Cartography | Map it yourself: the power to the people!
Sometimes, the best way to make sure that you appear on the map is to make the map yourself. Kibera, a slum from Nairobi, was not properly mapped by the government. Thus, members of the community started a participatory project to compensate.
There are many ways of mapping the land and creating maps. But Public Lab offers a clever alternative that allows anyone to create their own maps. That is: without relying on any service owned by tech giants and/or governments. Namely: balloon mapping!
Appearing on the map is meaningful, as it somehow means that you “exist”. But sometimes, the best way to be heard is to make yourself heard. Queering the Map does it by allowing LGBTQ2IA+ people to link their stories to the physical realm.
Renaming the space: giving everyone an address, and claiming the streets back
Street names and numbers are often inconvenient to define a location. For example, conventions may vary from a country to another, or, in slums, addresses can be hard to find. This can lead to catastrophic situations if, for example, an ambulance can’t find a place. While GPS coordinates are absolute, they don’t fit in the everyday language. To tackle this issue, 3 words divided the whole earth surface into 3x3m squares defined by 3 words.
Like dominants write history, they name the streets after their references. This is especially true in spaces that were colonized, such as Canada. In Toronto, a group of native activists is renaming the streets with Anishinaabemowin names. This confronts the postcolonial realm with the native Canadian heritage.
Face your guilt: fighting impunity by mapping injustice
HarassMap allows Egyptian women to map abuses and throw light on a societal problem. The project aims to ensure that harassers won’t harass again by exposing them.
WatchTheMed confronts governments with their responsibilities in the Mediterranean migrant crisis. By analyzing when, where and how disasters happen, they can highlight countries' mismanagement.
Underprivileged areas are usually overrepresented in criminality statistics. White-Collar Crime Risk Zones takes the opposing view by showing where financial crimes are most likely to happen in the US.
The Anti-Eviction project gives a voice to the unheard by mapping communities at risk of eviction. It aims to raise awareness of the emergency and injustices faced by the most vulnerable.
Representation Matters: reinventing the maps to open new narratives
The Decolonial Atlas showcases maps that challenge western representations of the territory. Thus, it invites to debunk the bias that has shaped mainstream cartography in the last centuries.
This Is Not An Atlas features maps that highlight the unseen. It presents disruptive ways to consider what a map actually is. | https://medium.com/design-for-sustainability-radar/power-of-maps-and-maps-of-power-how-design-re-thinks-the-dynamics-of-dominance-in-cartography-42030222ee55 | ['Pierre-Xavier Puissant'] | 2021-06-08 07:46:47.247000+00:00 | ['Sustainable', 'Sustainability', 'Design', 'Power', 'Maps'] |
Lack of fear of embarrassment | If you can’t handle the risk of embarrassment, rejection, and failure — you need to learn how.
“Caring what other people think of you is a security hole. Patch it or be exploited — including by mere script kiddies like sales & marketing departments or political campaigns.” [1]
Embarrassing moments are important, they are experiences to learn from. If you never put yourself out there you will lose out on much experience in a lifetime. So many discussions, ideas, projects that would give massive XP if you simply did them.
Usually the main factor stopping you is fear of embarrassment. And under a lifetime you will always have this feeling of potentially being embarrassed. Learn to learn from embarrassment. Learn to see challenges with risk of embarrassment in a positive light — something to look for, not something to avoid.
Additionally, how many people remember or care in the long run? People forget what they ate for lunch yesterday, I bet they forget that embarrassing thing you did last year.
Full disclosure: Learning from embarrassing moments is key. If you’re constantly embarrassing yourself in similar ways without progress then something is not right. Key word here is learning. Asking a stupid question a few times is smart. Asking it over and over is hitting your head against the wall.
There is risk here because you might think purely intellectually that you are not affected by embarrassment . However, your experience is molded by more than your thoughts — feelings and unconscious calculations are always present. In my experience if there is a mismatch between what you think and how you feel, the feeling will win in the long run.
So pay attention, put yourself out there as much as possible without wrecking yourself emotionally and go from there. There is hopefully no limit to what you can learn.
[1] https://twitter.com/patrissimo?
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17859574-how-to-fail-at-almost-everything-and-still-win-big | https://medium.com/festina-lente/lack-of-fear-of-embarrassment-f319e668c08d | ['Maximilian Rehn'] | 2020-08-20 10:37:23.153000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Fear', 'Risk', 'Learning'] |
用遊戲輕鬆學會iPhone攝影技巧，手機攝影原來這麼好學 | Gurushots player currently in Guru I level. iPhone photography lover with iPhone 8+. Follow my IG @uj_taiwan or @ujtaiwan :) | https://medium.com/@ujtaiwan/gurushots-%E9%9B%B6%E5%9F%BA%E7%A4%8E%E4%B9%9F%E8%83%BD%E5%AD%B8%E6%89%8B%E6%A9%9F%E6%94%9D%E5%BD%B1-%E4%B8%8A-e1eb5c14c98e | [] | 2020-12-24 14:43:26.470000+00:00 | ['手機攝影', 'iPhone', 'Gurushots', '攝影技巧', '攝影'] |
Simple POST request on Android Kotlin using Retrofit | Gradle dependency
You need to add below dependencies into your Android projects build.gradle (Module: app) file
API and raw JSON Request Response
Now let’s assume our server endpoint for your REST request is http://api.server.com/users and we want to add a new user in server using http POST method call. Server spec for request and response might look like,
Request body json:
Response body json:
We see, when we hit the endpoint with above request body, server inserts the user info into its database, creates a new user ID for that particular user and returns the same user including the assigned new user ID. We want to parse the response user into the client apps custom object.
Kotlin Data Model Class
We need to prepare model class UserInfo. As we see, json keys for request and response are not following coding convention of Android, so we need to add SerializedName annotation for keys so that when we use Retrofit it generates proper json with those keys. Using SerializedName we can map our property to jason key. Remember it is better to make the properties optional so that even if server does not response with all the keys we still able to create our rich object in client side.
Retrofit Workflow
Now, we need three components to work with Retrofit REST calls, | https://medium.com/swlh/simplest-post-request-on-android-kotlin-using-retrofit-e0a9db81f11a | ['Sazzad Hissain Khan'] | 2020-04-28 06:44:36.278000+00:00 | ['Json', 'Rest Api', 'Retrofit', 'Parsing', 'Kotlin'] |
Sirens: Embodiment of Legends | Leicher concludes:
“I feel very lucky that I’m the one to finally prove to the world what people here have known for half a century. The Kaiwi Point Mermaid is real.”
Whatever you happen to believe about the existence — or lack thereof — of creatures like mermaids, I have to say that I found Leicher’s account extraordinary. It gave me fresh zeal for my mermaid project, since the bulk of sightings usually come from centuries long past.
Another recent sighting comes from Israel: specifically, Kiryat Yam. Schlomo Cohen was one of the first people to see the mermaid in 2009. He reported that he’d been hanging out with friends on the coast of Kiryat Yam and noticed what he thought to be a young woman sun-bathing. However, she seemed to be lying on the ground in ‘a weird way’. The woman turned, realized she was being watched, and then proceeded to dive back into the waters. Cohen was stunned: the woman’s lower half, he explained, was long and fish-like. He was not the only one to witness the Kiryat Yam mermaid; at least a dozen other people were present that day and they, too, corroborated Cohen’s story.
Those who believe mermaids to be a staple of children’s bedtimes stories can be forgiven, if one reflects upon it. From an evolutionary and zoological perspective, both ‘human’ and ‘fish’ make for a truly impossible combination. In the first place, a woman is a mammal and fish are — well, cold-blooded aqua-dwellers. So, if mermaids existed, would they be able to breathe in the air, water, or both? If we imagine these young women of the ocean to have lungs, as people do, then wouldn’t their necessity to surface and breathe mean that we would have caught, or at the very least taken video, of such a specimen by now? Where are the decomposing mer-folk bodies snagged by trawlers or fishing nets? And what’s more, how would they reproduce? It would be very difficult to imagine a water-child being born through the end of its mother’s tail, but external fertilization of mermaid ova by a male member of the species is a bit easier to process.
(Photo courtesy of Cottonbro on Pexels)
By 2010, public interest in the existence of real mermaids spiked, in part thanks to the Kiryat Kam sightings. In 2012, the cable channel Animal Planet produced a TV drama titled ‘Mermaids: The Body Found’. The premise of the 90-minute program involved mysterious recordings of an unidentified marine creature, along with a supposed mermaid corpse and video footage depicting what the show’s researchers claimed were ‘aquatic apes’.
But while ratings for the program initially soared, not all was what it seemed. ‘The Body Found’ featured actors, not actual marine biologists. The ‘aquatic ape’ footage was nothing more than sophisticated CGI. There were no mermaid recordings, videos, or corpses.
‘The Body Found’ wasn’t meant to be a documentary at all. Rather, the program was classified as a ‘docudrama’, and both the CGI and the show’s earnest nature fooled millions of people into believing that evidence for the new-fangled aquatic-ape theory was real. In 2013, Animal Planet aired a follow-up to the original, called ‘The New Evidence’. And, while both productions included (finely-printed) disclaimers at the beginning, the damage had been done. Viewers felt that they’d been duped. So many people had been hoodwinked that the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration had to issue a statement, which read, in part: ‘…no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found’.
But faux-documentaries aside, is there even a smidgen of possibility that mermaids might still exist, or at least that they did at one time? A story from Holland offers a tantalizing clue.
In the mid 17th century, an unfortunate mermaid somehow slipped into Holland’s borders via a defect in one of its dikes. She was injured in the process, but people in the area found the poor creature and were said to have nursed her back to health. Not only did the mermaid survive; she thrived. She eventually learned to help the community with chores, learned how to speak Dutch, and even converted to Catholicism. Her account is alluring, but there is no mention of how the Dutch mermaid dealt with the issue of her tail. Would she have shed it during her rescue? If so, how would she have managed to ambulate without somehow generating a pair of legs? And if she kept her tail, how on Earth did she do chores?! Might they have kept her in a barrel of water to prevent her tail from drying out?
(Photo courtesy of Bruce Christianson via Unsplash)
Questions flood, but there is no dam to quell them. And yet, there’s one extraordinary sweetheart who once proved that mermaids are closer than we ever could’ve imagined.
In the high region of Peru’s mountainous terrain, the Andes, Sara Arauco gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Milagros. Milagros — whose name means ‘miracles’ in Spanish — was born with a perfect heart and a healthy set of lungs, but she would immediately make medical history as one of only three children in the world afflicted with sirenomelia, otherwise known as ‘mermaid syndrome’.
Mermaid syndrome is exactly what it sounds like: an infant born with fused legs, resulting in a child who appears to be a mermaid, or ‘water-baby’. Sirenomelia occurs in one out of every 100,000 live births. It can be recognized in the mother’s womb via ultrasound as early as 14 weeks. The fetal legs are fused, the fibula rotated, and in most cases there is a single umbilical artery, along with rectal atresia. The abdominal aorta is always absent. There are no genitals, but the fetus with sirenomelia may also present with other defects, such as cardiac problems and spinal bifida.
Physicians attend to the young Milagros (photo courtesy of Reuters
“When I saw my baby when she was born, I was filled with desperation,” claimed Milagros’s father, Ricardo Serron. Understanding the dire nature of their daughter’s condition, her parents left the mountains and fled to Lima for medical treatment. Physicians there noted that, at 13 months old, Milagros weighed a healthy 15 pounds. But her anatomical anomalies were serious: her left kidney was deformed, and the right kidney was too small to be of any use.
Saving Milagros was paramount, and in 2005 her parents consented to a four-and-a-half hour surgery that would attempt to ‘correct’ the tail up to her knees. Incredibly, Sara and her husband were able to observe the operation remotely. The televised procedure required a team of 11 surgeons and various other specialists such as plastic surgeons, pediatricians, and cardiac physicians.
The operation seemed to be a success. By 2006, Milagros was taking her first steps, and in 2009, another procedure was able to separate her legs entirely.
According to Milagros’s parents, their miracle water-baby had always been bright, intelligent, and vocal, with a large vocabulary and a remarkable ability to relate to anyone, not just children her age. In 2016, another operation separated the binding tissue from Milagros’s knees to her groin.
Pictured: a happy young Milagros after successful surgery (photo courtesy of Reuters)
Milagros thrived, but in 2019 her kidney ailments proved to be too much. Just before celebrating her fifteenth birthday, the water-baby from the Peruvian mountains passed away. Friends and family dubbed her ‘Ariel’, in memory of another mermaid who shed her tail in exchange for legs.
Dear Milagros was a stark conundrum for naysayers who parrot incessantly that we’ll never see a ‘real, live’ mermaid.
With 97 percent of the world’s oceans unexplored, the salty waters of the Deep Blue harbor secrets that we can’t yet even fathom. I hope that the mermaid is among them, skimming the water alongside her sisters, who are the narwhal and wise porpoises.
SOURCES: Peruvian News, Animal Planet, Wikipedia, LiveScience, StrangeHistory.net, Jeff’s Diving Locker | https://medium.com/the-mystery-box/sirens-embodiment-of-legends-1142d225347a | ['Brown Lotus'] | 2020-12-21 16:03:15.555000+00:00 | ['Cryptids', 'Mysteries', 'Mermaids', 'Unsolved Mysteries', 'Science'] |
I’m now versioning my app secrets in Git, here is why you should do the same. | Back on Monday, the company received several emails, mentioning that the billing as ignited and with the maximum restrictions they reached 15 000€ in just 2 days. That’s not so cool for a small commit of fail like this… The thing is that it’s happening to many people every year.
You have to know that those keys have a specific pattern and there is a bunch of bots that are crawling the web searching for that pattern.
What happened is that someone had populated several of the biggest CPU optimized VM in order to crypto mine some Bitcoin (BTC).
The moral of this story is: Never commit any sensitive data anywhere to prevent any accidental leak, even on the small repositories you might think that they will never become public.
For that, most cloud provider services allow managing secrets in a secure way, that will be injected on runtime directly in cloud functions or the VM through Environment variables. This is a really cool thing and starting that day, I was applying that anywhere, even on my own private repository, just in case…
…Until last week, where I wanted to add to my already not so small collection of secret a serialized version of a Firebase Service account, which is a JSON file with amongst others a full RSA string key.
There are some limitations on some provider about secrets management
Despite the fact that managing complexes secrets is something hard using environment variables (e.g: RSA keys pair, JSON config, …) there are some other limitations…
And on Zeit Now, which is kind of a wrapper around AWS, there is an upstream limit in terms of size of secrets…
This means for those who are base64 'ing complexes' secrets such as Firebase/ Google credentials and service account, you will probably exceed the limit. This happened to me and to many others.
All of this leads me to another technique: Encryption.
From 99 secrets to 1 secret with a versioned encrypted JSON configuration
Instead of defining various environments variables as secrets to store my private configuration and hit the limits. I’m using symmetric encryption to store one complete JSON file that contains my secured configuration.
The only thing that remains in the cloud secrets storage is the encryption key and —potentially— the initiation vector (IV) that is used to cipher this configuration object.
This practice as some benefits:
All the configuration stands in one place.
You can easily store JSON structures and namespace your config parameters properly.
It is safe.
It’s IDE and developer-friendly, with statics typings and auto-completion.
Generally speaking, if you’re not a rookie and apply the basics of security, there isn’t many chances that someone successfully breaks through your security and steals your code repository without having you get notified.
But even if it happens here, using the following strategy you’ll be safe because, like your database passwords, your whole configuration is encrypted.
That way you have far enough time to invalidate and generate new access keys for any of your services and secure your repository again.
But wait… What is symmetric encryption?
A quick reminder about symmetric encryption
Symmetric Encryption in a nutshell — Wikipedia
Symmetric encryption is the action of encoding a text (here, a stringified JSON) using a randomly generated key. Using the same key, the program is able to decrypt this chunk of data later and restore it.
In addition to the key, each time we encrypt the stringified configuration object, we use a random chunk of data called an Initialization Vector (IV). This prevents having the same encryption results when ciphering several times the same document. Which increases security.
All of this is done using a technique called Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) if you want to read more about it feel free to Google about it or Wikipedia.
Good news, it’s pretty easy to use a CBC cipher in NodeJS. It’s supported out-of-the-box using the crypto module on top OpenSSL.
Using Cipher IV CBC to encrypt a JSON configuration for your cloud projet
The following example is split into 2 parts:
First: encryption. We will encrypt on the developer computer the desired JSON configuration object. We could have done this on some websites such as this one but I respectfully disagree with that practice. You should never take any risks and expose your configuration on an external website and/or letting someone else generate your encryption key. Otherwise, it’s useless to encrypt something. Once we have the encrypted string, we just add it to our repository and commit it with our source code. Second: decryption. We will decrypt the configuration when the code is bootstrapping using our encryption key injected by the secrets provider in our environment variables and make it available in our application.
Ready? Let’s code! | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/im-now-versioning-my-app-secrets-in-git-here-is-why-you-should-do-the-same-2a72c1a49039 | ['Andréas Hanss'] | 2020-04-23 21:48:14.527000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Software', 'Cloud', 'Encryption', 'AWS'] |
“THROUGH THE APEX” for F1 using AR,VR and MR | Well as soon as we See the above Two pictures we know how fun it is to use snapchat filters and play Pokémon go. Well the Secret behind this fun is augmented reality. Augmented reality captures the reality through the camera vision by recognizing the real world objects creating customized views for the user. Today Most of the AR applications are In the mobile platform but these are heading towards to watches and AR glasses as well in the market.
Most Popular AR Products and its uses in the market.
Top AR PRODUCTS
1 .DoodleLens
DoodleLens is a fun AR app. You doodle a thing on a piece of paper and snap a photo of it with this app. The app turns it into an AR sticker and you can pop into whatever photo you want. You also get a frame-by-frame animator, some light editing features, and various effects
2. FACEBOOK / Instagram / Snap Chat
These social media apps uses filters which will give a customized view of the face to the user. These apps have been using AR features in order to deliver a good user selfie experience.
3.Google Translate
Google translate provides real time translation using the camera and translating words that consists inside the images. We can point the camera to the relevant text we need and it will translate and give the desired translation.
Virtual Reality
Unlike augmented reality virtual reality provides a total different world to the user. This will be a simulated experience for the user . This technology is used in several sectors such as ,
· Video games
· Medical Sector
· Military training
This is provided through a virtual reality headset and a suitable environment to provide the necessary feeling.
Best Products in the market
1. Oculus quest — This has the below features. Price 399$
2. Oculus Rift S — Price 399$
3. PlayStation VR — Price $275.02
Mixed Reality | https://medium.com/@rajitharul23/through-the-apex-for-f1-using-ar-vr-and-mr-4fc93eaf88cd | [] | 2020-12-05 22:11:46.434000+00:00 | ['VR', 'AR', 'Senna', 'F1', 'Mr'] |
4 Pillars of Web Testing: A Guide for Beginners | By René Thomas
In an age when the entire world is glued to screens big and small, websites are now facing an unprecedented amount of traffic 24/7. Testing these websites to ensure they are able to hit user sweet spots has now become more crucial than ever. But what if you’re a rookie tester and you have no clue where to start? What do you do then?
In this article, I’ll share the four key areas you MUST consider when testing a website. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll have everyone thinking you’ve been around the testing block more than just a few times!
1. Functionality ….make sure it works, duh!
Let’s kick things off with a no-brainer! Functionality testing is done to make sure your website “behaves” the way it is intended to. It’s that simple. You might ask: “Isn’t that what all types of tests do?”, and the answer would be yes. The difference with functionality testing is simply that it focuses on validating whether the actions of the site match the requirements or specifications it was built to fulfill.
The design of a website is usually based on a list of basic core functions and expected behaviors that must be met. In the Agile framework, these design specifications are typically found in user stories written to meet your user’s needs. Functionality testing very closely simulates the user’s experience by testing all the actions the website is expected to perform in the real world. This means that these tests are useful in defining whether or not the final product is truly “Done”.
Another benefit of functionality tests is how they allow your testing scope to vary from very modular, unit tests to broad, system-wide tests. Since applications are usually weakest where multiple points interact, a great strategy is to integrate different unit tests into testing groups. Testing this way exposes whatever bugs are lurking at these integration points.
Check out this great article about 8 Functional Testing Types that you can include in your testing. Also check out this Functional Testing Guide for a more in-depth discussion on how to efficiently include functional tests in your test strategy.
2. Performance Matters!
Now let’s talk about Performance Testing. It’s really what the name suggests: executing tests to ensure the website performs at its best under varying conditions.
When we speak about Performance Testing, we are generally talking about testing site speed, scalability, and stability.
Site Speed & Scalability
“Two Hundred and Fifty milliseconds, that’s the magic number!”; so says Harry Shum, the Executive Vice President of Technology and Research at Microsoft when asked what he recommends as a competitive website speed.
A user should have little to no friction when using a website, so asking yourself questions like “Are loading times frustratingly slow?” and “How are click-through-rates being affected by slow load times?” should guide how you carry out your performance tests.
Slow load times = poor user experience. This leads to reduced website traffic and ultimately potential customer and revenue loss. Let’s say you’re a user in the middle of an online transfer on your bank’s website when suddenly the buffering ring of death appears just as you hit “SEND.” Was your transaction successful? Where did your money go? That situation would make anyone a little anxious.
This is where you come in as a Tester; by continuously putting the website under varying levels of stress and load, you can be sure it can handle a certain threshold of users at the same time without slowing down or crashing.
E-commerce websites like Amazon have seen other-worldly increases in revenue since the beginning of the CoronaVirus pandemic. So far, they’ve managed to maintain their usual site standards even with such crazy increases in concurrent users. Companies like that know they have to carry out these types of tests to be able to make predictions for the future. Can you imagine if Amazon crashed on Black Friday because their servers weren’t equipped to handle the influx of buyers?! Sure it works when there are 100 users online, but does it perform at the same standard when there are 100,000 users? *Insert scalability*
Site Stability
An alarming 47% of respondents in a recent survey said they would immediately leave a website if they had trouble loading an image. What’s even more concerning is that, according to SOASTA and O’Reilly in their book Time Is Money-The Business Value of Web Performance, users perceive load times to be 15% slower than they actually are. Stats like that mean you have to work twice as hard to keep users satisfied. What I’m saying here is that as far as testing for scalability goes, just remember: the website should always act optimally even with load increases. These results are crucial in helping you prepare for future influxes. If you only test under ideal conditions, you run the risk of releasing a website that simply won’t be able to handle sudden user spikes.
The take-away here? Keep Performance Testing at the top of your list, and you’ll have a website that’s not only stable but virtually tough-as-nails. Check out this list of 15 BEST Performance Testing Tools (Load Testing Tools) in 2020 that can help keep you up to speed.
3. Compatibility…like butter on toast!
Compatibility testing is generally understood to be a type of non-functional testing that ensures an application will run across different browsers, hardware, operating systems, and environments. Your goal is always user satisfaction, so it’s important to keep in mind that users come in different shapes, sizes, and device preferences. Since not all of your users have an iPhone, it is your responsibility as a QA specialist to make sure you test whether the website can operate on all devices that may be used to access your website.
Compatibility testing can be daunting because there are so many types of devices a user could be using. Even if you were to focus your tests on the most popular browsers and devices, it would be almost impossible for you to physically account for all the possible variations of those browsers, devices, and operating systems. The good thing is it’s 2020, and we have simulator tools to take care of that.
BrowserStack is currently one of the most reliable testing platforms, which allows you to simulate tests in minutes across on-demand browsers, operating systems, and devices. Check it out if you want to increase your website compatibility and test efficiency tenfold.
4. Accessibility, because… Inclusivity
Remember I mentioned before that users come in different shapes and sizes? Well, it doesn’t just refer to their devices and which browsers they use. Some users live with physical disabilities such as visual and hearing impairments.
With stay-at-home orders being enforced across the world due to the COVID19 pandemic, we are now living through what I am calling a “Digital Renaissance”. Normal everyday life is now virtual. A regular trip to the pharmacy has become a few swipes and a click on a user’s cellphone. This pandemic has proved just how reliant we are on the internet to live comfortably. As businesses continue to digitize their products and services to accommodate this new life, it is our job as testers to ensure no user gets left behind.
So what is Accessibility testing? It’s testing for user inclusivity. In more technical terms, it is a subset of Usability Testing. It adds to the general premise of usability testing (which tests that your site is usable by the average user) by testing how usable it is for people with disabilities.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a document that provides an international standard for web content accessibility against which creators and QA Specialists must test their product. You can view the WCAG Documents on the WCAG website to find out how you can keep your website compliant.
Remember, it’s not enough to just be user-friendly; your website isn’t fit for release until you’ve tested that it’s “ALL-user-friendly”.
Wrapping up
This short guide is clearly not the holy grail of web testing. It is however a great starter kit for a tester who is new to the space. The four areas mentioned — Functionality, Performance, Compatibility, and Accessibility — are core tenets of web testing that you must consider in your test plan. Having these bases covered is a great place to start. Here are my final tips for you:
Take advantage of the abundance of testing resources you have at your fingertips, including those I listed above and in our blog. Don’t be afraid to ask questions to clarify user stories or any information that seems murky or inconsistent with the app you’re testing. You’re a tester. It’s your responsibility to spot flaws and errors, not just in the app but in the testing process. Remember, you’re an advocate for the user — always focus on ensuring the app responds well to the users for whom it is being built. If there are gaps, speak up and share with your team.
Bearing in mind these tips and the 4 types of testing, you’re well on your way to being a great tester. Own your role and get testing! | https://medium.com/@rene-thomas/4-pillars-of-web-testing-a-guide-for-beginners-642a500b1001 | ['René Thomas'] | 2020-12-18 21:48:00.899000+00:00 | ['QA', 'Software Testing', 'Qa Testing', 'Quality Assurance', 'Testing'] |
The Cost of Disloyalty in Sports | I love my mom. She’s great. She raised me to be the man I am today and motivated me to become a writer by consistently nagging me to become an engineer or doctor. To me, if asked at this particular moment, she is indispensable. That being said, if Gregg Popovich came back with a counter offer asking for my mom to be a part of the Kawhi Leonard trade, I would pack her bags myself. I hear the weather is nice in San Antonio.
For the most part, we’re pretty good at viewing trades as business transactions, with the services of one person exchanged for the services of another. Every now and again though, a trade happens where the subject isn’t just another player, but a symbol. Be it of our past success, of commitment to the franchise or that all encompassing word invented to reduce an athlete’s agency: loyalty.
So let’s talk about loyalty.
It doesn’t exist.
Done. Good talk guys.
Just kidding.
However, we did make the exception for some of the recent high profile transactions allowing ourselves to view them through the prism of loyalty rather than team improvement (we may have simmered down as time went on, but the initial reactions remained). To make sure these trades get appropriately ranked in the pantheon of sports transactions we decided to go back and take a look at some, but instead of deciding whether or not they were team’s breaking some “unspoken bond” we investigated whether the teams made right decision when emotion was removed from the equation.
The Indianapolis Colts Drop Peyton Manning
One of the greatest QBs to ever do it. The man who brought a Superbowl title to Indianapolis (and not just to visit), Peyton Manning, was coming off of four surgeries to repair his neck back in 2012. So Indiana decided it was time to not pay him his $28-million option bonus and moved on to their budding young superstar Andrew Luck.
While teams don’t tend to shower lifers with exuberant amount of cash towards the back end of their careers (Kobe Bryant geriatric retirement tour notwithstanding), they at least try to work out an amicable departure situation. In cases where the start can still bring value such as mentorship or even quality playing time, they tend to grandfather in legacy deals such as Dirk Nowitzki’s at Dallas (although I’m fairly confident he has silent shares in at least one of Mark Cuban’s ventures). I expected Peyton to be a Colt for life. The Colts expected $28-million to be too high a price tag for that.
Was It Worth It?
For a second there? Maybe. The Colts were one game from the Superbowl in 2014, defeating Manning’s Broncos before getting dismantled by the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game. Since then, they’ve failed to even make the playoffs. Meanwhile, Manning returned to have one of the best statistical seasons in NFL history, managed two more Superbowl appearances, and even won his second ring (albeit on the back of Von Miller) before riding off into the sunset to do cheesy insurance commercials and possibly call his brother to rant about his performances. So, probably not.
Montreal Canadiens Ship P.K. Subban to Nashville
This was possibly one of the worst breakups in recent sports history. It was so bad, it’s likely that we’ll get a 30-for-30 and a straight-to-Showtime movie sometime in the future with Dule Hill taking on the role of Subban. On the plus side, if this trade didn’t cause mass riots in Montreal, nothing ever will. So the city can rest easy.
Amidst speculation about the defenseman’s personality causing a rift in the locker room, the storied Quebecois franchise decided they ‘had enough’ and moved on from Subban. Some hockey traditionalists thought it was a blessing, and described Subban as selfish and a showboat. Others placed the proper value on his passion and enthusiasm for the game, and argued Montreal had made a massive mistake.
What was shocking was how quickly the team moved on from Subban, especially after he had pledged his allegiance to the city, announcing a $10 million commitment to the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
Was It Worth It?
We’re still sorting through the embers of possibly one of the most significant trades in franchise history, but considering the Predators and Subban made the Stanley Cup Finals in the first year of their union, while the Canadiens flamed out in the first round and then failed to make the playoffs, it’s not looking great so far. Plus, unless they can somehow move mountains to get out from under his contract, Montreal is looking at a $7.8 mil cap hit for Shea Weber into 2026. To make matters worse, some Canadiens’ fans have turned on management as a result of the deal. When the Predators were making their Cup run, a bar in Montreal named Chez Serge (no relation) renamed itself Chez Subban and was an active place of shelter for all Subban fans still willing to cheer for their former star.
The Boston Celtics Don’t Treat IT2 as an Asset
How do you reward a player who left it all on the court for you while also suiting up for the team amidst deep, personal trauma to give a city something to hope for? You trade him in a package that visibly devalues his own status as an asset and then have your fanbase fire off tweets attacking him for the rest of the season of course. How else?
Isaiah Thomas and the Boston Celtics surprised everyone in 2016/17 when they raced to first in the East, and an Eastern Conference Finals date with the Cavaliers. A team without a clear-cut superstar leading the pack, coached by a basketball savant and powered by the biggest engine in the smallest body they were living the dream before hitting LeBron-shaped reality.
That summer, Danny Ainge unceremoniously moved on from Isaiah Thomas, who left everything (including his health) on the court for his team in a trade that emphasized more the value of a pick and Jae Crowder than IT. Was his assessment accurate, objectively yes, but if we’re talking about loyalty and commitment to someone who, even if just for a season, replaced all of his blood with Celtic green like it was some sort of St. Patrick’s day wager it was still what I would describe a “bitch-ass move” by Ainge.
Was It Worth It?
Objectively? Yes, yes it was. The Celtics netted Gordon Hayward in addition to Irving and managed to play to within one game of NBA Finals without either of those two on the court. Isaiah Thomas struggled to come back from injury and then struggled to integrate himself into a reduced role under the pasha of basketball, LeBron James. IT is now playing a minimum while the Celtics are gearing up for years of contention. So yes, it was, but I hope Danny Ainge can’t sleep at night.
Masai Ujiri, Maybe, Possibly, Lies to DeMar DeRozan?
Odds are, even Masai was surprised when the Spurs asked for DeMar DeRozan in a package for Kawhi Leonard. He probably shipped out an offer that did not include DDR and focused instead around Kyle Lowry and some youth. But then the Spurs came back with a counter and the rest is history.
Yes, DeMar is probably a victim of miscommunication and has the right to be upset. After a career in the Great White North, DeRozan pledged his loyalty to Toronto despite the siren call of his native Sunny California. He remained a Raptor “for life” (his words not Masai’s) and wanted to put the franchise on his back. That kind of commitment forms a strong bond with the fans. The sort of bond that leads to the fanbase throwing a riot on Twitter when DeMar got traded. Then again, that same fanbase would probably crucify Masai had he not taken this trade and we found out about it later, so you can’t really win them all.
Was It Worth It?
This one is really TBD. DeMar is yet to play for the Spurs and Kawhi is yet to play meaningful basketball since about February so we don’t really know. The Raptors however got a top-5 player when healthy and in the worst case, shed a lot of salary en-route to a possible rebuild (if they have to). If Kawhi leaves, it will all come down to how Paskal, OG and to some extent Delon Wright and Fred Van Vleet turn out. If Kawhi stays, I will source the materials for a Masai Ujiri statue myself.
In the end, none of these trades will ever be measured by how loyal the team was or wasn’t to a player. We will all have our Twitter moment before moving on and checking the record. You know why? Because loyalty in sports does not exist. It’s something we, the fans, tend to imbue upon our players or teams because it makes our relationship with them that much more special than a simple business transaction in which we pay money to watch a game either on TV or live. So really, as long as you keep paying the price of admission, it was worth it for the team.
Serge Leshchuk is a senior writer at Grandstand Central, number one Process devotee and nihilist Raptors fan who also does video production. You can send your complaints about any Celtics related articles to him directly on Twitter. | https://medium.com/grandstandcentral/the-cost-of-disloyalty-in-sports-7a908992f483 | [] | 2018-08-03 19:08:47.638000+00:00 | ['Basketball', 'DeMar DeRozan', 'NBA', 'Toronto Raptors', 'Sports'] |
Co-Sleeping: The Benefits And Drawbacks Of A Family Bed. | Overview
As hard as it very well might be to envision, there exists a somewhat essential nurturing issue that routinely produces a debate about whether to have your kid sleep in a similar bed as you and your accomplice. Fortunately (or sadly, depending on your point of view), there is no consensus on which viewpoint is the “correct” one. What’s more, there’s almost no genuine logical or medical information supporting either position.
Most typical concerns raised during family bed discussions
Proponents of co-sleeping or the family bed point to the fact that in the majority of countries, parents and children sleep on the same bed. They claim that kids are being forced to be independent too early and that human evolution simply can’t keep pace with the new demands our culture is placing on its children. They believe that before a kid can be self-sufficient, he/she must believe that the world is a secure place where their needs will be addressed. Children who sleep on a family bed end up being more autonomous, feel more secure, and more confident than the ones who don’t. Critics, in any case, say that what works in different nations doesn’t generally work here in the US. Early independence is important in America, therefore newborns should learn to be apart from their parents as soon as possible, especially if both of them are working professionals and the children stay in a daycare facility.
The children who co-sleeps, contrary to popular belief, sleep lighter than children who sleep alone (blankets rustling and parents turning over in bed wake them up). However, light sleeping isn’t always a negative thing. Indeed, there appears to be a link between lighter sleep and a decreased risk of Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Even the most soundly sleeping children will wake up every three or four hours to take a brief glance around the room. After a minute or two, the great majority (about 70%) ease themselves back to sleep. However, around 30% of parents or guardians will find something they really must play with in order to get their baby back to sleep.
Clearly, it’s significantly simpler for a nursing mother to reach across her bed for the child than to get up and lurch a few doors down for breastfeeding. According to some studies, this may promote women to breastfeed for extended periods of time. However, problems occur when dads feel displaced by the nursing infant and believe that the only place to get a decent night’s sleep is on the sofa.
The pros of co-sleeping
Try not to be humiliated. You’re not being over-caring, or overindulgent — it’s a decision made by a large number of wise guardians .
. The practice has a long history behind it. For millennia, children have shared a bed with their parents in various societies throughout the world.
in various societies throughout the world. This allows nursing women to obtain more sleep. Some nursing mothers find it simpler to keep their kid close for overnight feedings so that neither the mother nor the child loses sleep.
It gives youngsters a sense of safety and security. Some parents think that isolating a socially active youngster by sending him to bed alone at night is cruel. Others just believe that sleeping near their parents gives youngsters a stronger sense of security and well-being.
Ensure that your bed is big enough to fit everyone. (But no waterbeds, because the infant may roll between you and the mattress.) Put the bed against the wall and have the infant sleep on the wall side, or if your loved one is sleeping on the outer edge, acquire a guard rail. And remember overly soft mattresses¸ comforters, and pillows may pose a risk of suffocation.
Think long and hard before you start this practice. Once your baby has been sleeping in your bed for six to eight months, it’s going to be awfully hard to get your loved one out if you change your mind.
The cons of co-sleeping
Always having a parent around at bedtime can become a strong “sleep onset association,” also called a “sleep crutch” — anything we do for or to our kid in order to assist the child fall asleep at the start of sleep. This sleep association is often referred to as sleep props.
Some children will grow to expect interactions like back massaging, patting, and being held to fall asleep, in addition to establishing the sleep crutch. ” They may be mistaken as nervous or anxious because they struggle to go asleep without a parent nearby, therefore they show worrying behaviors to persuade a parent to stay close at night.
Many parents are afraid that they’ll accidentally roll over their sleeping child if the whole family is sharing the same bed. This is a perfectly legitimate concern.
In the case where either parent is a habitual drinker or takes any medicine that may make you difficult to awaken, or on the other hand in case you’re by and large such a sound sleeper that you’re conscious that you may accidentally stroll over the top of your child. Although, it is a rare situation.
Evenings are often the only time a couple with children has to be alone together. However, when you share a bed with your children, they physically separate you from your partner. There isn’t much time or room for intimacy because of the co-sleeping situation.
Children of various ages require varying amounts of sleep, and their bedtimes reflect this. When parents and older children share a bed, they often turn in much sooner than they would want, owing to the needs of the younger children. This situation can quickly become aggravating for all parties concerned.
There is no proof that sleeping with your infant accelerates the bonding and attachment process
Conclusion
If you do decide to co-sleep, be sure the togetherness you seek fulfills your child’s needs as well as your own. If you are a single parent or your partner is frequently away from home, for example, you should not let your child sleep with you only to alleviate your loneliness.
Children who begin co-sleeping at a young age are unlikely to “grow out” of it once it has become as natural as sleeping with a pillow next to them. Long-term consequences might also be socially detrimental. As the kid grows older, he or she may be unable to engage in activities that other children his or her age enjoy, such as sleepover parties, summer camp, and overnight field excursions. If you’ve been sharing your bed because you believe it would make it easier for your child to sleep, it’s not too late to quit the practice. Within a few days, you should be able to educate your kid to sleep in her own bed.
Citation: https://bloomposts.com/parenting/co-sleeping-the-benefits-and-drawbacks-of-a-family-bed/ | https://medium.com/@bloomposts/co-sleeping-the-benefits-and-drawbacks-of-a-family-bed-3b3e731c949d | ['Navjot S'] | 2021-08-07 18:59:31.564000+00:00 | ['Parenting Tips', 'Parenthood', 'Parenting Toddlers', 'Parenting Advice', 'Parenting'] |
Five lessons I learned coming out at a young age | What coming out young taught me
Photo Credit: Unsplash-Tobias Nii Kwatei Quartey
I remember when I was 12, it was the summer before starting seventh grade and I came to a decision that summer. I had decided that I was going to come out to close family and also friends at school. I was going to let those around me know I was gay. I had come to this decision after months of grappling with it. I remember sitting there thinking to myself, this was not going to be easy.
I knew backlash was coming each and every way. It was going to be crap coming from everywhere. Whether from my family, friends and the kids at school. And I’m not sure why at that age, I felt that so many people needed to know; but deep down in my heart, I knew this needed to happen for the pivotal evolution for the essence of who I was going to be. And it was in those moments that would soon follow, which would lead to my development as a Man in society.
There were five key basic elements learned from that experience that I have now been able to identify during my years as an adult.
1. Authority figures are not always correct
For me growing up the first authority figures I knew were not the police or the administrators at school but my parents, my elders and my pastor at church at that time. And I remember coming out to these people and the mixed responses I got.
One common response I received from them and many others was that being gay was a sin, and to identify with such a thing would separate me from God. And most people who come out young when hearing such things would question and doubt themselves and internalize what was said to them (understandably so, since it is your elders telling you this). However, I remember hearing this over and over again, and each time I was shocked. I was shocked to realize that these people were wrong….
Because as young as I was, I knew that the notion that being gay was wrong or a sin wasn’t correct, I didn’t know how to articulate or express it at the time, but deep in my heart I knew and felt it wasn’t right. And that would be one of the many defining moments in which I saw my parents and elders around me as people. Not these invincible adults who always knew right and always made the right decisions, but as humans who can sometimes err, who are sometimes flawed and sometimes incorrect.
2. Sometimes you have to be your own reference point
Before coming out, I remember searching through the archives of my mind for a reference point. A reference point of someone who I actually knew who had came out and better yet came out at a young age. Someone who was a Man, Black, Haitian and openly Gay. Alas, none of those filters were found and my search came up blank. There was no reference point for me to refer to. I had to be the sacrificial lamb for myself. I had to be my own reference point.
So many times in life when we are doing something, that seems to be the impossible or difficult, we quickly scan our memory banks to find something similar to hold onto to help us believe we can do it and go forth with faith. But sometimes that reference point does not exist, and it us who are now going to have to establish one for ourselves and hopefully others as well in the process.
So most times when I am faced with adversity or the seemingly impossible; I think back to that young black 12 year old boy who didn’t really have anyone to understand his journey but God and how he pushed through. And how he did not allow anyone to tell him who the hell he was. Or to drive fear into his heart, and he just moved forth in faith knowing one day, He’d be on top of what once seemed like an impossible situation to go through.
3. Faith keeps you focused
It was tough at a such a young age, and under your parents rule and jurisdiction dealing with all the scrutiny of coming out young. At one point I literally couldn’t understand why people treated me so differently. I remember at one point being so angry with the world and not comprehending the prejudice I was facing. I realized people are truly afraid of what they don’t understand. But what kept me pushing was holding onto the notion that one day Gay Marriage would be legalized and to see that one day being gay would be no different than being straight.
Now while, there’s still some work needing to be done in that department, I think the world is coming a long way. Gay marriage has been legalized. I know that someday I can marry the guy I desire to be with. I don’t have to settle for a domestic partnership. I can have the same rights as my heterosexual counterparts.
I now get to see on TV, couples that look like relationships I’ve been in. It’s like seeing myself on TV. I just knew one day this would have to come to pass. That the prejudice surrounding me couldn’t last for long. As the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase”.
I just knew there was going to be a day I was going get to the end of that staircase.
4. Other people’s perception of you is not your responsibility
Growing up I used to hear people tell me how they still loved me despite my “Lifestyle” choices. And I remember always thinking to myself when hearing that, “what lifestyle?” I don't recall me going to “Gay meetings” every week to discuss living this supposed gay lifestyle. This isn’t the mob. I always hated hearing that, because being gay to me was no different than being straight in my eyes. Because straight people don’t look at being straight as a “lifestyle choice”, so why should I view being gay with that perception?
It was then I realized I am not responsible for the way other people perceive me. People perceive you based on their innate beliefs, experiences and sometimes traumas. And guess what? Those are all things you can’t control. So if I can’t control it then I am not responsible for it.
I remember discussing sexuality with an old friend a while back. And that friend said something so simple yet astounding. Their exact words were “Being gay is not a lifestyle, it is a sexuality, the sooner people can realize that, the better off we all will be”. It was so simple yet so true.
5. Own who you are and no one can use it against you.
I’ve learned during that time to own who I was there was no reason for me to be ashamed, fearful or anything of the sort. No one could ever intimidate me when it came to the subject of my sexuality, I owned it, embraced it and I didn’t see it as a detriment to my character. I never once ever thought to myself, my life would be so much more easier, if I was straight. And that’s because there are so many straight people out there with just as tough lives as their gay or LGBT counterparts. Sexuality is only part of the equation but it doesn’t make up the whole formula.
I’ve applied these notions to my everyday life because of the moments I’ve had growing up. I have owned my mistakes and all my decisions, realizing they form the very man that I am. Everything truly is from my perception a lesson or a blessing. I think of how my best decisions and worst ones, brought me to where I am, and how they made me a stronger individual.
Having those experiences growing up, aged me and I felt in some ways made me wiser. If I didn’t have those experiences at the time in my life, I don’t think I would be this fearless man that I am today. And don’t get me wrong there have been many times I have lost my way. There were times I became doubtful, fearful, pessimistic and even bitter.
But whenever I lose my way, I remember that young black 12 year old boy, who didn’t let nothing stand in his way. And that young black 12 year old boy is now 27. And what he now realizes today is that no one can take away the power that lies in him unless he chooses to give it away.
Most times, I never have to look around me for strength or the will to go forward in the many challenges I face. Instead I can look within.
Because I have become my own reference point. | https://medium.com/@dcconstant/five-lessons-i-learned-coming-out-at-a-young-age-eef5eea38ee6 | ['Dc Constant'] | 2020-12-23 05:43:30.601000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'Black', 'Equality', 'LGBT', 'Family'] |
A Hard Lesson Learned, The Importance of a Growth Mindset | The British education system needs improvement. I think that this is the case all around the world, there are always ways the schooling could be better. As a former Scottish student, the focus was the material, the test. Never how to learn, which is arguably, far more important.
Upon my fifth year of secondary school, my year was brought to the hall to sit in on an assembly all about the importance of a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. For those who are unaware, a fixed mindset is a simple belief that your innate ability to complete a task or succeed is static. It remains the same and there is no way of changing it. For example; “infectious diseases are just too difficult to learn, I just can't memorise all these terms”. A growth mindset is a belief that you can work and build upon your preexisting skills and that hard work reaps the high reward. For example; “I just can’t memorise all these terms, yet”. A single word can change your entire life.
My last year of secondary school was tough, I didn’t believe I had the capability to succeed because I “just wasn’t good at exams”. This led to my rejection letter from my dream university, and what I felt was a disappointing college course instead. Of course, I learned to be grateful for my experiences and I grew so much as an individual, I would never trade that for the world. But at the time, I was heartbroken. I felt well and truly hopeless. This was just another challenge though, and this time, failure was not an option.
