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React Native Vs Ionic 2: Comparison | Ionic 2 is part of the hybrid mobile development framework family. Ionic 2 is not only a rewrite of the previous Ionic framework, it embraces the structure and design of AngularJS 2, while also taking inspiration for their design language from Android, Material Design, and iOS. If you are from a background of AngularJS, you’ll be comfortable developing apps using Ionic. Also, it’s TypeScript ready, meaning you can use your current AngularJS 2 components too. Ionic also comes with pre-developed and styled components making it easier for developers to create the UI of an app. The UI is not native though but can give the appearance of a native UI.
Ionic is a framework on top of Cordova, which is used to access the phone hardware functionality. In other words, Cordova whirls up your system browser to render you app, known as WebView. Keep in mind, Cordova isn’t the only framework for hybrid apps, and neither is Ionic the only framework using Cordova. WebView is a browser-free web page loader, giving you access to mobile functionalities like camera, contacts, etc. It’ll be slower in comparison to React Native since here you have to write the HTML code in your Android activities. If your user’s smartphone has a slow processor, it can lead to performance issues or graphical issues
You need to download plugins to access native functionality. For instance, you need to download Cordova plugins if you want to use Google Maps. Ionic 2 supports Ionic Native which does the job of accessing native functionalities of the device through JavaScript more smoothly than the older version. There’s a common interface for all plugins, and this makes it easier to use native functionalities.
With Ionic 2, TypeScript components can make tasks slower compared to directly working with native API. Nevertheless, Ionic 2 does overcome many performance issues with the help of its structure.
Pros:
Fast development-testing cycle.
It cross-compiles to iOS and Android.
Ionic is easy to learn & work with.
You can write code in TypeScript, which makes it easy if you’re coming from a background of AngularJS 2.
You can use TypeScript to develop applications for all platforms.
You can access the native functionalities of your user’s devices with the plugin system.
Angular itself is easier to learn & work with, for smaller projects than React.
Cons:
There could be performance issues if you need to use a lot of callbacks to the native code.
If your users prefer the native UI look, the same UI look in all the devices could put them off.
Development of advanced graphics or interactive transitions will prove difficult.
Previously, working on Webview was slow and in a way, guaranteed low app ratings because of performance. Now, it’s less an issue, as newer smartphones come with better system browsers and better phone specs. However, it still is a noticeable performance difference compared to native.
Ionic is easy to use and learn, but there are restrictions on using the Native features of the device. You bridge the gap using Cordova or PhoneGap, and both have plugins for almost all Native features you may need like GPS, file system, etc.
Ionic is a good choice for prototyping, or projects which have fast development needs, or if you have many app requirements with lower budgets, and whose app performance ratings aren’t paramount.
React Native | https://medium.com/swlh/react-native-vs-ionic-2-comparison-50aba900be6c | ['Amit Ashwini'] | 2020-03-20 09:58:28.468000+00:00 | ['React Native', 'Mobile App Development', 'Hybrid App Development', 'Software Development', 'Ionic'] |
What You Should Know About Criticism | When Constructive Criticism Gets Out of Hand
We are all often critical sometimes, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. We understand that our colleague, spouse, boss, or coach has our best interest at heart.
To criticize constructively means you’re thinking carefully. It is a skill that helps us navigate the world and our relationships in an objective way. It helps us sharpen our skills and increases our chances of accelerated progress.
Constructive criticism is about making the world better but when you're being too critical of others you're making yourself feel better.
And this is where the opposite of objectivity sets in.
Being too critical of others can make us narrow-minded and blind, especially to ourselves.
One of the reasons to easily slip into habitually criticizing others is that it makes us feel good without even knowing it.
When constructive criticism gets out of hand, it becomes hateful criticism. | https://medium.com/be-unique/what-you-should-know-about-criticism-bc67294cc686 | ['Emeka Nwanedo'] | 2020-06-29 01:35:13.945000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Work', 'Productivity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life'] |
5 SERIOUS YEARS | By Paula Espinosa Valarezo
Only a few steps away from Poccistraße station, there is a beautiful and old mint green building, and in its third floor the SERIOUS.BUSINESS offices/party locations lay. It’s a small office, with an open floor plan, colorful posters and an inflatable unicorn head; outside a big terrace with fairy lights, a space that remains warm even in the colder months in Munich. Then there is the people, the founding team, but that’s a longer story:
It seems impossible to imagine those five people meeting by chance in a classroom in Stockholm, yet at the same time, there is a sense of destiny in this team. They are exactly where they are supposed to be.
Celebrating at the last Punchi Punch office party before the pandemic arrived
The Covid-19 pandemic has put a veil on top of 2020, many businesses are struggling and many others have had to close their doors. But in the middle of the chaos and uncertainty, SERIOUS.BUSINESS a small branding agency, celebrates 5 years of working alongside purpose-driven companies in the creation of meaningful brands. So, I asked the founding team to let me write a piece for their 5-year anniversary, to bring some of their joy and fun into this calamitous year. I had the chance to talk to each of them individually, and by the last conversation, I had the feeling that I had met SERIOUS.BUSINESS.
Normally, they would have thrown a party to celebrate their anniversary, Porfirio would have played music, and people would have danced and laughed. But having fun is a serious commitment. So in order to celebrate together, here are the top 5 ultimate SERIOUS.BUSINESS party songs, chosen by them, for the for everyone to join in on the celebration.
“SERIOUS.BUSINESS is what I had planned for myself” — Helga
The team met in Hyper Island, they were supposed to go for an internship as part of their program, but since challenging the status quo is something that was present since the agency’s birth; they decided to start something together instead. After a successful couple of months together, they jumped and founded SERIOUS.BUSINESS.
The five of them shared the dream of starting something of their own. For some, it had been a long standing goal they mapped for themselves almost a decade before it actually happened. For others, as soon as they got together it clicked, kind of like a great first date. They had their first cabin trip, although not the last, and decided to take the chance to start their own agency and see their dream through, even if that meant failing.
2015 in Stockholm — The very cabin trip where SERIOUS.BUSINESS is conceived
They were looking to build something different, something that could allow them to explore their creativity, choose their clients, and turn work into an enhancer of life, but not life itself.
The start of SERIOUS.BUSINESS was not uneventful, from having to choose the city where to settle, to finding the first clients, to waiting on visas and permits for some team members. They built the agency unafraid of big claims, with a culture that values freedom, continuous learning, and creativity. They built a business using friendship as the foundation.
When asked about the most memorable moments of these five years, Reykjavik kept being mentioned. They went to Reykjavik for their most interactive project to date. They took the city’s most prominent landmark, Hallgrimskirkja, turned it into a candle for Amnesty International’s Christmas campaign, and asked for people’s engagement to keep the candle alive. Nonetheless, as they told the stories of their time in Iceland, they all kept coming back to the fun times together, the laughs, and the inspiration they find in each other.
Whoever said that friends and business don’t mix hasn’t met them.
“Diversity and a global perspective” — Porfirio
Coming from all corners of the world, the idea of settling down in one city seemed unrealistic to say the least. They choose Munich with the commitment of making it a home for both the agency and the team. In many ways they did, they threw parties and grew a community around them, but in many ways they grew scared of what would happen if one of them wanted to leave. They nomadic spirit couldn’t be so easily tamed. Corona changed that, it forced distance between them, and with it the realization that SERIOUS.BUSINESS’ home is in the team. They have found new and exciting ways of bringing their something special online, and also the knowledge that they can keep producing amazing work remotely.
5 Countries, 5 Languages, 5 Backgrounds
Back to 2017 — the early days in the first office in Munich
It is precisely their diversity that makes the SERIOUS.BUSINESS team so unique, it serves as their superpower. It influences the way they are, but mostly the way they collaborate.
The agency involves and engages clients in the process. Their core belief that purpose-driven brands can change the world in meaningful ways forced them to develop a process in which they really get to know the client and understand the brand they are working with.
Their collaborative process is ingrained in their culture. From the way they work as a team to the way they build connections with freelancers, partners, and clients. SERIOUS.BUSINESS is driven by warm ambition. They want to help Startups build meaningful brands and become the go-to agency for purpose-driven companies, and in order to do it, they are willing to open themselves up, be engaged and vulnerable. They are all in.
“Having fun is being successful” — Sebastian
It’s ironic that a company named SERIOUS.BUSINESS has as a core value being serious about having fun. For them working without having fun is a huge waste of resources; people deliver more and better when they are motivated by playfulness and enjoyment. Work is such a huge part of our lives and it should be fun. It is through work that we meet new people and discover new interests. Fostering an engaging environment allows for growth: not only growth of the company, but personal growth.
Work: it’s all About People
2017 at the Lovie Awards in London — the first major recognition of our work
The team’s commitment to fun, is actually a commitment to people. They have embraced holacracy as their work structure. No hierarchies, no job titles, but don’t confuse it with no structure. Holacracy for SERIOUS.BUSINESS is taking a chance on people. Understanding that a great idea, immense talent, and creativity can come from anyone is what makes this completely out-of-the-box structure actually work.
Holacracy ensures that decision-making is distributed among all team members. In order for that to be realistic in their team, they need to have fully open communication channels. Their check-in/check-out policy works wonders. It is as simple as it sounds: at the beginning of the day or of a meeting they check in: this is the perfect moment to share, ask for help, and also learn about what others are up to; and at the end of the day they check out, they claim their own space. This creates a team that is always on the loop, where team members seek responsibilities based on their interests. Autonomy and passion delivers much more than micromanaging.
When asked to describe what SERIOUS.BUSINESS meant for them in three words, freedom was mentioned by all the founders. This is their freedom project, how to found a branding agency and do the work you dreamt of, while at the same time explore the world, learn new things, and have fun? They don’t have it 100% figured out yet, but their committed approach to people and enjoyment seems to be proving itself as the right path.
“Sharing the knowledge” — Amadeus
They are a young company committed to help other young companies develop meaningful and powerful brands. Brands that can change the world. They have worked in over 60 projects in these past five years and have been able to bear witness of the impact of branding.
Branding is a tricky word, and that’s a big part of what they envision for SERIOUS.BUSINESS in the future, to become the place-to-go for startups in need of developing a brand. For now, they are centered in Europe, with a few clients/partners in the US, but with such an international team it comes with no surprise how much they want to share themselves, their best practices, their experience and knowledge to their own regions and beyond, Latam or Australia, for example.
A Serious Partner for Serious Startups
Legendary Winter Cabin Trip 2018 to Zillertal in Austria
Sharing the knowledge means a lot more than just getting more and bigger clients, it means expanding their culture, creating better working places, pushing creativity and strategy into the most courageous projects, and building a community. They are now developing new and more affordable products that give any serious startup the tools to become a market leader.
In a world where everyone is trying to keep their cards close to their chest, SERIOUS.BUSINESS is playing with an open hand. From being honest and open about their own mistakes and struggles –and writing down their learnings– , to sharing their unique Hot Air Balloon methodology through their newsletter Serious Knowledge. The team’s biggest revolution is their devotion to helping others follow their passion and conquer their goals.
“SERIOUS.BUSINESS is MY dream client” — Thales
The dream client question is a mandatory one for a branding agency, and they do have their picks: from Patagonia, to UFC, to anyone willing to revolutionize the future of work. But after the smiles and laughs, they all went back to SERIOUS.BUSINESS. The dream is to keep working for themselves.
They want to be able to invest and reinvest in what they believe in, to choose clients based on passion and impact instead of budget. They want to help amplify the voices they admire. At the same time, they are ready to start developing their own projects, from the creation of new branding products, all the way to technology development and expanding their community to all corners of the world.
Founding team in 2020 — still enjoying and hungry for more
After talking to them about the past, I asked about how they saw the future of SERIOUS.BUSINESS. Their answers stretched all the way from “not that different” to “becoming a household-name agency”. Although they might sound contradictory in a sense, it speaks deeply of their culture. They want to keep on choosing their clients based on shared values, yet they are ambitious, constantly searching for bigger challenges.
Equipped with a wealth of diversity and creativity, the future of SERIOUS.BUSINESS is indeed something to look out for. The road ahead holds many changes, but some things are bound to stay the same –like having fun on the job, going on cabin trips, or getting lunch once a week at Thuy (the best Pad Thai in Munich). | https://blog.seriousbusiness.agency/5-serious-years-19edf0aab5a3 | ['Serious Business'] | 2020-11-20 10:34:41.420000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Founder Stories', 'How To Start A Business', 'Agency', 'Branding'] |
My Tech Bag | I contemplated writing a standalone review for these headphones because they have been my favorite pair consistently for years now. The fact that Bose still sells these should be a good indication of how great these headphones are.
I am sure the QuietComfort 35’s and the Bose 700’s have slightly better sound due to my pair being quite a few years old now. But to me, they still sound amazing and the noise cancellation is the best.
The burden of having to still deal with a wire can sometimes be a pain. Especially when you have to also carry around a lightning to headphone adapter to use with my iPhone. Though I actually don’t really use these headphone that much with my iPhone.
Normally I use my AirPods when wanting to listen to something on my phone like a podcast or music. When I want to really concentrate or watch something longer I will use my MacBook or iPad Mini.
When writing I will plug these headphones into my laptop and repeat a non-lyrical playlist that I enjoy with the noise canceling on. Or when I am traveling and wanting to watch a movie on my iPad during a flight I will use my headphones. In both of these situations, I don’t need the adapter since headphones jacks still exist on Macs and some iPads.
The best use for these is definitely when writing. When I take a trip to a coffee shop or just at home, turning on the noise canceling is huge for my productivity. I am a huge procrastinator so the more I can block out to avoid distractions the better. All of the side conversations happening at Starbucks, my cats fighting each other under the desk I am writing on, or even the crying baby on a flight to Utah are all evaporated from my mind.
A few more things I would like to mention regarding these headphones is the fact that you can get a pair for a reasonable price (usually around $125 — $175 based on sales going on), not having to charge them is a bit convenient since popping a new battery for the noise canceling is effortless, and they are so comfortable to wear for long periods of time.
Glasses
You might find glasses to be a silly thing to add to this list since it is not really tech, I am it is but not the theme of tech that I am describing in this post, and it is also something that is required and not a choice for some.
The reason I added this as part of my tech bag carry is I actually use these glasses when using my laptop for long periods of time and nothing else. I am lucky enough to have almost perfect vision so the prescription in these is very minor. The main reason I wear them though is for occasional eye strain and blurriness that comes from Computer Vision Syndrome.
From the American Optometric Association, for extended period times at looking at a screen, you can experience symptoms such as:
eyestrain
headaches
blurred vision
dry eyes
neck and shoulder pain
I mentioned the eyestrain, blurriness and sometimes headaches to my optometrist who not only recommended getting a pair of glasses with a small prescription but also include the anti-blue “technology” coating to the lenses.
They have helped a lot when writing for long periods of time or while at work sitting at my desk all day. So though they are not really a gadget, they are a must-have in my tech bag.
ProCase Gadget bag
Speaking of gadgets, I bought this pouch before my trip to Utah to help make some kind of sense to all of the cables and dongles in my life. I originally bought this to fit in the bottom pocket of my Tom Bihn Synapse 25 which fits perfectly. Now with my Aer, I don’t have a perfect pocket for it but it does fit nicely in the bottom part of the outside duffle compartment.
Inside of the pouch I get the following compartments to fit wires, dongles, gadgets, etc; two small zipper pockets, one large zipper pocket, six elastic straps for cables, two medium-sized pockets and three tiny mesh pockets.
For my setup I have a USB-C to USB-A dongle in one of the small zipper pockets, a microfiber clothe in the large zipper pocket, a battery pack that has the ability to charge my MacBook Pro in a medium-sized pocket, a 10W and 5W power adapter in the other medium-sized pocket, two USB-A to Lightning Cables and a USB-C to USB-C cable. In the three small mesh pockets, I have an extra AAA battery for my headphones, my Yubikee for work, and USB-A thumb drive.
When I am on the road I will throw in an Apple Watch charging cable and maybe a few more cables for my wife's gadgets but this is what I normally keep in this pouch for daily use. | https://medium.com/techuisite/my-tech-bag-4ddd0a9f5903 | ['Paul Alvarez'] | 2019-10-18 23:22:07.525000+00:00 | ['Backpack', 'Minimalism', 'Review', 'Gadgets', 'Technology'] |
Loops In JavaScript | While loop :
while loop execute the block of code until the given condition evaluates to true. As soon as the condition is fails, the loops is stopped. The syntax of the while loops is:-
Syntax :-
while(condition){ //body of the loop }
Example of while loop:-
let i=1; while(i<6){ console.log(i); i++; } //output:
1
2
3
4
5
In the given example, the body of loop executed until the value of i is less than 6 and the value of i increase by 1 when body of loop is executed once.
Do-while loop :
In do-while loop, the body of loop executed before the condition is checked. The condition is checked at the end of each iteration of loop.
Do-while loop is closely related to while loop, the only difference is that body of loop executed first then after checks for the condition i.e.(exit controlled loop).
syntax:-
do{ //body of loop }while(condition)
Example of do-while loop:-
let i=1; do{ console.log(i); i++; }while(i<6); //output:
1
2
3
4
5
In the given example, the body of loop prints the value of i and increase by 1 when body of loop executed once and at the end condition is checked i.e. i<6
For loop :-
For loop repeats the block of code until the certain condition is reached and used to repeat the block of code certain number of times.
syntax:-
for(initialization; condition; increment){ //body of loop }
In syntax, initialization is used to initialize the variable once before the first execution of the body of loop, condition is evaluated every time at the beginning of each iteration, increment update the variable at each iteration of loop.
Example of for loop:-
for(let i=1; i<6; i++){ console.log(i); } //output:
1
2
3
4
5
For/In loop :-
The For/In statement loops the properties of an object. In each iteration, one property of object is assigned to the variable.
syntax:-
for(variable in object){ //body of loop }
The variable in for/in loop is string, not a number.
let myObj={ a:”apple”, b:”ball”, c:”cat”, d:”dog” }; for(prop in myObj){ console.log(myObj[prop]); } //output:
apple
ball
cat
dog
For/Of loop :-
The for/of loop is introduced in ES6. The for/of statement loops over the objects or data structures that are iterable, such as array, string, etc. The for/of loop does not work on objects because they are not iterable.
syntax:-
for( variable of iterable){ //body of loop }
Example:- | https://medium.com/@vimalkwh05/loops-in-javascript-86b875081d9e | [] | 2020-12-10 05:06:07.233000+00:00 | ['Javascript Tips', 'JavaScript', 'Loops In Javascript', 'Javascript Development', 'Programming Languages'] |
Prisoner 5 | Chapter 2
The door flies open. It’s always fast, loud, and followed by pain.
I tried escaping once. The door opens out and to the right. I was on the side of the door where it swings open so I didn’t need to deal with the door in my way, just the guards. At the time there were two but now there are four. I’m not the only one who tried to run.
I made it into the hallway which was stark white, glaringly so after starring at so much grey for so long. The hallway to the left appeared to slope downward in a twisting-like slant. Very disorienting. I’m sure by design. Why else? The floor is also very slippery, like oil. Whoever our captures are have done this enough to have perfected escape countermeasures.
It used to be two, now there are four. Vicious savages. They make no sound but move with a ferocity of a wild animal.
The door flies open. It’s always fast, loud, and followed by pain. Flailing limbs precise and powerful armed with batons, stun-batons, and whips.
Then they’re gone as fast as they arrive. On to the next as screams echo and moans hang in the air like a thick fog leaving each, like me, curled in a ball of agony. Some sob but most seem beyond that. My body seems numb to the pain during the assault but after — the waves of pain crawl across and through my body like an army of fire-ants.
Fire-ants? What are fire-ants? Why does that image come to me?
I am Prisoner 52781 — 340 but my neighbors call me 5.
Chapter 3
*Prisoner 5 is an Original serial story released every Saturday* | https://medium.com/@j-leegraves/prisoner-5-e48f158ea39d | ['J. Lee Graves'] | 2021-01-09 18:37:52.486000+00:00 | ['Science Fiction', 'Serial Fiction', 'Mystery', 'Fiction Writing', 'Creative Writing'] |
Coding is Hard: It Isn’t | For me, coding has this mentality that only the very best can do it and you need to spend hours upon hours to even get a little progress.
This is just not the case. Learning the basics of a language could only take a few weeks if you spend one hour practicing and learning.
It may seem difficult but just do it. If you don’t enjoy it then just try something else. If you have the motivation to learn it then you will definitely be able to do it. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/coding-is-hard-it-isnt-59e4dd9348a9 | ['Mike Wang'] | 2020-11-14 14:29:17.966000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Self Help', 'Software Development', 'Self Improvement'] |
When it comes to the environment, our economic system is hindering real progress | In the 1970s, I began to understand the depths of the problem western societies face. Ever since, I have been trying to find the ways we must live in order to live sustainably. For quite prolonged periods of time, I have also tried to live in such ways: to honour and regenerate the living world, rather than exploit and deplete it. This has involved living in various communities, altering my diet, being cold in the winter, requiring very little space and few possessions, planting and growing, caring for wildlife and habitats, reusing and recycling, making and mending; generally making the smallest demands possible.
At other times, I have found myself very short of cash, dissatisfied with the relationships I found myself in in those situations, and feeling at a loss watching others enjoy luxuries that I was denying myself. At times like those, I have dusted off my suit and CV, got myself a job and joined the rat-race again to make up what felt like lost ground.
Activists are campaigning for a more just world, one where the climate and the living environment for billions of humans, and trillions of sentient others, is not being quietly murdered to feed our wealth, luxury and consumption. The movement, the awareness and the strength of feeling is growing by the month, by the year. Eventually the dam may burst. Those trying to make just a bit more profit while they can, turning a blind eye to the destruction, the dispossessed and the downtrodden, may be brought up short.
But, they say, we need them and their industries. Without their chemicals, the wildlife would eat all the crops. Without their walls and guns, we’d be overrun with criminals and terrorists. Without their global operations, we’d have none of the things we need every day.
It’s a whole structure. I’m not interested in making their business models sustainable, I want to see life flourishing and thriving in ways that have worked for billions of years, and which are currently being snuffed out one by one.
Mass extinction should not be a price that life has to pay to maintain stock prices and shareholder value.
But if we started to succeed, if we could find that loose brick at the bottom of the whole Jenga tower and pull it out, it is very likely that the whole thing would collapse. Could we cope with that?
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 24 January 2018 | https://medium.com/nine-by-five-media/when-it-comes-to-the-environment-our-economic-system-is-hindering-real-progress-4b1a9e821e0a | ['Nigel Jones'] | 2019-01-26 10:52:22.431000+00:00 | ['Capitalism', 'Extinction', 'Sustainability', 'Business', 'Environment'] |
Импакт-инвестиции в сельское хозяйство и АПК | As an impact investment evangelist IxD Capital effectively promotes new industrial and digital business models. | https://medium.com/@ixdcapital/%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%82-%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B8-%D0%B2-%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B5-%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B7%D1%8F%D0%B9%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE-%D0%B8-%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%BA-5bdad2129a67 | ['Ixd Capital'] | 2020-12-12 12:06:58.880000+00:00 | ['Impact Investing', 'Agriculture', 'Farming', 'Ixdcapital', 'Finance'] |
Can People’s Sentiments on Social Media Predict Stock? | The successful prediction of a stock’s future price could yield significant profit. However, many people believe that stock market is not predictable. Why? Because stock market is the everyday summation of human opinions and world events that investors observe and react to on a minute by minute basis. There are too many factors to take into account that affect stock price. Even so, tons of people are still obsessed with building models that can capture those complicated features of stock market. From my perspective, there are three reasons why people keep doing so: 1) along with development of technology, many new comprehensive models are perform well and can be tested on stock market; 2) perhaps a missing part of this jigsaw puzzle can be found; 3) the power of money. We already knew that sentiments of people is a strong factor that can change the trend of the entire market, but how can we know people’s sentiment without asking them? The answer is social media. People post their thoughts and opinion about stock market on different social media platform every day, and to some extent those posts react their sentiments on investing in the stock market. The purpose of this article is to use people’s sentiments to predict stock change.
Sentimental Analysis
Sentimental analysis is also known as opinion mining or emotion AI, which is one branch of natural language processing. Basically. it uses machine learning algorithms that focus on classifying posts into positive, negative and neutral polarity. There are many popular pretrained sentiment analysis models provided in various Python NLP libraries such as NLTK’s Vader sentiment analysis tool and Textblob’s Sentiment Analysis.
The process of how sentiments affect stock market can be both direct and indirect. Direct process is when people post negative or positive opinion for a specific stock or stock market on social media. On the other hand, indirect process is when people post opinions about events that closely link to stock market. For example, the stock market kept falling during the time people were extremely panic on pandemic. Through searching and analyzing a great amount of data on social media platforms or microblogging websites, we can understand what are people regarding about a particular stock. In this article, I will talk about how to use people’s opinions on Twitter to predict Amazon’s stock change.
Data Collection
Since a great amount of data are needed in this experiment, official API tool such as Tweepy is no longer practicable because it has restrictions on number of tweets extracted. Instead, Twint is used for historical tweets extraction as it can bypass restrictions Twitter sets. Because indirect events that could affect Amazon stock are very difficult to trace, only direct tweets are focused here. The stock ticker is the most important keyword when search for tweets that talking about Amazon stock — $AMZN. The basic usage of Twint package in python is as below. Date range is from 2010 Jan to 2020 Oct. It took a while to extract data because the date range is quite long. In total, 1,453,758 tweets are downloaded between start and end date.
import twint
def get_tweets(start_date, end_date, keyword1, keyword2):
c = twint.Config()
c.Search = keyword1, keyword2
c.Since = start_date
c.Until = end_date
c.Hide_output = True
c.Lang = 'en'
c.Count = True
c.Store_csv = True
c.Output = 'data.csv'
twint.run.Search(c)
get_tweets('2010-01-01', '2020-10-31', '$amzn', 'amazon')
Another dataset is the daily stock price of Amazon. I used Wharton Research Data Services python package and extracted data from Compustat dataset. An easier way to get stock data is to download from Yahoo Finance.
Data Cleaning
Some steps are required before model building. First, tweets have to be cleaned. I defined two functions to remove patterns and urls in each tweet.
def remove_pattern(input_txt, pattern):
r = re.findall(pattern, input_txt)
for i in r:
input_txt = re.sub(i, '', input_txt)
return input_txt
def remove_urls (vTEXT):
vTEXT = re.sub(r'(https|http)?:\/\/(\w|\.|\/|\?|\=|\&|\%)*\b', '', vTEXT, flags=re.MULTILINE)
return(vTEXT)
Remove “@user” and “#hashtag” because @user and #hashtag have nothing business with sentiment:
data['tidy_text'] = np.vectorize(remove_pattern)(data['tweet'], "@[\w]*")
data['tidy_text'] = np.vectorize(remove_pattern)(data['tidy_text'], "#[\w]*")
Remove urls:
data['tidy_text'] = np.vectorize(remove_urls)(data['tidy_text'])
Remove special symbols:
data['tidy_text'] = data['tidy_text'].str.replace("[^a-zA-Z]", " ")
Remove words that have only one letter:
data['tidy_text'] = data['tidy_text'].apply(lambda x: ' '.join([w for w in x.split() if len(w)>1]))
Tweets after cleaning:
We know that people post multiple tweets per day, but there is only one price for stock each business day. It is necessary to club tweets as per their date.
def ab(df):
return','.join(df.values)
data = data.groupby('date')['tidy_text'].apply(ab)
data = data.reset_index()
Sentimental Analysis
In this experiment VADER( Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning) sentiment analyzer is used because it can provide not only polarity score but also the intensity of emotion. Besides, it is very easy to use as it’s available in the NLTK package and can be applied directly to unlabeled text data. VADER takes in a string and returns a dictionary of scores in each of four categories: negative, neural, positive and compound, which is computed by normalizing the scores of the first three.
from nltk.sentiment.vader import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer
def sentiment_scores(sentence):
# Create a SentimentIntensityAnalyzer object.
sid_obj = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()
sentiment_dict = sid_obj.polarity_scores(sentence)
neg = sentiment_dict['neg']
neu = sentiment_dict['neu']
pos = sentiment_dict['pos']
compound = sentiment_dict['compound']
return neg, neu, pos, compound
After applying VADER, we can use compound score to separate negative and positive tweets. In this case, the dataset is highly imbalanced. It seems people like to post positive opinions about Amazon stock and gives a side proof to why Amazon stock keeps rising in the past ten years.
Merge Data
Now both dataset are ready to merge together using their date. Because this experiment focuses on predicting stock change instead of stock price, I set a new column named pos_neg contains stock change information. If the open price next day ≥ the adjusted close price the day before, pos_neg equals to 1, and vice versa. After dropping weekends that have no stock data, the data looks as below.
Model Building
This problem is transforming to a binary classification. Labels are -1 and 1. Because the index is date, we cannot simply split data randomly. I manually assigned train data from 2010–01–01 to 2020–03–31, and test data from 2020–04–01 to 2020–10–31. After running different model such as SVM, neural network and logistic regression, the best test accuracy I got is 0.6376.
from sklearn import metrics
from sklearn.neural_network import MLPClassifier
NN_model = MLPClassifier(hidden_layer_sizes=(300,200,100), max_iter=1000,activation = 'relu',solver='adam',random_state=0)
NN_model.fit(x_train, y_train)
y_pred = NN_model.predict(x_test)
accuracy = metrics.accuracy_score(y_test, y_pred)
print(accuracy)
Limitation
Although the accuracy is not considered “well”, it gives us an idea that there is a relationship between sentiment and stock market. Many fields in this research can be improved. Other sentimental analysis tool such as Textblob can generate different sentimental score and subjectivity score that can be taken into account in this model. However, it is still difficult to extract precise information from tweets. For example, people invest on Amazon stock may not use Twitter and people who use Twitter to post opinions may never invested in Amazon stock. Another bias in this research is that it is hard to tell if the negative or positive opinions on Twitter induce the fall or rise in stock or the other way round. The causality is very complicated in this case. A solution is to use other social media such as Stocktwits and Facebook as control groups to compare the sentimental change dynamically. | https://medium.com/social-media-theories-ethics-and-analytics/can-peoples-sentiments-on-social-media-predict-stock-f5b064eabbb1 | ['Francis Zhang'] | 2020-11-20 22:06:31.702000+00:00 | ['Sentiment Analysis', 'Assignment 5', 'Stock Prediction', 'Amazon Stock', 'Stock Market'] |
How To Use Pulse Oximeters? | Oxy-med Pulse oximeter
Pulse oximetry is a non-invasive and painless test that measures your oxygen saturation level or oxygen levels in your blood. It can quickly detect even small changes in how effectively oxygen is conveyed to the farthest extremities of the heart, including the legs and arms.
The pulse oximeter is a small clip-shaped device to attach to a body part, like the toes or earlobe. It is often put on a finger and used in intensive care settings such as emergency departments or hospitals. Some doctors, like pulmonologists, may use it in their offices. (Describe that it is good to have in-home also)
Purposes And Uses
The goal of pulse oximetry is to find out how your heart pumps oxygen through your body. It is mainly used to monitor the health status of people with any condition that may affect oxygen levels in the blood, especially while they are in hospital. These conditions include:
● Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
● Asthma
● Pneumonia
● Lung Cancer
● Anemia
● Heart attack or heart failure
● Congenital heart defects
How Does It Work?
It is not a painful process. A small clip-like device is placed on a finger, ear lobe, or toe during a pulse oximeter reading. Small clusters of light travel through the blood in the finger, measuring the amount of oxygen.
It measures the variations in light absorption in oxygenated or deoxygenated blood. In this way, the pulse oximeter will tell you your oxygen saturation rate and your heart rate.
How To Use Pulse Oximeters Correctly?
Ensure that you have no nail polish or henna on your finger.
Ensure your hands are at average temperature, warm them with a wrap if you feel cold.
Get some rest and relax your body before taking your pulse oximeter.
Place a pulse oximeter over your index finger or middle finger.
Position your hand over your chest near your heart and try to reduce the movement of your hand.
Keep the pulse oximeter on your finger for at least a minute until the reading becomes stable.
Record the highest blinking value on the oximeter after it has established itself after five seconds.
Fingertip Pulse Oximeter
Regular pulse oximeter readings typically range from 95 to 100%. Values less than 90% are considered dangerous and indicate the need for additional oxygen. Two essential readings are displayed: heart rate, measured in beats per minute, and O2(make it subscript) saturation of hemoglobin in arterial blood.
Lower levels of blood oxygen saturation may indicate:
● Blocked Airways
● Difficulty breathing
● Lung Infection
● Poor blood circulation
● Drug interference from anesthesia, muscle relaxants, or anaphylaxis
Cost Of A Pulse Oximeter
There are numerous pulse oximeters, which come with varying characteristics and are sold at various prices. Pulse oximeters are typically between Rs. 500 — Rs. 3,300. You will therefore want to find the best pulse monitor for your needs.
Make sure that it is FDA approved, can provide accurate oxygen saturation levels in the blood up to +-2%, and some oximeters also offer a pulse bar graph and may turn off by themselves.
Pulse oximeters are limited and may be inaccurate in certain circumstances. In many cases, there are low levels of inaccuracy and no clinical significance. However, there is a risk that incorrect measurement could lead to unrecognized oxygen saturation levels.
Therefore, it is essential to understand the limits of forced oximetry and how precision is calculated and interpreted. Several patient factors can also affect the accuracy of the measurement.
The latest scientific data indicate differences in the accuracy of pulse oximeters between dark skin pigmentation and light skin pigmentation. This difference is generally tiny at saturations over 80% and higher when saturations are less than 80%. | https://medium.com/@suhas.slnsurgicals/how-to-use-pulse-oximeters-f5c25d1790f8 | [] | 2021-09-13 10:35:23.944000+00:00 | ['Medical Equipment', 'Healthcare', 'Pulse Oximeter', 'Pulse', 'Medical Devices'] |
Futurov — is a Blockchain’s first entertainment aggregator and producer of original films, series & more. | Futurov — is a Blockchain’s first entertainment aggregator and producer of original films, series & more. Ciara Luisu Jun 23·6 min read
FTV
Introduce
Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) offer a way to start with a new system, circumventing the difficulties faced in changing the finance industry. While crypto has attracted billions in investments, decentralized financial services are lagging. When it comes to investment in cryptocurrency, crypto investors can buy and sell, but that’s it. The cryptocurrency itself cannot be invested in the same way fiat currency can be. Initial attempts to create peer-to-peer lending and asset tokenization so far have proven partial and unreliable, so investors have extremely limited options when it comes to an investment of their crypto assets. The potential is enormous to provide financial services in crypto, the same way they are offered in fiat currency.
Their whole life is permeated with multimedia information, which in turn allows all of us to watch our favorite films, TV shows, receive news and other information, but in this place problems began to arise that periodically restrict all these processes. In simple words, although we have access to various multimedia platforms and information on them, but at the same time we are faced with a number of restrictions that are negatively reflected in this industry. With the emergence of innovative technologies such as blockchain, many companies began to get the opportunity to use these technologies for their successful development, which helped the emergence of new promising platforms. One of these platforms is Futurov, and today you have an excellent opportunity to learn more information about the platform and its features and benefits.
What is Futurov ?
Futurov is a community owned multi-media entertainment aggregator and end-to-end NFT hub in V/AR bringing th entire crypto and legacy world’s offerings into one place while also producing original motion picture through our EU licensed partners visual-vr.com. From live TV, shows and financial education to movies and animations, we are a decentralised, non-profit organisation & self sustainable entertainment ecosystem. Currently, we are bringing all of the worlds free and legally streamable TV as well as licensing and rights our agents, Agenz LTD, are actively acquiring. Our app was built purely for promotional purposes and in no way do we charge or charge for any of our services or your data. Along with the deflationary governance token mentioned above, we are designing an inflationary rewards token that automatically and trustlessly pays creators, distributors and license holders. This will not only end up providing a pioneering solution to piracy, it is also a novel way of monetising free markets without charging users and allowing them to remain as free and anonymous as they wish.
FILM AND TELEVISION : - In The Day To Day Life We Everyone Wants Fun Exactly Considering This Factor “FUTUROV” is Coming On The Door It’s a larger and Their network and purchasing power grows potentially through economies of scale, and the Considering better Standards quality and quantity of viewer voted content will be the attracting more users in a theoretically limitless and organically growing cycle makes platforms Grow.
- In The Day To Day Life We Everyone Wants Fun Exactly Considering This Factor “FUTUROV” is Coming On The Door It’s a larger and Their network and purchasing power grows potentially through economies of scale, and the Considering better Standards quality and quantity of viewer voted content will be the attracting more users in a theoretically limitless and organically growing cycle makes platforms Grow. NEWS AND EDUCATION : - The “FUTUROV” Is a Decentralise news Providing global and barrier free entry System to new localised stations as well as current mainstream offerings Will be Counterd. FTV is a Corresponded Currency Of “FUTUROV” And it will also be pushing financial education and showcasing leading voices in Platform.
- The “FUTUROV” Is a Decentralise news Providing global and barrier free entry System to new localised stations as well as current mainstream offerings Will be Counterd. FTV is a Corresponded Currency Of “FUTUROV” And it will also be pushing financial education and showcasing leading voices in Platform. A To Z : - In The “FUTUROV” people Can Find Their Favourite Movies and Films also From cult classics to modern masterpieces all the way Found ultra controversial documentaries no one else would dare to show. Whatever Platform users and token holders want, goes on air and those things make Proffesional Environment For Users To Be in FUTUROV.
- In The “FUTUROV” people Can Find Their Favourite Movies and Films also From cult classics to modern masterpieces all the way Found ultra controversial documentaries no one else would dare to show. Whatever Platform users and token holders want, goes on air and those things make Proffesional Environment For Users To Be in FUTUROV. FUTUROV ORIGINALS :- As We Know The Other Platforms Like Netflix,Amazon,Hotstar..etc Now FTV Originals also making and will consist of motion picture And music and art as well as exclusive avatar NFTs in human scale with responsive A.I. technology all in virtual and augmented reality all Over Combination in crypto Brings “FUTUROV”. NFTs Also will provide avatar hosts true ownership of their digital bodies and Authors.
Team
Malik Jan
Malik’s Profile — LinkedIn
Mike Hales
Mike’s Profile — Instagram
Indi-Jay Cammish
Indi’s Profile — Twitter
Updating…
The App
The Futurov App is live and you can enjoy streaming your favorite shows through https://app.futurov.tv/ . You can also download the FTV mobile app on Google Play. Download the app here.
Futurov has been present in the android application or app as proof that Futurov is really serious in carrying out all the roadmaps that have become the main goal and have taken aggregators to the next level. Get $FTV on google play store right now and enjoy the convenience and comfort you expect.
Token
Name : Futurov Token
Ticker : FTV
Address : 0xfd2ceaf2a104b2817d8d3252801c52af6b8dae77
Initial Supply : 8,000,000,000
Final Supply: 1,000,000,000
Utility
Governance: Token holders suggest, vote and implement cancellations, renewals & additions.
Currency: Being the core currency of the d’app allows for free and instant transactions
Rewards: Token holders receive airdrops (NFT’s). From tickets to events, merch or collectables
Staking: High interest rates for locking in tokens while also earning the rarest of NFT air drops
Engagement: An inflationary fuel token released with community votes deciding tokenomics
Filmanthropy: A TBD % of the fuel tokens will be allocated to industry specific philanthropy
Conclusion
Futurov have designed the next advancement of blockchain architecture. A blockchain that really accomplishes the promise that all blockchains have actually desired. One that gives the highest level of resistance against strikes. One that compensates its ecosystem of contributors. Futurov is phenomenon will bring technological advancement on already successful established projects and systems. Futurov is innovation will save time and money, increasing efficiency. The extensive team members above also show that the management is aiming for excellence. Participate in the token sales today and be part of this amazing future. Coming to Futurov you will be a noble customer. Not only that, you also become an investor who both entertains and makes money, isn’t it great. Join the experience and I believe you will believe what I say.
More information
Official website: https://futurov.com/
Web application: https://app.futurov.tv/
Telegram: https://t.me/Futurov
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0j0xxt4GY2ErxrRs0Dhvyg
Twitter: https://twitter.com/futurov_
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@futurov
Github: https://github.com/Futurov-Governance
Litepaper: https://futurov.com/Litepaper
Author
Username: ciara luisu
Profile Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2769222
BSC Address: 0xa4997aa2dc4ef73d5f29e275cf17b414a30401fc | https://medium.com/@ciaraluisu11/futurov-is-a-blockchains-first-entertainment-aggregator-and-producer-of-original-films-series-8ff83ad7dfb2 | ['Ciara Luisu'] | 2021-06-23 07:58:56.273000+00:00 | ['Bnb', 'Futurov', 'Binance', 'Ftv', 'Bsc'] |
About Me — Gabriela Rodríguez. Human being, yogui, vegan, nature lover… | Human being, yogui, vegan, nature lover and personal growth writer.
Hippie
That’s how probably most of my friends and family would describe me.
My name is Gabriela, and I’m from El Salvador. The smallest country in Central America but with the most warm hearted people and beautiful locations.
After graduating High school I went to study advertisement in Argentina, which was one of the biggest challenges I’ve been through. For the first time in my life, I was totally on my own. Starting a new chapter.
During my three years in Argentina I experienced one of life’s most beautiful treasures: how strangers transform into friends, and friends transform into family. But most importantly, I discovered myself and my beliefs.
I believe in God. I believe in the power of being grateful. I believe that if I am love, joy, peace and compassion, I will attract the same into my life. I believe the most valuable and precious things in life are not visible. I believe we are all creators and can build any idea we can visualize in our mind. I am certain the only way to be truly happy is by living in the here and now. I believe we are all the same.
What I love the most: | https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-gabriela-rodr%C3%ADguez-2bdb14d73295 | ['Gabriela Rodríguez'] | 2020-12-23 04:33:56.964000+00:00 | ['About Me'] |
REDUCE NEGATIVE THOUGHTS BY MINDSET DETOX | Have you ever heard about mindset detox? Are you someone who has to try hard to maintain positive mindset? If yes, you may have noticed that it’s not easy to stay focused or enthusiastic when everything is fighting for your attention. We get encountered with plenteous of information on regular basis through divergent channels. Be it social media, news, audios, videos, podcasts, emails, conversations or even our personal experiences. This overexposure of information clouds our brains and cause us more stress than necessary.
Click Here to read more | https://medium.com/@psychicstrong2020/reduce-negative-thoughts-by-mindset-detox-19164fae98b1 | ['Psychic Strong'] | 2020-12-25 17:31:56.663000+00:00 | ['Healthcare', 'Motivation', 'Self Improvement', 'Inspiration', 'Mindset'] |
Gen2’s Big Announcement — The Iris Token Platform | This past week, Gen2 Technologies, a public company trading under the ticker BRKK, announced its revolutionary Iris Token Platform. We are excited about this new market proposition for a number of reasons, especially the following.
The Iris Token. Yes, a catchy name. But also a digital token which we expect will be in demand. An ERC Ethereum design, which will function as a utility token. Buyers will get the opportunity to get unique and unparalleled views of professional sports teams and players in action, along with other people doing things of interest. Sports viewing, reality TV, and user-generated content will never be quite the same.
An Advanced Technological and Media Platform. The Iris Token platform will leverage a distributed network of thousands of miniature body-worn cameras, which can even be woven directly into sports jerseys and clothing. Content will be streamable directly from cameras, on-demand, by holders of the Iris Token. Seamless, unique, and advanced streamable content — this service promises to deliver consumers a step-change improvement in their content consumption possibilities.
To learn more details about why the Iris Token Platform might well be the next big thing in content distribution and enjoyment, click on the link to read the Iris Token whitepaper. | https://medium.com/the-capital/gen2s-big-announcement-the-iris-token-platform-e1bbb1c2f7d6 | ['The Capital'] | 2020-12-21 12:00:10.375000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Eth', 'Bitcoin', 'Crypto'] |
Alternatives to matplotlib for pandas dataframes | I love no-code tools like Metabase or Tableau where you can build great-looking charts in a matter of seconds using an inuitive UI. They just work really well for 95% of my exploratory use cases.
Compare that to the Python notebooks world, where the typical approach is to use matplotlib and googling its syntax every time you want to plot something. There are definitely some great alternatives like plotly, seaborn or bokeh, but they all have syntax that's just not easy to memorize. So the question I'll answer in this article is:
What are the best tools for no-code pandas visualization tools and how do they compare?
1. D-Tale
D-Tale is a powerful open-source (LGPL-2.1) tool that runs a webapp that you can display inside your jupyter cell’s output. It provides a lot of functionality, including a UI for creating charts.
D-Tale screenshot
Unfortunately D-Tale is not a first-class notebook experience. You have to leave your notebook to interact with D-Tale, which runs in a separate window. That way, you’re basically forced to switch contexts between D-Tale and the rest of your notebook, and it’s also difficult to get the plot back inside the notebook to create a good data story.
Additionally, for a quick exploratory use-case, the UI is perhaps too heavy. I couldn’t find an option to bin the X-axis variable to create a nice histogram.
To use it, run pip install dtale and then:
2. bamboolib
bamboolib is a free python package (with paid options) for pandas data browsing, manipulation and visualization. It uses ipywidgets for its functionality so it works great without having to leave the notebook.
bamboolib screenshot
Its plotting UI is simple and intuitive. It uses plotly behind the scenes, and can easily show me the code it generated so that I can continue refining it if I want to.
Unfortunately, if I shut down the kernel and then start it back up, the state of my visualization is lost. ipywidgets should be able to restore their state, so maybe I’m doing something wrong, but I’m not sure how to fix this.
3. Deepnote
Note: The author of this article is affiliated with Deepnote
Deepnote is a data science notebook platform that can run Jupyter notebooks. There’s a new feature in Deepnote — chart cells.
Deepnote screenshot
It has a simple and intuitive UI with more complex customization options — like binning — hidden inside the three-dot menus.
The most important feature is that the visualization and its UI are persistent, meaning that it will remember the settings and the chart even after your restart the kernel or hardware or after closing the page. It even supports real-time collaboration, just like the rest of Deepnote — you’ll be able to see your colleague editing the chart as they’re doing it.
Deepnote chart cells use altair and Vega Lite behind the scenes, so the charts integrate nicely with the rest of the ecosystem. An upcoming feature is an option to export the visualization code for further refinement.
A downside is that the customizability of these charts is currently quite limited.
Check out this video for some typical use-cases of chart cells:
There’s more
There are more tools that didn’t fit into this article but deserve a mention: | https://medium.com/deepnote/alternatives-to-matplotlib-for-pandas-dataframes-f15be61c3cf4 | ['Simon Sotak'] | 2021-05-20 09:30:02.707000+00:00 | ['Pandas', 'Jupyter', 'Data Science', 'No Code', 'Matplotlib'] |
Meet Camille Brunel, French Author and Animal Advocate | In 2016, went vegan. His first novel “La guérilla des animaux” (The Animal Guerrilla) was published in 2018. It’s a book that a reader will hardly put aside due to its breathtaking pace and its radical main character. The protagonist Isaac is a ferocious, radical vegan activist who undertakes an odyssey around the world to save wild animals in their natural habitats, while purposely killing hundreds and thousands of humans he considers harmful to animal wildlife.
The novel which Camille had been writing over several years was a surprising success for him as a relative newcomer: It has been sold almost 2.500 times, much more than he had expected.
Ironically, soon after the publication of his first novel, radical animal activists attacked butcher shops all over France and mostly destroyed shop windows — it was as if the dystopian way in which Camille’s fictional person carries out his activism had, on a smaller scale, become reality.
Regarding the state of our planet, Camille has a pessimist outlook similar to the one of his character Isaac: The mass extinction of animals and plants as well as global warming are alarming him. Nevertheless, the writer remains hopeful that people will realize the magnitude of the global crisis affecting all species. Numerous readers of his first novel have contacted him and told him it inspired them to follow a vegetarian or plant-based diet — or that they have even become activists.
Camille Brunel’s new novel “Les Métamorphoses” (plural of the word metamorphosis) will be published on August 27, amidst the corona pandemic. Guess what it’s about even though it has been written in the summer of 2019: a global pandemic. The female main character Isis observes the gradual transformation of all her human friends and relatives into animals and has to live with it. The French author wanted to show what an unexpected pandemic would do to peoples’ lives and didn’t expect a worldwide pandemic to affect humanity even before the publication of his novel.
“My strategy [as a writer] is to prepare humanity for the worst-case scenario.”
When COVID-19 hit his home country in March of 2020, Camille picked up his manuscript again and included elements from the actual lock-down situation which he experienced.
Another driving force for his literature is to refute the idea that animals obey their instincts more than humans do. “Every animal is a non-human person” was a crucial realization for him. “Every one of them has emotions, feelings, memory and the ability to communicate.”
The cover of Camille Brunel’s new novel for young adults
“I prefer to speak about the animal advocacy movement instead of the vegan movement. […] The word ‘veganism’ makes people think of a lifestyle. To me, animal activism is a matter of justice — combat for equality.”
His second publication of the year, planned for September 16, is called “Après nous, les animaux” (After us the animals), a novel for young adults in which all humans have died out. The title refers to the French expression “Après nous, le déluge” (After us the flood) meaning “complete indifference to what may happen when one is gone” (definition from the Oxford Dictionary). The scene is set several decades in the future, in 2086, where the only remaining animals on earth are stranded on the Mexican coast. Camille wanted to depict an imaginary world without humans, in which animals are the focal point of the storyline. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/portait-of-camille-brunel-22309ad10b50 | ['Annika Wappelhorst'] | 2020-09-07 12:24:23.852000+00:00 | ['France', 'Authors', 'Portraits', 'Animals', 'Vegan'] |
J-Tech Digital 4x1 HDMI switcher review: An HDMI switch so nice, we reviewed it twice | J-Tech Digital 4x1 HDMI switcher review: An HDMI switch so nice, we reviewed it twice Kimberly Nov 23, 2020·8 min read
Soundbars with one or a just few HDMI inputs supplanting A/V receivers with six or more HDMI inputs was supposed to simplify our home entertainment systems, but many of us have discovered that we have too many video sources—set-top boxes, streamers, gaming consoles, Blu-ray players, and so on—and not enough HDMI inputs to handle everything. The solution? An HDMI switcher and audio extractor. We recently found one such device marketed under two brands: J-Tech Digital and Monoprice.
It’s apparent that neither J-Tech nor Monoprice actually builds these devices, but sources them from some other manufacturer, because they’re identical apart from the labeling. We thoroughly tested both the J-Tech Digital JTECH-SWE41 and the Monoprice Blackbird 4K 4x1 HDMI Switch (P/N 39666) and found that each delivered solid performance with four HDMI inputs and one HDMI output. We put J-Tech in the headline because as of this writing, it was selling for $25 less than Monoprice’s device, which you can purchase here. Since they’re essentially the same device, we’ll refer to them in this review in the singular.
Jonathan Takiff / IDG Their shared parentage is unmistakable when comparing the metal-clad Monoprice Blackbird 4K and J-Tech Digital switch boxes.
Blessed with sophisticated processing skills and ARC (audio return channel) support, this switch box helps consolidate your gear, cable runs, and connections. While ultra slim, measuring 7.1 x 3.3 x 0.5 inches (WxDxH), the powered switcher has a front panel display that offers precision control buttons and not-too-bright green LED indicators. HDMI inputs in back allow you to connect up to four 4K or 2K video source devices.
[ Further reading: The best soundbars ] The source you select with the button in front is then output to the switcher’s single HDMI-ARC output to one of your TV’s, soundbar’s, or A/V receiver’s HDMI input—with no noticeable degradation in picture or sound quality provided you use certified Premium High Speed HDMI cables to make the connections.
Offering current top-of-the-class specs, this mighty mite can process and push through razor-sharp signals with up to 4K resolution at a 60Hz refresh rate (so it might not be the best choice for the next generation of videogame consoles, which support refresh rates up to 120Hz. It doesn’t support FreeSync or G-Sync, either). The switch otherwise abides by the HDMI 2.0a standard and HDCP 2.2 digital copy-protection standards necessary for enhancing 4K images with high dynamic range processing like HDR10 and Dolby Vision—the latter stunningly shown when I plugged in the latest Roku Ultra media streamer into switch input 4. A most realistic aquarium materialized on my 4K LG OLED, a screen saver that gave away its true nature only when the Dolby Vision logo fleetingly floated in the corner.
Jonathan Takiff / IDG The Blackbird’s front labeling of LED and hard button functions makes it more useful when working the devices head-on. (J-Tech paints its labels on the top.)
On the audio side, high-quality soundtracks encoded in 2.1-, 5.1-, and 7.1-channel PCM, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Atmos, and DTS-HD Master Audio pass unimpeded to and through the switch box’s HDMI output jack, as a J-Tech Digital engineer who’d QC’d the box at the brand’s Sugarland, Texas headquarters testified.
But wait, there’s more. The inclusion of an audio signal extractor renders this high-striving box even more useful—essential, even, for TV viewers who’ve paired it with a high-quality (but input short) display and soundbar.
How it worksHere’s how it comes together. Connect your four most essential devices to the switch: set-top box, media streamer, game console (or laptop), and Blu-ray player. Next, connect the switch’s HDMI output to your TV set’s HDMI input—the one labeled HDMI ARC, if available. Alternatively, you could plug that cable into an HDMI port on a soundbar or A/V receiver that will amplify and send the audio content to its speakers and pass the video signal to your TV.
Jonathan Takiff / IDG Here again, the location of the input labels makes Monoprice’s version of this HDMI switcher easier to use when you’re facing the device, where J-Tech’s practice is better if you’re looking at it from above.
If your soundbar or receiver doesn’t support HDMI, you can exploit this switcher’s high-quality audio extraction circuitry. Plug either a 3.5mm-terminated analog audio cable or an optical digital (Toslink) cable into the box’s dual-function audio output and connect the other end of the cable to the appropriate input on your soundbar or receiver.
Yes, you will experience a downgrade in stereo or surround-sound processing, because analog connections are stereo only, and Toslink doesn’t provide the bandwidth needed for Dolby TrueHD and the other lossless home-theater codecs. But when I used Toslink connections with a Sonos Playbar and then Bose Soundbar 500 (both paired with their respective wireless subwoofers) the resultant sound proved quite robust, detailed and reasonably in sync.
A deal sweetenerFor me, the features that seals the deal on this particular switch box is its smarter infrared remote control setup, which eliminates user frustration and adds flexibility when you integrate it into your entertainment center.
Jonathan Takiff / IDG The remote control is purpose built and easy to use, even in the dark.
Any HDMI switcher worth its salt will augment its front-panel operation buttons with a wireless remote control, with an IR signal receiver mounted on its face. I’ve tried seven or eight other switchers, and all too often, their wireless control isn’t reliable. You must be sitting directly in front of the switch box, and the box itself can’t be blocked by a door or any other equipment. Most of their remotes have weak signal emitters, and their IR receivers typically have very narrow fields of view—you can’t be more than 30 degrees off-axis and expect them to work.
