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Batch 10 up on the virtual stage — Meet Followistic | Vanessa Naumann is the co-founder of Followistic, a NMA-startup which helps publishers to reconnect with their audience. Vanessa told us which cool features they’ve packed into their engagement toolset and why we need to have trust in order to innovate.
João Loureiro and Vanessa Naumann. Photo: Tom Medici / The Fish&The Knife
Hey Vanessa, what is your home office status?
For me working in the home office is not a new thing. I was traveling a lot for work, so working remotely really feels normal for me. Right now I want to help spread the word to how people could deal with the situation and show people my best practices.
Go for it! What are your pro survival tips?
Don’t be too hard on yourself. Meditate, so that you have a clear mind, and also take breaks. Drink a lot of water, eat healthily. When it comes to working structure: only pick three things to focus on in a day and set aside time for strategic discussions with your team.
Oof, the home office can be tough!
“Why wouldn’t readers like a truly personal reading experience?”
What is Followistic working on?
Followistic is a reader engagement platform that helps online publishers or content creators to get their readers back to their page continuously. We created a widget which is shown at the end of every article. Within this simple widget, the readers can tell the publisher exactly what topics they want to read about more often. They are then notified via email.
How do publishers benefit from your product?
The publisher gets a behavioral analytics dashboard, where they can follow what the readers like. That information is very useful for the publisher’s content strategy. We basically bridge the communication gap between readers and publishers. So readers feel more engaged by being able to give their feedback and have full control over the content they receive.
“We basically bridge the communication gap between readers and publishers.”
Speaking of the publishers, what changes are you expecting in the media industry?
The media industry will change but right now it’s just not changing fast enough. Maybe the situation in the Corona crisis allows us to understand how important technology is in our lives. Because now we need to reach out digitally to each other in order to improve our human connections. I think Followistic fits right in. Through our widget, we are pushing the conversation of the publishers with the audience.
Followistic at Web Summit 2019. Photo: private
“If you never try to make a change you won’t get forward.”
What drives the team of Followistic?
We really want to create purpose through digital products. When we started, I think it was most important to create value and also to give readers control. Now we also want to change the publishing industry. Yeah, it’s a moonshot to say that, but we want publishers to understand that personalizing and giving readers control can be a huge advantage. Everything is more personal today. So why wouldn’t readers like a truly personal reading experience?
Last but not least: why should people work with you?
I think we all are great communicators. We understand humans and can explain really well why the technology works for people out there. We don’t have the highest knowledge in publishing — that’s a fact. But we are willing to learn. And sometimes it’s helpful when somebody from the outside brings in another perspective of your own industry. That’s why we’d love to work with publishers so that we can understand the publishing industry much better. To work with them directly on the market and to develop the best products for them. Often people seem to be afraid to try new things. But if you never try to make a change you won’t get forward. Sometimes it’s important to take a leap and trust innovators like us. It’s worth a try! | https://medium.com/next-media-accelerator/batch-10-up-on-the-virtual-stage-meet-followistic-e158e2cda949 | ['Next Media Accelerator'] | 2020-04-17 09:01:16.635000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Reader Engagement', 'Media', 'Innovation', 'Publishers'] |
Sometimes, all we can do is wait for a good story to come. | Sometimes, all we can do is wait for a good story to come.
Just like that. Good stories love to play hide-and-seek in our minds, and they love to play that game for days.
Meanwhile, I’m living my life. Studying, reading, and relaxing — and that part is helping me a lot, because when our world slows down our thoughts get clearer, like mud at the bottom of a pond, they settle when the water stops moving.
There’s a lot of noise in our lives, and like physical noise, we don’t notice it until it’s gone.
Isn’t that beautiful? | https://medium.com/short-shots-city/sometimes-all-we-can-do-is-wait-for-a-good-story-to-come-d3cd129e6904 | ['Jm Miana'] | 2020-12-22 16:01:12.572000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Creativity', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Short Form'] |
How to Build Lean AI Startups (Including Real-World Case Studies) | Source: Omdena
How to Build Lean AI Startups (Including Real-World Case Studies)
This article will share insights on how to build lean startups that change society for the better and leave a positive impact on the planet.