My first year at college was the biggest wake-up call I could have ever received. I took the time to learn how to study, a crucial skill that was somehow lacking despite how academically orientated I have always been. And most importantly, I learned the value of hard work. Flashcards were constantly updated, I almost never missed a class, my reports were well-articulated. I pushed myself until I realised that the opportunity I have been given as a gift. That my intelligence was not dictated by a grading system but by hard work and perseverance.
With everything happening throughout the world right now, we power on. Within a single year, I transformed from a fed-up student with an average grade of C to a straight-A student with a fire unlike any she had ever experienced.
I am so proud of where I have come from and my story shows me all the time that with the right mindset, we truly can change. | https://medium.com/@kieramalham/a-hard-lesson-learned-the-importance-of-a-growth-mindset-b6f16827589f | ['Kiera Malham'] | 2020-12-21 06:02:09.898000+00:00 | ['Growth Mindset', 'Education', 'Self Improvement', 'UK', 'Education Reform'] |
How To Hire A Software Development Company | 5 Signs that a Software Development Company is Awesome
Back in the 90’s, it wasn’t as difficult to find the best software development company as it is today. Because now there are far too many companies out there, and all cannot be relied on. A lot of companies talk about what they can do; they don’t talk about what they’ve done. Some companies can’t define their USP properly. Some companies lack a solid foundation required for running a corporate organization. Some companies are simply not capable enough to handle large scale projects, which require professional maturity and experience.
So how do you know if a company is genuine? How can you find out about them before actually working with them? How to hire a software development company that will deliver you the results?
The answer is actually simple. If you observe the below traits in an IT company, you can surely increase your chances of success of being correct in your assessment.
1. They don’t just tell, they show
There are tonnes of web development companies whose profile consists of the list of services they can provide. If you observe a lot of them closely, you’ll notice similarities in the same, and that they don’t mention their portfolio properly. Simply put, they don’t talk about what they’ve actually done. A genuine company shows you photos of their team outing, showcase the software solutions they’ve made, case studies on various industry verticals they’ve worked on, an active social media presence containing information relevant to their target audience, etc.
2. They have a good website
A website is a type of software and an IT company has to be good at creating software because they’re skilled software developers. You cannot judge a book by its cover; surely it matters if an IT company has a banal website containing bugs, responsive design issues, 404 errors, functionalities that just do not work at all. A good company makes sure to take its website seriously, as they realize it’s an investment that always pays off in terms of business and attracting new hires.
3. They are registered
A company is a company when it has multiple people working for it. There are advantages of outsourcing to professional IT companies as compared to an individual, when your project size is huge or it needs future AMC. Make sure that the company is registered, this you can verify by doing a Google Search. Also, check out if the company has any certifications, such as ISO or CMM Level 3.
4. They have won awards
An excellent company is one which has won multiple awards, from reputed B2B research platforms. There are portals like Web Guru, Good Firms, AppFutura, etc. which reward top software companies, for the excellence in work they’ve done. These awards have good credibility, as the client reviews on their portal are duly verified.
5. They know their strengths
The top companies are always mastering at something. They know what they’re strong at. All mobile software development companies aren’t strong in SEO. All AI companies aren’t good at blockchain. Good companies are honest to admit where they’re weak at.
Best Company for Software Development in India
Walkwel is the name to trust when it comes to getting your custom software developed. We have more than 7 years of experience, with offshore development center based in Chandigarh, India. Our team of experienced IT professionals will ensure that you get the best solution for your requirements. We’ve won several awards, among which we were recently rated as the ‘Top Blockchain Company’ by AppFutura. You can trust us when it comes to enterprise software development for your organization. | https://medium.com/@walkwel/how-to-hire-a-software-development-company-1898a6284356 | ['Walkwel Technology'] | 2019-11-27 10:41:39.020000+00:00 | ['Web App Development', 'Website Development', 'Web Development'] |
How to configure collections in Adobe Search and Promote to support multiple environments through the same account? | This tutorial explains the details on how to configure search collection in Adobe Search and Promote to support multiple environments through the same account.
Collection in Search and Promote
The collections can be used to allow customers to search specific areas of a website so that they can quickly find what they are looking for.
For example, customers can search a collection of URLs that are related to product sales or to support services.
Each collection is specified on a single line with a name and a URL mask. A URL mask can consist of the following:
• a full path such as http://www.mydomain.com/products.html
• a partial path such as http://www.mydomain.com/products
• a regular expression
To make a mask a regular expression, you insert the keyword regexp between the collection name and the URL mask e.g FAQs regexp ^.*/faqs
The IndexConnector URL entry points can be referenced to the collection as below
QA regexp index:test-feed*
Each line in the Collections field can contain only one URL mask. However, you can specify multiple URL masks for the same collection name on different lines.
Support http://www.yoursite.com/email_support/
Support http://www.yoursite.com/phone_support/
The collection=<Collection Name> e.g. collection=Support parameters specifies the collection to use for the search.This parameter maps to the sp_k backend search parameter, sp_k=<Collection Name> e.g. sp_k=Support
Configuring Collection
One of the best scenarios to use the collection is indexing the data for multiple environments e.g QA, UAT, etc into the same Adobe Search and Promote account, the collection parameters can be used to search the documents specific to the environment.
I am using the IndexConnector as a URL entry point to index the data through XML feed files but the URL entry points can be a website URL with links.
Refer to the below URL for more details on configuring Index Connector.
Refer the below URL for details on enabling custom JSON presentation and Transport templates
Let us now configure the collections to support QA and UAT environments search through the same Search and Promote account.
As a first step configure the index connector for both QA and UAT environments with environment-specific feed file.
product_QA.xml
<channel>
<title>Product Feed</title>
<Item>
<link>
<title>
<![CDATA[Book Prod1 Title]]>
</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Prod1 description</p>]]>
</description>
<productType>Book</productType>
<ProductId>prod1</ProductId>
<imageUrl>/content/dam/Images/product/prod1.jpg</imageUrl>
</Item>
<Item>
<link>
<title>
<![CDATA[Book Prod2 title]]>
</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Prod2 description</p>]]>
</description>
<productType>Book</productType>
<ProductId>prod2</ProductId>
<imageUrl>/content/dam/Images/product/prod2.jpg</imageUrl>
</Item> http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema " version="2.0"> Product Feed https://qa.example.com/product-title/p/prod1 Prod1 description]]> Book prod1 /content/dam/Images/product/prod1.jpg https://qa.example.com/product-title/p/prod2 Prod2 description]]> Book prod2 /content/dam/Images/product/prod2.jpg
<link>
<title>
<![CDATA[Watch Prod3 Title]]>
</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Prod3 description</p>]]>
</description>
<productType>Watch</productType>
<size>10</size>
<ProductId>prod3</ProductId>
<imageUrl>/content/dam/Images/product/prod3.jpg</imageUrl>
</Item>
<Item>
<link>
<title>
<![CDATA[Watch Prod4 Title]]>
</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Prod4 description</p>]]>
</description>
<productType>Watch</productType>
<size>20</size>
<ProductId>prod4</ProductId>
<imageUrl>/content/dam/Images/product/prod4.jpg</imageUrl>
</Item>
</channel>
</feed> https://qa.example.com/product-title/p/prod3 Prod3 description]]> Watch 10 prod3 /content/dam/Images/product/prod3.jpg https://qa.example.com/product-title/p/prod4 Prod4 description]]> Watch 20 prod4 /content/dam/Images/product/prod4.jpg
product_UAT.xml
<channel>
<title>Product Feed</title>
<Item>
<link>
<title>
<![CDATA[Book Prod1 Title]]>
</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Prod1 description</p>]]>
</description>
<productType>Book</productType>
<ProductId>prod1</ProductId>
<imageUrl>/content/dam/Images/product/prod1.jpg</imageUrl>
</Item>
<Item>
<link>
<title>
<![CDATA[Book Prod2 title]]>
</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Prod2 description</p>]]>
</description>
<productType>Book</productType>
<ProductId>prod2</ProductId>
<imageUrl>/content/dam/Images/product/prod2.jpg</imageUrl>
</Item> http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema " version="2.0"> Product Feed https://uat.example.com/product-title/p/prod1 Prod1 description]]> Book prod1 /content/dam/Images/product/prod1.jpg https://uat.example.com/product-title/p/prod2 Prod2 description]]> Book prod2 /content/dam/Images/product/prod2.jpg
<link>
<title>
<![CDATA[Watch Prod3 Title]]>
</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Prod3 description</p>]]>
</description>
<productType>Watch</productType>
<size>10</size>
<ProductId>prod3</ProductId>
<imageUrl>/content/dam/Images/product/prod3.jpg</imageUrl>
</Item>
<Item>
<link>
<title>
<![CDATA[Watch Prod4 Title]]>
</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Prod4 description</p>]]>
</description>
<productType>Watch</productType>
<size>20</size>
<ProductId>prod4</ProductId>
<imageUrl>/content/dam/Images/product/prod4.jpg</imageUrl>
</Item>
</channel>
</feed> https://uat.example.com/product-title/p/prod3 Prod3 description]]> Watch 10 prod3 /content/dam/Images/product/prod3.jpg https://uat.example.com/product-title/p/prod4 Prod4 description]]> Watch 20 prod4 /content/dam/Images/product/prod4.jpg
Enable the IndexConnector for both QA and UAT data feeds, Settings → Crawling →Index Connector
Add the IndexConnector configurations to the URL entry points, Setting → Crawling → URL Entrypoints, the URL entry points can be configured as environment-specific URL’s instead of IndexConnector
e.g
https://uat.example.com/search_index.html
https://qa.example.com/search_index.html
Configure the collection Settings → Searching → Collections, the collection can be also configured as environment-specific URL masks
e.g.
UAT https://uat.example.com/products
QA https://qa.example.com/products
The configurations are ready, let us now run a Stage indexing (note the configuration are not pushed to live yet)
Index →Full Index →Staged Index →Run Full Index
The collections can be tested through the collection page “Test Collections” option
Specify the search index URL, the index URL can be taken from Reports → Data Views →Default View, for index connector, the URL is formed based on the primary key defined in IndexConnector definition(our case product id)
Let us now fetch the search result through URL
URL to fetch all the data without specifying the collection name — http://stage-xxxxxx.guided.ss-omtrdc.net/do=json&sp_staged=1&sp_q=*
This will display the data from both collection(QA and UAT)
The URL to fetch the data specific to UAT, this will return the data specific to UAT collection
http://stage-xxxxxxxx.guided.ss-omtrdc.net/do=json&sp_staged=1&sp_q=*&collection=UAT
The URL to fetch the data specific to QA, this will return the data specific to QA collection
http://stage-xxxxx.guided.ss-omtrdc.net/do=json&sp_staged=1&sp_q=*&collection=QA
The configuration can be pushed live after successful validation and run a live index, Index →Full Index →Live Index →Run Full Index
The URL to access live data http://xxxxxxxxxxx.guided.ss-omtrdc.net/do=json&sp_q=*&collection=QA
http://xxxxxxxxxxx.guided.ss-omtrdc.net/do=json&sp_q=*&collection=UAT
The search collection can be used to enable the user to search on a specific section of the website e.g products, materials, etc. The collection functionality can be also used to enable the search functionality for different environments(e.g QA and UAT) in the same Adobe Search and Promote Account. | https://medium.com/tech-learnings/how-to-configure-collections-in-adobe-search-and-promote-to-support-multiple-environments-through-aeb9fa3f466c | ['Albin Issac'] | 2020-08-06 19:56:19.806000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Programming', 'Website', 'Adobe', 'Search'] |
Designing a More Circular World, Together | Exploring the future of the Circular Economy with the IDEO CoLab
Imagine if your company could make more money, reduce material costs, make the most of its assets, and drive stronger engagement with its customers, all while taking care of the planet and its people. That’s the promise of the Circular Economy — a new way of working that is restorative and regenerative by design.
Many organizations are publicly taking on the circular challenge: Apple recently announced a goal of a closed-loop supply chain, H&M aims to become 100 percent circular and renewable by 2030, and Philips aims to deliver 15 percent of total revenues from circular solutions by 2020.
IDEO, in partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, has written a playbook on how to design such systems — models that cut waste and pollution, keep products and materials in use, and regenerate natural and social capital — but most established industries don’t know where to begin. We kept hearing:
“The business case for the Circular Economy makes a lot of sense—but the challenge is implementation, often requiring product, service and business model innovation.”
No doubt, it’s hard to imagine what that future might look or feel like. Knowing that, we set out to bring the Circular Economy to life, creating an exhibit of circular products based on questions like, “What if sneakers could be made better than new?” and “What if food packaging was redesigned for online shopping?” Turning abstract principles into tangible prototypes helps us inhabit the future right now. | https://medium.com/ideo-colab/designing-a-more-circular-world-together-784feda30910 | ['Chris Grantham'] | 2018-12-06 05:25:35.692000+00:00 | ['Circulareconomy', 'Circular Econonomy', 'Sustainability', 'Sustainable Fashion', 'Design Thinking'] |
Invocation perseverance; prolific Griz 399; errant GPS | Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.
WYOMING
If there’s a grizzly with star appeal in the Lower 48 states — one with her own social media presence — it’s 24-year-old Grizzly 399, who usually wanders through Grand Teton National Park with her several cubs. A grandmother many times over, she produced another litter — four cubs! — this year. So in late October, when she appeared on highways and dirt roads near Wilson, Wyoming, people stopped their cars, grabbed phones and cameras and just about went nuts. Photographer Maureen Matsen told Gaia GPS’ Out and Back podcast that whenever she sees this happen, she thinks she should “just start filming these photographers because of the joy on their faces.” Wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen, who has been documenting Griz 399’s life for 15 years, says this mother bear is special because she appeals to human emotion. When one of her cubs was killed by a car one summer, Mangelsen says he saw “Griz 399 sobbing on the roadside near the body of her cub, grieving much like a human mother would.” Yet you don’t want to mess with this mama bear: In 2007, a tourist walking near Jackson Lake Lodge blundered into her space and was attacked by Griz 399 and her yearling cubs. “They’re just going to eat me,” Dennis Van Denbos recalled thinking. “There’s nothing I could do. There’s no way I could fight off four grizzlies.” He suffered several bites but was glad that wildlife officials spared the bears. Montana writer Todd Wilkinson says the decision to let Griz 399 live has been important for grizzly recovery in the Yellowstone area. A prolific mother, Griz 399 has produced seven litters, including three sets of triplets, plus this year’s quadruplets: “Now she’s long in the tooth, her fans are wondering how long she’ll live.”
Sienna Gonzales/High Country News
See four more little stories here: https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.12/humor-invocation-perseverance-prolific-griz-399-errant-gps | https://medium.com/high-country-news/invocation-perseverance-prolific-griz-399-errant-gps-4ab110e25f11 | ['High Country News'] | 2020-12-02 15:13:52.522000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Wildlife'] |
I Am Ready to Cut Down My Social Media Time. Then What? | I Am Ready to Cut Down My Social Media Time. Then What?
Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
Sign-off your social media accounts, put WhatsApp on silent, don’t do binge-watching.
How many times do you hear this advice?
The dilemma is what to do after that.
A fair question. Surrounded by a life of “likes,” “Shares,” and “Comments,” it’s a tough decision to keep ourselves out from all the action. If FOMO is for real, it has to do something with human nature. And, to act against human instincts is going to be a tough ask.
Even if you gather all the courage and wisdom to act, the actual fight begins after that.
What to do with this sudden addition of extra time in your life?
I recently experimented with the set of people I work with on my self-improvement platform. It was a quick one day challenge to stay away from any screen time for two hours. It was a Sunday, and I expected it to be a tough challenge for everyone.
I am not too sure about everyone else, but it became tough for me, at least.
The wall clock stared at me like a monster as if asking — “Why are you wasting your time?” And I did not have any answers. I read for a while, played with my daughter, took a nap, did some home cleaning, but still, there was time left.
Those two hours were a fresh perspective. I would not say it was a revelation to me, but it helped me look for alternatives to fill my time to be more productive outside social media. | https://medium.com/illumination/i-am-ready-to-cut-down-my-social-media-time-then-what-14173ce05ba8 | ['Nishith Goyal'] | 2020-12-21 16:37:34.877000+00:00 | ['Time', 'Self Improvement', 'Habits', 'Self', 'Social Media'] |
Soliloquy | Soliloquy
A Poem (Rondeau): The Voice of Your Sanity
Photo by Tom Morel on Unsplash
Soliloquy, a mastery of eloquence,
of vital consequence,
To instruct,
and to deconstruct,
matters of utmost importance.
Words of disapproval or acquiescence,
Always leading to renascence.
Increasing wisdom; never reduct.
Soliloquy.
Feign ignorance,
assume casual elegance,
when others eavesdrop and interrupt,
or seek to obstruct,
Your sanity’s cadence.
Soliloquy. | https://medium.com/ipoetry/soliloquy-d689c829e717 | ['Ivan Yong Wei Kit'] | 2020-12-12 19:37:19.971000+00:00 | ['Ivan Yong Wei Kit', 'Writing', 'Poetry', 'Poem', 'Rondeau'] |
The Queen is Dead | Photo by Bruno Bučar on Unsplash
“Come on! We HAVE to do it. We really need it. You know this, Jack.”
I did know this, so, hesitantly, I agreed to it. My partner, Rachel, and I had been offered the chance to write an article for the paper. There had been an inexplicable rise in the number of occupants in homes in this area of the country with many of the old folks being sent to homes by their children, seemingly abandoned. We were tasked with investigating this phenomenon and to report our findings.
Personally, I wasn’t too psyched about going anywhere near St. Michael’s, but as I knew how important this story would be for the both of us, I decided to go anyway. After all, it had been years since I’d been there.
“You’ll be fine,” I reassured myself.
So, on a drab Tuesday morning, Rachel and I embarked on a two-hour long drive to Sunshine Smiles Home for the elderly. The choice of home was not arbitrary. I made the decision to choose the home furthest away from St. Michael’s.
Unfortunately, the area was not rife with attractions or visitors hence the roads in and out still passed by St. Michael’s. Rachel didn’t know I studied at St. Michael’s as I had disassociated myself with the school for years now. As we drove by my alma mater, which seemed to be outlined by an ominous glow, Rachel looked in wonder at the elaborate architecture before proceeding to relate to me stories from her days as a student. She then went on a questioning frenzy, asking me all about my school days.
Rachel was like that. She was very inquisitive, as journalists should be, and extremely persistent. She also had the desirable quality of understanding people’s unspoken feelings, and as my answers to her questions began to grow unenthusiastic and ambiguous, she knew I was getting uncomfortable, so, she stopped asking. Before long, I was daydreaming.
“Hey, Jack! Come on man!” Rachel cried in desperation.
“What? Oh, sorry Rach.”
My partner had nudged me into consciousness. Ever since we drove past my old school, my mind had been stuck in a constant loop of memories. Memories I half wished were lost.
As my mind tuned into the world, I realised we were in the parking lot of Sunshine Smiles. The building looked nice enough although it was clear to me that its outside was merely a facade. It had a coat of faded yellow paint and some nice plants were planted on a sizeable grass patch on its side. I assume they were being taken care of by the residents who had a green thumb. Aside from that, there was not much else to tell.
“Rach, is it okay if you do the talking? I’ll take notes.” I suggested as we walked to the big wooden front doors.
Sunshine Smiles was an ‘almost oxymoron’. The supposedly cheerful yellow building with the refreshing plants on the outside was meant to counter the depressed occupants inside resigned to living the rest of their joyless life spent going through the motion. I say ‘almost’ because, its aroma of despondence was pungent and could be sensed from before you entered the home. While to the unenlightened, it may look like two clearly dissimilar environments, a keen observer would be able to tell that that was not the case.
Inside, the air was still and the home was as grey and soulless as its occupants with the only sounds coming from the clanging of empty plates and cups being washed, the occasional groaning of an old folk as they moved from one spot to another, and an old radio broadcasting songs from years ago.
These homes have a certain effect on people, once you walk through the doors, a little part of you dies and is sucked away forever into a black hole of sadness, never to be found again.
As soon as I walked in, staring at my surroundings, I felt my soul being trimmed at its edges, making it just a shade smaller than it was before.
As Rachel spoke to our contact at the home, I studied the poor men and women subjected to the prison of old age in front of me. Perhaps it was the lack of strength or simply the onset of constant indifference, common in the old and depressed, but they looked emotionless.
They were resigned to their fate. It didn’t matter what they were earlier in their lives, a fierce soldier or a closed off librarian, there was no difference now. They were all waiting obediently for the end, with no fear nor anticipation but apathy. I shuddered at the thought of my future potentially being the same.
I continued scanning the room in the hope that I would see some sort of emotion that would soften the blow of this unforgiving sight. Then I saw him, now old and frail but the face still unmistakably his. My heart jumped in fear then dropped in sadness. As the nurse sent a spoonful of warm soup towards his trembling, old lips, I remained rooted to the ground. I was unable to move, numb from the onslaught of emotions shooting across like fireworks in my brain. I just stared at the scene in front of my eyes.
What do I do? What COULD I do? How do I face the man that killed my best friend?
“Hi, I’m Jack. You must be Frank Jovic. Welcome to my humble abode or should I say, OUR humble abode?” I said with arms outstretched as if about to hug a giant teddy bear.
“Hi,” was the solitary word of response, delivered in a restrained and unbothered manner.
“I’ve got top bunk so you can have the bottom bunk. Is that fine?”
“Yeah, alright.”
Like a boy outside the clubs on a Friday night pursuing a disinterested girl, I was carrying the conversation, trying to impress him with the many ‘cool’ features of the room.
“You can use my record player anytime you’d like! I’ve got plenty of records here too!”
“Would you like a mint? I keep a bowl here filled. I like mints.”
“No, thanks. I’m good.”
Just like that boy, I was clearly striking out.
That was my only conversation with Frankie in our first week staying together. He seemed to be able to find his own way around campus for classroom lessons albeit with tardiness. Needless to say, this did not go down well with the teachers. It was as if he would rather be reprimanded at the start of each lesson than ask me for directions. I didn’t take this to heart, I just assumed he wanted to explore the campus.
Then, on a particularly gloomy Monday morning, he spoke to me.
“Jack. Could you tell me how to get to Math? I’ve not been to that part of campus yet.”
“Yeah, sure mate. Let’s go now.”
I was a little shocked to be honest, but I took this opportunity to start a conversation with this sullen introvert.
“How’d you find your way to class last week?”
“I used the map Mr. Simon gave me on the day I arrived.”
“Ah yes, that bastard. Isn’t the map a little confusing? Why didn’t you just ask me for help? I don’t bite.” I asked cheekily.
“No.”
I left it at that just because I didn’t know how I should respond. I just remember thinking to myself that this guy was perhaps the quietest person I had ever met. Perhaps this is what made me so drawn to him.
His overly reserved nature may have triggered me to subconsciously challenge myself to pry him open like an oyster in the ocean.
Whatever it was I was to find inside was inconsequential to me. I just wanted to know what was inside this introverted shell. A few moments later, he would unknowingly begin the process of opening up.
“Sorry Jack. I realised that I was a bit rude. I know I’m not the easiest person to talk to but thanks for making an effort. I appreciate it.”
This time it was I who had no answer. He’d made it awkward. I could only nod at him, and with our destination coming up on the corner, I had no time to think of an appropriate answer. We just walked in silence till we reached the classroom.
I didn’t see him till I reached our room after dinner. He was smoking a cigarette at his desk, staring blankly out the window. He seemed to be deep in thought. He turned and nodded at me when I walked in.
“You want one?” He asked me with a cigarette box in his hand stretched towards me.
“No thanks. I don’t smoke.” I replied promptly.
I wasn’t against smoking nor was I antipathetic towards people who did. I was just a little confounded and in a state of increased alertness. That day, Frankie had started two conversations with me. That was two more than the whole of the week before.
We sat there in silence for a while. He at his desk and I on my bed. After what seemed like an eternity of awkward silence, I opened my mouth.
“Would you like to liste-“
“Hey let’s play a reco-“
We both looked at each other with confusion before bursting into fits of laughter. It was clear we were both hellbent on not talking about the awkward conversation we had earlier, instead we introduced a whole other thing to focus our energy on. In this case it was the record player.
“You like the Smiths?”
“Never heard of them.”
“WHAT? Okay sit back and prepare to have your mind blown and your heart melted.” I proclaimed as I put on The Smiths’ 1986 classic The Queen Is Dead.
Photo by Ocramnaig_o1 on Unsplash
Every once in a while, my mind pulls me back to my days at St. Michaels and the memories that came along with them. I had spent quite a bit of my teenage years at St. Michaels, and my best times there were undoubtedly spent with Frankie, my best friend.
Unfortunately, all I have left are these bittersweet memories of him because while I had my best days with him at St. Michaels, Frankie was living his last days with me and like termites slowly making its way through the bark of a tree, the feeling of resentment and guilt continue to gnaw at my insides, leaving a bigger hole with each passing minute.
Frankie was the first person I had truly loved (not by necessity) and I wish I still had him by my side. Instead, all I have are these sullied memories, the best of which are encapsulated by the night we listened to The Smiths for the first time.
“…How can they look into my eyes and still they don’t believe me…”
Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash
Sundays at St. Michaels meant mass and ‘Reflection’ sessions. ‘Reflection’ sessions were meant for us to talk feelings. It was usually done in groups of ten sat in a circle with one of the school counsellors conducting the session.
Anyway, this was marketed as a tool for alleviating the stress of student life and to strengthen the bond between us, but we all knew that it was bullshit.
The students didn’t care for it, the teachers didn’t care for it and at some points, I felt like even the counsellors didn’t care for it but since it was made mandatory by the school board, everyone had to go along with it. The sessions were a colossal waste of time. I hated it. I had gone through two years of it and I felt no different from when I entered the school.
“It’s the scam of the century!” I used to tell all my friends, including Frankie.
However, Frankie took it seriously. In fact, the discussion groups on Sunday were when he was chattiest. It was on one of these Sunday sessions that I caught a significant glimpse into Frankie’s darkened soul. We were asked to talk of our deepest regret. A heavy topic that was met with insincere responses by all the boys except for Frankie.
“Mr. Jovic, you’re up,” said the counsellor.
“I wish I hadn’t woken up. I wish I didn’t go down for breakfast. I wish I hadn’t taken a shower and I wish I hadn’t gone to school. This is my biggest regret.”
Amid laughter from the rest of the boys, the counsellor said with a stern voice,
“Stop messing around young man and be serious!”
“I am being serious sir. If I hadn’t done any of those things, my parents would still be alive.” Frankie replied nonchalantly.
Suddenly, the room became quiet. You could hear a pin drop. Everyone just stared at Frankie.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I had done things differently. Honestly, the only reason I wanted to go to school that day was because I wanted to watch the football after school. My parents told me that I should just stay home, they weren’t going to work that day anyway, so that we could have a nice day together.
I still remember my mom telling me, “Come on son! Let’s all bunk off together. We can get some ice cream, catch a movie at the cinema. Let’s make a day of it!”
In the background, my dad was making his coffee with an obvious pip in his stride. They were so happy. I shrugged off my mom’s suggestion and told her I couldn’t miss the game today. After all, the boys were playing our rival school in the final. I couldn’t miss it. She conceded reluctantly but gave me a kiss on the forehead and my dad ruffled my hair before sending me on my way.”
Frankie paused for a moment.
“Have a good day at school today son! We’ll fetch you after the game and then we can go and get some ice cream. Love you!”
He stopped again.
“Those were the last things my mom said to me. My dear parents were found in our family wagon, which was smashed into a tree near my old school. So close to where I was watching the match. I don’t even remember the score. All I remember is my old form teacher calling me down from the stands to tell me that there’s been an accident.
If I had just stayed home that fateful day, I’d still be able to smell the familiar scent of my mother’s perfume as I held her tight and I’d still have the chance to sit down on the sofa and watch the football with my father as he shouted at the television, as if the players on the field were actually mere meters away. I would trade all of my possessions for just one more day with them. I miss them dearly.”
The stunned group sat in silence once again. Everyone had the same stunned look on their faces.
“Thank you, Frankie. All of you may go.”
Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
Unfortunately for Frankie, St. Michael’s did not possess the caring, nurturing environment that was advertised and it showed. The weeks following the Sunday incident, Frankie was the subject of teasing and physical abuse by the school bullies.
He was labelled “orphan boy” and was their punching bag, literally and figuratively. Months ago, I might’ve joined in the bullying but since Frankie arrived, I had changed. He had taught me the value of empathy.
Soon after, Frankie no longer actively participated in Sunday sessions and the spark that I saw when we first hung out seemed to have been extinguished, as many before him, by the darkness of that horrid school.
It was evident that he wasn’t doing well. I knew it and some of the teachers knew it but the only person who could help this young man was the worst person in the world.
“Sir, may I speak to you for a moment?” I asked as I stood at the door, half of my body out of the frame, with as much courage as I could muster.
“What is it?”
“Mr. Simon, sir, I’m worried for Frankie. Some of the boys are picking on him. I don’t think he’s taking it too well.”
“Sit down Willis. Let’s talk.”
I took my seat in front of the headmaster’s long mahogany table stacked with expensive stationery, a symbol of the man’s many years of service to the school, and then I took a good look around the room. I’ve been in there a few times but I never really paid attention to my surroundings. Whenever I was summoned to see him, I’d be stood at his desk, looking down on the ground or fiddling with my jacket.
The room was elegant, wooden cupboards and drawers lined the walls of the room, the chairs were single seated leather couches, more comfortable than the beds in our dormitories even. However, what was even more striking was the lack of any personal items. No souvenir from holidays, no family pictures. Nothing to signify that he had a life outside of St. Michael’s.
“Do you know what makes a man, Willis?”
I didn’t know how to answer so I shook my head.
“Courage makes a man. Every boy that steps into St. Michael’s will leave as a man, a capable, strong willed gentleman able to navigate through rough waters. I appreciate the courage that it took for you to come here today and speak up for your fellow schoolmate.
I’ve never told any of the students here, but I was an orphan myself. 40 years ago, I lost my father. He was a worker down at a port. While removing crates off a small merchant vessel, he slipped and hit his head on the side of the boat. He lost consciousness before he fell in the water. He died alone because everyone else had gone on break and he had to watch the goods. They found his body washed up ashore the next morning.
My mother, god bless her soul, stricken with the heartbreak of losing the only man she had ever loved, and the pressure of raising a teenage son on her own, took her own life only months after my father passed away. Aside from my aunt, who regarded me as more of a burden than a blessing, I was alone.”
“I pulled through though.” He went on. “Do you know how I did that? I decided to follow one simple motto.
‘If he can do it, I can do it too’.
I follow that motto to this day, and it has never let me down.”
I’d never seen this side of him and frankly, I didn’t know what to make of it. I had seen this man almost every day for the past two years and yet I knew nothing about him. Now, he had dropped this bombshell.
However, I knew what he was getting at, and I disagreed. Mr. Simon and Frankie were very different people.
“Sir, I don’t think Frankie has the strength to go through this alone. Perhaps the school could provide additional counselling and maybe stamp down on the bull-”
“If I can do it, he can do it too. Now I don’t want to hear another word of this. Get out.”
Mr. Simon interrupted me and that was that.
I promptly left his office with the situation no better than it was a half an hour before.
A month later, Frankie hung himself in the bathroom.
Photo by Gian Reichmuth on Unsplash
I splashed water on my face and rubbed ferociously.
Focus Jack! FOCUS! Just do the interview and get out of there. You don’t even have to say anything. Rachel will ask all the questions and you just have to dictate. Come on!
I saw my reflection in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw. The soul seen deep in my sunken eyes was reminiscent of the boy I was at St. Michael’s, the person I was before Frankie.
It was as if being in the vicinity of that horrible man and that horrible institution was turning me back into that sinister preppy schoolboy I was before, a cog in the evil machine that is St. Michael’s school.
I played a part in the death of my friend but that monster out there, was the mastermind behind it and here I am about to interview him.
Rachel said he was the only one able to speak for an extended period of time and had no problems communicating with other people, so he was the only option.
I mustered up the courage to wash my hands and leave the bathroom. After all, I was a St. Michael’s boy, and we were nothing if not courageous. The importance of this was stressed many times by him.
“Hello sir, I’m Rachel Thompson with the New Paper. Is it okay if we speak to you for a bit?”
“Why, of course! It’s very nice to meet you.” Mr. Simon answered delightfully.
The thoughts in my mind were getting increasingly vulgar as the interview went on. This man was very different than the one I remembered. He was engaging, polite and strangely welcoming. He was now an easy person to talk to and this infuriated me.
After what seemed like an eternity, Rachel finally reached her final question.
“Mr. Simon, it has been a pleasure speaking with you today. Unfortunately, we’ve reached our final question. You’ve lived a long, enriching and eventful life, is there anything you would do differently if you could do it all again?”
I had had my head down throughout the whole interview up to this point. This question sent me straight back to that fateful Sunday afternoon, when Frankie was asked his deepest regret, and my head involuntarily shot up.
Mr. Simon saw my face and must have recognised me because the smile he had been carrying the whole interview suddenly disappeared. He looked at me and froze as though he had seen a ghost.
I put my head down almost immediately after. I could hear him stammer a little, then he answered in a voice I recognised. It was timid with an undertone of melancholy. It was the exact voice I heard Frankie speak with when I first met him.
“No. No regrets.”
Rachel smiled, said thank you and we left the room.
Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash
“Hey, did you know that guy?” Rachel asked as we entered the car.
“Nope, why do you ask?”
“He was staring at you a little at the end there.”
“Hmm, I hadn’t realised. Maybe I reminded him of his son or something,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
“Oh well, I think we’ve got a good piece on our hands. Job done. Let’s go home. How about some music?” Rachel said as she switched on the radio. | https://medium.com/@faheemfuad/the-queen-is-dead-930503d9c986 | ['Faheem Fuad'] | 2020-12-23 02:41:16.615000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Fiction Writing', 'Fiction', 'Stories', 'Suicide'] |
9 Best Diapers For Babies- | 9 Best Diapers For Babies-
Your baby will go through thousands of diapers before potty training, so you want to make sure you’re shelling out for ones that actually work. The best diaper should be absorbent and built well to prevent leaks, and they should also be lightweight and soft so your little one stays comfy.
How to find the best diaper for your baby:�
�Look for design add-ons: Things like wetness indicators and front-back labeling are surprisingly convenient for diaper changes.
�Avoid absorbency weight claims: Some diapers claim to be super absorbent because they can hold a specific percentage of their weight. The truth is that most diapers can physically hold more than they’ll need to, but what matters more is how quickly and effectively they absorb the fluid. Plus, the ones that can hold an excessive quantity tend to be bulkier, like overnight diapers.
�Be cautious with green marketing: We’ve seen a handful of brands make unqualified green claims that violate FTC regulations. For instance, no diapers are “eco-friendly” (i.e. they all have at least some impact on the environment) and they’re not “natural” because they’ve all been processed in some way. Still, there are sustainable options that also perform well (and are included in this roundup!).
Buy in bulk: They won’t go to waste. You know you’ll be using lots of diapers, so it’ll save you time and money to buy more at once.
Here are the best disposable diapers you can buy for your baby:
� Snug & Dry Diapers
� Swaddlers Diapers
� Hello Bello Diapers
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Need Free Pampers Coupons and Merchandise …. GET THEM HERE | https://medium.com/@suucedewithme/9-best-diapers-for-babies-7b43f60e3153 | [] | 2020-10-30 09:16:32.005000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Baby Clothes', 'Baby Care', 'Baby Products', 'Baby Boomers'] |
Gun Laws Have Basically No Impact on Mass Shooter Rate | And the mass shooter rate is fabulously low to begin with.
The media cycle this weekend has landed on a new study published by the BMJ, (archive link) on the connection between state gun laws and rate of mass shooting incidents. It’s been picked up by Vox, Yahoo, and elsewhere. Predictably, this study is being leveraged in our collective social media metabrain to push the idea that more gun laws reduce mass shootings.
The study by Paul Reeping, Bindu Kalesan, and Charles Branas, has couple of real howlers buried in it that we need to talk about, and the conclusions it draws are technically correct but misleading in practice. Let’s look at the study and then speak of what useful conclusions we can draw from it.
The Study
You can find the study, titled “State gun laws, gun ownership, and mass shootings in the US: cross sectional time series,” here. (academic citation: BMJ 2019;364:l542) An archive link is here. I encourage readers to go there, read it, and come back, but here’s a brief summary from their abstract:
Exposure An annual rating between 0 (completely restrictive) and 100 (completely permissive) for the gun laws of all 50 states taken from a reference guide for gun owners traveling between states from 1998 to 2015. Gun ownership was estimated annually as the percentage of suicides committed with firearms in each state. Main outcome measure Mass shootings were defined as independent events in which four or more people were killed by a firearm. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting System from 1998–2015 were used to calculate annual rates of mass shootings in each state. Mass shooting events and rates were further separated into those where the victims were immediate family members or partners (domestic) and those where the victims had other relationships with the perpetrator (non-domestic). Results Fully adjusted regression analyses showed that a 10 unit increase in state gun law permissiveness was associated with a significant 11.5% (95% confidence interval 4.2% to 19.3%, P=0.002) higher rate of mass shootings. A 10% increase in state gun ownership was associated with a significant 35.1% (12.7% to 62.7%, P=0.001) higher rate of mass shootings. Partially adjusted regression analyses produced similar results, as did analyses restricted to domestic and non-domestic mass shootings. Conclusions States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership had higher rates of mass shootings, and a growing divide appears to be emerging between restrictive and permissive states.
The methodology deserves critique.
Gun Permissiveness
We used the 1998–2015 edition of the Traveler’s Guide to the Firearms Laws of the Fifty States to obtain the independent variable of interest, an annual restrictiveness-permissiveness scale of US gun laws for each state
This sounds like a fascinating book for gun owners to have on a shelf. You can apparently buy it here, and it’s updated yearly. Here I must state I’m not being compensated in any way for driving them traffic. (this a Medium rule, and a good one) I have not read this book, but from what I gather from the BMJ report, they basically take all the following factors, weight them, and issue a composite score:
The report considers more than 13 factors in developing the score, including: standard firearms ownership and permit requirements; if semi-automatic, high capacity magazines, machine guns, and suppressors are permitted or restricted; if the firearms laws across the state vary widely; if the state employs a right to self-defense, ability to conceal, ability to open and vehicle carry, ability to conceal carry in state parks, or whether a gun permittee can carry in a restaurant serving alcohol; whether there is a duty to notify law enforcement of permit status; and if one can keep a gun in their vehicle at colleges and K-12 schools (primary and secondary schools).
The first thing we need to point out here, is that the Traveler’s Guide isn’t ranking states by how hard it is to become a gun owner. They are ranking states by how big of a pain in the ass the government makes gun ownership. We’ll come back to this.
Composite scores are always suspect when you get into data analyses, because they depend on arbitrary decisions by the author about how to weight stuff. But we won’t lay too much criticism on the BMJ authors here, because this was probably the best source available for what they were trying to do. I would be more alarmed if they chose a politically biased source, such as the rankings from The Gifford Center or Guns and Ammo.
Gun Ownership Rate by Suicide Proxy
Gun ownership is not directly surveyed across all 50 states each year in the US. A review of over 24 gun ownership indicators found that the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm was the best measure for estimating gun ownership by state.17 This has also been verified in several other studies across different regions,1819202122 in which the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm was shown to be highly correlated with the proportion of households reporting gun ownership (across 21 US states r=0.90,23 across nine census regions r=0.9324).
Gun researchers almost always use suicide proxy to determine ownership rate, which works basically like this. You plot the ratio of gun suicides to total suicides, compare it against accurate polls of gun ownership, develop a best fit relationship, and then use that best fit equation to back-figure gun ownership. I don’t like it, for several reasons.
The main problem in using suicide proxy is confounders. Overall suicide rates vary by state, and not only with gun ownership, but with many cultural factors, which flow from socioeconomics and mental health. At its root, the use of the suicide proxy to approximate gun ownership, especially without any other controls, rides on the presumption that the mental health profiles of each state are the same. This may not be a bad presumption for many generalized studies of gun violence, particularly at the national level. But if you’re going to specifically study mass shootings, you’ve got a big problem. Mass shootings are deeply linked to mental health, so any metric that’s also linked to mental health is going to have hidden effects on your data that you need to control against. Your results will be kinked.
There’s been a lot of study about how to un-kink this, and Dr. Michael Siegal’s name seems to crop up a lot in the journals discussing the topic. The study in our second article on the suicide problem, authored in part by Siegal, uses the rate of issuance of hunting licenses to unkink it. Here’s another study that used subscriptions to Guns and Ammo magazine to unkink it. Different researchers use different methods.
Suicide proxy is unfortunately about the best thing statisticians have for approximating gun ownership rate, so the researchers were basically stuck with it here, but they don’t appear to have done anything to untangle the mental health confounder. And the mental health confounder is very important for mass shootings.
Mass Shooting Definition
Mass shootings were defined as independent events in which four or more people were killed by a firearm.
This is a reasonable definition, and a thing worth of research as-defined, but it is not at all what the public thinks of when they hear the words “mass shooting.” These incidents are probably dominated by “drug deals gone wrong,” and mostly not “suburban soccer moms and kids getting gunned down randomly.”
Further, mass shootings are a tiny sliver of the gun death problem. They’re almost literally not worth mentioning. From a prior HWFO article:
This entire study is about the tiny yellow sliver in the smallest pie chart on the bottom left. Remember this, we will return to it.
Multivariate Assessment
We included the following annual measures of state-level characteristics in our analyses: median household income, percent high school graduation, percent female headed households, percent in poverty, percent unemployment, incarceration rate, and percent white.
The study was multivariate, which is good. The only way to garner anything meaningful in this research space is to separate out the different factors that impact gun violence. It would be nice if violence researchers spent more time on the factors that are more determinate, such as wealth inequality, but those don’t fit the media narratives particularly well. It’s a bit curious that they chose “percent white” instead of “percent black” in their list, and I wonder why. Asians and Latinos have tremendously lower homicide victimization rates than African Americans, so that makes me wonder if the choice wasn’t driven by political correctness instead of good science. Black population ratio is five times more predictive of overall homicide rate than gun ownership rate.
But the real howler, the worst thing the study did, was here:
Because restrictiveness-permissiveness of state gun laws and state gun ownership were highly and significantly correlated (Pearson’s r 0.79, P<0.001) and interdependent, we did not include them in the same regression models.
What?
I’ll say this again, in italics this time:
What?
The entire point of a multivariate analysis is to control significantly correlated confounders. And there’s a huge link between gun ownership and restrictive gun laws. It’s also not “interdependent,” the dependence is almost entirely one-way. It’s called the ballot box.
As we mentioned above, the Traveler’s Guide isn’t rating how difficult it is to become a gun owner, it’s rating what a pain in the rear the government makes gun ownership. And gun owners are, in isolation, always going to vote against the government making their lives a bigger pain in the rear. Increased regulations don’t reduce gun ownership, gun ownership tempers and controls regulations. The correlation is strong. There is absolutely no reason to not include gun ownership as a confounder in their analysis, particularly given that the researchers acknowledge the strength of the correlation.
Let’s step sideways for a second and look at a multivariate analysis from a prior HWFO article, penned in part by the aforementioned Dr. Siegal:
From Siegal, Ross, and King, in AJPH, here
The three biggest potential confounders for the BMI study, as identified by Siegal et al. in the above table, are black population ratio, Gini Coefficient (a measure of wealth inequality), and gun ownership rate. Additional minor confounders were violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, and incarceration rate. The BMJ study controlled for “percentage black” in a probably poor way, controlled for Gini Coefficient by looking at poverty rate and unemployment rate, and controlled for incarceration rate. But they chose to ignore gun ownership in their multivariate analysis, and instead did a separate analysis on it.
Why would they do this? Maybe we can get a clue from their results: (emphasis mine)
Results Fully adjusted regression analyses showed that a 10 unit increase in state gun law permissiveness was associated with a significant 11.5% (95% confidence interval 4.2% to 19.3%, P=0.002) higher rate of mass shootings. A 10% increase in state gun ownership was associated with a significant 35.1% (12.7% to 62.7%, P=0.001) higher rate of mass shootings. Partially adjusted regression analyses produced similar results, as did analyses restricted to domestic and non-domestic mass shootings.
That certainly seems like gun ownership rate is far more predictive than permissiveness, and we already know ownership rate and permissiveness are linked via the ballot box. But apples are not oranges, and these comparisons don’t marry up unless we can normalize them, so they use the same incremental unit in comparison.
Presuming we accept the suicide proxy methodology, the national gun ownership rate in the USA varies from 20% to 70% — a variation of 50% across the data set. The “Traveler’s Guide to the Firearms Laws of the Fifty States” rating system assigns gun permissiveness values to the states ranging from 20 to 100, a variation of 80 “units.”
A variation of 1/8th across the permissiveness range changed the mass shooting incidence rate by 11.5%. A variation of 1/5th across the ownership range changed the mass shooting incidence rate by 35.1%. If you normalize these figures by range increment, you see that (gun ownership rate) is 1.9 times more predictive than (gun law permissiveness) to mass shooter rate.
That’s a noticeable difference. Gun ownership is twice as predictive. This leads me to highly suspect that if they’d done their job properly, and included ownership rate itself as a confounder in their multivariate analysis to compensate for the voting booth effect, the correlation between (gun law permissiveness) and (mass shooter rate) may be negative, and the positive correlation they do show is purely an artifact of higher ownership rates.
I wonder whether they actually did this calculation originally, didn’t like the answer, and then went back and stripped the gun ownership confounder out of the multivariate analysis to get graphs that would play better on Vox and Yahoo. I have no way to know.
Without controlling for ownership properly, we don’t know anything about whether gun laws have any effect at all. It seems they may be negatively correlated. How could that be? Perhaps, again, the ballot box. Perhaps a state with a higher mass shooting rate than it would ordinarily expect given their gun ownership rate is more inclined to pass restrictive laws.
It’s just an idea.
The Rates are Fabulously Low Anyway
Let’s look at their graphs.