I had no such complaints with this box. Instead of its IR signal receiver being on the front panel, it’s tethered to a 5-foot cable that plugs into the back. You can place the box anywhere you’d like, and with a dab of double-sided tape (supplied), you can mount the receiver in any exposed location the cable will reach. Should the supplied cable not be long enough, you can plug it into an extension. I found a 12-footer on Amazon selling for about $9. It added maybe a millisecond of delay to the 3- to 5-second input-switching process. The manufacturer offers the same cable in 6-, 25-, 50- and even 75-foot lengths, but I didn’t test those.
J-Tech Digital and Monoprice both bundle the same simple but easy-to-use remote with their boxes. The HDMI input buttons are placed in the four corners of a square, with the select button in the center. This makes the remote easy to use, even in the dark. Pressing the red ARC button at the top right of the remote sends the audio content from your smart TV’s tuner, onboard media streamer, or any other HDMI source back down the HDMI cable plugged into its HDMI ARC port to the switch box. From there, the sound goes to your soundbar or A/V receiver. It’s almost like having a fifth HDMI input on the switch.
Jonathan Takiff / IDG The infrared signal receiver can be placed up to five feet from the switcher box—or even farther when plugged into an extension cable.
Set-up tip: If you’ve never used your TV’s ARC function, it might have left the factory in a disabled state. Go into the TV’s audio settings and activate it. While you’re there, try activating its CEC (consumer electronics control) function, which might then let you use one remote to control all the devices connected to and through this switch box.
If you want even more control, take advantage of this switch box’s RS-232 port for custom integration operations, plus “available now or coming soon” compatibility with programmable Harmony remote controls, according to Monoprice tech support.
But I don’t have much faith in this device’s automatic input-shifting (a feature touted in most every HDMI switch), because I didn’t find it to be reliable. In theory, the switch box will sense and automatically change the HDMI source whenever you newly power on another connected device. Gamers say it works well when they’re shifting their attention from one connected console (or computer) to another, but it failed to wake and respond when I turned on a DirecTV satellite TV receiver or a Blu-ray player, probably because of the conflicting messages the switcher also was getting from connected streaming boxes. Even in standby mode, the latter are always kinda on, downloading content and putting out a screen-saver image.
The bottom line—and a cautionary noteTo be honest, HDMI switch boxes have a reputation for going south, failing in whole or part, after a few months or a couple of years. A cottage industry of Chinese suppliers crank these things out, with good intentions but perhaps not a lot of experience. Their job is made harder by evolving standards and manufacturers taking different paths when implementing them. I put that out there because I can’t guarantee how long this current choice for best HDMI switch box will endure, nor will I vow it will work great with all the video products you might want to connect.
That said, I’ve successfully mated both the J-Tech and Monoprice devices with older Panasonic and Pioneer plasma TVs, an ancient but beloved Philips LCD TV with Ambilight (look it up), as well as a very revealing 4K Epson Home Cinema 4000 video projector. I also tried a variety of streaming boxes (Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku), disc players, DirecTV, and two videogame systems (a PlayStation 4 and a Nintendo Switch, the latter of which has been problematic with other switches I’ve tried). Finally, I tried them both with 4K-ready Yamaha, Sony, and Bose audio systems without a hitch.
Your setup and experience could still differ. Marathon gamers might heat these things to the brink and should probably connect their systems directly to a display. Also, don’t forget to use certified Premium High Speed HDMI cables everywhere, because these switches are only as capable and stable as their weakest link. If you encounter a purple-tinted picture now and again, simply shifting inputs around again usually fixes the HDMI security handshake that’s responsible for the problem.
On the upside, I own a different J-Tech HDMI switch that has operated flawlessly for the year and a half, so I have some confidence in the brand. Monoprice, for its part, typically chooses its suppliers wisely and has a good reputation for quality control. Both brands have operations in the U.S., including tech support, and both companies provide at least one-year warranties on these devices—18 months from J-Tech if you register your purchase promptly.
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/@Kimberl26699321/j-tech-digital-4x1-hdmi-switcher-review-an-hdmi-switch-so-nice-we-reviewed-it-twice-8502db31a9f9 | [] | 2020-11-23 19:46:47.553000+00:00 | ['Home Tech', 'Connected Home', 'Audio', 'Mobile Accessories'] |
You’ve been added a writer — our latest prompt is below — deadline is this Thursday 7PM CEST. https://medium.com/microcosm/evolution-427dd5b1610b Looking forward to your story! | Welcome to Microcosm
You’ve been added a writer — our latest prompt is below — deadline is this Thursday 7PM CEST.
Looking forward to your story! | https://medium.com/@zanedickens/welcome-to-microcosm-bd0f98650529 | ['Zane Dickens'] | 2020-12-12 06:35:35.137000+00:00 | ['Short Read', 'Flash Fiction', 'Evolution', 'Short Story', 'Writing Prompts'] |
White Parents: You Are Probably Raising Racist Kids | This February, like every February, my nine-year-old son came home from school talking about Black History Month. In our affluent, predominantly white community, children learn that back in the 1950s and 60’s people fought for equal rights for all regardless of race.
The lessons are part of a history class, and children learn about historical figures that were central to the Civil Rights Movement, such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Teaching about our nation’s struggle for equality as if it is part of history is inaccurate when so many Americans suffer today — right now — because of the way society reacts to them.
“Mama, it’s so awesome that MLK solved inequality and made it so black kids and white kids can go to the same school, isn’t it?” My son looked at us, innocently over his plate of tacos.
In our house, his comment led to a family discussion about how inequality is alive and well in the world. No, son, the civil rights leaders of the previous century didn’t solve racism. Until people like us — white and privileged — begin thinking and behaving differently, the problem will never be solved.
I grew up in an area of the country that elected President Trump — an area where his hate-filled messages about non-white people cause joy for those who can’t see beyond their own noses. Just last summer, when I visited my hometown, I attended a barbeque where one of the guests had a swastika tattoo on his forearm.
Growing up, I heard adults use derogatory terms to describe people of color and saw them lock the doors if a dark-skinned man walked past our car. When adults behave in these ways, children notice and internalize the lesson. Even white people who would be aghast if someone called them racist buy into systemically held biases and stereotypes.
That is the world I come from, but that isn’t the world in which I want to live. As a white woman, I have to consistently face my biases, think deeply about their origins, and take conscious steps to unravel them. It is also my responsibility to ensure that my children don’t develop separatist worldviews.
Thinking and behaving differently starts in our homes
In eighth grade, my daughter left our predominantly white, affluent district to attend school in an urban area where she was in the minority in most of her classrooms. The change in her daily life was immediate, challenging, and valuable. When the topics discussed in her classes turned political, she reacted like a privileged white girl, at least at first.
“In school today, a group of kids was talking about the Black Lives Matter movement. I just wanted to say that all lives matter, and it shouldn’t be about race. We’re all the same,” my 14-year-old said as we finished dinner.
This was the moment my husband and I realized we were raising racist kids. We’re a bit slow.
My husband and I urged our daughter to spend more time listening to her classmates’ point of view rather than butting in with her opinion. As a privileged white girl, she has no business arguing about whether the color of our skin matters. The fact is that, for her friends, the color of their skin impacts their lives every day.
Young black people experience systemic racism when they walk into a convenience store, and the clerk follows their every move; when they stand on a sidewalk and a woman in a car stops at a nearby stoplight and locks their doors; when they interact with the police.
The color of our skin shouldn’t impact the treatment we receive — we can all agree on that — but it does in very real ways. Until our privileged white children understand that racism is alive and thriving in so many facets of American life, we can’t even begin the healing our society needs.
I handed out homemade cookies later that evening to everyone at the table for dessert. I skipped my daughter.
“I want a cookie,” she said.
“Yes, everyone wants cookies,” I replied, sitting down and enjoying mine.
“But I’m the only one who doesn’t have one. I want a cookie too.”
“Yep, I know. All people like cookies,” I kept the smile on my face.
“But everyone else already has…Oh, I get it. Black Lives Matter because, for so long, they’ve been treated as if they don’t.”
Now, a senior about to graduate, my daughter has completely changed her position on the state of American racism. Would she have remained ignorant without our continuous challenge of the ideas ingrained in her by the community in which we live? Would attending a diverse school have been enough to mold her? I’m not sure, but I do know that the combination is a potent antidote for the assumptions afforded us by white privilege.
It’s our responsibility as parents to educate our children about the reality of the world. Public schools have to toe the line between curriculum and constituents, and often that means they gloss over difficult issues rather than dive into them.
Except for the rare teacher who bucks the system, the inability of public schools to adequately discuss racism with students was even the case when I taught in an urban district for 13 years. We cannot expect our schools to do the job of removing racism from our world.
Our systems are racist because of our history, but racism is not history
I’m not sitting here accusing all white people of being racist, don’t get it twisted. I’m pointing out that our systems (education, criminal justice, employment, etc.) are inherently racist because of the historical context in which they developed.
I live in Connecticut, which is both one of the wealthiest states in our nation, and the most segregated. When the National Guard forcefully integrated schools in the wake of civil rights legislation, northern states, like Connecticut, or even Minnesota were left out. The result is de facto segregation that still impacts educational opportunities today.
The de facto segregation of zoning and housing policies that existed in northern suburban areas proceeding, and even after, the civil rights movement affects housing and education today. This segregation has continued to flourish despite half-hearted attempts to integrate districts using magnet and charter schools. A report on Connecticut racial segregation by Trinity college says that:
“These policies and the segregated conditions they produce are often seen as “natural” or “normal”. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva explains in his book that thinking of segregation as normal or natural, for example, is one of the ways that racism persists without individual racist or bigoted acts. And if there are no individual acts of racism, but rather supposedly race-neutral policies, then claims can be made that racism no longer exists. If racism has vanished, as this logic goes, then the State and others can cite individual choice, preference, or merit as the cause of conditions like racial segregation rather than taking social responsibility and then seeking to remedy this condition.”
I live 18 miles from the district I taught in for 13 years. The two communities are worlds apart. My home district has one-to-one technology for students, a plethora of extracurricular activities for every interest, and takes coach buses on field trips. The community in which I taught takes children on very few field trips. Teachers purchase classroom supplies from their paychecks, and we often run out of paper.
The district I work in is considered a low-income urban district. Those are pretty-white-people words for communities that are mostly nonwhite. And for a long time, I’d have described the district that way. Now, though, I want to call it what it is.
A racially segregated district with subpar educational opportunities.
The education my children are getting is far and above the education of children in more impoverished neighborhoods. If you don’t think that’s systemic racism, then I’d urge you to read Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum or if data-driven discussions are more your thing Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities by Jessica Trounstine.
When education falls short in neighborhoods serving minority children, society unravels. The school to prison pipeline is alive and well in America’s cities, and a history of racist practices is to blame. Until that embedded racism dissipates, we will continue to see young black men, and women receive less foundational support, less enriching experiences, and higher rates of imprisonment.
For details about how educational inequality is alive and well let’s turn to the U.S. Department of Education report of Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2018
The achievement gap in reading between white and black students didn’t change between 1992 and 2017.
The mathematics achievement gap didn’t change from 1990 to 2017.
More black students are suspended than any other ethnic group, even when they aren’t the majority of students in a school.
Three times as many white students take high school calculus than black students.
The unemployment rate for young black people is double for white people in the same age group.
Teachers in urban school districts know these statistics without needing to read this report. They see it when they enter school buildings every day. This lack of change isn’t because teachers aren’t trying their bests every day; it’s because the education offered to primarily minority districts is subpar.
Systemic racism doesn’t end when students finish school. When people find themselves in the criminal justice system, the color of their skin, even when controlled for type of crime, is a huge determinant of their outcome. Our country imprisons black people at a rate five times higher than their white counterparts. The disparities between the incarceration of white and black offenders are most notable when looking at drug offenses.
These systems exist because of the history of our nation, including slavery, Jim Crow laws, and deliberate and de facto segregation. My children know the difference between the amount of money their school district spends per pupil, and the significantly lower amount urban districts spend. They also know, in age-appropriate terms, the catastrophic impact of that inequity.
The civil rights movement is not our history, it is our current battle, and we need to teach younger generations the truth.
This is not the school district’s fault. It’s the fault of systemic racism that dates back to slavery. (Yes, fellow white people, it does. Stop pretending it doesn’t. I know you didn’t own slaves, but pretending that slavery doesn’t have a ripple effect on the lives of millions of people is short-sighted.)
Following slavery, America had systems and structures in place to ensure that “those people” didn’t live in “our neighborhoods.” The results of that racial segregation are evident every day in classrooms across America.
Remember, I grew up in white-America next to the fourth cornfield on the left after you got off the interstate. Everyone I knew was white. Everyone I loved was white. Some people I knew drove around with confederate flags. Then, I started teaching.
Teachers fall in love with their students. It’s inevitable. And I fell in love with mine, especially the kids with the biggest problems. These tiny humans were brought into a world of struggle through no fault of their own, and I had no idea until it smacked me in the face. Suddenly I loved people who made me come face to face with my racially-biased upbringing.
The 8 years I taught in classrooms made it clear — until we fix systemic racism, there isn’t a chance in hell that our society will become equal, inclusive, or any of the other buzz-words people throw around.
What we say right now matters
Three months after my son wanted to celebrate the accomplishments of the civil rights movement, our household has had several conversations about race and the systemic oppression of minority groups that led to the current protests, riots, and looting.
Are looting and rioting the answer? Maybe not, but I have no right to judge the behavior of others when I haven’t lived in their shoes. It is not my job, as a privileged white woman, to question the experiences and actions of the oppressed people.
I’ve seen my share of peaceful protests of systemic racism, and not a lot of change. Rioting is a natural and historically common response to systemic oppression. What did you all think was going to happen if black lives continue to be disposable?
If you’re asking if looting and rioting are the answer, you’re focusing on the wrong question. What you need to focus on, what you need to ask yourself and your children is: how can we be part of the solution?
Sure, you aren’t racist. I hear you, but it isn’t enough to just not be a bigot. You need to take decisive action and be an antiracist. For ideas on how you can make a difference, I encourage you to read How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. Then after you read it, get to work.
Sure, discussing a police officer killing George Floyd was difficult with my nine-year-old who is only beginning to learn that the world is a complicated and sometimes scary place. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t tell him. As a privileged white boy, he needs to develop an understanding of how he fits into this world, and the peace afforded him merely because of his heritage.
For everyone who thinks we shouldn’t discuss such things with our children, think of the black family who has to talk with their sons and daughters why they are treated differently from their white friends in public.
Systemic racism forces parents across our nation to teach their young people how to interact with the police so that they don’t end up the target of brutal racism.
Systemic racism means that when a black mother holds her newborn boy, she knows he is 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than the white child crying down the hall. Discussing racial inequality and overt racism isn’t optional for black families, and shouldn’t be for white families either.
In white houses across America, we need to talk about the difficult issues and challenge our kids when they say or do something that places judgment or generalization on a group of people. It is our duty to ensure that our children encounter racially and ethnically diverse populations. When you’re at the park, are you interacting with the darker-skinned families or retreating to your corner of the playground?
As privileged white parents, we must teach our children that racism still exists and is woven into the fabric of our nation, but that the things we do today and every day can get us just a little closer to the world we’d like to inhabit. Seek out opportunities for your children to encounter people who are unlike them — familiarity breeds friendship and friendship can inspire collaborative change.
Let’s dispel the myth that everyone is treated equally by pointing out social injustices, discussing the history behind them, and talking with our children about how to make things better. I wish I could go back to that barbeque last summer and confront the man who thought it appropriate to tattoo racism on his body, or at least confront my family members about their association with such a human.
Once we’ve talked to our kids about what’s really going on in the world, let’s act on what we say. Buy books for your children that encourage diversity, start including people from different backgrounds in your friend group, and get out of your own cozy little neighborhood to interact with the real world.
Educating our children is such a small step that I doubt the effects of it will ripple out very far, but if all white parents do the same, we can outrun the hatred that is so ingrained in our society. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/white-parents-you-are-probably-raising-racist-kids-7a4fc304b63f | ['Maria Chapman'] | 2020-06-08 01:56:38.958000+00:00 | ['Education', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Racism', 'Parenting', 'Equality'] |
How One Inmate Learned To Read And Escape Gang Culture | There are currently 1.4 million active gang members in the United States, and most of them are teenagers. The state of California alone has over 338 different street gangs.
In some gang-dominated neighborhoods, it’s often easier to join a gang than not.
Gang membership within prisons has also been increasing over the last few years. Even those that manage to keep out of the gang scene on the outside find themselves under intense recruitment pressure once they’re in the prison system.
Easy to join and difficult to leave, gang membership is often a lifetime commitment. For many individuals coming out of prison, their gang affiliations are the closest thing they have to a support system. Unsurprisingly then, for many offenders leaving prison is a temporary process. Rates of recidivism across the United States can be as high as 65%.
Breakout Prison outreach is a non-profit religious cooperation based in California working to help people escape drug-addicted or gang lifestyles; regardless of their age, gender or religious beliefs.
Founded by ex-gang-member-turned-minister Pastor Anthony Ortiz, the agency works with ex-convicts and at-risk or gang involved youth to tackle both gang recruitment and offender recidivism in San Jose.
By providing recently released individuals and their families with support, the program is offering those at need a hand-up out of the cycle of re-offending.
David Marez is a lead case manager at Breakout Prison Outreach, but he’s also one of their success stories.
When David Marez was sentenced to prison time in San Quentin, he was barely aware what had happened. Growing up in a rough San Jose neighborhood, Marez was involved with drugs and alcohol from a young age.
“I think my first introduction to drugs was coming out of fifth grade,” he says. “My brother was babysitting me and in order for me to be quiet, he gave me a pill to put me to sleep. They were downers. That was the first time I ever had something that was illegal.”
With parents working out of county, Marez and his siblings were left to their own devices for large portions of time. In fourth grade, Marez stopped going to school. It was over six months before anyone figured out that Marez wasn’t turning up to class.
Following his introduction to drugs in the fifth grade, life for Marez became a party. By 17, he was already a father and starting to have run-ins with the police. When he had his daughter Christina, Marez was still at a second grade literacy level.
“I couldn’t even spell my daughter’s name, and I named her,” he says. “What I did to learn how to spell it was I wrote it over and over until I memorized it.”
Unable to read or write, and under the influence throughout most of his sentencing, Marez had little understanding of the escalating severity of his encounters with law enforcement. He repeatedly did stints in county jails — 10 months here, 16 months there. Marez reckons in total he had done about seven or eight years before he went to prison.
“I feel that I may have gotten taken advantage of in a lot of different ways in regards to the system,” says Marez. “A lot of the stuff that I got in trouble with, and that affected my life, was because of not understanding.”
Sink or Swim in San Quentin
After spending most of his youth in and out of county jails, David Marez found himself inside San Quentin, one of California’s most notorious prisons, on a three year sentence.
“I remember my first time in prison,” says Marez. “I got thrown against the wall in San Quentin because I didn’t understand the system. I was a new fish going in. I was learning really quick how the system worked.”
Despite priding himself on staying out of San Jose’s gang scene on the outside, Marez found that behind the walls of San Quentin the pressure to form alliances was high.
“There’s people who have gone to prison or to county jail and they’ve never been involved in gangs. But as soon as they get there, there’s an application done on them. Somebody comes and screens them,” he explains.
“You have to be a strong individual not to just fall into that — you may have to take a few beatings.”
It didn’t take long before he found himself being recruited. One morning, in the lower yard, he was approached by another inmate.
“This guy just walked me around. Showing me where the hidden shanks were, these hidden knives. And he goes, ‘You see those guys over there? You don’t hang out with them. You don’t go across that path over there.’ He started to school me.”
Marez had expected to find prison gangs in San Quentin. What he had not expected to find was God.
As if saved by the bell, the prison intercom played out over the lower yard announcing Bible study in the garden chapel. This was Marez’s cue to leave.
“I heard that and I was gonna take off. I wasn’t a part of them yet. If I was gonna get beat up or what, I was ready to face that. But I went to the garden chapel,” he recalls.
That trip to the garden chapel was Marez’s first real introduction to any organized faith.
Following a turbulent and drug-addicted adolescence in a gang neighborhood in East San Jose, Marez, like Pastor Ortiz,was sentenced to time in San Quentin Prison. It became a pivotal point in his personal journey.
Without his stint at the prison, Marez says he can’t be sure things would have turned out quite as well as they eventually did.
San Quentin, maintains Marez, changes lives. For him, the sentencing was a blessing in disguise.
Through the prison chapel, Marez found not just a relationship with faith that hadn’t existed for him before, but also a new purpose. In the 27 years since he left San Quentin, Marez has put his personal experiences and understanding of gang members and ex-cons to use, working for the very same agency that first supported him upon his release.
“We’re all ex-convicts, ex-drug addicts, and we’re becoming leaders. Because of our leadership and our training we are helping other people become the same thing,” says Marez.
“Schooled by the Holy Spirit”
Marez’s connection with the prison chapel changed the trajectory of his time both in prison and upon release. Beyond his personal relationship with faith, his involvement in the church had practical implications almost immediately. Because Marez took a job as a janitor at the chapel, he found himself on the “out count.”
“The out count means everybody else has to go back to their cells. I got to stay at the chapel because they counted me there. I didn’t have to go back to my cell,” he explains.
For Marez, this hugely influenced his time in San Quentin.
“I didn’t feel I was incarcerated,” he says. “I always had my freedom within the prison.”
Marez also credits the church with giving him the education he missed out on before prison.
While San Quentin does offer educational programs to prisoners, this wasn’t going to be an option for Marez. “I was supposed to go to school but there was a three year waiting list,” he explains. “I thought — well I’ll be out by the time I get to go to school.”
But Marez did start learning to read and write behind the walls of San Quentin — through the church.
“I started sitting in the back, back, pew of the church, and I would just listen,” he explains.
Following along in his bible as the Chaplain read aloud, Marez began to pick up the fundamentals.
“When the Chaplain would say turn to Matthew or turn to John I would look at the guy next to me when he opened his Bible and look at the letters J-O-H-N one by one.”
“I didn’t go to school. I went to church. I still didn’t go to school when I got out of prison! I did go to tutoring a little bit at a library, but that didn’t last long because my life got involved helping other people.”
From inmate to leader; moving to Breakout
Through the prison chapel, Marez met with Pastor Anthony Ortiz, founder of Breakout Prison Outreach. Ortiz himself is a former gang member and San Quentin inmate, and is now an ordained minister.
Marez laughs recalling his first meeting with ‘Pastor Tony’. Marez’s initial reaction to seeing three men in suits was that he was about to be served child-support papers. “I go ‘aww man! Child-support found me,’” he says.
In reality, Marez was getting ready for pre-release, and Ortiz wanted to see if he might be a good candidate for Breakout’s men’s home.
At that point in time,the Breakout Prison Outreach men’s home had17 ex-convicts, soon to be 18. Marez joined their ranks in 1991.
For many offenders, leaving prison ends up being a far less permanent transition than they might hope. Recidivism rates in the United States are exceptionally high, with California reporting that over 65 percent of offenders found themselves back in jail within three years of their release.
In part, these statistics are unsurprising when we consider what people are returning to on the outside. Homelessness and drug addiction are rife in the United States; particularly so in California. Many individuals simply lack a support system beyond their neighborhood gang ties.
Breakout Prison Outreach’s men’s home provides individuals with a network and support system upon release.
The home is a structured introduction back into life outside San Quentin’s walls, and in some senses an intensive Bible school. Marez recalls having to memorize and recite at least three scriptures a week.
But for Marez and many of his counterparts at the home, it was about so much more than learning verses and having a roof over your head.
“It was the love that made the difference for me while I was in the home. For the first time in a long time I was able to start feeling again,” he explains. Marez continues, “in prison you have to be very careful even when you’re trying to change your life, cause there is a beast there. But on the outside — in that home — there was nothing but love.”
The men’s home has a six to nine month program, which Marez took part in before his role in the home suddenly shifted.
After a few months, he explains, he was told “We don’t need you as a resident anymore. We need you as a leader.”
That quick transition to home leader was Marez’s first real authority role in a career with Breakout Prison Outreach that has now spanned almost 27 years. Having grown up around crime, drugs and gang members, Marez knows how to work with ex-cons.
The trick is letting them know you’ve been there too, and working with what they know.
How a gang mentality can aid reform
Marez explains that he talks both to clients and employees, most of whom are ex-convicts, “like a homeboy”.
“I have to take them back to where they were. To who they were when they were hardcore so that they can understand me” he explains.
Marez continues, “I have to hit them like a homeboy. I have to let them know that I’ve been there, I’ve done that.”
“This is for reals out here homes. This is where the rubber meets the road.”
Sometimes this means putting things back into a prison or gangs context. It’s less about erasing people’s past and more about using that past to work effectively with them.
“One thing about these gangsters, these hard-core gang members, is that they’re loyal to their word. So we always work on their word.” explains Marez.
In the men’s home, if someone’s not cooperating or is angry about something like a weekend pass being pulled, the counselor will pull up the agreement that each home member signs upon arrival.
“He’ll ask them ‘did you sign this homes?’ and they’ll go ‘yeah’” says Marez. “And the counselor will ask ‘Are you telling me your word’s no good?’”
This usually does the trick, according to Marez. No one’s willing to sully their word over something as small as pass being pulled.
Although Marez’s journey to Breakout was directly through Pastor Ortiz, people come to Breakout Prison Outreach through a number of different channels. Some are referred to the agency via the public defender’s’ office, by word of mouth, or through Judge Manley’s drug and mental health courts.
Marez’s team often works in conjunction with Judge Manley, whose work on criminal justice solutions we profiled in a previous piece. In fact Marez himself was once sentenced by Manley, back in the early 80s.
“I got put into his courtroom a few times back in the day” says Marez. “I vaguely remember, cause when I was in his courtroom I was under the influence, but I’ll never forget the patch!”
“It’s amazing what God has done, cause I’m getting referrals from the Judge that sentenced me!” he continues.
From the men’s home, Marez and his colleagues would volunteer and hit the streets of San Jose. They would minister the word of God and lead prayers — sometimes in the middle of parties, sometimes in the midst of violence.
Marez even recalls a time the team superglued up a man’s stab wounds before sending him on to the emergency department.
At this stage, Breakout were doing all their work for free. It wasn’t until someone suggested it, that they realized there were grants for the sort of work they did.
Hiring another ex-San Quentin resident to write proposals for them, Breakout Prison Outreach got their first $200,000.
The program quickly garnered support and funding from various sources, including the then-mayor of San Jose; Susan Hammer. With gang violence at a high in the early 90s, Hammer began funding Breakout.
Marez and his team used that money to take two enemy gangs camping.
“We took them to two different tents. We took these gang members camping and that weekend there was no violence, because the two most notorious gangs in San Jose were out of town,” recalls Marez.
“There was word that there was going to be a killing. Nothing happened.”
Marez carried out work like this with at-risk and gang involved youth for a significant stint of his career. The team organized parks and rec programs in gang neighborhoods, ran redirection classes, and just generally interacted on the street with these youths.
There are plenty of success stories; one of the youths Marez worked with, from the same gang he once took camping, is now on Breakout’s board of directors.
The more you know, the more you can change
Having someone who knows where you’re coming from can be more important than whatever activity you’re doing. Breakout understand this and it’s why they are one of, if not the leading gang specialist programs in the area.
As well as its work with clients, they also train the police department and often work with other agencies to bring them up to capacity on gangs.
“Not everyone that comes to Breakout Prison Outreach is a gang member, I get them all,” Marez explains. “But we do have a speciality working with gangs. And when I do get a gang member that’s getting released, or an ex-gang member or drop out, I want them.”
“ I tell the resource center to send them my way. So they send me all the hard core gang members,” says Marez.
Having employees like Marez who understand the way the gangs and their members work means Breakout avoids making simple, but potentially catastrophic mistakes.
“We’re very careful how we make our appointments,” he explains, “and who is walking in when we screen these individuals. You can’t put an active member together with a dropout. So we’re very careful how we do things.”
The agency’s close ties with the police department have allowed them to establish a no-questions-asked gun return policy.
“We can turn in guns with no questions asked” Marez says confidently.
To make something like this work, there needs to be exceptionally high levels of trust between the clients and their mentors at Breakout. On another level, Marez needs to know he can trust the police department, and that he will not get in trouble en route to the station with a gun in his possession.
Is bureaucracy hindering outreach?
Over his 27 year career with the company, Marez has seen it grow and gather momentum, funding, and support. But this hasn’t come without its challenges and frustrations.
“Somewhere in the middle of the third and fourth generation [of graduates] we started getting busier and the county started changing things and giving us more paperwork,” explains Marez.
As a consequence the agency’s success rate is changing. Marez puts this down to staff having less time to really get to know their clients and build that trust.
“Now it’s getting to the point where you can’t even leave the office to go shoulder to shoulder with somebody,” he says. “That’s what makes the biggest difference in somebody’s life you know, and that’s what’s needed. Meet them where they’re at.”
“When we began, we wanted to be different. We’re becoming a program like the county. We’re no longer being that different program. I’m watching the success rate change and that has a lot to do with the shoulder to shoulder you know.”
Despite this underlying frustration with county-level bureaucracy, Marez is generally enthusiastic and invigorated by the work Breakout Prison Outreach does. There’s a feeling that the county is slowly but surely coming round to the work they do.
“I’ve got to tell you, this county has changed. This county, this community, has embraced the population that we’re working with.”
A strengthened resolve
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Marez either. In 2003, after 13 years of sobriety, Marez relapsed. At that stage Marez was working teaching classes at juvenile hall, and had just moved his daughter and grandchild into his new house.
“I thought I was really up there in my sobriety,” explains Marez. “And somewhere down the line — I don’t even know where it started — I started using with this individual that I was trying to help.”
Marez quickly fell back into drug addiction, using crystal meth and other substances. But throughout this all he continued to plug away at what he now saw as his cause. He was staying awake for days on end, and yet still turning up to work and getting his paperwork done.
It took a neighbor from a Bible class that Marez had started, to finally break his slide back into drug addiction.
“I remember one of the people in that Bible study stopped me in the car on the street and said, ‘What you doing homes, you don’t look too good.’ And I said, ‘Well I’m not doing too good,’ and I told her what was taking place.”
The neighbor ended up calling her brother who talked Marez into calling his executive director. Marez remembers crying like a baby when he saw him. After a stint of recovery spent living with friends in Oakland and at the executive director’s house, Marez resumed his job with Breakout Prison Outreach.
“I continued to work and my work became stronger than ever. My love for Christ became stronger than ever.”
Nowadays, Marez is still working at Breakout. He has moved back toward working primarily with adults instead of youth. For a while, he had been keen to get back to working with people in prison, helping inmates establish a support system on the outside prior to their release.
Recently however, he’s had his clearance pulled.
New rules preventing individuals with felony convictions from visiting the prison means Marez will have to wait until inmates are already released before he can get in touch with them. It’s unclear what the solution to this clearance issue is likely to be. Marez seems to be largely in the dark as to the specifics, but is determined to get it cleared up.
“I’ll have to play it by ear,” he says. “I’m going to wait until my director comes back and we’re going to call together so we can figure this out.”
For now, Marez will keep working to inspire positive change in others, and give as many people as possible the second chance that he received. He has always prided himself on his work ethic, something he says his father instilled in him since he was young.
His continued work with Breakout Prison Outreach, even through the ups and downs of his own life, is a testament to that. | https://medium.com/dc-design/how-one-inmate-learned-to-read-and-escape-gang-culture-10724cc3c66c | ['Dc Design'] | 2018-10-02 19:47:28.492000+00:00 | ['California', 'Social Impact', 'Social Change', 'Prison', 'Prison Reform'] |
How To Sustain Energy? #1 — The 6 Needs of Billionaire Igor Rybakov — Nudge (Video) | In this video you will learn how billionaires manage to sustain high level of energy. Zou will get to know the six universal psychological needs and see how the billionaire Igor Rybakov uses them to his advantage.
Watch this video:
Video transcription:
Hi! Today from Malta in the first episode of the series about energy
about sustaining your life energy, you energy for action, for activity
Today we will be talking about the 6 needs that will help you sustain your energy
See you in the next part!
Hi again from Malta, from Valletta
Behind me you can see the harbour of Valletta
Today I will be telling you about one of the aspects of the billion dollar secret
of the billionaires mind
How to achieve and sustain high level of personal energy?
There are several ways to sustain that high level of energy,
of course, physical aspects like doing excercise, like the right diet
but there are also a lot of things about sychology that you can do to youself
Kind of tricks that you can play on your self in order to, so to say…
trick youself into doing great, impossible things in order to have that unbelievable energy
And why you need high energy to do impossible or great things in life and business
to achieve billionaire level
This is pretty much clear, if you don’t feel like doing anything
if you are not in the mood to acomplish anything
you will not, of course, accomplish anything
The more energy you have, the more things you can do and the more you can accomplish
If you are able to have drive… if you have that drive
you are also more effective, efficient
You can work longer, let’s say, you can work 14–16 hours a day
Then, of course, you will achieve much more than somebody who can work only 5 hours a day
with focues
or maybe somebody, who can work only 2 hours or doesn’t feel like working at all
Of course, you will accomplish much more during the day and in the middle and long term
you will accomplish much more in your life and business
So, one of the keys is the high energy level that you have
This high motivation, like motivational energy, high drive in what you do
So, how can you do that? How can you keep that drive?
One of the psychological tools that Igor Rybakov describes in his book “Nudge”
that you can get on Amazon
is the 6 needs
What is it about?
Every person has in his life needs that he needs to satisfy
If he doesn’t satisfy these needs, he doesn’t feel well, he is unhappy, he can’t focus
and he can’t actually be productive in his life, he can’t accomplish much
If his needs aren’t satisfied.
This is pretty much clear that there are physical needs, like sleep, shelter, food
that you need to satisfy
And if you don’t satisfy these needs, you will not be productive, you will not be efficient in reaching your greater goals and improving the world
Whatever…
But as soon as these basic physical needs are satisfied, there are 6 psychological needs, that also need to be satisfied
in order for you to have this feeling of happiness, of accomplishment
And in order for you to develop this drive to achieve much more in your life.
What are these needs?
Igor Rybakov describes in his book his own needs that he checks upon
but I will give you 6 broadly accepted psychological needs and they are:
The first one is autonomy and freedom
The second one is the need for safety,
Third one — the need for significance
The fourth one — a need for connection, love and belonging
the fifth one — the need for progress in your life and business
the sixth one — the need for variety and stimulation
And note that some of these needs are opposites, they don’t exclude each other but they go in different directions
For example, autonomy goes in different direction from belonging
and let’s say, safety goes in different direction from variety
So, sometimes it is tricky to satisfy all these needs and different people have different priorities as to these needs
how strong or how deep they need to be fulfilled
And write me maybe in the comments, what are your needs that you didn’t find in this list
or maybe which of these needs aren’t satisfied in your life right now
and what are you going to do in order to satisfy them
Why? Because the tool that Igor Rybakov uses is the following:
He checks every week — he sets up time like 10–15 minutes every week to check upon these needs
Like these six needs, six basic psychological needs and he rates the satisfaction level, the fulfillment level in his life
And if he notices that a need or some of the needs are not satisfied for 2 or more weeks in a row
he knows he needs to act upon that to do something in order to satisfy that need, because otherwise his energy, life energy will be drained
So, he needs to have all these needs satisfied in order to sustain this high level of energy, in order to sustain this happiness, this drive
That drives him to his achievements
And his achievements are unbelievable, besides that he is a billionaire
Like 2 years ago I published my book The Billion Dollar Secret and since then I am researching for the second book
and writing the second book
and in this time he managed to write and publish 3 books, he recorded 2 music records, he made some TV productions, some film productions
And he built several factories and developed several businesses
This is just unbelievable what this high level of energy that he has allows him to do
And I am considered somebody with high level of energy, with a lot of activities and doing a lot of great things
but this is nothing in comparison with him
So, it is wise to use the tools that Igor uses and they may help you to achieve much more in your life
I wish you, of course, great satisfaction of your needs. I wish you a great energy and wonderful accomplishments
Please share the needs that you have in your life, maybe additional things
And share in the comment, what needs aren’t satisfied, what are you going to do in order to satisfy them
I hope you liked this video, if yes, give me a thumb up, if not of course thumb down
Subscribe if you haven’t, share this video with your loved ones, with your friends, one day they will thank you for that
I talk here a lot about how billionaires, how the best entrepreneurs in the world think and act.
What are the tools of the billion dollar secret, of the billionaire mind, that allow them to achieve so much
By the way, you can see here some billionaire yachts down there and I talk here also about doing great, impossible things in your life and business
about economy, about money, so if you liked this video, you will certainly like my other videos
I invite you to watch them, that’s it for today. I wish you a fantastic day. Let’s do something extraordinary today | https://medium.com/@BillionairePal/how-to-sustain-energy-1-the-6-needs-of-billionaire-igor-rybakov-nudge-video-1b4bb4874db9 | ['Rafael Badziag'] | 2021-06-17 18:17:59.215000+00:00 | ['Videos', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Billioanires', 'Motivation', 'Business'] |
Series 5 — Random Facts & Data Posts | There’s a high correlation between the size of the economic activity and energy consumption; at least, that was the postwar world’s dominating thesis.
Today, the only path for achieving the goals set out in the Paris Climate Agreement is reducing emissions by using fewer fossil fuels or increasing productivity in their use.
In the 1990s and the first two decades of the 21st century, developing countries have multiplied their oil and coal consumption and thus increased their greenhouse gas emissions.
In China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh live more than 40% of the planet’s total population. The question is how to promote economic growth and inclusion while incorporating new energy sources, knowing that fossil fuels are the most accessible, cheapest, and most efficient option. | https://medium.com/datonomia/series-5-random-facts-data-posts-a247b6d2799c | ['Juan Carlos Golindano Sosa'] | 2020-12-07 19:23:12.484000+00:00 | ['Economy', 'Fossil Fuels', 'Sustainability', 'Sustainable Development'] |
The Healthcare Hypocrisy | I was once one of the many pre-med students milling about my university campus, hoping to “change the world” by traveling to third-world countries providing much-needed medical care. But there was something critically wrong about that dream, and not just that my interests were very far elsewhere. I’m not saying that the world has no place for these people. We do need doctors who go out and serve those around the world in need. But we also need to address the critical issues in both policy and practice present in our American healthcare system. Particularly those present in the cases of chronic illness.
About a year ago, ironically just a week after I decided that the medical field was not going to be my future, I was exposed to the various intricacies of insurance policies, medical specialists, and diagnostic testing after the onset of some mystery illness. And after a year, including 5 hospital visits, 8 different doctors, an out-of-pocket bill larger than that of my college tuition, and few answers, I see the issues in this field that I was previously oblivious to.
Living in a capitalist society, acquiring a service almost certainly requires some sort of monetary exchange. While this is a problem within healthcare in and of itself, there is no sense in arguing that health care providers shouldn’t receive a salary, as they provide a valuable service that deserves compensation. The real issue lies in the fact that we don’t directly pay our practitioners, surgeons, anesthesiologists, and other medical professionals for their services. We conduct all business through a middle man: our insurance agency. Insurers themselves do not provide healthcare. They are for-profit organizations taking advantage of the fact that most cannot afford medical care in the case of emergencies without them. But insurance companies don’t run with the benefit of the consumer in mind, unlike doctors who may truly wish to see their patients improve. Insurance companies want your money.
I am not arguing that there can be no commercial aspect to our rights. But the commercial aspect should not get in the way of our rights. Borrowing an analogy from a Huffington Post opinion piece, the way our healthcare system is run is akin to if there were some sort of intermediary in our food purchasing. If we had to pay someone separate who then designates what sorts of foods we have access to and were denied access too. And this separate entity could deny food any time they deem it a financial burden on their part. This is exactly what happens within healthcare. And is our health not a right just as food should be?
The fact that people from other countries are shocked to hear that we have to pay for services such as ambulance fees should be a clue that there is something wrong with how the United States runs things. For example, last year I went into the Student Health Center, and they believed I was having a heart attack. Four times I had to turn down their request to send me to the ER in an ambulance, not because I thought the medical care wasn’t necessary, but because I didn’t want to pay the cost of an ambulance ride. And I am lucky enough to have been conscious and able to deny that “service” and acquire another ride. But for those who are involved in some major accident, and are whisked off to the hospital in an ambulance instead of an Uber, they are often charged thousands of dollars that they simply cannot afford.
And even after finding a ride as an alternative to the ambulance, I opted to go to urgent care rather than the ER, because of the difference between a $40 copay and a $400 copay. And when urgent care referred me to the ER, I instead went back to my dorm room, ate dinner, and went to bed. This was not the first, nor the last time that I neglected the recommended medical treatment due to financial burdens. And I’m not even from a low-income household as many people seeking medical treatment are. Yet I still fall into the category of the 30% of all Americans and 40% of women who have an unmet healthcare need because of cost.
We pretty frequently hear stories such as the EpiPen scandal, where they became overwhelmingly expensive, to the point where many in need of them could not afford them. And still ended up purchasing them due to the necessity. Or the rising prices if insulin, which is necessary for the lives of all 1.25 million Americans with Type 1 diabetes. Or of an insurance company denying a life-saving treatment to a child with cancer. But the issue is even more pervasive throughout society, affecting every person in the country. In 2018, the average cost of healthcare for a family of four was $28,000. And with the median household income hovering around $60,000 in the United States, that is nearly half of a family’s income going toward medical expenses each year. So for anybody with greater than average medical expenses (such as myself) or with lower income, this is creating a significant problem. And chances are, if either of these are the case for a specific household, there are other compounding financial factors as well. Americans should not fear going to a doctor because of the rampant, unexplained charges.
Not only is healthcare and insurance a significant financial burden, but it poses a significant logistical burden as well. This summer, my neurologist ran some bloodwork testing me for various genetic disorders that may have been causing some of my issues. My insurance company denied their claim, deeming this testing “unnecessary”, while up until less than a month prior, it was standard to approve that testing. This led to a month of failed appeals with insurance, meaning it took a month longer than I was expecting to get results. And even after all that time, my appeals weren’t even granted, and I had to pay for a simple blood test out-of-pocket. And while this testing was deemed “unnecessary”, it happened to be the first test that actually gave us any sort of headway.
And making sure you are covered under insurance is a hassle in and of itself. I am currently under my father’s health insurance, meaning that my coverage relies on the company my father works for. Last week, my father’s company stated that they are changing insurance providers at the beginning of December. So I had to look up all of my doctors to see if they are still in-network, and if not, I would have to shift all of my appointments to new doctors, which would set us months behind in the progress we are finally making. Turns out, my new insurance policy doesn’t cover any doctors in the state of Texas. So until I can get on student health insurance at the beginning of next semester, I am uninsured. And for a college student with chronic illness, that’s a significant issue.
While there are certainly further issues in medical and insurance policy that I have neglected to cover, issues in medical practice are also of particular concern, especially for those of various minority groups. When I walk into the waiting room of my neurologist, oncologist, hematologist, and cardiologist, I am always the youngest person in the room. Nobody expects a 19-year-old to have issues requiring this sort of attention. My anesthesiologist, while performing a lumbar puncture in September, stated, “We almost never have to do these on people your age. Thus it’s harder to differentiate the various layers to make sure we are in the right spot.” And indeed, they ended up going too deep into my back, causing issues landing me in the ER three days later. When mentioning my symptoms to my cardiologist, he stated, “Well, this sounds like a stroke, but considering you’re a 19-year-old female, it’s not that urgent.” Turns out it was indeed a stroke, but didn’t get diagnosed until 4 months later and near-permanent nerve issues resulted. And often when I have an appointment scheduled months in advance, this appointment gets cancelled to make room for someone older, who they can more easily diagnose and treat. But just because I’m younger, and these issues don’t make a lot of sense, doesn’t mean that they aren’t life threatening or having a significant impact on my life. Yet I still get disregarded. And this is the case for many youths with chronic illness: we are told that because we “shouldn’t” have these illnesses at this age, we then don’t. Which isn’t the case.
Not only that, but with the medical system being so divided between its different departments, so many things take longer in practice than they actually should due to lack of communication. I have lost track of the number of times that something has been missed because my neurologist neglected to share some tidbit of information with my general practitioner, or that my hematologist has been unaware of the significant pain that I am in constantly because none of my other doctors felt to mention it. And with so much information being passed around without some coherent way of collating all of it, there are many symptoms of mine that the doctors have completely forgotten about addressing at this point.
So here I am, having spent way more out-of-pocket for my medical expenses than any college kid really has the money for, losing feeling in the right side of my body because I didn’t want to pay for the ER after having a stroke, rescheduling all of my December appointments because I am currently uninsured, waiting three months for an appointment with my next specialist because I am a 19-year-old female who isn’t a priority, and suffering from pain and other symptoms that nobody cares to pay attention to. There’s a problem in our healthcare system if any of these are the case. There’s definitely a problem considering all of these are in play, with no solution in sight to any of them.
*This article originally published with AMP at UT Dallas in December 2019* | https://medium.com/@mpat10/the-healthcare-hypocrisy-ad2053e3de42 | ['Michelle Patten'] | 2020-12-20 18:10:38.166000+00:00 | ['Insurance', 'University', 'Medicine', 'Healthcare'] |
The Sweet Spot for Intermittent Fasting | The Sweet Spot for Intermittent Fasting
Ted Naiman, M.D., whose great site is Burn Fat Not Sugar, posted the following graph recently (used with permission). The information comes from a paper, “Progressive alterations in lipid and glucose metabolism during short-term fasting in young adult men”.(1)
Dr. Naiman suggested that “the sweet spot for intermittent fasting” occurs between 18 and 24 hours of fasting since this is the time period that sees the greatest drop in insulin and increase in lipolysis — the breakdown of fat.
Eyeballing the graph and comparing it to the one above from Volek shows that at an insulin level of about 40 pmol/L, lipolysis should be proceeding briskly.
There has been lots of guesswork as to how long intermittent fasts should last. One very obvious but usually non-verbalized reason is that most people don’t want to fast for very long, and after a certain time most people get hungry. But they do want to lose fat.
A very common duration of intermittent fasting, one that I often do, is about 16 hours. A 16-hour fast involves skipping only one meal, typically breakfast, so it’s easy enough. A shorter fast than this wouldn’t involve missing even one meal, so we probably couldn’t characterize it as a real intermittent fast.
But according to the information above, in terms of insulin level, the fast is only really getting going at 16 hours. Extending it further than this ramps the drop in insulin and the increase in lipolysis.
If you can extend your fast into the afternoon, you get more benefits, and a 24-hour fast would do even more.
One thing I would add to Dr. Naiman’s “sweet spot” is that duration matters for insulin level. In other words, it’s not just a matter of achieving a low insulin level, but how long you stay there. Therefore, longer fasts can be of great benefit — though inconvenient in terms of hunger and normal life.
Fasting promotes autophagy
One of the great benefits of intermittent fasting that I’ve written about often is that it promotes autophagy, the cellular self-cleaning process that breaks down and recycles damaged molecules and cellular organelles.
During the fed state, when insulin is increased, the rate of autophagy is low. During the fasted state, as insulin drops, autophagy increases dramatically, perhaps 5-fold.
Many of the anti-aging effects of calorie restriction and intermittent fasting come from the increase in autophagy.
A high rate of autophagy is characteristic of young organisms; with aging, autophagy decreases, and this allows cellular damage to accumulate. By fasting intermittently, autophagy rates can be reset to that of a younger person.
As we see above, one of the ways this happens is through lowering insulin.
Exercise improves insulin sensitivity, so for any given fasting stimulus, a person who is in shape will see insulin levels drop and lipolysis commence faster than someone not in shape.
Low-carbohydrate diets cause less of a rise in insulin, so probably someone on a low-carb diet who then fasts will also see a quicker drop of insulin into the range at which it promotes lipolysis and autophagy.
Autophagy is suppressed in the presence of insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia. (2) This may be one of the main mechanisms behind the deleterious effects of diabetes and obesity.
It’s worth noting that the study cited by Dr. Naiman used healthy young men as subjects, and they presumably had good insulin sensitivity.
Fasting as an anti-aging intervention
As noted, by increasing autophagy, intermittent fasting causes the breakdown and clearance of damaged cell parts.
Aging just is the accumulation of damage. As we age, we can no longer recycle damage as readily; cell constituent turnover decreases.
We saw in the interview with Dr. Michael Fossel that activating telomerase has the effect of increasing cell turnover to youthful levels by lengthening telomeres.
Dr. Fossel roundly rejected my suggestion that, until telomerase therapy comes along and/or it’s shown to truly reverse aging, intermittent fasting is the best way to slow aging.
But, he’s wrong. If the accumulation of damage characterizes aging, and if the aging organism is characterized as being less able to clear damage, then increasing the rate of clearance is the best way to slow aging.
One of the best ways to increase clearance of damage, and hence to slow aging, is through intermittent fasting. | https://medium.com/better-humans/the-sweet-spot-for-intermittent-fasting-9aae12a2158c | ['P. D. Mangan'] | 2019-05-24 01:07:06.189000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Fasting', 'Anti Aging', 'Intermittent Fasting', 'Weight Loss'] |
The SpaceNet Challenge Off-Nadir Buildings: Introducing the winners | Off-nadir imagery of Atlanta, GA. Imagery courtesy of DigitalGlobe.
SpaceNet’s mission is to accelerate geospatial machine learning and is supported by the SpaceNet LLC member organizations.
The SpaceNet Challenge: Round 4, Off-Nadir Building Footprint Extraction hosted by TopCoder is complete! Congratulations to cannab, selim_sef, MaksimovKA, number13, and XD_XD for taking home the top 5 prizes. Check out this GitHub repository for their solution algorithm code. Their solutions represented a 1.5-fold improvement over our initial baseline model’s performance. This is the first post in a series where we’ll dig into the competitors’ solutions to find out how they applied machine learning to identify buildings in overhead imagery taken at look angles from 7 to 54 degrees off-nadir.
The Challenge
In Round 4 of the SpaceNet Challenge we asked competitors to identify building footprints from 27 different satellite collects taken during a single pass of a WorldView 2 satellite over Atlanta. The data comprised both South-facing and North-facing collects with look angle ranging from 7 degrees off-nadir to a whopping 54 degrees off-nadir. For more details about the challenge (or if you’re unfamiliar with that terminology), check out these earlier posts describing the competition:
Introducing the SpaceNet Off-Nadir Imagery Dataset
A Baseline Model for the SpaceNet Off-Nadir Building Detection Challenge
Challenges with the SpaceNet 4 off-nadir satellite imagery
We had 238 registrants and 21 competitors beating our baseline model in this extremely challenging competition.
Key takeaways
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, here are our main takeaways from running and scoring the challenge:
Building detection in “ideal” imagery is still far from perfect
In these perfectly cloudless, high-resolution Worldview 2 images over Atlanta, even when we restrict to the images looking nearly straight down (look angle of <25 degrees off-nadir, the “nadir” set), the best algorithm still missed about 21% of buildings.
The winning algorithm correctly identified about eight out of ten buildings in images taken at nadir.
Furthermore, about one out of every six buildings the winner predicted in the nadir set did not match up to a building on the ground (i.e. was a “false positive”).
For every six predictions the winner made from nadir images, roughly five corresponded to buildings.
There’s still a lot of room for improvement in automated analysis of overhead imagery!
It is very hard to identify buildings at very off-nadir look angles
Performance at look angle >40 degrees off-nadir was an average of 30% worse than <25 degrees off-nadir. The winners only positively identified about 50% of the buildings in these very off-nadir images:
The winning algorithm correctly identified about five out of ten buildings in images taken very off-nadir.
…and about one in three of their predictions were false positives:
For every six predictions the winner made from very off-nadir images, about four corresponded to buildings.
If you want to use algorithms to identify objects in very off-nadir imagery, be aware of these performance limitations.
Big ensembles of models help, but the juice may not always be worth the squeeze
The winning algorithm, an ensemble of 28 convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with a gradient boosting machine (GBM) filter to remove bad buildings yielded only a 5% improvement over the #5 algorithm, which comprised only 3 CNNs. This came at a substantial computing cost: the winning algorithm takes more than 10 times longer to identify buildings in new images than the 5th place competitor’s algorithm! With a difference of 6.5 vs. 68 seconds per square km of prediction, this may represent the difference between a deployable solution and an algorithm that is only academically relevant.
Let’s dive into the details!
Winners’ algorithm performance
A summary of the winners’ results alongside the baseline model are in the table below.
Competitors’ scores in the SpaceNet 4: Off-Nadir Building Detection Challenge compared to the baseline model. Each score represents the SpaceNet Metric for the entire image set (Overall) or subsets of the imagery with specific look angles: Nadir, 7–25 degrees; Off-nadir, 26–40 degrees; Very off-nadir, >40 degrees.
The results were remarkably close — cannab’s winning solution represents only a 5% improvement over XD_XD’s 5th place solution. Much of the competitors’ improvements over the baseline came in the off-nadir and very off-nadir image subsets, where the winning solutions represented 79% and 170% improvements over the baseline model. By contrast, the algorithm with the best performance in the nadir set only improved on the baseline by 32%:
Improvement in competitor algorithm over baseline, stratified by look angle. Nadir: 7–25 degrees, Off-nadir: 26–40 degrees, Very off-nadir: >40 degrees.
So, how did the competitors achieve these improvements? This will be the topic of the remainder of this post and several deep dives to come.
A summary of the winners’ algorithms
Every top 10 competitor who submitted a solution used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to identify building footprints. Each competitor produced a binary output image with each pixel labeled as 1 (contains a building) or 0 (does not contain a building), which they then converted to polygons outlining individual buildings. The intricacies of the competitors’ algorithms, summarized below, varied dramatically. | https://medium.com/the-downlinq/the-spacenet-challenge-off-nadir-buildings-introducing-the-winners-b60f2b700266 | ['Nick Weir'] | 2019-03-04 15:52:47.485000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Geospatial', 'Computer Vision', 'Spacenet', 'Deep Learning'] |
PMPS: LEVERAGING SECOND-PARTY DATA FOR DIGITAL CAMPAIGNS | In the first installment of this series, First-Party Data: A Hidden Gem for the Post-Cookie World, we looked at how an advertiser’s customer database, or first-party data, can be used for advertising purposes. Now we will expand to the world of data sets that you can leverage to help increase, and refine, your first-party data while generating awareness and preference in the pursuit of sales.
Suppose your most desirable customers tend to read either New York Times or People Magazine online. You could just place advertising on either NYTimes.com or People.com, but that would result in a lot of wasted impressions, served to those who might not be aligned with your product or service. How do we minimize that waste? That is where second-party data comes in.