There are hundreds of use cases where AI can help to do exactly this. Impact-driven startups have the potential to solve real-world problems, tackle environmental problems, and improve the lives of many people, especially vulnerable populations.
Billions of dollars are already flowing into AI ventures, which are primarily addressing profit gains and industrial automation. The AI for Good movement where often commercial meets social value is slowly picking up.
Now, in order to build impact-driven AI startups, there are a few essential steps to follow.
Don´t fall prey to visionary entrepreneurship
As discussed in the bestselling book “The Lean Entrepreneur”, our media glorify business outliers like Bezos, Branson, Gates, and Jobs as heroes with X-ray vision who can look to the future, see clearly what will be, imagine a fully formed product or experience, and then, simply make the vision real.
In reality, to be visionary, one should not merely execute on a seemingly good idea and ignore all doubt. Otherwise, startups will build doomed products in a vacuum where there is no real product-market fit, which leads to costly and heart-breaking failures.
The alternative scenario is to go lean right from the start.
Big Data Jobs
Embrace the mentality of lean
Brant Cooper, NYT bestselling author of the “Lean Entrepreneur” and CEO of Moves the Needle recently spoke at one of our demo days and gave the following definition:
The idea around lean is the elimination of waste. Don’t waste your time, money, resources, creativity, inspiration in building products nobody wants.
Trending AI Articles:
Test your problem-solution fit
You have figured out a problem, now it's time to start testing. The good thing is that there is lots of open source code, which won´t cost a dollar and can be used to build an MVP. This will also help to test if you really need AI at this point in time.
Just because AI is an approach to solving your problem, it might not be the only way to do so. Each case is different, but at this point, when you’re using real humans or some other way to test your problem, stop and ask yourself the following question:
What is it about my problem that AI could solve in a better (more accurate, less costly, more reliable, etc.) way?
Get the data
If AI proves to be a promising direction, you´ll need to gather some data, curate it to make it’s useful, then design a model, and train it.
In practice, the work required to find, curate, and manage the data is often the biggest and hardest part of the problem.
However, there is also a common misconception that you need a perfect data set to get things started. This is not only technically wrong but also would mean that the vast majority of organizations will never be able to do any meaningful work with AI. Often, a promising direction is to leverage the growing amount of open-sourced datasets.
Making progress in AI means to take incremental steps towards creating higher returns on impact and value rather than looking for the costly “perfect shot”.
Build your product
Now it is time to package your AI up into a product with a user interface and other features than just doing AI.
Remember, a good product solves a real-world problem. It’s no good having an AI that can just look at a photo and differentiate between cats and dogs.
Today, still most AI is developed in isolation from the people and social circumstances that make them necessary in the first place. To change this, we need to enable truly human-centered development by moving away from old ancient practices and top-down approaches.
A bottom-up approach takes the development process out of the lab and into the real world. This embeds diverse perspectives and open dialogue, where the user or customer of the solutions is part of the development process. All of which increases the chances to build inclusive and trustworthy solutions.
The good thing is, if you are solving a real-world problem, people are more likely to join your endeavor and give feedback.
Improve & scale-up
The better the data you can give an AI when you train it, the better it is.
Once you’ve launched your startup, you’re going to start gathering more data. Data that you didn’t have when you first trained your AI. Now, you can improve your AI. In order to do this effectively and efficiently, you need to raise a few detailed-oriented questions in your team early one, such as:
How are you going to gather and store data?
How often and when are you going to retrain your AI?
How are you going to test performance improvements?
Real-world examples
Lastly, I want to share two very inspiring real-world examples of applying AI for the betterment of society.
Detecting child malnutrition through computer vision
Child Growth Monitor is a game-changer startup that is working on an application to identify malnourished children under the age of 5 years.
It is a solution based on a mobile app using augmented reality in combination with artificial intelligence. By determining weight and height through a 3D scan of children, the app can instantly detect malnutrition.