You can plainly see the effect we spoke about in the prior section. The gun ownership line is steeper than the gun permissiveness line, and ownership vs permissiveness are linearly correlated. It shouldn’t be hard to control permissiveness against ownership. Anyone worth their salt could do it in about ten minutes with their data. But let’s look closer at the axis themselves.
“Mass shootings per million people”
Million.
That rate is fabulously low. The range peaks at 0.3, with a median (eyeballing) of around 0.1. The states in their data set have a mass shooting rate of around one incident per ten million people, and that’s even with the rather broad definition they chose (four or more people shot) instead of the colloquial media definition (unhinged assholes randomly shooting kids and soccer moms).
Put this number in perspective. Between 40 and 50 people per year die from lightning strikes in the United States, for a national death-by-lightning rate of around 1.38 per ten million people. In the average US town, a mass shooter incident as defined is less likely that someone not only getting hit by lightning, but dying from the lightning strike. And only one in 12 lightning strikes is deadly.
But we don’t realize how rare these things are, as body politic, because we’re glued to our phones addicted to outrage porn. This study is just feeding the outrage engine, and seems quite honestly to have committed at least one egregious error in its multivariate analysis while doing so. Maybe more.
Conclusions
From the abstract:
Conclusions States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership had higher rates of mass shootings, and a growing divide appears to be emerging between restrictive and permissive states.
This is absolutely technically correct, given their methodology. But a more proper and honest conclusion statement would probably have been this:
The fantastically rare instance of four or more people dying in a gun homicide, which makes up such a small fraction of gun deaths that it’s quite honestly barely worth mentioning, is correlated to both gun ownership and gun law permissiveness. The second correlation to gun law permissiveness is very likely just an artifact of the first correlation, because gun owners vote in their best interests. Gun laws likely have no correlation (possibly a negative correlation) to the rate of incidences of mass shootings.
Nothing in this study says more gun laws would reduce mass shootings. If they issue a revision of their multivariate analysis which controls against gun ownership rate itself, it might, but it’s very unlikely based on the data they presented.
Which may be why they didn’t do it.
I’d love to read an updated study though. | https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/gun-laws-have-basically-no-impact-on-mass-shooter-rate-3c079b709f5b | ['Bj Campbell'] | 2019-03-11 12:50:15.341000+00:00 | ['Guns', 'Gun Control', 'Politics', 'Data Visualization'] |
There’s No Gender in the Cabbage Patch | There’s No Gender in the Cabbage Patch
On the Gender Reveal Cabbage Patch dolls
The baby doll aisle is by far my favorite aisle in Target. I don’t play with dolls anymore, but I am greatly entertained by them, especially when they start laughing or crying out of nowhere when I walk by. It’s like a year-round haunted house, right in the middle of my local department store.
The features companies come up with for the dolls get more realistic and complex as the years go on. My baby dolls had bottles of milk-like liquid you could shove in their gaping mouths, and some could be filled with water so that they could “pee,” but they couldn’t breastfeed, cry, or perpetuate archaic and potentially harmful ideas about gender identity.
American toys have been getting more progressive.
Barbie has a wider variety of body types and careers, and there are even gender-neutral dolls. So I was dumbfounded when I found “Gender Reveal” dolls in the toy aisle while Christmas shopping at Target.
The “founder” of the gender reveal party herself, Jenna Karvunidis, is now backtracking and supports the movement to end the pointless parties. But Cabbage Patch (or Mattel, which manufactures the dolls) apparently didn’t get the memo.
I grew up with Cabbage Patch dolls because my late grandmother was obsessed with them. At the beginning of this decade, when gender reveal parties were booming in popularity, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see such dolls. The conversations around gender identity weren’t as prominent then.
Now, however, the product makes the company seem extremely tone-deaf and certainly solidifies Cabbage Patch dolls as a fad from the 80’s that no one cares about anymore.
In case you are wondering, there are no genitals on these cabbage babies.
To conduct the big “reveal,” one would pull down the doll’s diaper and see whether there was a blue or pink heart on its ass cheek. Maybe they are serving children well by not affiliating gender with sex, albeit unintentionally.
After revealing the gender, I guess you take that information and use it to go out and buy clothes, choose between the names Jessica or James, and justify yelling at the baby when it likes baseball instead of ballet or vice versa, and then expect it to grow up and date a doll of the opposite binary gender and then throw it out of your window when it dates the same sex instead?
Were there any focus groups with kids that helped the company determine that this was a worthwhile idea?
Is this gender reveal thing fun for kids who play with dolls? Does it bring them joy? I’m asking honestly. Or does it send them on a roller coaster of emotions? Are little boys angry about not getting sons? Oh, right! Silly me. Male children of the parents who would buy this doll aren’t allowed to play with dolls.
You might be wondering why I’m spending my time writing about a doll. The answer is obvious: I’m a social justice warrior with nothing better to do than rage about inanimate objects! But seriously, I’m not angry at the dolls, I’m angry at the culture that created people who think such dolls should exist in 2019.
Raising children without gender isn’t just for the sake of the relatively small percentage of kids who grow up to be transgender or non-binary, or those who become women who are butch or men who are femme. Gender-neutral parenting promotes equality and might help reduce the occurrences of issues like eating disorders, which sometimes stem from a person’s desire to make their body measure up to cultural expectations based on their assigned or true gender.
When we see babies as a gender first, we construct a whole idea of who they should be, laying out shoes for them to fill before they even have a voice. Of course, everyone has dreams for their children. Why can’t those dreams be gender-neutral? Success, marriage, or starting a family — none of the things that parents often want their kids to experience are restricted to a certain gender.
What is the real point of a gender reveal party anyway?
Your friends and family can choose clothes and gifts based on things all babies like and need — not colors like pink and blue. So why is Mattel promoting the practice to a future generation of parents?
It’s just a doll! And your baby is just a baby. | https://medium.com/th-ink/theres-no-gender-in-the-cabbage-patch-bee839ffe9df | ['Kristen Pizzo'] | 2019-12-27 14:59:38.467000+00:00 | ['Gender', 'LGBTQ', 'Parenting', 'Identity', 'Social Justice'] |
7 Tips For Becoming A Better Public Speaker | No matter where you are in your career chances are you will have to give a presentation or talk to a group of people at some point. In our current situation with the pandemic most of us are on video calls all day, which require great communication skills.
Even in normal times most of us have had to speak up during a meeting or maybe you’ve been asked to speak at a conference. Any time you talk to a group of people whether it is 10 people or 1,000 people it is important to be able to present yourself and your company well.
You can watch the video of our full discussion below or just listen to the audio version as a podcast. If you want more content like this you can subscribe to our Youtube channel.
Click below to play or go here to listen on your favorite platform.
As professional speakers, we have a lot of experience speaking to large groups of people around the world and today we are sharing 7 tips for becoming a better public speaker.
1. Practice, practice, practice. When you have a presentation to give whether it is for 5 people or 5,000 people practicing it is extremely helpful. It will give you confidence, it will help you feel prepared, and it can help you figure out areas you struggle with. If the day of the presentation is the first time you run through the whole thing you risk stumbling through it, sounding unprepared, and feeling nervous. Set yourself up for success.
2. Repetition. The more you give presentations or webinars or speak up in meetings the easier it will get. The first few times are the hardest. You have to be resilient and keep trying, even if you mess up. Don’t let a bad presentation stop you from doing more in the future. Learn from your mistakes, get feedback from others, practice, and keep going.
3. Get feedback. Whenever you can ask others for feedback. If you are speaking at a conference and they give you audience feedback, read it and take relevant advice to heart. Or maybe you have a family member or a friend in the audience who can offer some comments. If you are giving a presentation in a meeting ask a coworker or a boss for feedback. Maybe you talk too fast and you need to slow down. Maybe you need to speak up and pronunciate better. Or maybe you are doing a great job at engaging the audience. Take feedback when you can and always work to improve yourself. But remember never take feedback personally, use it to help you, don’t let it tear you down.
4. Breathing and pace. Both breathing and pace take practice in public speaking. When you are nervous and uncomfortable it is easy to forget to take normal breaths and you may speak so fast that no one catches what you are saying. You may feel like you just want your presentation to be done so you can sit down and not have everyone looking at you. Practicing deep breathing before a presentation can be very helpful. It opens up your airways and it helps relax your body. And during your time talking speak at a pace where people can understand you, and use pauses to your advantage. Pausing in the right spot can really emphasize a point or get people on the edge of their seats.
Blake and I made lots of mistakes during our entrepreneurial journey and learned things the hard way, but you don’t have to. Whether you are considering going off on your own or you already have, this will be a valuable resource for you. Download our PDF on the 7 things you need to master if you want to be a successful entrepreneur.
5. Structure. Whenever you are giving a presentation or a talk you want the people listening to walk away with your main points. To do this you really need to have structure in the material you are sharing. It usually helps to share 3–5 main points you want to get across. Structure your speech like an essay, start with a thesis statement and add three to five supporting statements and then summarize at the end. Keep it simple so your audience can follow along. Stories are powerful. Using them throughout your presentation or even in a meeting to paint a picture or give real-life examples, can really help.
6. Know your audience. It is important to know who you are talking to so you can personalize your talk for your audience. Will you be talking to 5 people, 50 people or 500 people? Are there any topics you need to avoid? Are there cultural differences that you need to be aware of? Do your homework, know who you are talking to, and personalize it as much as you can.
7. Dealing with nerves. We both have given hundreds of speeches to large groups around the world, but we still deal with nerves before we go up on stage. It’s just human nature. But there are things you can do to deal with it. Exercise and meditation can help. Deep breathing is a good thing to practice, especially right before you talk. Avoid coffee and caffeine if it makes you jittery, eat healthy and get good sleep before a presentation. Maybe you have an activity that calms you like playing chess or listening to music that you can do before you speak. It’s okay to be nervous, you just have to learn how to channel it in the right way.
You can hear more of our stories and strategies in this episode of the Be Your Own Boss (BYOB) Podcast. Click below to play or go here to listen on your favorite platform.
Subscribe to the podcast on: | https://medium.com/be-your-own-boss-podcast/7-tips-for-becoming-a-better-public-speaker-5d2561cbf6e8 | ['Be Your Own Boss Podcast'] | 2020-12-29 07:12:06.268000+00:00 | ['Personal Branding', 'Communication Skills', 'Public Speaking', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Career Development'] |
The Look. The Love.(end of prologue) | In the seconds before I hit him, I thought to myself, why would anyone start to walk towards a speeding car, until I realized why someone would do that. Then, I noticed something out of the ordinary, a peculiar look upon his face.
He did not express fear or worry about what was going to happen next. Instead, he had this pleasant, sort of peaceful expression, which spoke so much in such a short amount of time. His eyes expressed pain but looked at peace, all the while, his smile expressed gratitude as if he was thanking me for something.
Altogether, he had this expression that I knew all too well. An expression that I had seen too many times to count. Something I fought to never see again on myself or others.
The expression that stated, “Kill me, please.” | https://medium.com/@wonglife/the-look-the-love-end-of-prologue-fb947760903d | [] | 2020-12-20 06:31:10.244000+00:00 | ['Death And Dying', 'Facial Expressions', 'Prologue', 'Sneak Peak', 'Suicide'] |
Go Structs (Part 4) — Anonymous Fields and Promoted Fields | Photo by Peter Geo on Unsplash
When defining a struct, it’s actually possible to leave out the key name’s field. When doing so, the data type’s field (e.g. “string”) doubles up as the key-name.
This article is part of the Structs in Go series.
Let’s take a look at an example.
Lines 10–11: This looks a little weird here, but my intent is to have 2 entries, the person’s firstName and their age. Since I’m using anonymous fields, it means that the key-name to use access the firstName field is quite literally “string” and for age, it is “integer”.
Lines 20–21: We use the “string” and “int” key names to print out the respective values.
This technique doesn’t quite work if you want to have multiple fields of the same data type. In those scenarios you can resort to using a mix of anonymous fields and regular fields, for example let’s say I want to add a new “lastName” field to my struct:
Anonymous Fields using Custom Data types
At this point, you might be thinking Anonymous Fields makes things weird and confusing, e.g. why is the age represented by the key-name “int”? I agree it is weird and not useful. That’s why in practice, it’s more useful to set up anonymous fields using custom data types (rather than primitive data types). To understand how this works, lets revisit the nested struct example, here it is again:
We can tweak this so to convert the address (line 18) field into an Anonymous Field:
This outputs:
Line 18: This was homeAddress address before, but we have now converted it to an anonymous field, address , which refers to the custom struck-based data type.
Line 38: Now we’re accessing the custom data type’s name, to access it’s content, which again looks more natural.
Line 39: This illustrates an extra bonus when setting up an anonymous field for a nested struct. That is that the child struct’s fields are promoted and become available at the parent level, i.e. they are Promoted Fields | https://medium.com/@sher-chowdhury/go-structs-part-4-anonymous-fields-794883d525b3 | ['Sher Chowdhury'] | 2020-12-25 21:17:49.136000+00:00 | ['Golang', 'Go', 'Golang Tutorial', 'Go Structs', 'Anonymous Fields'] |
Solve Disputes Without Going To Court | Schulman Bhattacharya, LLC | YES! You read it right. Schulman Bhattacharya has the solution to solve any commercial disputes even without going to court. This is a method that is applied by professional lawyers.
There is a Three Method to solve any dispute without going to court:-
1. Mediation
This is a method where two parties solve their problems with the help of a third party. it may be an informal meeting where two parties reach their settlement with the help of a third party. This is the easiest way to solve disputes. Schulman Bhattacharya tries in their case and finds this method effective but there is a downside of this method. Schulman Bhattacharya says in some cases two parties never want to meet and in this situation may be difficult to deal with.
2. Arbitration
In this method, two parties agree on a settlement contract. Where two parties sign the contract of settlement. Schulman Bhattacharya has applied that method in some of his cases. Arbitration is the solution where two parties may be agreed on the contract note.
3. Informal Negotiation
In Informal Negotiation two parties try to resolve disputes with the help of a third party. This method is often used by professional lawyers.
Having any disputes not good for anyone if you get it solved without going to any court that would be better for both parties.
Even though if you wouldn’t be able to resolve your disputes then You can contact professional lawyer Schulman Bhattacharya he has vast experience in Dispute cases. He also has an experienced team as well as capable enough to get good results in court.
If you have any dispute which is giving you problem in your businesses.
Then, An experienced team has been looking forward to handling your case. | https://medium.com/@schulmanbhattacharya1/solve-disputes-without-going-to-court-schulman-bhattacharya-llc-43d3d71a3440 | ['Schulman Bhattacharya'] | 2021-07-06 10:54:11.349000+00:00 | ['Schulman Bhattacharya', 'USA', 'Lawyers'] |
How Can Professional Oppressors Say, ‘Black Lives Matter’? | On August 11, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced that he had chosen former presidential candidate and California senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate. In a campaign email, Biden proclaimed that Harris “is the best person to help me take this fight to Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021.” In an overview of the news, CNN highlighted Harris’s “multi-racial background”, indicating that the Biden campaign’s decision may have partially stemmed from a desire to embrace the reinvigorated movement for racial justice in these tumultuous times.
Following the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25, the nation erupted in protest, demanding justice and accountability. These massive, ongoing, nationwide uprisings are primarily a manifestation of the renewed Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. As American police departments responded by doubling down on their flagrant brutality, the movement coalesced around efforts to “defund the police.” This was encapsulated in a July 6 post on the official BLM website:
“We know that police don’t keep us safe — and as long as we continue to pump money into our corrupt criminal justice system at the expense of housing, health, and education investments — we will never be truly safe. That’s why we are calling to #DefundPolice and #InvestInCommunities…”
On the surface, Biden’s VP pick may appear to be an olive branch to the BLM movement, as Harris’s identity as a black woman has been given significant attention. This is certainly a noteworthy development in the 2020 election season, as Harris is the first woman of color to run as VP on a major party presidential ticket (though others, such as Angela Davis, have run as third party VP candidates). Despite the historic nature of this news, we must also observe Harris’s troubling decade-long record as a prosecutor in the state of California, a topic that law professor Lara Bazelon summarized in a New York Times op-ed. For instance, during her tenure as San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions” and “championed state legislation under which parents whose children were found to be habitually truant in elementary school could be prosecuted, despite concerns that it would disproportionately affect low-income people of color.”
When Harris later became California’s attorney general, she fought to continue the death penalty, opposed investigating police shootings, opposed statewide standards for regulating police body cameras, and remained neutral on an initiative that was approved by voters in which certain low-level felonies would be reduced to misdemeanors. When asked by a reporter if she supported marijuana legalization, Harris laughed (marijuana prohibition is a major focus of the disastrous and racist War on Drugs). And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, as Briahna Joy Gray observed last year, we should also zoom out from the troubling aspects of Harris’s record specifically and contemplate her decision to become a prosecutor in the first place.
Regardless of the extent to which Harris’s policies disproportionately harmed people of color and other marginalized populations, her record pales in comparison to that of her running mate. As a young Delaware senator, Joseph R. Biden supported racial segregation efforts in public schools, particularly in the area of busing. Janell Ross summarized this history last year by writing, “[Biden’s] legislative work against school integration advanced a more palatable version of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine and undermined the nation’s short-lived effort at educational equality, legislative and education history experts say.” Biden went on to become a primary architect of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (often referred to as the “crime bill”), which resulted in what we now call “mass incarceration” — a devastating phenomenon that has had a vastly disproportionate impact on minority communities.
In conjunction with the Reagan-era “tough on crime” mentality, Biden participated in the demonization of the black community through rhetoric that included the infamous term “predator” — a dehumanizing and racist dog whistle. Unfortunately, that was the least of his racist comments; he once said he didn’t want his kids to grow up in a “racial jungle”, later referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean”, and — strangely enough — eulogized the infamous racist Strom Thurmond.
Possibly in an effort to draw attention away from this disturbing record, Biden began lying extensively about his involvement in the civil rights movement (in short, he was never involved). To further exhibit his profound disrespect for the black community, Biden recently responded to questions from black radio host Charlamagne by saying, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” | https://medium.com/discourse/what-kind-of-message-does-the-biden-harris-campaign-send-to-the-black-lives-matter-movement-e7c43eef599c | ['Matthew John'] | 2020-08-27 19:30:31.472000+00:00 | ['Election 2020', 'Biden', 'Politics', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Kamala Harris'] |
June 17th 2021, Silver Chartbook — Silver with a turbo | Tied to the hip to Gold, it is essential to keep an eye on the Gold/Silver-ratio. Silver is still stretched, lagging, while Gold is currently taking a breather and hence getting ready to approach the US$2,000 mark. Most likely gold will go beyond that level. It isn’t far-fetched to expect sooner or later a rubber band effect of Silver needing to catch up, and once it breaks the US$30 level, it might as well accelerate much faster than expected. Silver with a turbo.
Recent trading sessions have driven Silver and Gold to lower levels. Still, Silver already shows relative strength within the precious metal sector. As a result, we might witness one of the last cheap points for adding to one’s physical Silver holdings.
Monthly Chart, Gold to Silver Ratio, How much?
Gold/Silver-Ratio, monthly chart as of June 17th, 2021.
The Gold/Silver-ratio can help identify relative strength/relative weakness relationships between the two metals. Consequently, it is mighty helpful to guestimate which of the ones is moving first. Furthermore, one can time one’s trade placements. In addition, it is a barometer of the overall larger picture for long-term assessments from a fundamental perspective.
A look at the monthly Gold/Silver-ratio shows that Silver is pushing against a support level, which, if breaking, could lead to a two-legged move, adding a 50% turbo boost to Silver prices in relation to Gold (red arrows down).
Gold/Silver-Ratio, Weekly Chart, Trending down:
Gold/Silver-Ratio, weekly chart as of June 17th, 2021.
Now zooming in to the weekly time frame, we can see that the ratio is trending down. Consequently, Silver is catching up with Gold. Typically once the ratio price meets the upper red regression line (yellow circles), it consequently declines.
Trading in a triangle would mean that a lower white support line break could initiate a more volatile downward movement. Consequently, this would represent added turbo fuel to a more sustainable Silver upward movement.
Silver in US-Dollar, Monthly Chart, Think long term:
Silver in US-Dollar, monthly chart as of June 17th, 2021.
Looking at the isolated Silver price from a long-term chart (monthly) perspective, we can clearly see the bullish consensus (bullish triangle in white lines). Moreover, the thick volume supply zone between US$22 to US$25 suggests that reaching US$20 once again has a much lower probability.
Silver with a turbo:
Your typical weekly market newsletter sounds something like: “Maybe up, but it could also be sideways and down is also an option” — a protective means never to be wrong for the author. More rarely, you will find extreme opinions which give a doomsday picture to hope five or ten years later, a market crash gets the author noticed, and if not, no one remembers what was said 5–10 years ago. Nevertheless, there are market wizards. Decades of track records supporting sound market analysis.
Stanley Druckenmiller is such a genius with 30 years in a row producing an average of more than 30% profits return per year on his client’s money. More impressively, his worst year is still a double-digit number. When we heard him recently stating that the dollar would lose within 15 years its status as a leading currency globally, the hypothesis that motivated us nearly two years ago, starting as a permabull in our publications, felt confirmed. Another turbo in play. It is these puzzle pieces more and more now coming together that support our firm belief that inter-market relationships paint a picture where Silver could become the predominant shade of a futuristic picture of wealth preservation. In this context, we are aggressive buyers here for physical Silver in this temporary price dip.
Feel free to join us in our free Telegram channel for daily real time data and a great community.
If you like to get regular updates on our gold model, precious metals and cryptocurrencies you can subscribe to our free newsletter. | https://medium.com/@florian-grummes/june-17th-2021-silver-chartbook-silver-with-a-turbo-cf6f711a8163 | ['Florian Grummes'] | 2021-06-17 11:18:54.717000+00:00 | ['Precious Metals', 'Trading', 'Gold', 'Silver', 'Investing'] |
233 Skilled Workers Invited In Newest Arrima By Quebec | Quebec is a popular destination for aspiring immigrants. As the year comes to a close, Quebec is wrapping up its last draws of the year.
In 2018, Quebec began to employ the Arrima system to control the applicant pool for immigration programs. The province decided to replace the “first-come, first-served” approach with a more convenient application intake process. Prospective immigrants who are targeting Quebec will have to make an EOI profile under Arrima so that they qualify for the Regular Skilled Worker Program or RSWP. Once you register in Arrima, you will be added to the applicant pool automatically.
Canadian PR Visa From The Comfort of Your Home! Discover Your Immigration Options Today!
Details of the draw
On December 16, Quebec organized a draw to issue invitations to apply for immigration candidates who 3rre planning to immigrate under the RSWP. A total of 233 people received invitations and all of them had an existing Expression of Interest in Arrima.
This draw targeted two categories in particular. Firstly, the province rewarded candidates who have already secured a verified offer of employment. Secondly, the draw catered to people residing in the province as a consular officer, a diplomat, or a member of any intergovernmental organization operating in Quebec.
The staff of such officials were also included in the draw since their professions are listed in the Quebec Immigration Regulation under Section 26.
The immigration programs offered by Quebec have different eligibility requirements and enrollment processes as compared to the federal programs. The Ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI) chooses candidates on the basis of the labor deficiencies in the province. They also take into account whether a person shows the ability to integrate with Canadian society.
Canadian PR Visa From The Comfort of Your Home! Discover Your Immigration Options Today! | https://medium.com/@betterplaceimmi/233-skilled-workers-invited-in-newest-arrima-by-quebec-3668bf964c1f | ['Betterplace Immigration'] | 2020-12-27 15:10:38.548000+00:00 | ['Skilled Worker', 'Quebec', 'Betterplaceimmigration', 'Canada', 'Immigration'] |
Love this!! | Love this!! Please consider adding alt text so people using screen readers can enjoy your fun illustrations, too. 💻💙 | https://medium.com/@aprilhamm/love-this-fc1c1b06ab8 | ['April M. Hamm', 'She They'] | 2020-12-20 23:09:31.531000+00:00 | ['Comment', 'Hamm', 'Accessibility', 'Content Strategy', 'Illustration'] |
The Fall | Dropping into depression
The Fall
How we unconsciously create our state of mind
Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash
The first feeling was that I was unsupported. The belief that I was no longer supported by what had created me, and that which defined all I was.
I should have laughed at such a stupid thought. How could I be unsupported, how could such an idea ever have been believed?
But it was believed, and then came the feeling of horror realizing that I was on my own, no longer supported by my source.
I was terrified, and terror became an underlying feeling in my new identity. Horror was the base, and a terrified mind was the result.
Then came hatred and filled me. It burned my mind and made me crazy. Then came panic over being alone. Panic and terror was the new state of my mind. The mind that believed that the first thought of being unsupported to be true.
Self-abuse was the next feeling. A feeling of hatred towards myself and the suffering started as a constant reminder of what I did. And with that came guilt and more self-abuse.
The reality of my new state of mind was too dark, and my mind became defensive. It now believed that what had happened to me was not my own doing; it was done to me.
Lust came as a way to forget the suffering. But not releasing suffering, the mistaken lust just became another evidence that I was unsupported.
I was now in a state where I was taken for granted that I was unsupported. Panic was constant, and guilt was tormenting my soul.
Resentment and bitterness came and became my new friends. The righteous answer to what was done to me. I was a victim of what was done to me. Resentment towards the attackers and bitterness over my situation was now logical.
Then came longing for what was no more. Panic returned and showed me that all hope was lost, and fear was my new friend.
Then came resentment towards the self I had become. Guilt came because of what I had thought of others. Disgust filled me as I saw my new self.
Then came discouragement as I again realized that without my source, there was no hope of release.
Then came sorrow and finally sadness.
I am sad because I am unsupported. This layer of sadness is always there. I try to hide it because sadness is so different from joy, and I do not want to become one with sadness. But it’s always there, and it’s there because I am unsupported.
But sadness is not the cause; it was made by sorrow, which was produced by discouragement, which was made by disgust, which was created by guilt, which came from resentment, which came from fear, which came from panic, which came from longing, which came from bitterness, which came from resentment, which came from guilt, which came from panic, which came from believing that I was unsupported.
What if that first thought was not true? Would the resentment be real? Would bitterness? Would longing? Would panic? Would fear? Would disgust? Would discouragement? Would sorrow? Would sadness?
It’s just thoughts. They are not real. They can all be released if you realize that the sole purpose of that last thought only is to prove that the prior was true. And that again was only made to show that the one before it was true, etc.
It’s a chain of lies because their root is a lie. You cannot build truth on a lie. Only illusions can be made like that, and they only affect because you believe them. | https://medium.com/life-in-spirit/the-fall-d2f4c7d3f70 | ['Flemming Engstrom'] | 2020-05-04 15:12:58.928000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Personal Development', 'Spirituality', 'Thoughts', 'Forgiveness'] |
Preliminary | 2020 was a difficult year and was also a turning point year in accelerating world change towards accelerating new technologies. Where many things have changed as has been said in these articles:
So in 2021–2022 is the year of adjustment of human life to the accelerated process of world change with the acceleration of technology. One of the things that are felt is the changing patterns of technology use in human life, one of which is financial technology, investment, shopping, payments, and conducting online meetings.
This may still be a bit difficult and uncomfortable in the middle of 2020, especially when things that are not considered disrespectful are normal and even become the main requirement for everyone. This makes people increasingly accelerate the race to keep up with the acceleration and adapt to changing world with existing technology.
One of the issues for some countries and even people today is how to create a technology that can help everyone and can be used comprehensively in all sectors of life and energy that make it work. If we look at the existing technology, several existing technologies are capable of doing this.
One of the things we hear most often is the word “Green Energy” which is a new and renewable energy that has extraordinary and unlimited energy. And if we look at this, several ways can be used with existing technology, one of which is by using or utilizing solar cells, water treatment, plant ecology, gas pipes, and so on.
But often it is plagued by various problems because there is no automatic supervision and control that can do this. So in the acceleration of technology that is happening at this time, the “Techno Home” must be created by utilizing the “Green Energy” that exists today.
Green Energy
“Green Energy” is one of the new ecosystems in this modern world order where all energy is created from all things that can be renewed again and will not be lost, even into infinity.
In today’s world, an energy that leads to infinite energy is indeed being developed. one of the ongoing uses is biofuel using CPO / palm oil which is widely grown in developing countries and some existing equipment as green energy, namely the “solar cell” which is used for solar power generation and “kinetic energy” which is used for wind and water power plants
But this still cannot cover the main role of coal and fossil oil which are very popular and very easy to use because they have been used for centuries. On the other hand, coal and oil commodities have an important role in stabilizing the existing economy. This is very difficult to get rid of or make it non-existent.
the role of “Green Energy” today is how to embrace all the energy that has been available to date and save that energy with materials or things that can be converted into electric or kinetic engines. Where the conversion we often call Hybrid combines 2 ways of entering energy (Green Energy and fossil energy). into a machine or vehicle so that it can move and run according to the function and purpose of the tool.
If we look at a growing sector as it is today, housing should be the first pilot project for green energy. Why? Because from the housing you can feel how the function and role of this green energy for daily needs. And housing is a land of “green energy” that is the most extensive and can coexist with humans.
This is evidenced by the small scale where the upper-class people especially use solar cells for hot water and the use of electricity for daily use. With proof on a small scale, it should be able to be made also for a large scale. Where is housing with the concept of Green energy?
But the next problem is the maintenance and maintenance of these tools, if you look at the existing problems, one of them is human negligence in the use of electronic goods that are closely related to green energy. but this can be minimized periodically with the existence of “Techno Home” which can guide, remind and carry out maintenance and periodically upgrade several functions of green energy equipment with the help of artificial intelligence.
Techno Home
Techno Home is a term used by some people to describe or describe a future house (future house) that has many smart electronic circuits and can help humans carry out all activities.
Usually, almost all rooms in Techno Home are based on a cloud system because the life in it is combined with smart features that can be connected to various devices based on artificial intelligence / smart electronics using the IoT system.
This is well proven by how all the care in the house can be carried out automatically and if it is controlled, it can use the smartphone in the owner’s hand. This also becomes the basis for how a Techno Home can develop and collaborate on green energy.
This is indeed a bit hard to imagine, let’s look at it as an example. For example, you can see from inside a normal house that there is a stationary bicycle for sports only. Meanwhile, in Techno Home, static bicycles have various functions which should be an initial detection of the body’s condition, electricity generators, physical data and sports activities, and so on. But if planned with green energy, then the stationary bike can turn into a small generator to produce green energy.
Not to mention talking about the flow of air which is seen as a means of refreshing / in the house for example a small waterfall in a fish pond can be a small power plant that helps create green energy and a place for air circulation for plants and the ecosystem as a whole.
Can we imagine if the statistical bicycle is only a manual static bicycle, will it be given that it is big enough? If the small waterfall in the pool is only for air circulation, does it have a big impact?
So nowadays this IoT system has a role that is very much needed by humans. And if there is no small system, this will be detrimental because everything has to be done manually by humans. So that in the calculation of current investment and technological advances, it is very disadvantageous which will take time, effort, space, and costs without the energy produced.
IoT System
With the IoT system, it is very helpful to collect information, carry out maintenance, notify if there is damage, and save power like a personal assistant. Where the IoT system is designed to help all human activities make it easier and can do all work from a considerable distance.
Techno Home with a little more complex mechanical system will produce purity of green energy which is very sustainable and has the potential to create unlimited energy. Where unlimited energy will come out of human behavior that is always moving, which is captured and converted into energy, especially electrical energy.
Advantage
If we talk about the advantages of using green energy, then we will talk about the energy that will not run out and the energy that is the main force in carrying out activities that 80% already use or depend on electrical energy. even with green energy and techno home, it will make electricity cheaper and have a polluting impact on the environment.
this affects not only one sector, but all life will change. Even if coupled with the game psychology program in IoT, it will bring impacts and a new ecosystem that is good for the environment and allows it to become a new, more modern work of life.
With Techno Home, all human routines will be read and assisted by technology to find statistical movements that will have an impact on the development of the energy source itself. And humans will help the technology to realize the intended device so that energy can be obtained, for example, solar cells, wind chargers, kinetic electricity, and the like.
Weakness
If there is an advantage, there must also be a drawback. where the Green energy and Techno Home sectors are still experiencing obstacles in terms of procurement of goods/investment. From the calculation of the procurement of goods carried out independently, it is found that a simple house costs money that can only be purchased by upper-class citizens. This is triggered by the high price of solar panels, quite expensive kinetic assembly prices, and many more
And if you look at the prices that have been stated, it is very difficult for green energy and techno home to materialize. so it needs the role and support of all parties for extraordinary development in the field of materials and the field of application of existing systems.
Solution
From the things described, we can see the tremendous potential of this project, and indeed the obstacles that exist to date are the investment costs that existed at the beginning of the construction and initial installation. This resulted in the project failing many times and no one even glanced at this solution. Only a few people use this stuff for very small purposes. Even when there is someone who makes this solar garden, it doesn’t respond well enough
So on this occasion, we are eager to make green energy and techno home based on clusters, where all 85% of the houses use green energy materials based on kinetic and solar cells. This indeed requires a lot of support from several companies as well as investors who are able and willing to try this basic thing.
Because after being proven by theory and calculation, it was initially a very large investment, but with the capabilities and things that Techno Home can do, everything will pay off and become even more profitable. This is because 65% of the electricity used comes from routine human work and all the electricity income earned will reduce the electricity load used.
It even occurred to us that we would create 2 Techno Home start-up rooms based on the Custer itself and booking a fitness lounge connected to several ID-based IoTs could help residents to enthusiastically generate extraordinary green energy for the region and themselves.
Financing
If we think about where will the funding for this project come from and if it is used as a cluster, who will buy the cluster? In our opinion, to finance this project, we will collaborate with several large vendors and developers who care about green energy for a better world. One of the vendors that are needed is a developer, network company, technology equipment company, health company, and many more.
And if based on our calculations, making Green Energy and Tecno home requires a lot of tools and a lot of investment costs, including:
Solar Panel
with a land area of 1 hectare, it is possible to make as many as 60- 65 houses of type 40 m². With the need for 12 panels to get a capacity of 3 kWp. The area of each panel is 1.7 square meters, so you need a roof of 12x1.7 = 20.4 square meters that is not blocked by shadows of trees or buildings throughout the day from sunrise to sunset. So that it requires 1 hectare of land to produce approximately 4000 watts per day.
The cost that must be incurred is 780 panels (an estimate of 65 houses and one house requires 12 panels) and the price of one panel is estimated at 9 million — 13 million rupiah. So the initial investment in the house is about 11 billion outside the home and excluding other expenses.
And if from PLN the price is Rp.1,467 (compass data, 2018), then the value of 11 billion can be BEP by itself in the range of 6 years with an estimate outside the use of other electricity. But with the age of a solar cell that is over 10 years old, the vendor’s investment will indirectly be profitable.
Wind Catcher
Given the area of land and buildings above, the next step is to make a wind catcher that functions as modified kinetic propulsion and will capture very small wind movements so that it can move to catch the wind that is outside the house or that will enter the house. With the estimated type taken 100A x 24V = 2400W / hour
Costs incurred for the price range in 5 million rupiahs, with an estimate of one house requiring a capacity of 3 pieces, so the price of 1 house is estimated at 15 million rupiahs, so the initial investment that must be spent is around 1 billion apart from other costs.
And if from PLN the price is IDR 1,467 (compass data, 2018), then the value of 1 billion can be BEP by itself in the range of 1 year with an estimate outside the use of other electricity. But with the age of the windcatcher above 5–6 years, the vendor’s investment will indirectly benefit.
GYM Kinetic
When we talk about green energy, then we don’t forget that we will talk about health which is very useful and has other benefits. Where actually from sports equipment used by humans, it can produce kinetic energy that produces the electrical energy that can be reused by humans.
But often people do not realize and don’t like to do this, but with the addition of a little game/loyalty, psychology can make people live healthily and generate electrical energy from what they do. However, for this program, it is necessary to consider several experts and to consider the conditions of each person in using supporting tools.
After we discuss the main technology of Green energy, we must also pay attention to the Techno home which is based on the IoT System which we often call a virtual assistant. Where the function of this virtual assistant has an important role to keep every process carried out by all major technologies can be properly recorded, perform simple maintenance and notify engineers or interested people if a problem occurs in the main technological process.
With the IoT system, it will indirectly change people’s lifestyles to switch to a more secure security system based on virtual assistants. Where all smart system-based devices will be connected to a smartphone that can be known about the condition of the device and controlled remotely.
Even for the cost, for now, it is very relative depending on the usability and how functional the virtual assistant is. But the development of this virtual assistant is very necessary and important for its continuity so that the financing of this will continue to grow and will adjust everything.
Conclusion
Of all the things that we have discussed above, it is a small part of the business plan of a series of business plans that should make a country have extraordinary unlimited power based on green energy. And if this is applied to a larger scope and the more multinational companies that join even from abroad, it will make this program more concise with very excessive benefits.
Even if it is seen from the amount of investment it looks very large, the existence of cooperation between several companies and mutual collaboration between one another will make things even easier. This can also be realized with a more thorough and developed repair detail,
The calculation is still very raw because it is very far from land prices, location, and other factors that greatly affect the calculation of a place. But indeed if this proposal is going to be implemented, we can start with a discussion about it in depth. Of course, in the calculation, there must be data on the value of utilization and the value of the assembly and maintenance of the existing tools. To get maximum results and implementation and have a higher value than the general function.
Hope
We hope that we can help to realize it in a company/institution under one of the vendors so that it can continue to be developed even more and can be run as a whole. To produce maximum results for the use of the wider community.
We hope that we can work together to do this big thing because, with cheap and reliable electricity, indirectly more and more data on the need for electricity usage will be directly proportional to energy income from green energy and techno home.
Papers as a Business Program Proposal in the PLN ICE (Innovation & Competition in Electric) By Samuel Liputra
CC from https://newsevengenerationsiklan1.blogspot.com/2021/06/idea-4u-development-of-green-energy.html | https://medium.com/@samuelliputra/preliminary-fdcc59d885af | ['Samuel Liputra'] | 2021-06-08 03:07:18.086000+00:00 | ['Elections', 'Future', 'Technology', 'Green Energy', 'Samuel Liputra'] |
Superhero TV Show Power Rankings — NOV 2018 | Don’t underestimate Stanley…
ARROW (CW)
Season: 7
Episodes Reviewed: 4–8
RENEWAL STATUS: TBD. Likely.
THE GOOD: (1, 2 & 3) “The Slabside Redemption” was one of the best episodes in recent memory. With multiple fight scenes — including one where Oliver fights people with a soda can in a pillowcase— along with major revelations about Stanley, a change of heart for Turner and two big deaths, it was an episode to remember. It also involved Oliver’s most brutal beatdown yet and finally ended the Diaz saga (I hope)! Plus — how about that line where Oliver casually mentions to Sampson that he’s sliced his artery? Amazing.
THE BAD: (1) Team Arrow is downright uninteresting this year. They all seem to wander around doing their jobs, occasionally running into each other and arguing. With the exception of Felicity, everything else in their lives is fine. No romantic issues for Curtis. No revenge-hunting for Dinah. No Oliver-betraying Rene. It’s all kind of quiet, which is concerning for a show that’s 1/3 of the way through its season. (2) I don’t even remember why Diaz hates Oliver. Oh well. Looks like he’s finally done for. (3) NO! BEEBO MADE IT TO ARROW!
How to Make It Better: The flash-forwards are great but are way too short. Here’s hoping Stanley takes over as big bad for the rest of the season. Have we ever seen a villain like that? I don’t think so!
Stray Observation: Wow — they killed off Brick, Sampson and Diaz! Those are the first deaths on the show in a while! (Since Quentin in Season 6?)
Bold Prediction: More marriage troubles for Olicity. Is that bold?
Score: 8/10 (+2)
Old Prediction Realized: Stanley, Oliver’s “big fan” in prison, isn’t who he says he is. [close] He is Diaz’s man on the inside…[incorrect]or perhaps another villain[correct].
Is there any redemption for Khalil? And is he really the best henchman Tobias can get?
BLACK LIGHTNING (CW)
Season: 2
Episodes Reviewed: 4–7
RENEWAL STATUS: TBD.
THE GOOD: (1) Gambi fighting with drones!!! (2) Painkiller’s struggle has been surprisingly interesting to follow, despite his weird 360-degree character flip. (3) Even though he doesn’t do anything significant(none of the characters do) I love Tobias.
THE BAD: (1) Not sure why the POD kids issue isn’t a matter of national security. Twitter would be all over that. (2) I wonder where they’re going with this Sange/Perdi stuff. It’s been very weird so far. (3) Each episode of this show feels exactly the same. I wish something significant would happen.
How to Make It Better: Easy fix — drop the theme song. As most of the episode open with a song, its jarring to switch to the theme song just for the opening.
Bold Prediction: Lala doesn’t come back this season. Has he been written out?
Score: 3/10 (no change)
They outdid themselves AGAIN!
DAREDEVIL (CW)
Season: 3
Episodes Reviewed: 1–5
RENEWAL STATUS: Cancelled.
THE GOOD: (1) Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk! Missed that guy. (2) Foggy running for DA! That’s a great choice for that character. (3) The 11-minute fight scene in the prison!!!! A work of art.
THE BAD: (1) Surprise, surprise, a Marvel Netflix show that’s way too slow. (2) How is Matt not entirely black and blue at this point? (3) Ugh why do we have to go back to the black costume?
How to Make It Better: Bullseye costume! (I know I won’t get my wish)
Bold Prediction: Karen and Matt get back together! (No? Wishful thinking?)
Score: 8/10
“Mazel tov.”
FLASH (CW)
Season: 5
Episodes Reviewed: 5–7
RENEWAL STATUS: TBD. Likely.
THE GOOD: (1) Absolutely loved Rag Doll. He seemed like a villain straight out of Gotham. He added a bit of that “villain-of-the-week” magic from the earlier seasons that I’ve missed. The show’s done a good job of bringing that formula back for most of the episodes so far. (2) While Nora’s been pretty whiny all season, Cecile’s lesson about Iris was unexpected and genuine. (3) Elongated man swinging from rooftops!
THE BAD: (1) Not sold on Cicada yet. His “I will kill all the meta-humans” mantra is very cartoony. Then again, maybe he’ll go like Dr.Alchemy and be defeated mid-season. (2) Again — there are still too many cooks in the kitchen. I could do without Sherloque, Cecile, Joe and maybe even Caitlin. (3) I’m not sure if Nora is likable or not. She’s very temperamental, but does explain her reasons.
Stray Observation: Nice to see Weather Wizard II again!
How to Make It Better: Convince me Cicada is dangerous.
Bold Prediction: Icicle will return before season’s end!
Score: 7/10 (no change)
Time Bureau antics!
LEGENDS OF TOMORROW (CW)
Season: 4
Episodes Reviewed: 3–6
RENEWAL STATUS: TBD. Likely.
THE GOOD: (1) Despite being a gay woman, Ava Sharpe is the only “straight man” left on this show. She’s vital to keeping this show, which gets wackier every week, grounded. Henry Heywood is also effective in this role. (2) I was pleasantly surprised at Nate’s non-reaction to Amaya’s doppelgänger. They could have made a big deal about it, but I was glad that Nate handled it maturely. (3) I think moving Nate off the team is a good move, as it will allow the team to more readily accept Charlie into their ranks. We’ve yet to really explore her character.
THE BAD: (1) Gary can be annoying, but Mona is just awful. I’m okay with her being a love interest for Gary, but she has no business working in the Time Bureau. (2) I feel like Matt Ryan is regretting signing up for this show, which is essentially Constantine for kids. I wish they’d give him a more important role. (3) Can I just say how much I despise Gideon? Probably more than any Arrowverse character, I feel that Gideon only makes things easier for our heroes. And don’t give her lines!
How to Make It Better: Okay — make it a comedy. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be dark moments and real stakes.
Bold Prediction: Nora Darhk and Ray Palmer exit the team at the end of the year.
Score: 4/10 (-2)
We’ve got the early makings of a super UN here!
SUPERGIRL
Season: 4
Episodes Reviewed: 4–7
RENEWAL STATUS: TBD. Likely.
THE GOOD: (1) Things got real in Episode 4. Alex finally got told off by the President for all the DEO’S mistakes and Supergirl got a scolding for ignoring protocol and endangering her life. The DEO was lectured about betraying the job to which they devoted their lives. The more superhero shows are rooted in reality, the more they make sense to us. These are all (relatively) realistic consequences. (2) Manchester Black as an anti-hero. We’ve never seen anyone like him on the show. He feels like he’s from Arrow, which is refreshing to see on a show like this, where everyone is a goody two-shoes. (3) Lena’s internal ethical debate about human experimentation. Finally, they’re showing that Lena has a little Luthor in her.
THE BAD: (1) Nia just kind of…disappeared… (2) Some wacky stuff going on — like that dog/alien/dragon? What happened to fighting — you know-Livewire? (3) Colonel Haley would have been a good antagonist, but she keeps giving Alex and Kara passes.
How to Make It Better: Let’s get to the Supergirl clone!!!
Bold Prediction: Lena finally goes to the dark side.
Score: 4/10 (-3)
Jason Todd is the worst.
TITANS
Season: 1
Episodes Reviewed: 4–8
RENEWAL STATUS: TBD
THE GOOD: (1) Jason Todd — what a fun version of Robin! He’s an irritating jerk who enjoys being Batman’s sidekick for all the wrong reasons, which bothers Dick to no end. (2) The reveal that Rachel can not only heal but reverse-heal, as she displayed by reopening Dr.Adamson’s self-inflicted neck wound, was epic. (3) I loved the episode with the Melting Man. Robin’s detective work made me reminisce about old Batman comics. I didn’t even miss the rest of the team in that episode.