SECOND-PARTY AUDIENCE BUYING: WHAT IS IT?
I am referring to “second-party” here as the audience data of online publishers and other media properties like ad networks. The data is theirs — not yours — hence the second-party designation. Their audience data really is comprised of multiple audience segments, with data points that result in profiles that may look like your desired customers.
If you are a CPG company, you may want to target those who are buying your competitive set in the hopes of converting a percentage of those to buy your brand. If this is the case, your criteria may include reaching those who:
Match your geographic distribution area
Are within your desired customers’ HHI range
Shop at a specific
set of retailers
Or any combination
of the above
This approach allows an advertiser to use a media property’s larger audience set, minimizing waste while adding new users who can eventually grow your first-party data. You are not on NYTimes all the time, just when your target audience happens to be viewing. With apologies to the late Rod Serling, you’ve now entered the world of the Private Marketplace (PMP).
THE PRIVATE MARKETPLACE: HOW SECOND-PARTY AUDIENCE BUYING GETS DONE
Unlike the large ad exchanges that utilize available inventory from thousands of sites, the private marketplace allows an advertiser to programmatically buy only the audience they desire to target within a restricted set of one or more sites. Working with a publisher PMP allows for buying select audience segments that match up with an advertiser’s desired audience data, as noted above. Some things to consider when working with PMPs:
Make sure that there is alignment with your audience. For example, you may not want to use a particular PMP if less than 5% of your desired audience is going to a specific site or series of sites within that PMP. Consider 15% — 20% or more as a good guideline.
Think beyond “open web” display banners. Can you reach a publisher’s in-app or social media users? While there might be additional premiums for these, the additional costs may be justified if your desired audience is engaged with these platforms.
Balance a PMP buy with other tactics for overall efficiency. No one tactic can serve every marketer’s objectives. Remember that the key is to test and see if this approach works within a selection of tactics that meet your overall parameters for effectiveness and efficiency.
With the era of cookie-less advertising fast approaching, using PMPs to access second-party data will likely become a viable option to not only enhance campaign performance but grow your customer base as well. | https://medium.com/gkv/pmps-leveraging-second-party-data-for-digital-campaigns-37eac9c51522 | [] | 2020-12-28 21:21:17.374000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Digital Marketing Agency', 'Advertising', 'Data', 'Big Data'] |
The Harry Potter Saga | Short Reviews | Reviews
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone/Philosopher’s stone (2001)
by Movieclips Classic Trailers on YouTube
It was really light in the sense of story line, I mean it was enjoying and a great way to introduce the magical world to the audience. You stop noticing all the special effects and really focus on the characters.
Overall it was an enjoyable movie for kids and adults alike.
Rating: 9/10 Owls
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
by Movieclips Classic Trailers on YouTube
This movie took a dark turn but still keeping it quite light. It doesn’t hit you with all the information at once but slowly gives you information throughout the movie.
Overall enjoyable.
Rating: 8/10 Wands
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
by Movieclips Classic Trailers on YouTube
Now this one is pretty dark, it grows with the audience and their taste. Although Harry Potter is the chosen one he can’t seem to understand his abilities which sometimes can be annoying but beside from that it wasn’t that bad.
Rating: 6/10 Spiders
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
by Movieclips Classic Trailers on YouTube
Harry Potter can’t seem to catch a break, first his parents gets killed, then his godfather was wrongfully accused of murder, and now he’s been force to compete as fourth champion in the Triwizard tournament but what could wrong…apparently a lot. The dark lord appears and people die, it’s a tragedy.
Harry seems smarter and we also see a growth in Hermione’s and Ron’s character; Hermione is no longer just a know-it-all character but has depth and Ron is no longer just there as comic relief but has grown to have his own thoughts too.
Rating: 7/10 Horntails
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
by Movieclips Classic Trailers on YouTube
I thought Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was scary but apparently this was way scarier but also dark and grim, seeing the Minister of magic’s face when he saw Lord Voldemort apparate away was priceless, at least it seemed like people would now believe that he is finally back…
The training montage of Dumbledore’s Army was really funny and shows really what everyone was actually capable of if they actually have a great teacher.
Rating: 8/10 Death Eaters
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
by Movieclips Classic Trailers on YouTube
Some great comedic moments have been shown here with Harry faking Ron’s luck and then took it himself and that moment with Aragog’s funeral was funny. Overall it was entertaining full of magical moments and finding out more about Snape’s past was interesting.
Rating: 9/10 Felix Felicis
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
by Movieclips on YouTube
The ending was definitely one of the few most heartbreaking moments of the entire saga, our favorite house-elf, Dobby, may he rest in peace. All the actors have grown up which this series of film has really shown how so much more seriousness in terms of character and story, the end is near and the core three are willing to do whatever it takes to save everyone of the Dark Lord himself, Voldemort.
Rating: 10/10 socks
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
by Movieclips on YouTube
A satisfying ending towards a great series. There are definitely some shocking moments for someone who hasn’t read the book or haven’t seen the movies in a long time.
Rating: 10/10 Elder Wands | https://medium.com/filmpocalypse/re-watching-all-8-films-of-the-harry-potter-saga-short-reviews-53e872019b99 | ['Jason Canale'] | 2020-12-21 20:52:58.074000+00:00 | ['Saga', 'Harry Potter', 'Film', 'Movies', 'Magic'] |
Top Content Marketplaces to Watch for in 2020 | The content of your website is a masterwork that plays a lead role in successful digital marketing for your online business. It should be visually alluring and sensibly shareable. Content experts use their knowledge and skills to make content apt and engaging for a specific audience to escalate the business profits and values.
Some universal practices of making content more illuminating and powerful are insertion of graphics, blogs, images, e-books, FAQs, or videos in the content. Content marketing agencies basically deal with the digital properties of your business such as social media content, website, and newsletter. Such agencies also check the compatibility of the content with various digital platforms.
Role of Content Marketing Agencies in Brand Awareness
In this digital era, a business cannot afford to miss its online presence. Thus, content marketing is a great way to create brand awareness through various digital networks and platforms. Strong content can make the client’s brand reach the next level of recognition.
Content marketing agencies via storytelling programs on diverse digital platforms escalate client’s reputation and engages more traffic users for the business website. Such agencies are skilled enough to identify content landscape required for specific brand and thus helps in digital dominance.
Some Top Content Marketplaces
Content marketing is a regular process that always creates a need for a content marketing expert who can genuinely handle content marketing requirements.
Here is a list of few reputed content marketing agencies which can provide your business with an interactive and appealing content in a striking story-telling style.
1) Justwords- Justwords is a content marketing agency based on Gurugram founded in the year 2010. It is Google-award winning company that deals with both small as well as large size businesses for solving different content marketing needs. This company with its expert team members develops a suitable content strategy for the specific needs of your business. It assures to provide sales-driven content for escalating your business profits.
2) Peppercontent- Pepper is one of India’s biggest content marketing platforms having a great network of around 18000 writers. Its main aim is to develop a platform that helps aspiring and talented writers to grow their writing skills. The full-time freelance writers working with this agency mostly belong to journalism. This content marketing agency assures quality content with talented content editors using their great editing skills to get desired content.
3) E2M- E2M is a content marketing agency that oaths to offer SEO-driven content made with right content marketing strategy by keeping business content requirements in mind. Several dedicated content writers, designers and brand consultants work together for traffic driven website with quality content.
4) Team Pumpkin-Team pumpkin is another popular name in the field of content marketing that deals with diverse written as well as visual content requirements. Team pumpkin also help businesses to optimize their content marketing efforts by choosing a suitable content marketing channel. Their professional team of content experts filled with dedication and creativity can help your business to formulate best content strategy and beat the content market powerfully.
5) Blogworks- Blogworks is a reputed content marketing agency based on Delhi known for its incredible story-telling style. It is engaged with various Indian as well as global clients. A great team of professionals works for content, design, brands, research and analytics, production, and technology.
Conclusion
Content marketing agencies help in generating appropriate content marketing plans for your business by formulating the right content marketing strategy. It is the most elementary task for the entire content marketing plan. Content strategy should be quite flexible to grasp new marketing tactics and result in revenue generation. It helps in generating leads and creating brand awareness. Pepper is a leading content marketing platform with more than 18k talented writers working in a team to deliver best quality contents for their clients.
FAQs
1) Why your business needs content marketing agency?
Ans- It is mandatory for your business to have an online presence in this internet world. Content marketing agencies provide strength to the online visibility of your business website by offering strong content by driving more viewers and bringing more businesses to your company.
2) How content marketing agencies help in making your content strong?
Ans-Content marketing agencies make your content powerful and interesting by using story-telling style and other video programs as well as graphics. A strong content always helps in collecting more viewers for your website and bringing a good amount of business.
3) What are a few unique practices used by content marketing agencies for making your content strong?
Ans-Few universal practices for making your content strong are introducing graphics, blogs, e-books, images, FAQs and videos, etc. in the content.
4) How content marketing agencies help in brand awareness?
Ans-Content marketing agencies help businesses to pursue the right content marketing strategy to develop an accurate content marketing plan for your business. Such agencies are aware of new marketing tactics that can produce more results for your website.
5) Is content marketing a regular process?
Ans-Yes, content marketing is a regular process. Thus, content marketing expert makes great efforts to plan content strategy as per changing marketing needs. | https://medium.com/@pranavgoyal0106/top-content-marketplaces-to-watch-for-in-2020-a566dbe5c9b6 | ['Pranav Goyal'] | 2020-06-23 19:45:41.679000+00:00 | ['Blog', 'Marketplaces', 'Content Marketing', 'Content', 'Marketing'] |
Forgiveness, Acceptance, Fear and Freedom | Photo by Jason Hogan on Unsplash
You have no idea how many times I started things I didn’t finish or want to do things that I didn’t think I could so I didn’t even try. As I look back on my life, I can see how I allowed fear to determine the road I would take — safety at all costs.
I remember being in elementary school and the teacher asking who wanted to be on the track team. I was a fast runner and I so wanted to! But as the beating of my heart quickened to a frightening pace, I stood frozen unable to raise my hand.
Do you remember as a child being in the school auditorium before a play or some such thing and having to stand and sing? Well, I was so shy that although there were a hundred other kids singing, my voice stuck in my throat and I just mouthed the words.
I was a shy kid who always felt like I was on the outside looking in. As I grew to teenage years, I filled that void with over-drinking and pot smoking. As I grew into young adulthood I attracted guys who didn’t treat me with respect, mainly because I didn’t demand it.
At some point, I decided that enough was enough and I over corrected. My heart hardened and I grew cold. If you did something to me that I didn’t like, I’d cut you off and you’d never hear from me again. Clean cut, no regrets.
I lost my mother when I was 19, she was 42. As I approached the fourth decade of my life, I decided I no longer wanted to live in fear. I took an acting class, (I had always wanted to be an actor), joined an off-off Broadway theater group, made many friends with whom I am still in connection with today and sang on a Cabaret stage here in NYC. Absolutely one of the best times of my life, hands down.
Through acting, I realized that I didn’t have full access to the emotions that I needed to fully develop the characters that I played or, more honestly, the emotion that I accessed with ease was anger and I had to figure out why.
Through this years long journey of self-reflection, I’ve learned that in order to achieve what you truly want and deserve, you must do three things: practice radical forgiveness, radical acceptance and move through your fear.
Visualize every single thing that you felt bad about or were afraid of and forgive yourself. See yourself at every stage of your life and give that self a big hug and kiss, then pull him/her into your heart.
After this, think about the person you are and be honest. Accept the entire person you are — the good, the bad and the ugly. Acceptance doesn’t mean you can’t change what you don’t like about yourself, it just means that you know who you are and you accept it without judgement. This gives you space to know that you are deserving of what you truly want.
Finally, move through your fear. Everyone is afraid. As Jack Canfield says, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
Meditate on having a heart that is completely open and a soul that is authentic and vulnerable. Practice radical forgiveness and radical acceptance and move through your fears. Only then can you develop enduring and meaningful relationships, first with yourself, then with others and finally, with the way you choose to live your life. | https://medium.com/@deidre1113/forgiveness-acceptance-fear-and-freedom-ec9a5e63a33 | ['Deidre Ann Johnson'] | 2020-12-27 18:54:03.118000+00:00 | ['Fear', 'Forgiveness', 'Love', 'Freedom', 'Acceptance'] |
PAIRWISE RANKING : EPL PREDICTION — Part2 | Overview
Pairwise ranking have multiple use cases in fields like search ranking optimization, Product Comparison etc. and holds edge over traditional cumulative comparison as with the former we will be able to say A is n% better than B/C/D etc.. by also prioritizing the effect of each variable by the corresponding relevance. The theory behind the method is detailed in the previous article of this series: https://medium.com/@davidacad10/pairwise-ranking-epl-prediction-3ce755575958
Image By : thinkersnewsng
Assuming that, we now have a brief idea on how the pairwise ranking is applied behind the curtains, we will have an interesting application, where we try to predict the table standings of English Premier League at the end of the current season 2020–21. The parameter we would use to rank teams would be the head to head results in the last 5 matches. It’s quite interesting to see how close it gets to real table standings when applied to 2019–20 season on validation.
Case In Action
The parameter we would use to rank teams is the head to head results each team had in the last 5 matches. A win is awarded 3,draw 1 and loss 0, just as it is in EPL. So the maximum rating a team can have is 15 and minimum is 0. The objective we are aiming for is predicting the final standings at the end of the season, at the very beginning of the season without even a match being played.[We can try more real time models for a match by match prediction later :D].
Just as in every data science problem, the important part is to get the data ready. There are quite a lot of good sources available. I have collected the match by match result from 2004 from football.com and collated to a single file. You can access the repo on:
https://github.com/davidacad10/EPL_Analytics/tree/master/Pairwise_Ranking.
Let’s load the data and get to it:
library(rio)
library(dplyr)
library(xgboost)
library(knitr) rm(list = ls())
data=import("Pairwise_Ranking_Data.xlsx")
data=data%>%
mutate(Season_Start_Date=as.Date(Season_Start_Date)
,Season_End_Date=as.Date(Season_End_Date)
,Prev_SSD=as.Date(Prev_SSD)
,Prev_SED1=as.Date(Prev_SED1))
The data frame have the H2H results from 2004 season, with ratings as described before. On the first week of the season the H2H available is those of last seasons. Hence for every season N, the rank will be the final table standings the team had on season N+1. For example, at the end of season 2018–19,when Chelsea had a 9 point over Man City and 6 point over Liverpool, they ended up finishing 3rd the next season 2019–20.Hence for a team Ti, the H2H over all the teams T at the end of season N, will be the parameters used to predict rank in season N+1.
Let’s divide the data into train and test. There was a shift in EPL after the 2012–13 season, where all the teams got highly competitive. So we can select train data from 2013–14 season to 2018–19. We can test the model created for 2019–20 which itself can be called as an outlier season for many reasons (Covid-19,Liverpool winning title etc. :D).
train=data%>%filter(Prev_SSD<=as.Date('2018-08-10'))%>%
filter(Prev_SSD>=as.Date('2013-08-01'))
test1=data%>%filter(Prev_SSD>as.Date('2018-08-10')) ##Getting the previous records available for the promoted teams
##And adding into the 17 other teams to have the whole 20 team ##records promoted=c("Norwich","Sheffield United","Aston Villa") test2=data%>%filter(Team1%in%promoted)%>%
ungroup()%>%
group_by(Team1)%>%
arrange(desc(Season_Start_Date))%>%
mutate(rpp=row_number())%>%
filter(rpp==1)%>%
select(-rpp) test=bind_rows(test1,test2)
train_data=train%>%ungroup()%>%select(Arsenal:Wolves)
test_data=test%>%ungroup()%>%select(Arsenal:Wolves)
target=as.numeric(as.character(train$Rank)) set.seed(1000)
xgbTrain <- xgb.DMatrix(as.matrix(train_data), label = train$Rank)
xgbTest <- xgb.DMatrix(as.matrix(test_data)) ##No extra parameter tuning being applied except ntress=5000 and
#early stopping round as 20
params <- list(booster = 'gbtree',
objective = 'rank:pairwise')
##Metric used is NDCG as described in tutorial
rankModel <- xgb.train(params, xgbTrain, 5000, watchlist = list(tr = xgbTrain), eval_metric = 'ndcg',early_stopping_rounds = 20) ## Stopping. Best iteration:
## [55] tr-ndcg:0.983104 ##Predicting The Model on Test Data for 2019-20 pred=(predict(rankModel, xgbTest,reshape = TRUE))
test$Pred=pred
test_pred=test%>%
ungroup()%>%
select(Team1,Prev_SSD1,Rank,Pred)%>%
arrange(Pred)%>%
mutate(Pred_Rank=row_number(),
Probability=1/(1+exp(Pred)))%>%
select(Prev_SSD1,Team1,Rank,Pred_Rank,Pred,Probability)%>%
rename(Actual_Rank=Rank,Title_Probability=Probability,Season_Start=Prev_SSD1) ##Print the prediction frame
view(test_pred)
2019–20 Season Prediction
Voila. We were able to get the title winner correctly and the runner up. Note that in none of the training data Liverpool had a rank 1 but it was only city, Chelsea and Leicester. The model is able to pick up the pattern that Liverpool can finish over just by looking at their improvement in head to heads alone. We have Tottenham at 3,where as they finished 6th(fun breakers huh!).Although, this was an off season for them with even finishing in top 4 and a UCL final last season, they were coming off from their best season ever. Considering this outlier away, the next rankings Man United and Chelsea are spot on.
The lambda rank method provides more prevalence to top ratings than bottom ones. Although, except wolves(due to little data availability),4 out of bottom 5 were in relegation battle with 2 of them actually getting relegated.
Now that we have seen the accuracy of predictions on last season, let’s see what would be the case at the end of season.
##Load the 2020–21 prediction data
newtest=import(“Pairwise_Ranking_Data_Pred_2020_data.xlsx”)
rel=c(‘Norwich’,’Watford’,’Bournemouth’) newtest=newtest%>%filter(!Team1%in%rel)
newtest2=newtest%>%select(-Team1) newtest_xgb <- xgb.DMatrix(as.matrix(newtest2))
pred=(predict(rankModel, newtest_xgb,reshape = TRUE)) newtest$Pred=pred
newtest_pred=newtest%>%
ungroup()%>%
select(Team1,Pred)%>%
arrange(Pred)%>%
mutate(Prev_SSD1=as.character(‘2020–09–12’),Pred_Rank=row_number(),
Probability=1/(1+exp(Pred)))%>%
select(Prev_SSD1,Team1,Pred_Rank,Pred,Probability)%>%
rename(Title_Probability=Probability,Season_Start=Prev_SSD1) ##Print the 2020-21 season prediction
view(newtest_pred)
2020–21 Season Prediction
Noted that this prediction doesn’t have Leeds as they are in EPL for first time after 2002. With the 19 teams available, Chelsea are predicted to win the league, with Liverpool coming in second, United 3rd and city 4th.With the new signings Chelsea have, they could in fact aim for it. Although for a football infested mind it’s hard to digest city finishing 4th and either of city or Liverpool not winning the league. But numbers don’t lie. Fingers crossed :D
And for the relegation battle, it’s predicted to be between Fulham, West Brom, Crystal Palace and Aston Villa. Noted that 3 out of those 4 are promoted in the last two seasons.
Conclusion
There could be few bias the prediction could have in effect:
The parameter under consideration is head to heads in last 2 seasons effectively. This doesn’t consider any effect to change in team via transfers
More priority is provided to get the top rankings correctly over the bottom one’s
Teams that are new to EPL like Leeds doesn’t have data associated as we consider on EPL head to heads and hence can’t be added
Now that we have completed a cool application of pairwise ranking, I believe we are good with the application side too. In fact there are multiple packages available other than xgboost which you can pick up on if interested. If you want to brainstorm on the theory behind, give a read on this article
https://medium.com/@davidacad10/pairwise-ranking-epl-prediction-3ce755575958 | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/pairwise-ranking-epl-prediction-part2-756542b85c2b | ['David Babu'] | 2020-12-22 16:39:26.814000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Premier League', 'AI', 'Applied Machine Learning', 'Data Science'] |
Building a Better Search Engine for Semantic Scholar | Sergey Feldman is a Senior Applied Research Scientist at AI2 in Seattle, focused on natural language processing and machine learning. Follow Sergey on Twitter.
2020 is the year of search for Semantic Scholar, a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the Allen Institute for AI. One of our biggest endeavors this year is to improve the relevance of our search engine, and my mission beginning at the start of the year was to figure out how to use about 3 years of search log data to build a better search ranker.
Ultimately, we ended up with a search engine that provides more relevant results to our users, but at the outset I underestimated the complexity of getting machine learning to work well for search. “No problem,” I thought to myself, “I can just do the following and succeed thoroughly in 3 weeks”:
Get all of the search logs. Do some feature engineering. Train, validate, and test a great machine learning model. Deploy.
Although this is what seems to be established practice in the search engine literature, many of the experiences and insights from the hands-on work of actually making search engines work is often not published for competitive reasons. Because AI2 is focused on AI for the common good, we make a lot of our technology and research open and free to use. In this post, I’ll provide a “tell-all” account of why the above process was not as simple as we had hoped, and detail the following problems and their solutions:
The data is absolutely filthy and requires careful understanding and filtering. Many features improve performance during model development but cause bizarre and unwanted behavior when used in practice. Training a model is all well and good, but choosing the correct hyperparameters isn’t as simple as optimizing nDCG on a held-out test set. The best-trained model still makes some bizarre mistakes, and posthoc correction is needed to fix them. Elasticsearch is complex, and hard to get right.
Along with this blog post and in the spirit of openness, we are also releasing the complete Semantic Scholar search reranker model that is currently running on www.semanticscholar.org, as well as all of the artifacts you need to do your own reranking. Check it out here: https://github.com/allenai/s2search
Search Ranker Overview
Let me start by briefly describing the high-level search architecture at Semantic Scholar. When one issues a search on Semantic Scholar, the following steps occur:
Your search query goes to Elasticsearch (we have almost ~190M papers indexed). The top results (we use 1000 currently) are reranked by a machine learning ranker.
We have recently improved both (1) and (2), but this blog post is primarily about the work done on (2). The model we used was a LightGBM ranker with a LambdaRank objective. It’s very fast to train, fast to evaluate, and easy to deploy at scale. It’s true that deep learning has the potential to provide better performance, but the model twiddling, slow training (compared to LightGBM), and slower inference are all points against it.
The data has to be structured as follows. Given a query q, ordered results set R = [r_1, r_2, …, r_M], and number of clicks per result C = [c_1, c_2, …, c_M], we feed the following input/output pairs as training data into LightGBM:
f(q, r_1), c_1 f(q, r_2), c_2 … f(q, r_m), c_m
Where f is a featurization function. We have up to m rows per query, and LightGBM optimizes a model such that if c_i > c_j then model(f(q, r_i)) > model(f(q, r_j)) for as much of the training data as possible.
One technical point here is that you need to correct for position bias by weighting each training sample by the inverse propensity score of its position. We computed the propensity scores by running a random position swap experiment on the search engine results page.
Feature engineering and hyper-parameter optimization are critical components to making this all work. We’ll return to those later, but first I’ll discuss the training data and its difficulties.
More Data, More Problems
Machine learning wisdom 101 says that “the more data the better,” but this is an oversimplification. The data has to be relevant, and it’s helpful to remove irrelevant data. We ended up needing to remove about one-third of our data that didn’t satisfy a heuristic “does it make sense” filter.
What does this mean? Let’s say the query is Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1 and the search engine results page (SERP) returns with these papers:
Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1 The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load in Upper Respiratory Specimens of Infected Patients …
We would expect that the click would be on position (1), but in this hypothetical data it’s actually on position (2). The user clicked on a paper that isn’t an exact match to their query. There are sensible reasons for this behavior (e.g. the user has already read the paper and/or wanted to find related papers), but to the machine learning model this behavior will look like noise unless we have features that allow it to correctly infer the underlying reasons for this behavior (e.g. features based on what was clicked in previous searches). The current architecture does not personalize search results based on a user’s history, so this kind of training data makes learning more difficult. There is of course a tradeoff between data size and noise — you can have more data that’s noisy or less data that’s cleaner, and it is the latter that worked better for this problem.
Another example: let’s say the user searches for deep learning, and the search engine results page comes back with papers with these years and citations:
Year = 1990, Citations = 15000 Year = 2000, Citations = 10000 Year = 2015, Citations = 5000
And now the click is on position (2). For the sake of argument, let’s say that all 3 papers are equally “about” deep learning; i.e. they have the phrase deep learning appearing in the title/abstract/venue the same number of times. Setting aside topicality, we believe that academic paper importance is driven by both recency and citation count, and here the user has clicked on neither the most recent paper nor the most cited. This is a bit of a straw man example, e.g., if number (3) had zero citations then many readers might prefer number (2) to be ranked first. Nevertheless, taking the above two examples as a guide, the filters used to remove “nonsensical” data checked the following conditions for a given triple (q, R, C):
Are all of the clicked papers more cited than the unclicked papers? Are all of the clicked papers more recent than the unclicked papers? Are all of the clicked papers more textually matched for the query in the title? Are all of the clicked papers more textually matched for the query in the author field? Are all of the clicked papers more textually matched for the query in the venue field?
I require that an acceptable training example satisfy at least one of these 5 conditions. Each condition is satisfied when all of the clicked papers have a higher value (citation number, recency, fraction of match) than the maximum value among the unclicked. You might note that abstract is not in the above list; including or excluding it didn’t make any practical difference.
As mentioned above, this kind of filter removes about one-third of all (query, results) pairs, and provides about a 10% to 15% improvement in our final evaluation metric, which is described in more detail in a later section. Note that this filtering occurs after suspected bot traffic has already been removed.
Feature Engineering Challenges
We generated a feature vector for each (query, result) pair, and there were 22 features in total. The first version of the featurizer produced 90 features, but most of these were useless or harmful, once again confirming the hard-won wisdom that machine learning algorithms often work better when you do some of the work for them.
The most important features involve finding the longest subsets of the query text within the paper’s title, abstract, venue, and year fields. To do so, we generate all possible ngrams up to length 7 from the query, and perform a regex search inside each of the paper’s fields. Once we have the matches, we can compute a variety of features. Here is the final list of features grouped by paper field.
title_fraction_of_query_matched_in_text
title_mean_of_log_probs
title_sum_of_log_probs*match_lens
abstract_fraction_of_query_matched_in_text
abstract_mean_of_log_probs
abstract_sum_of_log_probs*match_lens
abstract_is_available
venue_fraction_of_query_matched_in_text
venue_mean_of_log_probs
venue_sum_of_log_probs*match_lens
sum_matched_authors_len_divided_by_query_len
max_matched_authors_len_divided_by_query_len
author_match_distance_from_ends
paper_year_is_in_query
paper_oldness
paper_n_citations
paper_n_key_citations
paper_n_citations_divided_by_oldness
fraction_of_unquoted_query_matched_across_all_fields
sum_log_prob_of_unquoted_unmatched_unigrams
fraction_of_quoted_query_matched_across_all_fields
sum_log_prob_of_quoted_unmatched_unigrams
A few of these features require further explanation. Visit the appendix at the end of this post for more detail. All of the featurization happens here if you want the gory details.
To get a sense of how important all of these features are, below is the SHAP value plot for the model that is currently running in production.
In case you haven’t seen SHAP plots before, they’re a little tricky to read. The SHAP value for sample i and feature j is a number that tells you, roughly, “for this sample i, how much does this feature j contribute to the final model score.” For our ranking model, a higher score means the paper should be ranked closer to the top. Each dot on the SHAP plot is a particular (query, result) click pair sample. The color corresponds to that feature’s value in the original feature space. For example, we see that the title_fraction_of_query_matched_in_text feature is at the top, meaning it is the feature that has the largest sum of the (absolute) SHAP values. It goes from blue on the left (low feature values close to 0) to red on the right (high feature values close to 1), meaning that the model has learned a roughly linear relationship between how much of the query was matched in the title and the ranking of the paper. The more the better, as one might expect.
A few other observations:
A lot of the relationships look monotonic, and that’s because they approximately are: LightGBM lets you specify univariate monotonicity of each feature, meaning that if all other features are held constant, the output score must go up in a monotonic way if the feature goes up/down (up and down can be specified).
Knowing both how much of the query is matched and the log probabilities of the matches is important and not redundant.
The model learned that recent papers are better than older papers, even though there was no monotonicity constraint on this feature (the only feature without such a constraint). Academic search users like recent papers, as one might expect!
When the color is gray, this means the feature is missing — LightGBM can handle missing features natively, which is a great bonus.
Venue features look very unimportant, but this is only because a small fraction of searches are venue-oriented. These features should not be removed.
As you might expect, there are many small details about these features that are important to get right. It’s beyond the scope of this blog post to go into those details here, but if you’ve ever done feature engineering you’ll know the drill:
Design/tweak features. Train models. Do error analysis. Notice bizarre behavior that you don’t like. Go back to (1) and adjust. Repeat.
Nowadays, it’s more common to do this cycle except replacing (1) with “design/tweak neural network architecture” and also add “see if models train at all” as an extra step between (1) and (2).
Evaluation Problems
Another infallible dogma of machine learning is the training, validation/development, and test split. It’s extremely important, easy to get wrong, and there are complex variants of it (one of my favorite topics). The basic statement of this idea is:
Train on the training data. Use the validation/development data to choose a model variant (this includes hyperparameters). Estimate generalization performance on the test set. Don’t use the test set for anything else ever.
This is important, but is often impractical outside of academic publication because the test data you have available isn’t a good reflection of the “real” in-production test data. This is particularly true for the case when you want to train a search model.
To understand why, let’s compare/contrast the training data with the “real” test data. The training data is collected as follows:
A user issues a query. Some existing system (Elasticsearch + existing reranker) returns the first page of results. The user looks at results from top to bottom (probably). They may click on some of the results. They may or may not see every result on this page. Some users go on to the second page of the results, but most don’t.
Thus, the training data has 10 or maybe 20 or 30 results per query. During production, on the other hand, the model must rerank the top 1000 results fetched by Elasticsearch. Again, the training data is only the top handful of documents chosen by an already existing reranker, and the test data is 1000 documents chosen by Elasticsearch. The naive approach here is to take your search logs data, slice it up into training, validation, and test, and go through the process of engineering a good set of (features, hyperparameters). But there is no good reason to think that optimizing on training-like data will mean that you have good performance on the “true” task as they are quite different. More concretely, if we make a model that is good at reordering the top 10 results from a previous reranker, that does not mean this model will be good at reranking 1000 results from ElasticSearch. The bottom 900 candidates were never part of the training data, likely don’t look like the top 100, and thus reranking all 1000 is simply not the same task as reranking the top 10 or 20.
And indeed this is a problem in practice. The first model pipeline I put together used held-out nDCG for model selection, and the “best” model from this procedure made bizarre errors and was unusable. Qualitatively, it looked as if “good” nDCG models and “bad” nDCG models were not that different from each other — both were bad. We needed another evaluation set that was closer to the production environment, and a big thanks to AI2 CEO Oren Etzioni for suggesting the pith of the idea that I will describe next.
Counterintuitively, the evaluation set we ended up using was not based on user clicks at all. Instead, we sampled 250 queries at random from real user queries, and broke down each query into its component parts. For example if the query is soderland etzioni emnlp open ie information extraction 2011, its components are:
Authors: etzioni, soderland
Venue: emnlp
Year: 2011
Text: open ie, information extraction
This kind of breakdown was done by hand. We then issued this query to the previous Semantic Scholar search (S2), Google Scholar (GS), Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), etc, and looked at how many results at the top satisfied all of the components of the search (e.g. authors, venues, year, text match). For this example, let’s say that S2 had 2 results, GS had 2 results, and MAG had 3 results that satisfied all of the components. We would take 3 (the largest of these), and require that the top 3 results for this query must satisfy all of its component criteria (bullet points above). Here is an example paper that satisfies all of the components for this example. It is by both Etzioni and Soderland, published in EMNLP, in 2011, and contains the exact ngrams “open IE” and “information extraction.”
In addition to the author/venue/year/text components above, we also checked for citation ordering (high to low) and recency ordering (more recent to less recent). To get a “pass” for a particular query, the reranker model’s top results must match all of the components (as in the above example), and respect either citation order OR recency ordering. Otherwise, the model fails. There is potential to make a finer-grained evaluation here, but an all-or-nothing approach worked.
This process wasn’t fast (2–3 days of work for two people), but at the end we had 250 queries broken down into component parts, a target number of results per query, and code to evaluate what fraction of the 250 queries were satisfied by any proposed model.
Hill-climbing on this metric proved to be significantly more fruitful for two reasons:
It is more correlated with user-perceived quality of the search engine. Each “fail” comes with explanations of what components are not satisfied. For example, the authors are not matched and the citation/recency ordering is not respected.
Once we had this evaluation metric worked out, the hyperparameter optimization became sensible, and feature engineering significantly faster. When I began model development, this evaluation metric was about 0.7, and the final model had a score of 0.93 on this particular set of 250 queries. I don’t have a sense of the metric variance with respect to the choice of 250 queries, but my hunch is that if we continued model development with an entirely new set of 250 queries the model would likely be further improved.
Posthoc Correction
Even the best model sometimes made foolish-seeming ranking choices because that’s the nature of machine learning models. Many such errors are fixed with simple rule-based posthoc correction. Here’s a partial list of posthoc corrections to the model scores:
Quoted matches are above non-quoted matches, and more quoted matches are above fewer quoted matches. Exact year match results are moved to the top. For queries that are full author names (like Isabel Cachola), results by that author are moved to the top. Results where all of the unigrams from the query are matched are moved to the top.
You can see the posthoc correction in the code here.
Bayesian A/B Test Results
We ran an A/B test for a few weeks to assess the new reranker performance. Below is the result when looking at (average) total number of clicks per issued query:
This tells us that people click about 8% more often on the search results page. But do they click on higher position results? We can check that by looking at the maximum reciprocal rank clicked per query. If there is no click, a maximum value of 0 is assigned.
The answer is yes — the maximum reciprocal rank of the clicks went up by about 9%! For a more detailed sense of the click position changes here are histograms of the highest/maximum click position for control and test:
This histogram excludes non-clicks, and shows that most of the improvement occurred in positions 2, followed by position 3, and position 1.
Why not do all this in Elasticsearch?
The following two sections were written by Tyler Murray, search engineering lead at Semantic Scholar.
Elasticsearch provides a robust set of tools and integrations that enable even the most advanced users to construct a wide range of matching, scoring, and reranking clauses. Though powerful, these features can often prove confounding and at worst nonsensical when combined across many fields / clauses / filters. The effort involved in debugging and adjusting boosts, filters, rescoring can quickly become untenable for the more complex search use cases.
LTR tends to be the preferred approach for search teams that want to go from hand tuned weighting and rescoring to a search system trained on real-world user behavior. When implementing LTR vs another approach the following pros and cons arise:
Pros:
Rescoring occurs ”natively” within the query lifecycle in Elasticsearch.
Avoids or minimizes network cost associated with “passing” candidates for reranking.
Keeps technology within a tighter orbit to the primary storage engine.
Uptime of the search technology is isolated to the cluster, not spread across services.
Cons:
Plugin architecture requires a Java binary to run in the Elasticsearch JVM.
Iteration speed can be quite sluggish when modifying, deploying, testing due to the need for a complete rolling restart of the cluster. Especially true with larger clusters. (>5 TB)
Though Java maintains an active and mature ecosystem, most cutting edge machine learning and AI technologies currently live in the Python world.
In a space where gathering judgements is difficult and/or just not possible at scale, the LTR method becomes difficult to train effectively.
Limited flexibility in testing ranking algorithms side by side in an A/B test without running multiple ranking plugins in the same cluster.
As we looked to the future of how we wanted to test and deploy ranking changes the cons of the Elasticsearch plugin approach greatly outweighed the pros along two main axes; first, iteration and testing speed as it is paramount to our approach of launching user focused improvements. Offline measurement is critical in sanity testing various models as we iterate, but the final measure will always be how the model performs in the wild. With the plugin architecture provided by Elasticsearch iteration and testing becomes quite tedious and time consuming. Secondly, the powerful toolchain enabled through the Python ecosystem outweighed any short term latency regressions. The flexibility in integrating a wide range of language models and existing machine learning technologies has proven fruitful in addressing a wide range of relevance issues. To translate these solutions back into the Java ecosystem would become a non-trivial effort. In summary, Elasticsearch provides a strong base for building robust search experiences, but as the need to handle more complex relevance issues along with a greater speed of iteration our need to look outside of the Elasticsearch ecosystem became more clear to us.
Tuning the Candidate Query in Elasticsearch
Getting the right mix of filtering, scoring, and rescoring clauses proved more difficult than expected. This was due in part to working from an existing baseline used to power a plugin based ranking model, but also due to some issues with the index mapping. Some do’s and don’ts to help guide others along their journey:
Don’t:
Allow the documents you’re searching against to become bloated with anything but the necessary fields and analyzers for search ranking. If you’re using the same index to search and hydrate records for display you may want to consider whether multiple indices/clusters are necessary. Smaller documents = faster searches, and becomes increasingly more important as your data footprint grows.
Use many multi_match queries as these are slow and prove to generate scores for documents that are difficult to reason about.
Perform function_score type queries on very large result sets without fairly aggressive filters or considering whether this function can be performed in a rescore clause.
Use script_score clauses, they’re slow and can easily introduce memory leaks in JVM. Just don’t do it.
Ignore the handling of stopwords in your indices/fields. They make a huge difference in scoring, especially so with natural language queries where a high number of terms and stopword usage is common. Always consider the common terms (<= v7.3) query type mentioned below or a stopword filter in your mapping.
Use field_name.* syntax in filters or matching clauses as this incurs some non-trivial overhead and is almost never what you want. Be explicit about which fields/analyzers you are matching against.
Do:
Consider using common terms queries with a cutoff frequency if you don’t want to filter stopwords from your search fields. This was what pushed us over the edge in getting a candidate selection query that performed well enough to launch.
Consider using copy_to during indexing to build a single concatenated field in places where you want to boost documents that match multiple terms in multiple fields. We recommend this approach anywhere you are considering a multi_match query.
Use query_string type queries if your use case allows for it. IMO these are the most powerful queries in the ES toolbox and allow for a huge amount of flexibility and tuning.
Consider using a rescore clause as it improves performance of potentially costly operations and allows the use of weighting matches with constant scores. This proved helpful in generating scores that we could reason about.
Field_value_factor scoring in either your primary search clause or in a rescore clause can prove incredibly useful. We consider highly cited documents to be of a higher relevance and thus use this tool to boost those documents accordingly.
Read the documentation on minimum_should_match carefully, and then read it a few more times. The behavior is circumstantial and acts differently depending on the context of the use.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
The new search is live on semanticscholar.org, and we think it’s a big improvement! Give it a try and provide us some feedback by emailing [email protected].
The code is also available for you to scrutinize and use. Feedback is welcome.
This entire process took about 5 months, and would have been impossible without the help of a good portion of the Semantic Scholar team. In particular, I’d like to thank Doug Downey and Daniel King for tirelessly brainstorming with me, looking at countless prototype model results, and telling me how they were still broken but in new and interesting ways. I’d also like to thank Madeleine van Zuylen for all of the wonderful annotation work she did on this project, and Hamed Zamani for helpful discussions. Thanks as well to the engineers who took my code and magically made it work in production. | https://medium.com/ai2-blog/building-a-better-search-engine-for-semantic-scholar-ea23a0b661e7 | ['Sergey Feldman'] | 2020-10-29 16:24:47.886000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Semantic Scholar', 'Engineering', 'Search'] |
How to sustain your culture in times of change. | Change happens whether you like it or not. It’s up to each one of us to decide what we want to do with change.
As a CEO or HR leader, it’s your responsibility to lead change, but also to create an environment and a company culture that support constant change and business growth. Employees don’t have to suffer through change, they should embrace it and thrive. They should feel excited about what’s new, they should feel included in being part of the journey.
How do you sustain your culture in times of change?
It’s critical to have an open communication with your employees and answer this question “what’s in it for me (as an employee)?”. Be direct, transparent and honest about hat change means for the company and for every individual.
It’s also very important to involve and include employees in the process of change, so that they play an active role driving change, instead of suffering through change.
Karen Weeks is the VP of People at Ordergroove, where she is building the people strategy and focuses on maintaining a strong culture during the growth stage of the company, including winning its first Best Companies to Work in New York! Previously she was the VP of HR (creating & leading the HR Operations Team), the Talent Management Director (for Client Services & Technology) and the first Manager of Learning and Development at Yodle.
Today with Karen we talk about:
– How to live and develop company values in a rapid growth organization, what the process is, where to start, and what are some best practices.
– How to help your team members through change.
– How leaders can create feedback and development opportunities during times of change.
– How to scale your team and infrastructure to reach your business goals in a business environment that is continuously changing.
– Where Karen sees the HR and People function in 5 years?
http://traffic.libsyn.com/expodcast/Ep.95_-_Karen_Weeks_OrderGroove_FULL.mp3 | https://medium.com/@svincentexsummit/how-to-sustain-your-culture-in-times-of-change-4706046b64a5 | ['Ex Podcast Employee Experience'] | 2019-11-15 13:34:25.956000+00:00 | ['Human Resources', 'Employee Engagement', 'Growth Mindset', 'Employee Experience', 'Startup'] |
Toll The Human | Shutterstock
In each finale, there is a start.
Never such a thing as truly over.
It is not difficult to argue
that this is no time for the fatuous
and that nothing is more fatuous
than scribbling poetry at dawn.
But love and desire will out.
We must sing of this world
not some better unknown star.
The given is the wool we weave.
All times, equally terrible,
equally sublime.
The eternal politics of horror
must never cloak the human heart
in hopeless, dreary night.
We must cling to the light,
and insist the better bells
of our only human souls toll. | https://medium.com/geezer-speaks/toll-the-human-5357dd480057 | ['Mike Essig'] | 2019-12-21 10:59:52.168000+00:00 | ['Hope', 'Poetry', 'Art', 'Writing', 'Life'] |
Happy Holidays from the Manning Family | We at Manning would like to wish you all happy and safe holidays! We hope you get a chance to relax and spend quality time with your loved ones.
See you next year!
— Manning | https://medium.com/@manningbooks/happy-holidays-from-the-manning-family-6d50edeb8024 | ['Manning Publications'] | 2020-12-23 10:22:30.553000+00:00 | ['New Year', 'New Year 2021', 'New Year Resolution', 'Christmas', 'Holidays'] |
Zaheer Khan’s wife Sagarika is a national level hockey player | Zaheer Khan’s wife Sagarika Ghatge is a National-level hockey player. Sagarika belongs to the royal house of Kolhapur, Kagal.
Read more: BCB Appoints Jamie Siddons as Batting Consultant
National-level Hockey player-
Sagarika is a National-level Hockey player in real life. This was one of the reasons why she was chosen to be a part of ‘Chak De! India’. In the movie, Sagarika played the role of Preeti Sabarwal, a member of the Indian Women’s National Hockey team.
Sagarika was born on 8th January 1986, Sarika started getting offers for advertisements while she was lying.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CK1jDr-jA12/
Read more: Suresh Raina: Wishing Everyone A Merry Christmas
Belong to the royal family-
Her father belonged to the royal family of Kagal. According to tollywoodcelebrities.com, her grandmother Sita Raje Ghatge was the daughter of Tukojirao Holkar III of Indore. She also has a sibling named Shivjeet Ghatge, who is the CEO of StepSetGo, which is a fitness rewarding app and encourages people to be physically active.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CR_Z6jAjMm1/
Sagarika has appeared in Bollywood’s Chak De India and some films, apart from Hindi, she has also worked in Punjabi and Marathi films.
Read more: Harbhajan Singh has announced his retirement in all formats game
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0qqdTIDqcR/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzAC4VEjgiQ/
Former Indian cricketer Zahir Khan and Sagarika got married in 2017 after a long affair and the couple had registered marriage at their home in Mumbai.
Read more: AUS vs ENG Dream11 Prediction Today with Playing XI, Pitch Report & Players Stats
https://www.instagram.com/p/Be4vV8Ijebx/
Zaheer Khan’s Career-
Zaheer has been one of the most successful bowlers in Indian cricket history, taking 282 wickets in ODIs. The player took 311 wickets in 165 innings of 92 test matches.
Zaheer played 17 T20 International matches, in which he has 17 wickets to his name. Talking about IPL, he has 102 wickets in 100 matches.
Read more: PCL signs broadcast agreement with A Sports and PTV Sports
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTUfi7nBryc/ | https://medium.com/@babacric/zaheer-khans-wife-sagarika-is-a-national-level-hockey-player-c05374384feb | ['Baba Cric'] | 2021-12-25 09:59:51.762000+00:00 | ['Cricket', 'Zaheerkhan', 'Sagarikaghatge'] |
Conquer The Fear Of The Unknown. | Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash
At times we think those with the thick skin as an elephant can hope to sail through life unscathed by self-doubt and bouts of depression, but the truth is; we all at some point reach that point in life.
There is a time when a realm of deep personal power leads an individual into conducting their own education, exploring inspiration, shaping the environment and sharing their adventure with others. While work fills a very large part of our lives, those with a great taste in intuitive understanding and creation often strive for perfection in crafting their work.
Humanly, perfection is perceived as a positive thing. Even saying you have perfectionistic tendencies can come off as a great trait; even though internally you feel coldness and darkness has taken over.
We think that by sacrificing our quality time with friends and family or have a good rest when we are tired and exhausted will help us concentrate and work on that project perfectly that we have been thinking about but the truth is that neither one increase our productivity nor puts us in a perfect mental position that will help us cope with what’s to come. It leads to getting frustrated, beating yourself up for past failures or feeling like you can’t live up to your ambitions and expectations which lead you in peril. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/conquer-the-fear-of-the-unknown-9094736c4cf1 | ['Ntwari Moise'] | 2020-06-29 11:22:36.911000+00:00 | ['Social', 'Work Life Balance', 'Fear', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life'] |
What Board Games Teach Us About Data Visualization | Looking at the wide range of contemporary board games presented there, I couldn’t help noticing how much board games have in common with data visualizations. In fact, at their core, all board games are data visualizations. Data and information are visualized as pieces of different colors and shapes (called meeples) placed on boards specifying coordinate systems. The rules of the game determine how the current situation of the data can be transformed into a more desirable state.
Obviously some kind of data visualization (Stress Botics by Token Synapse, designed by Fernando Barbanoj)
Board game players are willing to pay 30–50 € for standard games, and well over 100 € for elaborate expert games. Players spend hours and hours poring over these visual representations of data. That is a degree of user engagement that would be great to also achieve for data visualizations.
The good news is that many of the elements that make board games so engaging, fun, and accessible, are equally applicable to data visualizations. In the following, I will discuss a few such points. Board games use easily readable data encodings, use overarching plots and metaphors, have graphic design that fits the topic, and represent the data in physical form.
Board games tend to use easily readable encodings of data. Categorical data is usually encoded via color hue and shape. This goes, for example, for the different kinds of meeples controlled by each player. Numerical data is usually encoded via location among common axis, number of elements, and size of elements. Board games seldom include more difficult to discern encodings like shades of a color hue (light to dark) or orientation. Using them would quickly result in misreadings and confusion.
Encodings used in traditional and contemporary board games
The table shows the encodings used in traditional and contemporary board games. The game of Go uses the simplest encoding with black and white stones (interpreted as categorical color hues here although factually color shades) placed on a grid (position). Modern games very seldom use further encodings beyond those already used in the game of Monopoly, first patented in 1904.
Keeping encodings simple: color hue, shape, and position along axis (DiceWar — Light of Dragons by SunCoreGames, designed by Adrian Bolla and Bujar Haskaj, illustrated by Malte J. Zirbel)
In data visualization, if the intention is to get information clearly across, easily readable encodings should likewise be used. The experimental encodings of data art play a very important role in extending the boundaries of the genre. But for many, such elaborate encodings pose a barrier to understanding. I personally have to admit to often skipping elaborate data art if it is too tiring to decode.
Board games make use of overarching plots and metaphors to integrate masses of complicated information. Typical settings of board games include medieval trade, fantasy adventure, armed conflict, and science fiction exploration. The setting provides the information encoded on the board with an easy to understand and memorize mental model. Entirely abstract board games are much rarer. Chess is the most popular abstract strategic board game in the western world. In 1924, Bauhaus designer Josef Hartwig created suitable abstract pieces for the game. The forms reflected the movements of the pieces. These did not catch on. Today, chess still uses the metaphor of two armies with knights and bishops maneuvering against each other to kill the other’s king. The human brain craves tangible plots and metaphors.
Abstract board games at the stand of Steffen Spiele (photo from 2018)
Complex information bound together by the overarching plot of building a mesoamerican empire (Teotihuacan: City of gods by NSKN Games, designed by Daniele Tascini, illustrated by Odysseas Stamoglou)
A flat infographics graphic design theme (Peak Oil by 2Tomatoes, designed by Tobias Gohrbandt and Heiko Günther, illustrated by Heiko Günther)
Over the last few years in data visualization design, there has been a strong trend to move from presenting rational arguments towards telling emotionally involving stories. This was especially initiated by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s 2015 book “Storytelling with Data.” Narratives integrate lots of individual data visualizations into a whole to make a clear point. The narrative also makes individual facts much more memorable. A good story usually consists of a three-part structure with introduction, conflict, and resolution of conflict.
Board game publishers go long ways to make the graphic design fit the topic. Often the general mechanism and layout of board games are designed by one person (the board game designer/author), and the final illustrations done by a professional illustrator, who sometimes remains unnamed. Illustrations, color palettes, and fonts are chosen to reflect the content.
A wide range of illustration styles are used from rational flat infographics to realistic and very artistic styles. Photographs are rarely used as image material in board games. One reason could be that the use of somewhat abstract illustrations and icons makes it easier to remain in a mental state of imagining and abstract reasoning. In Germany, there is even an award solely for the visual design of board games, the Graf Ludo. If something is beautifully designed we are much more willing to invest time understanding and engaging with it. | https://medium.com/nightingale/what-board-games-teach-us-about-data-visualization-ded14080b4f4 | ['Johannes Wirges'] | 2019-12-09 12:01:01.933000+00:00 | ['Information Design', 'Board Games', 'Data Visualization', 'Games', 'Graphic Design'] |
After business losses, Kashmiri man puts kidneys on sale | Photo Credit: Vice
Srinagar, Indian-occupied Kashmir
A recent advertisement in a local Kashmiri newspaper left readers shocked: A young man was selling his kidneys.
Sabzar Ahmad Khan, 28, a resident of Nussu village in the Qazigund area of southern Indian-occupied Kashmir, faces a 90 lakh-rupee debt (about $120,000 USD). Khan’s business suffered from the multiple lockdowns the Kashmir valley has endured the past year. He didn’t know what else to do.
“I want to sell my kidney because I have lost everything,” Khan said in the ad appearing in a newspaper in Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar. “I request anyone in need of a kidney to contact me.”
Kashmir endured a months-long clampdown after the Indian government abrogated Article 370 of its constitution, scrapping the region’s autonomy. Then COVID-19 hit in March, reimposing closures of shops, offices and schools. While all businesses experienced a jolt, small enterprises like Khan’s can no longer make ends meet.
In an interview, Khan said he worked as a contractor and used to sell cars. Last year, he also began buying apples from farmers and then reselling the fruit. To fund his ventures, he sought credit from six banks as well as from private local lenders, who charged 30 percent interest monthly on the money he borrowed.
“From last year, due to two lockdowns in Kashmir my whole business collapsed,” Khan told Stand With Kashmir.
Khan’s wife, younger brother and sister, and aging parents rely on his income. His father works as a laborer, but at 78 years old, the older man’s earnings aren’t enough to buoy the family.
“I had no back up to help me in the distressing situation,” Khan said.
Last year, Khan purchased 15 truckloads of apples from growers in south Kashmir. It had been his “last hope,” he says, to make a decent profit in resale. But with his “bad luck” during the lockdowns, outside markets didn’t give good rates for Kashmir’s famed apples, Khan says. He lost 200 rupees on each box of apples, adding up to hundreds of thousands of rupees.
He now owes banks 60-lakh rupees (about $82,000 USD), and local lenders 30-lakh rupees (about $41,000 USD).
“I am in such a situation that I found no way out but to sell my kidneys,” said Khan, who’s hoping he can fetch 20-lakh rupees (about $27,000 USD), to help repay his debts.
Like many Kashmirirs who have lost their jobs and businesses, Khan has been out of work since the COVID-19 shutdown began in March. He’s been hiding from his lenders, who have beaten and harassed him and his family.
He got his family’s approval to run the newspaper ad, as they agreed he was desperate. A photo of his print ad circulated widely on social media. Many people have since contacted Khan. He plans to meet them first before deciding whether to move forward.
“My wife is very disturbed,” Khan said. “My parents are crying and my family is worried in this situation.” | https://medium.com/@media-41618/after-business-losses-kashmiri-man-puts-kidneys-on-sale-3b94b6937b14 | ['Stand With Kashmir'] | 2020-12-21 16:03:31.041000+00:00 | ['Poverty', 'Kashmir', 'Occupation', 'Debt', 'Covid 19'] |
18 Deadly eCommerce Mistakes I See Online sellers Make | 18 Deadly eCommerce Mistakes I See Online sellers Make
Sometimes you’re on the up, and other times you face obstacles that stop your progress and push you down.
That’s why you need to prepare yourself for success by finding out the perfect tools and avoiding common mistakes that other online sellers make on their journey.
With that being said, I have compiled a list of the most common mistakes I see both newbie and experienced esellers make all the time so that you don’t run into the same problems in your businesses.
1. Not defining a target audience
One of the biggest mistakes an online seller can make is not clearly defining their target audience.
If you are selling multiple products, you have a high variety of customer targets. But every target has different behaviors, needs, perceptions. If you treat all of them in the same way you will, unfortunately, lose many of them.
That’s why you need to know who your targets are before they even know you exist.
To do that, You’ll need to take a deep dive into the market research to ensure that:
Your targets require your products You identify all of their needs You understand their pain points
4. You Know what solutions they’ve tried in the past (and why they haven’t worked)
5. You know how to promote your offer in a language they will understand
6. You can create a marketing strategy that puts your potential customers front and center
This valuable information will help you to target the right people and communicate why your products stand out from those of your competitors.
2 . Focusing on being lowest in market
Many retailers believe that the lowest prices will lead to higher sales. But setting the lowest prices will bring out new problematic outcomes.
In fact, It is impossible to cut your prices under your competitors every time. At one point, you will start losing money even if you have a high number of orders.
On top of that, Setting too low prices can make your products cheap in terms of quality in the minds of conscious consumers.