Malnutrition in children is a problem affecting more than 200 million children.
Anticipating shocks to deliver life-saving health products
VIEBEG is building AI to anticipate shocks of all kinds to deliver life-saving health products in challenging environments. VIEBEG is a leading provider of medical products and equipment and the first online pharmaceutical distributor in East Africa, providing more than 300 hospitals and clinics in Burundi, Rwanda, and DR Congo.
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 ! | https://becominghuman.ai/how-to-build-lean-ai-startups-including-real-world-case-studies-84306075a372 | ['Michael Burkhardt'] | 2020-12-03 18:47:54.902000+00:00 | ['Lean Startup', 'AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Funding', 'Startup Lessons'] |
13 Games I Play to Continuously Crush My Writing Goals With Ease | 13 Games I Play to Continuously Crush My Writing Goals With Ease
Writing is hard, playing isn’t
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Ugh. It happened again.
Just before you slept yesterday, you were excited to wake up, brew your favorite coffee, and start writing a new article today.
But today, you feel like sleeping. Writing doesn’t seem exciting anymore. It seems tedious.
Not able to finish your writing goal today, worse, not even at least opening the doc to start writing, is sucking the energy out of you. You feel like you are procrastinating. You feel like you are missing something. You feel like you are a loser who doesn’t get things done.
It just feels bad. You want to write, but you can’t.
You are tense. You’re frustrated. You’re losing hope.
But wait! This is actually a good thing — it’s a necessity for success. We can’t avoid it, nor skip it, and can’t even suppress it. It happens whenever it has to happen. I call this “The Writer’s Mind-Building Period.”
This actually comes with a lot of benefits. A few are:
You start to think more clearly when that period ends. Because you’re fresh, you’re fully energetic, and you’ve got a newer, better perspective now. You get more motivated to write and make up for your lost time.
However, it comes with some drawbacks too:
Laziness is addictive. You become addicted to that — not writing. You feel like giving up and you might, actually, give up even though you know that it’s a temporary period.
The good news? That period will end whether you write or not. It just happens. So when that period comes, it’s better to write than to waste time, right?
I play a few games and those help me get my writing tasks done really easily in those periods. It’s fun.
Wanna try those?
Cool. Let’s do it. Let’s make our writing journey fun.
Remember, every writer is different. You have the choice to choose your own game (I’m a weird kind of writer, every game works for me in different scenarios.) | https://shajedulkarim.medium.com/13-games-i-play-to-continuously-crush-my-writing-goals-with-ease-bfd5528ba538 | ['Shajedul Karim'] | 2020-09-09 08:22:24.801000+00:00 | ['Writing Prompts', 'Writing', 'Marketing', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips'] |
How to choose disposable baby nappies | 1
The nappies should be breathable. Although with the development of science and technology, the emergence of “nappies” has brought great convenience to people, there are still many parents who would rather choose traditional nappies than “nappies”. Not only is the price of nappies more expensive, but the most important thing is that they are not as breathable as nappies. Children will feel uncomfortable wearing nappies. Therefore, old-fashioned nappies are always the first choice for families with newborn babies.
It is recommended to choose disposable eco-friendly nappies,biodegradable nappies made from Palmbaby is the best disposable nappies which people from Australia choose.
2
The material of the nappies should be soft, absorbent, washable, and easy to dry. In terms of materials, gauze, white cloth and soft cotton cloth are all suitable. You can also choose old white sheets, adult’s old cotton sweaters, cotton wool pants, old quilts, old bed sheets, etc. nappies made for newborn babies.
3
If it is a new reusable nappies, it must be boiled and washed first, and then used after removing the hard pulp. If it is cut from old clothes, it can be washed clean, boiled in water, and dried in the sun before use.