THE BAD: (1) Rachel’s real mom: It worked as a MacGuffin to get the team into the clutches of the Organization, but now that they freed her, the result is a bit anticlimactic. Now what? I can’t imagine she remains on the show for more than a few more hours. (2) Where does Kory find all of that outlandish purple material? (3) Does Dick Grayson not have to go to work? Isn’t he a detective? And what about his new partner’s murder?
How to Make It Better: More Detective Grayson!
Score: 9/10 (+1) | https://medium.com/cinenation-show/superhero-tv-show-power-rankings-nov-2018-5e1140a67107 | ['Daniel L'] | 2018-12-19 03:13:49.520000+00:00 | ['Superheroes', 'Television', 'Marvel', 'Dc', 'Rankings'] |
Introduction to forecasting Philippine stock prices using Facebook’s Prophet | Introduction to forecasting Philippine stock prices using Facebook’s Prophet
A basic python workflow for predicting the stock price of the Philippine company, Jollibee Food Corp (JFC)
I’ve been into stock trading in the Philippines since I was in college and was immediately convinced that this is a field where forecasting models would be very useful. Why? Because your ability to make money in the stock market is dependent on your ability to predict what the price is going to be in the future.
In this post, I will demonstrate a quick way to forecast the daily closing price of a Philippine stock, Jollibee Foods Corporation (JFC), using the powerful Prophet package on python. Prophet is an open source forecasting tool made by Facebook that speeds up the standard forecasting workflow from something that typically takes days or weeks to something that takes as little as a few minutes (assuming you already have data in the correct format).
All relevant data and code can be found in the time-series directory of this repo.
We will follow the workflow below:
Install and import the necessary packages Get the data Plot the time series Train the Prophet model Predict the future! Assess accuracy
Let’s get started!
1. Install and import the necessary packages
Just Prophet + the basics.
# Run these on your terminal
pip install pandas
pip install datetime
pip install fbprophet
pip install numpy
pip install matplotlib # Alternatively, you can run these from jupyter this way
!pip install pandas
!pip install datetime
!pip install fbprophet
!pip install numpy
!pip install matplotlib
2. Get the data
All we need is a file that we can read into python as a pandas DataFrame which contains 2 columns corresponding to the stock’s closing price and date.
For this introduction, I’ve saved a copy of JFC’s closing prices from 2013–09–01 to 2019–04–26 (along with the rest of the code here) in the time-series directory of this repo. We can access the data by cloning this repo and navigating to the time-series directory.
git clone
cd data-science-demos/time-series # Run these on your terminalgit clone https://github.com/enzoampil/data-science-demos.git cd data-science-demos/time-series
!git clone
!cd data-science-demos/time-series # Alternatively, you can run these from jupyter this way!git clone https://github.com/enzoampil/data-science-demos.git !cd data-science-demos/time-series
jfc = pd.read_csv(" # Read the JFC data (csv) as a pandas DataFramejfc = pd.read_csv(" jfc_20130901_to_20190426.csv ") # Convert the date column to datetime format
jfc['CHART_DATE'] = pd.to_datetime(jfc.CHART_DATE)
3. Plot the time series
For this, we can use the basic plotting functionality accessible straight from the pandas DataFrame.
# Plot the time series
# 'CHART_DATE' is the date and 'CLOSE' is the closing price
jfc.set_index('CHART_DATE').CLOSE.plot(figsize=(15, 10))
plt.title('Jollibee Daily Closing Price', fontsize=25)
You will notice that JFC’s closing price moves in cycles of upward and downward movements, but the overall trend is still going up. One of the strengths of Prophet is that it can automatically account for the seasonality found in trends when making its forecasts.
4. Train the Prophet model
Now, we can train the Prophet model! To do this, we have to first filter the DataFrame to have only two columns: the date, “CHART_DATE” and the closing price, “CLOSE”. Then, we change their names to “ds” and “y”, respectively, since Prophet automatically reads the “ds” column as the date and the “y” column as the variable being forecasted. Finally, we train the model on the training data, which refers to the data before the beginning of a specified holdout period. In this case, “HOLDOUT_START” is the date corresponding to the beginning of the holdout period (set at 2019–03–01).
Note that the data for the holdout period will be treated as our validation set and will be used in assessing the performance of the trained Prophet model.
# Set holdout (validation) set start
HOLDOUT_START = '2019-03-01' # Import the Prophet package
from fbprophet import Prophet # Filter to only the date and closing price columns
ts = jfc[['CHART_DATE', 'CLOSE']] # Rename the date and closing price columns to 'ds', and 'y', respectively
# We do this since prophet automatically reads the 'ds' column as the date and the 'y' column as the variable that we are forecasting
ts.columns = ['ds', 'y'] # Fit the Prophet model to the training data (before the start of the holdout set)
# We set daily_seasonality and yearly_seasonality to True to account for daily and yearly seasonality, respectively
m = Prophet(daily_seasonality=True, yearly_seasonality=True).fit(ts[ts.ds < HOLDOUT_START])
5. Predict the future!
In Prophet, we do this by first creating a future dataframe, where we specify how far into the future we want to forecast; in this case, we set it to 336 days. Next, we call the predict method found inside the trained prophet model (using the future dataframe as an argument) and this returns the predictions.
# Set the forecast period, "periods", in the specified unit, "freq"
# In this case, we're predicting 336 days into the future
future = m.make_future_dataframe(periods=7*4*12, freq='D') # Make the actual predictions
pred = m.predict(future) # Visualise the predictions using Prophet's plotting method
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
fig1 = m.plot(pred)
plt.title('Jollibee: Forecasted Daily Closing Price', fontsize=25)
The forecasts along with historical closing prices are shown above. The blue line corresponds to the forecasted closing prices, while the black dots correspond to the historical closing prices from the training set. The forecasted closing prices for the holdout period indicate that prices will go down for that period (2019–03–01 to 2019–04–26).
The shaded blue region corresponds to the forecasted 95% confidence intervals. You will notice that forecasts that are further away, also have wider forecasted confidence intervals.
6. Assess accuracy
To assess the accuracy of our trained Prophet model, we will compute the root mean squared error (RMSE) of our predictions on the holdout set from 2019–03–01 to 2019–04–26. To visualise performance in more detail, we also plot the predicted JFC closing price vs the actual JFC closing price for the 57 day holdout period.
# Concatenate holdout (validation) set predictions and targets into one dataframe for easy comparison
pred_holdout = pred[(pred.ds >= HOLDOUT_START)&(pred.ds <= ts.ds.max())].set_index('ds').yhat
target_holdout = ts[ts.ds >= HOLDOUT_START].set_index('ds')
comb = pd.concat([pred_holdout, target_holdout], axis=1).dropna() # Calculate root mean squared error (RMSE)
import numpy as np
rmse_holdout = np.sqrt(comb.yhat.subtract(comb.y).pow(2).mean()) # Plot predicted vs target while displaying accuracy based on rmse
comb.columns = ['Predicted', 'Actual']
comb.plot(figsize=(15, 10))
plt.title('Predicted (yhat) vs Actual (y) JFC Closing Price
Validation Set RMSE: {}'.format(rmse_holdout), fontsize=25)
As stated earlier, the forecasted prices (blue) for the holdout set indicate that prices would go down overall for the duration of the holdout set. Interestingly, the actual prices (orange) also showed an overall decrease in JFC’s closing price, although sharper than the one predicted.
In addition, the short term movements also appear to be reflected by the forecasts. The actual trend shows an initial increase up to April 8, and then a drop leading to April 26. Again, the forecasts show similar movements, although not as sharp.
The calculated root mean squared error (RMSE) of 5.56 tells us that on average (with increased weight on large errors) the Prophet model’s JFC closing price predictions are wrong by PHP 5.56 for the holdout set from 2019–03–01 to 2019–04–26. Is this error small enough for us to trust the predictions? That will depend on our willingness to take on risk, but a conservative rule of thumb is to only make trades on forecasts that indicate a profit opportunity even at the expected downward deviation from the forecasted price.
What’s next?
Congratulations! You now know how to execute a basic forecasting workflow using the powerful Prophet package. This involved the following steps: 1) installing and importing the necessary packages, 2) getting the data, 3) plotting the time series, 4) training the Prophet model, 5) predicting the future using the model, and finally, 6) assessing accuracy. This same workflow can be applied using other forecasting models and for use cases other than predicting stock prices.
It’s important to note that there are still many ways to improve our current forecasting workflow:
Use exogenous variables and derived indicators for prediction. We can explicitly account for information other than the stock’s past closing prices (exogenous variables). Examples of these are a stock’s traded volume, the price and volume of other stocks, interest rates, inflation, success of a recent ad launched, and other derived metrics like moving volatility, RSI, short-term & long-term moving average, etc. Identify events that can catalyse price movement. Examples are company related announcements (often disclosed on twitter) such as those about performance, mergers & acquisitions, new laws, etc. We can model these specifically in order to estimate their impact on the price. Experiment with other powerful models. I often use Prophet as a baseline but still end up using other models that beat the base model’s performance. Examples of these are gradient boosting machines (e.g. LightGBM), deep learning models (e.g. LSTM RNNs), and other cutting edge time series models (e.g. TBATS, SARIMAX). Improve accuracy of forecasted model uncertainty. Aside from the performance of point forecasts, arguably more important is the accuracy of forecasted uncertainty, which can guide us in knowing when to trust the model’s predictions more. This has been a focus of recent research and some have successfully created models that accurately predict 95% confidence intervals that actually cover 95% of targets. Visualise estimated impact via simulation engines. By creating models that can account for external factors and events, we can turn these models into simulation engines that can visualise how prices will change across different scenarios (i.e. scenario analysis). For example, how would the price look given a recession next year, paired with a 2% hike in interest rates?
Above are only some of the many ways to improve our current forecasting workflow and I plan to discuss these in more detail in future blog posts. If you have any suggestions on which ones to start with, feel free to comment or email me at [email protected]. Stay tuned!
Note from Towards Data Science’s editors: While we allow independent authors to publish articles in accordance with our rules and guidelines, we do not endorse each author’s contribution. You should not rely on an author’s works without seeking professional advice. See our Reader Terms for details. | https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-forecasting-philippine-stock-prices-fd4df5dad9c3 | ['Lorenzo Ampil'] | 2020-09-16 21:39:05.233000+00:00 | ['Stock Market', 'Forecasting', 'Data Science', 'Simulation'] |
Teaching High School Math in 2020 — The Wild Ride, The Evolution & Where We Go From Here | Teaching High School Math in 2020 — The Wild Ride, The Evolution & Where We Go From Here
Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash
When this pandemic first hit, teachers and students everywhere stared shocked at their computer screens reading that schools would remain closed and instruction would continue fully online for the indefinite future. Math teachers started emailing, texting, pulling those old WhatsApp group chats out of the archives looking for ideas, assurance, some one to tell them it would all be ok. What did we discover? No one had a clue! It was a time of confusion and chaos, panic, insecurity and helplessness.
But, being the problem solvers that we are, we started to think, try things, share ideas, and slip into the whirlwind of survival mode. One day it’s video conferencing, how do we share screens, raise hands, find the elusive chat, channels, how do you even start a meeting? Next we’re diving into the Google tools, sharing docs, folders, linking, creating Classrooms, Classroom assignments... how awesome are those! Then we’re making video lessons, Screencastifying, Educreating, MacGyvering device stands out of old selfie sticks to record our notes. It was a crazy learning curve, but looking back, life has a way of erasing the trauma and I am mostly amazed by how much we were able to adapt and learn and still provide quality-ish learning for the students that wanted to learn.
Were there problems? Absolutely! With so much learning and change, the focus had to be on packaging and delivering content to the students along with some attempt to assess and give feedback. Students fell through the cracks, some simply could not participate for various personal or pandemic related reasons. If students chose to disengage, there was only so much we could do. Parents, dealing with their own professional and personal COVID related fallout could only do so much, but we all accepted that we were living through a state of emergency and we would have to make concessions. We somehow got through it. | https://medium.com/@annalisajames/teaching-high-school-math-in-2020-the-wild-ride-the-evolution-where-we-go-from-here-9122880e3af9 | ['Annalisa James'] | 2021-02-08 18:32:24.020000+00:00 | ['High School', 'Self Reflection', 'Math', 'Teaching', 'Pedagogy'] |
Apple’s New M1 Chip is a Machine Learning Beast | I watched the keynote and saw the graphs, the battery life, the instant wake. And they got me. I started to think, how could one of these new M1-powered MacBooks make their way into my life?
Of course, I didn’t need one but I kept wondering what story could I tell myself to justify purchasing another computer? Then I had it. My 16-inch MacBook Pro is too heavy to carry around all the time. Yeah, that’ll do. This 2.0 kg aluminium powerhouse is too much to be galavanting.
Wait… 2.0 kg, as in, 4.4 pounds?
That’s it?
Yes.
Wow. It’s not even that heavy.
C’mon now… let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story.
I had it. My reason for placing an order on a shiny new M1 MacBook (or two). My 16-inch MacBook is too heavy to lug around to cafes and write code, words, edit videos and check emails sporadically.
And Apple seems to think their new M1 chip is 11x, 15x, 12x, 3x faster on a bunch of different things. Thought-provoking numbers but I’ve never measured any of these in the past.
All I care about is: can I do what I need to do, fast.
The last word of the previous sentence is the most important. I’ve become conditioned. Speed is a part of me now. Ever since the transition from hard drives to solid-state drives. And I’m not going back.
I bought the 16-inch in February 2020. I’d just completed a large project and was flush with cash, so I decided to future proof my work station. Since I edit videos daily and hate lag, I opted for the biggest dawg I could buy and basically maxed everything except for the storage (see the specs below).
Thankfully I’ve still got a friend at Apple who was able to apply their employee discount to the beast (shout out to Joey).
Anyway, we’ve discussed my primary criteria: speed. Let’s consider the others:
Speed. If it’s not fast, get lost. Cost. A big factor but I didn’t mind paying for the higher spec machine nor do I mind paying for a quality computer. It’s my primary tool. I use it to make art, I use it to make money, I use it to learn, I use it to communicate to the world. Portability. I don’t like sitting in an office all day. Can I take this thing to a cafe or library for a few hours without searching for a power outlet? Consider portability a combination of battery life and weight.
Why test/compare them
Why not?
But really, I’m a nerd. And an Apple fan. Plus, I wanted to see how my big-dawg-almost-top-of-the-line 16-inch MacBook Pro faired against the new M1 chip-powered MacBook’s.
Plus, I can’t remember being this excited for a new computing device since the original iPhone.
Other reasons include: carrying around a lighter laptop and tax benefits (if I buy another machine before the end of the year, I can claim it on tax).
Mac specs
Whenever I buy a new machine, I usually upgrade the RAM and the storage at least a step or two from baseline.
512GB storage and 16GB RAM seems to be the minimum for me these days (seriously, who is running a 128GB MacBook effectively?).
So for the M1 MacBook’s, I upgraded both of their RAM from 8GB to 16GB and for the 13-inch Pro, I upgraded from 256GB to 512GB storage.
The 16-inch MacBook is my current machine, which I’ve never had a problem with until running the tests below.
Specifications of each of the Macs tested. Note: there are cheaper configurations of each but I typically upgrade the RAM and storage on each of my machines.
*Price (actual) is the actual price I paid for each model. Note for the MacBook Pro 16-inch, I actually paid ~$5,500AUD since I have a friend who works at Apple and applied his employee discount (thank you Joey).
**Price (baseline) is the price you’d pay if you upgraded all processing components (e.g. 8GB -> 16GB RAM on the M1 models and 2.3GHz -> 2.4GHz on the Intel model) except storage (since storage is usually the most expensive upgrade).
The tests
Apple’s graphs were impressive. And the GeekBench scores were even more impressive. But these are just numbers on a page to me. I wanted to see how these machines performed doing what I’d actually do day-to-day:
Writing words. I assume they all perform well at this.
I assume they all perform well at this. Browsing the web. Same as above.
Same as above. Editing videos. One of the primary uses I was interested in and one of the main reasons I bought the 16-inch MacBook Pro with dedicated GPU.
One of the primary uses I was interested in and one of the main reasons I bought the 16-inch MacBook Pro with dedicated GPU. Writing code. A text editor doesn’t require much but Xcode is getting pretty hefty these days.
A text editor doesn’t require much but Xcode is getting pretty hefty these days. Training machine learning models. I write a lot of machine learning code. I don’t expect to be able to train state-of-the-art models on a laptop but at least being able to tweak things/experiment would be nice.
Reflecting on the above, I devised three tests:
Video exporting with Final Cut Pro. I made a pretty hefty video earlier in the year (2020 Machine Learning Roadmap), it’s 2 hours, 37 minutes+ long. So I figured it’ll be cool to see how long each machine takes to export it. Machine Learning Model training with CreateML. Apple’s black-box machine learning model creation app. I don’t any large Xcode files handy but I decided to see how the CreateML app handles training machine learning models on the new silicon. Native TensorFlow code using tensorflow_macos . The test I was most excited for. Apple and TensorFlow published a blog post saying the new TensorFlow for macOS fork sped up model training dramatically on the new M1 chip. Are these claims true?
Why not test more extensively?
These are enough for me. I’ve got other sh*t to do.
Alright, time for the results. The best results for each experiment have been highlighted in bold.
Experiment 1: Final Cut Pro video export
For this one, all machines were given ample time to pre-render the raw footage. So when the export button got clicked, they all should’ve been relatively on the same page.
Experiment details:
Video length: 2 hours, 37 minutes+
2 hours, 37 minutes+ Export file size: 26.6GB (quoted), ~6.5GB (actual)
No surprise here, the 16-inch MacBook Pro exported in the fastest time. Most likely because of the dedicated 8GB GPU or 64GB of RAM.
However, it seems using the dedicated GPU came at the cost of battery life drain and fan speed (in the video you can hear the fans going off like a jet).
During the video export, the M1-powered MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13-inch remained completely silent (the MacBook Air had no choice, it doesn’t have a fan but the MacBook Pro 13-inch’s fan never turned on).
Experiment 2: CreateML machine learning model training
I’ve never actually used a machine learning model trained by CreateML. However, I decided to see how one of Apple’s custom apps would leverage their new silicon.
For this test, each MacBook was setup with the following CreateML settings: | https://towardsdatascience.com/apples-new-m1-chip-is-a-machine-learning-beast-70ca8bfa6203 | ['Daniel Bourke'] | 2020-12-24 23:09:23.067000+00:00 | ['Apple', 'M1', 'Machine Learning', 'Apple Silicon', 'Editors Pick'] |
Surviving & Thriving Through Your Doctor of Physical Therapy Program In 2020 | Stress
As I sit in my newly spotless and serene bedroom with a Christmas candle lit 2 days’ post-finals, it feels as though all the immense stress of the last 5 months was just a dream.
One of the applicants on the zoom open house asked my opinion on what the toughest part of the journey is.
My answer: Comprehensives
Comprehensives are our school’s version of finals. The way our program works is that each semester is hyper-focused on one area of PT practice. There is a fundamentals semester, orthopedics, cardiopulmonary, neuro, health policy, etc, with integrated clinical experiences and full-time clinical experiences threaded throughout.
At the end of the semester, you take a comprehensive practical and a comprehensive written for that semester, and a curricular comprehensive written exam and practical in the last year.
In my opinion, the hardest parts of PT school are these comprehensives. The comprehensive practicals aren’t actually much worse than any of the regular practicals we take on a regular basis in terms of content or structure. However, the mental toll is significantly higher.
In order to pass you need to score a 73% on the comprehensive practical and 73 on your written average, as well as in each course you take. The worse part of PT school is the anxiety as you wait to know your fate after taking a comprehensive practical hoping you didn’t have a safety fail.
Standing outside the practical room with our hearts beating out of our chest as we wait for any grader to call our name as we try to hide our nerves behind our masks and face shields.
We’re all just hoping that we don’t mess this up. We have invested more than $100,000 most of us don’t even have. We have seen some of our friends get left behind.
We have spent day and night with not much besides school on our minds. We have invested every ounce of ourselves into this and we are all just hoping it won’t all go to waste in the next 20 minutes for forgetting to sanitize our hands, or any other safety fails. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/surviving-thriving-throughyour-doctor-of-physical-therapy-program-in-2020-93873d29c1aa | [] | 2020-12-15 03:15:07.291000+00:00 | ['Stem Education', 'Higher Education', 'Student Life', 'STEM', 'Education'] |
Brett has a Full Buffet of Real Estate Services | Being an agent for 20 years I understand what my clients want. Having a Full Buffet of real estate services is what people need when making sometimes the most important decisions in their lives is crucial.
That is why every customer and client needs a real estate agent that has been around the block a few times and understands what needs to be done in almost every instance.
Getting a transaction completed can sometimes be difficult and hard without a seasoned real estate agent helping you through that situation.
Call me I’m Brett Real Estate Agent 216–703–5740 100’s and 100’s of transactions and counting | https://medium.com/@brettyoung-84661/brett-has-a-full-buffet-of-real-estate-services-bbbb8a602374 | ['Brett Young'] | 2020-11-26 11:39:46.635000+00:00 | ['Property', 'Housing', 'Success', 'Real Estate', 'Services'] |
Apple Is Working on CPUs With 32 High-Performance Cores: Report | by Joel Hruska
Once the M1 hit a few weeks back, it was clear that the diminutive processor was but a sign of things to come. Reports suggest that Apple will be upping the competitive ante in short order. The company plans to launch M1 follow-ups with up to 16 high-performance cores in 2021, targeting the MacBook Pro and iMac market. In 2022, it’ll launch machines with 32 high-performance cores in systems like the Mac Pro. While the 2021 CPU might still tap the FireStorm CPU core, it’s a good bet that the 2022 CPU will be at least one generation more advanced.
All of these rumors come from Bloomberg, which has a good record when it comes to Apple CPU coverage. The same report notes that Apple wants to bring laptop chips to market with 16-core and 32-core GPUs, and that the company is eyeing chips with 64 or 128 dedicated GPU cores. Each GPU manufacturer defines a “core” somewhat differently, so the fact that Apple is talking about a “128 core GPU” compared with, say, a 4096-core GPU from AMD or Nvidia, isn’t meaningful, but the rapid plan to scale up to higher levels of GPU performance is an effort to replace AMD GPU hardware the same way Intel will be pushed out of the CPU stack.
Threat Assessment
The near-term threat of the M1 is modest. Intel will lose some market share and Apple may snap some up. The vast majority of people who don’t-buy Macs today will continue to not-buy Macs in the immediate future.
The problem is not the M1. The twofold problem is that the M1 is merely the harbinger of future Apple CPUs built on more advanced architectures that will drive further up the product stack. The M1 is also a bellwether, demonstrating to other silicon design firms that it is possible to build an ARM chip that competes or outperforms an x86 CPU. If Apple’s M-class designs gain on Intel and AMD faster than Intel and AMD can pull away from them, Apple is going to gain ground. An estimated 2022 launch date is well in line with our own estimates of how long it could take Apple to challenge the top of the x86 product stack and/or exceed it.
As for the idea that the M1 could inspire other companies, consider the following hypothetical scenarios:
Scenario 1: Apple builds an ARM CPU just as fast as an x86 CPU, and is able to leverage its own ecosystem to deliver a modest improvement in performance per watt. The product compares excellently with x86 in low-power mobile, but fails to dislodge high-performance / high-power (35W TDP+) x86 products from market dominance.
Scenario 2: Apple builds an ARM CPU that’s dramatically faster than x86 CPU, both in terms of performance and power-per-watt. The gap is so large, previous non-Apple users begin switching to Apple. Qualcomm, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Samsung ally together to create new high-performance SoCs intended for Windows machines, to appeal to Windows users who do not want to use Apple software, but want access to at least some of this additional performance and power efficiency.
Whether we get Scenario #1 or Scenario #2 is going to depend on how large the gap is between future M x CPUs and future x86 CPUs, but if we get #2, other companies are going to start looking to get in on the action. x86 CPUs command enormous premiums compared with mobile cores, even if they ship in much lower volumes.
AMD’s success since 2017 is proof that the tactic of offering more cores with better scaling at higher effective performance can pull customers away from a large, entrenched, competitor. Microsoft has signaled that the firm is open to designing its own silicon if the need arises, and while it has no plans to enter the CPU market itself, that would change if the only options were “Design its own silicon” or “Lose the Windows market.” Microsoft may not prioritize Windows as it used to, but Windows is still an enormous part of its earnings and core business. Android has proven to be no threat to the desktop and laptop space, but Apple’s new Macs aren’t ever going to ship with Windows installed — and that’s a threat to Microsoft’s earnings and market share.
All of this comes back to performance, and the performance figures — even ones adjusted for differences in CPU resources utilization and SMT — do not particularly favor x86.
Running two threads through an x86 CPU core makes them far more competitive with M1 in raw performance, but performance-per-watt still favors Apple. Image by WCCFTech.
The fact that the M1 needs fewer threads to hit its performance figures — as discussed in this story from earlier today — is a strength of the CPU, not a weakness. AMD already ships a 32-core Threadripper, but taking full advantage of every core requires an application that can scale up to 64 threads. Running two threads through one core to boost performance, as Intel and AMD both do, is a clever way to increase efficiency, but it requires that an application spin off enough threads to perform useful work and load a chip effectively. At a certain point, you run out of room to keep adding cores. The 3990X doesn’t scale well against the 3970X outside of rendering applications because Windows 10’s support for >64T is kludgy.
None of this is to say that AMD and Intel cannot answer the M1 or Apple more generally. Since 2017, AMD has set records for how quickly it has scaled Zen’s performance. Intel’s Tiger Lake is a marked improvement over Ice Lake and currently leads in mobile. By 2022, Intel will either have committed to using third-party foundries for leading-edge nodes or closing the manufacturing gap between itself and TSMC.
What I suspect, however, is that a major pivot in CPU designs is coming. AMD and Intel both hold ARM architectural licenses, and both firms are certain to be conducting deep analyses of the M1 and exactly how it achieves its performance. AMD additionally has the K12 — a CPU I’ve been told on several occasions was shelved rather than explicitly canceled. While not much is known about the core, one of its features was the ability to decode both x86 and ARM instructions.
I expect that by 2022, both AMD and Intel will have their own new technology deployments explicitly intended to draw down x86 power consumption, improve efficiency, and boost performance per watt. The M1’s appearance will have lit a fire under such efforts at both companies. Timelines at the top of the market are also longer — if Apple launches a highly-competitive-to-superior 32-core part in 2022, it’d probably be 2023 or 2024 before said chip began bleeding off market share — but the stakes are also higher.
Intel’s entire justification for foundry self-ownership rests on the sales of high-end Xeon and Core i7 / i9 CPUs. The loss of these markets would be disastrous for the firm’s financials. AMD has much more experience operating on low margins and absolutely no interest in returning to the days where the question wasn’t “I wonder how much profit AMD made this quarter,” but “I wonder if AMD managed to lose less than $500M?”
Both companies will fight tooth and nail for their own market share. Both enjoy benefits like long-term guaranteed back-compatibility, familiarity, and customer loyalty. The sheer size of the x86 ecosystem is its own bulwark, and the final outcome of the x86 versus ARM fight, long-term, is uncertain.
But here’s one thing I am certain of: The M1 will be considered an inflection point in the history of CPUs, if only because it’s the first real challenge to x86 hegemony in decades. AMD and Intel will have to improve their own designs to meet that challenge, and even if they do so successfully, the products they build afterward will continue on a different evolutionary path than they might have taken otherwise.
Now Read: | https://medium.com/extremetech-access/apple-is-working-on-cpus-with-32-high-performance-cores-report-20218e8a2ae0 | [] | 2020-12-09 13:33:18.778000+00:00 | ['Semiconductors', 'Apple', 'Mac', 'Tech', 'Arm'] |
3 facts about time series forecasting that surprise experienced machine learning practitioners. | Time series forecasting is something of a dark horse in the field of data science: It is one of the most applied data science techniques in business, used extensively in finance, in supply chain management and in production and inventory planning, and it has a well established theoretical grounding in statistics and dynamic systems theory. Yet it retains something of an outsider status compared to more recent and popular machine learning topics such as image recognition and natural language processing, and it gets little or no treatment at all in introductory courses to data science and machine learning.
My original training is in neural networks and other machine learning methods, but I gravitated towards time series methods after my career led me to the role of demand forecasting specialist.
In recent weeks, as part of my team’s effort to expand beyond traditional time series forecasting capabilities and into a borader ML based approach to our business, I found myself having several discussions with experienced ML engineers, who were very good at ML in general, but didn’t have much experience with times series methods.
I realized from those discussions that there were several things specific to time series forecasting that the forecasting community takes for granted but are very surprising to other ML practioners and data scientists, especially when compared to the way standard ML problems are approached.
At the crux of this disconnect is that time series forecasting can be cast as a supervised learning problem, and hence the entire arsenal of ML methods — Regression, Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, XGBoost, etc…. — can be thrown at it. But at the same time, time series forecasting problems have several unique quirks and idiosyncrasies that set them apart from typical approaches to supervised learning problems, which require ML engineers to rethink their approaches to building and evaluating models.
Based on my recent discussions, here are the 3 biggest surprises ML practioners come across when dealing with forecasting challenges:
You need to retrain your model every time you want to generate a new prediction:
For most ML models, you train a model, test it, retrain it if necessary until you’ve gotten satisfactory results, and then evaluate it on a hold out data set. After you’re satisfied with the model’s perfromance, you then deploy it to production. Once in production, you score new data as it comes in. Eventually after a few months, you might want to update your model if a significant amount of new training data comes in. Model training is a one time activity, or done at most at periodic intervals to maintain the model’s performance to take int account new information.
For time series models, this is not the case. Instead we have to retrain our model everytime we want to generate a new forecast. To understand why this happens condsider the following example:
We will use ARIMA models to forecast Australian quarterly beer sales (the data set is taken from Hyndman’s Forecast package in R). First we will train a model on data from 1956 to 1970 and then test it on data from 1970 to 1973. Using a seasonal ARIMA(1,1,1)(0,1,1) model we can get a reasonably good forecast (MAPE =1.94% )(Fig. 1).
Next, we will use the same model to forecast sales all the way until 1993. You can see in Fig.2 that the forecast is no longer as good: The forecast continues to follow the same pattern that it had in 1970~1973, but the pattern of the actuals has changed — the constant trend that we can see from 1956 to 1974 starts to taper off after 1974, and the seasonal variations start to vary in amplitude as well. If you use the same ARIMA(1,1,1)(0,1,1) to forecast the sales for 1990 to 1993, you will get worse accuracy (MAPE = 44.92%).
Instead we would have to refit a second model that takes into account the new data and the changes in the pattern of the sales. This time, we will train an ARIMA(1,1,1)(1,1,2) model on the data from 1956 to 1990 and use it to forecast the values for 1990~1993— then we get a more reasonable MAPE value closer to that obtained in our first experiment (MAPE=5.22%).
To get an intuitive understanding of why this happens, first consider a classic ML task: Classifying cat images. The visual properties of cats are stable over time (unless we start looking at evolutionary time scales), so when we train a neural network to recognize pictures of cats, an implicit assumption is that the features that define cats are going to remain the same for the foreseeable future. We don’t expect cats to look different next week, or next year, or even ten years from now. Given enough data, the model we trained this week is good enough for the foreseeable future as well.
In statistical parlance, we say that the distribution of cat picture features is a stationary distribution, meaning that its properties such as its mean and standard deviation remain the same over time.
Now recall that a common pitfall in ML projects happens when the distribution of the development data set and the distribution of the production data set are not the same, causing the model to fail in production. Well for time series, it is almost always the case that the development data set and the production data set are not from the same distribution, because real world business time series (such as the Australian beer sales) data are not stationary, and the statistical properties of your distribution will keep shifting as new actuals come in.
The only way around this is to retrain your model every time you get new data. Note that this is not the same as continuous learning, where an already trained model is updated as new data comes in. You are actually retraining a new model from scratch everytime you want to generate a new forecast (although it would be an interesting research topic to see if continuous learning can be applied to time series forecasting).
From a practical point of view, this means that deploying forecasting algorithms to production is very different from deploying other ML models. You can’t just deploy a static model and score it, the concept of model serving doesn’t make sense for time series forecasting. Instead, you need to ensure that training and model selection can be done on the fly in production, and you have to insure that your entire training set can be stored and processed in production. Which brings me to our second point of the blog post:
Sometimes, you have to do away with train/test splits:
Let’s circle back to the basic approach to finding an ML model: usually you build a model using a train set and then evaluate it on a test set. This requires that you have enough data to set aside a test set and still have data to build a model with. But time series data is often very small compared to the data sets used in image processing or NLP. Two years of weekly sales data for a product at a given location is only 104 data points (barely enough to capture any seasonality). A Quarterly economic indicator data, taken over 10 years is only 40 data points. With data sets as small as this, we don’t have the luxury of setting aside 20% or 30% of the data for testing purposes. Nor is cross validation much help, since, depending on the algorithm you want to use, CV is at best tricky to set up for time series models, and at worst not applicable at all (Think about it: It doesn’t make sense to try to forecast values for February using training data from January and March — that would amount to leakage).
So instead, we resort to using information criteria such as the AIC, the AICc or the BIC. These are model selection metrics, which essentially try to approximate the test step analytically. The idea is that we don’t have an empirical way of determining the generalization error of a model, but we can estimate this error by using information theoretical considerations.
In practice, we train a predetermined set of models and then select the one that has the lowest AIC or BIC. Besides allowing for training models with limited data, using such criteria for model selection is very convenient when we want to automate forecast generation. For example in retail it is not unusual that we have to generate forecasts for millions of individual time series — a large retrailer will carry 20K ~ 30K products in several hundered locations, resulting in millions individual times series (one for each prodcut/location combination).
In a situation like this, each individual data set is small, but you have to deal with millions of data sets, so it is impossible for an analyst or an engineer to perform evalutions on a test set for each series, and automatic model selection becomes essential.
Many forecasting tools use this approach: Rob Hyndman’s popular Forecast package in R (1) uses the AIC for model selection in its auto.arima() and ets() functions, and many commercial demand forecasting applications, such as Oracle’s RDF, use the BIC for model selection. See Hastie and Tibshirani (2) for a introduction on the use of the AIC and the BIC for model selection.
The uncertainty of the forecast is just as important as, or even more so, than the forecast itself:
One more thing that distinguishes forecasting from other supervised learning tasks is that your forecasts are almost always going to be wrong. Somebody working with an image classification problem or an NLP problem can reasonably expect to eventually classify all new incoming examples accurately — given enough training data. All you have to do is make sure that your training data and the real world data are sampled from the same distribution. As mentioned in my first and second points, this is usually not the case in business forecasting applications, and your forecasts are almost always going to be wrong. What are the chances that you are going to predict exactly how many size M red Adidas shirts you are going to sell next week? So you always need not just a point forecast, but also a measure of the uncertainty of your forecast.
In demand forecasting and inventory applications, the uncertainty of your forecast is crucial for the applications that consume the forecast. The uncertainty of your forecast (represented by forecast intervals or by forecast quantiles) is what you will use to calculate your safety stock, that is the additional amount of inventory you want to carry to make sure you don’t lose any customers.
They take this idea a step further in Financial Time series modelling, where they actually have classes of models built explicitly for modeling the uncertainty of a time series, as opposed to the time series itself, such as ARCH and GARCH models.
Maridakis et al. (3) speak of subway uncertainty and coconut uncertainty. Coconut uncertainty, an allusion to a coconut unexpectedly falling on someone’s head while they’re on the beach, is the uncetainty of “unknown unknowns”, events that could never have been predicted no matter how hard we tried.
More generally, some time series exhibit ill-behaved uncertainty that is unpredictable. The distributions of forecast errors doesn’t follow any known distribution. Such information is useful for making judgmental decisions, but cannot be modeled and used for forecasting.
On the other hand, subway uncertainty (an allusion to the uncertainty of the how much time it will take to get from A to B using the subway) follows a known distribution such as the normal distribution or the Poisson distribution, and can be modeled and used to bound predictions within a certain range, even if exact values can never be predicted.
Those used to the very high accuracies achievable in other ML domains, and more importantly decision makers and business leaders caught up in the current machine learning hype, need to understand that often times the best we can achieve with a time series model is subway uncertainty. The persistent belief that if we could just find the right algorithm and the right data, a deep enough neural network or a rich enough unstructured data set, we will be able to achieve better forecasts is dangerously misleading. Sometimes the best we can get is manageable uncertainty — and we should build our data pipelines and decision support systems accordingly.
References:
(1) https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/forecast/forecast.pdf
(2) Hastie, Tibshirani, Friedman, Elements of Statistical Learning, Chapter 7 (pages 228–229)
(3) Makridakis, S., Hogarth, R.M. & Gaba, A. (2009) Forecasting and uncertainty in the economic and business world. International Journal of Forecasting | https://towardsdatascience.com/3-facts-about-time-series-forecasting-that-surprise-experienced-machine-learning-practitioners-69c18ee89387 | ['Skander Hannachi'] | 2019-12-12 05:33:44.319000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Timeseries', 'Forecasting', 'Statistics'] |
Happy Birthday, Mookie! | One question I am constantly asked is “During your many years with the team who is your all-time favorite Met?”
I really can’t give an answer because I have made so many good and close friends through my five decades I have been here.
However, one name who is for sure at the top of my list is William Hayward “Mookie” Wilson, who turns 64 today (Feb. 9).There is no one better.
Most Mets fans remember Mookie because of the his roller in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series which propelled the Mets to their improbable comeback.
For me, I have another memory. After the series was over, there was a racial incident on the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Campus. National League President Bart Giamatti asked the Red Sox and Mets to pick a player fly to Boston to speak to the students. Boston chose Marty Barrett and we picked Mookie.
Mookie was spectacular. He captivated the more than 3,000 students he spoke to in the auditorium. He talked about everyone getting along and that there was no benefit to settling disputes violent matter.
If he wanted to, Mookie could have gone into politics. He just has a great way to connect with people of all ages.
Mookie still works for the Mets as a Club Ambassador. He was a big hit at our recent FANFEST. Everyone in line for an autograph also wanted a photo and he didn’t disappoint. | https://metsinsider.mlblogs.com/happy-birthday-mookie-720ceb8a7bb3 | ['New York Mets'] | 2020-02-07 20:22:29.253000+00:00 | ['Mookie Wilson', 'New York Mets', 'Mets', 'Baseball', 'MLB'] |
Avoid a Mental Breakdown. Allow Yourself to Release Pent-Up Stress. | Avoid a Mental Breakdown. Allow Yourself to Release Pent-Up Stress.
Your mind will eventually release it one way or another.
Photo by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash
My impending mental breakdown drove me to regress back into my childhood.
When I was in college, I nearly had a mental breakdown. What saved me was a few trippy episodes of regressing to my childhood.
Before I realized, the giggles echoed. My ear to ear grin of a 7-year-old boy brightened the room. The problem? I was a 20-year-old man on the brink of mental breakdown.
Why would a 20-year-old man regress to a child-like state? I experienced an episode of age regression.
I was likely on the brink of a mental breakdown and didn’t even know it. | https://docjayauthor.medium.com/avoid-a-mental-breakdown-allow-yourself-to-release-pent-up-stress-2d28dd3fcbe9 | ['Doc Jay'] | 2020-10-10 23:40:42.889000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Mental Breakdown', 'Nervous Breakdown', 'Stress', 'Psychotic Breaks'] |
29. Aaron | Buffalo, New York. April 7th, 2020. Photo by Lucas Schleicher.
The sun is there before we
look away.
We know because the leaves are green
or because, in a bald branch, a cardinal
ricochets red
and shocks the tree to wave
in the crowded
chime-bright air.
Try hard not to think about the cardinal
or the chimes,
about before or after.
We have all heard voices through closed
doors or been surprised
by sudden views.
Times are places
and places can be anticipated.
Once, for example,
when walking through Paris,
a church opened off
an alleyway and inside
mirrors hung from
its ceiling.
The city was suspended in its domes,
spinning in the evening glow.
The water fountains
and Bouquinistes turned in place
to the flash of footfalls and gawkers,
and this unexpected parade
drew the quatrième around itself
like a mantle.
Saint Somewhere, phenomenal king
beside the island, nameable and loquacious.
I mean transpiring for the first time, without
a half way:
gravity, the stars, electromagnetism,
an enormous smile
and eyes that stare
into alien accidents at night.
Together, we draw the steps of the sleep
dance and each pivot is new.
There isn’t a pass between here and there
like there is in the mountains
or on the highway
between the valley
and the shore.
Instead, it is all at once
and history changes with you
for all of history.
Something like the sun,
there from eternity.
I open my eyes to it and call
each opening a new day,
but this is wrong.
It is my waking that is born each time.
Lightning, lighting, lightening,
arrived by revelation. | https://medium.com/@lucasschleicher/29-aaron-a62b65db3985 | ['Lucas Schleicher'] | 2020-12-27 17:00:04.807000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Creative Writing', 'Creative', 'Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium'] |
How to Eject* from an SR-71 at 78,800 Feet | A Beautiful Day in Almost-Space
It’s 25 January 1966: a hot new single by that English band The Beatles is lighting up the radio waves.
Driving through the temperate California air, palm trees flashing by in the morning’s magenta haze, Bill must have heard “Day Tripper” on the radio — it defies you to not sing along. Perhaps Bill voiced its ironic prophecy, as he headed to Edwards AFB for yet another stratospheric flight:
A one-way ticket?
…Yeah.
Bill Weaver, palling around with a supersonic jet. Seen here with his SR-71 prior to the 1966 crash: the early pressure suits were silver. [Lockheed-Martin]
By 1966, Lockheed engineers have largely perfected the SR-71 airframe. Today, Bill and Lockheed technical specialist Jim Zwayer will be testing ways to improve high-Mach cruise performance, flying a plane with an off-balance center of gravity. Now, we’d just run a computer simulation. But back then, the best way to find out how your airplane worked was often by flying it.
Today, the flight engineers have loaded Dutch with a thumb on the scale, slightly weighing down her tail. Bill’s mission is, essentially, to take it for a spin and tell them how it goes.
It’s nearing noon by the time Jim starts “reading the prayer” — the preflight checklist — in the backseat of their SR-71, mission callsign DUTCH 54. Strapped into the pilot’s seat, Bill moves through this responsorial psalm with practiced ease: every system is go. With a final amen, the plane shoots skyward, scaling the Mojave air.
As Dutch rises through her initial ascent, Bill notices her off-kilter balance requires excessive trim to counteract. It’s like he’s driving a car with a crooked alignment: annoying, but probably fine. He deftly dials in the settings required to level the plane. Something to tell the wonks, when he lands.
With precision earned only through practice, Bill pulls back on his stick, rising through the sparse California clouds to stratospheric heights. The altimeter winds up, calculating nose-bleeding altitude silently: 76,000… 77,000… 78,000 feet.
He levels off, high above the sky. From this lofty perch, Bill could see the curve of the earth before him, the inky black of space above. Without his suit, he’d be long dead. The stratosphere is not kind.
Gently, Bill banks his aircraft to the right. Flying at more than 2,400 mph, “gently” is the only way a smart pilot does anything. The bank will inscribe a lazy radius of nearly 100 miles.
At least, it would have.
The very same SR-71 Bill was flying when things fell apart, tail number 61–7952. On this flight, she is substantially better behaved. Like its distant cousin the crow, the Blackbird is smart enough to catch on when its picture is being taken. [Lockheed-Martin | Source]
In a thunderclap instant — all calamity needs — Dutch’s right engine suddenly malfunctions. It shuts off with an audible rending of garments, a clamorous stroke that every SR-71 pilot comes to dread. Bill knows what’s happened immediately: a supersonic unstart.
“Explosive banging noises” are swiftly followed by an “instantaneous loss of engine thrust.” The engine will not return — Bill will not even have time to try. If you’ve ever seen a runner trip, you can guess what happens next.
Traveling at Mach 3.18, Dutch stumbles over her lost engine, as useless as a shattered knee. The chaotic aerodynamics assaulting the plane’s altered center of gravity transform Bill’s commanded bank into an uncommanded rolling climb.
Bill throws his stick forward and to the left, hands folded around the yoke in silent prayer, a plea to belay this murderous climb. Dutch makes no response: I hope some god is listening.
Bill’s now at the mercy of the “violent yawing of the aircraft — like being in a train wreck.”
Inside, it’s like riding a carousel at impossible speed. Bill’s body is crushed against his seat by a giant’s implacable hand, the high acceleration’s g-forces locking him into his chair. The force of Dutch’s rolling climb is overwhelming: it drains the blood from Bill’s brain. His heart can only push so hard. The g-force pushes harder.
Only seconds have passed, but Bill has barely a tablespoon of sand left in his Hourglass of Useful Consciousness. He has no idea.
If his heart could push hard enough, it would be pounding the alarm in his ears.
An Air Force pilots fights to maintain consciousness — and fails — under a centrifuge-simulated acceleration of nine gs. Bill will ultimately experience several times this.
A pilot never wants to abandon their plane. It means your flight record is forever uneven, with one more takeoff than landing. But with Dutch completely out of control, Bill has no reason to stay. Egress is now essential.
Following emergency procedure, Bill cracks on the inter-cockpit speakerphone and briefs Jim on his planned descent to a more ejection-friendly altitude. You can eject in the stratosphere, but it won’t be nearly as fun.
Or rather, that’s what Bill thought he did. His garbled attempt at speech could only be transcribed as [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
It’s the building g-force, that stops him: his hourglass runs short. In the background, a thousand titanium rivets keen. Bill’s aircraft is ripping apart at the seams.
And that’s the final buzzer, folks!
The last grain of sand has slipped the glass. A thousand stage lights sighing off, Bill’s consciousness falls to black. The slamming of a coffin lid could not have been more final.
Today, we call this goodnight-nurse moment g-LOC, but the older name is more descriptive: “fainting in the air.” Bill is slumped against his harness, a television tuned to a dead channel.