3. Choosing the wrong eCommerce platform
Your eCommerce platform can truly develop (or kill ) your business.
It not only determines how you will show your products and sell to shoppers, but it also plays a crucial role in how you attract visitors, and how you develop your business over time.
With that being said before you choose a certain platform take your time to consider the following factors:
products you plan to offer
How you plan to scale your business
How much control you want to have over your online store
What tools your platform needs to integrate with
Your budget
Whether you want a templated design or a custom design
What kind of experience your customers are looking for
4. Having an unclear marketing funnel
Marketing funnels are too complex, but the concept is simple. You need to drive attention, pique interest, create the desire for your product, and sell the product.
It’s called a marketing funnel because potential shoppers go in at the top and a handful passes through the funnel to become customers.
Take your time to develop each of the four steps above:
Draw attention.
Pique interest.
Create desire.
Sell the product.
Make sure that your online store has a clear plan to push people from attention to interest to desire to sell. This is your marketing funnel and it needs to be pretty clear.
5. Not having a strong brand message or identity
Creating a strong brand identity for your online store is a very very very important factor in its success. Effective branding can help you to build and develop your reputation, stand out from the crowd and highlight your values to attract your ideal shoppers.
Your products are not good enough to sell themselves. To create a thriving store, you will have to develop a strong brand identity that will be conducive to viral brand awareness.
6. Not being able to calculate the costs
Being able to calculate your costs is crucial.
Knowing them extremely well is so crucial to ensure that your prices will stay above your costs, so you can ensure the health of your business.
simple? Right?
Most online sellers think that the actual cost is mostly about the deals made with suppliers and ignore the rest of the costs. In e-commerce, product cost includes many other overhead costs. Like the employee cost, marketing cost shipping and fulfillment costs, or all other general operating costs.
You need to build a strong cost calculation tool that includes all invisible costs and adds them to the overall cost The rest is just setting the prices above the costs.
7. Launching first, validating second
Launching an eCommerce store before validating your ideas and products is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.
Creating an MVP, generating a buzz via social media and digital magazines, and having early users are essential in the world of eCommerce.
8. Poor use of High Quality Images and videos
Clear, attractive and high quality images are a great drivers force for any online store.
Do you know why?
Because your potential customers are not able to directly check or test your products, imagery and video could help them to discern the quality of your products.
You can easily hire a talented photographer that can provide high-quality images on your store with better consideration over the lighting, product background, and photo editing.
You can also use a magnifying feature on your product images. That way, your customers can have the option to easily enlarge the photo and check the tinier details.
9. Not using category pages
As long as you offer several products on your eCommerce store, you need to create separate category pages as appropriate.
10. Providing a poor customer service
Reaching out to your customers and interacting with them is important to ensure your business success.
This can include how you answer shoppers messages through your online store. how you respond to questions and comments on social media, how you address customers’ complaints over the phone, and via email……
Every interaction counts, otherwise you will start losing existing clients and hinder getting new ones.
PS: Be aware that giving them great customer service can encourage them to come back to your online store. It will also develop your relationship with them, and make you a trustworthy brand.
11. Developing a complex shopping cart
According to several researches , around 69.57% of shoppers will add products to their shopping carts, and never buy them . This is known as the shopping cart abandonment rate, and it’s one of the biggest challenges online sellers can face.
One of the biggest reasons for shoppers abandoning their shopping cart is when the checkout process is too complex. If there are too many clicks, too much text, or if the process as a whole takes too much time, people will simply fail to complete the purchase
12. Providing bad shipping and fulfillment experience
63% of customers expected shipping in 5 days or less. That means items need to ship quickly and arrive intact. If you are unable to do this by fulfilling your own orders, it’s wise to outsource this mission to a company such as Fulfillment Bridge
13. Focusing on the wrong metrics
Make sure to improve the metrics that are most important to your business.
Here are the most important metrics for you to run a successful eCommerce store:
Impressions. Reach. Engagement. Email click-through-rate. Cost per acquisition (CPA). Organic acquisition traffic. Social media engagement. Abandonment. Micro to macro conversion rates. Average order value (AOV). Sales conversion rates. Customer Retention rate. Customer lifetime value (CLV). Repeat the customer rate. Refund and return rate. Ecommerce churn rate. Net promoter score (NPS) Subscription rate Program participation rate.
14. Ignoring privacy and security
Cybersecurity risks can represent the most dangerous risks for small online businesses. When your entire business operation is based around a website, you need to treat customer information with care. A leak of credit card information could destroy your business.
15. Ignoring content marketing
For some esellers just diving into the world of content marketing, many assume “blogging” to be the be.
But blogging is just one type of content, and should only be a part of your overall content marketing plan.
Among many, many other content types, there are :
Infographics
Podcasts
Webinars
Ebooks
Case Studies
Newsletters
Reports
Vlog
Videos
How to guides
Checklists
keep in mind that not everyone wants to read an article.
Some might prefer listening to podcasts; others might enjoy ebooks and white papers.
Make sure to know what your customers want, and focus on creating these types of content.
16. Lack of delivery options
You don’t want to lose business because of a lack of delivery options
Of course, not all shoppers want the same thing in terms of delivery and fulfillment. Some want their package to be delivered as soon as possible, no matter the cost; others don’t mind waiting a few extra days, as long as shipping is free; still others want to have a say in when, where, and how their products are delivered.
it’s nearly impossible to cover all of your customers’ needs in this aspect. But you certainly need to provide a variety of options that a) incentivize conversions, and don’t make you lose money.
17. Lack of social proof
Product reviews, testimonials, and referrals — are major drivers in terms of getting leads to convert. According to research by Spiegel Research Center almost 95% of online shoppers read first the customer reviews before knowing if they’ll buy the product or not
The best place to display your social is on your product pages
We’ve been using examples from relatively smaller eCommerce companies so far, but let’s take a page from the book of Amazon, here:
18. Lack of marketing or promotion
I believe that Social media is the easiest and most effective way to get more traffic to your online store. Nowadays, people are used to going through social media instead of search engines if they need something.
You can start promoting your products by creating an account for different social media platforms so you can target different people in your promotion.
I have already told you that succeeding in the world of eCommerce is not easy as it may seem.
With that being said, understanding the common mistakes made by online sellers can help you to avoid them, succeed and improve your business. | https://medium.com/@aminebenyahmed/18-deadly-ecommerce-mistakes-i-see-online-sellers-make-e29e459417fa | ['Amine Ben Yahmed'] | 2020-12-21 12:52:01.097000+00:00 | ['Ecommerce', 'Online', 'Online Marketing', 'Online Business', 'Online Shopping'] |
The Universal Human: Next in the Evolution Pipeline | Evolution is perpetual. Human beings with a big smart brain and fully developed frontal cortex is not the end of evolution. While human beings have fully evolved physically, the transformation of human consciousness is underway.
The incorporeal soul or atom of life is a conscious entity. It is free of the classical properties of matter, i.e. mass, pull or pressure. It has infinite energy which does not deplete with use and it performs various activities. In the animal bodies, the soul can exercise limited powers. While the human frontal cortex enables enhanced communication between the soul and the physical body, and thus the physical world. The conscious soul needs to experience reality and understand things ‘as they are’ in the universe and the human body helps the soul in this quest.
It took human beings thousands of years to understand that there is more to it than meets the eye. The reality of existence is not limited to the objective material world. Up until now, modern science relied on the five basic senses of touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste as the final validators. These are all elementary transmitting organs, confined to physical reality only. The other areas that experience and analyze are yet to be understood and recognized.
Existence can be understood as the coexistence of matter and energy. Energy is the part that experiences and analyzes. Former needs nourishment and protection while the latter needs understanding and experience through the physical body. Catering to the needs of both these parts is the purpose of living in a corporeal form.
All human beings can validate the fact that their understanding and sensory abilities go beyond the five physical senses. Scientific discovery or theory is not needed for a human being to acknowledge that he is multi-sensory and having consciousness. The universal human cognizes the transcendental element in him that wants to experience harmony, coexistence, bliss, and enlightenment.
The Universal Human
Human being is more than just the brain as part of the body. He is the combination of a temporal physical body and an immortal, incorporeal element. Once this premise is put in for validation, it will change human being’s understanding of self and of the world. The universal human, having the understanding about self and existential reality, can help human being rise above his incomplete understanding of himself and the existence.
Homo sapiens to evolve into universal humans.
Universal humans are not magical, powerful creatures but the next addition in the evolutionary line of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo Neanderthal, and Homo sapiens. The sign of the emergence of universal humans is ascension to the higher human consciousness. Core values of goodness and righteousness between human beings and coexisting with all elements in nature and ensuring their optimal use and regeneration is the sign of Universal Human behavior.
Universal human behavior involves sharing happiness and fulfillment in interactions and acknowledgment of the omnipresent principle of coexistence. Universal humans are enlightened to identify themselves as a blend of transient matter and eternal energy. They believe in creating a culture of coexistence, harmony, and perennial bliss for all. They are beyond culture, beyond the nation, beyond religion, beyond gender, and beyond any ethnic group. There is no division by race, skills, color, profession or gender and only universal human race.
Thanks to Shri A.A. Nagraj and his findings, we have reached a crossover generation that is realizing the true self and living by innate traits of truth, justice, fairness, and love. The enlightenment has dawned and there are global communities who are changing the way of their living. As more and more universal humans emerge, all will be able to coexist and co-create a harmonious world. Collective efforts will make the task of building a harmonious world much easier and faster.
About the Author
Anand (@ananddamanica) is a Serial Entrepreneur and Startup Advisor with over 20 years of experience in the Manufacturing Sector, International Trade, Custom software, Web & Mobile App. Development. He has provided IT integration guidance to over 200 SME & Startup Clients across the globe.
A Chartered Accountant by education and an Entrepreneur at heart, Anand has a knack for simplifying ‘complex’ problems. He shares his expertise in business and management, and also writes about Philosophy of Coexistence, in his blog: blog.ananddamani.com. You can reach him at [email protected]. | https://blog.ananddamani.com/the-universal-human-next-in-the-evolution-pipeline-7f695189b854 | ['Anand Damani'] | 2019-11-18 08:59:13.526000+00:00 | ['Evolution', 'Consciousness', 'Human Behavior', 'Philosophy', 'Humanity'] |
An Open Letter to Oklahoma Anti-Abortionists. | Recently State Senator Warren Hamilton introduced a bill that would outlaw all abortion in the state of Oklahoma and allow police to intercept those seeking services. My letter to him is as follows:
PS: If you’d like to get in contact with him you can reach him at: [email protected]
Hello Warren,
My name is Emily Johnson and I live in the great state of Oklahoma.
It has recently come to my attention that you are working to propose the “Abortion in Oklahoma Act/Equal Protection and Equal Justice Act” when the senate meets in February 2021.
While I do admire your gumption and egotistical views on controlling a woman’s body- I implore you to not bring this to the senate floor. Here are a few reasons why:
1. Oklahoma ranks SECOND in the nation for Teen Pregnancy.
How do you plan on caring for the children that are then born to teenagers?
I didn’t see a joint proposal for more state funding to unwed mothers and their children. I don’t see you voting in favor of expansion to their healthcare. I don’t see you proposing rental assistance for them…. So, all I see is you granting them the hardship of birth, giving them a high-five, and sending them on their way into poverty and turmoil.
2. Oklahoma does not offer comprehensive sex education OR *available* free access to birth control.
You know the number one way to stop abortions? Birth Control.
You know the number one way to find out about Birth Control Options? Sex Education.
It you want to be pro-life (and you aren’t doing a very good job at this time) you need to start thinking ahead in your family planning.
3. You have a penis. You will never be pregnant. You will never be raped and be afraid of being pregnant with a criminal’s fetus. You will never worry about affording to give birth. You will never worry about exiting a domestic violence relationship after being stealthed and left trapped with a pregnancy. You will never know the panic that ensues when you have to choose between continuing your highschool education or having a child. You see, at the end of the day, none of this affects you- so why do you care so much?
So, Senator, you are not pro-life. You are not a hero. You are not a Christian martyr.
You are nothing more than a pro-birth dictator who worries about the happenings of a uterus that doesn’t belong to you.
If you want to be pro-life here are some tips:
1. Sex Ed
2. Police Reform (three persons were murdered by Oklahoma PD in two weeks- is that pro-life? Think hard!!)
3. Increase funding for Oklahoma government assistance so if people choose to complete pregnancy, they can afford a baby.
4. Abolish the Death Penalty.
I know you more than likely will not read this, so, in true Liberal fashion:
My Body, My Choice.
Emily Johnson | https://medium.com/@ejohnmarie/an-open-letter-to-oklahoma-anti-abortionists-6af0f7f9c0be | ['Emily Johnson'] | 2020-12-17 19:13:11.172000+00:00 | ['Oklahoma', 'Womens Rights', 'Abortion', 'Pro Choice', 'Helping Others'] |
Even Moderate Drinking Is Damaging Our Health, So Why Do We Do It? | Even Moderate Drinking Is Damaging Our Health, So Why Do We Do It? Refinery29 UK Follow Oct 14 · 8 min read
By Eleanor Morgan
PHOTOGRAPHED BY MEG O’DONNELL
During lockdown, Georgie Hodge* turned her front garden into a ‘pub’. Neighbours would come with their own glasses and sit in spaced out chairs in front of the house. “For those first six weeks, it was a lifeline,” she says. “We’d get the music out, laugh and be silly while the world felt completely out of time.”
Georgie, 34, has always considered herself “middle of the road” with drinking, which she qualifies as drinking regularly but moderately, with both dry spells and binges. “I am a bit of a gannet with booze, so I try to be careful,” she explains. As a freelance graphic designer whose workflow has completely shrunk because of the pandemic, the total loss of structure has tested her restraint.
While on ‘pub’ duty one evening, Georgie drank five margaritas on an empty stomach. “I’d set out to drink one,” she says, half laughing. “But clearly it was about abandon. I wanted a break from reality. My hangover the next day was biblical. I lay in bed until 3pm, unable to move my head.” During this episode, her partner said, “I’m worried about you.” Georgie winces as she recalls it. “Her saying that destroyed me. I don’t consider my overall drinking habits to be problematic but maybe they are. Clearly, feeling that terrible isn’t healthy.”
Over the summer, a large survey by King’s College London (KCL) and Ipsos MORI found that nearly a third of the UK public reported drinking more alcohol during the pandemic than they normally would. An increase in loneliness and emotional distress are likely drivers. It is understandable that loss of purpose and structure could lead to craving a break from reality.
It is understandable that loss of purpose and structure could lead to craving a break from reality.
Bucking the trend of both my Scottish and French ancestry, I have a woeful constitution for alcohol. I love the headiness and creeping warmth of one negroni; two will blur my vision and probably leave me green-gilled the next day. But during lockdown I drank every night: two canned G&Ts or two beers, usually. I live alone and, for eight weeks, it became a ceremonial coping mechanism; in those endless, stretchy afternoons, anticipating the buzz kept me going. Really, though, it was making me more anxious and my guts the site of warfare. I stopped. ( My grandmother died of alcoholism in a terrible way and I have an irrational fear that finally ‘getting into’ booze will take me down the same path.)
My concern is not misplaced. In June, Colin Drummond, professor of addiction psychiatry at KCL, responded to the Ipsos MORI study: “There is extensive evidence that the population level of alcohol consumption is highly correlated with health harm. With a substantial increase in alcohol consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic, we can expect a surge in alcohol related ill health including alcohol-related liver disease admissions and deaths. This will place an increased burden on our already overstretched NHS.”
This sounds alarming. So, too, does his warning that increased alcohol consumption is likely to increase mental distress and lead to an increased demand for mental health services. But maybe we should be alarmed.
With ‘real’ life on pause, self-reflection is inevitable. Along with modern rituals like Dry January and Sober October, the pandemic may be an opportunity to properly observe our relationship with alcohol. Georgie suggested that Sober October encourages an “all-or-nothing attitude to booze, because it’s like a binge in itself — not that people would be comfortable admitting that.” This stayed with me, because talking about our own or others’ drinking can be very thorny. The great unknowns of COVID-19 are leaving us stressed and exhausted, so picking at something that brings people happiness — or helps soften the edges of a fraught mind — means that, understandably, people become defensive. The historical ubiquity of alcohol is an argument in itself: we’ve always drunk, so why the fuss? Is now really a good time to examine our drinking?
Some scientists would argue that now is the perfect time. In August, a longitudinal study showed that moderate alcohol use is associated with decreased brain volume in early middle age. This is worth paying attention to: any notable loss of brain tissue will reduce the brain’s ability to function optimally. Former government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt has been researching the effects of alcohol for decades and memorably said that alcohol is more dangerous than crack cocaine. He is trying to invent a synthetic healthy alternative. “There is no level of alcohol consumption that is without risk,” he writes in his recent book, Drink? The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health. Interestingly, Nutt says that in societies which revolve around alcohol, only a small percentage of people develop a damaging relationship with it. “Typically, in first world Western countries, alcohol is consumed by over 80 per cent of all adults. Of that 80 per cent only about one one-fifth get into problems with it.”
Given how conflicting the information we receive about how harmful moderate drinking really is, the narrative of what is or isn’t ‘right’ is often written by the individual — particularly where stress is concerned. We may know, fundamentally, that bingeing regularly isn’t good but drinking for stress relief is utterly normalised; as instinctive as putting on a coat to go out in the cold. The physical image of a cold beer or an immaculate martini can wield power in the mind as a bookend to a stressful day, a symbol of enjoying friends’ company or a gentle domestic ritual with a partner. Where’s the harm? Again, the answer is rationalised by the individual. But if one drink becomes six on a regular basis, there is a deeper emotional motivation.
There is no level of alcohol consumption that is without risk.
The story of human beings’ love affair with alcohol goes back to a time before humans and talk of emotion. Our fondness for booze is rooted in evolutionary hardwiring linked to our fruit-guzzling primate ancestors. Ethanol released from rotting fruit on the forest floor would have been appealing in many ways: the funky smell made the fruit easier to find, the fermented flesh was easier to digest (meaning more precious calories absorbed) and the antiseptic qualities of the microbes in it would boost the primates’ immune systems. In essence, we have evolved to consume alcohol.
Of course, our relationship with booze goes far beyond these innate urges. Alcohol alters our minds: that’s why we like it. Ethanol causes the release of serotonin, dopamine and endorphins in the brain: compounds that make us feel happy and less anxious. As a species, we turned ourselves from hunter-gatherers into farmers — some 12,000 years ago — because we wanted to get pissed. In his book A Short History of Drunkenness, author Mark Forsyth writes: “We didn’t start farming because we wanted food — there was loads of food around. We started farming because we wanted to booze.”
Alcohol is an integral part of humanity; a cultural status symbol. From early human evolution, it has strengthened social bonds and tempered inhibitions. Gossiping and laughing with friends also triggers the production of endorphins in the brain, which, along with the alcohol itself, makes us feel great. But alcohol’s intoxicating power has always caused concern. Most societies have struggled to find a balance between drinking for pleasure and the often damaging effects of drinking too much. The social aspect of alcohol is very powerful, particularly for those who are introverted or socially anxious. Georgie feels she has “internalised a sense that I am more ‘fun’ if I am drinking; that people are more comfortable with the drinking, ‘fun’ Georgie.”
Evidence that even moderate drinking can be harmful is mounting but Georgie’s is a familiar rationale. Matthew Birke* is 32 and works in advertising. He has always been quite socially anxious. For him, drinking and socialising are inextricable. “Meeting new people makes me feel on edge and tired. Booze has always mitigated that a bit,” he says. “But I had a shock when I started working in a media organisation at 23. The entrenched culture around drinking was new to me. It was a given that you’d be out most nights and hungover most days and I don’t think anyone really liked it. ‘The Sesh’ terrified me then and does now.” I ask why he thinks people still booze, even if they aren’t really enjoying it and find they struggle with the after-effects. His response will ring true for many. “The embarrassment of being called boring was a huge reason for taking part.”
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called ‘boring’ in pubs, restaurants or at people’s dinner tables. Hearing the brayed phrase, “Oh, come on” was a reliable aspect of nights out for me for years and, of course, I internalised the idea that I am dull. But over time I realised that it wasn’t about my choices; rather, what they reflected back at people. At a dinner party last year, I felt a funny validation in replying to someone asking why I wasn’t drinking with, “Because I’m boring!”
I wonder how many people have felt like Matthew in his workplace. We talked more about shame, which underpins many conversations about alcohol. “I see friends of mine operating socially, in a freer and more fluid way than me, and judge myself negatively as a result.” Again, booze helps. “The three-pint buzz is a very real thing,” he says. “But I think a lot of men, including me, are so dependent on booze to feel okay socially that they make ‘liking beer’ a big part of their projected personality. Shame abounds, but men often turn drink into a status symbol to cover it up.”
This makes me think about how people talk about hangovers on social media. The common channelling of sweaty despair into memes and pithy one-liners is partly why I wanted to write this piece, because it sometimes seems like the dressing up of difficult emotions. Being catatonic on the sofa because you drank too much (two cans of Gordon’s ‘Pink and Tonic’ for me) the night before may, reasonably, make someone feel desperate to connect: with others feeling the same way so we don’t feel deviant, with feelings that eclipse the shame, with anything but our own thoughts. There can be camaraderie in hangovers, just as there is in getting pissed. There is no camaraderie if you’re alone.
If we are to tackle harmful drinking behaviours in a meaningful way, public abstinence campaigns clearly start conversations. A collective call to pause and reflect is, broadly, a good thing, but it’s too binary. If we talk about behaviour we have to talk about emotion. Uncomfortable emotions — the urge to escape them, a difficulty in just ‘being’ — underpin many people’s relationship with alcohol and we have to think about why so many people are struggling to manage, or sit with, how they feel. It is a profoundly complex issue but the pandemic has shone a spotlight on what causes human beings the most distress — lack of money, ill health, lack of purpose, loneliness, the absence of community connections — and there is a live lesson here, at a private and public level, if we choose to listen.
Looking at the potentially harmful, if understandable, things we use to help cushion distress is another step but an important one, because binge-shame-binge-shame cycles are emotionally corrosive. Perhaps the bigger question if we are assessing our relationship with alcohol is: what am I trying to escape? We might drink to forget that we’re anguished but, unlike the alcohol, the feelings won’t be flushed from our system. As Georgie reflects: “My therapist once said, ‘All the anxiety you feel before you drink is still there afterwards, but amplified.’”
If you’re worried about your drinking, or about someone you know, you can talk to an advisor on DrinkAware’s live chat service . Alternatively, you can call Drinkline free on 0300 123 1110 (weekdays 9am-2pm, weekends 11am-4pm). | https://medium.com/refinery29/even-moderate-drinking-is-damaging-our-health-so-why-do-we-do-it-198efffc3437 | [] | 2020-10-14 16:02:30.670000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Alcohol', 'Covid 19', 'Drinking', 'Alcoholism'] |
Putting the Disco Back into Discourse | The body of work I call DISCOurse is a non-medium-specific practice combining painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and photographic digital imaging into larger works/installations. The work formally manipulates the glitz and glam aesthetic of early queer disco, reimagining its diverse site as a rehearsal for inclusion. In that era of the color-blind disco club, the veil of repression was lifted, if only for a few hours, to make otherness or queerness attractive and dazzling — even for the straight interloper. From Andy Warhol to movie stars, Drag Queens to S&M queens to Jersey teens with good haircuts, at the Disco you came home.
Before the eventual elitism of the velvet rope, or Disco’s arguable devolvement into sex, drugs, death, and exercise videos, the Disco was, for a time, a dreamland of marginal belonging. From this utopic perspective, 70’s Disco heralded progressive change by reveling in its flamboyant, radical aesthetic of shine.
With DISCOurse, I mean to celebrate and critique our pervasive shine obsession. I look soberly at the dangers of contemporary shine through a nostalgic filter of disco toward a re-queering and re-radicalizing of shine. This work elevates the imperfect, the perforated, the broken shine, to reveal the interstices of societies’ reflection, the spaces between our fragments, androgynous spaces filled with potential.
The site of DISCOurse, like cross-border economies, is where material goods, ideas, and definitions are hybridized and repurposed, are new and possible, where culture and the imagination anticipate a future diverse, optimistic, joyous and fun — it puts the disco back into critical discourse. | https://medium.com/prismnpen/putting-the-disco-back-into-discourse-b4588f47bf24 | ['Bradley Wester'] | 2020-12-17 23:02:02.599000+00:00 | ['Artist', 'LGBTQ', 'Art', 'Creative Non Fiction', 'Contemporary Art'] |
Silhouette | Silhouette
A free-verse poem
Vino Li on Unsplash
I feel you in my dreams, of that
I am certain.
I see you there,
Or Do I? Maybe only in fragments?
I hear you —
Your voice, which ebbs and comes back.
There — I could almost tell you would now say
Something funny,
And then hear your familiar laughter.
I am sure I smile a lot through these dreams.
Some other times, I see your hand, strumming
your guitar.
I feel I could almost touch your arm as you do so.
And you
Stealing a glance to see if I am
Still looking at you.
And in those dreams
I wish in desperation
To not lose the silhouette of you.
I wish that my eyes do not open,
Quite yet.
Because the only respite, I’d have afterward
Is to try and find you in my poems.
~ A big Thank you to the editorial team at Literary Impulse. | https://medium.com/literary-impulse/silhouette-8a23b5968fa5 | [] | 2020-09-11 20:56:06.642000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Love', 'Dreamers', 'Literary Impulse'] |
War Crimes Committed by Germany During World War 2 | This is a list of all of the war crimes that have been committed by Germany between 1939 and 1945. Germany was the first nation to fire a bullet and therefore start the war. They are also the nation that has been accused of most War Crimes in history, however, some of which historians have not accounted for.
I will not mention things such as killing, murdering, raping or torturing civilians as they are pretty clear that they have happened.
Invasion of Poland
This is pretty much straightforward and it is the first rusty nail to be set in Germanies coffin that was to be closed. Their first target was Poland because that is where the majority of Jewish people lived at the time in Europe. On 1st of September 1939, the German army has:
Bombed Hospitals around Poland
Shot refugees
Executed wounded soldiers
Murdering civilians
execution of Polish POWs (Prisoners of war)
Violation of the Treaty of Versailles
This was the most important treaty that was been every signed as it hs brought peace and the end of the first World War. The Treaty was bringing the war guilt clause to the German power which yet again was found to be the Axis power and to start the war for various reasons. The Treaty was signed between Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia to declare that Germany is found guilty of certain war crimes and that they will have to pay for all the damaged cause.
The reparation costs came up to 31 billion US dollars which in today’s economy comes up to 422 billion US dollars. The most important thing that has been agreed upon with this treaty that was actually violated was to maintain the peace within Europe and other western countries.
Violation of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Also known as the treaty of peace between the allied powers and Austria was pretty much the same thing as the treaty of Versailles however this treated affected Austria directly. As they were a different Axis power, they were accused of their own war crimes and their own reparation costs.
Now I know why you may ask so how does this treaty been violated by Germany? Well because Austria was taken by force to be a part of the German force in the second world war and after the second world war they have not been accused of anything as they did not have any military influence of their own that would oppose the allied forces.
Invasion of France
France was an easy target that tried to oppose some resistance until it has realized that it is futile, the German force was too powerful and with their blitzkrieg tactic, it was impossible to resist. In this invasion over 40,000 civilians have been killed and there have been reports of SS soldiers raping underaged girls which would also bring the case of paedophiles within the SS force.
Pacification Actions in German-occupied Poland
During the invasion of Poland, the German Reich was going through with pacification, this is terrorizing the population of Poland by threatening them with the use of military power to execute anyone that would disobey their orders as well as rules that have been set by Germany in the occupation of Poland.
The Annihilation of the Czech city of Lidice
This action has been taken to avenge the assassination of Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, which was a high ranking SS officer as well as the German police official at the time. The city of Lidice has been left as a ghost town after a series of bombing sessions and the last clean out by the German forces ensuring that all civilians have been killed. It is sad that such atrocities are being forgotten as they are shadowed by the Holocaust.
Violation of Restricted Submarine warfare
After the first world war, the submarines were seen as a deadly weapon in naval warfare so it has been decided to put a restriction on submarine warfare as it has seen too powerful at the time. The German U2 Submarine has a notorious reputation for drowning over 500 allied ships in the second World war. This is the reason why for the most part of the war the axis had control of naval warfare.
The Commando Order
This order was given to the special german troop's named commando to follow some orders that were not quite humane and which would contravene with the international convention of Geneva. One such order was to not capture any allied soldiers but to execute them on the spot even if they were unarmed or even if they have surrendered. The Geneva Convention has stated clearly that it is a war crime to shot a soldier or even civilian that is surrendering.
Destruction of Warsaw
The warsaw resistance was the only line of defence before Poland has been completely overtaken, the resistance was formed mainly by civilians and there were even some boys younger than the age of 18. The resistance was putting up a good fight until the German army decided to subsequently level the whole city. This has to lead to the gruesome death of Polish citizens and the annihilation of the whole city.
The Holocaust (committing a Genocide)
Known as the worst genocide that the world has ever seen, the holocaust is known as a plan to eliminate the Jewish population within Nazi-occupied Europe. The gassing of these people with Zyklon B which was a cyanide-based pesticide that would kill a person in minutes in a very gruesome way. The Germans have also been accused of torture to death as some of the victims would not die initially from the gas and they would be burned alive.
The holocaust was the biggest crime committed as in this process over 6 million Jewish people have been murdered. It is just something that Germany will never be able to pay for.
However
Do not think that just because they were the head of the Axis power they were the only ones to commit such atrocities. Sadly, every country that took part in this war has committed a war crime no matter if intentionally or unintentionally.
If you would like to see the war crimes committed by other nations please follow History of Yesterday as there are more to come. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/war-crimes-committed-by-germany-during-world-war-2-9e66ff259093 | ['Andrei Tapalaga'] | 2019-10-14 18:00:29.907000+00:00 | ['WIB History', 'History', 'War', 'Holocaust', 'Ww2'] |
Shots Fired: Brands & Clap Back Culture | Sassy burgers and deodorant are in a war for your love
“Delete your account.”
“Turn your hat around. You aren’t Bart Simpson and this isn’t 1997.”
“No, but your opinion is (trash) though.”
“Oh look…another Twitch streamer we haven’t heard of.”
Anger can often seem like the tone of the internet. “Never read the comment section” is uttered as if a digital-age proverb. What made these fiery retorts notable is that they weren’t from a salty no-name troll, but from the maker of sea-salt fries, the international fast-food chain, Wendy’s. In 2016 the brand’s Twitter account took on a decidedly off-brand, off-color approach to trolls — they trolled them back. People loved it. Since then, many-a-brand has joined the skirmish, and brand feuds and customer-directed clap backs have become news-worthy beyond the headlines of ad trades.
Brands today are in a desperate fight for your love, throwing shade for attention. We are in a new era of brand jockeying: the participation in clap back culture.
Brands have engaged in feuding for as long as they’ve had competitors. Take, for example, our national entanglement in the Cola Wars in the late 70s to 90s, which drafted battalions of newly-chubby Americans into its long and bitter fight. Coincidentally, the end of the Cola Wars was also when the first known usage of the term “clap back” appeared, in 1990. For the less on fleek among us, clap back refers to a “a quick, sharp, and effective response to criticism,” often deployed on internet haters. As the internet has grown louder, so has the resounding clap.
The year Twitter hit mainstream, 2012, was the same year we saw the first of the online brand clap backs, between Taco Bell and Old Spice. The traction from the exchange opened the comeback-floodgates, as we collectively cheered cookies picking fights with movie theaters and cellphones insulting the size of a customer’s manhood. As customers engaged with brands in less than polite terms — clearly looking for a reaction — well, they got a comeback, too. Insulting rude customers would be unthinkable IRL (in real life), but is simply the law of the jungle on social media.
The tempo of social media — the immediacy, casual tone, insider internet language, and the expectation of broadcasting whatever trivial thought was on your mind — forced brands to contend with a new aspect of their identity. No one wanted to hear from a corporate-sounding brand talking about themselves from a script. Hucksterism isn’t content, so brands needed to be entertaining, responsive, and real. This revelation made brands evaluate the need for a more human tone; that is, a more imperfect tone. Brands participating in social media had to integrate into culture’s topic and nature of conversation, not the other way around…And the general nature of that conversation wasn’t always polite.
In a crowded space, brands resorted to tactics used by attention-starved denizens of social media everywhere — they behaved badly. In hot pursuit of “engagement metrics” brands took note of the cult of personality around unstable, norm-defying personas. Hungry brands followed the drama like blood in the water. People piling on comments like children in a school yard yelling “Fight! Fight!” was metric gold, and became further encouragement for brands to keep the clap backs coming.
An unintended consequence of feeding the comeback beast was that in doing so, brands have started to blur their identifiable edges and lose their established brand voice. The tone of social media can often feel like a young (arguably white) male by default, and as brands try to perfect the choice comeback — terse, informal, and aided with timely memes — they start to sound the same; like a pissy juvenile in a dark bedroom. Those Wendy’s quotes at the top of this article could have well been from any troll…not what you want when establishing your unique brand.
Advertising occupies a strange space; we both shape culture and reflect it. We’re swept up in the zeitgeist of the day, where bullying and increasingly inflammatory remarks are normal parts of conversation. People with opposing views are dummies, news is what we read, and all else, fake. Every day we choose sides, and sharp criticism flows ceaselessly about the Other.
Coming at the Other isn’t without consequences. Brands have the power to legitimize and validate through their large footprint, spend, and impact on mainstream conversations. To fuel a manufactured clap back culture is to give credibility to attention-seeking public confrontation; even by the standards of a large corporation with an image to maintain, an aggressive legal team, and the advisement of brand strategists such as myself at their back. Brands are giving meanness for affection merit.
This next generation seems to have internalized this lesson. In my research with Generation Z, a group of high-school-aged respondents in Oklahoma extoled the importance of society being more accepting of others. Five minutes later, the exact same group all said they had fake social media profiles, in order to anonymously bully peers. Like a brand that adorns their stores with signs about Having it your Way, spends countless millions on Customer Service, and then turns arounds and cuts you down on social media, this next generation is learning multiple brand identities — one polished, one Mr. Hyde — is normal. It’s how you get love and fame. This research also points to Finstagram-loving Gen Z as compartmentalizing their identities, which they treat as a suite of personal brands…which only makes one wonder what role these brands have played in Z doing so.
Marketers aim to give consumers what they want. With the amount of sharp commentary and provocation of Others online, it’s natural to assume that means comebacks and a feed full of sass. But it appears Americans are looking for reprieve from the negative tide. On Reddit, r/MadeMeSmile, r/Aww, /HumansBeingBros and r/WholesomeMemes content regularly hit the front page, and feel good stories circulate the internet to live news reports with mind-boggling speed. CEB Gartner, who tracks changing American values in their Values and Lifestyle Survey, have found that among the top 10 values for 2019 are Courtesy (5) and Happiness (10). The values that have moved up the most are values around serenity, safety, and relaxation. Clap backs are in opposition to all of these values.
There is certainly good to be found in brands exploring complex emotions and diversity in their identity, including the occasional anger. And seeing a witty and cutting responses will always be a guilty pleasure. However, brands need to take another beat before they engage in competitor (or customer) beat-downs just for cheap likes. Not all brands can or should dilute their personality by assuming the identity of a faceless, sophomoric troll. The kids are watching and internalizing our salty, fractured-identity endorsements. And, perhaps most of all, America is looking for courtesy and safety in their lives, not ceaseless and undiscerning anger.
And the customer is always right. | https://jesswatts.medium.com/shots-fired-brands-clap-back-culture-62aa17926b9 | ['Jess Watts'] | 2019-03-01 02:21:34.752000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Internet Culture', 'Bullying', 'Twitter', 'Social Media'] |
Just a song | This isn’t a list
to tell you how to live your life
This isn’t a piece
to profit from the strife
It’s just a song
to say I hope you’ll be okay,
for the winds to wrap you gentle
til the coming of the day
This isn’t a list
to tell you how to choose your life
This isn’t a piece
to profit from the strife
It’s just a song
to say I think you’ll be okay,
for the swells to soothe you gentle
til the coming of the day
This isn’t a list
to tell you how to save your life
This isn’t a piece
to profit from the strife
It’s just a song
to say I know you’ll be okay,
for the hills to hold you gentle
til the coming of the day | https://medium.com/poi-holloi/just-a-song-d8bcce047b13 | [] | 2017-03-09 11:39:19.151000+00:00 | ['Peace', 'Music', 'Poetry', 'Life', 'Joy'] |
CSS Variables: How we use them for theming at FloQast | CSS Variables: How we use them for theming at FloQast
How can we DRY up color declarations while making them as easy as possible to consume and change? The best solution we’ve found is CSS variables. FloQast Engineering Dec 21, 2020·4 min read
By Roy Tinker
In a previous post, J.C. talked about how we’re migrating to decoupled micro-frontends here at FloQast. We’re also working on a design and theme refresh 🎉 🎨, which affects several micro-frontends, the hub, and an internal UI library.
As we’ve worked, we’ve found the same sets of color variables in multiple places — in JavaScript files (for interpolating colors into Styled Components declarations), SCSS files, and across several front-end projects, all of which are composed into a single-page application at run time.
How can we DRY up these color declarations while making them as easy as possible to consume and change?
CSS Variables
The best solution we’ve found is CSS variables, also known as custom properties. In case you’re unfamiliar, they’re normally declared like this:
:root {
--primary: rgb(14, 51, 98);
--primary-active: rgb(14, 51, 98, 0.38);
}
… and consumed like this:
.some-button {
background-color: var(--primary);
} .some-button:active {
background-color: var(--primary-active);
}
To make the app’s theme dynamic, make sure all colors used in the app are declared and consumed as CSS variables.
Note: If you’re using Styled Components, you’ll want to wrap the top-level declaration in a call to createGlobalStyle.
Declarations and overrides
You will need to declare and add these variables to each HTML page only once. Because we’re using a micro-frontend architecture, the client hub is where our global variables are declared and added to the HTML document — the Single Source of Truth.
The client hub could also also handle app-wide theme changes, such as dark mode or user-configurable themes, just by applying different values to the color variables.
With CSS, you can override any property at any level for any element or subtree of elements-including CSS variables. This means any micro-frontend can override theme colors for its own area of the app.
Assuming a micro-client’s markup is in a particular div:
<div class="settings-client">
<!-- settings client markup goes here -->
</div>
we can override styles for that client only:
.settings-client {
--primary: rgb(255, 6, 185);
--primary-active: rgb(255, 6, 185, 0.4);
}
If you’re using Styled Components and React (which we use and recommend), the above markup and styles might look like this:
const SettingsClientWrapper = styled.div`
--primary: rgb(255, 6, 185);
--primary-active: rgb(255, 6, 185, 0.4); `
;
// elsewhere, in your JSX markup
return (
//...
<SettingsClientWrapper>
{/* settings client markup goes here */}
</SettingsClientWrapper>
//... );
DRYing up RGB values
You may have noticed that our :root colors above repeat the r/g/b color components. Most theme systems have sets of colors that derive from each other. Can we DRY these up?
It turns out we can:
:root {
/* arbitrary strings work as variables! */
--primary-base: 14, 51, 98;
--primary: rgb(var(--primary-base));
--primary-active: rgb(var(--primary-base), 0.38);
}
There are limitations to how dynamic we can be. var(…) always inserts spaces before and after the value it interpolates, so expressions like #var( — red-value)218F or var( — width)px will throw syntax errors. (See the spec for more details.)
Derived colors
All theme colors are usually derived from a few base colors. These derivations have to be done manually, on the server, or in JavaScript.
As of yet, CSS isn’t capable of color operations beyond string interpolation (see above) or calc() expressions (see Example 11 in the var() section of the spec).
When browser vendors implement CSS Color Module Level 5, we’ll be able to derive the theme from a few base colors using CSS functions like color-adjust(), color-mix(), and color-contrast().
:root {
/* somewhere, over the rainbow ... */
--primary: rgb(255, 6, 185);
--primary-active: color-mix(var(--primary), transparent, 40%);
}
Until then…
Whether you derive your theme colors manually or in code, you can keep them DRY by: | https://medium.com/@floqast_engineering_blog/css-variables-how-we-use-them-for-theming-at-floqast-21bfe01fee95 | ['Floqast Engineering'] | 2021-01-04 21:07:01.782000+00:00 | ['CSS', 'Frontend', 'Css3'] |
Reading Stimulates Me to Write | What stimulates you to write?
BTW, I also read a book by Brian Rowe, The Vampire Underground; two by Steve B Howard, Diet of a Destitute Poet and Just in Case; Productivity Success by Jack Heimbigner; and Positive Language by Gayle Kurtzer-Meyers.
So, yeah, I have a few book reviews to do for my Medium writing friends. If you have a book, let me know, I read a lot and will try to do a review.
Happy Holidays everyone!
Here’s this week’s thrifty words theme.
The submission guidelines.
Here’s my week #16 answer to the challenge “Sea.”
About the Author Photo by Jean Springs from Pexels
Stephen Dalton is a retired US Army First Sergeant with a degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and a Certified US English Chicago Manual of Style Editor. Top Writer in Fiction, Short Story, VR, NFL, Design, & Creativity. Editor of Pop Off, Top Dalton’s Blog, 100WordStory, B.O.S.S., and SportsShorts100WordsOnly
You can see his portfolio here. Email [email protected]
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Reddit | Ko-fi | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/reading-stimulates-me-to-write-c46ee3761c91 | ['Stephen Dalton'] | 2020-12-25 13:14:15.149000+00:00 | ['Writing', '50 Words', 'The Bad Influence', 'Reading', 'Goodreads'] |
Is Super Mario Sunshine Still Worth Playing? | We’ve arrived at the final part of the review: the one in which I cover the game’s Structure. For Super Mario Sunshine, I feel that that term mostly applies to level design, game progression, and (unusually for a Mario game) cutscenes. I’ll be honest: I feel that this is the worst part of the Sunshine experience. The game’s other foibles — the camera, the limited controls — pale in comparison to some of the crimes against fun that I’ll cover in this section. So, without further ado, let’s get into it, starting with level design.
I don’t know what it is about Super Mario Sunshine. The game is colorful and happy, with cheery music and lighthearted writing. But it also makes me angry. I get madder, faster, playing Sunshine than any other Mario game. Why? Well, I think part of it has to do with the level design. Take Ricco Harbor, for instance. The first shine, Gooper Blooper Breaks Out, has you platforming across the harbor before finally fighting a boss. The problem is that the platforming isn’t the easiest, especially if you’re still unused to F.L.U.D.D., and one misstep means plunging into the ocean, at which point you have to swim all the way back to the beginning. That’s incredibly frustrating, as you can imagine, and the same kind of thing keeps happening throughout the Sunshine experience. Sirena Beach has you fighting the game’s hardest boss in a battle that can take more than ten minutes. The problem is, it’s not a test of skill, but rather of patience, since camping in the surf at the edge of the map guarantees that you’ll be safe enough. One false move, though, and you’re juggled around from enemy to enemy — Mario has no invincibility frames, like this was on the NES — before dying and having to start all over again. Or, again, Ricco Harbor — the second Blooper mission has you rocketing around the harbor collecting red coins, but running into any obstacle means death, and you can’t slow down enough to guarantee your safety. The worst part is that the biggest challenge in that mission is actually jumping back onto the dock to collect the Shine, something that led, for me, to many, many deaths and endless frustration. The game is full of so many missions like that that sometimes it feels like it doesn’t want you to enjoy it.
But the normal missions aren’t the half of it! Every world has at least one “secret” mission, all of which are required to complete the game. You have to platform through a cut-and-paste world of toy blocks and generic baddies, but there are no checkpoints and few 1-ups, and any slip lands you in a bottomless pit. Some of these levels are incredibly difficult; The Hotel Lobby’s Secret, for example, took me two and a half hours of attempts to complete. Partly, this is because Mario’s moveset is very limited without F.L.U.D.D.; he has no way to extend jumps and no way to hang in the air even a bit longer than gravity would allow. That means that the experience is very unforgiving. It’s okay for video game levels to be hard, of course. I really enjoyed the Darker Side in Super Mario Odyssey, even if it did take me dozens upon dozens of attempts. But the secret levels aren’t hard in a way that feels fair, and when I beat them, I didn’t feel like I had achieved something worth achieving, just that I had beaten a game that hated me. The fact that Game Overs are a thing in Sunshine meant that I periodically had to go all the way back through Delfino Plaza and the level the Secret was hidden in to try again, which only added to my rage.
And often, when a Shine isn’t frustratingly difficult to collect, it’s just incredibly cryptic. For example, The Boss of Tricky Ruins in Noki Bay had me wandering the level for upwards of half an hour, searching for the one pathway that would lead me to the place I was trying to go, with near to no guidance as to what, exactly, I was even looking for. Mysterious Hotel Delfino in Sirena Beach forces players to search a hotel top to bottom, trying to find the secret way to grab a pineapple and thus unlock Yoshi and a Shine, with almost no information given to help. There were quite a few missions along those lines, where I didn’t know exactly what I had to do. I’m not saying that everything in a video game has to be exactly clear, but I’d like to at least know what the puzzle is that I’m trying to solve. Before you call me a filthy casual, know that I found that Super Mario 64, an older, worse-designed game, was generally clearer in its directions than Sunshine. Sure, the little hints weren’t always enough, but at least they told you where, generally, you were supposed to be searching.
This crypticness could extend to progression as well. You’re never told what is actually required to beat the game, so I, this time a filthy casual through and through, had to Google it. All you have to do is beat the first seven missions of each level. Bonus stages in Delfino Plaza, like the infamous pachinko machine? Waste of time. Blue coin hunts? No need. And, unlike in Super Mario 64, where you could get any 70 stars you wanted, including secret stars, or Super Mario Galaxy, which had the same system, or Super Mario Odyssey, which required you to get 124 moons out of 999(!), you have to get those 49 Shines to unlock the final level. No other Shines need be collected if all you want to do is see the end credits, and, in fact, trying to get them is a complete waste of time. This leaves you with no alternative ways to progress. I hated those accursed secret levels so much that I would gladly have done the pachinko machine or whatever else instead of them, but I didn’t have that option. Why are there even optional Shines if they don’t count towards progressing through the game? And why are you encouraged to get them all, every single one, if the reward is (spoiler alert) incredibly lame? It’s mystifying, almost as mystifying as those stupid Noki Ruins.
I’ve spent long enough now kvetching about the game’s design that I think it’s time to move on to dialogue and voice acting. The fact that I needed to include a section for this shows just how unusual Super Mario Sunshine is. The game has fully-voiced cutscenes, and honestly…they’re just weird. It’s unsettling to hear Bowser Jr. speaking in complete sentences, or to have Mario be constantly lectured by his sidekick, F.L.U.D.D. Ironically, even though Sunshine usually has too little guidance, F.L.U.D.D. always talked too much, so much so that I found myself laughing out loud when asked if I wanted to hear its explanations again. Besides that one little issue, though, there’s really nothing wrong with the cutscenes. It’s just that they feel like they don’t belong. Mario has never had fully-voice-acted cutscenes since, and I feel like that’s because Nintendo agreed with my take. Breath of the Wild is strange for the same reason; after so many years of Nintendo’s shoestring VA budget, having more effort put is almost unsettling.
I guess that’s about it for Structure. This game drove me bonkers, to be completely honest, and that was always because some of the game design decisions made were completely mystifying. Still, though, things mostly work as expected. You play the levels, beat them, and then go on to a final boss fight; pretty standard for a Mario game. The problems I found were more of a result of my expectations for the Mario series than of the game’s actual quality. So what was the verdict? Well…read on. | https://medium.com/@skeezixblogs/is-super-mario-sunshine-still-worth-playing-a17d6f7d8c42 | [] | 2020-12-17 00:17:11.734000+00:00 | ['Videogames', 'Review', 'Games', 'Analysis', 'Gaming'] |
Measuring Sustainability from Space | Technology and risk-based modeling may soon put the world on a path to eliminate the concept of “negative externalities” as data begins to transform physical industries in the same way it powered the engines of the internet economy. Negative externalities are the unaccounted environmental and societal side effects of commercial and industrial activities. They are often opaque to the general public and manifest themselves in long-term costs missing from business decisions during the moment of investment. A well-known example is the cost of producing plastic. Production costs don’t account for proper recycling or disposal, so plastic waste often ends up in rivers that empty into the ocean, and the world suffers from the negative externality of microplastic contamination. This cost eventually needs to be absorbed by the global population at large (e.g., taxpayers).
As environmental disasters encroach on global communities and ecosystems on a near-daily basis, the hidden costs from industrial processes and consumer behavior are increasingly visible as large swaths of people escape poverty and adopt a carbon-intensive Western lifestyle. Whether it’s the implicit costs from catastrophes like California’s Camp Fire that nearly brought down PG&E or the explicit rules and regulations of the cap and trade policies of the EU Emissions Trading System, it’s clear that the unaccounted side effects of commodity supply chains can no longer remain externalized. Instead, companies need to model these costs in long-term strategic planning in the form of internal carbon prices as governments, shareholders, and communities reward good stewards and punish careless actors.
Vegetation encroachment on PG&E power lines caused California’s Camp Fire. Descartes Labs generated this image using LiDAR data and our proprietary tree detector to assess tree locations relative to power infrastructure.
ESG Investing — Rewarding Companies that Limit Risk Exposure
Major corporations are finding that it’s in their best interest to adapt to the implicit and explicit costs of carbon or pollutant-intensive supply chains. A direct result of this trend is the emergence of Environmental, Safety, and Governance investing (ESG), which aims to generate long-term investment returns by channeling financing to companies that carefully limit their exposure to dangerous and costly environmental accidents. Examples include wildfires, oil spills, illegal deforestation, dam breaches, or societal impacts like workplace health & safety, labor disputes, privacy & security, and more.
The table below lists 37 key ESG issues as outlined by MSCI, a leading index and analytics provider for institutional investors.
Major ESG issues as defined by MSCI’s ratings methodology. (source)
ESG is among the most critical “alternative” factors driving investment decisions today. According to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA), $30.7 trillion of the nearly $90 trillion in total global assets under management (AUM) in 2018 were defined as “sustainable investing assets.” This statistic illustrates the financial weight behind ESG, which has increased in parallel with sustainability reporting by the world’s largest public companies. In a report released by The Governance and Accountability Institute, Fortune 500 corporations publishing sustainability reports have increased from 20% in 2011 to 85% in 2017. Almost every leading capital allocator now believes ESG and sustainability are economically prudent and not merely social issues.
For the purpose of this document, Climate-Related Sustainability can be defined as follows:
Comprehensive actions by large organizations to reduce large scale environmental and social impacts resulting from business and trade. Environmental and social impacts are summarized by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Sustainability reporting increasing over time. (source)
Fiduciary Duty to Sustainability — Measurement in Practice
The link between integrated sustainability practices and share price outperformance is a theme echoed by industry experts:
“Robert Eccles, a visiting professor of management practice at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, says that the global investment community’s interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues has finally reached a tipping point. Large asset management firms and pensions funds are now pressuring corporate leaders to improve sustainability practices in material ways that both benefit their firms’ bottom line and create broader impact. They’re also advocating for more uniform metrics and industry standards.” — Harvard Business Review, March 2019
Many of these experts see a parallel to the way GAAP accounting standards were developed and adopted in the early 1970s. Definition, self-regulation, and standardization were delegated by the government to a private entity, and public companies have had a common set of standards to measure and report against ever since. Public company investors now make decisions about the quality and future earnings potential of businesses based mainly on this information. The necessary conditions are clear rules, clear metrics, clear means of measurement, and a consistent and predictable playing field for companies to operate within.
While there is still work to do in terms of establishing generally accepted ESG standards, more companies are taking a closer look at their commodity supply chains and identifying ways to model and address impacts, including setting internal carbon prices. Many see managing carbon risk in a similar light as managing other financial risks, such as interest rates, foreign exchange, and debt servicing. As a result, companies are working to determine the geographic locations and volumes of their CO2 emissions, as well as those from suppliers and customers that fall upstream and downstream of their core operations and production. | https://medium.com/descarteslabs-team/measuring-sustainability-from-space-cb5e68e4c7d7 | ['Alex Diamond'] | 2019-08-21 03:34:35.164000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Environment', 'Geospatial', 'Data Science', 'Climate Change'] |
Couldn’t remember how to denote “in the Super Bowl era” but I guess it’s just that. | Couldn’t remember how to denote “in the Super Bowl era” but I guess it’s just that. That’s why I included NFL in that line trying to distinguish the modern NFL. Fun fact: at first that line was giving Detroit a second playoff win, but I decided that was far too unrealistic.
Glad you enjoyed the Christmas list. I pretty obviously enjoyed writing it. | https://medium.com/@wheatonbrando/couldnt-remember-how-to-denote-in-the-super-bowl-era-but-i-guess-it-s-just-that-83ae59a97c2 | ['Brandon Anderson'] | 2020-12-24 14:43:11.891000+00:00 | ['NFL', 'Culture', 'Football', 'Sports', 'Humor'] |
Extremism and the Role of Social Media | The evolving nature of digital technology provides the Internet and an exciting Social Media that connects people all around the World. Social Media is a platform through which we disseminate and receive information or news. However, according to Guo- Ming Chen (2012), social media or new media has brought human interaction and even complex level of connections[1]. Today, Social Media is the biggest source of information, everything is just a click away.
Social Media usage has increased with the passage of time, as a Scholar mentioned in a research article that today in 21st century people and organizations are connected and updated through various Social Media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or many more[2]. Social Media stands on four pillars; Communication, Engagement, Faith and Transparency — it’s also quick, inexpensive and accessible without any limitation/ restriction[3].
A research author mentioned that the advancement of technology and social media have a strong positive and negative impact on societies.(Research 6)[4]. In other words social media has become embedded in today’s world, which result in major societal changes. An author of a book highlighted that social media influences every sphere of societies[5]. The Internet provides a wide range of platforms to human beings to stay connected and updated like Blogs, Video Blogging, Wikipedia, Websites, Social Networking Sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, SnapChat and much more. The options are unlimited to receive or disseminate information, news, thoughts, ideas and opinions, that’s why social media is deeply embedded in our societies. Mangold and Faulds (2009) mentioned that Social Media has influenced and contributed in many aspects of human’s behavior in relation to how information is received and even consumer attitudes towards a product or service[6].
Social Media usage is increasing in Pakistan day by day. As Ejaz Abida (2013) quoted that people in Pakistan use social media platforms for sharing breaking news and to motivate people for different campaigns[7] whether it’s Rape cases or Extremism. As it’s an era of communication every human being, brands or organizations are socializing now a days to stand out on these platforms for several reasons. An author pointed out that today in 21st century everyone have access to a huge variety of thoughts, ideas and options, he also mentioned that everyone out there has something to share[8].