4
Choose a suitable nappies, usually the shape of the nappies is square and rectangular. The square is 70–80 square centimeters, stacked into a triangle for use. Rectangular nappies usually use two at a time, but only one at birth. The number of nappies is about 30 pieces, but it is not easy to dry after washing in winter, so it is best to prepare more. | https://medium.com/@8383zhiyou/how-to-choose-disposable-baby-nappies-54aa2027a506 | ['Jiyo Ring'] | 2021-03-25 00:52:20.038000+00:00 | ['Baby Care', 'Baby', 'Baby Products', 'Baby Clothes'] |
7 Practical Steps for Generating Creative Ideas Daily | In the 21st century, creativity is the number one skill. We’re riding on a wave of new products, new technologies, new ways of doing things — and it’s not slowing down; in fact, it’s only getting started. Those who can creatively take advantage of these opportunities will be the ones who succeed.
Creativity, though, is a hard thing to capture. It’s like lightning. You have two problems: how to capture it and use it effectively; and how to produce it consistently.
For both, we need to understand what creativity is — and what it isn’t. In its simplest definition, creativity is a novel insight. It’s adding something that wasn’t there before. But wait — doesn’t that violate the laws of the universe? Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Yes, that’s right. You can’t really create something from nothing. So, what exactly, then, is a “novel insight?”
Simple: new combinations. New matter and energy aren’t created, but they interconvert.
Creativity is seeing one thing in another thing. But the two things have to be related. And they have to be connected in a specific way. If they’re too related, the insight isn’t novel; it’s obvious. If they’re too far apart, it’s not an insight at all. You can think of it as a Venn diagram. Creativity comes from the little slice of overlapping circles.
Image created by the author using Canva
The easiest way to generate creative ideas is to take two ideas, put them next to each other, and see what overlaps. It can’t be a shallow observation, though. Remember the Venn diagram — too much overlap isn’t valuable or creative. To use this effectively, you need to study different disciplines to see where they line up.
Elon Musk has a great metaphor for building knowledge. He likens it to a tree, but you have to start at the base. You can’t just look at the branches of a tree. You have to find out where the branches connect; you have to look at the tree trunks. The trunks are the significant branches of knowledge that connect all the different branches. You can go even further and see that all trees are rooted in the earth. They all emerge from first principles. Learn those principles, and you can apply insights from one field to another.
Creativity is a lifelong journey. It requires deep learning, patience, and trial-and-error. Most creative ideas are duds — and the most creative people in history had a high tolerance for failure. You have to be willing to tinker, try new things, fail, and iterate.
But there are a few things you can do to help your process. Below are seven practical steps you can take every day to help foster your creativity. | https://medium.com/better-advice/7-practical-steps-for-generating-creative-ideas-daily-51e5871538e7 | ['Tom Beck'] | 2020-12-20 14:50:05.566000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Self', 'Insights', 'Inspiration', 'Self Improvement'] |
One for the Road | FICTION
One for the Road
I drank myself senseless on Christmas Eve. I knew I shouldn’t have done that; I knew it was a bad idea; it was a terrible idea even, but I did it anyway.
The bearded man at the other end of the bar raised his shot glass; he raised it as ceremoniously as a priest during a Mass, then he froze for an instant, tried to steady his swaying body, even though his hand holding the glass remained impeccably motionless, like that of a crane operator, and declared: “One for the road! Ladies and gentlemen, one for the road!”
He downed it in one gulp, and the entire bar — full of patrons and smoke — also downed their drinks with him. I saw the sudden flashes of light, reflected from the bottoms of the raised glasses, flare up all around me, here and there, as if the starry night had crept into this crowded place and taken it over. I remember waiting for them to finish all that collective raising the toast and drinking — I had never been particularly fond of any mass actions, or inactions for that matter. And only then, when the last glass had landed safely on the runway of the counter or a table, did I allow mine to take off.
“Don’t be shy, ladies and gentlemen! Don’t be shy!” he would reappear a few minutes later, as shaky and wobbly as before, and yell: “One for the road! One for the road, ladies and gentlemen! And Merry Christmas to you!”
It took several of those high-proof farewells to knock him off his feet. Too much cordiality defeated him, apparently; so that, before long, two more or less sober Samaritans had to step up and tow him out of there, tow him back home — his insteps dragging on the ground, like twin turntable needles trying to record something. They left two parallel grooves in the fresh snow — so they had recorded something, after all: his path home.