Dutch, untethered, corkscrews higher into the air. | https://medium.com/@alexfoxrudinski/how-to-eject-from-an-sr-71-at-78-800-feet-e6449ec0f057 | ['Alex Fox Rudinski'] | 2021-04-18 17:39:27.353000+00:00 | ['Narrative', 'Essay', 'History', 'Nonfiction', 'Aviation'] |
Congenital Lyme disease | Opening remarks at the NIH/NICHD
Lyme disease can impact your developing baby
As Chairman of the Board of Mothers Against Lyme—an advocacy group concerned with the impact of Lyme disease, and it’s co-infections, on pregnancy— I met with the NIH and NICHD on December 7, 2020. Joined by several board members, my job was to set up their personal testimonies in regard to the terrible impact of Lyme disease on their lives, and the lives of their children. My words are applicable to other diseases. Perhaps they can be of use to some of you in your own advocacy. www.MothersAgainstLyme.org
ISABEL ROSE REMARKS
One incorrect statement from an influential source can ruin lives.
The Infectious Diseases Society of America recently published such a statement.
“To date,” they claim in their newest guidelines, “Lyme disease in pregnancy has not been found to result in congenital infection or syndrome of abnormalities, and no additional treatment or monitoring of the mother or infant is recommended beyond the standard of care.”
I repeat: one incorrect statement from an influential source can ruin lives. In fact, that one sentence left me feeling temporarily paralyzed. I even wondered if Mothers Against Lyme should continue our work, such was the degree of my personal morale collapse.
But as my emotion mellowed, I realized the wonderful opportunity we were given: the opportunity to share some data the IDSA may have missed.
So, I’m here; here as a representative.
Here because I know, like many women, I will never forget the moment at my 36-week sonogram when the technician said, “There’s a problem.”
I’m here because, like many women, I will never forget the day I heard, “There are many early interventions for children with developmental delays.”
I’m here because I will never forget the sound of my four-year-old daughter’s screams as a nurse poked her with a fresh I.V so my little one could get the antibiotics she needed for the Lyme disease our pediatrician swore would be completely cured after two weeks; a daughter who, at 19, is still struggling with chronic Lyme disease and it’s longterm consequences.
I’m here because I never saw a bullseye rash: not on myself; not on either of my children.
And I’m here because so many people — including doctors, and mothers, and women who are hoping to become mothers — still incorrectly think that if their Lyme test, or their child’s Lyme test, comes back negative, they don’t have Lyme.
I’m here because, until we get a reliable Lyme diagnostic, I want every OB to know what Lyme symptoms look like, so they can offer appropriate and available treatment to their patients who may be at risk, not just of passing their infections on to their offspring in utero, like I did, but at risk of having those infections damage their developing child in utero, like my infections did.
And I am here because, after suffering countless misdiagnosed physical and neurological assaults for 48 years, it was not until four years ago that I was finally properly diagnosed, and then successfully treated, for Lyme disease, as were both of my children shortly thereafter, and my 78-year-old mother — a woman who has spent much of her life suffering from what her doctors call Rheumatoid Arthritis but which I now call Lyme.
I know that correlation does not equal causation. But I also know that research is inspired by stories from the trenches, where I am, and where so many other women are, our sleeves rolled up, our hands dirty, our nails shredded or bitten to stumps. Maybe hearing some of our abbreviated stories will help convince you that further studies are critically needed. | https://medium.com/@isabelroseadvocate/congenital-lyme-disease-19e5e6a0319d | ['Isabel Rose'] | 2020-12-11 23:39:29.360000+00:00 | ['Congenital Disease', 'Maternal Health', 'Advocacy', 'Lyme Disease', 'Pregnancy'] |
3 Steps to Acing the Hashicorp Terraform Associate Exam | About The Exam
The terraform associate is the foundational level certification that evaluates your understanding of terraform and the features of Terraform Cloud & Terraform Enterprise.
The exam is based on a Pass/Fail, meaning you have to get a certain number of questions right to pass (I’d guess around 70–75%)
The exam costs $70 which is a great price compared to other exams out there
You will receive your score via email as soon as you complete the exam
There are around 60 questions and you are given 1 hour to complete the exam
The certification is valid for 2 years
This is an online proctored exam so be sure to have your legal documents ready as the proctor will want to check them before the exam
If you fail you can retake the exam after 2 weeks
My experience with the exam: I have some previous exam experience as I have taken the AWS Solutions Architect Exam. For the terraform exam I studied for about 3 weeks. When it came time to taking the test there was a waitlist for the proctors, it took about 30 minutes to connect and get started with the exam. So don't expect to take the exam at your scheduled time. As for the exam itself I felt that the questions were straight to the point and I didn’t feel like they were trying to trick me. Shortly after completing the exam I was emailed my results(Pass!!)
Exam Prep Steps
The 3 steps below are what I used to pass the exam. As I mentioned earlier, my preparation took me 3 weeks. Everyone study's at their own pace so be sure to take your time to understand the concepts. There is not one set way to pass this exam, I have shared the process that I used in hopes that you may benefit as well.
You should also refer to the Terraform Documentation as it will be your best friend when it comes to writing terraform code and studying for the exam.
Terraform Documentation: https://www.terraform.io/docs/index.html
1. Complete this Udemy Course
The first step I would recommend is to complete the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate 2020 Practice Exam. This course is the main resource I used to study. Zeal does a great job explaining the concepts thoroughly in a way that anyone can understand. There is a section dedicated to exam preparation in which Zeal covers everything you’ll need to know at a high level. There is also a practice test at the end.
Price: $10–12
Course Length: 10 hours
To get the most out of his course I recommend that you follow along with his practical labs and replicate them in your own environments.
2. Practice your skills with a Project
The second step is to go through with a practice project, the best way to learn is with hands on experience. Below I have attached a sample project that I recommend you go through.
credit to user @aiya#9965 from the AWS discord server
This is a great project that will give you some practical experience with terraform and help you solidify what you learned from the course. This project took me a week and I learned a wealth of info and best practices. After going through this project you will be well prepared and ready to move on to the practice exams.
Finished Project: https://github.com/nicohouillon/aws_test_approach_1
3. Go through Practice Exams
Finally I highly recommend taking practice exams as they will prepare you well for the exam.
Link: https://www.udemy.com/course/hashicorp-certified-terraform-associate-2020-practice-exam/
Price: $10
The questions are similar to what will be given on the exam, I recommend taking both exams until you get a 90% or above. The score you get on the practice exams is indictive of what you’ll get on the real exams, so spend time taking practice tests. | https://medium.com/@zaidfakhruddin2/3-steps-to-acing-the-hashicorp-terraform-associate-exam-927e4695e2bf | ['Zaid Fakhruddin'] | 2020-12-02 05:44:13.019000+00:00 | ['Iac', 'Certification', 'DevOps', 'Cloud', 'Terraform'] |
K-means clustering: find my tribe! | What is K-means clustering?
Find hidden information
At its core K-means clustering is an algorithm that tries to categorize sample data according to certain rules. If our sample data are vectors of real numbers, the simplest criteria is the distance between the data.
Suppose I have 4 sample data points in the two dimensional space:
(0, 0), (0, 1), (0, 3), (0, 4)
Data points: (0, 0), (0, 1), (0, 3), (0, 4) (Image by Author)
and suppose I know that I have two groups, how do I find the center of the two groups and the member data points of each group?
First step is to pick two starting points for each of the groups. In this example, it’s quite easy to simply eyeball and, say, pick (0, 0) as starting point for the first group and (0, 3) as starting point for the second group.
But let’s not do that, since that would make this example too easy.
Suppose I actually picked (0, 0) and (0, 1) as starting points, (0, 0) represents group 0, (0, 1) represents group 1. Next step is to assign the four data points to each of the two groups. We do this by calculating the distance of the data points to each of the groups and assign each data point to the one that’s closest.
Starting with data point (0, 0), its closest point is obviously (0, 0), with distance 0, so data point (0, 0) is assigned to group 0. Moving on to the second data point, (0, 1), it’s closer to group 1, so assign it to group 1. After going through every data point, we have:
group 0:
data points = (0, 0)
group 1:
data points = (0, 1), (0, 3), (0, 4)
Now that we have assigned data points to each group, the mean of each group needs to be updated. The mean of group 0 remains unchanged at (0, 0), but the mean of group 1 is now:
mean of group 1 = [(0, 1) + (0, 3) + (0, 4)] / 3 = (0, 2.333...)
And we have our new groups:
group 0:
mean = (0, 0)
group 1:
mean = (0, 2.333...)
But now that we have updated the group means, the data points for each group needs to be reassigned to make sure they are still closest to their group mean:
(0, 0): closest to (0, 0)
(0, 1): closest to (0, 0)!!
(0, 3): closest to (0, 2.333...)
(0, 4): closest to (0, 2.333...)
Notice now that point (0, 1) is no longer closest to the mean of group 1, so it needs to be reassigned to group 0:
group 0:
data points = (0, 0), (0, 1)
group 1:
data points = (0, 3), (0, 4)
Alternating between assigning data points to groups and updating group means, we eventually reach a stable state where no data point switch groups anymore, and that is our final K-mean clusters:
group 0:
mean = (0, 0.5)
data points = (0, 0), (0, 1)
group 1:
mean = (0, 3.5)
data points = (0, 3), (0, 4) | https://towardsdatascience.com/k-means-clustering-find-my-tribe-61460d3bc952 | ['Shuo Wang'] | 2021-09-13 13:27:58.752000+00:00 | ['K Means', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Algorithms', 'Machine Learning'] |
How to Find the Best Publications for Your Writing on Medium | You should really think about submitting more of your work to publications.
As I talked about recently, getting your work featured in other publications can bring your work new readers, more views, additional chances of diversifying, and ways to bring new success to older stories.
I think it’s super fun every day on Medium to not only think about what I’m going to write next but also what publications I plan to submit my work to!
I’m at a point where I have some kind of publication I can submit almost everything I write. But this didn’t happen overnight. When I first started submitting my work to places, I didn’t really know where to get started, and I wasn’t sure if anyone would ever accept my writing!
So how do you start the search process? What should you look for? | https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/how-to-find-the-best-publications-for-your-writing-on-medium-8c0858eaa5f5 | ['Brian Rowe'] | 2020-09-02 12:01:03.227000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Medium', 'Publication', 'Writing'] |
Yes, The #MeToo Movement Received A Backlash | November was my birthday month.
I forgot that my birthday was available to the public in my LinkedIn profile, and I only realized this, well… on my birthday.
Greetings poured in from people I didn’t know. Of course, I was grateful for the time they spent to click on the button that sends an instant greeting. Such heartfelt greetings.
Gratitude is important, and so is respect.
Sometimes, people often mistake kindness for something else. I guess a corrupted mind has something to do with it. But we never know.
Being on the professional platform was necessary for me to be noticed by recruiters. Getting a job was a priority, and it still is up to this moment.
Maybe I’m naïve, but I never expected sustaining a conversation was seen as a signal to steer the conversation to the direction I never planned to go.
I responded because I’m not that cold. But I realized maybe I have to learn how to be cold.
What should I have done then? I’m a bag of emotions.
Two conversations started with a birthday greeting. To be honest, I never knew they were on my contact list until they sent me a greeting.
What I knew was I accepted anyone who sent a request for the sake of expanding my network. I mean, what could go wrong?
To find out about their intentions wasn’t what I expected from a professional network. It’s LinkedIn. Not Facebook, and most importantly, not Tinder.
Ladies, if you’re reading this, when a dude (not a gentleman at all) says ¨Dear¨ within three minutes into the conversation, then know that the title under his name is irrelevant. Perhaps you already know this.
But in my case, I had good intentions and I believe people have good intentions too.
It’s pathetic how these people are desperate to even use a professional network to stir up a conversation they think would lead to the bedroom.
They had the guts to attempt unwanted conversations at an unusual time where a pandemic is happening, and that makes me loathe them even more.
I’m alarmed, disappointed, and disgusted to know that no matter what title appears under a person’s name, they become monsters the moment they make unwanted advances. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/metoo-received-a-backlash-558be0028910 | [] | 2020-12-10 16:46:22.949000+00:00 | ['Metoo', 'Life', 'Sexual Harassment', 'Feminism', 'Women'] |
Dev Tools to the Rescue — Part 2. This article reviews some of the best… | In my previous article Dev Tools to the Rescue — Part 1, we looked at some of the best developer tools for software development, project management, continuous delivery/integrity, designing, testing, etc.
In this article, we’ll continue with tools that are helpful for purposes like monitoring, analysis, cloud development, security, etc.
Confluence is a team collaboration application that allows teams to work together and share information and updates effectively. It may be seen as a wiki or knowledge base that organizes and stores all of the different projects’ information assets.
Features
Provides real-time editing and publishing updates that highlight the changes, tracked with version history.
Allows page and in-line and likes, comments, and visual elements such as emojis, images, and GIFs.
Gives alerts when a user is assigned a task or tagged that helps everyone to stay in the loop.
Provides full-text searching of all content, including comments, pages, and space descriptions.
Pages or spaces can be imported from plain text files, or exported to HTML or PDF.
Pros
Track and share project status easily.
Automatic daily backup feature.
Collaborative editing options.
Updates on the latest documentation.
Cons
Need a license, but it has a free trial.
Need to refresh the page to see edits made by other users.
Postman is a platform that helps users in interacting with APIs. It provides a friendly user interface for constructing and sending requests and reading responses. It works on the backend and helps developers to test their APIS and make sure they are working as intended. It is seen by the industry as one of the best tools for web developers for API testing purposes.
Features
Scalable API testing tool.
Streamlines the process of API testing.
You can build API before deploying code which helps in releasing reliable services.
It helps in the exploration of APIs by sending different kinds of data and observing their response.
Creates collections for API calls.
Pros
Improves the quality and testing time of the project.
It helps in detecting bugs early in the development stage that might cause much more damage to the system later.
Reduces production time by allowing the front-end and back-end teams to work in parallel by eliminating dependencies between them.
Automates manual tests and integrates them into the CI/CD pipeline.
Cons
The number of requests is limited in the enterprise version.
It is a difficult task to move a folder from one collection to another.
Keka is a Human Resource Management Software(HRMS) that solves daily basis issues in companies such as attendance management, automated payroll processing, and talent management.
Features
Employee Database.
Performance Management.
Employee Profiles.
Payroll Management.
Recruitment Management.
Time & Attendance Management.
Compensation Management.
Self-Service Portal.
Timesheets.
Leave Management.
Employee Finances.
Loans and Bonuses.
Pros
Streamlines the workflow and enables your team to turn tedious tasks into more simple ones.
Comes with a complete and customizable payroll system.
Helps HR to find the right talent through modern applicant tracking systems.
Provides functionalities such as continuous feedback, reviews, and goal management.
Cons
Difficult navigation through the payroll information.
Customer service is not satisfactory
Rollbar helps the developers to identify, prioritize, and resolve code errors and hence deploy better software.
Features
Provides the feature of Deployment integrations which makes it easier to know which deployment introduced the bug.
Debugging.
Proactive customer support that notifies you of any unnoticeable errors.
Pros
Easy setup.
Very advanced querying capabilities.
The telemetry feature is quite powerful.
Integration with git and slack with a native experience.
Cons
Limited options for filtering slack notifications.
Automatic grouping doesn’t work satisfactorily well.
Datadog is a monitoring platform for cloud-based applications. It brings together data from various sources such as databases, containers, servers, and third-party services to make your stack entirely observable. These features help DevOps teams avoid downtime, quickly resolve performance issues, and ensure customers are getting the best user experience.
Features
Provides visibility on application performance for enterprises.
It helps users in creating effective strategies for improving their services, tools, and apps.
Provides team collaboration tools.
Provides alert notifications.
Pros
It allows seamless workflow irrespective of the platform, language, and geographical positions by pre-integrating with third-party apps.
Can trace requests automatically across several libraries and frameworks.
It provides an easy-to-use search tool.
Offers an integrated view of the programs and services.
Cons
Limited analytics and reports.
A good amount of work is needed upfront to configure and install across your entire software or application stack.
Steep learning curve.c
Mixpanel is user-behavior-centric and analytic for both mobile and web users. It offers analytics and insights on user interaction with online products. Mixpanel is an event-based tracking tool that helps in increasing user engagement and conversions.
Features
Users’ website actions are focused and analyzed.
A simple and easy-to-use user interface that makes it easy to understand and analyze how people engage with your app.
Pros
Robust event-based analytics.
It has flexible plans that work for smaller startups as well.
Cons
Customer support responds slowly.
A steep learning curve.
The platform security is not that great and needs some work.
It cannot integrate with other data sources that well.
AWS is a cloud-computing platform that provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings. It offers a free tier usage with limited resources and features for customers to try AWS for free.
Features
Host dynamic websites on the cloud.
Computing power, database storage, content delivery.
Comprehensive security capabilities.
Multiple languages are supported.
Pros
Excellent tools for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Good online tutorials and documentation.
Highly reliable and fault-tolerant.
Very scalable with a few clicks upgrade and downgrade.
Cons
Due to the large number of services offered, it can be confusing for beginners.
It can create a huge pile of bills if not managed and monitored properly.
The initial setup is time-consuming.
FortiClient is an important part of Fortinet Security Fabric. It connects endpoints with Security Fabric and delivers endpoint compliance control, visibility, automation, and vulnerability management.
Features
It can be used as a VPN Client, AV client, and host of vulnerability scanners.
Integrated firewall, VPN, and vulnerability detection.
Identify and remediate vulnerable or compromised hosts across your attack surface.
Pros
Real-time protection against malicious websites and malware.
It is easy to set up on Windows 10.
Provides secure remote access with built-in VPN, single-sign-on, and two-factor authentication for added security.
Cons
It works on Windows and Mac, but there’s no Linux version.
No alerts show up when issues are detected.
No automatic update feature.
Localise.biz (aka Loco) is an online translation management service.
Features
Allows managing statuses for assets.
Offers both free and paid subscriptions according to the needs and the size of the project.
Import and export translations in a variety of different file formats.
Tools for tracking progress and assigning tasks to other team members.
Built-in WordPress translation editor.
Allows for direct creation of language translation files into your theme or plugin.
Pros
Filtering translations based on their status simplifies the work.
The dashboard offers a convenient user interface for translating texts.
Offers localization tools for extracting strings and generating templates.
Cons
You’ll have to upgrade to the paid version if you want better functionalities.
Conclusion
This brings to an end of our two-blogs series best developer tools out there. The development process has changed extensively and will continue to do so at a rapid pace. The tools we discussed in this series help developers to keep their focus on the major tasks like logic building etc. and let these tools help in the other processes of development which not to mention are equally important for the success of software. | https://levelup.gitconnected.com/dev-tools-to-the-rescue-part-2-c1b4bc586f9d | ['Mansi Babbar'] | 2021-06-20 17:52:48.689000+00:00 | ['Software Management Tools', 'Developer Tools', 'Project Management Tool', 'Monitoring Tools', 'Cloud Development'] |
A Confusing Time | A lot of things can happen in 4 years. I used to be taken by the idea of becoming a field worker where you could be months in the middle of nowhere, then at the end of the day you took that million money and spend it as you like. That was totally me when people asked me what department in university i wanted to choose, and proudly i said “I want to work in mining industry”. I wanted to be part of that industry because i saw what my cousin do, and how much money he made. I studied diligently to achieve that in a particular university that famous for its engineering department.
I got in, not in the main mining industry, but as one of the support department in mining industry. Actually my department can also work in other area that related to data and how to visualize it. Me, a stupid one who felt too proud forget that although it was hard to got into this university, it was totally harder to survive. I played all day in my first semester, and in the end i got a quiet bad score for all of my subject. My parents, a kind of old-school parents, scolded me nonstop while i got home and it continued during the holiday.
The next semester i learnt diligently to get a better mark, and i continuous did that until my last semester. But, during this time i realized i don’t want to work in mining industry. I joined the radio club cause i LOVE to talk. I just love to talk too much until i learn to listen. Then, i learnt designing because i love to learn new things. Then i learnt photography and videography because i interested. And after all of the experience, i can’t say to my parents that i don’t want to work in this industry.
Yup, being the first child in an Asian Family is quiet hard. My parents is becoming too proud as i graduated from that university. Keep pushing me to work in mining industry so i can help them to earn money, while i am still thinking what i want to be. I feel confused right now as i graduated. I don’t know what i want, but i can’t keep thinking without doing anything.
In my free time (like i have a busy one *EVIL LAUGH*), i keep reading Quora on how every person lived in their 20s like me. But in the end, those answer works because that people did it in their on way. Because they know themselves. Probably that’s what i need to know. What kind of person that I want to be. Probably as I can answer that question, I know where will i go. | https://medium.com/@realitayessy/a-confusing-time-1a9e26988e7a | ['Yessy Marie Realita'] | 2019-02-15 14:16:58.366000+00:00 | ['First Post', 'Storyofmylife', 'Life Lessons', 'Confused', 'Mining'] |
Building A System ‘Not’ Around Exceptions? | Image Credit: Pixabay.com
Those were the pre-corona days and pre-google-maps days :-) I lived in Australia then. I had started to use a dedicated GPS navigator device while driving. Eagerly waiting for the lady in the GPS to tell the directions, irritated if she doesn’t speak, I got used to it all. I understood that she would start talking only when there is an exception, i.e. when I am going off the direction. Or just before I need to make any change while driving. It means that, on the desired path, the lesser the exceptions the better. In other words, the more I am on the main path, the less get to hear from the GPS lady for exceptions!
The reason to bring this up here in this post is to talk about the business analyst’s role as a navigator. How good we are as navigators? In helping the conversations and collaborations? In writing the specs? Business analysts ensure that the system is being on the desired path and not on the exception path! I am sure we can argue that we want to build exception paths, errors, and scenarios that break the system. It is true. If we observe everyday linguistic patterns, there is a natural human tendency to talk about what we do ‘not’ want. Whereas what we ‘want’ is something that needs to succinctly be delved into. Is this a clever play of words? No. It is about utilizing 80/20 rule in thinking through what process or system you want to build. 80% on where you want to do and 20% on what exception and roundabout scenarios you can expect of. Let’s take a few simple examples as we relate this to a business analyst’s role.
Example 1: Alternate paths in a use case becoming main paths
As we know, each use case has a specific goal associated with it, for a given user or actor. To achieve that goal, a business analyst initiates the detailing of that use case. (Requirements Analysis and Design knowledge area from BABOK®). Use case specification has the main path, alternate paths, and exception paths. If we are on the right side of elicitation and writing specs, we would focus on the main path more. It is imperative that we would also discuss alternate and exception paths as well with the stakeholders and write those in the specs.
Example 2: User stories have no ‘so that’ clause in it
If a user story is missing out on a concrete “so that” clause, it means we need to understand the exact benefit or value of it. Why exactly this feature needed? It sounds trivial to write or not write this clause. Especially when we are running out of time and there is deadline pressure. Now coming back to the original storyline! If and only if there is a user benefit of a given user story, it means the story has value. Else it is either a lesser priority and we can put that story later in the backlog until it is on the ‘happy path’.
Example 3: Too many error conditions in a user interface
This one is interesting too. It requires system designing efforts to anticipate what errors and alerts a user interface could throw or show. At the same time, the end-users do not like to be involved in detecting and find a remedy to the problems. They would like to see errors to be prevented in the first place. That again means the requirements should be written such that those state how a system or a user interface eliminates the errors or alerts through intuitive and user-friendly steps and design.
The above-mentioned examples are classically observed during writing functional or detailed requirements. Coming back to the GPS navigator. This topic has been on my mind for a long time. Being an NLP practitioner, I felt the need to bring it up especially in the context of the business analyst’s role. The key is to keep the main thing the main thing. Happy driving!
Thoughts?
Author Info
Swati Pitre, CBAP®, is Sr. Business Analyst with 18+ years of industry experience across various domains and geographies. Her specialties include Product Development, BPM, Process Improvement Consultanting, Business Analysis/CBAP®/ CCBA®/ ECBA® Training.
Note: This article is republished from earlier share at LinkedIn Pulse https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-system-around-exceptions-swati-pitre-cbap-/?trackingId=hb77hGiWp4NivDsEV3sbjQ%3D%3D | https://medium.com/@swatipitre/building-a-system-not-around-exceptions-f10f8407a59e | ['Swati Pitre'] | 2020-12-23 04:28:56.359000+00:00 | ['Cbap', 'Mentoring', 'Business Analysis', 'Training', 'Business Analyst'] |
4 Ways to Love, Your Enemy | 4. Find common ground
Heck, a few of my best friends to date, are my old enemies. After forgiving them, sympathizing with them, and understanding them, we found out we actually had a lot in common.
Finding common ground allows you to see past the hate and anger and look at that individual as a human, and possibly, one you actually love after all the debris is cleared out.
Make new friends with old enemies. Once all the grunt work I stated above is completed, then there is room for growth — love.
Endgame
Sure, there are bad people out there; not every enemy is meant to be loved. However, there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from getting the peace of mind for yourself, and from possibly benefiting them as well.
This world is consumed with hate; we need more love. And what better way is there to show appreciation than bestowing it upon an enemy?
In order to love ourselves honestly, and others, we have to understand and accept the nature of humanity. When people are scared, hurt, or sad, they attack.
Rid yourself of the hate and anger and spread the love.
I haven’t been happier since I have let go of all my hate. Some instances, didn’t pan out. My enemies brushed my approach off, and that’s OK. As long as you find it within yourself to heal, accept, and forgive them, you can show the maximum amount of love, by being an example. | https://meghansmadness.medium.com/4-ways-to-love-your-enemy-333356d7302c | ['Meghan Gause'] | 2020-07-22 12:42:58.168000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Life', 'Love', 'Forgiveness'] |
Am I a High Performer at my job | Before we jump into the business to know if you’re or not a high performer.
Let us define what is a High Performer versus high potential.
A high potential is a person that has characteristics (we’ll discuss these later).
To be successful in different roles of bigger size, wider scope or more complexity.
In the upcoming 3 to 5 years.
Do not discourage yourself if your direct manager thinks differently.
Since many times managers see only the defects of the person.
Instead of the potential of the person.
Or tend to judge the subalterns based on their own limitations.
Believe me, it happened to me. It will feel disappointing but never quit.
Remember, “it’s very hard to beat someone that never quits”.
Not sure who said that, but it’s very inspiring.
Myth Busters
Before we jump into whether you’re not a high performer, that really doesn’t matter much.
You could become one if you manage to master habits that can help you.
If you want to know how to create habits, please follow this link.
Or send me an email if you want to ask any questions about this or other topics.
Down to business, if you’re or you want to become a high performer.
Regardless if you want to succeed in your current job role.
Or if you want to have you want to start your own business.
There are some interesting topics that will affect your perception of high performers.
These are, in particular order:
High potentials are General Managers
This is obviously not true.
They can be in any area and actually the more areas they can be found the better for them.
A person that has general ideas of how an area works is better suited to evolve.
In the corporate ladder you don’t need specialists, you need generalists.
They are the best
They’re indeed exceptional, but not necessarily the best.
And the best for what? A mentor is the best example.
High performers most likely won’t be mentors.
As teaching is a treat that comes from deep learning and passion to teach.
So being the best in teaching, doesn’t make you a high performer.
But you could be one as well.
The highest performers are High Potentials
A high potential is a person that can be ready for the next step or position.
Someone that has the discerning to make proper decisions in difficult situations.
About 33% or 1 in 3 high performers will be a high potential.
Another way to look at this, is that 66% of the high potentials are not high performers.
As you can see there, you can be a person that delivers very efficiently within the organization.
But not necessarily groom to be in a higher position.
Sometimes because you don’t want that yourself.
You don’t want to handle people but are happy just by delivering the best just by yourself.
And many high potential positions will require handling people and people interaction.
Then we have ourselves a high performer that doesn’t want to be a high potential.
Fitting the description.
I want all team to be High Potential
Incorrectly everywhere you see it.
You don’t want to have a team of superheroes with all Iron Man personalities.
Or all Captain America trying to lead everyone else.
That is why it makes sense to balance a team.
Some are followers and perform just as good as high potentials.
Diversity is a fundamental part of any team.
You need people that can specialize in their areas.
And some few that can drive and maintain the stamina of the team like high performers.
Also need natural leaders like High potentials to show us the way.
And do not lose focus of the objective.
Mental Agility
In this ever changing world, there is one constant that we can see everywhere.
You must learn in order to survive.
One of the aspects of the learning process is how your mental strength or agility
In that sense high performers will feel comfortable with complex problems.
They review those problems in an unusual way.
By trying to explain those problems to others they will make connections.
That looks more understandable to others.
And therefore more easy to follow.
Some characteristics of a person that has or don’t have a good mental agility will be:
Prefer known solutions vs inquisitive or curious.
Easily assimilate complex problems.
Only see problems with one point of view.
Enjoy exploring and learning more to solve problems.
On the other hand, there are other mistakes made by people.
Incorrectly assuming that high IQ means well educated.
How many do you personally know with their MBAs or PhD but they’re not smart enough.
Confidence during speaking doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is mentally agile.
Another important condition is to assume that someone good with numbers will be a high performer.
And finally, knowing details of many different things doesn’t make it a good performer.
People Person
Once we know if we have mental agility.
Next thing will be if I’m a people person.
Do not be dis encourage if you’re not.
Many people don’t know how to deal with people.
And that doesn’t make them low performers or low potentials.
But in the end, knowing how to connect with others is important.
And before we move on, please read this blog about empathy versus sympathy.
A people person is some that adapts to different cultures.
Not only from the region but also from other continents.
Curious about other cultures and uses these as a strength to approach the individual.
A person that is an exceptional communicator. who sees conflict as an opportunity rather than a problem.
And understand the importance of diversity and differences in the team to reach a more inclusive solution.
Reading teams dynamics, or what everyone does or likes to do.
Let us not confuse ourselves with some other characteristics.
That may seem like a people person but they’re not.
Like being a nice guy or gal or someone that is charismatic.
And that doesn’t mean that a high performer doesn’t have those attributes.
It just means that a nice guy won’t necessarily be a high performer.
Butt kissers also won’t align into the high-of-anything definition.
Self serving person with upper management is not someone that can be a people person.
Change Skills
Every time that I see this, it comes to my mind from one cartoon I saw many years ago.
A leader asking their people, who likes change and everyone chanting saying “yes!”
Then the same leader asks the same people, who want to change and nobody talks.
Just a fly passing by you can hear.
Finally the leader asks who wants to lead change and everyone is gone.
Arguably enough, we all are like that, at some point or the other.
In our professional lives, even myself coming from a continuous improvement area.
One of the attributes of a high performer is his or her ability to embrace new ideas.
Experiment, and know that not all things will go as planned.
A person that is optimistic about the future or easy going doesn’t mean that they will be able to cope with changes.
Or that mind set that “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”.
The more mistakes you make the more step stones you can use.
To increase your knowledge and prove to be a high performer.
I told someone a long time ago, I wish I would know all the things I knew when I was young.
So I won’t make the same mistakes today.
And he replied, if you didn’t make all those mistakes.
You wouldn’t know the things you know today.
One has to make those mistakes in order to grow.
And eventually become what you want to be.
Results Driven
Leading change is important.
But make a plan, stick to it and motivate yourself to it’s a different thing.
With the end goal in mind it’s very powerful to see the end in your mind.
A person that enjoys working in several things at the same time.
Is someone to look for as a high performer.
Attention to detail, cooperative or positive attitude.
Are not necessarily aspects of a high performer.
As well as working long hours.
One boss told me if you stay too long work hours, that means only two things.
Either you’re inefficient in your work or you’re overloaded with work.
Both of those are my responsibility and need to address promptly.
Remember my motto: Never work hard, always work smart.
You can always do both at the same time when needed.
But if you only work hard, you will never try to be smart at what you’re doing.
There is always a downside
Remember that for every spotlight you have, there is always a shadow.
High learning agile people tend to have another set of attributes.
That makes them unique and a good leader should recognize those.
By talking to them constantly, aside from the normal work conversation.
Once a year conversation to review performance objectives is a work a clown can make.
Monthly, quarterly conversations with meaning to understand emotions.
Difficulties, or personal need of a person.
It’s the work of a leader.
What happens if your leader / manager doesn’t do that.
The answer is obvious and it’s in your face, even though you don’t want to see it. It’s time to move on.
Those characteristics or shadows of a high performer can be.
Impatience, getting bored too easily.
Always seeking for the next challenge, instead of finishing the current one.
Maybe disorganized and poor at details.
Take on challenges beyond the team’s ability, thinking he or she can solve them.
When there is not one person’s job, it’s teamwork.
How to Assess a High Potential
Finally, there are several areas in which we assess someone or ourselves.
To know if they or we’re high performers.
Some are motivational drivers, some are behaviors they show.
Their previous performance is important to determine the potential.
And that learning agility that we cover before it will help determine if the person is ready or not.
In the motivational drivers you can find:
Behaviors like using initiative and taking responsibility.
Or achieving objectives and pursuing self-development.
Those are some of habits you will like to see in a high potential.
Also there are some negative themes that you don’t want to see.
But in the opposite side you don’t want them to be neutral about them:
Passive presence.
Perfectionist.
Back off under pressure.
Avoid risks.
Doesn’t not get insight from others.
Very serious.
Shows frustration and emotions.
Expects others to perform without motivation.
Finally you don’t want a person that does everything by him/herself.
As teams whether you have on site or off site.
Are becoming an essential part of our daily routines.
Please reach to me with any questions or concerns to my email.
Please subscribe to receive weekly updates on how to be better every day. | https://medium.com/@hugosblog/am-i-a-high-performer-at-my-job-935b5857fa2b | ["Hugo'S Blog"] | 2021-01-18 11:03:42.197000+00:00 | ['Performance', 'Workplace', 'Work'] |
6 Reasons We Need to Reform the Peace Corps | 6 Reasons We Need to Reform the Peace Corps
From a Former Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV Tanzania)
Source: Unsplash, Simon Berger
1. It is a form of systematic racism, for those it claims to serve and for those who serve.
The words, “systematic racism,” seem to be everywhere these days. However, it is crucial that we acknowledge that the words, “systematic racism,” do not refer to a system filled with racists. Instead, these words, refer to a system that would uphold racism and disproportionately harm and subjugate people of certain races even if no racists were present. Those leading the effort to decolonize Peace Corps, @decolonizingpc discussed systematic racism, saying that, “Even after adding more volunteers of color, more anti-racism trainings, more reforms (including the ones [they] have proposed on [their] page), Peace Corps will still be a neocolonialist organization because of the imperialistic goals of U.S. foreign policy.
Which brings us to Number 2 —
Soft power imperialism, such as providing financial aid or human resources for development, functions best under the pretense of altruism, though it remains predominantly self-serving.
2. It is an inherently imperialistic organization.
What does it mean to be an imperialistic organization, you may ask? Imperialism is an ideological framework, oftentimes carried out with government policy that works to extend the rule or authority of one country over another country. Such policies have historically been carried out under the guise of “civilizing” and “developing” other nations, employing both hard power, such as military force, but also soft power. Soft power imperialism, such as providing financial aid or human resources for development, functions best under the pretense of altruism, though it remains predominantly self-serving. Self-serving in what ways, you might ask?
Well, on to Number 3 —
3. It is a neocolonialist organization.
While Peace Corps holds dear to certain values and goals, it has always been an organization that functions mostly to serve U.S. foreign policy and the volunteers over the people that they are serving. In other words, Peace Corps functions as the United States’ most prominent soft power asset. In doing so, it is, by its very nature, an organization rooted in neocolonialism, or, “the practice of using economies, globalization, cultural imperialism, and conditional aid to influence a country.” In other words, we have traded direct political and military control, for a softer, but perhaps more insidious, form of control.
4. Father-Knows-Best Paternalism Meets The White Mans Burden
Imperialistic policies rely heavily on paternalism, which “limits a person’s or group’s liberty or autonomy and is intended to promote their own good.” A classic example of both imperialism and paternalism working together would be the 19th century European, “Scramble for Africa,” in which the African continent was sliced and divided in order to reap the benefits of its myriad natural resources. European nations — imbued with a sense of superiority that they saw as their divine providence from God himself — invaded African nations using the framework of paternalism to pillage and completely fracture traditional African ways of life and their political structures. Additionally, they imposed “patriarchal social structures into European-dominated hierarchies and imposed Christianity and Western ideals.” The effects of this so-called scramble still permeate African policy today. At the turning point of the 19th century, this seemingly pre-ordained calling to “civilize” other nations, was cemented in the poem, “The White Man’s Burden (1899),” which called upon the superior white man to go forth and colonize these far-off lands.
Neocolonialist policy that cloaks itself in good intention, lives at the intersection of “the white man’s burden” and the developing world’s need for self-determination and autonomy.
In the 20th century, the conceptual framework of the white man’s burden has been used by proponents of decolonization, to critique foreign expansionism and interventionism. Arguing that neocolonial programs more often than not perpetuate the idea that so-called developing nations are unable to embrace self-determination. Neocolonialist policy that cloaks itself in good intention, lives at the intersection of “the white man’s burden” and the developing world’s need for self-determination and autonomy.
So, why do post-colonial nations still struggle for autonomy? Well, it’s far more complicated than a 6 point list could cover, but let’s dip our toes in —
5. Peace Corps’ aid structure is based on conditional financial and human resource aid that has no proven long-term results for those it claims to serve.
Aid on the African Continent is a problem. It is a complex, goliath of a problem. One need only read Dambisa Moyo’s scathing book, Dead Aid, in order to get the picture of the international development industrial complex. She makes the argument that the aid industry in Africa is not only ineffective, it is “malignant.” Over the last 50 years, more than $1 trillion in development aid has been given to Africa. She argues that this aid has, “failed to deliver sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction — and has actually made the continent worse off.”
While the entirety of the Peace Corps’ financial structure could, and should be investigated, here, we are going to unpack only one part of this structure: small grants, which are organized by the volunteers and then in-theory allocated to the communities in which they serve. As explained by those running the @decolonizingpc Instagram,
“The entire process for the Small Grants Program completely relies on the presence of the volunteer, from the application and fundraising to monitoring and evaluation… Peace Corps practices do not live up to [its primary goal of sustainability] because project funding by the Small Grants Program requires the presence of the volunteer, who at any moment can leave site permanently without notice. It should also not be up to Peace Corps or any volunteer to decide what sustainability looks like for a community.”
Peace Corps’ structure attempts to move away from the aid industry — in the sense that it sends (in theory) skilled volunteers — abroad to help build sustainable programs rather than blindly throwing money at the problem. This type of aid is not conditional in a quid pro quo sense, but rather that the aid is conditional on the volunteer being there. And if the volunteer must be there for the aid or benefit to be reaped, well then, the goal of sustainability is called into question, and dare I say, inherently flawed. This became startlingly transparent in March 2020, when thousands of volunteers were suddenly pulled from their host countries due to COVID-19 — leaving communities in a lurch, funding stalled, and crucial projects never to be finished.
The conditional aid structure and very nature of both Peace Corps promise and its inability to create sustainable change, calls to question whether or not it has a place in the global community. People that work in the aid/development world love to say, “the goal is to work ourselves out of a job.” And yet, it remains a financially fruitful industry for those employed by it, including the Peace Corps.
6. It relies on a Westernized model of development.
During my time as a Peace Corps volunteer, while I traveled, while I read books about the aid industry and the developing world, one question always seemed to creep in from the recesses of my mind: “Developing toward what?”
What exactly do we mean when we say, “a westernized model of development?” Two well-regarded Iranian scholars and economists claimed that, “The western model of development prioritizes technological modernization, free-market economy, a democratic political system, and western health systems as the basis for development.” So, these items are used as metrics to measure the success of a nations’ development. Yet, those nations that we consider successfully developed (i.e. Britain or the U.S.) reached their status, “at the expense of slavery, war, other gross human rights violations, and overexploitation of the environment within and beyond their borders.”
What does Peace Corps have to do with this? Well, back to those at @decolonizingpc who have been actively speaking out and unpacking this issue: | https://tyleranne04.medium.com/6-reasons-we-need-to-reform-the-peace-corp-c6c1a329ed00 | ['Tyler A. Donohue'] | 2020-10-28 19:08:18.693000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Travel', 'White Privilege', 'Peace Corps', 'Volunteering'] |
Micro Front-End Architecture at Enterprise Scale (Updated July 2020) | tldr;
Micro front-ends enable you to compose your front-end and structure your business domains into re-usable and manageable chunks.
Your enterprise can be aligned with your business domains.
Technical debt can be deprecated and removed in a controlled way over time.
Micro front-ends and federated APIs are intrinsically linked. There should be a natural alignment with your business domains.
Simplicity and low-level standards are essential for a micro front-end architecture to ensure success, agility and to prevent technical debt.
Consistency for the customer and delivery must prevail over change, fragmentation and time.
Introduction
This article tries to compress years of experience in enterprise architecture into a useful guide with a focus on micro front-end architecture.
I tried to keep it reasonably brief and within these four chapters:
Fundamentals is a deep dive into the background knowledge necessary to understand enterprise scale environments, organizations and structures.
Micro front-ends is an exploration of the nature, requirements and constraints of micro front-end architecture.
Principles will guide our decision making for the actual micro front-end architecture.
Example web micro front-end architecture according to our fundamentals and principles.
Conclusion
Fundamentals
To really understand the concepts and reasoning behind micro front-end architecture, one has to analyze it in the context of enterprise environments. While ever changing technology and the inevitably complex legacy stacks are often the drivers for people to look at micro front-end solutions, we have to go deeper into the nature of enterprise scale organizations to really understand the potential and challenges of micro front-end architectures.
Enterprise environments
To be considered enterprise scale, multiple of the following attributes would have to apply.
Dozens of delivery teams working across
numerous business domains with
hundreds of business solutions (or features) within
a huge and usually diverse legacy code and technology base
Those attributes already imply the challenges enterprise scale organizations face.
Delivery teams
Due to the nature of enterprise organizations, delivery teams usually experience a lot of people movement. Delivery team members switch between teams, change roles, leave and getting replaced by new starters. The result is constant loss of knowledge and the need for retraining. This becomes even more challenging in organizations where delivery teams work across multiple domains and technologies.
Groups, Streams, Tribes, Verticals, …
To help delivery teams to focus, reduce cognitive load and enhance ownership, enterprises often organize delivery teams in groups aligned to the major business domains.
While this improves the delivery teams situation, it also introduces new challenges. Most business domains are not strictly separated but rather overlap in many areas.
Business domains
Like any company enterprises sell products to their customers. Customers pay for solutions that solve their problems. Enterprises usually offer huge amounts of business solutions and organize them within business domains. This gives structure and reduces cognitive load on the customer as well as on the enterprise.
It is essential for an enterprise to properly identify and understand the customers problems and requirements. These might change over time, but properly identified, the resulting major business domains and solutions are very stable and long lasting.
The Business domains are the foundation that allows us to organize the enterprise in a meaningful and productive way.
We can structure our teams, streams, tribes, verticals as well as all our business solutions according to our business domains.
Business Solutions
The enterprise exists to sell products to customers that can solve their problems. Each customer problem and requirement can be properly identified and refined in an agile process. The result is a business solution that can be build and sold to the customer as part of a product.
Business solutions should fit naturally into the business domains. Sometimes a business solution might fit into multiple business domains. This is where business domains overlap.
Business solutions are the building blocks of all products. Initially a business solution might actually contain multiple business solutions that could be re-usable. In this case the re-usable parts should be taken out and turned into individual business solutions. This gives much more clarity, avoids duplications, enables re-usability and improves productivity for the entire enterprise.
Micro front-ends
Business Solutions represent the smallest building blocks of the enterprise products. But they are purely business contracts describing customer expectations.
Micro front-ends are the actual customer facing implementations of business solutions.
Resources
To be able for a micro front-end to implement and fulfill the requirements of a business solution it must have access to all the necessary resources.
At enterprise scale we need a unified approach for all micro front-ends to access resources. This allows teams to focus and work on the essential value of the business solution and micro front-end.
Resource APIs
Micro front-ends access resources using APIs.
At enterprise scale APIs must be aligned with the business domains. This ensures clear ownership and structure.
Sometimes it might be tempting to align APIs with individual business solutions and micro front-ends. This is an anti-pattern which eventually leads into a huge mess of duplication, redundancy, dependency chaos and technical debt.
Resource API Federation
An enterprise with clear business domains will have groups, teams, tribes, verticals that take ownership of each domain. They are the experts of those domains and they build the necessary APIs for their specific domain.
Business solutions and micro front-ends often require resources from several business domains.
A naïve approach would be to let micro front-ends directly access multiple business domain APIs. This is an anti-pattern which eventually leads into a huge mess of unmanageable dependencies, prevents deprecation and causes massive over-fetching and cache synchronization issues.
This is where the principle of API federation shines. The federated API is a controlled way of providing information from several domain APIs in a single strongly typed place. This clearly separates the ownership of each domain API and the federated API. It also adds a clear contract between the federated API and each domain API. This allows the independent evolution and deprecation of all APIs without impeding dependencies.
Front-end platform
Enterprises usually target multiple front-end platforms. Web browser and mobile OS frameworks are the most common types of front-end platforms.
The reason for and biggest challenge of micro front-ends is the ever changing nature of those front-end platforms.
Platforms are changing
Web Browsers and Mobile Phone Operating Systems receive constant updates, add and deprecated features and adopt technology changes.
Compliance standards are changing
Compliance standards are considered parts of the front-end target platform like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), The American with Disabilities Act (ADA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and many more relevant to the specific enterprise and product.
Technology is changing
The main driver for micro front-ends is to deal with the exponentially increasing technology changes like web frameworks (JQuery, Angular, React, Web Components, …), mobile frameworks (XAML, React Native, Native Script, Flutter, …), programming languages (C#, JavaScript, Web Assembly, …), styling (CSS, SASS, Styled Components, Shadow DOM, …) and many more.
Technical debt
One of the biggest problems for enterprise organizations is the build up of technical debt. Technical debt is accumulating exponentially over time. It causes security issues, compliance failures, huge loss of productivity and prevents innovation.