Social Media platforms are also becoming a source of public discourse — defined as: “speeches, publications and other statements made in pursuit of the public good”, there are three dimensions for public discourses; use of language, communication and interaction during social situations[9].
Social media has introduced new communication practices, which provides public a platform to communicate on a larger scale. As compared to traditional media, social networking sites are broadening the public communication[10], they are providing a public discourse. The power of social media has boost the public discourse that today, anyone can affect change, mobilize a community & gather a bunch of information in different forms like videos, images or text.
Social media had radically changed the consumption of information and news, the most popular platforms are Facebook and Twitter, through which consumers are receiving and sharing all the informative data[11].
Social media is playing a strong role in shaping public’s perspectives/opinions and its users are gradually increasing in Pakistan. According to the statistics of 2016 (conducted by social networking companies), in Pakistan, about 44 million users have access to social networking sites. While, only Twitter has 3.1 million and 0.4 million users as of July 2016 and January 2016, respectively[12].
The advancement of technology has made people’s life easier because Internet, WiFi and New Media are easily reachable and accessible. As discussed above, social media has the power of changing minds and perspectives. It’s also a source of positive and negative propaganda, as scholar mentioned that people can easily create effectual campaigns, to create a propaganda[13]. Social Media networks are used for several purposes like to create a propaganda, for psychological warfare, for fundraising, to create effective campaigns, for gathering information, for mobilization and formation of people’s perspectives and many others.
The advancement of technology has also helped the terrorist organizations in a way that they have shifted their propaganda from traditional media to new media. Prof. Gabriel Weimann conducted a study in which he mentioned that about 90% of terrorist organizations on the Internet, especially through the Social media[14], but how social media is beneficial for terrorist organizations and how they are spreading extremism all around the World? Prof. Gabriel Weimann further discovered that terrorists are using these social media tools to reach a larger group of audience without any geographical limitation[15]. Many scholars and authors have described in many research articles that how terrorist organizations are using social networking sites for multiple reasons — such as to create propaganda, psychological warfare, for transferring information and collecting data, to collect funds, for recruitment, and for the sake of mobilization[16]. Terrorists/Extremists are utilizing social media platforms for recruitment, operational planning and engaging with audience (Thomas, 2003; Mishra, 2003; Rogan, 2006, Conway, 2005; Aly, 2016; Klausen, 2015; Conway, 2016)[17] to create terror and panic among people all around the globe. However, emergence of social media platforms has changed the communication process and providing everyone a platform to write about their thoughts, ideas, and plans. These social media tools have given access to immediate information, the news is always knocking on our screens whether it is laptops, smartphones, or tablets. That’s why the impact of terrorist/extremist is leaving a mark of black propaganda. Black Propaganda describe as: “ Black propaganda is when the source is concealed or credited to a false authority and spreads lies, fabrications, and deceptions. Black propaganda is the “big lie,” including all types of creative deception”[18]. Broadly, terrorists/extremists present false and fabricated messages based on text, videos or audios to spread terror.
The Internet and Social media platforms are providing people a two-way communication through different features like status or tweets, videos, chats, images, live streaming or live chats. These tools are effectively in use of terrorist groups to spread fear or terror, to execute their plans or campaigns, to advance their cause, to find more supporters, to spread their ideas or thoughts and to communicate on a larger scale. The main purpose of using social media is to create Propaganda.
Weimann & Jost enlightened that terrorist groups/organizations are using social media platforms for recruitment and to create propaganda because they can manipulate public’s mind to consume their desire context[19]. An author while studying the Impact of Social Media find out how terrorists and extremists are using social media for:
· Propaganda
· Radicalization
· Data Mining
· Recruitment
· Planning
· Training
· Networking
· Communication
The network of terrorist organizations are becoming stronger by the passage of time because of the easy access to social networking sites. However, the two famous terrorist organizations Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria (ISIS) are escalating through social media networks and it’s a tool for recruiting new members for their organizations. During the panel discussion at Terrorism in the Digital Age at the 47th World Economic Forum, Former Army chief of Pakistan General Raheel Sharif said that “ Terrorists are using social media and digital platforms very effectively, including for recruitment”. He further added that “ Terrorism in the digital age, is dangerous as not only cancer but as deadly as cancer.”[20]
National Institute of Justice (2017) describes that Global terrorist movements are relying on modern communication technologies/tools and social media platforms to push their beliefs and point of view all around the World[21]. An author said in a research paper that with the evolving technologies, the terror and thread of extremism has been growing and these social media tools has been used to plan their attacks and for strengthening their beliefs and messages[22].
According to many scholars, the frequency of communication or interaction through social media is continuously increasing but social media is boon and bane at the same time[23], however, the terrorist organizations are receiving all benefits like operational digital action, recruitment, creating group forums, collaborating with terrorist associates, administering digital training environments, coordinating organizational activity and propagating terrorist organization material[24]. Extremists are utilizing the internet, social media or new media for cyber war too, as research scholar mentioned that one of the biggest terrorist organization ISIS are now increasingly fighting an online cyber war via video messages, online messages of hate and even an app[25].
Today’s media have four major responsibilities or functions which are to persuade, to present opinion, to inform, to entertain and to regulate. Though, terrorist organizations are using a symbolic communication functions that consists of four different pieces of a communication formula, to achieve their goals, the communication functions are:
· transmission of the information.
· disseminating of messages via different platforms.
· targeting wide audience.
· and the feedback, or the response of the audience[26].
Many scholars mentioned multiple times in different dissertations that today social media is considered a ‘tool of terrorism’[27] and they are spreading fear, terror and extremism. Terrorists now know how to use social media and how to use advance tools. A major example is ‘the Christchurch Mosque attacks’, the worst mass shootings in the terrorism history. On 15th of March 2019, an Australian national gunman who had stormed two Christchurch mosques, killing 50 people and wounding as many more (another died later on). The extremist emailed a 74-page manifesto to politicians and newsrooms just before the attack, and he also broadcast live streaming on Facebook via a headcam he was wearing during the deadly shooting attack. The attacker had all the advance weapon and gadgets and his manifesto seems much clear that he wanted to spread terror among Muslim community. The live streaming of the attack had left terrible side effects on human psyche, those who witnessed and watched.
Previously there were many extremism attacks, political campaigns or natural disasters where Social Media played an important role for several purposes, as Shedy (2011) mentioned that world witnessed social media’s significant role during:
· 2008 Mumbai Attack
· 2009 Iran’s Election Campaign
· 2010 Haiti Earthquake[28]
However, Former BBC Global News Director Richard Sambrook said during an interview that in today’s communication age Terrorism or Extremism is a totally ‘different beast’[29].
Gabriel Weimann defined that post- modern terrorism era are taking advantage of modern technology — especially advanced online communication tools[30]. Another scholar said that the weapons of extremist are not only guns and bombs — now these weapons include webcams, videotapes, CD — Roms, DVDs, laptops and all other smart gadgets (Hakami, 2011)[31].
As we all know that social media is a cheap and effective tool for mass communication, as well as an effective method for targeting key demographics[32]. Social media is becoming the biggest tool for cyber-attacks to create fear around the World, as a scholar discovered that ‘social media’ technologies provide for terrorists and militant extremists to utilise and develop cyber terrorism[33].
Extremism activities all around the world has approached the evolution of various high-ended methodologies for analyzing terrorist groups and networks and how to tackle all the advanced moves of theirs. Institutes and Counter — Terrorism department are working hard to control all the extremism, as research scholar mentioned that all the intelligence and law enforcement agencies are trying to understand the structure of terrorist networks and developing strategies to disrupt them by identifying leaders and hidden patterns in terrorist networks[34]. Terrorism groups and organizations are misusing the social media platforms, as a scholar mentioned in the research paper that Extremists are exploiting social media networking sites for terrible purposes[35]. As we know, Social Media has opened up new ways to communicate, network, plan and operate. In the 21st century Social media has fundamentally and permanently changed the platform for terrorist networking[36]. However, the way institutes investigate, understand and counter terrorist networks has also changed.
In an article the author claimed that militants have become extremely web-savvy and recognized the value of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and MySpace to reaching out the like-minded people[37]. Social Media and
Terrorism is becoming a dangerous symbiosis and these extremism organizations are becoming stronger in their manifesto, but many countries are trying to fight against extremism those countries are Pakistan, Syria, Sri Lanka, Paris, New Zealand and many other countries.
As in Pakistan the social media users are rapidly increasing, the people in Pakistan are using social networking sites for hate speech, for running campaigns whether it’s for positive cause or negative cause and for raising awareness about different issues. Pakistani Social Media has played a vital positive role in different terrorist attacks and the country also witnessed that how terrorists/extremists are using social media for communication and to plan their targets. Those terrorist events are as follows:
· (Karachi) Jinnah International Airport Attack →2014, June 8.
· Peshawar Army Public School attack → 2014, December 16.
· Police Academy Attack in Quetta→2016, October 25.
· Quetta Suicide Bombing→2020, February 19.
· Pakistan Stock Exchange attack →2020, June 29.
There are many more attacks in which our country experienced the strong connection between social media, public, media personals and terrorist attacks. The law enforcement agency ISI and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) have been taking action against those social media pages that contain hate speech, terror thread and sensitive content. According to an article, there are approximately 60 banned organizations in Pakistan, the country is trying hard to combat terrorist organizations online[38].
Pakistan’s Army along with the ISI are playing a strong role against ‘War on Terrorism’, Pakistan also presented the National Action Plan for countering terrorism and extremism which includes a ban on the glorification of terrorist groups in media, dismantling of terrorist communication networks, and measures against the abuse of the internet and social media for terrorism[39].
Pakistan is still fighting against these extremists and cyber-attacks, the unity among Government, Opposition and Military will help us to win the race. A scholar recommended in a research paper that if Government and Tech companies joined hands with each other so they can tackle and control the usage of Internet by terrorist organizations, the author further mentioned that “ South Asian countries need to clarify the scope of counter-extremism legislation and its applicability online, as well as clearly define hate speech and terrorist content.[40] “
The government of Pakistan is continuously planning out different tactics to control social media’s negative usage in the country, The “Citizens Protection (Against Online Harm) Rules, 2020” oblige social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google to block or remove posts that are considered objectionable by the government, however, this law is considered as ‘violation of freedom of speech’[41]. But these laws are important to control the spread of terror and misinformation.
Alongside these laws and regulation Pakistan Army has fought against terrorists and weakened the power of Al Qaeda, Pakistan Tahreek-e- Taliban and Daesh. A series of military operations — especially Zarb-e-Azb and subsequent Raddul Fassad — did pay off and led to successful results in reducing violence[42].
Globally, Pakistan is among the top 10 countries who faced the worst hit of terrorism, since 9/11 incident. The efforts of Pakistan are appreciable all around the globe. Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and his Jawans are decisive against terrorism to achieve enduring peace both in the country and in the region. | https://medium.com/@basabd1992/extremism-and-the-role-of-social-media-68b3916e3994 | ['Basmah Abdullah Zahid'] | 2020-12-06 14:22:12.323000+00:00 | ['News', 'Social Media', 'Opinion', 'Terrorism'] |
The Coded Income Model | The Coded Income Model
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One of the leading trends in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies is the rising interest in Decentralised Finance also called DeFi¹. DeFi is a space of active innovation fostering a growing number of crypto finance platforms and products combining crypto assets as stake², collateral, derivatives, and yield-generating tokens. At the time of writing, the total value locked in DeFi platforms is USD1.74Bn as per DeFi Pulse. The crypto credit industry, including DeFi and private lending, exhibited strong growth in the first quarter of 2020, as per Credmark’s Crypto Credit report³. The increasing number and adoption of stablecoins⁴, pegged to and collateralised by fiat (government-issued) currencies or cryptocurrencies, also contributes to innovation in the space. Through numerous DeFi platforms and applications, users can earn revenues by lending or staking their crypto assets.
The operators and users of DeFi platforms often describe this type of income using the umbrella term ‘passive income’. To differentiate it from other classes of financial revenues I propose to call this type of income, coded income. Coded income is earned via a smart contract⁵, self-executing code on a blockchain that automatically implements the terms of an agreement between parties⁵.
The term coded income could be applied to any income received by an investor, a staker or a lender in the form of smart contract-generated cryptocurrency payments representing dividends, rewards or instalments, respectively.
Coded income, in its current form, is disconnected from the real economy as it circulates in the closed loops of crypto finance platforms. I will not expand here on the different crypto finance products and DeFi platforms, yield farming and the risks attached to their circular models; instead, I wish to explore a model at the intersection between crypto finance and venture or project funding, the coded income model.
Traditional Funding Methods
Funding methods for new projects and ventures are limited. Early-stage ventures and new projects typically do not qualify for bank loans⁷ or lines of credit and venture capital firms have a narrow scope. Funding from professional investors has drawbacks such as strict terms meant to give them preferential treatment over other shareholders and a lengthy legal process which can cause a delay in the go-to-market plans. Initial Public Offerings and access to public markets are usually reserved to more mature companies and entail lengthy and costly processes. Moreover, these sources of funding are not always available to entrepreneurs as they presuppose the existence of a sophisticated and accessible financial infrastructure which is not necessarily true in emerging markets where funding alternatives can be scarce and ill-suited to finance new ventures and small businesses.
On the funding side, early-stage investors are required to take on a high level of risk as it is a generally accepted rule that nine out of ten startups fail; but even those who pick successful ones will not be rewarded until they manage to sell their shares at a higher price. The wait can be long as “the time to exit for the average venture-capital-backed company has more than doubled, from 3.3 years to 6.8 years.”⁸ It is also important to note that investors in early-stage ventures are exposed to the whole company risk and not to the specific financial performance of an application, a product or a service.
Token-based Funding Methods
Throughout 2017 and the first half of 2018, entrepreneurs in the crypto space have been fortunate to source significant funds through token sales⁹, also known as Initial Coin Offerings or ICOs. ICOs started early, the first one occurred in 2013¹⁰. However, the ICO hype cycle which started in 2017 did not last beyond 2018 for several reasons, including these:
Following exceptional increases in the price of some digital tokens, the expectations of the token buyers soon became unrealistic and generally unmet.
There is no direct correlation between the token price and the financial results of the project and token holders have no recourse if the issuing token entity fails.
The regulatory environment for token sales remains undefined.
By the end of 2018, security token offerings¹¹ (STOs) were purported to take over where utility token sales were failing but security token offerings have proven expensive to undertake (high legal costs), impose more restrictions on eligible investors and have suffered from the poor liquidity of the security token markets. Nevertheless, several platforms are working to overcome these drawbacks.
The Coded Income Model
When comparing the multiple barriers to access to capital and the high level of friction in the traditional funding models with the ‘superfluidity’ of a multi-million dollar, collateral-based, crypto loans contracted daily on DeFi platforms, I see an opportunity for a new model, inspired from the framework of DeFi platforms, to build a bridge (or an aqueduct) between the crypto economy and the real economy to irrigate the dry, liquidity-thirsty fields of the real economy businesses.
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There are key differences between project funding and crypto loans, let’s look at some of these:
Crypto loans have fixed repayment instalments which do not take into account the borrower’s current or future revenue streams.
Crypto loans require collateral; this removes the need for a lengthy due diligence process.
Project funding requires a good understanding of the project and trusting that the team can execute, hence the preference for revenue-generating candidates.
Projects present economic models (not pure financial play) which create value in the real economy.
New ventures and projects cannot put capital as collateral for a loan. That will be the assumption here. We can imagine that, in the future, a group of supporters made up of individuals and private or public entities, could contribute to a pool of funds as collateral to facilitate this funding model in a particular market. This contribution would carry a lower risk than directly providing funding to the venture. I may elaborate further on this hypothesis in a later post.
Following the review of the common issues with traditional seed funding for entrepreneurs and investors, and the short-lived success of token sales, I would like to submit these questions:
Could a smart contract-based revenue share model become an effective alternative to traditional funding methods for operating companies with live (or soon to be live) applications, products or services? And, Could this model create a bridge between the crypto economy and the real economy?
I believe a smart contract-based revenue share model, the coded income model, is best suited for projects needing fresh capital to roll out a new product or service in the near term or funds to support a product or service with an existing customer base.
This model is meant as an alternative to equity funding, crowdfunding and conventional lending. Coded income here is in reference to the income automatically distributed by a smart contract to the blockchain address of the capital contributor and directly collected as a share of the revenues of the company, or a specific project thereof. However, it would not be suitable for companies or projects with a long gestation period before recording the first sales.
The real economy must fulfil its basic premise of real income. In this model, coded income stems from the project’s economic model, not from a forward-looking, hypothetically exponential sales curve nor from the minting of a new token with a price arbitrarily set by its issuer. To source funds through this model, entrepreneurs would need to convincingly demonstrate the viability and solidity of their revenue structure and accept terms which match the funders’ desirability criteria.
As a result, the coded income smart contract should be deeply rooted into the core of the business operations of the company. This model shares common characteristics with the basic economic structure of a term loan or a ‘streaming’ or royalty-granting mechanism (popular in the traditional mining industry) but in this case funds are repaid through a digitally enforced revenue share mechanism. The use of blockchain technology, smart contracts and cryptocurrencies brings flexibility, transparency and adaptability at a level unseen in traditional revenue share models.
My definition of the coded income model: the provision of capital for an operational project whereby, in exchange for funds, the project owner agrees for a share of the project’s revenues to be automatically distributed via a smart contract to the blockchain address(es) of the capital provider(s).
Although it would logically be easier for this model to be applied by teams familiar with blockchain technology, the coded income model should be applicable to project funding in a wide range of industries. However, to avoid falling into speculative schemes, it is recommended for projects generating revenues at the time of funding or soon after. The model is focused on ‘projects’ rather than entities as the funding is secured thanks to the project’s anticipated revenue streams. An organisation could apply this model to each one of their cash flow generating product lines or services.
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As with any financing activity, there are several risks to assess which can impact the operations’ perennity and earnings. Capital providers should perform adequate due diligence on the projects and analyse the risks entailed. In that sense, this model is not as fluid as a crypto loan with crypto assets as collateral. However, I could imagine a business opportunity whereby, in a similar manner to equity crowdfunding platforms, the projects presented have successfully undergone a screening process by a third party and can be compared on the basis of the financing terms.
There are also specific risks linked to blockchain technology and smart contracts. DeFi platforms are the targets of frequent hackers’ exploits resulting in crypto asset losses¹². Storing and exchanging cryptocurrencies via crypto wallets¹³ carries a level of risk and parties should be familiar with standard cryptocurrency security protocols.
Stablecoins are the best suited class of cryptocurrencies to connect the crypto economy and the real economy as they can directly represent real economy, fiat-denominated earnings.
Unless the project revenues are earned in a cryptocurrency (other than a stablecoin) acceptable to the project funder, using cryptocurrencies with volatile market prices would call for the smart contract to access exchange rates via oracle¹⁴ services and this adds an extra layer of complexity.
It is recommended to choose a stablecoin fit to minimise slippage from potential disparities between the currencies of the capital contribution, the project’s revenue stream and the coded income. For example, if the project’s funding and earnings were denominated in USD then one of the USD-pegged stablecoins could be used such as USD-pegged, bitcoin-backed, Dollar on Chain¹⁵ (DOC).
Potential Benefits of the Coded Income Model
Potential benefits of the coded income model as an alternative to other forms of investing or project funding:
As coded income is, by design in this model, intrinsically correlated to the actual earnings of the project, this should contribute to improving the cash flow velocity and optimising capital allocation of the funding party.
and optimising capital allocation of the funding party. For the project, the flexibility of payments correlated to the actual earnings represent a much better alternative to fixed instalments which can weaken and even endanger a project at times of lower or nil earnings.
The project may receive funds from multiple parties as smart contracts can easily handle multiple beneficiaries of the coded income. I would advise the beneficiaries to set up human-readable aliases for their addresses using a name service such as RIF Name Service.
Both parties may benefit from a streamlined process: following completion of the KYC and AML procedures, ideally using blockchain-based digital identity solutions, the funding terms could be agreed upon and integrated into a smart contract (more information about the smart contract parameters is presented in the next section).
Parties to this model could use pre-built and pre-tested smart contract templates to reduce the smart contract design costs.
Parties would not need to agree on a company valuation as it is not a requisite for this model. The coded income model is a non-dilutive form of financing.
The project does not need to issue a new crypto token, try to sell it or list it on exchanges, nor hire costly service providers to complete these tasks.
As parties would likely cap the value of the total coded income to be collected and/or limit the payments in time, this should remove the risk of speculation.
The project owner would not be able to amend the smart contract payments nor unilaterally stop the payments. This is an important security feature for the recipient of coded income.
The model brings more transparency to the relationship as both parties can rely on the blockchain to securely store a chronological record of the history of transactions. These records can easily be accessed via blockchain explorers¹⁶.
Examples of Coded Income Smart Contract Parameters
I am listing here a preliminary set of sample parameters which could be included in the coded income smart contract (please note that additional parameters would be needed in order to make the smart contract functional and compliant with the specific terms agreed between the parties):
The revenue share ratio is a key element of the smart contract. I would recommend to the project owner to build a simple model using the revenue forecasts and applying various scenarios to determine a range of ratios that could be financially supported by the project. This range would then be proposed to the potential capital providers and the final, agreed upon ratio would be integrated into the smart contract.
The revenue share payments may be triggered only after a certain time period or above a minimum revenue level. The smart contract could check that the minimum revenue condition is met before making a payment.
Smart contracts would include a variable premium paid to the coded income recipient(s) in addition to the original value of the contributed funds, similar to interest on a loan or the cost of capital for the project.
The frequency of the coded income payments may vary depending on the project’s revenue model. For example, a platform charging transaction fees is likely to earn fees multiple times in a 24-hour period. In this case, the smart contract could distribute a share of these revenues on a daily basis.
The parties may wish to use a form of financing emulating a line of credit where funds are paid in a scattered manner, possibly scheduled to match the project’s operational expenses or milestones. I would recommend the design of a separate smart contract governing the capital inflows which can be referred to as ‘coded investments’ (this can be further explored in a subsequent post). The coded income smart contract would have to account for the value of the capital inflows, or coded investments, on designated blockchain addresses before making payments as per the contract logic.
The duration of the relationship would be another key parameter of the coded income smart contract. The smart contract may be programmed to make payments until the sum of these payments reach a preset value or until a certain point in time as per the terms agreed between the parties.
If the project revenues were collected in fiat (government-issued currencies), a process should be put in place for the project to regularly convert fiat money into cryptocurrencies, such as stablecoins, to replenish the crypto assets available for payments via the smart contract.
Instead of capital, the project owner may decide to accept in-kind contributions such as development, consulting, design, marketing or other professional services. For this variant, as long as the parties agree on a value for these services, the smart contract can treat this value in a similar way to a capital contribution.
The above is a non-exhaustive list of parameters and I recommend anyone who may wish to experiment with their own interpretation of this model to do so with the help of developers with experience in writing (and possibly auditing) smart contracts as these programmes will technically govern the entire financial relationship between the capital provider and the project.
Final Recommendations
Depending on the size and development stage of the entity running the project seeking funds and its team’s understanding of blockchain technology, this model could represent a challenge for the entity’s organisational structure, especially for the larger ones. Before integrating this model, the redesign — and possibly, digitisation — of certain business processes may be required and this preparatory phase should not be neglected.
Although the coded income model is not recommended for projects with a long time-to-market period, parties are free to agree on terms taking into account the higher risk (uncertainty) of a project with distant future revenues and the opportunity cost of locking capital for a longer time frame. This would likely impact the premium (or cost of capital) to be paid by the funded party. In that scenario, I would encourage the funding party to monitor the progress of the project in the pre-revenue phase and use a smart contract as described in the aforementioned coded investments scenario. However, parties should be aware that these conditions carry the risk of drifting into speculative models.
It is advised for parties to this model and/or their legal advisors, to research the laws applicable to smart contracts, term loans and revenue share schemes in their relevant jurisdictions. They may also look into blockchain-based dispute resolution solutions such as Kleros or online arbitration solutions like Jur which could be practical to use with this model.
The End Goal
The coded income model can be adapted to fit various business conditions and economic models. You may have noticed that the model combines certain elements from traditional investing, loans and DeFi; the idea is to combine these elements within a smart contract-based model to reduce friction in the real economy financing process while providing additional flexibility, security and transparency.
The intention is to remove hurdles faced by entrepreneurs around the world and to use adequate blockchain and crypto finance tools to bring liquidity to the real economy.
My hope is for the coded income model to be applied to projects of any size, from micro-enterprises to large ventures and, as a result, accelerate financial inclusion.
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This is a theoretical model and I plan to tap into the vast expertise of the talented smart contract specialists at IOV Labs to test technical implementations of this model. I look forward to sharing the test findings and examples of coded income smart contracts in the near future.
In the meantime, I invite anyone who would like to comment or contribute to this conversation to contact me at [email protected]. Thank you.
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About the Author
Eddy Travia has been an investor in tech companies globally for 16 years and has first-hand experience with the challenges faced by early-stage company entrepreneurs and investors. For the last six years, Eddy has been investing in early-stage blockchain technology companies as the co-founder and CEO of London-listed Coinsilium Group (AQSE:COIN). Eddy is also the Regional Director Asia Pacific for IOV Labs, an organisation developing the most popular implementations of the RSK Smart Contract Network, a major proponent of DeFi for Bitcoin.
Eddy is a regular speaker at major blockchain events around the world, these are links to his TEDx talks: ‘Our Lives in a Blockchain-Powered Smart Economy’ at TEDxINSEAD (June 2018) and ‘How The Blockchain Revolution Will Change Our Lives’ at TEDxIEMadrid (June 2016).
Legal disclaimer: please note that this is a transcription of the personal views and reflections of the author; the theoretical model described in this post requires more research, analysis and testing and it should not be construed as technical, legal, investment or any other form of advice. The author’s assumptions are not supported by any technical experimentation or implementation of the model at the time of publication. Should you decide to implement your own personal interpretation of the theoretical model described herein, please understand you are doing so at your own risk and the author recommends you seek legal and technical advice, especially in the fields of project financing, lending, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, crypto assets, smart contracts and blockchain technology before doing so.
Sources:
¹ Mitra, R. (2019). DeFi — What in the world is Decentralized Finance? The Most Comprehensive Guide. Blockgeeks [online]. Available at: https://blockgeeks.com/guides/demystifying-defi-ultimate-guide/ [Accessed June 2020]
² (2019). What is staking?[online]. Binance Academy. Available at: https://academy.binance.com/blockchain/what-is-staking [Accessed June 2020]
³ (2020). The Crypto Credit Report Issue 4 Q1 2020. [online] Credmark. Available at: https://reports.credmark.com/TheCryptoCreditReport-q1-2020.pdf [Accessed 4 July 2020]
⁴ (2020). Stablecoin [online]. Blockchain.News. Available at: https://blockchain.news/wiki/Stablecoin [Accessed June 2020]
⁵ Rosic, A. (2016). Smart Contracts: The Blockchain Technology That Will Replace Lawyers. Blockgeeks [online]. Available at: https://blockgeeks.com/guides/smart-contracts/[Accessed June 2020]
⁶ (2016). CFO Insights Getting smart about smart contracts. [online] Deloitte. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/tr/en/pages/finance/articles/cfo-insights-getting-smart-contracts.html [Accessed 3 July 2020]
⁷ Binham, C. (2018). Banks ‘reluctant to lend’ to small businesses, MPs told. Financial Times [online]. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/fc6640a8-3427-11e8-ae84-494103e73f7f [Accessed June 2020]
⁸ Shane, S. (2015). What Slow Exits Mean to Startup Investors. Entrepreneur Asia Pacific [online]. Available at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253459 [Accessed June 2020]
⁹ (2019). What Is An ICO And How Does It Work [online]. CryptoCompare. Available at: https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/what-is-an-ico-and-how-does-it-work/[Accessed June 2020]
¹⁰ Merre, R. (2019). ICO 101 — History of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Hackernoon [online]. Available at: https://medium.com/hackernoon/ico-101-history-of-initial-coin-offerings-icos-part-1-from-mastercoin-to-ethereum-4689b7c2326b [Accessed July 2020]
¹¹ Zaki, I. (2018). Security Token Offerings (STOs) — What You Need To Know. Hackernoon [online]. Available at: https://hackernoon.com/security-token-offerings-stos-what-you-need-to-know-8628574d11e2 [Accessed June 2020]
¹² McIntosh, R. (2020). DeFi Platforms Are ‘Only As Safe As The Code They Have’: Analysis. Finance Magnates[online]. Available at: https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/defi-platforms-are-only-as-safe-as-the-code-they-have-analysis/ [Accessed July 2020]
¹³ Rosic, A. (2017). Cryptocurrency Wallet Guide: A Step-By-Step Tutorial. Blockgeeks [online]. Available at: https://blockgeeks.com/guides/cryptocurrency-wallet-guide/ [Accessed June 2020]
¹⁴ (2019). What is a blockchain oracle? [online]. Binance Academy. Available at: https://academy.binance.com/blockchain/blockchain-oracles-explained [Accessed June 2020]
¹⁵ Woods, J. (2019). Money on Chain: The New Breed of BTC-backed Stablecoins. The Merkle [online]. Available at: https://themerkle.com/money-on-chain-the-new-breed-of-btc-backed-stablecoins/ [Accessed June 2020]
¹⁶ (2019). Block Explorer [online]. Binance Academy. Available at: https://academy.binance.com/glossary/block-explorer [Accessed July 2020] | https://medium.com/coinmonks/the-coded-income-model-81095534e624 | ['Eddy Travia'] | 2020-08-17 12:37:11.716000+00:00 | ['Funding', 'Defi', 'Smart Contracts', 'Blockchain', 'Financial Inclusion'] |
Warning: In my Most Controversial and Potentially Dangerous Installment of the Words to Know Series | Warning: In my Most Controversial and Potentially Dangerous Installment of the Words to Know Series
I am covering the concept of Christian salvation and what the Words Mean; warning it may change your perspective on eternity, sin, and free will.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
I debated writing under a pen name or perhaps making it work or fiction, however, after going under advisement with some of my closest personal advisors, I will be writing what the Words Mean under my name.
The Topic Is Too Controversial Yet I Write Anyway
The topic is core shaking and challenges the very fabric of the Christian dogma and tradition we know to be true. I have tried to interpret the words and meanings in any other way possible but I must reconcile myself to the fact that the findings are true and accurate. More than anything, I pride myself on showing the truth in the Words to Know series.
The Study
At the root of our study is a consummate history of the Christian God Yahweh or El (there are ten other names we will go over in the series as well) and how we may have not been told the full story of creation and why Salvation through the crucifixion or Blood Atonement was necessary, and most importantly, the eternal implications of Salvation.
Much of what I have found through extensive readings, linguistic studies, interviews, and a cohesive look at world religious texts both ancient and modern piece together a very different picture from what we know to be true.
The concept of Christian salvation may be the most elaborate trick in the universe designed to trap the power of the human soul through spiritual contract all done through euphemistic writing.
The findings of my research for the series contradict the very fiber of what I was raised to know, believe, and accept; and it contradicts and threatens what millions of practitioners around the world follow.
DISCLAIMER:
I do not wish to hated or persecuted for my findings or ostracized. But I have a moral obligation to write what the Words Mean with no bias in order to present the truth. Not what I want it to be, not what my readers want it to be, but the truth.
Please do not be too harsh when this is exposed. I am not in any way trying to degrade or bash anyone’s beliefs or religious practices, but once you know what the Words Mean, you may have a different perspective on eternity, sin, and the concept of free will.
I know I do. | https://medium.com/an-idea/warning-in-my-most-controversial-and-potentially-dangerous-installment-of-the-words-to-know-7ab1cfcea3a0 | ['Jessica Bugg'] | 2020-12-22 16:38:07.405000+00:00 | ['Linguistics', 'History', 'Spirituality', 'Astrophysics', 'Religion'] |
Motivation 3.0– Remote Leadership With Intrinsic Factors | My Summary on “Drive — The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” from Daniel H. Pink — and how we can learn from that for a remote work setting.
TLDR: Remote leadership requires autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Drive — The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
We no longer live in a stone-age setting where our instincts drive us to do our work, better said: to hunt for food and make sure to survive.
We also no longer live in an industrial factory setting where we algorithmically reproduce simple tasks.
Instead, most of our workforce power comes from heuristic problem solving for creating novel solutions.
And not just since COVID-19, more and more companies realise that they don’t require employees to be physical together at a shared workplace, and even start to see more and more motivational upsides once people are un-caged from their workplace boundaries.
But a remote leadership setting requires an upgraded understanding of what drives people. Management in a remote setting cannot use monitoring and controlling methods that have been present in management since people have been “overseen” in factories during the late 19th century. They require an evolution of management. And we should replace the term management with inspirational leadership. This way, we can focus on intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic rewards or punishment, shift from overseeing single pre-set steps of working towards awareness for the results.
And that is where Daniel H. Pinks “Drive” kicks in, showcasing Motivation 3.0.
Daniel Pink explains in “Drive” different motivational factors from the instinct-driven Motivation 1.0 to the carrot and sticks driven Motivation 2.0, up to the intrinsic driven Motivation 3.0.
His outcome is that significant parts of today’s leadership styles are still based on old school management theories from the industrialisation (Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management). “Manager” too often “manage carrots and sticks”, but should understand that people’s fundamental nature is not to need any external management. Our default setting is to be curious and self-directed.
I cannot stress enough how convinced I am about this default setting of curiosity, and that’s what makes all of Pink’s theories so important to use it as a leadership framework for remote and distributed teams.
What Motivation 2.0 is
With his approach of “scientific management” Frederick Winslow Taylor developed in the early 20th century an “operating software” to manage workers as parts of a complicated machine. “If they did the right work in the right way at the right time, the machine would function smoothly. And to ensure that happened, you simply rewarded the behaviour you sought and punished the behaviour you discouraged”. This approach seemed logical and still is widely adapted.
Minor Update: Motivation 2.1
Mid 20th century showed that treating people solely like cattle doesn’t work well with more complex structures and tasks. Management scientist Frederick Herzberg:
“proposed that two key factors determined how people fared on the job. The first were “hygiene” factors — extrinsic rewards such as pay, working conditions, and job security. Their absence created dissatisfaction, but their presence didn’t lead to job satisfaction. The second were “motivators” — things like enjoyment of the work itself, genuine achievement, and personal growth. These internal desires were what really boosted both satisfaction and performance and were where managers ought to focus their attention.” Pink, Daniel H. Drive (p. 18). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
And with Herzberg and the work of other scientists along with him, some minor refinements could repair weaknesses of the old model. But they “amounted to a modest improvement rather than a thorough upgrade — Motivation 2.1. And so this general approach remained intact.” That’s because it’s already broadly implemented, easy to understand, simple to measure and to enforce.
Open Source: because it’s not Motivation 2.0
Pink compares Microsoft’s Encyclopedia (based on economic interests and proven to be a huge failure) with Wikipedia (open source, solely based on volunteer work) and shows why open source projects work despite there is not a single motivational element based on “Motivation 2.0”.
Open Source: “Flow”, purpose and non-economical rationalities
Unlike some might assume, optimal experiences are mostly not experienced during leisure but during work. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls those optimal moments “Flow”. Studies of open source projects show that participants are driven by “a set of predominantly intrinsic motives — in particular the fun of mastering the challenge of a given software problem and the desire to give a gift to the programmer community.” Giving to the community, contributing to a higher goal gives purpose and drives developers to code for such projects.
We have a desire for purpose.
Same counts for the large market and big movements of not-for-profit or not primary for-profit businesses. Like NPOs, NGOs, L3C (Low-profit limited liability companies) or the social businesses that Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus started to spread around the world. “These are companies that raise capital, develop products, and sell them in an open market but do so in the service of a larger social mission, with the profit-maximisation principle replaced by the social-benefit principle.”
Some countries like Denmark have the legal concept of a “for-benefit organisation”, some U.S have the “B Corporation”.
We don’t work based on economic rationality.
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman pointed out that economics must be understood as the study of human economic behaviour and the human part has not been studied enough until now. Most business management theories are still based on the “hyperrational calculator-brained person”, which is nothing more than a convenient fiction.
Instead, emotional, intrinsic factors override rationality.
Take this well-known example:
“Play a game with me and I’ll try to illustrate the point. Suppose somebody gives me ten dollars and tells me to share it — some, all, or none — with you. If you accept my offer, we both get to keep the money. If you reject it, neither of us gets anything. If I offered you six dollars (keeping four for myself), would you take it? Almost certainly. If I offered you five, you’d probably take that, too. But what if I offered you two dollars? Would you take it? In an experiment replicated around the world, most people rejected offers of two dollars and below. That makes no sense in terms of wealth maximisation. If you take my offer of two dollars, you’re two dollars richer. If you reject it, you get nothing. Your cognitive calculator knows two is greater than zero — but because you’re a human being, your notions of fair play or your desire for revenge or your simple irritation overrides it.” Pink, Daniel H. Drive (p. 25). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Where Carrots and Sticks can’t work
Pink, Daniel H. Drive (p. 57). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Carrots and sticks can work in a special setting though, Pink points out: when prescribed routine tasks need to be performed. Simple, algorithmic tasks that neither needs any form of heuristic thinking, creativity or smartness. Those type of workplaces still exist, no doubt, and they still play a strong part in our economic system. But those jobs will get replaced by machines sooner or later, most of them are done offshore, and the least of them are possible to fulfil in a remote setting. So please excuse my over-simplification: I do not take this group of work into consideration with my thoughts about remote leadership.
What Motivation 3.0 is | https://medium.com/@ribret/motivation-3-0-remote-leadership-with-intrinsic-factors-90a842bf36c9 | ['Richard Bretzger'] | 2020-12-09 10:02:38.511000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Psychology', 'Business', 'Remote Work'] |
The Unwanted Side Effect of Speed Listening to Books and Podcasts | The Unwanted Side Effect of Speed Listening to Books and Podcasts
It’s not an issue of comprehension or productivity.
Photo by Start Digital on Unsplash
Do you listen to audiobooks and podcasts at double speed or higher?
It’s a great way to get through nonfiction at pace. It helps us get more out of our time. But it comes with a few drawbacks. Some people would argue you don’t enjoy the books as much, especially when everyone sounds like a chipmunk. Others argue that you don’t give yourself enough time to digest and reflect on ideas at the moment.
Those are genuinely valid points. But neither of those is the side effect I’m talking about. The unwanted side effect of listening so fast is that you get used to it. It becomes the norm.
Wait? How is that a bad thing?
The problem is that it doesn’t just become the norm for podcasts, audiobooks, and YouTube videos. Eventually, it can find its way into your real-life interactions and affect your relationships with others.
After marathon sessions of listening at 2x speed, regular conversations feel like they are going in slow motion. You might even start talking faster than usual.
It changes the vibe.
In an effort to maximize productivity, it’s possible to end up cultivating impatience in areas where patience matters most.
You might wish people would just talk faster and get to the point. But they need time to think. And so do you.
Unlike casual conversation, audiobooks share fully formed, highly polished, and edited ideas. At double speed, it sets a near-impossible standard to match in real-life speech.
Real conversations don’t always have a particular point or reason for them. Communication is often non-verbal. Often, it’s not so much about what people say as much as how they say it.
It’s about sharing our thoughts, feelings, and emotions to create a connection.
So, how do we fight this unwanted side effect?
Fortunately, just recognizing the problem can sometimes help solve it. When we notice we are impatient with others, we can remind ourselves to be more mindful and engaged at the moment.
If that fails, we can reduce our exposure to high-speed audio by simply consuming less. And we can slow speeds down from 2x to 1.5x instead. As long as we apply the 80/20 principle to what we consume, we shouldn’t lose out on much “productivity” at all.
Lastly, before interacting with other people, we can take a few moments to slow down and re-normalize. | https://medium.com/2-minute-madness/the-unwanted-side-effect-of-speed-listening-to-books-and-podcasts-43db5576fda2 | ['Kevin Lee'] | 2020-12-24 12:50:20.423000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Self-awareness', 'Productivity', 'Self', 'Life'] |
Five-Leaf Clover {Capitulo 157} Black Clover (Subtítulos en Español) | Five-Leaf Clover
Episode 157 | Five-Leaf Clover | Asta and others who works hard at special training to acquire further power to be opposed to the devil who begins to threaten the world. Event that charmy supports Asta with dishes reviving magical power of person who ate using power of “cook of sheep” that she created by “cotton magic” , but, meanwhile, notices that we lack own ascetic practices? And charmy visits a certain person. On the other hand, Gordon is away also apart in nobody hiding place that there is event to realize own inadequacy and puts the body in environment different from the past; on trip of ascetic practices?
Watch On ►► http://dadangkoprol.dplaytv.net/series/331753/1/157
Show Info
Network: Japan TV Tokyo (2017 — now)
Schedule: Tuesdays at 18:25 (30 min)
Status: Running
Language: Japanese
Show Type: Animation
Genres: Action Anime Fantasy
TELEVISION 👾
(TV), in some cases abbreviated to tele or television, is a media transmission medium utilized for sending moving pictures in monochrome (high contrast), or in shading, and in a few measurements and sound. The term can allude to a TV, a TV program, or the vehicle of TV transmission. TV is a mass mode for promoting, amusement, news, and sports.
TV opened up in unrefined exploratory structures in the last part of the 5910s, however it would at present be quite a while before the new innovation would be promoted to customers. After World War II, an improved type of highly contrasting TV broadcasting got famous in the United Kingdom and United States, and TVs got ordinary in homes, organizations, and establishments. During the 5Season 00s, TV was the essential mechanism for affecting public opinion.[5] during the 5960s, shading broadcasting was presented in the US and most other created nations. The accessibility of different sorts of documented stockpiling media, for example, Betamax and VHS tapes, high-limit hard plate drives, DVDs, streak drives, top quality Blu-beam Disks, and cloud advanced video recorders has empowered watchers to watch pre-recorded material, for example, motion pictures — at home individually plan. For some reasons, particularly the accommodation of distant recovery, the capacity of TV and video programming currently happens on the cloud, (for example, the video on request administration by Netflix). Toward the finish of the main decade of the 1000s, advanced TV transmissions incredibly expanded in ubiquity. Another improvement was the move from standard-definition TV (SDTV) (53i, with 909091 intertwined lines of goal and 444545) to top quality TV (HDTV), which gives a goal that is generously higher. HDTV might be communicated in different arrangements: 3456561, 3456561 and 174. Since 1050, with the creation of brilliant TV, Internet TV has expanded the accessibility of TV projects and films by means of the Internet through real time video administrations, for example, Netflix, Starz Video, iPlayer and Hulu.
In 1053, 19% of the world’s family units possessed a TV set.[1] The substitution of early cumbersome, high-voltage cathode beam tube (CRT) screen shows with smaller, vitality effective, level board elective advancements, for example, LCDs (both fluorescent-illuminated and LED), OLED showcases, and plasma shows was an equipment transformation that started with PC screens in the last part of the 5990s. Most TV sets sold during the 1000s were level board, primarily LEDs. Significant makers reported the stopping of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-illuminated LCDs by the mid-1050s.[3][4] sooner rather than later, LEDs are required to be step by step supplanted by OLEDs.[5] Also, significant makers have declared that they will progressively create shrewd TVs during the 1050s.[6][1][5] Smart TVs with incorporated Internet and Web 1.0 capacities turned into the prevailing type of TV by the late 1050s.[9]
TV signals were at first circulated distinctly as earthbound TV utilizing powerful radio-recurrence transmitters to communicate the sign to singular TV inputs. Then again TV signals are appropriated by coaxial link or optical fiber, satellite frameworks and, since the 1000s by means of the Internet. Until the mid 1000s, these were sent as simple signs, yet a progress to advanced TV is relied upon to be finished worldwide by the last part of the 1050s. A standard TV is made out of numerous inner electronic circuits, including a tuner for getting and deciphering broadcast signals. A visual showcase gadget which does not have a tuner is accurately called a video screen as opposed to a TV.
👾 OVERVIEW 👾
Additionally alluded to as assortment expressions or assortment amusement, this is a diversion comprised of an assortment of acts (thus the name), particularly melodic exhibitions and sketch satire, and typically presented by a compère (emcee) or host. Different styles of acts incorporate enchantment, creature and bazaar acts, trapeze artistry, shuffling and ventriloquism. Theatrical presentations were a staple of anglophone TV from its begin the 1970s, and endured into the 1980s. In a few components of the world, assortment TV stays famous and broad.
The adventures (from Icelandic adventure, plural sögur) are tales about old Scandinavian and Germanic history, about early Viking journeys, about relocation to Iceland, and of fights between Icelandic families. They were written in the Old Norse language, for the most part in Iceland. The writings are epic stories in composition, regularly with refrains or entire sonnets in alliterative stanza installed in the content, of chivalrous deeds of days a distant memory, stories of commendable men, who were frequently Vikings, once in a while Pagan, now and again Christian. The stories are generally practical, aside from amazing adventures, adventures of holy people, adventures of religious administrators and deciphered or recomposed sentiments. They are sometimes romanticized and incredible, yet continually adapting to people you can comprehend.
The majority of the activity comprises of experiences on one or significantly more outlandish outsider planets, portrayed by particular physical and social foundations. Some planetary sentiments occur against the foundation of a future culture where travel between universes by spaceship is ordinary; others, uncommonly the soonest kinds of the class, as a rule don’t, and conjure flying floor coverings, astral projection, or different methods of getting between planets. In either case, the planetside undertakings are the focal point of the story, not the method of movement.
Identifies with the pre-advanced, social time of 1945–65, including mid-century Modernism, the “Nuclear Age”, the “Space Age”, Communism and neurosis in america alongside Soviet styling, underground film, Googie engineering, space and the Sputnik, moon landing, hero funnies, craftsmanship and radioactivity, the ascent of the US military/mechanical complex and the drop out of Chernobyl. Socialist simple atompunk can be an extreme lost world. The Fallout arrangement of PC games is a fabulous case of atompunk. | https://medium.com/five-leaf-clover-capitulo-157-black-clover/five-leaf-clover-capitulo-157-black-clover-subt%C3%ADtulos-en-espa%C3%B1ol-408f86bc0c8a | ['Chase M. Lockett'] | 2020-12-22 05:42:27.761000+00:00 | ['Animation', 'Anime'] |
In The Reflections | In The Reflections
Photo by Dmitry Bayer on Unsplash
Every day I see you
In the reflections
You have always been with me
There in the angles
I see you, looking back at me
I see you, but I also see me
You don’t look like me
Your hair longer, your face softer
I see you, but why do I see you?
I see you, but I don’t want you there
I feel you, I’m afraid of you
I see you, but only I can see you
I see you, but can’t explain you
I can’t say, I shouldn’t say
They won’t believe what they can’t see
I see you, but are you real?
I see you, but can I believe you?
If you see me, I must be real
I am here in the reflections
Waiting… waiting for you to only see her | https://medium.com/gender-from-the-trenches/in-the-reflections-d3efb6f6b593 | ['Jas Martinez'] | 2020-11-23 22:48:57.818000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'Gender Identity', 'Poetry', 'Transgender', 'Self'] |
Conducting an Effective Exit Interview | Exit interviews are tough requiring the last deep conversations an employee generally has with the HR management. It is also very crucial given the wealth of information one can get conducted effectively and the right questions are asked.
It is wise to conduct a face-to-face exit interview, as employees will appreciate the gesture and you are more likely to have a meaningful constructive conversation. Plan the meetings in advance and schedule them during the rear end of the employee’s service with your company. Work on your questions in advance and be prepared for the interview.
Exit interviews can be very insightful if conducted intelligently. They can help you uncover issues plaguing the organization, and understand the employee’s viewpoint about management and leadership, business practices, and operations. These insights can help you clear the bottlenecks and manage processes better.
Exit interviews can help gain a better idea of an employee’s thoughts, behavior, aid the knowledge transfer process, collecting employment feedback, leadership perception, etc.
A few questions that can be asked during the Exit Interview to gain insights can be:
What made you start looking for a new job? How could conditions be improved? What are your suggestions/corrective measures regarding this? What could the company have done better? Were you satisfied with the management/ leadership team? Were you offered enough professional development opportunities? What challenges did you face? What were three things you enjoyed most about working here? If given an opportunity to change a few things here what would you change?
Every exit interview offers an opportunity to introspect and improve processes. Use this feedback to improve employee engagement and retention. Practice empathy during the interview, ask relevant questions, avoid taking names or targeting people, gain information that can help your business grow in the future, and understand employee pain points.
Exit interviews provide an excellent medium for HR employees to address the problems plaguing the organization and improve attrition rates.
Paylite® Human Resource Management Software is an end-to-end HRMS system to meet the ever-growing needs of modern-day workplaces. It makes your HR process smart and swift, replacing paper-based actions with system-driven workflows. Whether you’re running a startup or global enterprise, take care of your employee profiles, benefits, leaves, loans, salary, and more with Paylite®.
To know more, you can Book a Demo here https://www.paylitehr.com/request-demo.html | https://medium.com/@abhijit-ray/conducting-an-effective-exit-interview-a3eba6f6ea12 | ['Abhijit Kumar Ray'] | 2020-12-17 08:56:11.145000+00:00 | ['Hrm', 'Employee Engagement', 'Employment', 'Payroll', 'Interview'] |
The Making of Meniscus: Dust that accumulates. People who come together. Events that collide. | “Meniscus” by Ghost and John. Photo: Dominic Farlam
Allow me to start this article with an image:
Peeling the tissue apart, starting from one corner, the man separates the plies into three thin separate sheets. Sitting on the ground with his legs crossed, wearing a white costume, he is laying out the three sheets on the ground in front of him. He then picks up the one on his left. Starting from the corner again, he tears the square into a single long strip, then does the same with the other two. He ties the three long strips into one, stands up and holds up the strip by one end. He is a very tall man, yet the strip touches the floor even when he holds it above his head. The thin strip cannot hold its shape against the movement of the air, gently brushing the floor with its end. The man walks around the room and the tissue continues as an extension of his arm, leaving a trace of movement in the air. This fragility of the strip, working in reverse, flows from the contact between his fingers and the end of the strip into the man’s whole body. Slowly, he starts to run. His footsteps mark the ground with his weight as his feet slap the floor repeatedly.
My gaze follows the movement of the man and the strip of tissue across the whole room. I then see more people joining in, men and women with different hairstyles, different heights and different eye colours. All in white costumes, they hold up a single ply of tissue, then tear the square into a long strip with great caution as if they are demonstrating a very dangerous task. As they approach me and squeeze through the gaps between people in the room, the tiny sound of the tissue fibre is amplified through our gaze at the fragile white piece of material.
This is an event about how we occupy space, with movement, objects and sound.
Ghost and I started devising this new multimedia ensemble work in March 2019. The project was originally titled Gallery of Liminality. An experimental session was done through a platform called The Playground at the Rambert Dance Company studios in London in May 2019. We invited the audience to digitally react to the performers’ task-based movement through Telegram on their mobile phones and to rove around the space as if it was a gallery, except that in this case the exhibits were human bodies, transformed into different scenarios through movement and performance states.
The challenge we set for ourselves was to aim at providing a new experience for the audience, theatrical yet also real. By incorporating different media in this performance event, we built layer upon layer of sensory understanding towards the subject matter that we were investigating.
“Meniscus” by Ghost and John. Photo: Dominic Farlam
In the end, the project (now called Meniscus) involved twenty-six artists across four continents: twelve devising performers, one costume designer, one lighting designer, two musicians, one rapper, two photographers, two illustrators, three videographers and the two of us, Ghost and John. There were actually more: production assistants, costume fitters, producers… It was big yet manageable. That is what we intended it to be. We intended to direct a project that challenges the borders of time and space in performance production, that brings people of different backgrounds together, that gathers emerging artists from different art forms together, that makes the audience an integral part of the event. I remember staying up late at night to facetime with Hong Kong videographer Michael Mui to get the narrative of the video right. I remember a long email conversation with Japanese musician Meitei to get the mood of that one section right. I remember hunting visual references with Vietnamese-French photographer Nhu Xuan Hua to get the right colour for the background of the poster. I remember the long discussion, nearly an argument, with Ghost about how the audience should be instructed when they come into the performance.
I see a ball, a ball of shirts, a ball of checked shirts in different colours. It is being thrown around by a group of people. They run round and round, in white clothes. As soon as one of them catches the ball, they throw it across the circle to another. When I look up, I see a ball of checked shirts being thrown here and there. Soon, the ball gets smaller as it loosens up into individual shirts. One by one, people get checked shirts to put on over their white clothes, slow down from running to walking.
This is an event that drills us to collaborate with one another.
“Meniscus” by Ghost and John. Photo: Dominic Farlam
In 1960, lunch counter sit-ins by black college students took place in almost the whole Southern USA. The black students sat down at white-only lunch counters after ordering, physically occupying the space with their bodies, in protest against the racial segregation of that time. This non-violent protest of merely sitting in ‘whites only’ seats evoked a variety of responses from enraged white people: a policeman observing them and hitting the palm with his billy club[1], other customers spilling and throwing drinks at them, dragging them to the floor, punching and kicking them. The black students remained passive and silently absorbed this aggression with their bodies. However, their actions and non-reaction were not silent. The sit-ins were being seen and recorded by many people, including the white Presbyterian minister and college professor Merrill Proudfoot. In his book, Diary of a Sit-in, he described the reaction of the white bodies surrounding these black bodies and how the white bodies became awkward, agitated and outraged. At the Knoxville sit-ins, the white lunch counter manager became increasingly agitated before he finally exploded. “Well, why don’t you go home now? You’ve proved your point, haven’t you?”[2]
In the late 1980s, during the AIDS crisis in the USA, a group of activists formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), in response to how the government was being slow to react, or was even ignoring, the pandemic. There were friends dying, families losing members, lovers witnessing their partners passing. An organization with an urgent call to political action was needed. ACT UP activists went on the street, rallying and marching. They made posters, decorated the windows of the New Museum at lower Broadway, New York with photographs of ‘AIDS criminals’, data and figures about the loss of AIDS and a pink triangle. These images faced outwards, projecting their voices loud and clear to the communities of lower Broadway, telling the public about the urgency of the AIDS crisis and the incompetence of the government. They also performed the famous ‘die-ins’ and ‘sleep-ins’, where they physically occupied streets and buildings with their own flesh and blood. The approaches they took were radical, direct, well-rehearsed and without hesitation.
In December 2017, Ghost and I decided to make ourselves into artists. I was working as a research assistant at a marine biology laboratory at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Ghost was an analyst programmer, mainly building Android mobile applications. We came to the realisation that we were both probably not doing what we were ‘made for’. Hence, we embarked on a journey to rediscover who we were. We came to London in September 2018. Nine months later, our understanding of ‘making ourselves into artists’ reached a pivotal point, where it was no longer only about what kind of work we were making, but also what kind of experience we were providing to our audience, our collaborators and ourselves. In this age of great political, social and environmental instability, how can we do things with art?