When I got out of there myself — yet without all that dragging and towing — I felt the sidewalk swim beneath me, just as if it tried to catch me off guard and smack me in the face. I saw everything swim and be in constant motion: the snow-caked shops closed for the night; the blazing street lamps forcing me to squint my eyes; the snowplows sailing majestically down the snow-covered streets like the monumental icebreakers that are about to reach and claim the North Pole; the trashcans being discreetly emptied by the warmly dressed garbage men roaming the empty streets — a swarm of nocturnal creatures creeping out of their lairs only after dark. The world, despite the pervading cold, seemed to be in a sudden mood for swimming — so I swam along with it.
I swam down the road, my plump and short legs desperately worked beneath me — like the needles in the hands of one knitting a jumper — doing their fat best not to let me down; my long coat grazed and caressed the snowdrifts, like a delicate and passionate lover.
Hazily, I saw — through the low-placed windows that I passed on my way — the cheery families gathered around their tables: the late Christmas dinners; I saw the warm and colorful blaze of fairy lights pour from each of the top-floor windows; I felt the festive mood suffusing the air; I saw the Christmas trees sag under the oppressive weight of all the sparkling and glittering nonsense being attached to them, as if they were generals with their chests hung with medals. And then I saw a splash of vomit on my right shoe — I must have stepped into something left by that yeller from the bar: I was a shrapnel victim. I dug the tip of my shoe into the nearby snowdrift — a portable shoeshiner, very convenient.
Then it occurred to me; then it struck me — I couldn’t go back home like this; I just couldn’t return home empty-handed like this — it was Christmas Eve for crying and howling out loud.
I staggered back, back to where the shops and flashy display windows could be found. I staggered back to the shops with their shelves bending and buckling under the overflow of presents, toys, mascots, shiny gift-wrapping papers, and everything that one might wish for on a day like this. I staggered back there, yet only to find them all closed and boarded up — such a cruel lack of compassion on a night like this, on such a special night like this. The tree sellers were gone as well and only the occasional heaps of green needles here and there — impossible to miss on the uncompromising whiteness of the fresh snow, like the blots of blood on the crime scene — marked the spots where they had till recently practiced their trade.
Before I realized what I was really doing, I grabbed a spruce growing next to some building — the first one that I had encountered on my way. I kept wrestling and fighting with it, the snow and needles raining on me, on the ground, on the car parked nearby, until the fairly thin trunk gave up and broke with a snap.
Eager to walk away from there as fast as possible, from the amputated tree trunk sticking accusatorily from the snow, from the incriminating evidence of my wooden crime, I cleaned it up; I straightened the spruce up, as if I were adjusting a child’s clothes before dropping it off at school.
I barely climbed the stairs; it was dark in there. The tree kept brushing against the walls of the narrow staircase, showering the needles all the time, leaving a treacherous trail on the steps — I would deal with it later; I would deal with it tomorrow. I found the door to the apartment to be invitingly ajar — a warm light seeped from there, like the comforting heat from a fireplace. I silently walked in.
In the living room, I saw a table; it was all set: full of empty plates; the empty chairs all around it, as if I intruded on a secret meeting of the huddling furniture. Was I too late? Did I miss it? Had they started without me? Was it that bad?
Cursing myself, I propped the spruce against the wall; it poked and tilted the picture hanging there, like one fingering a loose tooth. I wiped my forehead — it was hot in there; too hot to my liking.
Then I saw it: another Christmas tree, fully decorated, large and proud, sitting in the opposite corner of the room: a glittering impostor — they hadn’t even waited for me to do it.
A sudden wave of drowsiness came over me; I could hardly keep my eyes open: I had to lie down. I directed my clumsy and more and more dragging steps toward the bedroom. The door was open; the bed was nicely made up — every tired man’s dream.