Micro front-ends must become part of solving the technical debt problem rather than adding to it.
Legacy
Micro front-ends are supposed to solve problems within the enterprise. Those problems are usually a result of the accumulated technical debt. We call this the legacy stack.
To ensure a successful transition, we must make sure that there are no direct dependencies between the legacy stack and the new micro front-end architecture.
We achieve this generally by decoupling the new business domain APIs from the legacy stack with a transparent bridging layer.
Architecture of change
Since technical debt is the product of technology change, a micro front-end architecture must provide a solution to allow for technologies to change without the accumulation of technical debt.
Therefore the foundation of the micro front-end architecture should be the most basic and stable part of the targeted platform.
In case of the web platform, the Custom Element of the HTML standard would represent the lowest common denominator that has the least dependencies and is expected to be a stable foundation for the longest time. The simplicity and being part of the basic standard of the target platform makes it the perfect foundation for our micro front-end architecture targeting the web platform.
Consistency
Micro front-ends break apart the product into smaller chunks. But only the sum of all of these chunks make the final product again.
Micro front-ends will evolve at different paces. They will be build by different people and over time in different technologies.
A micro front-end architecture must ensure that the end product offers consistency in regards to the User Experience.
It is also important that the consistency across the development experience is preserved to manage cognitive load and retain productivity and transparency.
Principles
The following principles can guide our decision making on the way to our new micro front-end architecture.
All principles are equally important and only numbered for future referencing.
1. Business domain driven
Micro front-ends and APIs are strongly aligned with the business domains.
This enables the enterprise to organize itself and form expert groups, streams, tribes, teams for each business domain.
2. Business solution driven
Each micro front-end is the result of a business solution.
The business solution is the contract with the customer that describes exactly the intentions, actions, reactions, resources and expected outcomes.
3. Reusable and composable
Micro front-ends can be composed of nested micro front-ends.
We identify and extract re-usable business solutions within business solutions. As micro front-ends represent business solutions so they must also be composable accordingly.
4. Service Oriented
Micro front-ends should only use federated business domain services (APIs) to query, mutate and subscribe to state, data and resources.
Decoupling the micro front-ends from the back-end resources is essential to ensure the independent nature of each micro front-end. Using a single federated API between micro front-ends and domain APIs removes all dependencies and enables rapid evolution at each layer without any impediments.
5. Technology agnostic
Micro front-ends must not depend on specific technologies. The most basic suitable long term building block should be the integration point for each targeted platform.
To prevent the buildup of technical debt we must ensure that any technology can be deprecated and replaced without impacting the rest of the system. This can only be achieved if all technologies are encapsulated within the most stable long term API for the given platform.
6. Independent
We must be able to independently develop, test, build and deploy every individual micro front-end at any time without depending on or impacting other micro front-ends.
Rapid evolution of our micro front-ends is only possible if there are no impeding dependencies. Since micro front-ends are composable and can be nested we must make sure that appropriate packaging and versioning prevents impeding dependencies.
7. Consistent
We must ensure that the user experience is consistent across all micro front-ends. We should try to keep the development experience also as consistent as possible.
User experience must be consistent. Look and feel as well as behaviors are an essential part of the product and customer satisfaction. Development experience should be consistent to ensure productivity. Since there will be huge amounts of micro front-ends all build at different times by different teams we have to find ways to ensure consistency and maintainability.
Example
At this point we are well equipped to create a micro front-end architecture that is based on the enterprise scale environment fundamentals and the resulting principles.
We will target the web platform, since it is the most common one. Later we will see how other platforms can benefit from our architecture as well.
Context
For simplicity we assume a medium sized enterprise with multiple domains and websites for numerous redistributors as customers, who demand support for all browsers down to IE11.
Web platform
The first principle we have to consider targeting the web platform is to be technology agnostic. The native foundation of the web platform is HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Considering the IE11 constraint we can only target a limited set of HTML 5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5.
Custom Elements
Following our principle we want to encapsulate any higher level framework within the most basic long term container. Given our constraints this would be HTML Custom Elements. As part of the official HTML standard we can safely assume that this is a suitable long term choice at the most basic level.
The following code is an example of the most basic implementation of a micro front-end according to our principle.
This allows us to wrap any future technology safely without creating any dependency on the system at large, which allows us to replace it at any time. Here we integrate React into our micro front-end without violating any of our principles.
Now we can use our micro front-end at the most basic level anywhere, even nested within other micro front-ends that internally use a complete different framework.
Following our principles we do not attempt to include extending inbuilt elements as well as Shadow DOM at this stage for multiple reasons. Mainly both are till a very wonky standards and not supported in all browsers required for this example.
Nested micro front-ends
Another important principle we have to consider in regards to our choice is to be composable and reusable. As already demonstrated custom element containers do follow this principle by design.
Now we also have to consider the principle of being independent. This is more challenging since it introduces dependency management. The principle demands that we can upgrade any micro front-end at any time without affecting any other micro front-end. But since a micro front-end can be nested within another micro front-end we have to ensure that we follow the principle. Fortunately this can easily be achieved by versioning and packaging of our micro front-ends. So upgrading a micro front-end to a newer version will become a conscious decision within a controlled process.
Build Platform
Following up on the need to version and package our micro front-ends to obey our principle of independence, we have to decide how to build.
We will follow our principles again and chose the most basic long term standard for the given platform which in this case is packaging our micro front-ends in NPM packages.
Peer Dependencies
We must avoid duplication of dependencies to reduce loading times for the customer as well as avoiding conflicting dependencies. With NPM we achieve this by specifying peer dependencies for our micro front-ends, which the web client has provide.
Dependencies
The website client has to provide all the required dependencies. At this stage we will be able to automatically discover conflicting peer dependency requirements and upgrade all necessary dependencies in a controlled process to resolve those conflicts.
Here the principle of independence is still intact. It just forces us to keep our dependencies up-to-date to prevent conflicts.
In special cases a micro front-end can still have its very own dependency that gets compiled into the micro front-end package.
Dependencies can still be loaded dynamically to reduce loading times in a process called code-splitting that is build into the website client.
Consistency
Keeping dependencies up-to-date also helps us with our principle of maintaining consistency. Styling and theming as well as other product features spanning across all micro front-ends can now simply become support packages and peer dependencies for all micro front-ends. We just have to make sure that we obey the principle of being technology agnostic for these packages as well.
APIs
Now that we have a way to implement and build our micro front-ends, we have to find a way to connect them with the required resources.
The principle of being service oriented clearly prescribes the use of APIs. Following the principle of using the most basic and long term standard for the given platform we have the choice between custom REST endpoints or the GraphQL standard.
The principles of being business domain driven, service oriented and technology agnostic all clearly point to GraphQL as being an actual standard on the web platform specifically designed for domain driven environments.
Unified micro front-end API
Choosing GraphQL also improves the simplicity and long term stability of our micro front-end API interface. We can basically provide the Query, Mutate and Subscribe native interface directly to every micro front-end as the one and only unified micro front-end API. Reducing cognitive load and complexity.
In addition we completely remove any custom interface dependencies between micro front-ends and their nested micro front-ends.
Client API and State
Micro front-ends can now query, mutate and subscribe the local state in exactly the same way they do for the backend. Improving simplicity and reducing cognitive load even further.
This allows micro front-ends to interact with each other without any dependencies in real-time through the strongly typed entities of the client schema.
Legacy transition
Using this approach also allows us to start building and deploying micro front-ends right away, since we can integrate them into our legacy stack retaining maximum isolation.
We can then either remove more and more legacy code with micro front-ends and/or switch over to a brand new website client when ready.
We can also create a micro front-end that is just wrapping legacy pages within technology agnostic iFrames.
Federated Backend APIs
And finally we can achieve our goal of supporting the enterprise to structure and organize itself aligned with the major business domains.
The principle of being business domain driven means that each domain owns its own APIs. Therefore each domain can have its own strongly typed entities within an ever evolving schema.
With GraphQL we can now combine all these domains into a single federated API that can be consumed by all micro front-ends.
Conclusion
A well planned micro front-end architecture can help enterprises to overcome the constraints of their legacy stacks.
It enables the enterprise to focus on their customers by identifying business domains and business solutions.
It allows organizational changes to verticals, stream, tribes, chapters or any other domain driven agile approach that can improve the organization as a whole.
The resulting clear boundaries, ownership and interfaces reduce cognitive load and improve productivity and quality.
Technical debt isn’t inevitable anymore but rather becomes a controlled process of deprecation and removal. This drives innovation, quality and productivity.
This article is only a high level overview and there are many more details that are specific to your enterprise. But I hope it can provide you with the necessary fundamentals and principles to get you started to transform your business.
Thank you and please leave comments on how to improve this article or get in contact with me if you want to discuss things in more detail. | https://medium.com/swlh/micro-front-end-architecture-at-enterprise-scale-updated-july-2020-9159a4e0cc49 | ['Bernd Wessels'] | 2020-10-12 08:37:16.773000+00:00 | ['Enterprise', 'Micro Frontends', 'GraphQL', 'Frontend', 'Architecture'] |
You Already Have | I feel him go slack in my grip and fall to the ground. Before the waitress or cook can talk to me I run out of the alley and back to the street. It won’t be long before the police or ambulance show up and I don’t have time to talk to them as they file their reports. I may be needed elsewhere and frankly I don’t really want anyone knowing who I am.
I continue to run until I round a few building corners. I scan my eyes around as I take in the fast food wrappers and empty plastic bottles that line the sidewalks in places. A subtle breeze carries a plastic bag like a tumbleweed. I take pleasure in a dandelion that has sprouted from a crack in the cement. Gotta enjoy those little things. A car speeds by with blasting music and the ground vibrates. A block ahead of me at a bus stop, I notice a man in a sweatshirt. He pulls one of those masks onto the lower half of his face the runners use in the winter and slips on the hood of his sweatshirt.
“Give me your fucking wallet.”
This sounds familiar. “Give me your fucking tray.” We never really escape prison. For a moment, I remember Brandon looming over me in the cafeteria, flexing his biceps that I could never fail to notice. He made sure everyone noticed them. And for good reason too.
“Give it to me man,” the mugger says and I snap out of my memory and into the present.
“No,” I say as the man raises his arms to grab me. My reflexes are faster and I am able to grip one of his arms. Yes, I still got it. It’s been years since I did an arrest, and only months since I was actually in prison. I still got it. Shit. I don’t still got it. He’s faster and manages to move around me pressing his chest against my back and an arm around my neck as he reaches into the pocket of his sweatshirt. Then I feel his gun pressed against my side.
“Don’t make me use this,” he warns.
“Alright, alright,” I tell him.
His hand reaches into the back pocket of my jeans where he fumbles with my wallet. The moment he has it, I feel the gun retract from me and I turn around very quickly and tackle him to the ground. Lucky for me, the guy let his gun fall. As I mount him, I can only see his eyes, but it’s enough to recognize that he can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen — early twenties at most. Just a kid basically. I consider reaching for the gun, to threaten him with it, but I can’t let my prints get on it so I choke him to gain control. His hands spastically grip my wrists as he tries to free himself.
I could run, or I could restrain him and call the cops. Maybe my old partner will show up, if he’s even still a cop. I do miss Luis.
I miss our patrols. I miss him. He used to visit me when I was locked up…until he didn’t.
When the mugger is a little out of breath and stops fighting back, I release one hand to reach for my cell phone to call the police. I can restrain him here until they arrive and then rush off to blend back in with the darkness of the night. Unfortunately for me, he has spare weapons and before I can press the final “one” on the screen, one of his hands lets go of mine and he pulls out a pocketknife. I drop my phone and reach to control his arm. He fights me off with his other hand and lands a punch to my cheek. As my head swings away from him a moment, he stabs into my stomach.
Pain.
Excruciating pain.
I fall backwards, unable to breathe. He pulls the knife from me, which hurts just as bad as it did going in. He looks at me with terrified eyes for a moment. I don’t think he thought he would actually do this. I don’t think he thought his victim would fight back. Maybe I should have just given him my fucking wallet. Shit. He slides the sleeve of his sweatshirt down over his hands to cover them as he punches the “one” on my phone to complete the call and lays it next to me on the ground.
His hands are shaky. His voice chokes but he tries to keep his badass tone. Just barely. “Don’t tell them I did this. I don’t want to have to find you and kill you for real.”
You already have, I think. This kid has no clue. He’s just a mugger, not a murderer…but in a few minutes all of that will change. He runs away as the phone rings. Then it connects with the dispatcher. I can’t speak. It doesn’t matter anyway. They can’t help me. The pain fades away and the weakness is what takes over. I feel myself giving into it. Somehow I have already forgiven him. Easier to forgive him than myself. It was several years ago when I was him. Mistakes. Accidents.
I see Luis. He looks so tough as he restrains the perp. He looks over to me. Then I don’t see him anymore because the motherfucker’s friend jumps me. It’s the one that we’d been tracking. The suspected rapist, the violator of bodies. I fire a shot into his calf. He leaves me alone, but I don’t just handcuff him. I lose it. I just lose it. I am trigger happy. Next thing I know…the guy’s brains are on my face. I can’t see Luis through the brains.
Then I see him sitting on the other side of the glass, holding the phone. He tells me about everything but his new partner. He never talks about work. We know I can’t handle that. I show up one day drunk on bravery after a confrontation with Brandon. I tell Luis I love him. He leaves. I never see him again.
It won’t be long before they come. They will save me. Maybe I will live so that kid doesn’t have to feel too guilty. I hope they catch him though, so he can serve his time. I served mine. It won’t be long before they come. It won’t be —
Originally published online for Eleven & a Half, Eugene Lang College’s literary journal. See the original version here. | https://medium.com/slice-of-life-a-collection-of-short-stories/you-already-have-2968d5d8d555 | ['Charlotte Rene Woods'] | 2016-07-30 03:33:53.883000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'LGBTQ', 'Noir', 'Crime Fiction'] |
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 Johanna Dec 24, 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/@johanna39728064/sonos-users-can-now-double-the-boom-in-any-room-by-adding-a-second-sonos-sub-subwoofer-a35fbec8f6d4 | [] | 2020-12-24 08:53:24.856000+00:00 | ['Surveillance', 'Mobile Accessories', 'Cord', 'Connected Home'] |
The great pretender: faster application tests with MySQL simulation | If you have a web-based application, chances are high that it uses some sort of database to store information. Chances are also high that you’ll want to test that application somehow. One of the questions you then have to answer is, “How do I test something that queries a database?”
Option 1: Limit database interaction to a mockable API
A tempting first step is to mock out high-level API calls. If you have a getCurrentUser method, a mock can ensure that method returns an object with appropriate data.
This is fine for some simple CRUD applications, but becomes an issue when you want to use MySQL features beyond simple SELECT <column> FROM <table> WHERE name = <value> queries.
Option 2: Mock out database calls directly
You could have something like this:
function testHighScores() {
$db_connection = new MockPDO();
$db_connection->receiveQuery(
'SELECT `name`, MAX('score') as `high_score`
FROM `game_scores`
GROUP BY `name
ORDER BY `high_score` DESC'
)->andReturn([
['name' => 'Kathleen', 'score' => 6700],
['name' => 'Will', 'score' => 6200],
['name' => 'Matt', 'score' => 2300],
]); assertNotEmpty(
(new ScoreRepository($db))->getHighScores()
);
}
This is fast, since your application doesn’t actually interact with a database during the test. Mocking everything also helps your tests conform to the platonic ideal of what a unit test should be — you can effectively isolate each component being tested.
But tedium can set in quickly: mocked query results become stale if the query changes, or when the underlying table schema changes. This causes maintenance headaches if you’re at a fast-growing company.
Option 3: Run tests against an actual database
You can avoid issues of staleness by running your tests against a real database:
function createScoresTable($db_connection) {
$db_connection->query(
'DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `game_scores`'
);
$db_connection->query(
'CREATE TABLE `game_scores` (
`id` INT(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`name` VARCHAR(16) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`score` INT(10) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB'
);
$db_connection->query(
'INSERT INTO `game_scores` (`name`, `score`)
VALUES ("Matt", 20), ("Matt, 1200),
("Matt", 2300), ("Kathleen", 6700),
("Will", 6200), ("Will", 4800)'
);
} function testHighScores() {
$db_connection = new PDO(getConnectionString());
createScoresTable($db_connection); // do some sort of test
assertNotEmpty(
(new ScoreRepository($db))->getHighScores()
);
// clean up after test
$db_connection->query('TRUNCATE `game_scores`);
}
That introduces some new challenges — you have to figure out how to replicate your database schema, how to generate test data, and how to scrub the database once a test is complete, but otherwise it’s pretty reliable.
For over a decade at Vimeo most of our PHP tests have required a database connection. Though this has avoided some of the issues around mocking, it’s also pretty slow. Over the years we’ve come up with a number of different ways to make tests faster, using in-memory storage, collocating test databases and caching test results as much as possible, but a full test run still spends 50 percent of its total runtime talking to MySQL.
Why is using a real database so slow?
Setting up a database connection and communicating with an external service involves a lot of digital bureaucracy. This is especially noticeable when running tests in a virtualized environment (like inside Docker for Mac).
Databases are normally designed to hold a lot of information, and to hold onto that information for a long time. But when testing we usually want to wipe the database between each test, and tests normally write a tiny fraction of the data the actual production database would hold.
This slowness has led us to explore a fourth option.
Option 4: Simulate MySQL itself
What if we could use a library (written in the same language as our tests) to parse and execute MySQL queries — mimicking the behaviour of a real database? That library could be part of our test runtime, avoiding any interprocess communication.
function testHighScores() {
$db_connection = new FakePdo(getConnectionString());
// create tables with SQL queries as above
createScoresTable($db_connection); // do some sort of test
assertNotEmpty(
(new ScoreRepository($db))->getHighScores()
);
// clean up after test (as you would with a real database)
$db_connection->query('TRUNCATE `game_scores`);
}
Two months ago that library didn’t exist, at least not for PHP. Luckily there was something very similar — Slack has created their own MySQL engine, written in a PHP-adjacent language, to speed up their unit tests.
Slack’s testing story is slightly different from Vimeo’s: initially they chose to mock out all database query results when running tests. In 2015 they started simulating some simple SELECT / UPDATE queries, but more complex syntax (such as queries with joins) still required mocking
In 2017 the maintenance burden of mocking those queries became so costly that Slack decided to go all-in on MySQL simulation, and a developer there created an engine that supports all the MySQL queries they throw at it.
Hack, the language that engine is written in, is similar enough to PHP that it’s possible to roughly convert the code to PHP — I built a toy transpiler for that purpose two years ago. Over the holidays I used that transpiler on Slack’s MySQL engine, adapted it to play nicely with PHP, and added a number of MySQL features (like variables and auto-incrementing indexes) that we use at Vimeo.
That library, the boringly named PHP MySQL Engine, is now open-source. Ninety-nine percent of our tests use it in place of an actual database. During a full test run it processes everything from a simple SELECT `id` FROM `foo` to a 1,100-line behemoth that’s basically the final boss of MySQL parsing and execution.
Caveats
Whenever you’re simulating anything for tests, you run the risk that your simulation is slightly off, leading to tests passing that really should fail. It’s also very difficult to replicate MySQL exactly (one example: MySQL’s inference for computed column types is occasionally a bit wrong).
There are also many MySQL features the PHP engine does not support: anything that relies on stored procedures, triggers, or views cannot be simulated by it.
Anyone who’s decided to venture down the route of simulating MySQL should make sure they’ve first thoroughly evaluated mocking, and running tests against a real MySQL database. Read this article if you want to get cold feet.
Benefits
It’s much quicker — in CI, our unit test runs are on average two times faster than when using a real MySQL database.
Even better, it’s 4–5 times faster for our developers on Macs who previously had to run all PHPUnit tests under Docker, as our pure-PHP test environment no longer needs any virtualization.
If you’re wondering how PHP could be faster than a MySQL (a highly-optimised C binary) it’s all about the overhead connecting to a MySQL server, sending the data and waiting for a response — and doing that hundreds of thousands of times over a full test run.
My hope is that this performance boost will make testing a bit more fun.
Where to next?
Our work with PHP MySQL Engine is basically finished, at least for now. It’s not perfect, but it does exactly what we need it to do.
Aside from speeding up tests, there are a few other things this engine could be used for in the future: | https://medium.com/vimeo-engineering-blog/the-great-pretender-faster-application-tests-with-mysql-simulation-26250f13d251 | ['Matt Brown'] | 2021-02-02 00:06:11.196000+00:00 | ['MySQL', 'PHP', 'Testing'] |
No, women can’t have sex anytime they want | No, women can’t have sex anytime they want
And saying that is harmful.
Photo by LexScope on Unsplash
“Women have privileges too!” is the general response when you attempt to chat with a cis-hetero guy about feminism and male privilege. The first one they’ll list is that “women get to have sex whenever they want!”
This inequality of access to sex is a widely shared stereotype and one that a lot of young men feel very strongly about. They see it as a huge advantage that women have over them, that they can basically always find a guy for a shag. The old cliché is that if a guy walks into a bar and yells out, “Who wants to have sex with me?” no women will volunteer, while if a woman did the same, she would have her pick of horny men to take home.
The incel movement in particular repeats this idea a lot, in very misogynistic terms. One Reddit post, with the title “Back to the basics — women are the gatekeepers of sex,” argues that:
“If not for the extremely powerful male sexual desire, men would never interact with women, ever! Men and women are so different and hardly relate to one another. We’re like foreign creatures who are annoying [to each other] and who we can hardly relate to. So why bother with them at all?”
The post goes on to say that this extremely powerful sexual desire, supposedly stronger than any that a woman could feel, combined with a sense of worthlessness, leave men trailing behind on the market of sex.
Women get rejected, too
This myth, even though it is widely shared, is completely false. Firstly, because women get rejected too. I don’t know any hetero woman who hasn’t made moves on a guy and found herself facing a solid no — apart from those who never make the first move.
There are many reasons for which men don’t always want to have sex with women — not being attracted to them, having a partner, not being in the mood, having an early start the next morning… Men are not machines that crave sex all the time.
Sure, maybe there are times in their lives when they are incredibly horny and can think of nothing else, the teenage years being one example. It’s the same for women. For a couple of days a month I can think of nothing but sex — it’s how I know I’m ovulating. But neither for men, nor women, is that a constant state of being, whatever it might feel like to frustrated teenagers who wank a dozen times a day.
Suggesting otherwise is harmful, because it makes men feel uncomfortable declining sex, as though to do so threatens their masculinity. It makes women, when rejected by men, question everything about themselves — because if men should always want sex, how vile must you be for them to turn you down?
It’s worth noting that the term “incel” was originally coined by a woman. In the 90s, Alana set up a website to discuss her sexual inactivity, which she called Alana’s Involuntary Celibate Project and hoped would become a resource for others like her — people who couldn’t find a partner and needed support and guidance. Since then, Alana has publically distanced herself from what the word has become — shorthand for men who feel entitled to sex, and hate women for having a say in the matter.
When women do get rejected, or when they feel like they are unattractive and that no boys want to date them, they don’t turn it into hateful rhetoric against mankind. They don’t go to the internet to call them bitches and sluts. When women feel undesirable, they turn it inwards. They starve themselves, verbally abuse themselves as they look in the mirror— while some boys form movements like the incels, with sometimes deadly levels of misogyny.
Women put far more effort into looking desirable
A variant of the argument that women have sex on tap is that men have to put more work in, while women just show up. I suggest that any man who says this be given a bikini wax, and told that he must come back every two weeks to continue to be able to have socially acceptable genitals.
Women put so much time, energy and money into looking pretty, in the face of increasingly crushing beauty standards. From starving themselves to trying on every outfit they have to find one which doesn’t “make them look fat,” from obsessing over every flaw to getting up at 6 in the morning to have time for an extensive make-up routine before work, from waxing, plucking and straightening hairs to squeezing on shapewear to hide their bulges, you cannot say that women do no work when it comes to seduction.
And trust me when I say, if you don’t do all of that, if you do what guys do and just roll up to a bar with unbrushed hair, a dirty T-shirt jeans and sneakers, you are not going to be surrounded by takers.
If men spent as many hours at the gym as women put into hair, makeup, diets, shopping for clothes, dithering in front of the mirror, working out not for pleasure but for weight loss, they would have that body that apparently all women want in a man.
I am not saying this is desirable. I don’t think that men should be spending more time on their appearance, I think women should be spending less and that we should value natural beauty, and step away from appearance entirely and discover all the other ways people are sexy. But to start we need to recognise the pressure women face every day to look perfect.
The burden of fear
Even if women did have an unlimited supply of men willing to have sex with them at any moment, that doesn’t mean they can actually comfortably follow through with it. Sex can hardly be described as widely available when it comes with a risk of ending up raped, or murdered or violently attacked. It’s like saying you can have candy any time you want, but in the bag there are loads of hidden razor blades. That’s not free access.
“His greatest fear is his date will be fat, her greatest fear is her date will be a serial killer,” as the saying goes.
Women also have to pay other prices for sex, that prevent it from being an easy option, like facing a lot of judgement over their number of sexual partners. If you feel the entire weight of society and worry about your future partners opinion of your number, than you are more reluctant to go have casual sex. And often the same guys that are jealous of women for being able to access sex easily are the ones that would be very quick to shame them on their number of partners …
Orgasms are few and far between
The most common definition of sex is aligned with male pleasure — it begins with penetration (everything else is foreplay) and ends with ejaculation. Besides being very discriminatory towards all those that do not practice penetrative sex, this definition sidelines female pleasure.
If we were to redefine sex as only being complete when a woman has an orgasm, it certainly would not be easier for women to find than men. There is a well-documented orgasm gap between men and women — one study from 2016 by the Archives of Sexual Behavior showed that 95 percent of heterosexual men reported they almost always orgasmed during sex, compared to 65 percent of heterosexual women.
So yeah, a penis to thrust itself into your vagina might be easy to find, but if an orgasm is what you are looking for, it’s easier for blokes, hands down.
Crossed wires
The examples given to illustrate women’s supposed advantage when it comes to sexual opportunity are very limited: usually referring to casual sex, initiated with a blunt question — do you wanna go home and f*ck?
When men complain that women can find this more easily, they are basically complaining that women don’t want to have sex on their terms. If sex presents itself openly and bluntly, men would be more likely to want it, for reasons we’ve already mentioned: they are more likely to have a good time and less likely to get assaulted. Women are also exposed to direct sexual advantages in situations of harassment on a near daily basis, so it is less charming when they hear it again in a bar, for instance. Understandably, women often want to wait longer, have a conversation, maybe even a few dates, before having sex.
An oft-cited study from 1978 showed that when students approached people of the opposite sex at random and asked the question: “I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Not one of the women approached said yes, while 75% of the men did. When you change the question to “would you like to go out with me tonight?” men and women accepted the proposition in roughly equal proportions.
What men complaining about women’s access to sex are complaining about is that they want sex on their terms — even as they are reluctant to approach women on their terms.
The “women” referred too are women that correspond to a certain beauty norm
When they complain about women always being able to have sex, men are referring to the women they would want to sleep with. They are referring to the women that fit into a socially defined level of beauty, dismissing those that don’t. Which makes sense because they don’t really even consider those women as worthy of thought or acknowledgment.
Our society has defined a large proportion of women to be unworthy of male desire. Amongst women, there are the fat, the “ugly” or the unfuckable, who struggle to find sexual partners because their attractiveness has been devalued by our society.
Men easily dismiss women that aren’t attractive enough for them, aiming in their league, or, usually, higher.
What they resent, in saying that women are the “gatekeepers of sex”, is basically the fact that women, too are allowed to have “standards.” There is a strong sense of entitlement over women’s bodies, linked to the fact that we are constantly objectified. And objects aren’t supposed to have opinions, ‘standards’, a right to say no. | https://starkraving.medium.com/no-women-cant-have-sex-anytime-they-want-e06363af1f5a | ['Stark Raving'] | 2020-10-21 23:48:53.127000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Feminism', 'Equality', 'Sex', 'Sexuality'] |
My Case Against OnlyFans | OnlyFans logo via Wikimedia Commons
In case you don’t know, OnlyFans is a platform for creators to share content to paying subscribers. It has grown in popularity recently due to the influx of young women creating OnlyFans accounts to distribute nude content in exchange for monthly pay that generally ranges from $5-$20 per month from each subscriber.
At first, it seemed like an ideal option for sex workers who are already established in the porn industry. They already have a dedicated fanbase and can smoothly take control of their content, distributing it exclusively to their devoted fans in exchange for a monthly rate from each subscriber.
The beginning of quarantine is when I started to notice how casually it was being used. With so many people getting laid off and being forced to stay at home, selling nude content online seems like a viable option for women who are young, hot, and don’t take their sexuality too seriously.
There are layers of appeal to this route. There’s the money, of course. There’s convenience — you can do it from the comfort of your bed. Then, there’s the appeal of being so desired by so many men just because of the way you look. If we dig deeper, there’s also the power dynamic of controlling what you share with men who are so desperate to even have a glimpse of your body.
But nothing in life is free.
The Price of the Female Body
The female body is the only tangible thing that is truly priceless. This is why men go to strip clubs and literally throw money at naked dancing women. There is nothing else on Earth that is so truly priceless that people throw money at. Even diamonds have a price tag.
Beauty Fades
Feminine beauty is a mystical element because it is a short-lived wave of immense power over the people around you. You benefit from things like the “Halo Effect” where people automatically project good qualities onto you outside of your looks, such as intelligence and humor. You have people want to talk to you and treat you well. You can now essentially get paid for being attractive through apps like Instagram and OnlyFans.
But this privilege has a peak of about 5–10 years. Beauty fades, looks decline, and you become invisible as younger women enter their prime and push you out of the spotlight. All the attention you were receiving in your prime trickles off into the very occasional compliment, if even that.
Dopamine Addiction
A common archetype in literature is the evil old witch. She has many distinct characteristics, and one of the most consistent ones is her old age. Her old age is associated with bitterness and jealousy of youthful women.
This theme being written over and over again throughout history reflects the common experience of pain that women go through as they age and their beauty fades. This is significant because it shows that even before social media gave us dopamine addictions, it’s always been common for aging and losing attention to be difficult.
Now that the loss of attention has a monetary value attached to it, the process of aging can be exponentially more painful.
The World Wide Web
When you put something on the internet, it is out of your hands forever. Once a photo is uploaded, there is potential for every person on earth for the rest of the technological era to have access to it. This means your future children, your future employers, your future in-laws, your family. The true cost of a short period of extra cash is the eternal potential of your content resurfacing where it’s not supposed to. The fear associated with the possibility of exclusive content resurfacing shows that engaging in cyber sex work should not be considered a low-key side hustle. There is nothing low-key about it.
Supply and Demand
Low supply + high demand = high value.
What happens when you meet a guy you want to settle down with but all the homeless guys on his street saw you naked when you were selling yourself on the internet during that one 50% off promo?
We hate to put value on male opinions of women because we want to live for ourselves. It’s good to be independent and be yourself regardless of what men think but considering that in order to have a successful marriage that takes up more than half your life, your ability to attract and select a high quality man has to be immaculate. You can’t attract and select a high quality man without at least considering why men find what they find attractive, attractive.
This doesn’t mean molding yourself around male standards.
This means considering male preferences, validating them through evolution, and analyzing whether they align with your personal goals.
Men prefer to have women to themselves. This stems from the evolutionary desire to reproduce, and therefore want as much confirmation as possible that her offspring belongs to him.
Now, consider your personal goals. Do you plan to enjoy the finer things in life with little effort? Do you plan to raise a strong family unit? Do you plan to focus on advancing in a career?
Your goals will determine how much value you place on appealing to this particular male preference.
So what are you really selling through OnlyFans?
You’re selling your ability to be employed after your hotness subsides. You’re building yourself up for an immense dopamine addiction that will never ever ever be able to be fulfilled the same when your wave of OnlyFans clout passes. How can you maintain dignity when you’ve sold something that could be so priceless for $10 a month? You’re filtering high quality men out of your dating pool.
This is not slut shaming.
This is not misogyny.
This is love.
No man in the world is worthy of seeing your body for pocket change.
Your femininity is already so valuable that you deserve to receive something equally priceless in exchange. Evolution suggests life-long security.
Have a blessed day. | https://medium.com/@zneutral/my-case-against-onlyfans-a4b57c8de7e7 | ['Z Neutral'] | 2020-06-15 06:37:06.546000+00:00 | ['Sex Work', 'Divine Feminine', 'Male Gaze', 'Feminism', 'Onlyfans'] |
How to Manage your Zoom Event’s Registration, Payment, and Promotion on Blockchain | The global COVID-19 pandemic led to massive cancellation of events around the world, the most entrepreneurial event and conference organizers are re-inventing the industry by switching to live video, which pushed Zoom user-base from 10M to over 200M in less than 8 weeks!
This is a unique opportunity to exponentially multiply the number of attendees as it removes the time and financial constraints of physically traveling to the event location and finding accommodations.
Easier said than done though.
Setting up a live-video event comes with multiple administrative obstacles. Zoom, by far the solution with the highest user members, allows setting up webinars with up to 100 panelists and 10 000 attendees, which is great. However, they currently only offer Paypal as a payment option and you are left to promote your event with your own email list or market it externally at additional costs and additional registration management headaches.
There is a simple solution though. Relying on a smart contract to run the entire process.
To assist the global community during the pandemic, 2key.network team created Zoom SmartSession, a comprehensive solution to manage your Zoom events and conferences on blockchain, collect payment in crypto, and automate organic referral marketing with a built-in multi-step, incentivized organic referral solution.
2key SmartSession is the first-ever smart-contract product accepted on Zoom Marketplace!
First Blockchain-Crypto App on Zoom Marketplace
With 2key SmartSessions, managing payment and registration for Zoom events or conferences is fully executed by the embedded smart contracts. Payment is made in cryptocurrencies that can be bought with a Credit Card during the registration process.
The SmartLink used to invite people to your SmartSession automatically collects the admission fee and restricts access to your Zoom event or conference exclusively to paid participants. This last point is particularly crucial as Zoom events have been plagued by digital gate-crashers. Accessing Zoom SmartSession is possible only if signing in with the email used to buy admission rights, effectively eliminating Zoom bombers.
In addition to automating the entire registration, payment collection, Zoom link generation and delivery, SmartSessions come equipped with access to an integrated self-managed, incentivized, organic referral solution to spread the word about your event.
Once the SmartSession is deployed on Ethereum blockchain, the smart contract does all the work for you.
You can watch the number of paid registrations, the number of times your invitation has been previewed and opened, and the number of times it has been shared in real-time from your dashboard.
It looks like this and you can watch the referrals grow and branch out as your potential audience grows through organic referrals.
How does it work?
If you are new to the 2key network — we have prepared some detailed explanations on how to create a Zoom SmartSession link easily and quickly. You can find a tutorial video here
And a step by step-by-step guide here
If you are new to 2key network, its TL;DR is
A. First Time Use Only (~5 minutes):
Create a personal account and a Page (your business/ professional identity).
(your business/ professional identity). Connect your Ledger/ Metamask wallet, or create a 2key wallet (supporting any ERC Tokens). Note — The page wallet must be a different address from your personal wallet on 2key.
B. Create and share a Zoom SmartSession link (~2–3 minutes):
Connect your 2key account with your Zoom account in 1 click.
Give your SmartSession a title and design it.
Creating a Zoom SmartSession Interface
Set the session date and time, its duration, price in USD/ETH, and the number of participants.
in USD/ETH, and the number of participants. Set a 2key referral incentive as a percentage of the admission ticket price (if you want more people to hear about your event and register).
as a percentage of the admission ticket price (if you want more people to hear about your event and register). Deploy the Smart Contract on Ethereum Blockchain (cost ~$1 in ETH)
on Ethereum Blockchain (cost ~$1 in ETH) Publish the SmartLink with your intended Zoom participants and beyond!
with your intended Zoom participants and beyond! Track the link distribution and its results.
Withdraw the collected registration fees from the 2key dashboard straight to your wallet.
That’s it!
No coding needed. No integration, and no upfront cost.
Create your Zoom SmartSession in minutes and get your event not just back on track, but larger, better, and more durable than ever.
How does it look for participants?
Participants click the link, see the session details, and pay the registration fee in ETH (soon also in more cryptocurrencies like DAI, USDT, and others). If they don’t have ETH, we support buying crypto with credit cards directly to their wallet. Visa or MasterCard accepts 17 different Fiat currencies in 180 countries.
After the Tx approved, the participant receives the Zoom link of that specific session and approved to log in with the same email.
If you activated the referral option, participants can also earn crypto by sharing the SmartSession invitation SmartLink. When someone down their referral chain buys a ticket to your event, each referrer of the referral chain leading to that purchase receives the percentage of the reward as defined in the smart contract.
So, time to create your secure Zoom SmartSession?
2key SmartSession is an approved product on the Zoom marketplace and connected with Zoom API. This means it meets all Zoom stringent requirements for usability, reliability, and stability. You can find 2key SmartSessions on Zoom App Marketplace.
Find 2key SmartSessions on Zoom App Marketplace
___________________________________________________________________
2key is a Layer2 solution to Ethereum Blockchain, that transforms today’s HTTP links into Tomorrow’s Decentralized Web.
Creators of SmartLinks, a unique smart-contract based technology that tracks, records, and rewards all referrers in a referral chain that leads to the completion of a specific action.
Find 2key here: Website, Blog, YouTube, LinkedIn, Telegram News & Announcements, Twitter, Facebook | https://medium.com/2key/how-to-manage-your-zoom-event-registration-payment-and-promotion-on-blockchain-1de21e0ff881 | ['Patricia De Hemricourt'] | 2020-04-29 07:18:35.971000+00:00 | ['Conference', 'Zoom', 'Blockchain', 'Events', 'Event Planning'] |
Can classification problems be solved by unsupervised clustering? | Definition of Classification: “The action or process of classifying something according to shared qualities or characteristics.”
“It’s all about finding patterns and understanding what differentiates them.”
The answer to the given question largely depends on what a person understands by the term ‘classification’. One might argue that new data points can only be classified when we have a “knowledge” about previous data points.
However, I would counter that argument by saying that even when we do training for a supervised classification task, we understand the structure of that data. Then, we try to understand the data attributes which differentiates one data point from another. If we select the wrong set of attributes then the training would surely be of no use, and the classifier won’t work on new data points with accuracy.
So, doesn’t that mean that we have the “knowledge” even before the supervised training about the kind of data attributes defining a data point? All we do during the training phase is just to estimate the threshold values for these attributes that differentiate one type of data point from another. The training is often called “parameter estimation”.
Now, what if the estimation of these threshold values for these data attributes be estimated in an unsupervised manner. If these thresholds are estimated, we would know the shared qualities of a particular class or category of the data point, and thus would be able to classify new data points. Hence, solving the classification problem by unsupervised learning.
Ok, but what’s the catch? The catch is that understanding only the important data attributes is difficult. Researchers spend a lot of time in selecting different data attributes and training them and evaluating the model. After a number of iterations, researchers can say that they have found a working model.
An example of this could be classifying movie reviews in positive and negative categories. For example, in the paper “Movie review mining: A comparison between supervised and unsupervised classification approaches. “[1], the authors have identified phrases and POS tags which are the main characteristics of a negative review. Next, they do a semantic-based clustering(not by matching exact words, but checking semantic similarity), and group all the existing reviews in positive and negative classes. Once this unsupervised clustering is done, new movie reviews could be classified by simply using something like K-Nearest Neighbor, with these two groups.
In a second example, the paper “Unsupervised Named-Entity Recognition: Generating Gazetteers and Resolving Ambiguity” [2] explains the extraction of named entities from text with unsupervised clustering approach. This is something which is traditionally done with a supervised approach. But, the same output of unsupervised clustering approach as a supervised approach here gives us a hint that identifying classes could be done in an unsupervised manner as well.
Everything explained in this post are completely the author’s thoughts, and may not completely align with what people think in general. I would love to know what other people think about this. Do you agree or disagree?
References: | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/can-all-classification-problems-be-solved-by-unsupervised-clustering-3a9f3e1f72c0 | ['Tech Evangelist'] | 2019-02-27 14:39:21.296000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Supervised Learning', 'Classification', 'Unsupervised Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
He Admonished Her For Saying We Have A Rape Culture | There are still so many misconceptions about rape and sexual assault that it would be difficult to address each one in-depth in the course of a short piece on the topic, but here are a few of the major ones that contribute to an entirely faulty understanding of what a rape culture actually is.
Myth: Sexual assault and rape are vastly different crimes that shouldn’t be linked together under one umbrella. Rape is much more traumatic and much more devastating, where something like groping might simply be annoying.
Truth: Sexual violence of any kind is an attack on the body autonomy of the victim. Violations of respect for body autonomy are dehumanizing. It’s not so much the unwanted touching itself, but what it communicates to the person being touched about their right to control their own personal space and what happens to their body. The purpose of rape, sexual assault, and unwanted touch of any kind is to convey to someone else (even if it’s subconscious) that they are a thing and that their body does not belong to them. It’s an act of exerting domination. This is why rape is such a common weapon of war, both historically and in the present day. Rape is not about sexual desire; it’s using sex as a weapon to demonstrate power.
Different people suffer different kinds of after-effects when they have been subjected to this type of dehumanization, but PTSD, sleep disorders, depression, eating disorders, and panic attacks may affect any survivor of sexual violence (including harassment that is strictly verbal), not only those who have been raped. Mental health professionals group sexual assault and rape together because they are all part of the same dynamic.
Myth: Most women who are raped are attacked by strangers who often use overt violence or weapons to subdue their victim.
Truth: Less than 20% of rapes are perpetrated by strangers. 39% are perpetrated by an acquaintance, and 33% are perpetrated by a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend. 48% of rapes take place in the home, and although violence or weapons may be involved, coercion and simply refusing to take “no” for an answer are more common.
“According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), date rapes are among the most common forms of rape cases. Date rape most commonly takes place among college students when alcohol is involved or date rape drugs are taken. One of the most targeted groups are women between the ages of 16 to 24.”
Myth: Men are rarely raped, and it’s not possible for a woman to rape a man.
Truth: Most rapes are perpetrated by men, and about 10% of rape victims are male, but women do sometimes rape or sexually assault men, as well as other women.
Rape doesn’t need to be legal, it doesn’t need to be seen as a normal thing or a good thing in order for it to be such a common element of the culture that it qualifies as a rape culture. You can’t equate it with other crimes that also take place frequently because the way those crimes are viewed and prosecuted is entirely different.
A culture where victims are stigmatized and attacked, as well as routinely asked what they were wearing or what they did to bring this upon themselves is also part of a rape culture.
A culture where every 37 seconds an American is sexually assaulted, where 1 in 16 women say their first sexual experience was forced, where out of every 1000 rapes, only 6 results in incarceration — that’s a rape culture. No one shames mugging victims, or accuses them of making it up. There is no pervasive cultural narrative that says that most mugging victims are vindictive liars out to harm some innocent guy with false accusations but there is such a pervasive narrative about rape (despite the fact that false accusation rates are somewhere between 2–10%) and are nearly always perpetrated by someone who fits a particular profile for doing so.
Myth: A significant percentage of rapes involve a scenario where a woman rescinds consent sometime in the middle of the sexual encounter or there is some misunderstanding about whether consent has been given.
Truth: Rape is an act of asserting domination. It is not a misunderstanding or a change of consent. A Harvard medical school study of forced sexual initiation determined that 1 in 16 women had their first sexual experience against their will. Some 50% of women surveyed said the perpetrator was larger or older. More than 46% of the women were held down. In 56% of the instances, men used verbal pressure. Men used physical threats more than 26% of the time and caused physical harm in more than 25% of the instances. Some 22% of the women were drugged.”(emphasis mine) CNN Health
“We feel it is accurate to describe these events as rape,” said Dr. Laura Hawks, a primary care physician and research fellow at Harvard Medical School who co-authored the study.
Myth: So few rapes are prosecuted or result in convictions because it’s often one person’s word against the other and it’s just too difficult to determine what actually happened.
Truth: Although it’s true that oftentimes rape victims do not behave how we might expect them to, most of that is well understood by neuroscience and by trauma experts (although not the general public).
“The victims, most of them women, often had trouble recalling an attack or couldn’t give a chronological account of it. Some expressed no emotion. Others smiled or laughed as they described being assaulted. “Unlike any other crime I responded to in my career, there was always this thought that a rape report was a false report,” says Tremblay, who was an investigator in Burlington’s sex crimes unit.”
Nearly everything that is commonly believed about how people “should” behave in these situations is completely wrong. Beyond fight and flight, common human responses to trauma are also freeze or fawn (trying to appease the attacker).
Because of this, as well as other societal preconceptions, rape victims are often treated with anything from disbelief to outright antagonism. When anyone alleges any other kind of crime, we always start off by believing them, up until such time that further investigation reveals that we should do otherwise. This is very often not true in the case of rape, one of the indications that we do indeed have a rape culture.
When Amber Wyatt was raped 12 years ago, she immediately went and told fellow party-goers and the police. Her physical exam showed trauma consistent to rape and she had the semen of one of her attackers in her body. But despite all of that, her community, from law enforcement to fellow students and parents, actually turned on her, rather than bringing her attackers to justice.
When interviewed for the Amber Wyatt story, former Fort Worth Police Department sergeant, Cheryl Johnson, said it was common practice to not pursue cases or for grand juries not to indict, despite strong evidence of a crime.
“We had cases where there were photographs and confessions from the suspects that were no-billed,” Johnson told me in 2015 in the tidy living room of her Fort Worth home. One case in particular stuck with her: A man admitted to giving a woman drugs that would render her unconscious — and then raping her after she had passed out and photographing the act. The victim was sent the photographs of her own rape, which she turned over to police. Still, the grand jury decided not to indict.
Myth: Our society takes rape as a crime so seriously that perpetrators are frequently brought to justice and serve long sentences.