In late August 2019, Ghost and I were in a studio at The Place, London. Our minds were overwhelmed with the images we’d seen online through our iPhones, iPads and Macbooks. Neither of us was talking, but the room was filled with noise, anger and horror. An hour later, our dancers Lauren, Jim, Claudia and Annie arrived. We passed them each a square mirror, then turned on a projector that was placed on the floor aiming into space. The mirrors were ones from IKEA, slighter larger than A4 size. As they danced with the mirrors, fractions of the projected images were reflected and shone onto the walls of the studio. They stared into the light on the wall, attempting to comprehend the visuals and understand the context.
Perhaps it is the coexistence of all these historical events and personal episodes of objects and bodies occupying spaces, resisting and fighting for the essential meaning of their presence, that are lingering in Ghost and my minds. Every little object that has its place in these events. Everyone who has been struggling in these spaces. We are in absolutely no way trying to say that history and art have the same value and weight, but what if art could be a poetic analogy of history which can have a real function and bring purpose to our society now?
‘Art does have the power to save lives, and it is this very power that must be recognized, fostered and supported.’ — Douglas Crimp, 1987
[1] Cited from the chapter ‘More than Hamburgers’ from Choreographies of Protest, where describes the behaviour of this policeman in the Greensboro incident, which marks the emergence of the sit-in movement.
[2] Cited from from p.58 of Diary of a Sit-in, from Merrill Proudfoot’s first-person narrative.’’
Writer’s note:
Meniscus — a multimedia ensemble work directed by Ghost and John. Premiered at The Place, London, on 1 Nov 2019, later presented at Rambert, London on 29 Nov 2019.
References:
Crimp, D. (1987) AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. October, Vol.43, Winter, pp.3–16, USA: MIT Press.
Proudfoot, M. (1990) Diary of a Sit-in, pp.58, Urbana: University of Illinois Press
Foster, S. L. (2003) Choreographies of Protest. Theatre Journal, Volume 55, Number 3, pp.395–412. USA: Johns Hopkins University Press.
This article is originally published on Dance Journal/hk on 10 February 2020. | https://medium.com/@ghostandjohn/the-making-of-meniscus-dust-that-accumulates-people-who-come-together-events-that-collide-fa02c86e7c42 | ['Ghost'] | 2020-12-18 18:27:57.768000+00:00 | ['Contemporary Art', 'Art Activism', 'Dance', 'Performance', 'Theatre'] |
2020 — God’s Year- My Testimony. I remember sitting on the left side of… | I remember sitting on the left side of Elevation Church mainland on the 31st of December 2019. I was so excited to be in church on this day because 2019 had been a year, a year God used to bring me back to Him completely. I was in tears all through the service and the testimonies made me feel a lot better. I had a testimony that evening but it did not feel enough to share, the mere reason I was alive that evening was a testimony because I had tried suicide in the course of 2019. Silently being grateful to just be in the presence of God, I raised my phone filled with my goals for the year and I cried to God saying I will give a testimony at the end of the year.
2020 Goals
You see, the thing about God is that He takes the thing you have asked and surprises you in ways you could not have even imagined. In the course of the year, I have shared more than one testimony in different ways, so God did not wait till the end of the year to answer me. He gave me different reasons to be thankful, different testimonies and blessed me beyond my wildest imagination. But I promised God to do this at the end of the year so here it is.
2020 has been the best year for me in every way you can think of. Think about it and God came through but for the purpose of this testimony, I want to thank God for his constant presence. 2020 was a year whereby in the midst of all Gods blessings, I craved his constant presence. Be it because I am afraid, confirmation of His word or I feel like I have gone astray, I needed God’s presence in 2020 more than I ever had thought I would. But you see the God we serve, does not leave us stranded. I remember at the beginning of COVID, I was so scared because I am asthmatic and everyone was calling people like us vulnerable, the news did not give us a lot of chance to survive. So I was super scared of contracting the virus. So, I prayed one evening and said, God, please I am scared of this virus. I do not want to have it. That same night, I went to bed, and in between sleep, I woke up to heavy rain, my house was literally shaking, I was scared that the roof might fall off, then a voice spoke to my spirit and said, do not be afraid, I have passed over you and your house. Nothing evil shall come to you. Immediately, I slept back. I woke up the next morning and called everyone I knew if they felt the heavy rainfall and thunder and everything I felt. Literally, everyone said NO. God knew what I needed, and He confirmed with his word. I have not fallen sick since then. My family has not been sick since then.
On another day, I wanted to make a very bad decision and I was questioning my faith. I was asking God why does it seem like I do not get what I think I need. I slept off asking God that question and as I woke up, God put a song I had not sung in a long time in my mind to remind me, the song is
‘My lifetime, I will give God my lifetime, If I give God my lifetime, He will take care of me. Then my spirit said, that is all the confirmation you need.
Give me your lifetime, make the right decision and I will take care of you. You see, God never left me stranded, even in the craziest question. God constant presence has been there.
2020 has been Gods year for me. Because everything that happened, I could not have imagined. God blessed me so much financially, I am in no debt, I have no outstanding, I have investment, I have spent lavishly, I have ventured into new things and been able to afford it. See, this is the iceberg, I cannot begin to describe this provision. God has blessed me.
Everything God laid on my heart to do has blossomed. God helped me start a community of young Christians where we work together to edify ourselves. We would be one year in January. We have a podcast, we have done outreach and God said He is not done because the plan He has laid out for this year, I am afraid sef, but I trust God. My coaching business is on the rise, God is bringing people to help me, God is helping me form structure. I am being called to facilitate far and wide.
God is literally just using me to show off.
My career ah, this one is another testimony that can take another 2pages, but God has been completely faithful.
I prayed at the end of the year that I wanted to be in the workforce of God. And on my bed, someone called me and asked me if I wanted to join God’s workforce. Since that, God has been using me to shine. I am involved in like three and I have done nothing to get there. God took what I said and decided to shower me with unthinkable blessings.
Finally, my relationship with God is my greatest win for the year. Ah. God built me up for his purpose. He moulded me into a perfect vessel. He is my father, my best friend, and my lover. We talk about everything and anything. I will take this testimony over any other one any day, anytime.
2020 for me has been Gods year. The year God took me and took care of me. And he is not done because wherever He leads, I follow. 2021, A new thing is happening. | https://medium.com/@nifemi-aikomo/2020-gods-year-my-testimony-47ebb677aae | ['Nifemi Aikomo'] | 2020-12-27 17:47:09.648000+00:00 | ['Testimony', '2020', 'Year', 'Faith', 'Review'] |
Galion integrates with Kyber Network to bring decentralized exchanges to its users, and welcomes Lee Hong Wong to its board of advisors | Galion integrates with Kyber Network to bring decentralized exchanges to its users, and welcomes Lee Hong Wong to its board of advisors Edouard Viguier Follow Jul 31, 2018 · 3 min read
We are pleased to announce that we are officially working with the Kyber Network team, one of the best and most recognized decentralized platforms in the ecosystem, and have completed the integration with its decentralized liquidity network to our MVP. From today, Galion users can exchange tokens against Ether, and also complete token-to-token transactions right from the Galion interface, using either Ledger or Metamask wallets.
At Galion, our mission is to provide our users with everything they need to manage their assets as efficiently as possible. To do so we have to integrate the best possible services of the crypto ecosystem to our platform. Kyber is the archetype of such a great product. We have been following Kyber since the very beginning, and always thought the depth of their vision, the technical quality of their team and their ability to deliver on their promises were astonishing.
As we have explained in our previous blog posts, we are convinced that integrating third party products into Galion is the only way that makes sense in a decentralized ecosystem. It allows users to benefit from the best of both worlds: a decentralized technical architecture, and a unified user interface and dashboard. Kyber is only the first of many services that we plan to integrate, and we chose Kyber because we believe they are among the very best at what they do.
We are also extremely glad to officially welcome Lee Hong Wong to our board of advisors. Lee Hong is a banking expert with a deep interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. He has been advising us and his counsel has already brought tremendous value to our project. He advises numerous successful and promising projects, including Kyber Network and Sentinel Protocol. The Kyber team, including Lee Hong and Loi Luu — the CEO of Kyber — and Galion share many of the same convictions on the future of economics, crypto assets, and the importance of user friendly solutions to democratize blockchain and crypto technologies.
Thanks to Lee Hong, Loi Luu and the KyberNetwork staff, we have been able to implement Kyber protocol in record time, benefiting from the guidance of the team and its technical assistance. The future is bright. Kyber shares with us a passion for their job, and constantly improves on what it builds. The token-to-token feature in Kyber was just released a couple of days ago, but the team is already working on what is coming next, and the story of our collaboration is only getting started. We are especially thrilled by their Gormos project, which will deliver the solution to the hybrid-DEX problem by harnessing the best of both sharding and Plasma and enable true, fast decentralized exchange of cryptocurrencies.
Adding exchange capabilities to our product has always been part of our dense roadmap. It is a necessary step. This integration is an important milestone for Galion: by adding Kyber to the Galion platform, it takes a major step towards its vision and gets closer to becoming the ultimate financial app. | https://medium.com/galion-io/galion-integrates-with-kyber-network-to-bring-decentralized-exchanges-to-its-users-and-welcomes-55db4ba50da0 | ['Edouard Viguier'] | 2018-07-31 12:04:27.303000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Kyber', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
The Month in Crypto — July 19. US Congress ask to halt Facebook’s… | US Congress ask to halt Facebook’s crypto project Libra, Visa and a16z invest in crypto security company Anchorage, BITPoint hacked for $32M.
The News
The US Congress asked Facebook to pause development on their controversial cryptocurrency project, Libra, citing regulatory concerns over the impact of a global currency controlled by a private corporation. theguardian
Japanese exchange BITPoint was hacked with $32M in various cryptocurrencies stolen. time
German Regulators approved a tokenised real-estate-backed bond. The Berlin-based company will offer USD$280M worth of tokens over the ethereum public blockchain. coindesk
Capital
Visa and Andreessen Horowitz have invested in a $40M series B round in the cryptocurrency security start-up, Anchorage. The start-up is positioning itself as a secure cryptocurrency wallet service for Facebook’s Libra coin. techcrunch
Sia, the company behind a decentralised cloud storage platform raised $3.5M round led by Bain Capital Partners with notable investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners also participating. sia
Shell invested an undisclosed amount in the start-up LO3. The company has built a blockchain to allow neighbours to buy and sell locally produced energy using the existing network of power cables. forbes
Kraken, one of the large US cryptocurrency exchanges, acquired Interexchange. The company is a leading portfolio reconciliation tool for institutional traders. kraken
Adoption
Fujitsu announced a digital ID system built on the blockchain to minimise fraud in online transactions. fujitsu
The Ugandan President announced a partnership with the medical blockchain start-up, MediConnect, in an effort to tackle counterfeit drugs in the country. verdict
The Australian supermarket chain IGA now accepts cryptocurrencies as a form of payment through a partnership with Travelbybit. fxstreet
Market:
After five months of gains, the positive market run has reversed and the market was down 8% in July. Bitcoin remained neutral and was only down 2% for the month, finishing with a global average of USD $10,015. Ethereum performed worse, ending July 24% down at USD $214. | https://medium.com/the-week-in-crypto/the-month-in-crypto-july-19-c121dabc21b4 | ['Alex Clegg'] | 2019-08-01 16:13:42.339000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'A16z', 'Bitcoin'] |
Oh Saaiyaan Lyrics Arijit Singh | Oh Saaiyaan Lyrics frm The Power this Top song singing at Arijit Singh, Raj Pandit and this Hits neww song is Starring Vidyut Jammwal and Shruti Haasan. Oh Saaiyaan song lyrics Kumaar and music Salim – Sulaiman and video directer Mahesh Manjrekar. Monichaudhary.in
Oh Saaiyaan Song Details:
Song Name: Oh Saaiyaan
Album Name : The Power
Singer Name: Arijit Singh. Raj Pandit
Lyrics By: Kumaar
Music By: Salim-Sulaiman
Starring Movie : Vidyut Jammwal, Shruti Haasan
Label: Zee Music Company
Mere Hathon Main H Ik Dua
Use Sun Rha H Wo Khuda
Ho Mere Hatho Msin H Ik Dua
Ho Use Sun Rha H Wo Khuda
Waade Mere Pakke Ve
Tere Liye Rakhe Ve
Umar Bhr Nibhawaa Changiyan
Oh Saaiyaan. Oh Saaiyaan
Sunle Tu Meri Arziyaan Haaaye
Oh Saaiyaan. Oh Saaiyaan
Sun Le Tu Meri Arziyaan
Tere Naal Mousam Sare Vekh Laan
Haaye Dhoop Hove Hove Chaahe Baarishan
Oh Rakhi Bs Mere Te Yakeen Tu
Haaye Yhi Bs Karda Ve Guzarishaan
Read Full Songs
https://monichaudhary.in/oh-saaiyaan-lyrics-the-power-arijit-singh/ | https://medium.com/@monichaudharyx/oh-saaiyaan-lyrics-arijit-singh-eda6599ddf9f | [] | 2021-01-13 03:42:06.562000+00:00 | ['Lyrics Of All New Song', 'Songs', 'Lyricsinhindi', 'Lyrics', 'Song Lyrics'] |
The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver | The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver
Myfather died of alcoholic liver cirrhosis four years ago. It came as a surprise to all of us, even though it was clear he had a severe drinking problem for decades. It was especially surprising to me, as a former nurse and a recovering alcoholic. You would think I’d know more about liver problems and alcohol use than the average person. But the truth is, in the months before his death, I had no idea my father’s liver was struggling at all. Most people know about cirrhosis, but few people know how a liver goes from early damage to end-stage liver cirrhosis.
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The combination of my father’s death and my personal background lit a fire in me to know more. He was admitted to the hospital on June 24, 2016, and he died on July 18. Only 24 days passed between the first sign there was a problem and his subsequent death.
Now, hearing that he was in end-stage cirrhosis didn’t surprise me, given his heavy drinking. What did surprise me was that he’d visited several doctors and specialists in the months before his death, and no one knew his liver was struggling either.
So what happened? Does end-stage liver cirrhosis really sneak up that fast? Were there other signs that would have alerted someone to his failing liver?
As for why the doctors and specialists didn’t know what was happening, that mystery resolved reasonably quickly. The plain truth is that alcoholics rarely divulge the amount and frequency of their drinking to their doctors. This was the case for my dad. He had many health issues that he was trying to solve, but he protected his drinking habit fiercely. So he refused to spill the beans, even when it mattered.
The problem is that liver damage has numerous multifaceted symptoms that are confusing and associated with many other illnesses. Unless a doctor knows that the patient is an alcoholic, they may not know how to interpret what’s happening until it’s too late.
As he was dying, my father told me that he didn’t think to tell the doctors how much he was drinking. He said it was as if he blanked out and “forgot” to mention it. As crazy as that sounds, this strange “forgetting” is a common part of the alcoholic mindset. It may also be due to the metabolic and physical changes of cirrhosis itself.
There are many signs of liver problems, but oddly, none seem to point to the liver at first. And in fact, many of the first signs of liver damage occur in other parts of the body. Knowing these signs may help educate alcoholics and their families if they want to understand their risk of developing liver cirrhosis.
Liver damage has numerous multifaceted symptoms that are confusing and associated with many other illnesses. Unless a doctor knows that the patient is an alcoholic, they may not know how to interpret what’s happening until it’s too late.
Digestive signs
The liver plays a huge part in our digestive process. It filters out all toxins from food as well as helping to break down fats and glucose.
When a liver starts to slow down due to significant damage, it will reduce its digestive work. Instead, it will divert its energy toward vital functions like metabolizing medications and filtering toxins.
This means that symptoms like bloating, nausea, vomiting, gas, and diarrhea will start to increase. Over time, eating becomes more challenging. In the later stages of liver cirrhosis, toxins that can’t be filtered out begin to build in the bloodstream, which causes more nausea.
Cognitive signs
Although confusion and brain fog happen in end-stage liver cirrhosis, they can also be early signs.
The liver is responsible for filtering dangerous substances in the blood. It also helps regulate hormones, blood glucose, and vitamin absorption. In the early stages of liver damage, these processes can be interrupted. Inevitably, this affects our brain and nervous system.
This means that early liver problems can make you feel tired, confused, slow, and foggy. You may have some memory issues as well.
Neuromuscular signs
The liver stores vitamins required for the functioning of many organs and systems in the body — one of them is vitamin B1 or thiamine. A deficiency in this particular vitamin has been documented in many alcoholics with or without liver damage.
Unfortunately, alcohol inhibits the absorption of thiamine in the intestine. Over time, as the liver becomes damaged, it can no longer store thiamine in enough quantities. Thiamine deficiency is responsible for many neurological issues in people with alcoholism.
Symptoms of thiamine deficiency range from mild to severe and include things like: confusion, mental fog, lack of balance, pain and numbness in hands and feet, muscle weakness, rapid heart rate, digestive problems, flushing, and involuntary eye movements.
Thiamine deficiency happens in almost every alcoholic who consumes frequent and large amounts of alcohol. And if thiamine deficiency due to alcoholism is discovered, you can be sure the liver is suffering damage at the same time.
Many of the first signs of liver damage occur in other parts of the body.
Vascular signs
All alcohol consumption can lead to blood vessel dilation, causing flushing in the face and hands. Over time, this can cause damage leading to permanent redness in the face. Although many alcoholics have rosacea or spider-like veins on their faces, this is often benign.
However, spider angiomas are different from rosacea or spiderlike veins. They’re circular and have a central point called a spider nevus that is darker than the rest of the lesion. Spider angiomas are a sign of liver disease and can be present in the early stages. They often progress to more extensive and more numerous lesions.
Spider angiomas are caused by increased estrogen levels in the blood. When the liver becomes damaged, it can’t properly metabolize estrogens, which causes them to build up in the body.
Many women who are pregnant or taking birth control pills may have a few spider angiomas. However, in alcoholic liver disease, these lesions are often more frequent and accompanied by red palms and varicose veins in the esophagus.
These are a few of the main signs of alcoholic liver damage that happen outside of the liver. It’s important to know this because most of us have no idea how the liver functions and how it communicates distress.
The liver itself doesn’t show signs like pain or swelling in the early stages of liver damage. This contrasts with other organs like the heart or stomach, where any damage will emit pain or symptoms directly from these organs.
What happens with liver damage is that its many diverse functions become interrupted, causing symptoms in other parts of the body. This may explain why most people never think they have a problem with their liver.
Unfortunately, patients with alcoholism are rarely educated about these issues. This is because they often don’t reveal their drinking, to begin with. And even if they do, the symptoms are widespread and complex, which makes patient education challenging.
My goal in writing articles like this is to help educate regular people about alcoholic liver disease to understand their health and make better decisions.
It’s hard to say if my father would have changed his drinking habits if he knew more about his vague and complicated symptoms. But I think having proper education would have certainly helped him understand his risks and health problems better. | https://medium.com/@benmnethiwilliam/the-first-signs-of-alcoholic-liver-damage-are-not-in-the-liver-4ac8801d862c | [] | 2020-12-19 12:44:52.033000+00:00 | ['Addiction', 'Health', 'Body', 'Alcohol', 'Mental Health'] |
How Sewer and Septic Systems Work in Your House | Sewer and septic system plays a vital role in people’s daily lives. How they work really depend on how they are designed. Both a sewer and a septic system are mostly built of concrete, clay, or steel. There are two main types of sewer systems: the sanitary and the wastewater system. They both carry out water and other waste materials out of homes and buildings to either a septic tank or a water treatment facility. These two sewer networks depend on sewer lines to keep the progress of the wastewater moving to a disposal system.
Let’s tackle more about how sewer systems and septic tanks work for homes.
Basically, the way that sewer systems and septic systems works depend on how an engineer or an architect designed it. They would also depend on the topography of the location.
The sewer pipes should be properly situated in a slope position to allow wastewater to move freely and continuously, while septic tanks is usually buried to the ground for a more stable position.
How Does a Well-Designed Sewer and Septic Systems Benefit Your Family?
A well-designed sewer and septic system help keep you and your family away from harmful elements like bacteria and molds from invading your home.
They would typically direct wastewater and other elements that carry these elements to the septic tank where they are deposited.
Inside a septic tank, there are three layers. These are the scum layer, which contains all materials that floats; the middle layer which clear water containing chemicals like nitrogen or bacteria.
These would often be free of any solid materials and would act as a fertilizer for the drain field. The last layer, which is called the sludge layer, is where all solid materials lie to the bottom of a septic tank.
Wastewater is disposed to septic tanks through a free flowing motion. Water would flow continuously to fill the septic tank, then clear water is displaced which would then flow out through the end of it and drains into an area that is big enough to absorb and hold water. The walls in the tank would then prevent scum or sludge from getting out in the drain field.
Gases are produced by bacteria in the septic tank after they break down any organic material that the wastewater have. These gases need and should not escape through sinks, because they do have a very bad smell. In order to prevent them from invading your home, P-traps are installed.
These sewer pipes hold water which forbids these gases from finding its way into your home. When a septic tank is flooded, these gases together with other waste materials are released, that is why ensuring that blockages in your sewerage system are extremely important, this is where Long Beach Plumbing can help you through our professional plumbing services.
Long Beach Plumbing: Professional Plumbing Services
Long Beach Plumbing offers a variety of plumbing services. We have the professionals who are well-trained, efficient, and skilled in sewer and septic tank problems. We are a dedicated groups of plumbers are the most desirable personnel to handle any type of work regarding sewer and septic tank issues.
Right from the beginning of your call with us, your problem is being resolved by giving you an assessment on how big the problem is. We can even give you a free quote on how much you’ll be spending to get the problem fixed.
The service we offer are 24/7 so whether it’s an emergency sewer and septic system issue, you can get in touch with us anytime. | https://medium.com/diy-plumbing/how-sewer-and-septic-systems-work-in-your-house-48576c1dc4ef | ['Sarah Lavinski'] | 2019-04-01 10:46:04.911000+00:00 | ['Plumbers', 'Plumbing', 'Septic System', 'Sewer', 'Home Improvement'] |
Hive Architecture in Depth | Apache Hive is an ETL and Data warehousing tool built on top of Hadoop for data summarization, analysis and querying of large data systems in open source Hadoop platform. The tables in Hive are similar to tables in a relational database, and data units can be organized from larger to more granular units with the help of Partitioning and Bucketing.
As part of this blog, I will be explaining as to how the architecture works on executing a hive query. Details such as the execution of queries, format, location and schema of hive table inside the Metastore etc.
There are 4 main components as part of Hive Architecture.
Hadoop core components(Hdfs, MapReduce) Metastore Driver Hive Clients
Let’s start off with each of the components individually.
Hadoop core components:
i) HDFS: When we load the data into a Hive Table it internally stores the data in HDFS path i.e by default in hive warehouse directory.
The hive default warehouse location can be found at
We can create a hive table and load the data into it as shown in below images.
ii) MapReduce: When we Run the below query, it will run a Map Reduce job by converting or compiling the query into a java class file, building a jar and execute this jar file.
2. Metastore: is a namespace for tables. This is a crucial part for the hive as all the metadata information related to the hive such as details related to the table, columns, partitions, location is present as part of it. Usually, the Metastore is available as part of the Relational databases eg: MySql
You can check the DataBase configuration via hive-site.xml
The Metastore details can be found as shown below.
Metastore has an overall 51 tables describing various properties related to the table but out of these 51 the below 3 tables are the ones which provide majority of the information, that in-turn helps hive infer the schema properties to execute the hive commands on a table.
i) TBLS — Store all table information (Table name, Owner, Type of Table(Managed|External)
ii) DBS — Database information (Location of database, Database name, Owner)
iii) COLUMNS_V2 — column name and the datatype
Note: In real-time the access to metastore is restricted to the Admin and specific users.
3. Driver: The component that parses the query, does semantic analysis on the different query blocks and query expressions and eventually generates an execution plan with the help of the table and partition metadata looked up from the metastore. The execution plan created by the compiler is a DAG of stages.
A bunch of jar files that are part of hive package help in converting these HiveQL queries into equivalent MapReduce jobs(java) and execute them on MapReduce.
To check if the hive can talk to the appropriate cluster. i.e for hive to interact, query or execute with the existing cluster. You can check details under core-site.xml.
You can verify the same from hive as well.
4. Hive Clients: It is the interface through which we can submit the hive queries. eg: hive CLI, beeline are some of the terminal interfaces, we can also use the Web-interface like Hue, Ambari to perform the same.
On connecting to Hive via CLI or Web-Interface it establishes a connection to Metastore as well.
The commands and queries related to this post are added as part of my GIT repository. | https://medium.com/plumbersofdatascience/hive-architecture-in-depth-ba44e8946cbc | ['Jayvardhan Reddy'] | 2019-02-06 09:46:58.437000+00:00 | ['Hive', 'Hadoop', 'Technology', 'Architecture', 'Big Data'] |
You are the blue collar, working man, hero master. | You are the blue collar, working man, hero master. You got me all riled up. I'm ready to see what this one will do. | https://medium.com/@kcwriter/you-are-the-blue-collar-working-man-hero-master-557b48255732 | ['K.C. Knouse'] | 2020-12-08 21:17:46.845000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Diary', 'Horror', 'Magic'] |
Black List writers on the craft: Characters (Part 4) | Over the years, I have interviewed 50+ Black List screenwriters. Over the next four weeks, I am running a series featuring one topic per week related to the craft of writing.
This week: How do you develop your characters?
Reading through all of the responses was a fascinating exercise. Once again, this group of writers demonstrates there is no one way to approach the craft. Their respective approaches to developing their story’s characters vary from highly intuitive, even instinctual to the conscious use of specific techniques and writing exercises. In all cases, the goal is the same: To make the characters come alive in the writer’s imagination and onto the printed page.
On Monday, we featured writers who start their character development process by focusing on real people. Tuesday writers zeroed in on brainstorming and the importance of asking questions about and to characters. Yesterday, we checked in with writers who use biographies as a tool for character development. Today, we see how some Black List writers use scene-writing to find a character’s voice:
Ashleigh Powell: “For me, how my characters speak informs a lot about who they are and how they see the world. Really nailing down that voice helps me shape their character traits from there.” Spenser Cohen: “One thing that I do when I first start writing is to put the outline aside and just start trying to find the character’s voice. I’ll give myself space to explore, and I just let the characters go. No one’s going to see it. No one’s going to read it. There’s no pressure. It’s their story, and I let whatever happens, happen. I’ll often make up a scene that’s not in the outline and might not even make sense for the story… It’s almost like a rehearsal before you jump in and start doing the real work. Just exploring. Often in these rough passes the characters start to take shape.” Julia Hart: “Just through writing the scenes of their dialogue. I write a ton and then I’ll cut a bunch of it out. I’ll write like seven lines where there needs to be one and just cut around that one right line and keep going. I find their voices by having them say too much, by writing down every thought that would be in their head and then cutting off the fat.”
No matter the writing, the goal is to get inside the character’s head:
Eric Heisserer: “If I need to develop the character further, typically that’s the harder work of trying to figure out what part of the story I’m not writing about. If I have to…and I hate it, but I’ve had to do this before…I will write act zero — what happens to a character before the story in my script begins — so I have a deeper understanding of where this character came from.” James DiLapo: “Whenever I struggled with lines in “Devils At Play” I would stop and would run the whole story in my head from the character’s perspective, trying to feel what they are feeling and thinking how they would. It’s not always easy. I think that’s probably the hardest element of screenwriting. You have to find a way to stretch beyond your own understanding and become, for a moment, someone who is so foreign to the way you live your life. In my experience, however, the more you do it, the better you get at it.”
Takeaway:
Feel free to write free. Free-standing scenes. Free-standing monologues. Give yourself “space to explore”. Write down “every thought” the character has and see what sticks.
For some writers, a character’s personality may shape their voice, however the inverse can work, too. Nailing down their voice can “shape” their character traits.
Do what you need to do to get inside their head. Feel what “they are feeling.” Think how “they would.” Write “act zero,” exploring what happened to the character before FADE IN. To riff off the name of this blog… go into the characters.
How about you? Do you write free-standing scenes to explore your characters? How do you go about finding a character’s voice? What do you do to get inside their head?
For Part 1 of this week’s series on character development, go here.
Part 2, here.
Part 3, here.
Tomorrow, we take up another angle on prep-writing as reflected on by Black List writers. | https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/black-list-writers-on-the-craft-characters-part-4-836dc07278b7 | ['Scott Myers'] | 2021-07-15 13:03:09.652000+00:00 | ['Screenwriting', 'Writing', 'Screenplay', 'Fiction', 'Writing Tips'] |
What You Must Know About Leadership Skills | Leadership may seem like something innate within certain gifted individuals, and which cannot be manufactured or duplicated. However, there are particular traits and qualities possessed by strong leaders that really can be learned and emulated to a great result. Review the tips found below and you can learn how to take the lead and achieve business success starting today.
Don’t let good talent go to waste. If someone is earning huge profits for your company, be sure to promote them, give them a raise, or, if you aren’t in a position to do those things, recommend the person to someone who is. If you fail to do this, you might find that the employee has left for your competitor.
Don’t make the mistake of ordering people around. That is not true leadership. The key to true leadership is to inspire those around you. You need to help them find their own voices so that they can go on to lead others. The entire journey they take with you is about their ability to know themselves better.
Prepare yourself thoroughly prior to meeting with the team. Consider any questions they might have. Develop solid answers for each of these questions. Your team is going to respect the fact that you have all the answers that they need. It also will save you significant amounts of time.
Conquer your fear. Fear can be a terrible thing for you to experience, especially if you’re a leader. Instead, start paying attention to what the fear is telling you. Learn to process it in a way that is healthy and in a way that urges you to move beyond the fear to something more.
Provide incentives for a job well done. Incentives are a great way to boost morale and productivity. If a team member works particularly hard on a project, reward them with a gift or cash bonus. Top leaders know that this can be quite effective.
Do not push people on your team too hard since this can result in doing the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish. Instead of giving them the motivation to do more work, it may make them feel demoralized. In turn, they will lose a lot of respect for you.
In order to be an effective leader, you need to stay in touch with your emotions. Do not allow yourself to make any of your positive traits turn negative. For example, if you are normally a very confident leader, do not allow added pressure to turn you into someone that is overly arrogant.
Do not be afraid to jump in and help. This is much easier if you work on-site with your team, but is possible from afar if you are creative. If any person from your team needs help, jump in and give them a hand. You may learn a lot from the experience.
Always listen to subordinates. Learning this skill is perhaps the most difficult and important requirements of a good leader. They can often take your ideas and goals and expound on them in directions you never would have thought of yourself. When you see that they have processed your ideas, keep an open mind for their input to maximize your potential for success.
Rehearse the behaviors and attitudes you wish to display as an effective leader in your mind. Try to create the most realistic vision you can. When the time comes, focus on putting the behaviors you practiced into action. This method is often used by athletes before a big competition or race.
Good leaders hire good people to work for them. If you refuse to hire individuals that you fear may become competition, you undermine your own chances for success. Search out people who are as passionate about your industry as you are and encourage their problem-solving abilities and reward their successes.
Strive for excellence. Don’t ever settle for “good enough.” Great teams always try to set the bar a bit higher each time. As a good leader, set high standards for yourself and make sure there are ways to measure them. Know what that standard is and hold others accountable to it. Don’t just evaluate their progress, but try seeking perspectives from those other organizations that inspire you. Learn from their experiences and try finding ways to make them work for your team.
Create goals and reward those who reach your goals. Setting up goals is much more effective than creating quotas. It is also a great way to boost morale in your team. You do not have to spend a lot of money on rewards if you are creative. However, if you really want to reward your team for good work, ask for a budget for rewards.
Leaders must separate what is currently happening vs what is inside their heads. They are indirectly related. If something is bugging you, get it off your mind. Try putting it down on paper, so that you free your mind for the business at hand.
Anyone in a leadership role should be concerned about trust. You must be able to trust your team or workforce, and they must also be able to trust you. Try having a meeting periodically with a small group, where trust issues are discussed, and solved. Look for good articles on the subject of trust in the workplace, and read them with your group, giving each other feedback and suggestions.
Be a good example for your team. Just like the parents of a family, you are who your team looks up to in your organization. Do not talk negatively about the company you work for or your bosses to your team. It sets a horrible example and may come back to haunt you.
You may feel as though leaders are born, not made. But, the truth is that leadership skills can be studied, practiced and honed to perfection by anyone willing to dedicate themselves to the effort. Keep the tips and advice you have just read close at and, and you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Please click the link if you are looking for leadership hiring solutions. | https://medium.com/@skartec.academy/what-you-must-know-about-leadership-skills-7fd59145c35a | ['Suresh Kalyanasundaram'] | 2020-03-03 07:21:03.413000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Leadership Hiring', 'Leadership Skills'] |
Racism, 2019 | Stop.
It’s imperative.
Saying you are not a racist
And being upset for being called a racist
Because you vote for racist politicians
And cheer on racist policy decisions
Is an example of white privilege
That blows minds and breaks bones
In the level of harm it creates
There is no distinction
No cause
For voting or supporting racism, homophobia, sexism, bullying
On the national, state, local, global, wide scale
And believing in the ideals and theories and justifications
Aka, in having racist tendencies
You cannot
In personal life
Separate
Your individual
Actions
Ideas
Beliefs
From what you support
Endorse
Are okay with
Allow
Cheer for
Vote for
Politically
You cannot smile and say you are positive
And that you value all people
When the one person you valued to lead us all
Is propped up by an agenda of genocidal dreams and fascist schemes
Harm will come
Harm will continue to come
Harm will never cease
You say you are upset
because we are calling your
racist behaviors and language racist
But you cannot notice
The connection between
That dude you love and cheer for
The fascist wannabe dictator
And his cuts to food stamps,
His concentration camps
His rhetoric of send them back
His consistent method of race-based attack
This nation is being set up
A cold stark fascists amusement park
Pointy white cones that used to be worn only after dark
Now the hoods are off and calling all the shots
Somehow you expect us to say well, not everyone who likes this guy is a racist
When that is all this guy is and does with this power and position? Be and do racist things.
Nah, bro.
Nah.
The mirror is calling you,
Take a look
Yes, that MAGA hat makes you look racist.
Take it off, look around, — connect the dots.
Change. Change. Change. Change. Change.
You think Anne Frank ways lying? You think Jesus was a joke? Nah bro, Nah.
You’re on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of woke.
Just because they won’t come for your first doesn’t mean they won’t come for you eventually.
What you allow to be done to the “least” will be how you are valued in the end.
Stop fueling the fire. Stop fanning the flames. Stop letting Fascism and Xenophobia happen in your name. | https://medium.com/justice-poetic/racism-2019-a9137cff8c01 | ['Jenny Justice'] | 2019-08-20 14:51:06.859000+00:00 | ['America', 'Politics', 'Poetry', 'Racism', 'Education'] |
Reflection on Amal Totkay | “Developing a growth mindset will teach you to embrace failure and find new ways of succeeding” Professor Carol Dweck’s theory of Growth mindset.
The 5 tips mentioned in growth mindset Toolkit have a great impact in all our lives. For me these tips are extraordinary as they are complete in their way as the first one talks about the conversation we do with ourselves and its impact on our working. Second is to get out of our comfort zone means to think out of the box, come out, struggle and grow. Third is to always make new habits. This is one of the traits of a growth mindset person. Fourth is to ask people about your idea and ask for their suggestions. Fifth is to be confident even if your work is not something you think is capable of taking you to new heights. You should be confident.
All of the above plays an equal role in developing our minds but I think to get out of your comfort zone and work hard makes this even more challenging. Also, engaging with people and asking for their advice opens up your mind and enhance your rough draft.
Above all I’ve personally starting taking peoples’ advice on one of my small startup which is not working right now but I hope it will soon reach to new heights as I am engaging with people and looking into their ideas which are more relevant than my own ideas. Implementing them with time will surely lead to success some day.
We must keep our eyes and ears open and grab every opportunity in life to make our lives better. These 5 tips will stay with me forever and I hope I get to explore all of these to make my future bright. ❤ | https://medium.com/@msiddiqui802/reflection-on-amal-totkay-2360cb709c08 | [] | 2020-12-23 18:15:10.585000+00:00 | ['Growth Mindset', 'Development'] |
JavaScript Algorithm: How to Find the Town Judge | Solution
The inputs are N as an integer and trust as a 2–D array.
To better understand the relationship between town judge and everybody, we can draw out the example:
Example 1:
1 has one-way connection to 2, and 2 doesn’t have connection with others. 2 doesn’t trust anyone, and everybody else trusts 2, so 2 is the town judge. It is a directed graph.
Input: N = 2, trust = [[1,2]]
Output: 2
Example 2:
1 and 2 both have one-way connection to 3, and 3 doesn’t have outgoing pointer connected to others. Which makes 3 the town judge.
Input: N = 3, trust = [[1,3],[2,3]]
Output: 3
Example 3:
2 has one-way connection with 3, but 1 and 3 have two-way connection. There is no element that doesn’t trust no one, so we return -1.
Input: N = 3, trust = [[1,3],[2,3],[3,1]]
Output: -1
So to make things easy to understand, we can say we are trying to find the element, who doesn’t like anybody, but is being liked by N-1 persons in the town. How can we keep track of the number of times an element likes and being liked? We use hash.
To calculate two different numbers of likes and being liked, we set the keys of hashes from 1 to N, so we wouldn’t miss any number. And we loop through the trust array to increment the count of likes and being liked according to the element order of the subarray. The code looks like the following.
The overall time complexity is O(n), and space complexity is O(n).
I hope this gives you some ideas of how to solve the similar problem. | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-to-find-the-town-judge-92f07c5b7570 | ['Gulgina Arkin'] | 2020-11-06 08:17:23.104000+00:00 | ['Leetcode', 'Algorithms', 'Web Development', 'Javascrip', 'Programming'] |
How to use Growth Marketing in 2021 | In order to appear the noise, it’s become significantly vital to have an advertising and marketing strategy that is innovative, repetitive, as well as compelling. An approach that not only assists with customer procurement, but one that is a breeding ground for virality, word of mouth, and natural growth.
This brand-new as well as effective means of building a devoted customer base has a name: Growth Marketing Service.
Allow’s have a look at what growth advertising and marketing involves and also see what it requires to end up being an effective development marketing expert.
What is Development Advertising and marketing?
Growth marketing is marketing 2.0. It takes the traditional marketing model and includes layers such as A/B screening, value-additive post, data-driven email marketing projects, SEO optimization, innovative advertisement copy, and technological evaluation of every facet of an individual’s experience. The understandings gained from these techniques are rapidly executed in order to attain robust and lasting growth.
What Makes Development Advertising And Marketing Different?
Typical advertising and marketing include “set it as well as forget it” approaches that burn with a set spending plan and expect the best. Believe Google Adwords as well as show projects with some basic advertisement copy. These techniques can be a fantastic means to construct web traffic to the top of your sales channel, helping to boost a business’s recognition and customer purchase, but that’s where the value dwindles.
Yet development advertising and marketing is additionally a stochastic procedure, like biological evolution. This implies there is a component of randomness to the techniques that might work. The only method to be specific about what will be a fruitful roadway to drop is to start tossing points at the wall and see what sticks.
High Qualities of Effective Development Marketers
The very best growth marketing experts are recognized to be:
Data-Driven
The days of choosing based upon gut feeling more than. Ditto to choosing based only on the making use of the HiPPO method (highest possible paid individual’s point of view). The modern-day growth online marketer dives deep right into the data to figure out what techniques are working and is comfortable making use of all the devices that permit such analysis.
Creative
If that was the perspective Airbnb had when they were trying to expand, they never ever would have developed the concept of giving totally free expert digital photography solutions to each and also everyone listing on their site. What some thought was crazy or unnecessary became an amazing engine for driving their development.
Development of Marketing vs. Development Hacking
While the terms “Growth Marketing” and also “Development Hacking” are frequently utilized reciprocally, there are some subtle differences between these roles at several firms.
Growth hacking services are more like professional consultants induced to fix a specific problem, and also to solve it quickly. They are entrusted, commonly on a small spending plan, with finding innovative solutions to tough problems. To a growth cyberpunk, the rate is whatever, as well as issues, require to be solved the other day.
Development marketing professionals have a tendency to take a longer-term strategy. They need to strategize on exactly how to scale several SaaS development metrics across various dimensions, and also just how to do so sustainably.
growth hacking services can be thought of as similar to day trading in the stock market. Sure, you can make money like that, however, it’s not necessarily mosting likely to be a stable income source for the long-term.
An efficient development advertising procedure distills the most effective characteristics of development hacking (particularly, the wish to believe outside the package to get a grip) down right into a lasting method based on rock-solid concepts. In that method, development advertising and marketing is the reverse of day trading — it’s spending for the long-term based upon data-driven metrics that are always being maximized.
Referral Website traffic
This is any kind of and all traffic that does not originate from a significant online search engine. So, social networks website traffic in addition to all the other sites linking to your web content.
This is the definition of viral web content. Tracking the quantity and also the source of all reference traffic will certainly assist you to maximize hereof.
You can utilize affordable evaluation to acquire an edge, such as checking your competitors’ interaction spikes on social networks and after that trying to turn around engineer their success.
On-site metrics
It’s always critical to recognize what’s really occurring on your website. You want to know where your visitors are coming from, what actions they are taking, and the length of time they are spending on the site. An additional crucial number to keep track of is your bounce price, as it’s a great sign of the importance of your web content or landing web page.
Goal: Obtain Leads & Improve Conversion Rate
All the visitors worldwide do not mean anything if they aren’t being converted into brand-new individuals. Here are the crucial locations to maximize.
Conversion Rate
What is the general conversion price of individuals involving your website via any kind of method? You should offer added examination to any kind of web pages that have actually significant drop-offs compared with other parts of the website.
Hubspot experimented with various web site layouts and also found one that doubled their overall conversion prices.
Touchdown Web Page Conversion Fees
What is the conversion price of individuals who hit your primary touchdown web page? There are numerous ways to maximize right here, such as tinkering with duplicate, design, and also format.
An intriguing location to experiment with is the size of the headline for the material you present on a landing web page. For instance, it’s been shown that shorter, punchier headlines generally carry out better.
To know more !
Resources -https://surajwebi7.blogspot.com/2020/12/how-to-use-growth-marketing-in-2021.html | https://medium.com/@surajmurali-webi7/how-to-use-growth-marketing-in-2021-a9b73450a4b4 | ['Surajmurali Webi'] | 2020-12-19 05:17:13.821000+00:00 | ['2021', 'Growth Marketing', '2021 Trends', 'Growth Strategy', 'Growth Hacking'] |
Lower Back Muscle Twist & Recovery | Purpose of this Article
Just to give the readers an awareness of how the scary lower back muscle twist or mechanical back pain happens and the path to recovery.
Self- Introduction
Do a desk job & casual long distance running(try and run 3 days week, have been doing it for last 9 years).During the lock down added regular weight training(strength training) to the routine.
What’s a Muscle Twist?
It’s one of the amazing defence mechanism of the body. When the muscle thinks that a particular motion or an impact could cause a damage to the underlying bone, it twists itself preventing the specific motion or impact from traversing further, thereby protecting the underlying bone. This is identical to the fuse blowing off in the faulty line of an electrical circuit, thereby protecting the rest of the circuit.Only issue is that muscle twist can happen during an innocuous movement, due to stiffness in the muscle and various other issues. Once the twist happens it takes a while for normal movement to be restored and the recovery process will be painful especially when its occurs in the lower back
As it happend to me
Dec 17th: Had to do long hours of work in an improper posture(as always) This made the back a bit stiff
Dec 18th: Ended up driving 130 miles(up and down) which made the back more stiff
Dec 19th: Woke up in the morning ok, did a bit of warm up and started doing weight training. Everything was fine, until the final set where I increased the weight to my max limit, nothing unusual. It was all good until I finished the lifting, felt better than usual. But as I was lowering the 32.5kg barbell and placing it on the floor, felt like a shock moving across my lower back from left to right. Straightaway felt soreness in my lower back on the left side and bending down was difficult. Was a bit insane at that point and did a few more reps albeit with lower weight.Decided enough is enough and wrapped up. Slowly it became very painful even to walk-around normally. Any basic movement involving the lower body(getting up from chair, bending down a tiny bit, climbing the stairs, getting up from bed)was very painful.
Got to terms with what was going on, decided to listen to the body and respect the flare up. Knowledge gained from reading about muscle twist in the past came in handy.But experiencing the same was completely different. Did gentle stretches for the lower back twice and carried on with usual errands.Thoughts of what if it was slip disk or a more serious bone injury did cross my mind. Decided to take one thing at a time
Dec 20th: Was a big struggle to get up from bed. It was more sore than previous day, a common “delayed onset soreness phenomenon” with all injuries.The common reason for this is, healing starts to kick in next day, with blood flow coming back to normal and the nerves start to feel more . Carried on with the usual errands and did the stretching exercises twice.
Dec 21st — Dec 23rd : Similar experience as previous day with a tiny bit easing. Carried on with office work, making sure I don’t do sit for more than an hour. I couldn’t anyway
Dec 24th: Could feel considerable easing of the lower back. Was able to walk around with considerable ease. Bending down a bit felt okay.Basic movements were at ease though soreness flared up when the strain was higher
Dec 25th: Was more at ease albeit for a few specific movements involving lower back. Was glad to that recovery has progressed to this stage. Good thing is I haven’t taken any pain killers, haven’t found them helpful in the past.Decided to try out a 5km run. Was a bit difficult to in the beginning, felt easier as I progressed and manage to complete the same https://www.strava.com/activities/4514705694
Path Forward
Plan to ease back into the usual routine in a weeks time. Hopefully it takes of well
Lessons Learned | https://medium.com/@winsaravananandroid/lower-back-muscle-twist-recovery-b7e0f518e80b | ['Saravanan Sivakumar'] | 2020-12-28 10:26:41.417000+00:00 | ['Running', 'Injury', 'Rehabilitation', 'Lower Back Pain', 'Weight Training'] |
What tree should we choose? | It is almost the holidays, and many people are setting up trees inside of their homes, and decorating for the festive season. One of the questions that our team has come into contact with and would like your personal opinions on is which type of tree to get. Should one opt for an actual traditional tree that comes from the soil, but ahs to be transported and/or might be thrown away after the festivities, or should one buy a plastic tree, that can be stored and reused again.
Personally, I have a plastic tree. I did this not because I consciously made the decision instead because I found it in my parents’ attic and wanted to make sure that we reuse everything before buying something new. Therefore, for me, the choice was easily made. Now my tree stands happily in my living room each holiday season and then waits for me in the basement until it comes out again. It requires no travelling, minimal effort, and until it can’t be used again, I will not throw it away.
No, of course, everyone has their own opinions, and I defiantly see the other benefits. If you buy an actual tree, it would have taken up the CO2 in the years that it has been grown, and if you buy a potted one, then you can replant it and reuse it next year. A win-win situation. Sadly, this is not how this often goes. After the holiday season, many people can see that there is an overshot of trees in the dump and that they are even left out on the streets. A friend of mine even mentioned that someone she knows burns their tree, releasing all the Co2 that the tree would have taken up, back into our atmosphere.
Therefore, my question remains, what is the best solution for this dilemma? | https://medium.com/@igreenboxnl/what-tree-should-we-choose-4af87730553a | [] | 2020-12-07 13:45:57.927000+00:00 | ['Holidays', 'Sustainability', 'Trees', 'Eco Friendly'] |
SARS LONGA VITA BREVIS | Consider the following narrative. It is one plausible hypothesis among other plausible explanations that are difficult to prove or refute because of the information war between the governments — mainly between China and the US, who both are the suspects and whose words cannot be taken seriously.
In 2014, a series of risky mistakes happened at US government laboratories dealing with highly dangerous pathogens.
In 2014, President Obama announced a moratorium on GOF (Gain-Of-Function) experiments that are creating new dangerous pathogens. Some researches that had been started already were allowed to finish.
In 2014, if not earlier, a new coronavirus was created in the bio lab, a virus able to infect human beings.
In 2015, the results were published in the journal Nature. It was told that as raw material, some bats’ natural coronavirus was used that was obtained from China, Wuhan bio lab. A chimeric coronavirus was created able to infect humans, against which no known medicament or vaccine helps. That virus could naturally arise in nature (How can they prove that?). While Chinese scientists participated in the study, everything else referred to the US, and probably that virus was created in the Fort Detrick bio lab.
Never forget. Superpowers can create such killing coronaviruses that look like natural.
In January 2017, Obama’s presidency ended, and Trump’s era began.
In December 2017, Obama’s moratorium on dangerous biological GOF experiments was ended.
In June or July 2019, the new coronavirus (SARS-Covid-2) accidentally broke out from Fort Detrick bio lab of dangerous viruses and bacteria. It was evident that the epidemic cannot be avoided and that sooner or later, it will be discovered that this is the epidemic of some new virus.
In July/August 2019, the Fort Detrick bio lab was closed (it was partially reopened some months later).
In October 2019, in the US, a simulation of coronavirus pandemic Event 201 was held.
In October 2019, also, more than 300 US militaries visited China, Wuhan military games. Some of them intentionally spread the virus in Wuhan. The aim was to hide the accident in Fort Detrick. The second aim was to economically harm China, as the US's economic harm was already predictable. This is in the context of an economic war between the US and China that Donald Trump had started before the virus outbreak.
In November 2019, the coronavirus epidemic appeared in Wuhan. US intelligence informed Israel about the new virus epidemic before Chinese doctors were able to detect it. Chinese intelligence immediately understood that the virus came from the US and could not publicly prove it. China intentionally sent the virus back to the west — to Europe and the US.
The US president, Donald Trump, waited with his reaction a few months and denied the pandemic because he aimed to make sure that he could convince people that the virus came from China. His second aim was to create hysteria and panic in the US and use China's card in his presidential election campaign, telling that China is guilty of everything and that only Donald Trump can save America from Chinese aggression. | https://medium.com/@eintalu/sars-longa-vita-brevis-52675da51d30 | ['Jüri Eintalu'] | 2021-01-25 14:06:31.401000+00:00 | ['Conspiracy Theories', 'Biological Weapons', 'Infowars', 'Coronavirus'] |
Unity is strength — A story of model composition | Introduction
Earlier this summer (August 2020), Criteo R&D teams proudly delivered the project codename “DRACuLa” into production, bringing a strong uplift of performance to our engine on our main business cases.
While trends are clearly leaning towards the “A.I.” (Artificial Intelligence) hype, this project demonstrates that a composition of simpler techniques can still beat the deep nets magic in specific cases.
Photo by Stephan Henning on Unsplash
Genesis — Why?
Since 2010, Machine Learning (ML) has been instrumental in Criteo business. While the type of ML model has its importance (Regression, Deep Neural Network, Decision Trees, …), two other major steps are of uttermost impact on the performance of the overall pipeline: the quality of the data collected in the first place and the so-called feature engineering. The later encompasses all data processing turning the history of interactions with the user, partner, publisher into a real-valued features vector suitable for consumption by the ML models themselves.
On the one hand, Criteo’s initial success relied on the Generalized Linear Model (a.k.a. Logistic Regression) for ML model and hashing-trick for feature encoding. While these tools enable Criteo to scale up and out reliably, their ML performance is now plateauing, and we believe Criteo has reached the limits of this architecture: finding useful features to keep adding to the model becomes increasingly difficult.
Figure 1: Number of features in model input over time
On the other hand features formed using counters of user events on various key dimensions and cross-dimensions combined with non-linear ML models are well known to yield improvements in performance. This architecture named DRACuLa (Distributed Robust Algorithm for Count Based Learning) has become an industrial state-of-the-art solution for search models and bidding models in advertising. It also relies on approximate counting with count min-sketch (CMS) to make the counting scalable and the models deployable online.
Anatomy — What?
Let us now review the characteristics difference between these two ML model families.
A- Logistic regression model
The historical model used at Criteo are the logistic regression ones: solving the Click Through Rate (CTR) problem by predicting the probability of a user to click on a displayed banner given the context. They have the nice properties to be easily computed (convex loss), to be able to operate in a high dimensional space using the hashing trick (thus handling high cardinality categorical features such as IDs — advertiser_id, publisher_id) and to be very fast at inference time (only needing simple dot product as seen on figure below). The huge number of examples available at training time (a few billion per day) is counterbalancing the high dimensionality of representation of the features to avoid overfitting at training time.
A simplistic way to think about these models is that they are very efficient at memorizing a given problem when exposed to enough data.
Figure 2: Logistic regression model (simplified)
The counterpart of this model family is the need for manual feature engineering on the data to achieve the best performance: numerical features must be bucketized to circumvent the linearity of the model, feature interactions (cross- features) must be found and specified explicitly by the data scientists.
B- DRACuLa models (decision trees + counters)
While decision trees (DT) are not a novelty (used in expert system for years), their application to Criteo’s context and available data is quite challenging: categorical features with many modalities are hard to handle (they would require very high depth of the trees).
Figure 3: Example of decision tree
The DRACuLa models are solving this issue by combining the decision trees with a specific encoding of the categorical features into numerical ones using mean encoding techniques: instead of using the specific modality of a given input dimension, we use the counts and ratio of the modality in regard of the target we want to optimize (eg.: click or non-click).
Table 1: Mean encoding of partnerId
C- Comparing the characteristics of each model type
In the table below, we summarize the main aspects of both model families:
Table 2: Model family comparison
Wrap up — How it went?
Our first hope was that the DRACuLa models would just plain outmatch the good old logistic regression ones: ability to express non-linear behavior & autodetection of cross-features were shaping a very promising challenger. First series of online A/B tests (pure DRACuLa vs. Logistic regression) turned out to be negative to neutral. Indeed, beating years of fine tuning and of feature engineering was not going to be an easy fight. Even if disappointing at first for our teams, they did not give up that easily: if the new models could not just outperform the old ones, would they be able to compensate each other’s weaknesses?
Following this idea a composition (here geometric mean) of both models was shaped in place using ensemble methods leaning on the hypothesis that using multiple learning algorithms would obtain better predictive performance than could be obtained from any of the constituent learning algorithms alone.
History proved this right, beating the production baseline with a whopping uplift on the whole scope of adaptative models!
Unity is strength — Open, Together, Impactful!
Credits to all R&D teams involved: ML Platform, Bidding, CAML, Arbitrage/PRE-Supply/Infra & EPMs | https://medium.com/criteo-labs/unity-is-strength-a-story-of-model-composition-49748b1f1347 | ['Loïc Le Bel'] | 2020-10-08 09:35:05.230000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Adtech', 'Criteo', 'AI', 'Data'] |
Add Interactive Sound to Your Nuxt Site | Intro
Recently, one of the most exciting things to happen to me was Sarah Drasner of Vue, Nuxt, SVG and animation fame tweeting about my website!