Truth: There is no other crime where judges are so often reluctant to give the appropriate sentence because they don’t want to “ruin the life” of a promising young man, even though he’s already ruined the life of a promising young woman. There is no other crime where if the perpetrator took pictures of himself committing the crime and sent them to the victim, that the grand jury would still decline to indict.
The newspaper headlines are all too often full of stories of men who pleaded guilty to rape who got little to no jail time. Brock Turner was only one of these. There are dozens of others from the past few years alone. Most of these are white men. Black men tend to have the book thrown at them. When white men do this, particularly upwardly mobile young white men, it tends to be looked upon as boys will be boys rather than as the criminal behavior that it so clearly is. | https://medium.com/inside-of-elle-beau/he-admonished-her-for-saying-we-have-a-rape-culture-2fc3438c80c | ['Elle Beau'] | 2020-12-19 22:39:33.515000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Rape', 'Rape Culture', 'Life', 'This Happened To Me'] |
More powerful chain of crisis will come soon with covid-2019? | More powerful chain of crisis will come soon with covid-2019?
Covid-19 maybe an signal of chain of crisis which will happen in near future.
We all have realized that Human can’t control Covid-19 even with various vaccines made by so-called powerful countries such as USA, CHINA, RUSSIA.
This is the first crisis which is out of control of human.
Can covid-19 be ended by vaccine or police and law in near future?
Covid-19 will not be ended and it will be live with humans until human disappear in earth.
The First Reason is: It is said that vaccine is not able to protect peoples from new Corona virus called variant of original corona virous.
There are founded many new-variant virous in recent days.
The Second Reason is: Many Babies are being born in a days so that There are new peoples where corona virous can live.
The Third Reason is: All countries and governments can’t apply very strict rules like China or NK.
These 3 major factor is enough to prove that covid-19 will never exit.
It will suffer humans but will not able to destroy them in this earth.
As soon. stronger crisis will come up soon and It might destroy humans.
Let’s see what is that. Climate Change will be next crisis that can be more dangerous to human.
Bill Gates( founder of MS) said that we should help small farmers survive in climate change. Climate change will decrease profit of Farmers in the world and They are the Most vulnerable people in the world when climate is changed. Even though their farming business is small and their profit is small, if they are failed and they can’t do farming, It may destroy whole economy of world. It is true because food is the first condition that human requires to survive.
What can we do to avoid climate crisis?
I can say we can’t avoid climate crisis.
The reason is:
First: To stop climate change or decrease speed of climate change, we have to stop usage of fossil fuel at first. To stop usage of fossil fuel , All governments have to apply much more strict and powerful rules than ones of covid-19 protecting rules.
As we have seen so far, All governments are not willing to or not able to apply strict covid-19 rules because humans don’t want it.
so It is impossible to apply more strict rules to stop usage of fossil fuel.
Second: Most of presidents and kings of countries are all over 60 years old. It’s very clear that they don’t have interests on climate change because they have short lifetime left.
Third: If stop usage of fossil fuel, All economy will be destroyed. so Human don’t want stop usage of fossil fuel. Nobody don’t want to lose his regular job.
3. Fossil Fuel Lack Crisis will come soon before 2100–01–01.
Anybody knows that There is no enough amount of fuel for human to live for more than 50 years.
It is true that if we keep burning fossil fuels at our current rate, it is generally estimated that all our fossil fuels will be depleted by 2060.
What will happen after this crisis?
4. Next Crisis will be World War III.
World War 3 will get started and It will be a war to occupy regions where energy sources exist like fossil fuel or gas.
and It will be a nuclear war between strong and powerful countries which has nuclear weapons.
It will destroy environment of Earth. It will pollute the air and land and destroy ozone layer.
About the next crisis, I will talk you soon later. | https://medium.com/@sld377575/more-powerful-chain-of-crisis-will-come-soon-with-covid-2019-340128d92703 | ['Dastan Slambekov'] | 2021-04-25 10:59:57.113000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Environment', 'Crisis', 'Earth'] |
The Worst PS4 Games: Aces of the Luftwaffe | I’m normally an easy mark for an arcade shooter, or “shmup” as some folks like to call them. Give me a horizontally or vertically scrolling background, a ship or plane of some kind, and hordes of enemies to blow up, and I’ll happily give you hours of my time.
Both the Android and iOS platforms are full of this style of game, featuring original entries and classic arcade ports. Many of the newer titles crafted for mobile play improve the core mechanics with skill trees, endless piles of levels, responsive touch input, and a variety of characters to unlock.
Aces of the Luftwaffe is one such attempt at a progression-infused shmup, developed by Handy Games. It currently sells for $3 dollars on iOS, and has a respectable handful of vertical scrolling stages. Although it takes a little grinding to get to the end (or an infusion of additional real cash), its fun controls and unlocks make it one of many “okay” choices in the portable arcade shooter space. | https://xander51.medium.com/the-worst-ps4-games-aces-of-the-luftwaffe-cec484b26 | ['Alex Rowe'] | 2020-04-30 22:52:01.310000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Technology', 'Mobile', 'Videogames', 'Tech'] |
Prototyping is the shortcut to the success your team needs | Prototyping is the shortcut to the success your team needs
So, you’ve got your team together for a brainstorming session where the the blue sky thinking begins. The conversation probably centers around what might this thing be and/or what should this thing be. However, after about 20 minutes the conversation devolves quickly into a philosophical debate that leads to nowhere where team members check out. This is the point where you need a prototype.
Prototyping helps key stakeholders and other organization members align quickly around an idea quickly poking holes into the ideas and showing problems that block it from coming to life.
You might have heard all the assumptions about how the should be this way because that’s what X Company is doing. Yet, a conversation hasn’t been had about why X Company did what they’re doing, who their market is, and what research they performed to go to market. A prototype can clarify all of this information and more.
Guerilla prototyping doesn’t have to be fancy.
Whether you’re making a fancy digital prototype in Framer or Figma or you’ve drawn up a mobile phone on a piece of paper with some tap options to take to office mates, even the simplest prototype can provide information both on usability, generate further divergent ideas, and give you that initial feedback to start to carve away at the design. If nothing else, you’re going to come away surprised at the findings and potentially have your team’s assumptions validated.
Your prototype will give you a confident platform shortcutting the back and forth convergence and divergence in the design process all while refining the idea further. I’ve built an entire user flow before having it eventually turn into a product idea I didn’t even imagine would be built all because we went straight from ideation to mockups to learn as much as possible in a short time span. Prototypes give my team a platform to discuss technologies to leverage, ways to scale, the true meaning of the product’s purpose, and the business and user goals it might solve. That initial brainstorming conversation led to the fragmentation of ideas now becoming solidified and documented via a prototype allowing everyone to agree on the holistic and realistic success criterias.
For more on prototyping, follow along here on Medium at: http://jshmllr.medium.com/follow and jshmllr.com | https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/prototyping-is-the-shortcut-to-success-your-team-needs-6eaf880e55cd | ['Joshua Miller'] | 2020-12-06 13:08:44.277000+00:00 | ['Design Thinking', 'Prototyping', 'Design', 'UX', 'Figma'] |
Exploring a Different Kind of Calculus | Exploring a Different Kind of Calculus
Since Leibniz and Newton developed Calculus, the scientific world and all its disciplines have not been the same.
From physics and engineering to biology and mathematics, calculus permeates through the modern sciences as an indispensable tool in the search for truth and inventions.
However, there are different ways of looking at it. From a physical and practical view, it has to do with the concept of rate of change and that leads to applicability in physics through laws written down in the form of differential equations.
From a purely mathematical perspective, we have several ways of looking at it. The act of differentiating a function can be seen as a transformation from one space of functions to another. I won’t go into detail about function spaces and what the word “space” is covering, but it suffices to say that a set of functions displays some of the same properties as a space of vectors with an underlying field e.g. ℝ.
This transformation is a certain kind of mapping d/dx with the following two important properties
These properties together are called linearity.
In analogy, the real function f(x) = kx where k is some real number also satisfies the linearity conditions above in the sense that
It also bears an analogy to linear transformations in the subject of linear algebra where the objects of study are linear transformations between vector spaces e.g. matrices. And matrices satisfy the linearity conditions as well.
The first property is a very important one and what this is intuitively saying is that it preserves the structure of a function space with respect to the operation of addition.
So this is like a dictionary between two worlds. Translating additive structure from one world to the other. This kind of function is called a homomorphism.
What we will do in this article is defining another kind of operator. A transformation between function spaces that instead of resembling the linear function above, resembles the logarithm.
We shall also derive the various rules analogous to the differential operator defined above such as the product rule, chain rule, etc. It turns out that our operator also displays homomorphic behavior but from a multiplicative function space to an additive one.
The operator that I am talking about is called the logarithmic derivative and is defined by the following
Let’s state some of the nice properties that this operator has before using it.
A natural question is what it does to constants. But as is easily shown,
Since it inherits that from the normal differential operator.
The most important property is that it takes products to sums and divisions to subtractions.
Which you can show using the definition and the usual rules of differentiation.
When a constant is multiplied on a function, the constant vanishes when we logarithmically differentiate it.
This also means that we can change the order of subtraction between functions in the operator argument i.e.
Let’s now state the chain rule for this operator.
The derivation of this is quite simple.
It is quite nice how well it resembles the chain rule for the differential operator. We also have the power rule:
In particular, we have the following two useful formulas
At this point, you might be wondering what the eigen functions of this operator are.
Of course, for the normal differential operator, it is the scaled (natural) exponential function in the sense that
but for the logarithmic derivative, it turns out that
for all constants c, making these functions eigen elements in the function space we defined the operator on.
Now that we have some rules of the logarithmic derivative in our toolbox let’s use them.
Let’s first find the logarithmic derivative of the sine function. Using the definition, we quickly obtain
You might remember that the sine function can be written as an infinite product.
Now, using the above rules we can transform the infinite product into a series by taking the logarithmic derivative on both sides.
We get,
We have used several of the rules defined above. The power rule, the product to sum, commuting subtraction, vanishing constant, and the chain rule, respectively.
Technically, we need an argument to be sure that the product to sum rule holds on the infinite product. It turns out that the following is enough.
I will state it first and then explain it after.
The factors inside the product need to be holomorphic (i.e. analytic) on an open subset D of the complex plane
None of the factors is identically zero on D
The product converges locally uniformly to a function f
If these conditions are true, then the corresponding series that we get by taking the logarithmic derivative on both sides converges locally uniformly on the following set
The backslash here means set-difference.
This was a little technical. What does it mean?
First of all, that a complex function is holomorphic means that it is “complex differentiable". That turns out to be a stronger requirement than real differentiation and in fact, if a complex function is differentiable then it is differentiable infinitely many times which means that it is analytic (i.e. it has a power series expansion). This is not true for real functions in general!
That the factors are not identically zero on D simply means that it does not map an open set to zero.
It turns out that for a holomorphic function, if it is zero on any open subset, of an open connected set D ⊆ ℂ on which the function is defined, then it is zero everywhere on D! That is no matter how small the subset of D is. This is not true for real functions.
So informally speaking, a holomorphic function has global information in an arbitrarily small subset of it’s domain.
The Identity Theorem above is extremely important and is used in the proof of the fact that some analytic functions have an analytic continuation.
The locally uniform convergence is a more technical requirement so I will not write it out in full detail but it suffices to say that it is a weaker requirement than uniform convergence but a stronger requirement than pointwise convergence, thus if the product converges uniformly, then it converges locally uniformly.
I’ll leave the details as an exercise for the reader.
If we get back to the resulting series, it would be quite nice if we hadn’t that π lying around in the denominator, but a substitution and a multiplication reveals this identity in a more famous form, namely
Leonhard Euler was the first to find this series. He also used the infinite product representation of the sine function. You can read more about Euler’s beautiful discoveries here.
The logarithmic derivative operator is being used extensively in complex analysis and analytic number theory and is a very important tool in the study of The Riemann Zeta Function. It is also used together with contour integration to calculate the number of zeros and poles of meromorphic functions in closed contours.
Using our rules for this operator, we can find a lot of other series from infinite products.
How about you give it a try? | https://www.cantorsparadise.com/exploring-a-different-kind-of-calculus-23204e02d545 | ['Kasper Müller'] | 2020-12-21 06:00:55.541000+00:00 | ['Math', 'Engineering', 'Physics', 'Mathematics', 'Science'] |
Ford is known as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. But was he such a great leader at all? How do you spot a weak leader?Was Henry Ford a Good Leader? | Ford is known as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. But was he such a great leader at all? How do you spot a weak leader?Was Henry Ford a Good Leader? Maximilian Perkmann Follow Dec 14 · 4 min read
There is an often-told story of what happened when some intellectuals denounced Henry Ford, claiming he didn’t know much. Ford challenged them to come and ask him anything they liked. He listened to their questions and, when they were through, he simply reached for several phones on his desk and called in some of his bright assistants and asked them to give the answers the intellectuals sought.
Model T — Pixabay.com
He ended by telling the panel that he’d rather hire smart people to come up with answers, so he could leave his mind clear to do more important tasks, tasks like thinking.
One of the quotes credited to Ford goes: “Thinking is the hardest work there is. That is why so few people engage in it.”
Was he such a great leader?
The Other Perspective
John Maxwell poses the story of Henry Ford as a negative example in his chapter about the leadership principle of “empowerment”. According to him, the company lived for a long time on the revolution that has been the Model T and its innovative form of production. Henry Ford has invented assembly line production with the Model T.
However, the company faced a hard time with Henry Ford in the following years. By blocking the ideas of capable employees and with his eccentric behavior Ford almost destroyed the company. Only his son Edsel Ford was able to rescue the company. Because of Edsel, several employees remained in the company. Henry Ford’s grandson “Henry Ford II” took over the management in the next generation. In the beginning, he made some very good decisions and, above all, hired excellent managers. Unfortunately, he fell into negative patterns too, causing some great damage through intrigue. You can read the exciting details about this in the 21 Leadership Principles. I do not want to go into more details, but I just want everyone to have a serious look in the mirror. Do you see some parallels to the Ford family?
Are You a Weak Leader?
A weak leader is driven by fear. The fear of no longer being the center of attention, the fear of being replaced, and the fear of losing control.
Photo by Alfred Aloushy on Unsplash
In fact, a great leader does not need to fear replacement. When people lead excellently, an exciting paradox comes into play: those who work to make themselves superfluous are given more and more responsibility.
Provide a safe framework
The most valuable thing a leader can give is a safe framework where they don’t have to worry about things that aren’t their job. Everyone has a limited amount of resources in their head. So if someone needs their brain capacity to manage uncertainty, they won’t have that capacity available for creative performance. If a leader provides a safe framework, then employees can concentrate fully on their creative work.
Theodore Roosevelt simply says that “the best boss is the one who has enough brains to select good leaders who can achieve his goals, and then does not interfere with their work.”
Insecurity in Leaders
How do you spot insecure leaders?
Resistance to change
Change means uncertainty. That’s why “weak” people often struggle with change. However, self-confident people are aware that preventing change is much more dangerous in the long run than the short-term uncertainty of a change process. Even if a change does not bring the desired result, we can always continue to change until it fits again.
Lack of Self-confidence
If you don’t know who you are, you can’t stand firm when there is a problem. Being self-aware and being able to confidently represent decisions is a must for every leader.
Micro-Management
Most of the time, the good development of an organization depends on the leader doing a few big things well. Insecure leaders tend to get lost in a thousand small details and “micromanaging” their employees.
Competition
Insecure leaders become nervous when others increase in authority in the organization. As a result, they try to reduce their influence or to
Take Away
“Leadership, is the ability to bring out the best in people. The technical skills of business are easy. The hard part is working with people.” — Rich Dad, Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad Poor Dad
Working with people, taking responsibility and trust are some serious skills when being in a leadership position. To conclude, I want to bring up another quote from Harry Truman, 33rd president of the United States:
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit — Harry S. Truman
Interested in leadership? Have a look at my article Agile Leadership: A Mindset, Not a Method | https://medium.com/illumination/was-henry-ford-a-good-leader-311fc36e7381 | ['Maximilian Perkmann'] | 2020-12-20 21:37:07.998000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Leadership', 'Management'] |
Anti-Vaxxers Taking a Moral High Ground Are Hypocritical and Dangerous | Disseminating disinformation aside, whether inadvertently or otherwise, is one thing. Education is key, and I will delve into that aspect of this madness in a future article.
For now, I want to discuss the prevalent issue of the perceived morality of this equation.
Personally, I do not believe morality courses through the veins of anyone who continues to support the current presidential administration, under whose watch nearly 300,000 Americans have died, a large percentage of them needlessly, at the present rate of one person every 30 seconds.
The evangelical pro-Trump crowd is today having a field day espousing their opposition to Covid vaccinations on moral grounds.
Why? Because while the president touts the “warp speed” of the vaccine approvals, and takes credit for their delivery, he also touts by his actions not having to follow mask, social distancing or other protocol due to the aforementioned “civil liberties.”
It’s a mixed message. The latter wins.
The moral argument regards fetal tissue being used in Covid vaccinations, or used for research in their creation.
Here’s something provocative: I don’t care. I’m taking the damn vaccination, regardless. Here’s something else: It’s not true.
Fetal tissue has been cultured — lab grown — for use of vaccine development based on cell strains for decades. But even if it wasn’t, and there was existing human fetal tissue in the mix, I’d take the vaccine.
I’ll speak plainly. Last I checked, we cannot bring aborted fetuses back to life. In the event recently aborted fetal tissue was actually used in these cases — though all indications are this is not the case — moral issues aside, if those fetuses can now save (millions of) lives, does that not matter?
I would love to hear your thoughts … | https://medium.com/@joeleisenberg/anti-vaxxers-taking-a-moral-high-ground-are-hypocritical-3470f7cad59b | ['Joel Eisenberg'] | 2020-12-05 22:29:39.987000+00:00 | ['Illness', 'Vaccines', 'Abortion', 'Culture', 'Covid 19'] |
Venus Hum — Ambassadors of Goodwill | Venus Hum — the electro-pop trio of Kip Kubin, Tony Miracle and Annette Strean — may very well be Nashville, Tennessee’s ambassadors of goodwill. At once, they defy expectations of what a “Nashville” band sounds like and represent all the great things about the city’s music scene. Though no Nashville-bred pop-electronica movement surrounds them, Venus Hum share the diligence, intelligence and superb song-craft of every great band from the city.
Miracle and Kubin create lush soundscapes on laptops, synthesizers, guitars, bicycle wheels, oscillating fans and anything else handy. Over the pulsing and swirling music, Strean sings incredibly visual lyrics in bright, hopeful melodies. Comparisons to the Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, and Heaven 17 chase the band and critics drop such heavyweight names as Kate Bush, Tori Amos, and Bjork when describing Strean’s voice. In such vaunted company, the band’s hometown should be but a footnote, yet it persists as the facet most interesting to first-time listeners.
Fortunately, the band is happy to discuss their city and gathers in a small coffee shop nestled between a guitar store, record shop, and Country & Western clothier to delve into the story of their existence.
Kip Kubin, tall and composed, arrives first. Kubin came to Nashville from New Jersey. He had no background in music and in fact had already developed what would become a life-long aversion to pianos. Instead, he preferred synthetic sounds. For Kubin, “there wasn’t music until electronic music. I didn’t care about anything until I heard a Tomita record at my friend’s house. That’s when I realized that music was worth something.” Kubin met Tony Miracle through mutual friends. When Miracle gave Kubin an Erasure album, it sealed their friendship and portended their future partnership.
Annette Strean, the delicate girl with the big, broad voice that carries Venus Hum’s bubbling tunes, arrives next. She is the only member of the band who actually drinks coffee, bringing the total number of coffee drinkers at the table to one. Strean moved to Nashville from Whitefish, Montana. Her childhood sounds somewhat idyllic in her descriptions — family gathered ‘round, singing hymns with little Annette belting show tunes out to the rafters. Soon, she discovered The Cure and Siouxie Sioux and her eclectic influences took a wide detour through 80s synth and gloom pop. Her love of different musical styles collided in electronica. Says she, “I think of electronic music as so influenced by different kinds of beats and world music and sounds. I think the idea is the same — making a beautiful sound out of something that maybe traditionally you wouldn’t.”
Tony Miracle, the most rock ’n’ roll member of the group with his spiked hair and blunt assessments of the music scene, has the most un-rock ’n’ roll reason for arriving last — taking care of the baby. Miracle moved to Nashville from Cincinnati, Ohio to study music at Belmont University. His earliest musical influences came in the unlikely shapes of The Steve Miller Band and Styx. “That American rock is how I got into electronic music,” Miracle declares. “‘Jet Airliner’ had a minute and a half long synthesizer intro and radio back in those days would play that. It was just this weird Moog freak-out.” A guitar-player since age 10, Miracle forced himself to listen through a Thomas Dolby record, and afterwards, his vision changed. “When other kids would fantasize about scoring the winning goal, I would fantasize about making the coolest synthesizer sound of all time,” he says.
Nashville, as one may have guessed, is a city of musical emigrants. Publicly dominated by the country music industry, Nashville has built an infrastructure that easily supports its broad and varied underground music scene. After all, the studios, clubs and shops are there for anyone to patronize. Strean agrees, “Anybody can make money as a waitress and go get an hour in a studio.”
The long history of Nashville’s great songwriters is another boon. “Because that bar is higher as far as songwriting, it does make you work to always be better. You have to be. There’s going to be an amazing singer at the pizza place next to your house,” says Strean.
Of the competition in the city, Miracle is cynically positive, “There’s so much crap here that you really do have to rise above it and that’s good. I think it makes for better artistry.”
The stigma of Nashville’s often over-marketed and under-dignified mainstream music industry causes some bands to disown the city. “I think the biggest trap of bands from Nashville is the pressure to pretend they’re not,” Kubin remarks. He adds, somewhat philosophically, “It doesn’t matter where you’re from. You do what you do wherever you are.”
During the morning in the coffee shop, the bright sun disappeared in a powerful thunderstorm and has returned to turn the rain into a steam bath. With a musical landscape just as varied and lively as its weather, Nashville’s once one-dimensional reputation may soon cease to be a point of curiosity in a band’s bio. And with a solid, fascinating album, Big Beautiful Sky, guaranteed to cross more than just geographical borders, Venus Hum may soon gather to talk only music. | https://medium.com/hey-todd-a/venus-hum-ambassadors-of-goodwill-6335c648723b | ['Todd A'] | 2018-07-26 17:40:21.461000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Nashville', 'Interviews', 'Zine'] |
Biden is Unhappy of Tech team Because of the Cyber Attack | In a historic first, President-elect Joe Biden will nominate Rep. Deb Haaland to lead the Department of the Interior, his transition team announced Thursday evening.
If confirmed by the Senate, Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, would be the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary. Fittingly, she’d do so as head of the agency responsible for not only managing the nation’s public lands but also honoring its treaties with the Indigenous people from whom those lands were taken.
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In a statement, the Biden-Harris transition team called Haaland a “barrier-breaking public servant who has spent her career fighting for families, including in Tribal Nations, rural communities, and communities of color,” who will be “ready on day one to protect our environment and fight for a clean energy future.”
In a tweet, Haaland acknowledged the unique “voice” she’ll bring. “Growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household made me fierce,” she wrote. “I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”
She understands at a very real level — at a generational level, in her case going back 30 generations — what it is to care for American lands,” says Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities.
Haaland’s nomination is a win for tribal governments, environmental groups and some progressive lawmakers who had been lobbying for the New Mexico lawmaker to lead the Department of the Interior. Her fellow House Natural Resources Committee member and rumored Interior candidate, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., wrote a letter to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus recommending Haaland for the post.
“It is well past time that an Indigenous person brings history full circle at the Department of Interior,” he wrote.
The Interior Department upholds the federal government’s responsibilities to the country’s 574 federally recognized Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages. Its roughly 70,000-person staff also oversees one-fifth of all the land in the U.S. as well as 1.7 billion acres of the country’s coasts. It manages national parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands, protecting biologically and culturally important sites while also shepherding natural resource development.
The Biden administration is expected to take a much different approach to natural resources than its predecessor, which championed oil and gas development above all else on federal lands. Biden has promised to shift the U.S. away from climate-warming fossil fuels toward renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
In an interview before her nomination, Haaland told NPR that would be her priority, too.
“Climate change is the challenge of our lifetime, and it’s imperative that we invest in an equitable, renewable energy economy,” she said.
Haaland’s experience as a lawmaker in fossil fuel-dependent New Mexico, and as the former head of the state’s Democratic Party, leaves her well-positioned to navigate that transition, environmental advocates say. The state has one of the most aggressive climate plans in the country.
“You have to understand the complexity of public lands management,” says Demis Foster, executive director of Conservation Voters New Mexico. “And I can’t imagine a better representation of that than here in New Mexico. We have a vast network of public lands. We have extraordinary biodiversity, and we have a very unique cultural heritage.”
State lawmakers also have to balance that, she says, with the “extraordinary force and influence of extractive industry.”
The New Mexico Oil & Gas Association called on Haaland to take a “balanced approach.”
“Responsible energy development on federal lands is a vital part of our state’s economy,” the group said in a statement. “The policies enacted by the next Interior Secretary,” it said, “will determine how much or little our state is able to support critical needs like public schools, healthcare, and first responders.”
Mike Sommers, chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement that oil and gas resources “will be critical to rebuilding our economy and maintaining America’s status as a global energy leader.”
Haaland has echoed Biden in saying that a transition to renewable energy is a job creator, which makes it a no-brainer during the economic uncertainty spurred by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Haaland was a vocal critic of many of those moves. As chair of a House Natural Resources subcommittee that oversees Interior, she has led hearings on everything from the Trump administration’s handling of national park reopenings during the coronavirus pandemic to its treaty-obligated communications with tribal governments for projects that affect their lands
“Tribal consultation is basically nonexistent during this Trump administration,” Haaland said. “President-elect Biden has promised to consult with tribes, which I think will help immensely with some of the environmental issues that he wants to address.”
ndigenous people are also disproportionately affected by environmental pollution, says Kandi White, the Native energy and climate campaign director at the Indigenous Environmental Network.
“Fossil fuel development, uranium development, clear-cutting of forests — all these things that have been happening on tribal lands were exacerbated under the [Trump] administration and need to be looked at,” she says.
As a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota, White says, she’s seen the effects of fracking and other development firsthand.
She thinks it will be impactful to have a Native American woman such as Haaland, who understands the complex government-to-government relationship between Indigenous people and the U.S., leading the Department of the Interior. | https://medium.com/@pinkydaroga/biden-is-unhappy-of-tech-team-because-of-the-cyber-attack-c5f6c2b6f97b | [] | 2020-12-20 20:14:17.344000+00:00 | ['Hacker', 'Tech', 'Cyber', 'Hacking', 'Joe Biden'] |
Want to Help New Families? Start by Supporting Mothers’ Mental Health | Want to Help New Families? Start by Supporting Mothers’ Mental Health
Statistics say one thing about postpartum mood disorders, but social media can say another
“Are you just loving being a mommy?” my friend asked me, cradling my newborn son in her arms.
The words lingered between us as I pursed my lips and tried to figure out how to respond. My son was 4 weeks old, and I wasn’t sure what I was feeling except tired, overwhelmed and numb. I knew the socially acceptable answer was a gushing “Yes! It’s the best.” But that felt hollow and foreign, so instead I broke the tension by saying, “Ask me on a day when I’ve had more than three hours of sleep.”
Four long months later I was diagnosed with postpartum depression and anxiety. With the right support, education and combination of medication and therapy, I began to emerge from the dark cloud that hung over my transition to motherhood.
Even as I started to heal, I felt alone in my experience with an emotionally challenging postpartum experience. There didn’t seem to be any space for me in the common narrative of motherhood. In a world of gushing Instagram posts about “bundles of joy” and “lives changed for the better,” my story of grief and losing myself just didn’t seem to fit into this happy mold.
Statistics say one thing about postpartum mood disorders, social media says another
I felt like I couldn’t identify with the blissful messages of joy other new moms were sharing on social media, the place where I found myself spending a lot of time as I was physically homebound in the early days of learning to care of a newborn.
But while I may have felt alone in my emotionally challenging postpartum experience, I certainly wasn’t: Postpartum mood disorders are one of the most common complications of childbirth, affecting one in seven new moms, according to the American Psychological Association. While the medical community and society at large have made huge strides in recognizing and treating maternal mental health conditions, there is still quite a bit of work to be done to support mothers.
“This is a huge life transition, becoming a mom. We treat it in common culture like it should just be easy and blissful and the most natural thing in the world,” says Kate Rope, author of the book Strong As a Mother, a guide to prioritizing mom’s health and wellbeing during pregnancy and postpartum.
After Rope’s own rough transition to motherhood 11 years ago, she was inspired to normalize the range of experiences someone might encounter and to offer solutions for the way forward.
“When you’re expecting a baby, you may have a ton of books on your nightstand and none of them are about you,” Rope says. “A lot of them are filled with strongly worded and conflicting advice, and it’s all focused on baby, almost like you’re producing a product.”
During pregnancy, moms are inundated with information about how best to optimize their developing baby’s health, Rope explains, from what to eat, to what medications are off-limits to playing music for the baby in the womb to foster brain development. That string of advice carries over once baby is born and becomes part of a larger message that a mom’s needs are secondary, she says.
“It becomes this virtue of perfection that is not realistic,” Rope says. “We’ve decided that any cost to mom is worth enduring to reduce medical risks for baby.”
Rope stresses the need to recognize that a mom’s well-being is central to positive outcomes for her children, saying “we need to look at them as a unit with as much kindness and compassion for the mom as for the baby.”
Rethinking the care for mothers
To start, we need increased access to mental health services and specifically, professionals who specialize in maternal mental health, says Rope.
We also need better structures in place to help identify and support moms who may be struggling: While the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) recommends providers screen women for depression both during pregnancy and postpartum, that is often left to obstetricians and gynecologists. However, mothers are more likely to encounter their child’s pediatrician in the early months, notes Carly Snyder, a reproductive and perinatal psychiatrist based in New York City.
Some pediatricians are catching on — in fact, it was my son’s pediatrician who recognized my symptoms and encouraged me to get help. Yet, Snyder says more training is necessary to help these doctors be equipped to refer women to mental health providers.
“It can be tricky for a provider to screen, but then not know where to send someone,” Snyder says. “There needs to be more general education for medical students, OBs, pediatricians. Everyone needs a basic understanding of perinatal mood disorders. It’s coming, but we’re not there yet.”
Recognizing the link between physical and emotional recovery
One of the most common misconceptions about postpartum mood disorders is that depression is the only condition, Snyder says, when in fact people need to be aware of the spectrum of mood disorders and their symptoms, ranging from depression and anxiety to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Any of these can develop during the postpartum period.
Even for those who may not develop a clinical mood disorder, the body undergoes several physical, chemical and hormonal changes during pregnancy, delivery and postpartum, Snyder says — and all of these changes can affect a mom’s physical and mental health.
“Delivery takes a huge toll on your body, it’s like running several marathons. In our country sadly, women are discharged within a couple days,” Snyder says. “So that toll of delivering the baby and running three marathons and caring for the baby isn’t alleviated, and then you go home and you’re exhausted and it’s all a lot. And for those who receive C-sections, that is a major surgery, yet we really don’t give women the opportunity to heal.”
Brook Bolen, a mom of one living in Asheville, North Carolina, says she felt ashamed by the anxiety and fear she experienced after her child was born, which led her to suffer in silence for nine months.
“The mainstream narrative that we have is that this is a joyous time, and I think that narrative really clouded my understanding,” Bolen says. “I didn’t know how individual of an experience it is and how many women struggle. I wasn’t feeling that joy and it reinforced this notion that I wasn’t supposed to do this, that this [motherhood] was a mistake.”
Once Bolen sought treatment at the encouragement of a friend and began taking prescribed antidepressants, everything changed she says, and she was able to enjoy her baby. Her daughter is now 5 years old, and while she didn’t feel she could talk openly about her experience in the beginning, she says doing so now has helped her find community.
“In the experiences I’ve had with other mothers, I’ve learned that many of them may not feel like they can say it publicly, but they will pull you aside and say thank you, I went through that too and no one talks about it,” Bolen says.
For Rope, increased awareness about the symptoms of postpartum mood disorders coupled with the willingness to seek treatment helped when she welcomed her second child.
“I’ve gotten over the hump of thinking it’s a selfish pursuit to take care of myself. I now realize it’s something I have a right to as a person and that it’s good for everybody if I do,” Rope says. “As a mom, your mental health matters. You deserve to have the support you need.”
Resources and support for postpartum mood disorders are available through Postpartum Support International or via their hotline, 1–800–944–4773. | https://medium.com/motherly/want-to-help-new-families-start-by-supporting-mothers-mental-health-c75e20d824cc | ['Erin Heger'] | 2018-12-18 21:49:20.341000+00:00 | ['Postpartum Depression', 'Motherhood', 'Parenting', 'Mental Health'] |
Overcoming “Pregnant and Pathetic” | Overcoming “Pregnant and Pathetic”
“From Boss to Busted” — the life of a pregnant woman
As humans, on our paths towards fulfillment, we aim to create. Through creation, we fulfill our divine purpose. Through creation, we answer the question: What is the meaning of life?
The purpose of life is to elevate this world — to leave it in a state of higher consciousness than we found it. We do this through creation, which is a core component of human behavior.
Our opportunity for creation often comes through in our work — the jobs we show up to for somewhere between 40–60 hours each week. Here, we align our minds, bodies and spirits to commune, question and build a better today for our fellow human and for future generations.
If we are lucky, we hit our career stride somewhere in our late 20’s, right about the age at which the average woman in the U.S. is also planning for her first child.
In the midst of the great creative expression of our lives, many women find themselves 30+ weeks pregnant, wearing a bowling ball for a belly, and hitting up the bathroom every 20 minutes to pee barely enough to tint the toilet water. Do I even have to flush that?
When pregnancy brain doesn’t have us forgetting our client’s name or daydreaming about the Monster Cookie ice cream (buy it) in our freezer, we find ourselves fully distracted in nesting mode.
When will baby transition to her own room?
Where is that baby bathtub I stored away?
It’s probably time to get that breast pump ordered. Breastfeeding — woof.
There is good reason and legit science behind Maternity Leave Law, which allows women to take leave before baby’s due date. At that point in the game, it takes every bit of energy to fasten a bra around our bloated breasts, let alone partake in the creative expression of our careers.
For mamas in the late stages of pregnancy, every day is a greater challenge in the creative department: we are high on hormones, low on sleep, and running out of creative juju.
As our body and mind give way to the life inside of our belly, we find ourselves no longer aligned with the creative process in which we’ve attributed so many hours. At our jobs, we feel unimportant as teams plan for future goals without us; we feel unproductive as we eke out each hour of the day — tired and daydreaming.
We begin to feel like a different version of our established selves (ego alert!).
Where is the woman who is considered a leader at work?
Where is the woman who strives for the next promotion?
Where is the woman who willingly puts in extra hours because there is simply no excuse for a job poorly done?
The disconnect between the woman we were and the woman we are becoming is processed over and over in our egoic minds. Simultaneously, the loss of creative career energy causes many of us to feel “less than” the woman we once were.
Look inward
Time to check yo’self, Mama.
As a woman bearing a child, you are living out the highest expression of creativity available to humankind.
Your body is in a continuous flow state of divine energy for 40(ish) straight weeks. Women have no greater opportunity to engage with their divinity than during pregnancy, when our bodies work endlessly to develop the most beautiful expression of creative energy — a soul in physical form.
Engaging the “Inner Body”
Take time throughout the day, every day, to bring your consciousness to the inner body and feel your spirit alive there. Feel, also, the spiritual energy of your developing child.
The “Inner Body” is the spiritual energy that exists in every cell of our physical form — the force behind every regenerated cell and every vibratory process. We are able to engage with this energy by holding our thoughts, our consciousness, in the body. When held there, you will feel the body in its entirety, all at once and as one form. You are engaging the Inner Body, which induces an overwhelming sense of peace.
In this state, recognize the selfless nature of the body — all that it does for you and your child without asking for anything in return, similar to the role of Mother.
With your consciousness held in the Inner Body, realize the truth that you are living the highest expression of creativity as an expectant mother.
“Inner Body Vibes”
Throughout pregnancy, we may feel detached and ostracized by the happenings of humanity, but we should see this as an opportunity. Pregnancy offers the opportunity for us to step out of our day-to-day human roles, to take notice of what is happening now, within our very bodies, every single moment. Creating life is a process more profound than any creative work you could hope to develop with your mind. Understanding that life is divine is vital to the evolution of humanity, as we seek to grow in love with one another.
The creation of life within a mother’s womb is proof that life does not require the mind. Quite the opposite. The mind (not to be confused with the brain — the brain is the body) has an entirely passive role in the creation of new life. Life, Being, is an entity in and of itself.
While the world may feel like it’s moving on without you, remember that it’s just spinning. Your time to create through your career will come back full circle. Until Earth rotates to that space in time, offer your mind grace and your body gratitude.
Today, you may have binged one too many episodes and eaten three too many bowls of cereal. You may have let your mind drift straight out of that meeting and slept in past the opportunity to take a shower, but realize that in all of those squandered moments and in this very moment, you are in the midst of the greatest creation of your lifetime.
So watch, eat, wander and snooze on, Mama. There’s plenty of time to do NONE of these things very soon. | https://medium.com/social-jogi/overcoming-pregnant-and-pathetic-e0dc88bcfcc1 | ['Meredith Hansen Favero'] | 2020-12-29 02:48:00.784000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Careers', 'Spirituality', 'Work', 'Pregnancy'] |
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There’s Always Poop | Portrait of a 32 year old me.
I am a mom. I wouldn’t have always started with that, but lately it’s hard to imagine having ever been anything else. There isn’t a minute of my day that I am alone. A sleeping baby in the living room dreaming while the smells of dinner fill the house. A tiny body strapped to my leg as I try to get through the warm up stretches before Beastie number two helps his brother pin me on the ground; my 40 minute workout always had been a long shot in the dark by a lost blind woman. In the shower, trying to find peace, a little pair of peaking eyes find me, wondering if Mommy is almost done because he misses her. We’ll skip the toilet scenes for now.
And yet, if you asked me how to be a mom? What do you when your child is screaming over a snack that never actually existed but continues the melt down anyway (long after a reasonable truce was offered)? How do you stop an ADHD driven toddler at the peak of their swing to not drink the bathwater that you know absolutely has poop in it from at least one of these beasts? I’d laugh and try not to think about the seemingly endless failures I’ve experienced with a shrug. No f-ing clue.
Hopefully more than less agree with me here. Being a teacher, tutor, and coach gave me the knowledge I needed to understand a child’s physical and mental development and put it into practice, but on a day to day basis, you simply must make the best choices possible… Like in those tough situations when your child simply won’t stop screaming crying over the cereal you thought he wanted that accidentally went into the cart in the spot where the actual correct cereal should have gone and is now somehow tainted. No matter how many breathing techniques we trained, deescalating phrases we prepared, that blue raspberry lollipop just does the damn trick every time.
But, when I keep that name Mom at the heart of me, sanity typically decides to stick around. Dad being synonymous throughout this entire article too. (Really most of these I’s are we’s and I give my husband all credit for my sanity still being intact!)
So, a quick toast (because there’s always time for a toast) to Mom’s and Dad’s (it’s capital on purpose); On the days it doesn’t feel like you are glowing with love, or you lost your temper and screamed, or you just wanted to cry because you could’ve done better today, the fact that you have those thoughts at all makes you a good Mom or Dad. There’s always poop, but we can still be a better Mom and Dad tomorrow.
Keep checking in with me for tips and knowledgeable sources for all the poopy moments of adulting. | https://medium.com/@mariemcdaniel18/theres-always-poop-5ae019ee3b9a | ['Marie Mcdaniel'] | 2021-03-11 23:15:48.779000+00:00 | ['Toddlers', 'Kids', 'Funny', 'Parenting', 'Moms'] |
My Personal Fitness Journey | Hello, My name is Charlotte and I am going to be keeping a record of my journey in the hope it will help others (eventually)
So let me explain why.
I am a graphic design student living in Devon in the UK and i am currently studying all things surrounding fitness and body confidence and learning as i go, it has come to my attention that so many women struggle with low self-confidence many of whom struggle to lose weight. There are so many fad diets out there so i want to get this straight first and foremost, i will not be documenting any fad diets nor will i be promoting detoxes or diet pills. My journey starts by INCREASING my calorie consumption and working alongside a PT once a week, i am currently on week 2 eating 1500 calories a day which to many people may seem like quite a lot of calories for a weight loss diet, I know it did for me. So two weeks in.. what have i noticed?
• I am never hungry
• I have more energy and therefore I am moving more
• My body has started to become regular — I feel like my body is starting to trust me again after years of underfeeding.
• I am happier and trusting in the process
• I am finding out more and more about body confidence
• Calorie counting can be difficult and some days i want to eat more other days less than my target, but up or down 100 calories makes little difference as long as I am consistent with my intake in a roundabout way.
• I have made a commitment to myself — for myself and nobody else and i am accountable for my actions.
• I have not set an end date — having a regimented idea about when this journey will end is not conducive to changing my lifestyle. My weight loss journey will end when i am comfortable with the way i see myself. My fitness journey will not end as there will be a point where i feel i would like to maintain my appearance rather than change.
In the last two weeks, I have lost 2 pounds. It is not quick, it is not always easy but I know If I can change my habits long term, my weight loss and my fitness level will be consistent.
I am hoping this insight into the fitness world and documenting my own journey will help me with my final major project for university where i aim to create a solution/support for women in my local area to access so they can gain accurate information about becoming a healthier version of themselves without the need to starve or supplement their diets with fad products that have no scientific proof to support the claims these brands make. I do not know what exactly my project will entail as yet but there are some key components which are important for me to include — Every BODY is welcome, there will be no body shaming, I would like to normalise rolls, blemishes, scars, stretch marks, etc, It will be a safe space and hopefully a community spirit of support for each other. | https://medium.com/@bodyjourneys/my-personal-fitness-journey-399653c5fbc9 | ['Charlotte Hill'] | 2020-11-27 12:01:41.753000+00:00 | ['Graphic Design', 'Fitness', 'Body Positive', 'Body Image', 'Weight Loss Program'] |
Why do we do Saraswati Puja? | INTRODUCTION
Saraswati Puja is a festival of Hindus. Goddess Saraswati is worshipping on the day of Saraswati, which is the goddess of wisdom and knowledge. This puja is celebrating in many states of eastern India, Nepal, and many nations. On this day yellow clothes people wearing and doanting.
When is Saraswati Puja celebration going on?
Saraswati Puja is celebrating on Magh Shukla Panchami. It is also calling as Basant Panchami. On this day, Mother Saraswati is worshipping with complete ritualism. On this day, Saraswati Mata is worshipping after sunrise. Saraswati Vandana should also be performing while worshiping Saraswati Mata. We get knowledge by worshiping Saraswati, the goddess of learning. Saraswati Puja has special significance on Basant Panchami. It is celebrating in the month of Magha. On this day, the statue of Mata Saraswati is installation by the people. At the time of worship, students and teachers together worship Mata Saraswati and perform Aarti.
IMPORTANCE OF SARASWATI PUJA FOR STUDENTS
In addition to Basant Panchami, worship of mother Saraswati is also essential in Navadurga. Saraswati Puja has more importance on Basant Panchami. On this day, students worship many Saraswati mothers. On this day, students worship mother Saraswati. And ask for wisdom so that they are inspiring to walk on the path of karma. Students and students take a bath early in the morning on the day of Saraswati Puja and worship Goddess Saraswati of learning.
After the worship is over, they receive the prasad. During this time, the statue of Maa Saraswati is installation in many schools and colleges. Many people also worship Maa Saraswati in their own homes and install the idol. The students, books, copy, pen, etc., in front of Maa Saraswati. We honor and wish for wisdom and wisdom.
It is believed that students who worship Mother Saraswati benefit intensely and are also encouraging to move forward. Goddess Saraswati has many names — Mahasweta, Sharda, Vindhyavasini, Hans Vahini, Veena Dahini, Vidya Pustak Dharini. Maa Saraswati brings enthusiasm to all people. Everybody celebrates this festival with great enthusiasm.
THE STORY OF SARASWATI PUJA AND BASANT PANCHAMI
Basant Panchami has a famous legend of Saraswati Puja. Panchami Tithi, i.e., Basant Panchami of Shukla Paksha of Magh month, was starting. Basant Panchami has special significance among Hindus. On this day, Saraswati, the mother goddess of wisdom, speech, and art, is worshipping. Saraswati Puja’s legend on Basant Panchami describes the manifestation of Maa Saraswati and the blessings from Lord Shri Krishna.
According to the legend Brahma Ji
According to the legend, Brahma Ji, the creator of this world, created humankind by the orders of Lord Vishnu, the world’s creator. Once they were wandering on the earth, they saw humans, and after seeing them, they felt that there is a lot of peace in the world. Still, he felt something was missing. Then he sprinkled water from his jug. While doing this, a beautiful woman with four arms appeared. He had Veena, Mala, Book, and Vara Mudra in one of his hands.
Brahma Ji called her Saraswati, the mother goddess of speech. He urged Maa Saraswati to provide speech to all beings with the help of her veena. Mother Saraswati gave voice to all the creatures of the world with the melodious music of her veena. The date on that god Saraswati, the god of information and speech, was unconcealed, was the fifth day of the intense 1/2 the month of Magh. This Vasant Panchami is additionally referring to as Sri Panchami. Vasant Panchami is also known as The birth of Maa Saraswati. God Saraswati, World Health Organization, originating music from her veena, is termed by Veena Vadini, Sharada, Bageshwari, Bhagwati, Vagdevi, etc., thanks to the origin of music. She is additionally referring to as the god of art and music.