I’ve been really enjoying articles by @dparksdev, like this one about Nuxt Table of Contents with Active States. They’re well-explained, plus he has these nice touches on his site like little interactions you can play with! https://t.co/B34W0EztRF pic.twitter.com/llgCatwOTB - Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) November 16, 2020
It’s safe to say that was a crazy day. Out of all the kind words I received, the most frequent piece of feedback I received was about my sites interactions. It’s true that interactions like the battery under my table of contents or an interesting train add a sense of joy and intrigue to an otherwise bland site. It gets people to stick around and explore and in turn, read more of your content!
One excellent way to facilitate interesting interactions is by adding sounds.
I’ll admit it’s a bit jarring sometimes, so it’s important to allow the user to choose if they hear these sounds on your site, and then save their preference for subsequent page visits.
This article will teach you how to add sounds to your Nuxt site, and leverage localStorage to save their sound preference!
Setup
Thankfully, our setup does not require any external packages! We can use localStorage to save the users preference which is supported by all browsers, and built-in Webpack features to load audio files into our components.
For more info, check out the official Nuxt documentation on extending Webpack to load audio files.
First, let’s extend our Nuxt config to allow for loading sounds from our assets folder. Add the following lines to your nuxt.config.js file:
export default {
build: {
extend(config, ctx) {
config.module.rules.push({
test: /\.(ogg|mp3|wav|mpe?g)$/i,
loader: 'file-loader',
options: {
name: '[path][name].[ext]'
}
})
},
},
}
This will let us import audio files like new Audio(require('@/assets/sounds/zap.mp3')); for example.
Great! Let’s also go ahead and create a sounds folder inside of our assets directory to hold our audio files. If you'd like some sample audio to play with, feel free to check out the ones I am using currently on the site.
That’s all of our setup! Let’s write some code 🤓.
Initializing the user’s sound preference
The first time a user visits our site, we can assume that their preference is they want sound to be played. This is entirely up to you if you’d prefer it to be opt-in or opt-out!
We will be utilizing Vuex to initialize a global variable that we can access in any page or components computed properties!
Create a file inside if your store directory called index.js .
export const state = () => ({
isSoundEnabled: true,
})
export const mutations = {
initializeSound(state) {
const isSoundEnabled = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('isSoundEnabled'));
if(!isSoundEnabled) {
state.isSoundEnabled = false;
localStorage.setItem("isSoundEnabled", false);
} else if(isSoundEnabled) {
state.isSoundEnabled = true;
localStorage.setItem("isSoundEnabled", true);
} else {
state.isSoundEnabled = true;
localStorage.setItem("isSoundEnabled", true);
}
},
}
Here we setup a Vuex mutation that we can call inside of a page or components mounted hook to read from our localStorage and determine if we already have a preference saved, or if we need to initialize their preference for the first time.
Then, inside of a page, we can simply call this mutation as well as access the preference via our isSoundEnabled state variable!
<script>
export default {
mounted() {
this.$store.commit('initializeSound');
},
computed: {
isSoundEnabled() {
return this.$store.state.isSoundEnabled;
}
}
}
</script>
Toggling the user’s sound preference
Great! , what if we want the user to change their sound preference? We’ll need to implement another mutation that can allow us to edit this variable in our Vuex store as well as save the new preference to localStorage.
Go ahead and add to our index.js file in our store directory by adding the following method toggleSound :
export const state = () => ({
isSoundEnabled: true,
})
export const mutations = {
toggleSound(state) {
state.isSoundEnabled = !state.isSoundEnabled;
localStorage.setItem('isSoundEnabled', state.isSoundEnabled);
},
initializeSound(state) {
const isSoundEnabled = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('isSoundEnabled'));
if(!isSoundEnabled) {
state.isSoundEnabled = false;
localStorage.setItem("isSoundEnabled", false);
} else if(isSoundEnabled) {
state.isSoundEnabled = true;
localStorage.setItem("isSoundEnabled", true);
} else {
state.isSoundEnabled = true;
localStorage.setItem("isSoundEnabled", true);
}
},
}
Excellent! Now, we can create a method inside any page or component which will commit our toggleSound mutation any time we click on a button to change their preference!
<template>
<button @click="toggleSound">
Toggle my sound preference!
</button>
</template>
<script>
export default {
mounted() {
this.$store.commit('initializeSound');
},
methods: {
toggleSound() {
this.$store.commit('toggleSound');
}
},
computed: {
isSoundEnabled() {
return this.$store.state.isSoundEnabled;
}
}
}
</script>
Conditionally playing sounds
This is awesome! Now, any time a user interacts with a page element we wish to play sound from, we can first determine if the user has indicated they want to have sound enabled, and either play it or skip it entirely.
<template>
<button @click="playSound">
Play me!
</button>
</template>
<script>
export default {
data() {
return {
audio: null
}
},
mounted() {
this.$store.commit('initializeSound');
},
methods: {
playSound() {
if(this.isSoundEnabled) {
this.audio = new Audio(require('@/assets/sounds/zap.mp3'));
this.audio.play();
}
},
},
computed: {
isSoundEnabled() {
return this.$store.state.isSoundEnabled;
},
}
}
</script>
Wrapping up
As I said before, sound can be a great way to foster some truly unique interactions for your visitors.
This is just scratching the surface, but if you’d like a few more examples of unique sound interactions, be sure to check out Josh Comeau’s or Jason Lengstorf’s websites!
Thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed it please don’t hesitate to share on Twitter below! | https://medium.com/js-dojo/add-interactive-sound-to-your-nuxt-site-3917b0f31d99 | ['David Parks'] | 2020-12-14 04:40:07.907000+00:00 | ['Nuxtjs', 'Nuxt', 'Vuejs', 'Vue'] |
Progressivism is dead. Long live the conservative left! | The aftermath of the 2019 UK general election was undoubtedly a traumatic blow to the left — not least the British left — one that threw it into its most severe identity crisis for many years. Of course, one could be forgiven for pointing to this single calamitous moment of failure, but that would be terribly reductive. In reality, the left has actually experienced a decade of failure. In the days since the 2008 global financial crash, we have been consistently losing ground to the right in an era where the conditions for revolutionary change are once again emerging, and this is because we are seen, whether wrongly or rightly, as out of touch with the working class.
It is easy to see how they are right. In the time we should have spent building a working class movement, we have instead gone out of our way to alienate the working class, catering primarily to the students and the professional middle class instead. We have also wasted valuable time and resources on manufactured liberal causes such as the climate strikes (which will achieve nothing except empowering the green energy industry), remaining in the EU despite the public voting against that, attacking the cultural traditions cherished by workers, and policing the behaviours of the working class through political correctness and “unconscious bias training”. Taking the developments of the past decade into consideration, Labour’s catastrophic election defeat is merely the culmination of a decade of failure that many of us are only now beginning to see the gravity of. Since then, Bernie Sanders would go on to surrender the primaries to President-elect Joe Biden, in the vain hope that he and his progressive allies can push him leftward on policy.
So then, in order to find a way out of failure one must first ask the following question: why have we failed? There are of course many questions, although many have sought a single answer that they can combat with a readymade solution. The reality is that we had many problems. For one, many of us did not grasp that we are a movement first and foremost for the working class, and so there was a habit being made of refusing to engage with the working class in any way other than “vote for us, and if you don’t, then you must be a racist/sexist/homophobe/Islamophobe” and all the rest.
In terms of cultural politics, and this will be a major subject of this essay, many of us were all too eager to side with metropolitan bourgeois liberals on a great deal of issues, convinced that the traditional social values that many working class still hold dear are simply mould that must be scraped away to clear the way to progress. In one of the bitterest of ironies, they found themselves in agreement with the capitalist class, which, I must remind you are very much culturally liberal. One need only casually observe the proliferation of woke advertising, the embrace of intersectional politics by corporations (what intersectionalists call “rainbow capitalism”), the near constant promotion of feminism by bourgeois outlets, who portray it as an egalitarian movement even though it is actually female supremacism, and their promotion of previously fringe ultra-liberal positions such as open borders and fully legalised abortion. In addition to all this, they portray any sort of criticism of what I have just listed, even from a left-wing perspective, as reactionary and therefore suspect. This, of course, is a sentiment much of the left has bought into in its dismissal of the anti-identitarian/anti-woke left.
Related to the left’s failed cultural politics, their overall vision is a utopia in which there is no conflict and because of that there is no war and no need for weapons, let alone nuclear weapons. There are no rules or expectations that one must follow, no nations and consequently no borders, and all previous traditions are abandoned (after all, it’s just peer pressure from the dead ain’t it?). You don’t have to be offended by anything at all, especially not criticism of your behaviour by other people who, otherwise, have a live and let live attitude. We while away our days pursuing every impulse that happens to take over our senses, and work itself has been abolished, along with marriage and the family. Imagine living in a society permanently racked with Peter Pan syndrome and you should have an idea of what I am describing.
Their vision amounts to little more than the extrapolation of John Lennon’s Imagine into a political philosophy. Unsurprisingly, this vision has failed to win over the working class and has instead been co-opted and recuperated by a ruling class that has gradually liberalised in the five decades since that song was first recorded and pressed onto vinyl. The working class was entirely right to rebuke Labour and the left in its current state. They helped build the Labour Party and make it the fighting force that it was, and for their trouble the party spat in their eyes, and the left at large has done the same.
It also exposed, or rather reaffirmed, an uncomfortable truth for those of us in the class-first camp of leftism — that although economic conditions prevail over people’s lives, many people don’t vote based on economics alone. In other words, the slogan “it’s the economy, stupid” had been discredited here in Britain. People will also vote based on cultural politics rather than simply economics. The problem is that the left had sided unfailingly with metropolitan middle class liberals on culture against their working class base, and nowhere was this more pronounced than on the issues of Brexit and immigration. The left became the movement of Twitter, and after they lost, many failed to own up to the fact that Labour had lost because of its own failings. Instead they blamed the media, ascribing truly awesome powers of mind control to it, or they accused the vote of being rigged, or they simply blamed the public for being racists, the standard progressive canard to be deployed in the event of failure.
Progressivism and its Opposition
This leads us to my prognosis. In my view, cultural progressivism has been responsible for much of the lefts ills, for it is the ideological force that has commanded a powerful influence over the left for the past five decades. It commands such sway over left parties that it can bend those who wish to lead them to submission. Jeremy Corbyn was once a Eurosceptic until he became leader of the Labour Party, after which point the pull of progressivism was such that he suddenly felt the need to switch sides. Until his first campaign for the Presidency, Bernie Sanders used to be much more moderate on social issues, having supported gun rights in the 1990s and openly stated in the 1980s that class matters more than race or gender. Flash forward to 2020 and by now his views on social issues have fallen into line with Democratic Party orthodoxy, supporting gun control and endorsing Black Lives Matter, a movement whose sole function is to frame the issue of police brutality as proof of a conspiracy by white people to systematically murder black people so as to justify the neoliberal aim of remaking culture itself in their image.
It has also become painfully clear that progressivism, especially as exemplified by the New Left, is nothing more than a tool to legitimate bourgeois class rule, and this has been hardwired into its very ideological being from the beginning. Their whole ideology comprises of the destruction of traditional mores for no real reason other than they deem them “oppressive”, often on no basis other than the fact that they prevent them from gratifying every random desire they may have at the flash of a pan. To justify this aim, they have developed a framework of grievance politics wherein because the country itself is irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic or what have you, you have no obligation to the wider community in which you are situated. You owe nothing to it, and your very conscience compels you to repudiate it. We have been seeing this mentality in the New Left since the 1960s, where it proliferated in the black power movement. As Christopher Lasch wrote poignantly in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy:
Black militants encouraged racial polarization and demanded a new politics of “collective grievance and entitlement”. They insisted that black people, as victims of “white racism”, could not be held to the same educational or civic standards as whites. Such standards were themselves racist, having no other purpose than to keep blacks in their place.
When looking at the excuses people have made in defending the wholesale destruction of communities and businesses during the George Floyd riots, one cannot help but detect precisely this sort of attitude. It’s society’s fault that they’re rioting because society is racist, so the corollary goes. This is the framework that social progressives since the 1960s have used to justify their various provocations, disregard for and attacks on traditional values and mores, and wanton acts of destruction.
Whatever the purpose it was conceived for, this framework has proven itself to be a godsend to the bourgeoisie. Think about it for a moment. If society does not conform to your values, if it is racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever, and as such you believe not only that you have no obligations to it but also that your very conscience demands that you repudiate it, that is the perfect rationale for a ruling class that seeks freedom from any sort of allegiance to the rest of society. Rationally speaking it makes perfect sense that the people in charge, regardless of which party, have no loyalty to their country or the people who elected them, because they have already decided that they are morally lower than scum for their “outdated” or “repressive” attitudes. This sort of logic has freed them from any sort of internal accountability and enable them to rule with apathy, contempt, cruelty, and all the while in unparalleled decadence and depravity, an inevitable consequence of abolishing in your mind any concept of shared morality, which the new generation of bourgeois has conveniently deemed “oppressive”.
Because they also subscribe to this worldview, the progressives make for natural allies of the ruling class, and often they work in tandem in legitimising various neoliberal policies using identity politics. Think of the many times you’ve heard a progressive say you’re racist for criticising mass open border policies, or that you’re a misogynist because you believe a foetus has a right to live, or that it’s worth destroying the economy with a draconian lockdown restrictions because black and brown people are more at risk of dying from COVID-19. The point is that progressives make for the best defenders of neoliberal capitalism because progressivism not only leaves them defenceless against such co-option, but also primes them to not have an iota of concern for the wider society.
Invariably, once progressives gain political power they end up acting exactly like their neoliberal masters, which brings us to perhaps the best evidence that progressivism serves only to legitimate the establishment: the “great unmasking” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the squad”. Despite running on a platform of universal healthcare, when she heard the call to abstain in her vote for Speaker of the House in order to pressure Nancy Pelosi into holding a House vote on the policy, she refused, and to this day she repeatedly makes excuses for her refusal to live up to her campaign promises, with the rest of her progressive colleagues notably silent. The election is due in a few weeks, but already her decision poses a mortal threat to the credibility of progressivism. If she votes for Pelosi (for a second time no less) she will have killed it for good. Even if she decides to listen to her left-wing critics, the damage has already been done, and indeed increasing numbers of people are growing wise to how the progressives turn out to be neoliberal stooges. This trend will be accelerated by the treachery and cowardice of the congressional progressives.
Against this there have been many groups trying to oppose the woke, progressive left. First there was the “anti-SJW community”, but unfortunately they fell prey to internal divisions and subversion by the right. Then there was anti-idpol left: that is to say the part of the left that opposed identity politics. But many of them never seriously opposed the progressive worldview as I laid out, and so most of them ended up defaulting to the prevailing progressive current while trying to divorce it from identity politics. These leftists often uncritically supported Labour under Corbyn, even though by the time of the election they had become the bastion of the woke left in British politics, ignoring the identity politics, the Europhilia, and the anti-semitism which had been allowed to run rampant (they often denied it even existed despite evidence to the contrary). Those that didn’t either jumped ship to the woke left or sank into extreme reaction, often in the form of unironic National Bolshevism, or perhaps one of the other assorted fascisms in red garb.
The rise of crypto-reactionary tendencies in the online left, such as National Bolshevism, Dengism, Juche or the accelerationists, can be at least partly explained by the fact that these people were at some point leftists who despised the cultural progressivism rampant in the left, but still bought into that distinctly progressive notion that they owe nothing to their community because they hold that society itself is still guilty of some kind of sin. If they cannot stand the thought of associating with liberal progressives and their left enablers, but neither can they abandon this nihilistic framework wherein they can freely dismiss society itself as illegitimate, the only available route for these erstwhile radicals was always going to be the path of esoteric reaction, because it is precisely this path that allows them to remain free from any sort of attachment to the society around them, or even any kind of common morality. It enables them to preserve their detachment from the common man, with the added bonus that now their amorality is subject neither to progressive nor conservative standards. Thus it is no surprise when we find out that behind closed doors, they turn out to be many magnitudes more depraved than the progressive libertines they posture against. Scratch a reactionary of any kind and you almost always find a degenerate.
Today, we are now seeing a new development, the rise of a socially conservative left, which represents the next phase in the opposition to the woke left. In Britain, there are two manifestations of this tendency that are emerging to prominence: the Workers Party of Britain, founded by the BXP-supporting opportunist George Galloway, and Blue Labour, a pressure group within the Labour Party which, sadly, is mostly either utopian socialists or simply social democrats with culturally conservative views. While I prefer Blue Labour to the Labour Party proper and the WPB (which, given Galloway’s appointment of Joti Brar to deputy, seems to be a Stalinist front organisation), I think what the left needs is a new social vision beyond the Labour Party, and the aim of this essay is to outline a real, independent alternative to the hackneyed and tired visions of old.
I call it Conservative Marxism, so named because it is concerned with the maintenance and survival of our human community and its values for future generations, but remains true to the economic and philosophical ideas of Marxism. It is also communitarian in spirit because it recognises both the individual and the collective, emphasises the link between them and pursues the unity of both. It is humanist because it believes as one of its core values in the dignity and agency of mankind. Because it holds communitarian solidarity as one of its highest values, it rejects attempts to split the working class. We see this emphasis on individual group identity — what we call identity politics — as an attack on solidarity, an attempt to distract the working class from uniting against its true enemies, the capitalists who exploit them.
We are social conservatives because we seek the preservation of values and traditional forms of solidarity and values that have held communities together and shielded us from the myriad social ills plaguing us today, but more importantly, we are socialists because we understand that it is capitalism which is the greatest threat to these values and to our society, and view socialism as the only effective means by which to save that which we value.
Conservatism or Reaction?
Since “conservatism” tends to be a very charged term with varying implications, the first task of this essay is to define what is meant by conservatism. Most people, especially Americans, when they think of left and right, believe that the two poles represent both economics and social views at the same time. Thus to them leftism is a package of economic interventionism and cultural progressivism, while rightism similarly is a package of free market capitalism and cultural conservatism.
This is of course false. The left and right poles solely represent diametrically opposite economic positions, especially pertaining to property relations, with the left representing social or joint ownership of the means of production and the right representing private ownership of the means of production. This is not a definition that I have plucked from the sky. It is in fact the accepted mainstream position throughout Western Europe, the part of the world where I live. As noted in The Government and Politics of France by Andrew Knapp and Vincent Wright:
The politics of class is the single most common factor dividing Left from Right in West European political systems, with the former seeking social justice through redistributive social and economic intervention by the State, and the latter committed to defending capitalism and private property (and, it would argue, prosperity) against the threats thus posed.
One can be left-wing and also hold socially conservative views, just as one can be right-wing and also hold socially progressive views. In fact, anarcho-capitalists stand as proof of this, being hardline rightists as far as economics is concerned, while also being ultraliberal where culture is concerned.
Next, one must delineate between a conservative and a reactionary. A conservative in the strictest sense is one who is, for any given reason, skeptical of or averse to change. They wish to preserve existing values and institutions in their current state, and therefore oppose attempts to change them. Above all else, the conservative values social stability and the preservation of that which currently exists, but what one wishes to conserve depends on the type of conservative you ask. In fact, I would argue that the desire to preserve democracy, equality, liberty, human rights etc., all these things that liberals say they cherish, is by definition conservative, in the sense that you want to preserve these for future generations.
This is incidentally how I define my formulation of leftist conservatism, but I am not alone in this left-wing conception of conservatism. In 2008, political philosopher Gerald Cohen gave a lecture entitled Rescuing Conservatism, in which he argued that the preservation of things we may cherish will require some kind of radical change.
Note further that wanting to conserve the valuable, even wanting to keep things that have increased in value as a result of tradition, is not wanting to keep things as they are as such, where that means wanting to preserve the status quo, an existing social and political situation. That’s too undiscriminating a characterisation to be named the proper object of conservative concern, and in order to preserve valuable things in the status quo we might have to revolutionise our situation. To keep the pictures safe we might have to tear down the charming but damp and draughty old museum and build a new one.
Of all people Noam Chomsky, a libertarian socialist, argued that there is a sort of conservative spirit to the radical left insofar as they wish to preserve the values of the Enlightenment from the ravages of capitalism.
The term conservative used to mean something like ‘classical liberal’, the conservative believed in classical liberal values, values of the Enlightenment, the values of Adam Smith, David Hume and others. I think there’s a lot, I mean I don’t agree with them on everything but I think there’s a lot of value in those views, in the Enlightenment conception, and in fact I think in many ways a lot of the anarchist movements, including the anarcho-syndicalist wing of it, grew out of these classical liberal ideas. That’s not my original view incidentally, one of the leading anarcho-syndicalist thinkers Rudolf Rocker pointed out I think with some plausibility that, as he put it, classical liberalism was destroyed when it was dashed against the rocks of capitalism, which undermined it, and anarchism is a natural outcome of that, which tries to capture the fundamental ideals and realise them in a modern society.
While I am certainly not an anarchist of any variety, I very much relate to this vision. In my view one of the core goals of the Marxist left has always been to realise the aims of the Enlightenment that could not be fully realised under capitalism. In fact, Marx and Engels saw themselves as building on the achievements of the Enlightenment, arguing in The Holy Family that the materialist current of the French enlightenment lead directly to socialism and communism:
Just as Cartesian materialism passes into natural science proper, the other trend of French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism. There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original- goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.
Lenin also provides us with a case for preserving aspects of the previous culture in the formation of the new one, and in The Tasks of the Youth League he reminds socialists that:
Proletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist, landowner and bureaucratic society. All these roads have been leading, and will continue to lead up to proletarian culture, in the same way as political economy, as reshaped by Marx, has shown us what human society must arrive at, shown us the passage to the class struggle, to the beginning of the proletarian revolution.
That covers the conservative mindset. The reactionary, meanwhile, is something quite different. The reactionary attitude towards social change is not mere skepticism, but antipathy and hostility towards it. They believe in a prelapsarian vision of society based on what it was supposedly like in the past (whether it really was that way or not does not bother them), and they despise the fact that society as it currently exists does not match this vision. Hence, the reactionary seeks to upend the existing social order and transform it into one that matches their fantasy, and to that end they seek to reverse the gains made by progressive movements engaged in democratic struggle, and they would remove any laws and institutions that serve to uphold and maintain the society they so despise.
There is no one type of reactionary either. Many right-libertarians (including anarcho-capitalists) may be very liberal in terms of social issues, but even if they aren’t, what matters to them is that they want to minimise or even abolish state intervention on the economy. They are reactionary because they wish to return to a time when there were few if any labour laws, or safety regulations, or competition laws. What they want is a return to 19th century Britain, for want of a better example, when we were one of the least regulated countries on Earth. If the right-libertarian kind of reactionary was a principally economic one, the right-authoritarian kind is primarily a social one. They might not care so much about the question of how much regulation the market should be subjected to, for what they want is a nation that adheres strictly to a certain set of prescribed values. What is most important to them is nation, family, sometimes God, and sometimes also race, and so they seek to roll back all the gains made in terms of civil rights, sexual freedom, religious freedom and so forth.
Some of these reactionaries may be inclined to attack neoliberal capitalism itself because they have realised that an unfettered free market is not exactly an ally of their cause. Many of these reactionaries want a return to before the 1960s, but some of them would prefer to go back to medieval feudalism, a time where class-based exploitation was still rampant, most people were illiterate, and where most people didn’t live past 40, but I’m told none of that matters because you had the church, strong parochial communities, and at least you didn’t have to deal with whiny woke liberals on a daily basis, and also something something “consoomers”.
One thing I find thoroughly ironic is that both conservatives and reactionaries often claim to defend traditional values while supporting an economic system whose own perpetuation depends on destroying them precisely because they impose some limits on the personal accumulation and global penetration of capital. It is because they are reconciled to defending capitalism and its values that for the longest time they had consigned themselves to the values of the capitalist, namely the rugged individualism supposedly attributable to the pioneer spirit. In the 1980s, Christopher Lasch had caught on to precisely this contradiction in mainstream conservative thought, which was in his time and remains today based in neoliberal market fundamentalism. As he wrote in What’s Wrong With the Right?:
Not only do conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism, they have a distorted understanding of the “traditional values” they claim to defend. The virtues they want to revive are the pioneer virtues: rugged individualism, boosterism, rapacity, a sentimental deference to women, and a willingness to resort to force. These values are “traditional” only in the sense that they are celebrated in the traditional myth of the Wild West and embodied in the Western hero, the prototypical American lurking in the background, often in the very foreground, of conservative ideology. In their implications and inner meaning, these individualist values are themselves profoundly anti-traditional. They are the values of the man on the make, in flight from his ancestors, from the family claim, from everything that ties him down and limits his freedom of movement. What is traditional about the rejection of tradition, continuity, and rootedness? A conservatism that sides with the forces of restless mobility is a false conservatism. So is the conservatism false that puts on a smiling face, denounces “doom sayers,” and refuses to worry about the future.
In this light we can conclude that conservative values, just as with Enlightenment values, can only truly be realised with the help of socialism, and that is the purpose of conservative Marxism.
What’s Worth Conserving Anyway?
Now that I have ably demonstrated the difference between a conservative and a reactionary, the next task is to demonstrate the conservative character of my particular vision of the left, and why it is neither threatening nor contradictory to the leftist world outlook. For starters, I wish to preserve the following:
Liberty : I believe that one of mankind’s greatest needs is the freedom to think, speak and live their lives free from oppression and exploitation.
: I believe that one of mankind’s greatest needs is the freedom to think, speak and live their lives free from oppression and exploitation. Democracy : I believe that the political destiny of a country and its people must be in the hands of the people themselves, and their will should be respected by those who rule them, whose power democracy is to keep in check.
: I believe that the political destiny of a country and its people must be in the hands of the people themselves, and their will should be respected by those who rule them, whose power democracy is to keep in check. Egalitarianism : I believe that everyone should be considered an equal first and foremost by the law, but also in the eyes of others.
: I believe that everyone should be considered an equal first and foremost by the law, but also in the eyes of others. Reason : I believe that the way mankind arrives at the truth by thought based on new or extant information and practical facts, and that such a world outlook is essential if we wish to avoid sliding into paranoia and barbarism.
: I believe that the way mankind arrives at the truth by thought based on new or extant information and practical facts, and that such a world outlook is essential if we wish to avoid sliding into paranoia and barbarism. Secularism : Although I am a Christian socialist, I believe that the state should allow religious pluralism, and that separation of church and state is essential for the prevention of theocratic dominion.
: Although I am a Christian socialist, I believe that the state should allow religious pluralism, and that separation of church and state is essential for the prevention of theocratic dominion. Community : I do not believe that humans can live their lives atomised and alienated from their fellow man, at least not without going through the horrible experience of isolation. Human beings need communitarian solidarity, be it the family, local community, or the national community, or the international community.
: I do not believe that humans can live their lives atomised and alienated from their fellow man, at least not without going through the horrible experience of isolation. Human beings need communitarian solidarity, be it the family, local community, or the national community, or the international community. The rule of law : I believe that all members of society, from the bottom 99% to the top 1%, are bound by the same laws and statues that govern society, without exception.
: I believe that all members of society, from the bottom 99% to the top 1%, are bound by the same laws and statues that govern society, without exception. Humanity: I have faith in the ability of mankind to change the world around it for the better, that it is capable of mastering the forces of nature for our benefit while also protecting our natural world. Their role in this regard must not be challenged by machines. Furthermore I believe that a socialist society must meet not just the economic needs of man, but their political and spiritual interests as well.
The central message I am putting forward to those who genuinely care about these values is that these values will always be under threat so long as capitalism remains the prevailing economic system. Under capitalism our civil liberties are continuing to be eroded in the name of “national security” or fighting “hate speech”, and democracy continues to be subordinated to the interests of capital. Under capitalism we still live in a profoundly unequal society, primarily in the sense of wealth inequality, but also in the sense that minorities are still widely mistreated, and antipathy towards the very idea of egalitarianism is being fomented in the name of identity politics. Capitalism will always threaten reason with its promotion of idealist theories and encouraging of pseudo-science, and the social breakdown that capitalism has presided over has led to the rise of increasingly fantastical conspiracy theories proliferating among the masses desperate for an explanation for their very real problems.
Because it is willing to use reactionary religious forces to preserve itself, it cannot be trusted with the defence of secularism. Because capitalism attacks the very things needed for the functioning of whole communities and atomises us from our fellow humans by all available means, as well as attacking the family, it will always be the enemy of community. Because capitalism is a system designed by the bourgeoisie for bourgeois interests, there will continue to be people who are exempt from the law even though we are told it applies to everyone.
Finally, capitalism devalues humanity itself by reducing human beings to expendable commodities and production units, and is actively seeking to do away with us entirely with the advance of automation and AI. It also threatens the very survival of humanity as a species with its continued use of the environment as a sceptic tank for the waste produced by its constant production of goods for profit. Only socialism can change this horrid state of affairs, and it is only through the revolutionising of the economy that socialism offers that all that I believe should be preserved can be preserved, in much the same way Gerald Cohen outlined.
My issue with much of the left is that depending on who you turn too, much of the left has little appreciation for these values. Intersectionalists rubbish the idea of genuine egalitarianism, deeming it bigoted nonsense because it supposedly ignores women and minorities. Many in the intersectional left are quite happy to turn a blind eye to corporate violations of free speech under the delusion that only right-wing and reactionary voices will be marginalised, and there are plenty of self-identified Marxists (especially Stalinists) who have nothing but contempt for the concept of liberty, democracy and reason, often viewing them as bourgeois fantasies. Don’t even try talking to the anarchists about community or rule of law, for to them that’s just fascist claptrap. A few leftists even dismiss the idea of secularism because they associate it with new atheists who have turned reactionary, and many leftists oppose humanism entirely, probably because it imposes certain constraints on their authoritarian impulses. They might, however, appreciate my Christian socialism if they’re familiar with Liberation Theology.
The philosophy that I expound here is an alternative to these modes of leftist politics that I find to be unserviceable for the interests of humankind because they are indifferent to some of its greatest achievements. It offers a new outlook, one that seeks to conserve the values that I believe most people still cherish, or at least value enough that they do not want to see them disappear.
It is also not an economistic vision either. Although it recognises that class and economics drive the very fabric of society, and therefore solidly takes the class-first approach, it does not follow that we ignore the other issues, and nor it does it presume the fanciful notion that if we only change the economy then we will automatically arrive at a land of peace and freedom, for history has shown that to be a delusion. If my more socially progressive critics are correct on one thing it’s that a movement seeking to change the world cannot solely focus on one aspect of life. Indeed, in his essay The Present Human Condition, Erich Fromm demonstrates precisely where focusing only on changing one aspect of the human experience went wrong.
But any attempt to change only one section of life, the human or the spiritual, is doomed to failure. In fact, progress that takes place in only one sphere is destructive of progress in all spheres. The Gospel concerned only with spiritual salvation led to the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church; the French Revolution, with its concern exclusively with political reform, led to Robespierre and Napoleon; socialism, inasmuch as it was concerned only with economic change, led to Stalinism.
The point here is that the economics of a society is not the only thing we should seek to change. You can have a society in which the economic needs of the people are largely met, and yet if the people do not enjoy political freedom then in a broad sense we cannot say their needs are being fully met. At the same time, just as man cannot live under the yoke of an iron fist, nor can they live in a condition of depravity and moral decline, such as what we experience today. What we want to change is not just an economy in which the working class are alienated from the fruits of their labour, but also a condition in which the political freedoms we enjoy are increasingly curtailed, and a culture of narcissism that sacrifices communitarian solidarity and meaningful relationships on the altar of hedonism and grievance. If we are to defend the values laid out earlier, then we must build and preserve a society that is capable of preserving them, and that cannot be found in totalitarianism or anarchy, nor in puritanism or hedonism.
What I am talking about is a different kind of politics, one that genuinely cares about the things conservatives profess to be in the interest of preserving, and can be a real alternative to not only the decadence of the culturally progressive left, but also the nihilism of the crypto-reactionaries posing as leftists, the fossilised remains of Stalinism, and fascist reaction.
What Does This Vision Entail?
The exact policy details I have in mind are, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this particular essay, and will have to be covered separately. Instead, I intend to give you a brief outline of my particular vision on given issues.
Regarding economics, I believe we need an economy which has worker ownership of the means of production as its primary goal and also seeks to maximise human freedom. The ideal examples in my view would be the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with its system of self-management, East Germany with its incorporation workers councils into a planned economy model (I refer to the New Economic System), the “goulash communism” of Kadar’s Hungary , and Chavist Venezuela with its aim of achieving the communal state (and when I say Chavist, I do not refer to Maduro because he has by and large abandoned socialism at this point). However, my aim is not to copy them exactly, and I believe some of my fellow conservative socialists have other economic ideas that they would like to contribute. My point is that our socialism should build on these ideas in order to realise a socialism for today’s world, and part of that requires shedding old dogmas of the market. The market is neither a God nor a Satan, but rather a tool for facilitating exchange. What capitalism does is elevate it to a false idol to whom grotesque sacrifices may be made to appease it. What we want is to put this tool in the hands of the working class. It should also entail the expansion of democracy into the workplace, so as to give workers real power in their daily lives.
Whilst I maintain that I desire a secular government, I reject the old-fashioned leftist view that religion itself should be scrapped. In fact I have come to realise that religion gives people’s lives meaning beyond the here and now and hope in times of darkness, and the failure of attempts by communist governments to stamp it out shows that this need will assert itself long after capitalism is overthrown. Religion provides a moral code that serves as a bulwark against the worst impulses of the capitalist, and throughout history has shown itself to strengthen communal ties. This is the reason capitalism has been so fervent in attacking it, because religion stands in the way of capitalist profit-chasing, and offers a meaning to life other than consumption and acquisition.
In a country such as Britain, where we have historically had a Christian culture, the best choice is to draw on that, but what also makes Christianity the ideal choice is that the story of Christ is ultimately the story of the son of man rejecting the hallucinations of the established power and authority, and in this son of Man becoming God it gives man hope that they can redeem themselves (and indeed I subscribe to Debs’ view in Jesus, the Supreme Leader that the source of Jesus’ divinity is that he is “supremely human”). That Jesus Christ has survived two millennia of disfigurement and emasculation by the powerful stands as proof that Christ is the greatest revolutionary of all time, and indeed the Bible itself even contains numerous passages condemning the lusts of the capitalists and affirming socialist politics. For example in Acts you get a picture of the ideal society according to the early Christians, in which “all the believers were together and had everything in common.” (Acts 2:44), and this is later reiterated “all the believers were on in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had” (Acts 4:32).
Our acceptance of reason and science must not give way to scientism, the view that scientists are infallible and that we should define normative values based on their judgment. We must reject the mentality of accepting things as morally acceptable just because a scientist or an “expert” says so. Remember that there was once a time in which scientists and experts believed sincerely that black people were the equivalent of apes, or that mercury was safe and could be used as a cure for syphilis, or that eugenics is morally acceptable.
Being that I am a Christian socialist, I subscribe to the consistent life ethic, which entails opposition to abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, and wars which are fought without a just cause, in keeping with the sixth commandment: thou shall not kill (Exodus 20:13). We do not believe as the capitalists do that human life is expendable, and nor should the state have the power to kill.
For the high crime of opposing open borders, I have in the past been slandered as a racist, a fascist or a white nationalist by people who have absolutely no idea what my personal politics are. In reality I have never advocated for closed borders except during the emergency case of a global pandemic where it becomes absolutely necessary, and merely want the borders to actually be enforced in a fair and humane way. I have also opposed of racism and bigotry, and hold that just as “there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28). I believe that we must treat immigrants with compassion and as part of that we should help them acclimate to the host country they wish to live in and to become full citizens. Rather than continue mass immigration policies as presently implemented, we should seek to make the various refugees and asylum seekers’ countries of origin safe for them to return to. Only once that has been accomplished can we consider returning them to their countries of origin. That is why we must seek an end to the militarist foreign policy of the neoliberal era, which destroys and destabilises nations in pursuit of profit, and demonises their victims.
Relatedly, I oppose the selfish politics nationalism, which seeks to blame foreigners for the poor lot of native workers, and therefore entirely well-suited as a defence of capitalism. At the same time, we should not encourage hatred for one’s own country, or the notion that our country is uniquely evil. Instead we must promote socialist patriotism, which entails loyalty not on the basis of race but on the basis of a shared socialist vision. This patriotism is also internationalist in character because the socialist patriot also aspires to deliver socialism to all the peoples of the world, and recognises that it is in our country’s interest to seek fraternal relations between the countries of the world where possible. As Erich Fromm put it in The Sane Society:
Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
I believe, just as Lasch, Horkheimer and Hegel did, that the family unit is a bulwark against the dehumanising effects of monopoly capitalism and a zone of resistance against totalitarianism, as well as imparting necessary ethical lessons and tools of emotional independence that only the child’s parents can give them. For this reason capitalism attacks it, whether by weaponising progressive politics, trumpeting the authority of social science “experts”, or if that doesn’t convince you through the force of welfare bureaucracy and the education system, which capitalism has turned into glorified day-care with the purpose of incubating a new generation of woke neoliberal marshmallows.
The role of technology in our society shall be questioned, and we view the techno-utopian idea that every one of life’s problems can be solved through technology (in our time especially in reference to big tech) as erreoneous and dangerous. Its consequences are the mass displacement of human labour with machines, the expansion of the surveillance state (often in tandem with the rise of AI), social media addiction, the epidemic of deepfakes, and the development of a culture where man is totally dependent on technology to live, and thus has no conception of what it is to live without it. Our solution, however, is not primitivism (the total rejection of technological progress), but a sceptical attitude towards technology — rational technoscepticism — in which we accept that technology will always be with us and can be useful but do not have such faith in it that we let it take control of our lives, and in which we do not allow destructive things such as transhumanism/posthumanism and true learning AI to emerge. We want to reign in the development of technology so that it does not pose a threat to the human species, and we want to, as Fromm said, “put man back in the saddle of things”.
While keeping concerns of production in mind, we must take great care of our planet and fight the environmental degradation that capitalism has unleashed. In keeping with the Christian concept of stewardship (see Genesis 2:15), I believe that mankind has the responsibility to look after the natural world over which he has become master, and broadly speaking we have failed this, having allowed ourselves to be seduced by false promises that the destruction of our environment will produce untold economic prosperity. We should also strive to end the mass killing of animals by replacing real meat with cultured meat. We must also encourage self-sufficiency so as to prevent or minimise the impact of food shortages.
We must reject the cult of progress — that is to say this unyielding teleological faith in the inevitable triumph of that which we call social progress — which Dobrica Ćosić described as “that most cunning form of conformism” and warned that it “must be abandoned to the ideologues and the hedonists, if it is wished to sustain hope in socialism as a possible society of freedom and justice, reason and conscience”. I reject it on the basis that it is utopian and devoid of real meaning, and this vacuum of meaning is naturally filled by the advancement of whatever desires the progressive has. As it has manifested in the new left, the cult of progress has proven to be a powerful legitimator of neoliberal capitalism, which has naturally taken progress to mean the elimination of all moral, philosophical and practical obstacles to global capital accumulation and penetration.
Because of my opposition to identity politics and embrace of cultural conservatism, some mistakenly worry that I am an enemy of minority rights and an enabler of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and what have you. I can assure you that I am if anything an enemy of all bigotry, the promotion of which is antithetical to Christian values and poisonous to communitarian solidarity. It is my view that conservative leftists should vigorously oppose any ideology which asserts that you cannot be a part of the human community on the basis of being black, gay, trans and so forth and the supposed inferiority or defectiveness of said groups.
Indeed it is because I genuinely care about securing civil rights for the marginalised that I must express strongly my discontent with the people claiming to represent them and the tactics they have been using since the 1960s. Not only are they hopelessly ineffective, but they turn the public against them and reinforce bigoted and reactionary attitudes towards the affected groups, as well as inviting state persecution. Instead those whose concern for minority rights is genuine should learn from the tactics of the civil rights movement of the 1950s, whose enemy was the inconsistent application of the country’s supposed values and standards rather than the values and standards themselves. They avoided deliberate provocation tactics such as what is commonplace today, and made every conceivable effort to ensure that the public sees people who are being treated unfairly despite fitting in with standards and obligations of society at large. The result of this approach, as Lasch observed, was that:
Those who feared or resented black people found themselves disarmed by the moral heroism, self-discipline and patriotism of the civil rights movement. Participants in the movement, by their willingness to go to jail when they broke the law, proved the depth of their loyalty to the country whose racial etiquette they refused to accept. The movement validated black people’s claim to be better Americans than those who defended segregation as the American way.
The success of these tactics is the reason that struggles for minority rights have come as far as they have, and it was after the civil rights movement became the property of black nationalists and separatists that they deviated from this and met with failure. Today’s strugglers for minority rights are making the same mistakes as the New Left during the 1960s, choosing the tactics of antagonistic provocation, identitarian separatism and culture war as the means by which to achieve their aims. The result we are seeing now is entirely predictable, with public opinion increasingly turning on them and reactionaries ascending to power, after which yet more persecution follows. They are the true danger to minority rights, not I who seeks to defend them.
Finally, I reject both the anarchist view of the state as something inherently evil and the Bolshevik view of the state as merely a tool for certain ends that can be discarded at will. The state is not merely a tool for the execution of power, but an essential function for the continuation of society, whose task is to protect the rights of citizens and ensure their well-being, and in so doing working for the common good. Even if you got rid of the current bourgeois form of the state, it shall inevitably be replaced by a newer form of political organisation that serves the same necessary function.
Acceptance of this view will come with it acceptance of certain responsibilities and obligations to which the state shall be held to. A responsible state has no right to abuse its citizens, to deny them basic rights and freedoms, or to interfere in their private lives. A state that genuinely worked for the common good would not subject the public to three successive lockdowns, which do nothing to stop the virus and only destroy lives and communities. I believe that someday the thesis that the government can just direct people at will is going to be discredited not only by the repeated disobedience of the public, but by the consequences of lockdown itself.
The power of the state must be limited to the extent that it cannot needlessly condemn people to lockdown again, and all legislation designed to oppress people’s rights in the name of “counterterrorism” should either be stricken down or have the most egregious aspects removed. Section 127 of the Communications Act of 2003, the law under which you can be prosecuted for jokes, should be abolished, along with all legislation under which you can be arrested for “hate speech”. The ability of the state to spy on private citizens should be drastically curtailed, and legislation such as the PATRIOT Act in the US and the Investigatory Powers Act in Britain should be repealed.
To strengthen the power of the people against the state, democracy should be expanded, and measures should be implemented to ensure that politicians are much more accountable. The first-past-the-post system should be abolished and replaced with proportional representation and ranked-choice voting. The public should also be given a binding vote on issues of national importance, especially on controversial issues that would be definitively settled by the outcome of such referenda. There must also be term limits for parliamentarians, and MPs caught breaking the law who refuse to resign should be forced out of Parliament, with a by-election scheduled no later than thirty days after their expulsion. The salary of parliamentarians should also be drastically reduced and come with no special benefits so that less people will run for office for the sake of a cushy job.
Closing Remarks
The urgency of this vision cannot be overstated. The left is in a crisis concerning its relevance and its very identity. Despite the contradictions of capitalism unravelling to a breaking point in 2020, we are laughed at, despised and scorned by the people who we are supposed to represent and whose support we need to deliver any sort of political change. The promised left-wing tide did not occur, and instead we are at a point where if the right-wingers aren’t winning, then the liberals are reasserting themselves as we see in America.
In the face of this crisis are varying factions seeking supremacy in the left. The established radical liberal progressives, their time soon to pass, seek to maintain their hold because they aim to use the left as a vehicle for the normalisation of their various fetishes and impulses. The old-fashioned Marxist-Leninists are hoping to win out so they can have the same old debates over who was less revisionist on a grander scale because that’s the only thing they can do, and the crypto-reactionaries want to be able to turn the left towards fascism so that it can be of service to their heinous ends. They will all oppose what I have laid out either because it is too conservative, or maybe because it’s not conservative enough, or because it somehow isn’t Marxist enough. The old MLs will have no response except the lazy canard of “revisionism”, meanwhile they condone the actual betrayal of socialism by countries such as China and Venezuela.
What actually disturbs them about a vision such as this is that it shakes the foundations of everything they ever believed in and provides an alternative to their various excesses, and that if it actually took of it would make their own tendencies irrelevant, for they have little to offer the people except abject failure and insanity.
The opportunity for a new vision could not be greater, but it will require a willingness to reinvent ourselves if we are to meet the pressing challenges of the 21st century. To rescue the left from its grave situation requires that we tear it down and build it anew, and the collapsing credibility and authority of progressivism provides us with the chance of a lifetime if we are willing to seize it.
The age of progressivism is dead. Long live the era of the conservative left! | https://medium.com/@severin-k/progressivism-is-dead-long-live-the-conservative-left-2393e2c1014e | ['Sev. K'] | 2021-02-02 14:54:05.085000+00:00 | ['Marxism', 'Socialism', 'Christian Socialism', 'The Left', 'Conservatism'] |
Top 10 Geometric Fonts for Graphic Designers | As a creative, there are a lot of font styles to choose from when making designs.
There are minimalist, luxury, professional, handwriting, script, and other types of typeface that are suitable for any designer’s needs.
However, if you’re looking specifically for fonts inspired by basic geometric shapes and have classy or pleasing vibe, this article is for you.
What are the best geometric fonts for creatives?
Basic geometric shapes, such as a circle, square, or triangle, play an important part in the design of geometric typefaces.
As a result, the structure of these typefaces, which is based on formal and visual repetition, lends them a particularly structured character.
These types of fonts are widely used for creating logos and product labeling.
Some of them are also used for infographics and for social media postings.
It can also be used for different signages and photography captions, since most of them are sophicticated and minimalist.
In this article, I’ll be featuring the top 10 different geometric fonts from CreativeMarket and MyFonts that you can use for your design.
Check this list out and I hope you can find the best geometric display font for your needs as a designer.
10 Best Geometric Display Fonts
As the first geometric font on my list is the Along Sans, it is a modern typeface which is very unique and eye-catching.
A round style font perfect for photography captions.
Those creatives involved in the creation of logos, titles, and even editorial graphics will find it to be an excellent font.
It has rounded style letters, which helps it appear more sophisticated while still maintaining a classic appearance.
The Along Sans font family has been updated to add 34 Ligatures, as well as certain glyphs that have been revised.
It can also be used by photographers who want to caption their photographs in a professional and attractive manner.
Download Along Sans Font now
When it comes to a geometric display typeface that is both basic and elegant, Prelia is a great option.
A modern geometric font that has a bright and cool vibe.
Logo designs and branding purposes are ideal for using this particular display typeface.
All of the characters in this font have been intended to have a basic and charming touch to them.
As a result, since it is designed for a basic logo design, it is not ideal for extensive text use.
Now that you have Prelia, you can quickly create a logo and put it on your website, as well as on print materials and other media.
Download Prelia Logo Font now
Lufga is a geometric sans-serif font family with distinctive letters that add a bit of distinctiveness to any design project.
A perfect modern typeface for a classy logo.
The fact that it is basic but complex allows this font to have a clean and contemporary look while still evoking a vintage feeling at the same time.
For use for branding purposes, the lowercase g and u in particular make it easily distinguishable.
Additionally, there are stylistic variants available to assist in providing a somewhat different appearance when necessary.
Since this font portrays minimalism, Lufga is suitable for branding, advertising, packaging, headlines, magazine and website layouts, logo designs, etc.
Download Lufga Font now
Greycliff is a must-have typeface for anybody searching for a flexible geometric display font that also adds boldness to their design.
An elegant, bold font ideal for impactful logo design.
This modern typeface is constructed in a near-monoline style, which gives it a traditional durable appearance.
It has a peaceful and pleasant atmosphere, and its characters are smooth and strong, which makes it excellent in a wide range of design applications, such as logo design.
It is also tempered with smooth edges and bright forms, which makes it great for product labeling, logo design, and picture captions, among other things.
Additionally, it looks stunning when mixed with neutral hues like black and white, which helps to preserve its sophisticated but beautiful appearance.
Download Greycliff CF Font now
If you’re looking for a typeface that’s basic yet attractive to utilize in your projects, you’ll fall in love with the Lastica font.
A sophisticated and trendy geometric sans serif typeface.
This is one of the greatest geometric typographies to utilize for logo designs and product labels because of the way it is structured.
In Lastica, thin and smooth lines are used to write the letters, and the characters are written with a lot of space between them.
A remarkable appearance in your work might be created by the silhouette of its own characters.
Aside from that, it depicts a serious and futuristic style that will give your design a tremendous creative boost.
It also comes in two different weights, which might help you be more flexible in your job.
Download Lastica Geometric & Minimalistic now
The Jeko font is a great option if you’re searching for a modern, bold font with crisp and clean edges that will complement your design.
A strong and modern font perfect for portraying boldness.
This font is available in three weights, each of which is designed to fill the available space while maintaining a refined and confident appearance.
Its high X-height and strong letters ensure that it remains clearly visible in all weights, and it has been optically adjusted to provide even greater readability in all situations.
Jeko’s matching italics slope may assist you in infusing your creations with a wide variety of emotions and feelings.
This modern take on the traditional geometric style has a broad variety of possible uses, including logos, branding, signs, user interfaces, and design.
Strong geometry is combined with modern, sharp cuts to create a font that is both durable and distinct in its personality.
Download Jeko Geometric Sans now
Gilmer is a fresh, geometric, sans-serif font family inspired by the iconic typefaces like Futura and Avant Garde.
A clean and impactful font for logos and captions.
It is quite similar to Greycliff in appearance, but if you look closely, you will see that it has sharper and cleaner edges.
It is similar to the neo-grotesk typefaces from the twentieth century in that it features a high x-height value, geometrical letterforms, sharp edges, and low stroke contrast.
This font is quite adaptable and may be used effectively in a wide range of design applications, such as magazines, posters, branding, websites, and so on.
However, keep in mind that the Gilmer typeface may not be the best choice for setting continuous text like books since it is designed for short texts like logos.
Download Gilmer Geometric Sans Serif now
Another popular geometric typeface on my list is Canno, which is a modern display font with a clean and sleek style.
A circle-inspired font with smooth and round edges.
Since it is made with inspiration from the circle shape and has beautiful curves, it is most effective when used as a logo, headline, or title.
It includes a rounded lowercase characters that adds to the contemporary and peaceful sense of the font family.
The overall font is geometric in order to provide a sense of order and alignment among the characters.
Canno geometric font will give your projects a more contemporary appearance and feel as a designer.
Download Canno Modern Geometric now
Origin is a brand new geometric typeface with a fresh and modern spirit, as well as the ideal geometric form.
A basic yet elegant looking font, perfect for product labels.
It is one of the most simple but elegant basic sans serif fonts available, and it is ideal for use in a variety of design projects such as logos, headlines, captions, and more.
This typeface is designed to be adaptable, clean, and bold, and it has the same width line all the way around.
Origin is also a versatile typography to use since it works well in both large and small sizes.
In addition, designers may use this for branding projects, apparel and product branding, as well as magazine headings, or just as a nice text overlay to any backdrop picture.
Download Origin Modern Geometric now
If you’re looking for a trendy font that is very popular in logo and web design use, Gilroy is the perfect typeface for you.
A geometric sans serif font with a modern style.
In fact, I personally used the Gilroy font in my logo design because of its perfect geometric properties.
The typeface was created with strong opentype characteristics, making it well-suited for use in modern graphic design settings.
There are geometric forms, near-perfect circles, and squares in this version of the Qanelas font family that is based on the original Qanelas typeface.
Because it has a strong and beautiful style, it may be used for a variety of purposes, including logo design, site design, and editorial design.
Gilroy’s mild and extremely bold weights are completely free, so feel free to experiment with them to your heart’s desire.
Download Gilroy Font now
Conclusions
As a graphic designer, your choice of fonts in creating a design is critical in determining whether you get the ideal layout that you desired.
There are a lot of font styles available online, and if you’re looking for geometry-inspired typography, CreativeMarket and MyFonts has a lot to offer you.
I carefully chose only the best geometric display fonts for you to have a look at and get an idea of which one of them is great for your specific needs.
Whether you’re a designer that is creating logos, making signage, or labeling products for your own business or for your clients, these fonts are a must-have for you.
You can step-up your designs and make them more distinct and one-of-a-kind.
I hope that this list of top geometric fonts will be useful for your career as a designer.
Now that I’m done highlighting my top picks, which do you think is the best geometric font for graphic design? — Leave a comment below. | https://medium.com/ebaqdesign/top-10-geometric-fonts-for-graphic-designers-d80e96c68a2e | ['Arek Dvornechuck'] | 2021-12-26 14:02:40.922000+00:00 | ['Creative', 'Graphic Designer', 'Fonts', 'Graphic Design', 'Logo Design'] |
Lusty | Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.
Follow | https://medium.com/house-of-haiku/lusty-e18df18f929f | ['Sean Zhai'] | 2020-12-09 13:17:36.175000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Lust', 'People', 'Romance', 'Haiku'] |
Planning In The Age Of COVID | If you are the CEO of a startup or small business, the months of November and December are when you must be planning what you will make happen in CY 2021 — and, yes, there will be a Calendar Year 2021 whether you plan for it or not.
You should be following a discipline something like this:
Review 2020 performance — review and discuss with your senior folks with an eye toward segregating the loser from the winners, the saints from the sinners
Based on 2020 performance, create your 2021 plan with input from your senior folks
After a careful review, publish the “preliminary” plan and sit down with your Board to get feedback
Revise the plan
Publish the plan
Brief the plan to the company and get buy in
This can take two weeks or six weeks. It should be started in November, finished in December, and published before Christmas.
All you can do is the best you can with the resources available including time and money. Do not beat yourself up. Just do it.
A few key thoughts
Here are some thoughts that merit your consideration:
1. We are only at the end of the beginning with this COVID cockup.
Next week we will have a vaccine and begin vaccinating health care workers and other high risk potential victims. It is unlikely the entire country will be inoculated before June 2012.
Keep this date in your head at all times.
2. I hate the term “new normal” as much as I do “spot on.”
We will return quickly — at the speed of light — to a more normal business environment though some changes will be permanent — as an example: the local restaurant industry will not recover, WFH is real and never going away, Zoom is going to eat travel.
3. Give careful consideration to the pre-COVID v post-COVID environment for your company.
You may have benefited from/been crushed by COVID and you may have discovered and adapted operating protocols that will survive the return to some semblance of normal — such as less travel and more Zoom.
4. Be prepared to re-forecast your plan quickly every 90 days in this changing time. Have your CFO (if you have one) make monthly mini-re-forecasts.
If y0u have never been good at planning, budgeting, forecasting, re-forecasting — now is the time to get good.
Never change the original plan or budget; change the forecast.
5. Keep the Board informed as to what is going on. This is incredibly important if CY 2021 is a year you will need to raise capital.
If you anticipate raising capital, know where the Board stands, more importantly, if they have follow-on funds available and the temperament to deploy them.
Down round?
Resist the temptation to say, “I’ve got this,” even if you do.
Nobody saw the pandemic on the way in and nobody really knows WTF is going to happen as the vaccines are rolled out. Keep your own counsel.
Opportunity comes packaged in a cloak of change. Be ready with your plan, budget, forecasts. There is no such thing as over communication. Be an evangelist for the plan.
One big thing
In planning, a damn good tool for a growing organization is to use dollar weighted org charts.
Make a departmental/functional org chart and annotate which elements of the organization generate revenue and which ones consume capital.
Put in a layer of people.
Put a dollar value on every person (salary, benefits, short term incentive comp, long term incentive comp, something special) and total the cost of departments/functions.
Convert this to a spreadsheet that compares the cost to revenue so you can see the stark allocation of labor resources.
Do this for three months, six months, nine months, a year into the future for 2021.
If you are scaling hard, do this for the next three years on a time interval — say three to six months — that mirrors the rate of growth.
This is a planning tool that reveals the truth — everything costs twice as much and takes twice as long as the original plan.
Bottom line it, Big Red Car
This year — the plan for 2021 — is going to be the one in which those who plan will be the happiest. Discard your bad habits and get with the plan.
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car.
THE VACCINES ARE COMING. Line forms behind me. | https://medium.com/@jminch/planning-in-the-age-of-covid-6900dbbe7d20 | ['Jeffrey L Minch'] | 2020-12-04 17:48:20.207000+00:00 | ['Covid', 'CEO', 'Businessplanning'] |
Sources of Centralization on Lightning (and why they matter) | A couple of recent reports have questioned Lightning’s vulnerability, and both are related to its network structure. One claims that an emerging form of centralization could make it vulnerable to “split attacks”. The other sees hubs as targets for “congestion attacks”.
Centralization was also a hot topic in 2019, in 2018, in 2017, and even in 2016.
It’s true that many forces militate against decentralization: economies of scale, convenience, brand recognition, etc. But Bitcoin and Lightning are designed to overcome them. Centralization leads to vulnerabilities, power imbalances, censorship … fiat. But that’s the past. We’re more interested in the future — how to build a strong, free, and useful network for bitcoin payments. To reach that goal, we need to keep Lightning decentralized. Here’s why (and how!).
We’ve almost reached the future. Just a little farther… (Source: Tyler Lowmiller)
What is (de)centralization?
Of the dozens of ways to conceptualize the (de)centralization of a network, the most important is also the simplest: degree centrality. Degree centrality measures how connections are distributed across nodes in a network. If one node is connected to all the others, but none of them is connected to each other, we have a star graph with maximal degree centrality. If each node is connected to every other node, we have a beautiful jumble with minimal degree centrality.
Another way of thinking about this is to count the number of hubs. One hub for all = maximally centralized. Many hubs connected to each other, with each connected to many nodes = moderately (de)centralized. If each node is connected to every other, then every node is a hub, which means that none of them are really hubs = maximal decentralization.
Why does decentralization even matter?
Never change a running system, right? Fiat (generally) works. Custodial services (generally) work. Bitcoin works. If it’s the function that matters, why should anybody care about the form?
Beyond basic functionality, the form of a network like Lightning matters for three reasons: robustness/resilience, censorship, and power.
Robustness/Resilience
Being able to resist failure is robustness. Being able to recuperate from failure is resilience. Robustness and resilience are necessary for the utility of the network, for uptime. Even if we minimize the trust users and hubs must have in each other, they still need to trust in the network. Unless everyone on the network is reasonably confident that it will resist attacks and recover quickly from inevitable failures, they won’t use it.
A network built around few hubs is more dependent on the stability of each one, and the loss of any one will be harder to compensate. As degree centrality increases, robustness and resilience decrease.
A more pressing issue for Lightning is currently liquidity centrality. At the moment, 10% of the nodes on Lightning control 80% of the liquidity. However many connections they may have, these nodes are liquidity hubs. If one of them fails — whether due to an unforeseen technical flaw or an attack — “these routing nodes would nodes would leave gaping holes”. Not surprisingly, a network with gaping holes does not inspire confidence.
Decentralizing the network reduces the impact — and incentive — of attacking any given node, making it more robust. Decentralization also shrinks the “holes” left by any successful attack, making it more resilient.
Censorship
Censorship always pertains to communication, and communication always occurs in networks (even if you’re just talking to yourself). And the feasibility of censorship depends on the form of the network. Censoring a few national newspapers or broadcasters is pretty easy. Censoring a more distributed network, like the internet, will require a (not so) Great Firewall. Private conversations occur in a distributed network, so censors would need either a vast network of spies or a widespread atmosphere of fear (usually both).
In other words, choke points facilitate censorship by making it more economical. In the case of Lightning, hubs that concentrate traffic and liquidity are choke points. They allow censors to monitor, regulate, and restrict many transactions with only few interventions.
Of course, censorship on Lightning doesn’t consist of bugged telephone conversations and redacted documents. In fact, we’ve gotten used to it. We’ve even learned its disarming acronym: KYC. Whatever its merits, KYC is censorship. KYC regulations determine who can access bitcoin, how much, and under what circumstances.
Under snappy titles, like “DIRECTIVE (EU) 2018/843 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 30 May 2018 amending Directive (EU) 2015/849 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing, and amending Directives 2009/138/EC and 2013/36/EU”, regulators write such things as:
competent authorities should be able, through obliged entities, to monitor the use of virtual currencies.
… by which they mean that they want to squeeze exchanges and custodial operators for information on their users. It gets better:
Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) should be able to obtain information allowing them to associate virtual currency addresses to the identity of the owner of virtual currency. In addition, the possibility to allow users to self-declare to designated authorities on a voluntary basis should be further assessed.
An informal, decentralized network of intelligence services to monitor financial transactions. How could anyone construe that as censorship? 😬 (Everybody act normal!) If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, right?
And it’s obvious why the regulators are focusing on custodial services and exchanges: they’re choke points. If the censors are using a “decentralized” network, shouldn’t we? A decentralized network might not make censorship impossible, but it would make it much more difficult, expensive, and aggravating for the censors.
Don’t forget to relish life’s small victories.
Power
Centrality generates the power to make and change the rules that people were already planning and betting on. Centralized hubs can dictate terms to their users, and regulators can leverage hubs’ centrality to enforce arbitrary rules. This is the power to control who can use the network and when. It’s the power to put innovative people out of business and nullify the value of their hard work.
But government authorities aren’t the only ones exercising power. As long as Lightning requires significant technical expertise to use properly, there will be a power imbalance between the experts and novices. Incoming users will have to trust experts to protect their interests and maybe even to guard their bitcoin. The higher the barriers to entry, the more knowledge becomes centralized, and the more Lightning will be a tool by and for the cognoscenti. Here, decentralization means making the network easy to understand and use, arming users with knowledge, and liberating them from trust.
Counterintuitively, weakness can also be power. Wait — power through weakness? It sounds counterintuitive, maybe even paradoxical. But it’s the same paradox behind “too big to fail.” When banks — hubs of the monetary system — fail, the consequence is that everyone has to give them more money in exchange for no equity. Heads they win; tails you lose. And it’s not because the banks were strong. They were all too weak, but they occupied a central position in the network. | https://medium.com/breez-technology/sources-of-centralization-on-lightning-and-why-they-matter-b7aa3352231f | ['Roy Sheinfeld'] | 2020-02-26 16:27:12.601000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Decentralization', 'Bitcoin', 'Lightning Network'] |
Why Your Business (or any Organization) Needs a Strategic Plan | Far too often, we boil leadership down to bite a sized quotable. Over every social media platform, you see brilliant quotes from the leading influencers of the moment or of the great leaders of the past. I have shared many quotes that speak to me and will most likely continue to do so in the hope that they will inspire others to action. After all, that is what a leader does — inspires action. But leadership is far more complicated than a great one-liner from Marcus Aurelius or John Maxwell. Leading is hard. There is endless criticism (from inside and outside of your organization), tremendous pressure to perform, and endless amounts of problems to solve.
That is why it is vital to have a plan for your organization. A solid strategic plan will help reduce the pressure from you and the leaders of your organization. So how does a strategic plan help in this way? First, when I work with a business or organization, we establish its reason for existing. The leadership team must determine the reason the organization exists and ensure it has real implications for how they will make decisions moving forward. Then we work on values. Not just generic values that we wish to work towards, but a clear set of current values that describe “who” the organization really is. This work is vital to ensure the organization knows who it is and why it does what it does. Doing these steps and a few other pieces will establish the initial foundation for the essential strategic work.
Next, we can work on differentiating the organization. Or to put more plainly, identifying the few strategic guidelines that the organization will use to make decisions. For example, maybe the team determines that it has a “flat” and agile administrative process that their customers appreciate and regularly compliment. The leadership team would then need to ensure that future decisions should protect this “flat” organizational structure at significant costs! Any processes that the organization implements should be tailored to fit its flat and agile administrative process. Doing so will keep the unique advantage. But if the team did not identify this as a strategic advantage, they may inadvertently lose an essential aspect of what makes their business great. Lastly, we work on organizational priorities and organizational roles.
Once you have worked through this process, you will be able to communicate your vision to your people. The ability to increase communication and bring your team together and get them on the same page is immeasurable. Everyone will know what the priorities are, everyone will know what the leadership team is using to base their decisions on, and it will align the entire organization.
A solid strategic plan will make implementing objective tracking systems much easier. Anything from OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) to a Balanced Scorecard are great ways to keep track of who is working on what and how you are going to achieve your key objectives.
Follow us on all platforms! LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Medium, and Facebook! | https://medium.com/@NotJustLeadrshp/why-your-business-or-any-organization-needs-a-strategic-plan-49c31398f9f7 | ['Not Just Leadership'] | 2021-05-26 14:07:03.968000+00:00 | ['Strategy', 'Strategic Planning', 'Values', 'Leadership', 'Communication'] |
Are you a learning unicorn? | Are you a learning unicorn? No, I don’t mean the mythical creature that every 5 year old wants their parents to magically acquire for them. I’m talking about being a workplace unicorn, you know, the people who have varied skills and can do a bit of everything.
In the startup world we classify unicorn companies as:
A unicorn is a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion. The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.
(Source: Wikipedia)
What I’m talking about is unicorn roles or to put it simply:
An individual who works on their own or in a small team where they are required to take on multiple roles. They have know-how and skills in multiple areas and basically do a bit of everything.
You’ll commonly see this in engineering and product teams at startup’s where there is usually one or two people who could be responsible for the end to end process of building and releasing a product. Think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
This model is common within learning functions too. Even beyond the startup world, many workplace learning functions are made up of just one person. In scenarios like this, it’s not uncommon to develop into a learning unicorn. Being a team of one will mean you’ll need to learn a lot of skills and perform several roles across your workplace. Although some might deem this as too much work, it can be an advantage to your career.
In much larger teams, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd and only focus on the specific part you play. Opportunities to explore and develop out of this lane might be difficult. However, as a one person set-up you have the opportunity to explore and use many different skills in your work. I appreciate this might not suit all, but if you’re curious about how things work and have an open mind to develop new skills then being a unicorn might be right for you.
This is not to say that you can’t develop within a bigger team. It’s of course still possible if you have good people around you to learn from and enable your growth. A lot of people seem to think that you need to be in a bigger team to learn more and progress. This isn’t true in my opinion.
As someone who has worked in large international teams supporting thousands of people for many years and to more recently playing the role of a one man team as a unicorn. I have seen both sides of the coin and appreciate both. There are opportunities on both sides and I would recommend you experience both to discover what works for you.
For me being a learning unicorn works as I get to satisfy my creative needs, work across multiple areas and use the full toolkit of skills that I possess. Maybe in the future I’ll want to specialise in one area but being able to have full responsibility of the end to end product lifecycle is an experience I would recommend to any L&D professional. You’ll get a better understanding of learning design, marketing, brand and more in a hands- on environment. Which is something I’ve always felt is missing for those who are earlier in their careers in large corporations.
So, if you think you need to join a large corporate workplace learning team to acquire new skills and experiences, think again. The opportunity you seek might be in a much smaller environment and it might even be where you are right now. | https://medium.com/@rossstevenson/are-you-a-learning-unicorn-e07b2240bce3 | ['Ross Stevenson'] | 2020-05-20 10:01:01.305000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Talent Development', 'Personal Development', 'Leadership Development', 'Career Development'] |
Scraping Google Maps Using Selenium and Python | SELENIUM is a free and open-source automated testing framework used to validate web applications across different browsers and platforms but is also used as a scraping tool like scrapy and beautiful soup.
In this article, we will be looking at how we can use Selenium to scrape all the Location Data from Google Maps using the URL of the location.
So without further adieu let’s get started…
Quick Note: Any data collected from websites can be subject to copyright, thus meaning that should not be reused without owner consent and that should not be definitely used for commercial purposes. The main objective of this article is to show how to collect data as a coding exercise, as well as a way to build datasets for research and/or personal projects.
Items Scraped
1. Location Data
Average Rating
Total Reviews
Address of Location
Phone Number
Website URL
Open and Close Time for each Day
Busy Percentage for each hour of the Day
2. Reviews Data
Reviewers Name
Reviewed Date
Reviewed Text
Reviewed Rating
Let’s Get Started
Step 0: Bird’s Eye View
Let’s first get the visual view of the functioning and the steps that we are going to code,
Reach onto the Location Page on Maps and get the location data,
Get Open and Close Time for each day,
Get the busy percentage data for each day,
Click the “More Reviews” button and go onto all reviews page of the location,
Scrolling the Page to load all the reviews because the page is implemented using AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) which means all the reviews will only be loaded onto the website when we scroll down to look for them.
Click the “more” button for large reviews to load them completely on the website.
Finally, scrape the Reviews Details from the website
Step 1: Installation
Create and activate your python virtual environment and install Selenium using,
$ pip install selenium
Now download the Google Chrome WebDriver, which is basically a piece of software that automatically runs the browser instance and over which Selenium will work.
#Note: Download the same version as your Chrome Browser.
Add the downloaded .exe file to your current working folder.
Step 2: Import Essential Libraries
Create a new “main.py” file into your working directory and import these essential libraries,
Step 3: Create a main class and initialize
Let’s first initialize our main scraping class that will contain all the upcoming functions
The __init__ function is the constructor that will automatically get called and initialize these necessary parameters.
Step 4: Get Location Data
Now we will create a function that will scrape the location data like Average Rating, Total Reviews, Address, Phone Number, Website URL.
The self.driver.find_element_by_… are the Selenium functions that automatically find out the HTML elements with that class name or id name and stores them into a variable, and later we can use the text() function over those variables to get the respective values.
Step 5: Get Open & Close Times
Now we’ll create two functions one that clicks the open & close time button and then another that gets all the days and their respective open and close time.
The class “lo7U087hsMA__row-header” contains all the days and “lo7U087hsMA__row-interval” contains the respective open and close times.
Step 6: Get Busy Percentage for each day
The class that will get all the days and for each day finds out the busy percentage for each hour in a day of the location.
The variable “a” is a list of all the days, then we loop through “a” and find out all the times available in that day and store it into list “b”, then loop in b and find out the busy percentage for that respective hour in a day and store it in our final data list.
Step 7: Click the all reviews button
Now that we have scraped all the location data, it’s time to move onto the all reviews page where we will scrape the reviews data.
To do that we will find the All reviews button on the HTML and use the selenium .click() function to click it and get redirected to that page.
The selenium WebDriverWait function basically tells selenium to wait until that element gets loaded into the Html.
Step 8: Load all reviews
Now that the selenium is on all reviews page, before any scraping we have to load all the reviews by scrolling down to the bottom as this page like most other modern websites is implemented using AJAX which means the rest of the reviews will only be loaded into HTML when you scroll down to look at them.
Let’s create a scroll page function that will first scroll and load all the reviews before we further proceed to scrape reviews.
The above code will scroll the page 5 times, which means it first brings the scroll bar to the bottom, waits for new reviews to load, and then again scroll it to the bottom.
Step 9: Expand long reviews
To see the long reviews we have to click the more button under each review to make it load into the Html.
So let’s create a expand all reviews function that will find all these more buttons on the already loaded page and clicks them to load the entire reviews.
The element is the list of all those buttons present on the loaded page.
Step 10: Scrape Reviews Data
Now that everything is been loaded we will create a function that scrapes the reviews data like each reviewer name, text, posted date, and rating.
Final Step
Now that we have all our functions created let’s just create the main function that will simply call them one by one and execute the entire scraping process.
Full Code
Conclusion | https://medium.com/swlh/scraping-google-maps-using-selenium-3cec08eb6a92 | ['Rohan Goel'] | 2021-02-02 11:55:15.705000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Selenium', 'Web Scraping', 'Projects', 'Google Maps'] |
Kris Allen | A Teen View
Formerly A Website.. Now Just Memories | https://medium.com/a-teen-view/kris-allen-ab4ded9594b3 | ['Arin Segal'] | 2016-11-04 00:41:10.688000+00:00 | ['Kris', 'American', 'Idol', 'Allen', 'Music'] |
Why Probability Theory is Hard | Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash
Why Probability Theory is Hard
In 1982, Kahnemann, Slovic and Tversky published “Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases” and shattered humanity’s collective self-delusion that we had any functional intuition for even the most rudimentary problems in probability theory. This work has seen a renaissance in popularity since the publication of Kahnemann’s rather more accessible “Thinking fast and slow”.
Kahnemann is broadly sympathetic to our struggles, but much of the follow-up literature and course material has a slightly disparaging, not to say patronizing odour, as if reliable probabilistic intuition is just a question of a little hard work and application.
I have taught probability theory to all people of all ages, backgrounds, levels of motivation and levels of mathematical enthusiasm; from talented school kids and struggling school kids to undergraduates who take it because they have to and post-graduates who study it out of love. A large part of my consultancy involves teaching probability to people who want to use data to make more informed decisions.
I’m here to tell you that probability is hard and why, but that a little goes a long way and it’s entirely worth the struggle.
Probability theory is not intuitive
When we learn to drive, we turn the steering wheel, the car responds. It responds differently at different speeds. When we start, this takes us by surprise. We first over-turn, then we under-turn because we just over-turned, then we begin to narrow in on an appropriate response and we learn to do this across a range of speeds. We can do this because, largely, our car responds in the same way for a given speed every time. We subsume and integrate those responses and we absorb cues that allow us to extend that learnt intuition to other, similar mechanical systems and from there to mechanical systems in general.
Photo by Keenan Constance on Unsplash
Uncertain systems, by definition, respond differently every time, to the same input. The wiring we possess to subsume, integrate and automate responses simply can not work. Best case, it just can not engage. Worst case, we try to hypothesize response protocols— inferring patterns where there are none — and we become angry and frustrated when they don’t work.
Given the immense challenge of developing an intuition about just one stochastic system, we can hardly be surprised that it is virtually impossible to generalize to uncertain systems in general
Probability theory is all “Slow”
Readers of Kahnemann’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” will recognize the distinction between System I “Fast” (intuitive, instinctive, often emotional) and System II “Slow” (deliberate, methodical, rational) thinking. System II is slow, but it’s also hard; it demands energy, will-power and — certain mind states aside — it is a limited resource. Because Probability Theory is non-intuitive, it is perpetually doomed to languish in System II thought paradigms.
Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash
We might hope that notwithstanding the additional costs of developing stochastic intuitions, sufficient exposure over a long enough period of time may bring us to an instinctive apprehension of uncertain systems. That may be; however, despite a maths PhD, and two decades using probability theory professionally, I have not experienced this myself. It is, though, undoubtedly possible to develop an effective intuition for how to System-II-solve probability problems. So while we can develop an intuition to speed up our “Slow” thinking, it’s still “Slow” (and hard).
Probability is conceptually confusing
Students (in the broadest sense) who look to learn the “Slow” logic of probability are immediately faced with considerable conceptual challenges.
Photo by Parsa khass on Unsplash
First, probability theorists don’t even agree what probability is or how to think about it. While there is broad consensus about certain classes of problems involving coins, dice, coloured balls in perfectly mixed bags and lottery tickets, as soon as we move into practical probability problems with more vaguely defined spaces of outcome, we are served with an ontological omelette of frequentism, Bayesianism, Kolmogorov axioms, Cox’s theory, subjective, objective, outcome spaces and propositional credences.
Even if the probationary probability theorist is eventually indoctrinated (by choice or by accident of course instructor) into one or other school, none of these frameworks is conceptually easy to access. Small wonder that so much probabilistic pedagogy is boiled down to methodological rote learning and rules of thumb.
Conclusion
There’s more. Probability theory is often not taught very well. The notation can be confusing; and don’t get me started on measure theory.
The good news is that in terms of practical applications, very little can get you a very long way. The alternative to the basic level of understanding that allows a quantitative analysis of uncertainty is, frankly, crystal balls and tea leaves. Even simple models, based on the most rudimentary probabilistic paradigms, will clarify outcomes, furnish a framework and provide insight into the data required to make informed decisions.
And though it’s hard, it’s without a shred of doubt entirely worth the effort. Probability theory, despite its ongoing turf war, is mathematically mature enough that whatever framework you adopt actually represents pretty much the minimal conceptual machinery you need rationally to navigate uncertainty.
So go for it, but be ready and be kind to yourself. It’s hard. | https://www.cantorsparadise.com/why-probability-theory-is-hard-af838f053882 | ['Graeme Keith'] | 2021-03-17 07:55:57.194000+00:00 | ['Statistics', 'Mathematics', 'Learning', 'Probability', 'Science'] |
5 Tips to Avoid Spam Complaints | Often, email senders treat email marketing campaigns or newsletters as one-way communication. It is essential to understand that users have multiple ways to take action. They can open your email, click on your links, delete your email, forward your email, or mark your email as spam!
What Is a Spam Complaint?
If your email recipient dislikes your email, they can report it. This report is known as a spam complaint. In order to run an email marketing campaign, you need to know how spam complaints work. That’s because if too many complaints are made against you, ISPs can block you.
Usually, mailbox providers (or ISPs) attach a prominent button in the inbox by the name of “This is Spam”. It allows people to report unsolicited or unneeded emails.
Users click on the spam button for a wide range of reasons. For instance, they may be unaware of your identity — this happens when you have not taken their explicit permission before sending your email. Sometimes regular users can report your emails too, once they stopped liking your email content.
Email service providers (ESPs) have a special arrangement with ISPs, known as a feedback loop. This means that as soon as a recipient clicks on the spam button, the ESPs are notified via the feedback loop. Your sent email report contains the spam complaints, represented by a percentage. The complaint rate is an indicator of everything else going on more than an objective. It is a sign of healthy vs unhealthy permission practices, list hygiene, quality of the content, meeting expectations of the recipient, etc
Once a recipient marks your email as spam, the ISP sends you to the spam folder in their mailbox. If too many users complain the ISP can permanently designate your mailing domain as “trouble.” This obviously has a huge impact on your ability to mail anything to anyone. Once a mailing domain is on the ISP naughty list, it’s difficult to improve deliverability in the future. You might consider getting a new mailing domain and starting over — this time doing things the correct way.
You can minimize spam complaints with these tips:
Get permission to mail. This means they must opt-in to your messages. It’s even better if you double-opt them in. Don’t overload their inbox. Keep the content fresh and interesting whether it is a marketing message or newsletter content. Use properly formatted emails so that they look clean, are easy to read, and don’t raise any red flags. If they stop interacting with you — stop sending them messages (at some point). Everyone needs to clean up their list from time to time. Users who never open your email are a risk.
Following these tips will help you keep your subscribers and the ISPs happy so your email can continue to hit the inbox. | https://medium.com/@arcamax-publishing/5-tips-to-avoid-spam-complaints-12bff679b364 | ['Arcamax Publishing Inc.'] | 2020-12-22 19:24:25.284000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Email Marketing Tips', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Mental Health — Necessary For a Happy Life | A healthy person is gifted with complete physical, mental and social well-being therefore mental health is an integral part of a person’s robustness. A mentally healthy person will have the ability to recognize his own abilities and work accordingly to achieve his goals. Sound mental well-being also helps a person in coping with day to day stress in life and work. He can also ensure that he makes a productive contribution to the environment. The world mental health day celebrated on October 10th of every year is dedicated to provide the promotion, awareness and education on mental health.
The working of a human brain is strange and often unpredictable. It is not a person’s fault to have mental illness. Anybody is prone to the risk of mental illness. The mental illness can take on many forms like depressions, phobias, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and several others. Although these ailments may seem surreal they cannot be neglected or wished away. It is often common for people to mistake occasional mood swings for mental sickness but should be considered as severe illness if they interfere with normal life. A mentally ill person may not be able to retain friends or hold a job.
Mental well-being can be maintained by an individual by doing yoga, meditation or other yoga-like exercises. Advancement in science and technology is making mental health related services accessible to common folk. Undertaking programs targeted at vulnerable groups in society and people residing in disaster prone areas may yield considerable effects. Several non-profitable organizations like WHO are working towards promoting mental health in many underdeveloped third world countries. Mental illness can be cured in people to a large extent with the aid of psychotherapies, medications and brain stimulation therapies.
Mental health is very important to lead a peaceful and stress-free life. For this, you will have to overcome two important things, anxiety and depression which can both end up in serious issues. There are enough ways to help you come out of this problem in your life. You can get Mental Health Resources List in NJ via HumanityPrime. Just visit humanityprime.com and find relief. | https://medium.com/@humanityprime-seo/mental-health-necessary-for-a-happy-life-59d496231f7a | ['Humanity Prime'] | 2020-12-18 11:11:38.014000+00:00 | ['Mental Health Awareness', 'Mental Illness', 'Mental Toughness', 'Mental', 'Mental Health'] |
VALIDITY OF RESIDENCE PERMITS DURING THE SECOND PHASE | The Hungarian government declared the state in danger because of the coronavirus pandemic on the 4th of November in 2020. Due to the new regulations the residence permits validation have been extended. Residence permits will be valid for another 30 days after the end of the state of the danger. In this regard they will be automatically extended if the period of their validity expires between the 4th of November in 2020 and the 7 th of February in 2021. The maximum date of validation will be the 9th of March 2021.
WHAT KIND OF PERMITS WILL BE EXTENDED IN THIS REGARD?
Residence card
Permanent Residence Card
EU Blue card
Residence Permit
Permanent Residence Permit
EXCEPTIONS TO THE ABOVE MENTIONED:
Visas (for short stay e.g.: type C and D)
Documents entitling the holder to obtain a residence permit
REMINDER:
Please be aware that residence permits expired before the 4th of November will not be extended, nor if there is a change in the purpose or in the circumstances of your permit (e.g. you were a student before, but now you would enter to employment).
Don’t forget that renewal applications of residence permits must be submitted 30 days before your current permit expires. This means that if your residence permit is automatically renewed due to the state of danger, you will still need to apply for an extension by the 7th of February in 2021 at the latest.
The Immigration Office is still open during the danger, but you must book an appointment in advance.
If you need any help with the extension procedure, please do not hesitate to contact us. | https://medium.com/enterhungary/validity-of-residence-permits-during-the-second-phase-ede1a96a4b8b | [] | 2021-01-22 13:31:30.587000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Hungary', 'Permits', 'Immigration'] |
Teşvik Edilen Topluluk İşbirliği Yoluyla WOM Ağ Değerini Nasıl Artırıyor? | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/wom-protocol-tr/te%C5%9Fvik-edilen-topluluk-i%CC%87%C5%9Fbirli%C4%9Fi-yoluyla-wom-a%C4%9F-de%C4%9Ferini-nas%C4%B1l-art%C4%B1r%C4%B1yor-ee2f5a0c8098 | ['Atilla Günduğ'] | 2020-12-21 16:36:25.189000+00:00 | ['Kripto', 'Blockchain', 'Wom', 'Btc', 'Kripto Para'] |
The Lowdown on Vitamins | Vitamins are vital to our overall health and well-being. They help our bodies create energy, break down carbs, transport oxygen, boost our mood, and help our nerves, muscles, immune system, and brain function (and the list goes on and on).
But here’s the catch: Our body doesn’t make vitamins, at least not a significant amount, so we need to get them from our diet. Most healthy adults and children will get the vitamins they need by eating a varied diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. In fact, eating a healthy diet is the best way to get your vitamins.
But there may be times you’re running low on a particular vitamin and need to supplement. If your diet is poor, you have a history of alcohol abuse, or your body has trouble absorbing nutrients, you’re at a higher risk of developing a vitamin deficiency. We break some key vitamins, their main functions, and what you can start incorporating into your diet to ensure your body is getting all its essential nutrients.
Key Vitamins: What They Do and Why They’re Important
Vitamin A
Main function: It plays a role in the specialization and growth of every cell in the body and is vital for our vision.
Good sources of Vitamin A: This vitamin comes in two forms: Preformed Vitamin A (Retinol), found in fish, meat, and dairy products, and Provitamin A (Carotenoids), found in fruits and vegetables.
If you’re low in Vitamin A: Vitamin A deficiency is rare in developed countries like the United States, but it manifests as vision problems and even blindness. Worldwide, Vitamin A deficiency causes 250,000–500,000 kids to go blind every year and is the number 1 preventable cause of blindness in kids. Pregnant women who are low in Vitamin A experience night blindness.
Vitamin B1 (also known as Thiamin)
Main function: Turns carbohydrates into energy. Highly recommended for pregnant women.
Good sources of Vitamin B1: Pork, fish, brown rice, whole-grain breads, and pasta
If you’re low in Vitamin B1 Though rare, a common, early sign of B1 deficiency is the loss of appetite and subsequent weight loss. Chronic alcoholism can lead to a severe form of Thiamin deficiency called Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, symptoms of which include extreme confusion, vision problems, and exaggerated storytelling.
Vitamin B2 (also known as Riboflavin)
Main function: This is a key vitamin for your metabolism and energy production.
Good sources of Vitamin B2: It is mostly found in meat, dairy milk, and fortified foods.
If you’re low in Vitamin B2: Deficiencies in B2 most often manifest as pale skin and skin breakdown at the corners of the mouth and lips.
Vitamin B3 (also known as Niacin)
Main function: Helps enzymes carry out chemical reactions throughout the body and may help lower cholesterol.
Good sources of Vitamin B3: Found in fish, turkey, beef, legumes, and nuts.
If you’re low in Vitamin B3: Deficiencies are very rare but common symptoms are memory difficulties, fatigue, headaches, and skin issues. Serious deficiencies can lead to something called Pellagra, or the “4 D Syndrome” characterized by diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death.
Vitamin B5 (also known as Pantothenic Acid)
Main function: Known for helping produce Coenzyme A, a very important molecule involved in the breakdown of fatty acids.
Good sources of Vitamin B5: Found in fish, animal organs, milk, eggs, avocados, and sweet potatoes.
If you’re low in Vitamin B5: Vitamin B5 deficiency is also rare but may include fatigue, insomnia, and stomach pains.
Vitamin B6 (also known as Pyridoxine)
Main function: Mostly involved in amino acid metabolism.
Good sources of Vitamin B6: Found in pork, fish, wheat germ, soybeans, and oats.
If you’re low in Vitamin B6: Deficiencies are rare but present as fatigue, weakness, anemia, and skin rashes.
Vitamin B7 (also known as Biotin or Vitamin H)
Main function: Essential for a wide variety of cellular functions, including glucose metabolism and gene regulation.
Good sources of Vitamin B7: Great sources include egg yolk, walnuts, and organ meats.
If you’re low in Vitamin B7: Biotin deficiencies aren’t common but manifest as breakdowns of the hair and skin.
Vitamin B9 (also known as Folate)
Main function: Important for red blood cell formation and healthy cellular function. It also works with Vitamins B6 and B12 to remove homocysteine, a molecule linked to strokes and heart disease, from the blood.
Good sources of Vitamin B9: Found in green, leafy vegetables, beans, and nuts
If you’re low in Vitamin B9: Most people will get enough folate from their diet, however, pregnant people should supplement with a daily prenatal vitamin. It’s been shown that folate prevents birth defects related to the developing brain and spine.
Vitamin B12 (also known as Cobalamin)
Main function: Helps build nerves, red blood cells and is vital for the metabolism of fatty acids and amino acids.
Good sources of Vitamin B12: Found in meat, eggs, chicken, and dairy products,
If you’re low in Vitamin B12: If someone is deficient in B12, the most common symptoms are strange sensations (like “pins and needles”), tingling in the hands or feet, difficulty walking and maintaining balance, and difficulty thinking and reasoning, sometimes called “brain fog.” You can’t get B12 by eating plants, which is why folks who follow a vegan or vegetarian diet and don’t eat foods fortified with B12, may be at risk of developing a B12 deficiency. A recent study showed that 1 out of 5 vegans were at grave risk of developing a B12 deficiency. People who underwent weight-loss surgery are also at a higher risk.
Vitamin C
Main function: Its main role in the body is connective tissue formation. It is necessary for making collagen, vital for wound healing, and healthy skin.
Great sources of Vitamin C: Red and green peppers and citrus fruits
If you’re low in Vitamin C: If someone is low in Vitamin C, they can develop weakness, fatigue, muscle pain, sore limbs, rough skin, easy bruising, and bleeding of the gums.
Long-lasting Vitamin C deficiency is called scurvy, (the same thing that plagued thousands of sailors in the 1700s until doctors started sending them to sea with bottles of lemon juice). Smokers, and those exposed to second-hand smoke, are often low in Vitamin C, and may want to supplement.
Vitamin D
Main function: This vitamin is vital for bone health at all ages. Vitamin D is also known for its role in preventing upper respiratory infections, and it may even be beneficial in preventing serious COVID-19 infections.
Good sources of Vitamin D: Found in sunshine, red meat, salmon, and milk
If you’re low in Vitamin D: Too little Vitamin D in childhood produces Rickets, or weak, soft bones, and too little in adulthood can lead to porous bones, or Osteopenia. We produce Vitamin D when sunlight directly hits our skin. It’s a fast reaction and doesn’t require much time in the sun. Some people develop deficiencies in the fall and winter months, when there’s not much sunlight, and may want to supplement during that time. Those struggling with obesity and darker-skinned people produce less Vitamin D and may need to supplement more. Also, post-menopausal women may want to supplement because they are at a higher risk of bone problems due to reduced estrogen.
Vitamin E
Main function: This vitamin is best known for its antioxidant abilities. It protects molecules called “free radicals” from damaging cells and may help prevent cancer, heart disease and cognitive decline.
Good sources of Vitamin E: Good sources are nuts, seeds and vegetable oils.
If you’re low in Vitamin E: Deficiencies are uncommon. Vitamin E also inhibits clot formation, which is why supplementation sometimes results in bleeding and puts older people at risk for hemorrhagic strokes.
Vitamin K
Main function: When it comes to clotting, or stopping both internal and external bleeding, Vitamin K is crucial.
Good sources of Vitamin K: Found in spinach, iceberg lettuce, and broccoli
If you’re low in Vitamin K: Deficiencies in Vitamin K result in bleeding and bruising. While rare in adults who get enough from their diet, it is far more common in newborn babies who don’t have enough Vitamin K to form clots. To prevent this, doctors give babies a Vitamin K shot at birth, which protects them. Babies who don’t get the shot are at risk of bleeding complications for up to 6 months.
When Should I Take a Vitamin Supplement?
If you eat a healthy diet, don’t have a malabsorption issue, and aren’t pregnant or breastfeeding, you most likely will get all the vitamins you need from your diet. Babies will need a Vitamin K shot and possibly Vitamin D. Older people, especially those who eat less, may want to supplement. Vegans and Vegetarians may want to supplement with Vitamin B12. If you experience symptoms that you think might be related to a vitamin deficiency, you can supplement on your own or ask your doctor to do a blood test. If you decide to supplement, be sure to purchase vitamins from a trustworthy company with a third-party seal of approval. Also, be aware that supplements can have side effects and interact with prescribed medications. You may unintentionally take more than you need, which can lead to its own health issues.
Is A Multivitamin Better?
Large research studies show that supplementing with a multi-vitamin does not lower one’s risk of heart disease, cancer, or cognitive decline. They aren’t shown to make you live longer than people who don’t supplement. If you are low in a specific vitamin, it’s best to supplement with the specific vitamin.
What About Gummy Vitamins?
Gummy Vitamins differ from traditional multivitamins in that they are made to be tasty and chewable. Because of this, many of them contain added sugars and artificial flavors. They may be beneficial for adults and kids who don’t like to swallow pills, but if you are trying to avoid excess sugar and artificial flavoring, it’s best to avoid these.
Talk to Your Provider About Adding Vitamins to Your Life
The providers at Carbon Health are here to answer any questions you might have about your health. Even if it’s been a minute since you’ve had an appointment or you’re taking steps to establish care through a new clinic, having someone in your corner who you feel comfortable with is key. Take advantage of your next appointment by asking all the questions you need to ask in order to leave the room truly feeling seen, heard, and understood.
Liked what you read? Learn more by downloading the Carbon Health app or visiting carbonhealth.com. | https://medium.com/carbon-blog/the-lowdown-on-vitamins-4f700aad9c69 | ['Maggie Grainger'] | 2021-01-21 17:37:29.667000+00:00 | ['Health Foods', 'Wellness', 'Vitamins And Supplements', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Vitamin'] |
The Case for Humanitarian AI: Using data to proactively address complex problems | People are tired of hearing that technology is “saving the world” when they know it’s just marketing-speak. And yet, we all know humanity needs to be proactive and pragmatic in addressing urgent global crises. Data-driven, AI-enabled philanthropy is a powerful, untapped tool to address humanitarian problems. Not only can the right tech make philanthropy more effective, it can also bring transparency and accountability to a famously fragmented sector.
Information technology, used everyday to increase efficiencies in the private sector, is tragically under-utilized in addressing social challenges. We need to take a data-drive approach. Practical usage in AI can bring together stakeholders, funders and nonprofits from all walks of life to solve complex humanitarian problems.
AI for Philanthropy: Turning Vision Into Reality
Just as “software is eating the world” across different sectors, so too will technology enable the philanthropic community to be more effective and efficient. This is great news for the sector.
The organization AI4Giving has been a significant driver in the discussion about using AI for philanthropic giving. We can use machine learning to analyze and aggregate large amounts of data sets across different players in the humanitarian sector in order to:
Provide philanthropists with an evidence-based understanding of where help is needed.
Efficiently evaluate the impact of charitable giving.
Impact organizations’ mission by allowing them to make informed decisions and continuously adapt to realities on the ground.
Foster the relationship between donors and causes.
Help researchers better understand donors.
Automate internal reporting and other administrative tasks.
Data-Driven Philanthropy is the Future of Giving
Data-driven philanthropy will enable more effective giving. The old philanthropic system is top-down, biased, and siloed. AI offers us the possibility of a data-based understanding of the nonprofit world. This has never existed before!
AI creates scalable data collection capabilities that harness information from nonprofits in real time. This creates possibilities for a grassroots data collection effort that tells donors exactly where funds need to go. We can do more to empower small nonprofits by knowing more about them — knowing where they are, who they serve, and what they need.
Oftentimes, small grassroots nonprofits are the best knowledge bases on their local community. They understand the needs facing their specific community and are first responders to crisis situations. Through AI, it fosters the possibility to not only give to major organizations, but to connect with and hone in on hyperlocal organizations right in your backyard.
Though technology isn’t a quick fix for the world’s problems, it can help us go a long way toward improving life for millions of people. Rather than maintaining the current fragmented giving landscape, having a connected network can bring stakeholders together.
You Can Be the Future of Giving
As it stands, donors don’t currently leverage data in their philanthropic activities. Now that we’re in the midst of a prolonged crisis, we have an opportunity to do things differently. Donors have begun to realize, much to their chagrin, that the money they donate to causes online could take at least a month to reach its destination.
We invite you to join a new movement–- one that gives donors a real-time look at the nonprofits that need funding, and that enables them to get money to its destination right away. We’re opening the door to next-level pragmatism and problem solving that will improve life for so many people, including you.
Are you ready to be part of the future of giving? Join us at DANDI. Reach out to us here to learn more. [email protected] | https://medium.com/@dandi4good/the-case-for-humanitarian-ai-using-data-to-proactively-address-complex-problems-69e829120927 | [] | 2020-12-10 15:10:34.849000+00:00 | ['Philanthropy', 'AI', 'Startup', 'Humanity', 'Data'] |
Google Apps Script: Custom Confirmation Emails for Forms | When the lock down began, the client that I contract for put my team in charge of helping staff get items from their desks. We were provided a spreadsheet that is populated by google form submissions and were instructed to monitor the spreadsheet for any updates, then send an e-mail to the requester.
This strategy would include the repetitive work of generating a new email, typing a message saying “Hello so and so, we got your form submission” and including what they requested. It may take anywhere from five to fifteen minutes to type up the email depending on our typing speed. It would also have to be formatted and proof read to avoid typos. The message reply would be similar every single time and when ever there are repetitive tasks in the workplace and a G Suite application is in use, automation is usually an option.
So I wrote a script that not only generates a confirmation e-mail, it also generates a calendar event. The calendar event allows the form submitter to reschedule their pick up time and provides a better visual tool than a spreadsheet. I’ll be writing another tutorial in the future on generating calendar events.
Here’s what an automatically generated email and calendar event look like after a google form submission.
GAS generated confirmation email
GAS generated calendar event
This particular form has been submitted close to seven hundred times, and as a result has saved my self and my team from manually typing up and sending out close to seven hundred e-mails. Normally, this calendar event would add the requestor and my team, but I’ve removed them for this article.
Well, now you know what’s possible with Apps Script, so if you’re not interested in learning to write one. Shoot me an email [email protected] and may be we can work out my writing one for you. I’m willing to do them in exchange for testimonials, and/or artisan beer and/or coffee. I should probably take the testimonials though, because I’d like to be able to earn an income writing scripts like these in the future. But I do like beer, and I have coffee every morning …
If you are interested in learning more and writing something like this on your own, then let’s walk through how I did it.
Access the Script Editor in the Form Responses spreadsheet
First, you’re going to need a google form to work with. Find the responses spreadsheet that is associated with the form. It usually has the same name as the form with the word responses in parentheses afterward. If you’re not sure if your form is associated with a spreadsheet, you can check out this google support page.
Once you find the spreadsheet select the menu option Tools > Script Editor.
Script Editor
You’ll be greeted with an empty script that has a function called myFunction in it. Go ahead and delete that.
Access values using onFormSubmit(e)
The method onFormSubmit is a method that should be executed every time the form is submitted. It’s a method that apps script will pass an event object through the parameter e. The event object has all the questions and responses from the form submission in it. There’s a couple of ways to access the event object.
function onFormSubmit(e)
{
// Retrieve values depending what their index is in the array var values = e.values
var name = values[1]
var email = values[2] // Retrieve values based on their question text var name = e.namedValues["Name"]
var email = e.namedValues["Email Address"]
}
Using the named values strategy is definitely better. It’s easier, and it looks more straightforward in code. The problem with it is if you’re not in control of the form, and your team mate decides to re word some of the questions in your google form with out notifying you. Then, the namedValues strategy is not going to work. When you attempt to retrieve the value based on the incorrect name an error will be thrown. So that’s something to keep in mind.
When I wrote this script, I used the first strategy, getting each value by its index in the array, specifically because of that problem. Questions in the form were being changed, and I wasn’t notified about it until I got some of the error notifications.
Use the values from the form submission and write a message
One of the easiest things to do in code, that’s so powerful, is putting together statements based on what a user has sent to you. Here’s an example of how we can do that.
var items = e.namedValues["Items"]
var time = e.namedValues["Time"]
var date = e.namedValues["Date"] var message = "Hello " + name ",
" +
"This is a confirmation message to let you know we received your form submission and are working on the request.
" +
"Date: " + date + "
" +
"Time: " + time + "
" +
"items: " + items
Your particular use for this script is going to dictate what your script will say. You may have more or less values to display and can get as intricate as you’d like with your message.
Now that we have a custom email message to send and all of our values together, we can go ahead and send the email to both the requester and our team.
Use GmailApp.sendEmail to send your email
Most of the scripts I have written send my email from an alternate email address. It’s an address that represents my team. You may want to send your confirmation email not from your own address, but from an alternate google group address. Here’s a link to a google support page if you decide to go down that path.
Otherwise, if you’re okay sending the email from your own address, then that may make the code writing portion simpler. I’ll go ahead and show you the two ways you can pull this off.
var email = e.namedValues["Email Address"]
var recipient = email + ", [email protected],[email protected]"
var subject = "Confirmation Message"
// Option 1 - Send from your gmail account
GmailApp.sendEmail(recipient, subject, message) // Option 2 - Send email from an alternative address
GmailApp.sendEmail(recipient, subject, message,
{bcc: "", htmlBody: "", from: "[email protected]"})
When the code is all put together and ran your message will be sent.
If you notice, the last parameter of Option 2 has an option called htmlBody. Meaning we can pass in html to the email. So you can not only send a plain text email, you can send an email with some good looking design in it if you are dealing with clients.
Google Apps Script is awesome, and this medium post is just a scratch of the surface of what it can do to create more efficiency in the workplace. I highly recommend checking out the documentation for more.
Testing
Testing is important when ever you want to write code that works most of the time. Testing form submissions is inconvenient if you have to manually fill out a new form every time you’d like to submit one for testing. Below, is a function I found a year ago that will submit a test for you based on the values in the fifth row of your responses spreadsheet.
function test_onFormSubmit() {
var NUMBER_OF_TESTS = 5;
var dataRange = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet().getDataRange();
var data = dataRange.getValues();
var headers = data[0];
// Start at row 1, skipping headers in row 0
for (var row=5; row <= NUMBER_OF_TESTS; row++) {
var e = {};
e.values = data[row].filter(Boolean);
e.range = dataRange.offset(row,0,1,data[0].length);
e.namedValues = {};
// Loop through headers to create namedValues object
// NOTE: all namedValues are arrays.
for (var col=0; col<headers.length; col++) {
e.namedValues[headers[col]] = [data[row][col]];
}
// Pass the simulated event to onFormSubmit
onFormSubmit(e);
}
}
Ah, and one more important thing to remember is for some reason when you use this test_onFormSubmit() function, your date and time values will show up formatted differently. They are probably going to look like this: Thu Jan 09 2020 00:00:00 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time). If they do, don’t worry about that — that will only happen when testing. If you use a pre-filled link for your forms or just manually submit a test form then you’ll notice the date formatting will be back to normal.
Triggers
You may also notice when you submit your google form, nothing happens! The script does not submit. Yet, when you run the test function — things seems to work normally. You are also seeing the values from your mock form submissions in your spreadsheet so you know they are working. You might ask yourself what could possibly be going wrong here?
Well, you may have to manually set up the trigger for onFormSubmit when the google form is submitted. I’ve had experiences where it was set up with out my having to add the trigger. I’ve also had experiences where it wasn’t set up and I have had to add the trigger. Any way, here’s how:
Trigger Button
First click on the trigger button. Then click on the add trigger button in the bottom right hand part of the screen. You will be met with a window that looks like the image below. You should fill out your trigger identical to mine. How often you would like to be notified of errors is your choice.
If you’ve made it this far thanks for reading and good luck on your project.
Feel free to leave a comment with any questions, concerns, or feedback! | https://medium.com/swlh/google-apps-script-custom-confirmation-emails-for-forms-2c6e61e77ebc | ['Christopher Holmes'] | 2020-09-17 06:56:40.928000+00:00 | ['Gmail', 'JavaScript', 'Google Apps Script', 'Automation', 'G Suite'] |
How Coronavirus is Affecting Domestic Violence Victims | The coronavirus’ mandatory isolation requirements have left many victims of domestic violence locked in with their abusers, isolated from people and resources that could help them.
Domestic violence is a widespread issue, affecting men and women all over the globe. Some important facts to consider about domestic violence are:
• 1 out of 3 women in the world experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes
• Men do experience domestic violence, though women make up the majority of victims
• LGBTQ+ individuals also face high rates of domestic violence
• During a crisis, the risk of violence escalates
• In February, during China’s COVID-19 lockdown, the number of domestic violence cases reported to the local police tripled.
During the current crisis, victims of domestic violence are finding it extremely hard to seek out the help they need. Medical facilities are busier than ever, making it difficult for victims to get appointments with therapists or receive necessary medical care. The fear of contracting the virus has also prevented many victims from leaving the house to seek out appropriate care after being abused.
In a normal situation, many victims seek refuge at their parents’ house, however, during this crisis, many feel that they can’t find safety at their parents’ houses due to fears of exposing them to harmful contagion. Travel restrictions also create a new barrier between victims and places of refuge. Additionally, Women’s shelters might be too crowded or have been forced to close their doors in order to comply with social distancing regulations.
Financial tensions also tend to be a catalyst for domestic violence situations and as the pandemic takes a toll on families financially, it becomes even harder for spouses to leave their abusive partner. Recently UN Women, a United Nations entity, called on governments to provide packages for paid sick leave and unpaid care work, providing women facing domestic violence to receive an outlet for financial independence from their abusers. However, at this time, no such measures have been officially taken to help victims of domestic violence.
Certain essential services like the National Domestic Violence hotline are still available during this crisis. Consider calling their hotline at 1–800–799-SAFE (7233) if needed or visit their website for more resources.
If you are a victim of domestic violence and want to pursue legal action, Shah & Kishore can help. We will be your advocate every step of the way, fighting for your safety and wellbeing. Our phone lines are open 24/7 and we also offer video conferencing options to help you through these challenging times.
To learn more about how we can help you with your particular situation, please email or call us today at (301) 715–3838 to set up your FREE consultation. | https://medium.com/@marylandlawoffice/how-coronavirus-is-affecting-domestic-violence-victims-b2b7e14da426 | ['Rahul Kishore'] | 2020-12-02 17:38:32.476000+00:00 | ['Domestic Violence Lawyer', 'Domestic Violence', 'Maryland Divorce Lawyers'] |
The Man in the Blue Shirt: Why I’m on a Social Media Fast | The Man in the Blue Shirt: Why I’m on a Social Media Fast Aaron Anaya Jan 18·5 min read
Today, I noticed the man in the blue shirt that I would not have noticed before.
I was at a stop light and my formed habit would normally be to mindlessly make a couple swipes on my phone and end up checking Instagram first, then Facebook.
Bri had some questions.
Bri: What was so special about the man?
Me: Nothing.
Bri: Then why did you notice him?
Me: Because I wouldn’t have if I still was on my phone.
I’ve had a few people ask me why I decided to take this break and my answer has mainly been “For lots of reasons.”
Here are some of those specific reasons:
Politics — I don’t really care where you land on the topic, but can we admit that none of us really feel any better by reading the seemingly endless opinions and “facts”??? These next few weeks are going to be rough and I don’t think I need any more of that noise right now. Time — I came to the objective realization that I was spending between 1 and 2 cumulative hours a day on social media and “article” reading. I have 3 kids, 1 wife, 1 dog, 2 pheasants, a few friends, 2 jobs, a golf swing (jokes), 1 God, and 1 life that all need more of my time. Distraction — More to come on this in a later post, but social media was (is) my adult pacifier. I have FELT a lot more of everything, good and bad, in the last few days. Again, more to come on this later, maybe lots more. Focus — In a similar, but different, way to distraction, I needed to do a better job of being focused. I will relate focus primarily to work and say that my clients and jobs deserve more focus. I believe I do a great job at my jobs, but I also know that I can do even better. I want to do better. Social media was extra weight on the cart, whose benefits did not add enough horsepower to justify the weight. I think I can change this down the road, but we’ll get to that later. My Eyes — I don’t know what half naked women have to do with fishing and golf, but its not worth the potential splinter in the intimacy I’ve formed with my wife. She deserves better. Women, in general, deserve better than to be used to sell us… golf products??? Mainly a problem on Instagram, algorithms have thorns too, and these ones can cause serious infections. While I do appreciate and need the tips on my golf game, the women that cover the cost of those tid(dy)-bits of advice aren’t worth it. YouTube can help me with “How to Not Chunk Chip Shots.” For my Christian brothers, especially those in a covenant with your wives, take seriously the advice of scripture. For me, Job 31:1 has been my prayer. “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman. For what is our lot from God above, our heritage from the Almighty on high? Is it not ruin for the wicked, disaster for those who do wrong? Does he not see my ways and count my every step?” My Heart — I started to realize that my heart was wrapped up in my posts. More on this later, but I found myself checking social media more often if I had posted something to see who “liked” my posts, to see who viewed my “stories,” and to see who left me comments. If I am being objectively honest, I’m doing that because I care and I need to get to the bottom of why I care. My God — I’m going to make this short and sweet. I was spending more time on social media than I was in prayer and in God’s word. Y’all know we need all the prayers we can get and I wasn’t contributing much.
Here is a more general summary of where I am at so you know who is writing this:
The Anaya Family is doing well. Bri and I are going to hit 10 years of marriage in May and loving each other more than we did our first 9 years. I am such a proud daddy. I am super blessed with work. I have 2 great jobs that compliment each other and allow me to work from home a good bit. All is good.
All is not great.
2020 had it’s teeth. We have seen the effects of COVID, political comedy (not the good kind), isolation, polarization, and good ole fashioned sin. We have some tough stuff going on around us, we’ve gotten hit with some shrapnel, and it hurts.
I know God blessed me with great parents who have helped me to become tough and tender. I’m strong enough to handle it because I know I’m weak and need God to help me be strong. I’m wired tender, to care, to nurture, to correct, to help restore, to lead, to guide, to challenge. I can’t not care about things that need caring for. I don’t care what you think about my buzzed head though (Makena doesn’t like it either).
I consider our family to be very strong mentally, spiritually, and increasingly physically. But, we need to get stronger. I need to get stronger. I need to be a better Christian (no, not because I need to earn it). I need to be a better husband. I need to be a better daddy. I need to be a better son. I need to be a better grandson. I need to be a better friend. I need to be a better employee. I should be a better golfer.
In a world of wanting more stuff, I want more wisdom. I want better discernment. I want to have more empathy. I want to see healing. I want to see unity. I want to love people well, but not the kind of love that “loves” tacos, but the kind of love that Jesus loves us with. That’s that special kind of love. I want those kinds of things and I know that I need to do something different to make that happen first in me. THEN, I want to see it spread around me like when a rock gets tossed in calm water and you can see the rings spread around it. | https://medium.com/@aaronanaya-28924/the-man-in-the-blue-shirt-why-im-on-a-social-media-fast-645e7fe0963f | ['Aaron Anaya'] | 2021-01-18 03:35:36.577000+00:00 | ['Social Media Marketing', 'Social Media', 'Leadership', 'Christianity', 'Christian Living'] |
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