According to mythological beliefs
According to mythological beliefs, Shri Krishna and Brahma Ji first worshiped Mother Saraswati. When Saraswati Devi was fascinating by Lord Shri avatar and in her mind Shri avatar longe for her husband’s type, then knowing this, Shri avatar blesses her to please her and afore mentioned that the will to achieve information, wisdom, and learning people who keep it’ll worship you on Magh Shukla Panchami.
METHOD OF WORSHIPPING GODDESS SARASWATI
Those who worship Goddess Saraswati must light a lamp and incense sticks in front of the mother Saraswati’s statue and pictures. After this, start the worship. First of all, cleanse yourself and your posture with this mantra.
“Om pious holy places and Sarva and place Ganapati Bappa samaritan pundaari kashaya sabha abhyanga list” — With these mantras, splash and chant yourself with flowers, thrice on your top and posture. Say “Om Keshav Aaye Namah ॐ Madhav Aaye Namah ॐ Narayanaya Namah” and wash hands again. Again the Asana Shuddhi Mantra said, “Om Prithi Tavaye Namah.” Apply sandalwood after purification and fire. Apply Shrikhand sandalwood with a finger. Worship done without willpower is not successful, so resolve. With three flowers, Akshata, sweets, and fruits in his hand, he chanted the mantra of Sankalp.
Then worship Ganpati and recite the Ganapati mantra and keep it intact in the urn. Similarly, worship the Navagrahas and Kalash. After that, worship Saraswati Mata. After that, install the statue of Maa Saraswati. Then chant the mantra with Akshat and release Akshat. Then spray them with water, apply sandalwood, offer flowers, make offerings, garland the flowers and wear yellow clothes. After that, take a flower and show it to the goddess. Then take a flower and place it on the book where the copy is kept and place on the moon. After that, perform Havan 108 times and perform Aarti. After that, accept Prasad and distribute it reverently to all.
CONCLUSION
Saraswati Puja is celebrating in many states across India, for which Magh Shukla Panchami is a special day. Therefore, the worship of Mother Saraswati has particular importance for students. Apart from this, prayer is also vital for children with mental retardation because Mother Saraswati is the Goddess of Wisdom. That is why we must worship Mother Saraswati on Vasant Panchami Should do.
To know more like this festival visit our website that is : https://gyanibalak.com/. Our website carries information about different types of festivals worldwide. | https://medium.com/@gyanibalakji/why-do-we-do-saraswati-puja-259003a1d8fa | ['Rahul Modhgil'] | 2021-12-17 10:18:07.239000+00:00 | ['Saraswati Devi', 'Saraswati', 'Festivals', 'Indian', 'Saraswati Puja'] |
How to Build a Magic System | Creating a magic system is one of the most fun parts of worldbuilding in speculative fiction because you can really let your imagination run wild! However, it’s very easy to go off the rails and create a system that ultimately serves no purpose in your story.
So many worldbuilding resources simply interrogate the details of your magic system. These worksheets and checklists rarely consider the why behind your magic system or attempt to connect it to your story’s message or theme.
To make sure that your readers take away the full impact of your story’s message, it is essential that you plan every detail of your story around your theme or your point. Let’s take a look at how to use your story’s core theme to create the foundation for a kickass magic system.
Magic systems should be an extension of your story’s point.
Your story point is what you want your readers to take away from your story — it’s a specific message about how the world works and it should drive every choice you make about your world, including your magic system.
The point of your story should drive what purpose your magic serves, how your characters interact with it, and what problems it creates or solves in your plot. By considering why your magic system exists and putting it in conversation with your story point, you will inevitably construct a system that makes sense and feels cohesive with the story as a whole.
Let’s explore how to tie the point of your story to its magic. Use the three questions below to create a solid magical foundation.
1. What is your story point? Why are you writing this story?
If you haven’t already, you need to determine your story’s point. Be as specific as possible, while also keeping the message to one simple idea. This idea will influence every decision you make as a writer. The more focus it has, the more focused your story will be.
Example: The point of my own fantasy #wip is “embracing emotions makes you stronger, not weaker.” As I move forward with developing my story and my world, I want to make sure that everything ties back to that central idea.
2. How can the magic system work with your story point?
Your magic system should be created in direct conversation with your story point. These two ideas should relate to one another in some way, but there are so many ways you can play with this. Brainstorm some ideas that force your magic system to contrast with or bolster the message you’re making.
Example: Since my story is about emotion, I wanted to create a magic system that is strongly influenced by emotion. I chose to create a system in which magical power is essentially determined by emotional stability and focus. If a magic user can control their emotions, their magic becomes more focused and more powerful. If they cannot, their magic will remain ineffective and can be dangerously unstable.
3. What purpose will your magic system serve in your story? What role will it play?
Once you know how the magic system works together with your point, you can determine its purpose in the story. Will your magic act as a hindrance to the plot, creating problems which must be solved? If so, what kind of problems and how do those problems impact the story point? Will it hinder your characters goals? If so, how? Or will your magic system challenge your character’s inner obstacle, the false belief they have about the world? If so, in what way?
Example: The magic system in my #wip forces my main character to confront her inner obstacle in order to recognize and control her own power. (An inner obstacle is the lie or misbelief that a character has to confront and unlearn in order to achieve their goals. Learn more in our Craft Complex Characters workbook!) My main character’s inner obstacle is that she believes emotions make people weak, and therefore she must shut her emotions out. This results in unfocused and unstable magic, and presents a danger to herself and others. Only by learning to embrace her emotions and recognize them as strength does her magic finally become controllable, and unstoppably powerful.
Why My Magic System Works
Even just from answering the 3 questions above, my system already has substance. It doesn’t matter what the magic actually is yet; what matters is that I understand why it exists.
The system I created also presents plot problems where my main character is forced to make decisions like: Should she use her magic, or not? Does her magic help her achieve her goals, or not? Do her emotions make her magically stronger or weaker? I tied it directly to her goals (avoid using her powers), the stakes of those goals (suppressing her emotions makes her power unwieldy), and the plot problems she’ll face (problems that force her to decide whether or not to use her powers). Now, her magic is inherently tied to her character arc as well. I knew that was the best way to prove my story’s point.
Thinking through these questions will allow you to create a magic system that bolsters your story’s message. From here, you can answer all those “detail” questions that build out how the system works. But by keeping your magic system in conversation with your story point, you can play with infinite possibilities and remain confident. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-build-a-magic-system-bcea13a17e6c | ['Golden May', 'Book Coaching'] | 2020-09-05 06:48:20.368000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Fantasy', 'Writing Tips', 'Fiction Writing', 'Worldbuilding'] |
Cash is Trash! | Cash is Trash!
Cash loses value over time. We all know this, we remember all the candy we used to be able to buy with a buck or two when we were kids.
The ever diminishing purchasing power of cash, is designed to make people want to invest it, or spend it; sooner rather than later.
The reason is simple, the whole idea behind engineering cash to lose value over time, is precisely so you feel the need to spend it or invest it, resulting in your dollar spent becoming someone else’s dollar earned, in hopes that this process is repeated as fast as possible in your community.
By repeating said process, the economic engine of the USA gets busy creating value with the same amount of circulating supply of Dollars, and avoids printing; which debases the idea of scarcity being the primary factor behind something having more value versus something else that’s available in large quantities. (E.X the value of Gold vs the value of Corn)
Parking currency in some bank, or hoarding it under a mattress collecting dust, creates a deficit in the circulating supply of dollars causing the inevitable printing of more cash by the government.
The more Dollars people save, the less money is circulating around for other people to earn it as income. It’s not rocket science!
Therefore, being too conservative with the money, or perhaps being lucky enough like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Zuckerberg to have so much money that it becomes impossible to spend it all, causes a downward pressure in people’s wages, and can cause the economic engine to come to a halt, or to continue operations with an ever more enslaved and disgruntled general population who find themselves having to work more and more in order to maintain their status quo.
The faster Dollars gets spent by someone other than us, the faster the same Dollars can become part of our income, and on the same token, the faster we get to spend it, the sooner it becomes our neighbor’s income; resulting in less money in circulation needed in order to create value, which in turns keeps prices under control and inflation at a minimum.
But that boat has already sailed, and cash is now more toxic than ever after the trillions of dollars that just got printed, and the many trillions more awaiting to be printed soon.
Cash is set to lose a net purchasing power of 15% a year for the next 5 years.
This means that what you can buy today with $100 in 5 years you will need $175 in order to buy that same stuff.
So keeping the money in the bank, saving and sacrificing yourself for 5 years, wishing to buy that house you really want, is just as practical as burning 75% of whatever you have saved RIGHT NOW and jumping on that mortgage TODAY with whatever is left of it.
That’s because real estate is considered by many as an investment that serves to help move the economy around creating jobs in a myriad of sectors, while at the same time serving as an almost perfect hedge against inflation which in turn helps us safeguard the purchasing power of money throughout time.
Real Estate is generally believed to inflate at a rate of 5% to 15% yearly. So let’s say that in 5 years Joe and Jane (who only had $10,000 saved up for their house) finally save up those $40,000 they needed for that $250,000 dream house they fell in love with 5 years ago expecting to be incurring a $210,000 mortgage; now the house they really wanted is no longer $250,000, but it is now $350,000 considering that Real Estate prices rose by around 5% a year in those five years.
So, by the time by the time Joe and Jane thought they were ready to get into their dream house by saving a whopping $40,000 in 5 years compared to their initial $10,000 they had, they are now in a worse situation than before.
Think about it for a second:
The year is 2020 and our beloved couple have a decent $10,000 set aside for buying a house.
They decide to wait until they have saved up $40,000 in order to minimize the mortgage amount as much as possible.
Joe and Jane are extremely happy because hey are successful at accomplishing that goal in 5 years, as they should be, they have shown the kind of sacrifice and perseverance 80% of the population lack.
There is one small problem however and it is that their dream $250,000 house is now worth $350,000
So what could’ve been a $240,000 mortgage if they had bought the house when they only had $10,000 saved; is now a $310,000 mortgage after the $40,000 they were able to “successfully saved” during 5 years of saving and sacrificing.
So did they really saved any money? Or was it all just a big scam for them to put money in the bank, where the only ones benefiting from that added liquidity was the bank itself who was probably lending their own money to other people at an interest?
Joe and Jane should’ve been better off entering into their dream house when they only had those $10,000 saved up.
In terms of value this feat accomplished by our friends, including all those nights of not eating out, not going on vacations, snd being frugal was LITERALLY FOR NOTHING. They money they saved up, compared to what the asset they truly wanted is now meaningless, and this sacrifice of trying to save these $40,000 has actually costed them $100,000 in mortgage debt.
That is modern day slavery… and that’s the perfect example of why the world’s fiscal policy seems to encourage money to be spent as soon as you earn it.
Enter BITCOIN
Bitcoin’s inflation rate is not subject to any country’s monetary policy, nobody can decide to either print more or less of it, it follows an algorithm, Bitcoin is a set of mathematical rules running in a decentralized, blockchain based system, that has proven impossible to hack.
Bitcoin is also limited as to how many Bitcoin will ever exist, with a maximum of 21 Million of it, so it’s also great as a store of value; as it is fantastic as a medium of exchange and value transfer.
Today’s international commerce relies on the US Dollar to make transactions. Italy sends wine to Venezuela, and they expect to be paid in US Dollars, not in Bolivars, and that happens because they simply DO NOT TRUST the Bolivar. So make things simpler, the world got together about 100 years or so ago, and they decided they would all do business using the US Dollar, it was believed back then to be the strongest currency. And incredible amounts of dollars are now circulating in the world. There’s whole countries even, which use the US Dollar as their national currency.
But, what happens when the world stops trusting the Dollar as the international medium of exchanging value? What happens when the world says NO MORE to the USA’s monetary policy and printing frenzy?
What happens when all these dollars begin to find their way back to the US because nobody wants to hold a currency that loses so much purchasing power and generates such an inflationary pressure on basic human needs such as safe shelter and a roof to call home?
If you were a whole country, You probably would not like your purchasing power to be diminished by 15% per year due to the irresponsible monetary policy of another country, would you?
So why are you content with living under such a monetary system? Is it because things happen so slowly that you are not aware they’re happening?
Did you know that if you drop a frog in boiling water, the frog will immediately jump back out, but if you were to put the same frog inside a pan containing fresh water at room temperature, and slowly brought the water to a boil, the frog would have actually stayed put and died?
Ray Dalio, famous economist and business man puts it like this: “Things happen gradually, until one day; they suddenly happen”
If the world continues to do international commerce in US Dollars, the planet will see a net loss in value. of 15% PER YEAR!!!
That’s 15% more time spent generating value at work so that any person can maintain their same lifestyle which ,by the way, is also going up by 15%
At 40 hours a week X 1.15 , that’s an increase of 6 more hours that a person has to work to see no change in their status quo.
Or yearly that is 13 more days of work.
And that’s only the 1st year!!!! What about the other 4?
Monetary Slavery is not just right around the corner, it has been happening for decades! We just didn’t know it because the effects of the USA monetary policy where hitting in places far away from us, thanks precisely to the US Dollar being the world reserve currency, other countries would buy the US Dollars to hold and try to preserve their own purchasing power because their own currency was weaker than the dollar, and they were ok by taking the hit in dollars rather than in their own money.
These countries have been acting just like Joe and Jane did when they wanted to keep saving to buy their house. And they are furious now that they see that their US Dollar holdings are posed to take such a hit for the next 5 years.
This is why Bitcoin and 3rd generation cryptocurrency platforms like Cardano (which can host other countries digital currencies while keeping them sovereign and adding programmable features as well as smart contracts to them if they wanted) are catching the attention of Joe and Jane, and that’s why it’s catching the attention of giants corporations with lots of cash in their balance sheets, here in the USA and around the world.
They expect for this 100 year cycle of the US Dollar as the World Reserve currency to be over sooner rather than later.
The USA has begun serious talks regarding the “Know Your Customer” (KYC) , and how to handle private wallets. They aren’t stupid either, they know that the cat is outside of the box, and they want to make sure that they don’t loose on their ability to tax the value that is being transferred using cryptocurrencies. They understand that cryptocurrencies are nothing but the only logical step in human evolution, and they want a smooth transition rather than a revolution.
Why do you think the Stock Market keeps going up despite the sheer amount of unemployment?
Why do you think Stock prices keep going up even though these listed companies are not necessarily being more profitable? Or at least not profitable enough compared to the rate their dividends are going up versus the rate at which their stock is going up in price.
One thing is for a Stock to go up in value (going up based on company’s profits)
And another thing is for q Stock to up in price (going up based on offer and demand regardless of fundamentals)
Somehow despite the obvious price hikes with no fundamental value added, the Stocks keep moving up, even when the USA is experiencing the worst unemployment situation in the past 80 years. That’s because large institutions, small to big companies, the wealthy , banks, and retirement funds all KNOW WHATS ABOUT TO HAPPEN and they rather put their money into “ANYTHING” rather than leaving it in cash.
The problem with putting all this money in the stock market is that the stocks keep going up and up in prices while the DIVIDENDS these companies pay are not going up at the same rate, as in: NOT EVEN CLOSE.
This creates a situation where the vast majority of the people are not in the market because they “believe” a particular company can pay them a dividend in return that is higher than what the bank is able to pay them. But they are rather in the market, just to see who’s the greater fool that is going to pay them more money for the same stock.
Mark my words , stocks are not designed to function as money, so when the inflation of common goods start to catch up to the stock market inflation, there will be a massive sell off from big institutions looking for the next best thing that can keep them ahead of the game in terms of purchasing power. They will sell before you get a chance to do so. This is the information age, and they are closest to the sources, they will know when that higher rent and loaf of bread is going to hike up in price high enough for you to have to sell that Tesla Stock! Leaving y’all’s pockets dry, holding the bags of coal you once thought could be traded at diamond prices.
Remember the numbers: You will have to work 13 more days this year to keep up with inflation! That looks an awful lot like a worker’s vacation time, doesn’t it?
The USA is going to start allowing companies to BUY BACK your vacation time from you at a premium, just like they do in Japan and some Slavic countries, which offer to pay you 15% to 25% more per hour to buy your earned vacation time back from you.
And because your current lifestyle is going to be 15% more expensive in a year, you will sadly find yourself selling your vacation time back to your OWNER.
Be smart, stop being a modern day slave, and get into cryptocurrency NOW before it’s too late.
CryptoMensan
Ramon Viggiani
#bitcoin
#cardano | https://medium.com/@cryptomensan/cash-is-trash-491eefb20dad | [] | 2020-12-27 20:41:07.805000+00:00 | ['World Reserve Currency', 'Cardano', 'Litecoin', 'Real Estate', 'Bitcoin'] |
How to obtain a URI for an image asset in React Native (With Expo) | Now, the important bit:
React Native’s official Image Component provides us with a method called resolveAssetSource(). This method takes a “number” (related to what I’ve mentioned above) or an ImageSource object as its only parameter and returns an object with width , height , scale and uri properties, this last one being the one we care about in this case. This will look like:
const exampleImageUri = Image.resolveAssetSource(exampleImage).uri
Now, what’s the point of all this you ask. Well, to be honest you could always use require() and it would work and that’s it right? Well not exactly.
The problem with using require() for image assets
Using require() has a couple of caveats. First, it’s CommonJS and we’re working on the browser-side of things, where it doesn’t really belong, in the end you’re using just a synthetic require() being provided by the bundler.
Second, we’d have a mixture of ESModule import s and CommonJS require() in our codebase. Something we can easily avoid it, at least in this case.
Third, the second to most important in my opinion. The syntax is different when you want to display your image in an <Image> component.
require (CommonJS)
import { Image } from 'react-native'; const exampleImage = require('./assets/images/example.png') <Image source={exampleImage} />
import (ESModule)
import { Image } from 'react-native'; import exampleImage from ' ./assets/images/example.png ' const exampleImageUri = Image.resolveAssetSource(exampleImage).uri <Image source={{uri: exampleImageUri}} />
Bonus (Dynamic imports)
I know it’s also possible for require() , but you could even use dynamic imports, like:
import { Image } from 'react-native'; const {default: exampleImage } = await import(' ./assets/images/example.png ') const exampleImageUri = Image.resolveAssetSource(exampleImage).uri
And lastly, by using import you’ll provide the source attribute to the <Image/> component in the same format you’ll need to provide it when you eventually finish your POC and start working with real data, fetching images from external URLs like CDNs and the like, that source format is and object with a uri property, like:
{uri: exampleImageUri}
Conclusion
In conclusion, this way you have a consistent way of handling image assets. All the code and components you wrote to handle and display your images when getting started building your app will still be useful once you switch from dummy to real data from external sources. No need to refactor components and update source props and the like.
Anyways, I hope this is useful to you, I’m still trying to master React (Native), this post is one part note-taking for myself and one part writing it down so somebody having the same issues can find it. If something I’ve stated in this post is wrong feel free to leave a note and I’ll try to get it corrected.
A couple of things to know about the URI structure
This uri property is comprised of a normal looking URL, in the form of :
http://127.0.0.1:19001/assets/assets/images/examples.png?platform=<android|ios...>&hash=<asset_hash>?platform=<android|ios...>&dev=true&minify=false&hot=false
A couple of things worth noting:
There are two assets/ directories in the path, I’m assuming the top one relates to an internal directory for the bundler and the second one being part of the string path we’ve specified in our import statement example.
directories in the path, I’m assuming the top one relates to an internal directory for the bundler and the second one being part of the string path we’ve specified in our import statement example. For some reason it also has 2 sets of query strings. I’m assuming the second set being for the dev server and the first one some other internal Expo-related service.
Now I’m not sure how this URI translates in production but, according to the Assets Guide in Expo’s official documentation, Expo uploads the project’s assets to Amazon CloudFront and I’m assuming creates some kind of map/replaces all assets references with the CDN URLs internally.
References | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-obtain-a-uri-for-an-image-asset-in-react-native-with-expo-88dfbe1023b8 | ['Fernando De Freitas'] | 2020-06-06 22:45:06.013000+00:00 | ['Expo', 'JavaScript', 'React', 'React Native', 'Require'] |
Mitch Goldfarb | Why not try a little patience?
Doesn’t that build anticipation?
Like waiting to go on vacation?
Or waiting to open presents on Christmas morning?
And isn’t that part of the fun in life?
So can you take a breath and try a little patience today? | https://medium.com/@prof-mitch/why-not-try-a-little-patience-acf59e7d3dbe | ['Mitch Goldfarb'] | 2020-12-22 11:50:36.346000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Truth', 'Success', 'Inspiration', 'Mindfulness'] |
Behind Mormon’s Space Jesus | Space Jesus at the Mormon Visitor’s Center in SLC
I quite enjoy studying and reading about maps and cartography, and I love investigating the worldviews that are forever drawn out before us on the planes of our past. A map is more than a navigational assist. Maps claim ownership by inking borderlines, they bring far away lands unseen to your armchair, they unite people across thousands of miles, they classify humanity by a myriad of categories, and much more. But one particular point of interest is a favorite of mine: where a map places its viewer, because it says something about who you are. Do you remember looking at an atlas when you were young and having that feeling that I can go anywhere. I can be or do anything? This feeling catalyzed my cartophilia.
With the earliest maps of the known world, the viewer was given the nearly blasphemous perspective of a god, looking down on earth. Some people didn’t like that, as they didn’t like it when they heard their precious planet was not the center of the galaxy, let alone the universe (sometimes you just got to roll your eyes at this kind of closed mindedness). But back when the first civilizations were carving their home into stone, we can hardly blame them for their limited knowledge. In fact, it was a necessary first step towards our current Global Positioning Systems, which ironically, always places the user at the center of the universe. When you open the app, it finds you, zooms in on you, and places you dead center. Not surprising that mapping every inch of this world has just led to more human hubris.
It was with this in mind that I wound my way up to “Space Jesus” at the visitor’s center on temple square in Salt Lake City, core of the mormon busine — I mean, universe. I could soapbox for a few pages on this for-profit former-cult, the white Jesus in every portrait, or the nefarious character of the man they call a prophet (or you could just listen to a great podcast series on it), but I will only focus on one interesting thing I noticed in this room, in the very spot I took this photograph.
Notice, like looking at a map, where it places me. I am standing underneath a Jesus, arms open but facing me. His forked beard and flowing locks, paired with a long Aryan nose, are all too Caucasian. People, haven’t we agreed by now that Jesus was Middle Eastern? But his highness’s whiteness is important and revelatory, seeing as black people are cursed angels to Mr. Smith. Wait, no, I think that changed in the 60s? I digress. Behind Jesus is a beautiful painting of outer space with great colors and dust clouds and a vastness that is augmented by some stellar acoustics. When I spoke, my voice reverberated around me, and so I muffled the mockery. Luckily, the only two people there, besides my friend, were chuckling at Space Jesus too. I must say, it is hard not to.
Then I focused on the planet behind and slightly to the left of the effigy and recognized it as Earth, and I confess, my face betrayed an impressed smile. I do appreciate a subtle message.
Mormons believe that at the end of times we will meet our friendly Jebbuh and his high holy daddy and mommy, and like the trust-fund baby that Christ was, we too will be given a planet to preside over, as god, cause we were good little boys and girls. And here is where this “map,” as it were, placed me: at that precise moment of judgement. My life was lived, and now, it was time for me to be worshipped (or sent to hell, I suppose). Either way, whoever stands there is being told a clear message that whether tourist or pilgrim, there is only one eschatological possibility: One day you will face Space Jesus, because our nice little “religion” is The Truth, and you ain’t escaping it.
But in a way, it does more. It makes me Mormon. Jesus looks at me, bowing his head down to do so, giving me his sole focus at the moment. His expression is confidently distant, perhaps in royal way? Frankly, it’s hard to read. His hands are open toward me, again as his sole focus, and they seem like they may close in on me, in some kind of divine blessing. I don’t think he’s casting me to hell. No, boi’s bout to grant me that fuggin planet I been jonesin’ for all my life. Look at the rest of space behind him! I own a piece of it. Which makes me Mormon, without my consent I might add. But like prophet, like messiah I guess. Oops. Let that one slip. Regardless, I am delighted by their little trick; I’ll never say those Young’ns aren’t clever.
However, as much as I love digging up this meaning (much like Mr. Smith did of indigenous graves in hopes of buried treasure), it does not delight me to think of all the people on this planet who stand there looking into the imagined future they will not see and yet, will live each day as if they will. Like our sweet young female tour guides who betrayed an inkling of wanting out, and who may never know what it’s like to look at a map and think “I can go anywhere. I can do, or be, anything.” | https://medium.com/@simoneskold/behind-mormons-space-jesus-6dfc286488bf | [] | 2020-01-16 20:30:11.291000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Mormonism', 'Criticism', 'Maps'] |
Our Little Preferences #2 | Midnight Harbour. Sai Kung, Hong Kong
Fragmentation
of our lives.
Every details
speaks volumes.
Same city,
different time zone.
Every good night to me,
is another good morning to you.
180 Meridian
You are a man of science.
Radiochemistry,
Nuclear medicine.
Built-in rationality.
I am a woman of philosophy.
Communication,
art-house cinema.
Sensuality in disguise.
Our identities,
façades of representation,
curated with dedication.
Sentiment,
is our common disadvantage.
A flaw in the system,
a fly in the ointment
The way,
you see through your brown liquid,
is my way I see through my translucent smoke.
Dimensions frozen,
physics no longer effective.
That night at your place,
over jazz music
and delicate cuisine.
I saw you,
looking straight at me,
piercing through my soul.
I knew,
but I never speak of it.
We are pretty much the same,
despite our preferences. | https://medium.com/artmagazine/our-little-preferences-2-e32ab3cc165 | ['Jessica M. Lee'] | 2017-02-26 11:18:26.231000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Sentiments', 'Internal Thoughts', 'Finding Connection', 'Observation'] |
Paradoxical Captivity | in a dystopian time
unbounded thoughts spreading around
in lightspeed motions,
outnumbered facts
colorful media presence,
our diverted attentions within jelly-fish brain
delusional extensiveness triggered into zombified reflections
sticking to the connected socials on screen,
war and peace,
unjust and just the ‘just’ of freedom
figured stories, manipulations,
diving into instance rather than understandable facts
uncoated and re-coated with falsification
we search for the truth and the false
in the outburst of thoughts and motions
digital synthesis onto our voices
grabbing attention to falsified facts
the truth remains a mystery, a hidden grail of modernity
our eyes visualize
onto the vivid fabricated beats
our brains trigger thoughts
missing the factual
our minds start to believe in what we see
Something seems illogical
the world, or my mind,
a sense of captivity
within an artificial world
(is it possible it is within an unbelievable neural network?)
sustaining billions like me
in a pretentious architecture
reframed every second, in deep-fake synopsis,
running from the beginning of time
with an end, unknown, outside our grasp.
Associated thoughts
We don’t know what we don’t know. But sometimes, it feels like we can’t see the depth of what we know. Life is a mystery, and so is death. While we are learning new aspects of life, the universe, artificial intelligence, etc., our understanding is evolving and questioning our existence in a paradoxical nature. The complexity and implications of the new learning of existential threat are out of bounds from my knowledge range. But, as a human, I am defaulted to seek answers, knowing that the more I know, the complex it becomes.
Reality is a delusion, as its meaning differs from creature to creature, human to human. The way we see colors are entirely different from how the bird sees the color shades. So, it is altogether impossible to understand the mystery of the universe, or the life itself, by our little brains. Obviously, to retain our sanity and lead our life with calmness, we all pertain to numerous journeys to keep up with the world that we visualize ourselves within.
I wrote this poem based on the above thoughts stuck inside my mind while half-slept in the morning. Or, probably after a nightmare (day-mare), which woke me up in the morning.
Suntonu Bhadra ▪ December, 2020 | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/paradoxical-captivity-1e53d3517705 | ['Suntonu Bhadra'] | 2020-12-23 11:02:10.948000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Life', 'Dystopia', 'Reality', 'Poetry'] |
Well What Was Expected to Happen. Subsequent to viewing a TikTok in which… | After viewing a TikTok where a photographer shared a series of unedited versus edited images. This photographer tried to explain to viewers that blemishes, acne, and all other imperfections may be unattractive — to some — but is natural for women, and how powerful editing is. However, she suggested, without editing, we are not as beautiful. These subtle reminders of what is considered beauty ensures women never feel desirable in their natural state. We have to chase perfection like standards. Yet unattainable to look like a computer-generated version of ourselves.
According to Whom?
It is understandable why some women are tired and over it. Women have been performing their palatableness and face exclusion for being anything less. These performances are acts to conform with little choice. From the celebrated bounce-back and glow up cultures to the expectation of attending social functions as kept — with new hair, nails, and makeup — all to be considered beautiful for the night and, undoubtedly, to feel desired in the world. Women spend time questioning how to present themselves — something which should not be a big deal. We continue to make sure we align with what society considers to be acceptable. Otherwise, many women prepare to explain “why their face is not done” for an event.
And, So What?
The pressure is the price of being shaped by the terms of desirability in your society. It provides fulfillment of being a beauty in a world where it is currency over mental freedom. Unless there is a change to the perception of beauty, it is redundant to push women to love who they are. It is dishonest to ask for enduring self-love by relying on insecure adults to suddenly not care to be desired. There has to be an acknowledgement of how soul-crushing social expectations are and provide a way to show up for those who feel they will never be desirable, and a plan towards helping make their life easier. | https://medium.com/@byiks/well-what-was-expected-happen-c02391775d3e | [] | 2021-01-28 17:43:10.476000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Expectations', 'Society', 'Random', 'Beauty'] |
Be Careful About Regex Performance Trap | 規則運算式相信大家都很熟，實務上也很常見，像是比對 Email、身分證..等，Regex類別具有不可變和執行緒安全特性，所以可以在任何執行緒建立並且共用，大部分情況比對文字相當快速，不過寫法上差異對效能還是有明顯不同。
影響比對效能大致有三點，1.考慮輸入來源、2.避免重複物件實體化、3.編譯模式不一定效能永遠好。
如果輸入文字非常彈性，而且幾乎符合我們的規則運算式模式，且也依賴大量回溯(Backtracking)演算法，該演算法算是規則運算式的核心能力，可讓運算式功能強大且靈活，並且比對非常複雜的模式。 但同時，這項強大功能需付出相當的代價。回溯經常是影響規則運算式引擎之效能最重要的一項因素，當然我們也可以不要進行回溯的線性比對，如果規則運算式倚賴回溯，建議設定逾時間隔。
針對上面三點，我簡單測試驗證電子郵件地址來看看寫法不同的效能差異。
private string[] addresses = { "[email protected]", "[email protected]" }; //string[] addresses = { "[email protected]", // "[email protected]" }; private readonly static Regex _regex = new Regex(@"^[0-9A-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9A-Z])*$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); private readonly static Regex _regexCompiled = new Regex(@"^[0-9A-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9A-Z])*$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled); [BenchmarkCategory("CallMatchWitnNew"), Benchmark(Baseline = true)] public void CallMatchWitnNew() { var pattern = @"^[0-9A-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9A-Z])*$"; var regex = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); foreach (var address in addresses) { var isMatch = regex.IsMatch(address); } } [BenchmarkCategory("CallMatchWitnNewCompiled"), Benchmark()] public void CallMatchWitnNewCompiled() { var pattern = @"^[0-9A-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9A-Z])*$"; var regex = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled); foreach (var address in addresses) { var isMatch = regex.IsMatch(address); } } [BenchmarkCategory("CallMatchWithoutNew"), Benchmark()] public void CallMatchWithoutNew() { var pattern = @"^[0-9A-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9A-Z])*$"; foreach (var address in addresses) { var match = Regex.Match(address, pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); var isMatch = match.Success; } } [BenchmarkCategory("CallMatchWithStatic"), Benchmark()] public void CallMatchWithStatic() { foreach (var address in addresses) { var isMatch = _regex.IsMatch(address); } } [BenchmarkCategory("CallMatchWithStaticCompiled"), Benchmark()] public void CallMatchWithStaticCompiled() { foreach (var address in addresses) { var isMatch = _regexCompiled.IsMatch(address); } }
結果
我們可以看到，CallMatchWitnNewCompiled函式執行時間最久(3,656,653.2 ns)且須分配大量記憶體(20180 B)，該函式中寫法也滿常見，另外，最常見CallMatchWitnNew和CallMatchWithoutNew函式中寫法雖然都比CallMatchWitnNewCompiled來的好，但建議還是使用CallMatchWithStaticCompiled函式寫法，不僅執行時間最快(451.6 ns)、記憶體分配最小(0)，而且也不會建立新物件(Gen0為空直)。
P.S:有興趣的朋友可自行修改輸入來源，有什麼其它發現歡迎留言分享。
RiCo技術學院:實戰課程和多種組合包限時優惠中
RiCo技術空間
Reference:
Regex Class
Best practices for regular expressions in .NET
.NET regular expressions
Backtracking in Regular Expressions | https://medium.com/ricos-note/be-careful-about-regex-performance-trap-64f8e42294c0 | ['Rico 技術農場'] | 2021-09-11 02:16:11.965000+00:00 | ['Net Core'] |
Do You Know That You Are Being Lied To? | Most people will never realize that they are being lied to.
In fact, the majority of humans cannot recognize truth anymore and are at a point where their minds have been so inundated with falsities, propaganda, and social programming that it has become difficult for them to discern what is real and what is not.
Many believe in an alternate reality constructed by mainstream media sources.
Unfortunately, these people are living in a false reality and the truth will not set them free. In fact, it only makes their reality harder to deal with because they feel that there is no escape from what they have been programmed for so long.
Yet the truth is far simpler than most people believe. All one has to do is remove themselves from society, turn off their TV, and disconnect from all social media outlets and news sources. Doing this will help them become more aware of what lies beyond the mainstream narrative.
Most people love to hear negative news stories about other people and they do not like hearing positive ones.
They prefer their own social media echo chambers in which they can discuss the latest bad things that are happening.
This is a phenomenon that has occurred as a result of social media and the fact that most people are not willing to do anything about it. They will instead prefer to complain on their Facebook page or Twitter feed while making sure they use trigger words like 'evil’, 'racist' and 'sexist’. This allows them to easily filter out anyone who disagrees with them.
The fact that most people are not willing to do anything about the state of society is a reflection of their own apathy and unwillingness to look beyond the established narrative. Instead, they prefer to live in an imaginary world where they feel as if they have some control over what happens. | https://medium.com/@alex-porto/do-you-know-that-you-are-being-lied-to-c25e14265019 | ['Alexandre Porto'] | 2020-12-23 14:54:36.987000+00:00 | ['Strength', 'Lies', 'Society', 'Freedom', 'Social Media'] |
Letter From Your Imagination | Dear Old Friend,
I wonder if you know I still watch you. I wonder if you know that I sit, curled in the corners and grooves of your mind. I wait, waxing and waning, for your attention. You with your hands and your soul, you are my sunrise. So how could you betray me? How could you neglect me? You and I used to be so close but as you grew bigger, you forced me to shrink and to hide in the dark of a moldy box far from sight. Its edges creaking and it’s wood splintering. So I ask, are you happy? Was the loss of my company worth it? Maturity. I used to hold your hand and run with you. I would wrap my arms around you and fill your lungs with air as you swam through your dreams. I was your closest confidant and you were my… my everything. If I had known that playing grown-up would lead to you one day leaving me to whither… I would still have done it. I would still have hugged your ideas and given them warm soil to grow from. I would still have built castles for you. I would still have twisted and bent like a gymnast to form a bridge between you and other children. Child. You were a child and my greatest architect. You took my malleable form and molded me into something great. I owe you for the time we had. I love you for the time we had. I miss the times we had. But now the sun has set on our great adventure. Perhaps the adventure ended a long time ago and I was too distracted to notice. Perhaps I was too busy trying to give you the stars to notice that night had fallen. I do not write to tell you of my anger at leaving the dragon unslain or the pirates’ treasure unfound. I write to tell you that I, like always, am here. I wait for the day that you remember that. I am so proud to have been your blueprint. And I pray to be called upon again. I will take you to the stars and laugh vibrantly alongside you as you rattle them. Remember my name, old friend, I will be here for you. I will wait in my box until you call on me to build a castle or better yet inspire you to build your own throne. I miss you and I am proud of you.
Write back soon, I always loved the stories that you told me. | https://medium.com/@imaeadler/letter-from-your-imagination-7a66b56b2235 | ['Isabelle Mae Adler'] | 2020-12-26 21:28:56.283000+00:00 | ['Growing Up', 'Childhood', 'Imagination'] |
Women In Tech: Celebrating International Women’s Day 2019 #BalanceForBetter | International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women as a global community. This year’s theme, #BalanceForBetter, strives to increase gender balance in all industries for a better working world. How can we achieve this balance? Bring awareness, motivate others and take action. Everyone can do their part.
Happy #IWD2019.
By empowering women through technical education it can help bridge the gender gap and open up opportunities for more women in tech. Some organizations that work to nurture women’s tech talent are Girls Who Code (USA), Black Girls Code (USA & South Africa) and Kizcode (UK).
Girls Who Code, founded by Reshma Saujani, has made the gender gap and tech education more visible by recruiting high profile ambassadors — most notably Supermodel Karlie Kloss to raise awareness. Girls Who Code has reached almost 90,000 girls and aims to contribute to gender parity by 2027.
Kimberly Bryant set out to create Black Girls Code to prove that girls of every colour can code. Through workshops and after school programs, Black Girls Code provides underprivileged girls in underrepresented communities the opportunity to learn and master their technical skills. Their goal is to train 1 million girls by 2040.
Müjde Esin created Kizcode to open doors for Turkish and Kurdish speaking women in the UK who faced domestic violence and forced marriages in their patriarchal societies. It is difficult for these women to integrate into UK society because they face language difficulties and unemployment. Kizcode aims to equip these women with skills to improve their quality of life through education and nurturing their skills. By empowering these women with code, tech and computer skills, it provides them with an opportunity for a career, to reach their goals or simply sell their handmade products and recipes online as a means of income.
You don’t have to set up a coding organization to make a difference. Two women that are fighting for diversity and balance in the workplace for women are Laura Gómez and Laura Weidman Powers. Through the people analytics tool, Atipica, Laura Gómez helps companies use data to strategize hiring and build more diverse workforces. Laura Weidman Powers, who served as a Senior Policy Advisor to the Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House, is an advocate for young Black and Latino Engineers, and works to ensure that they’re proportionally represented in the field.
When empowered with knowledge and mentored, girls and women can make the world a better place.
A group of girls from San Fernando High School in Los Angeles teamed up with DIY Girls, an organization supporting girls in STEM, to create lightweight and portable solar powered tents for the homeless. Homelessness was close to their hearts as Daniela Orozco, one member of the group who then was a senior of San Fernando, came from a low income family. Within only four years, the girls saw the increase of homelessness in their community and wanted to create a solution. Their solar powered tents has the potential to help many different people worldwide, including refugees or victims of natural disasters.
Thato Kgatlhanye from South Africa launched her company, Rethaka Trading, when she was only 18 years old. Disadvantaged children face many challenges such as lack of school supplies like school bags and being exposing to the risk of getting hit by cars while walking on unsafe roads on the way to school. Rethaka repurposes schoolbags filled with retro-reflective materials to increase visibility for the children’s walk to and from school. These bags are fitted with a solar panel that charges as the child is walking to school and when they get back home, they can use it as a light to study. “We are offering dignity, safety and access to light.” — Kgatlhanye
Although young, these women have shown great contribution to our society, much like blockchain. Blockchain technology is still maturing, but we’ve seen the impact it has already made on the world. If it wasn’t for the development of blockchain, STK Token and other cryptocurrencies, exchanges and wallets wouldn’t exist. It’s also opened up a new type of job for women in tech, Blockchain Developers.
STK’s former Blockchain Developer, Natalie Chin, who is still in school at McMaster University for Computer Science, is already making an impact in the space. Chin has been very actively involved in the blockchain community; volunteering, organizing, mentoring, and speaking at hackathons — including DeltaHacks and STACKATHON to name a few. Her talent has taken her to ETH San Francisco, where the STK team & friends won the top 3 prizes. Chin continues to work in tech in Toronto, and as a Blockchain Professor at George Brown College, where she shares her knowledge and experience to guide the next generation of Blockchain Developers.
Former STK Blockchain Developer, Natalie Chin teaching the next generation of developers.
In all these examples, we can see that when women are empowered, supported and represented in tech, they accomplish incredible things. This is one of the reasons to strive for #BalanceForBetter.
Is there a woman in tech that inspires you? Do you know someone we should profile? Leave your comments below! | https://medium.com/stk-token/women-in-tech-celebrating-international-womens-day-2019-balanceforbetter-932a7be54755 | ['Stk Token'] | 2019-03-08 15:36:14.030000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Women In Tech', 'International Womens Day', 'Technology', 'Fintech'] |
Pre-Pregnant | I’m going to have a baby! Someday! I always knew I wanted to be a mom, but between medical complications, concerns about population growth, working in the foster care system, and a whole lot of trauma, I was intent on adopting for years. Then last year I went to my partner’s concert (he’s a professional musician), and while watching him play the marimba I had a very clear thought: I must have this man’s baby inside me. This was alarming because 1. I had only known this man for about 3.5 months, 2. I was convinced I would not, and probably could not, have kids, and 3. Wouldn’t that destroy my perfect vagina?
I am a feminist, and I study feminist philosophy and methodology, but I have some serious flaws in my thinking. For example, I’m pretty sure that the idea of a vagina snapping back to pre-baby size after birth is a myth to keep women having babies. You’re telling me that my vagina will rip straight through to my asshole and then heal itself like that never even happened? I do not believe it.
This is important to me not just because that process sounds horrific, but because a significant amount of my self-worth is in my sexuality. I could be described as competitive about my sexuality. Years of trauma and mental illness taught me that sex was all I was good for, so I had better be the best at it.
The biggest threat to my (admittedly misplaced) self-worth is childbirth — my body will change, my vagina will change, and I just won’t be me anymore. When I try to discuss my fear with other people who can have children, I feel like my concerns are often dismissed with vague claims like, “oh it goes back” and “people have sex again after having babies.” I know people *do* have sex after having kids; I’ve seen the Duggars, but I’m not convinced sex with her after 18 kids doesn’t feel like throwing a hotdog down a hallway, and no one else seems to be worried about that. If people are worried about their vaginas after childbirth, they certainly aren’t talking about it.
It turns out there are a lot of elements of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood that people aren’t talking about. I don’t know many people who are learning about these things before becoming pregnant. In my opinion, that’s way too late.
I’m pro-choice, pro-abortion for any reason, but I know that personally, if I have a wanted pregnancy and then learn about some horrific aspect of childbirth 4 months into the pregnancy and decide I can’t go through with it, it would crush me. I also know that it is super unlikely that I would learn something so awful that I couldn’t go through with childbirth even though millions of people have done it before me. But I also also know that most people aren’t learning about childbirth until it is too late to not go through with it (for medical, legal or emotional reasons). My vagina and sense of self have been through enough; I just want to know what I’m getting myself into before getting into it.
I’ve decided to do all my motherhood research now, at 23 and very dedicated to taking my birth control. I’ll be reading books, listening to podcasts, doing some soul-searching and, most importantly, going to pelvic floor therapy. I have probably needed pelvic floor therapy (physical therapy for your vagina, basically) since I was 14 due to the anatomical issues before I experienced trauma, but no doctor introduced me to the idea until I was about 20, and at that point I was terrified. Pelvic floor therapy is now (it wasn’t always) a recommended treatment for a lot of postpartum issues, trauma injuries and more. I know that I can learn valuable information about my own body and what to expect from pregnancy and childbirth, but I’m just so fucking scared.
To inspire me to stick with it, I’m going to journal my fears, thoughts and findings here. I feel that a commitment to writing my experiences and reviews of resources will encourage a sense of greater responsibility. So that’s what I’m doing.
I’ve decided to call myself “pre-pregnant.” Naturally when you buy three books on pregnancy, try to sign up for a birthing class and ask all your friends very personal questions about childbirth, people ask “how far along” you are. I’ll be answering, “oh, I’m pre-pregnant. So like, not far at all” and then enjoying their confused looks. | https://medium.com/@riley27/pre-pregnant-13015dd6ad4b | ['Riley B'] | 2020-12-27 22:11:19.971000+00:00 | ['Self Esteem', 'Pregnancy', 'Feminism'] |
Getting to know the Lawrence Family JCC | We are the Jewish Community Center, so it only makes sense that we want you all to know who works here at the Lawrence Family JCC! We are going to start highlighting different members of our staff and members of LFJCC so that you can feel more connected to us and each other.
What do you like most about your job at the JCC?
Watching generations of people flourish in their lives because of their connection to Jewish life and our work.
What book, movie, or music genre do you enjoy the most?
I read non-fiction books and I like reggae music.
Did you choose your profession or did it choose you?
It chose me for sure!
What skill would you like to master?
Patience.
What one thing makes you the happiest?
My children. All three, two humans and a dog.
What color crayon would you consider yourself?
Orange.
What is the last gift you gave someone?
Jewelry.
What one non-work related topic do you know the most about?
I know a little something about a lot of things.
If you were a brand, what would your motto be?
Change doesn’t happen in a day, it happens daily.
How would people communicate with each other in a perfect world?
Respectfully.
Do you consider yourself lucky?
Not lucky, fortunate. Luck would suggest that I had no role in my own good fortune. I’m blessed, no doubt, but I have worked hard to be in a place to receive those blessings.
What would you do with 10 million dollars?
Donate to the Lawrence Family JCC
Keep an eye out for more interviews and insights into the staff and members of the Lawrence Family JCC | JACOBS FAMILY CAMPUS | https://medium.com/lawrence-family-jcc/getting-to-know-the-lawrence-family-jcc-ead1f467a7dc | ['Lfjcc Contributor'] | 2019-05-08 23:29:30.071000+00:00 | ['Female Leadership', 'Leadership', 'Interview', 'Community', 'Judaism'] |
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