I didn’t even bother to take off my coat, much less the shoes — it was my bed, after all, I could afford a hint of slovenliness, once in a while at least. It was warm; it was pleasantly soothing; it was fine.
Then she appeared in the doorway, like a slice of bread jumping out of a toaster.
“Out, out, out of here!” she started screaming right away. “Get out of here, now.”
A tall and balding man dressed in a ridiculous sweater with a horizontal diamond pattern — was that the best he could do? — materialized right next to her; the silly robust grocer.
“Jeez, not him again. Not that guy again,” the baldie squeezed into the room, past the speechless woman; he leaped to my side and started tugging at my coat’s sleeve, like a toothless dog maltreating a trespasser. “Sir, you can’t be here. Sir, you can’t keep coming here.”
“Call the police,” the woman demanded. “Kids, call the police. Tell them that this man is here; he’s here again.”
I saw a duo of girlish little heads peeking around the doorframe and looking like tiny flowers in a boutonnière.
“Sir, it’s not your home,” the baldie went on and on. “Sir, you can’t be here. It’s not your home.”
“Kids, call the cops,” the woman kept wailing. “Where’s the phone? Call the cops.”
“Sir, get up. Sir, it’s not your bed,” the baldie pleaded. “Please go away. It’s not your home.”
“It was my home,” I slurred, burying my head deeper into the pillow — a blissful smile on my face — into the soft bedclothes. “It used to be my home. It was my home once. I only had one for the road.” | https://medium.com/the-nonconformist/one-for-the-road-9b90780fd14e | ['F. R. Foksal'] | 2020-12-29 09:44:40.141000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Books', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Flash Fiction'] |
Be A Santa in The Lives of The Underprivileged | Try to be the Santa in someone’s life with the spirit of giving and without an expectation of getting something in return!
I wish you all have a Merry Christmas and a safe and healthy New Year!
Join me on Twitter and LinkedIn. Cheers, Debesh Choudhury. | https://medium.com/illumination/be-a-santa-in-the-lives-of-the-underprivileged-de5cebd40aca | ['Debesh Choudhury'] | 2020-12-25 09:20:59.728000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'New Year', 'Life', 'Festivals', 'Celebration'] |
Casa's Privacy Model | At Casa our goal is to make it easy for non-technical crypto asset owners to be their own bank. While we have no intention of providing custodial services to our users, we do wish to provide financial software and services that help facilitate our users in their quest for financial sovereignty. As such, there will be some data that third parties such as Casa may know about your crypto activity. We keep as much of your data private as possible, but here is some detail on what third parties will see and your options for taking steps to strengthen your privacy if you so desire.
We’ve moved our blog! To continue reading this article, visit the link below:
https://blog.keys.casa/casas-privacy-model/ | https://medium.com/casa/casa-privacy-model-ee6d1a08fd82 | ['Jameson Lopp'] | 2019-07-18 21:51:49.823000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Privacy'] |
Game of Thrones Season 8: What went wrong? | Game of Thrones Season 8: What went wrong?
Using Data Science to investigate what made the final season of the hit TV show so unpopular
Few TV series have caused as much drama amongst viewers as Game of Thrones. For the first several seasons fans were adamant that the show was unrivalled in its storytelling, gripping drama and loveable characters. Fast forward to the end of Season 8 and we’re in a very different place. Many fans of the show were extremely disappointed with how the storylines ended, some even going so far as to start an official petition to remake the final season, which currently has over 1.7m signatures!
The graphs below show visually how unpopular Season 8 was, plotting the trend in IMDB and RottenTomatoes ratings for all Game of Thrones episodes.
Graphs showing the 3-episode moving average rating for Game of Thrones episodes, from ratings websites IMDB and RottenTomatoes.
Undoubtedly there are several reasons for this, some of which are hard to quantify as they are ultimately subjective - for example, the development of the storylines themselves. We have no meaningful way of quantifying a storyline and even if we did it is impossible to knowing whether a given alternative would have been more or less popular with viewers. As a result, I’ll focus on things that can be quantified - the results still give a surprisingly clear contrast between Season 8 and it’s predecessors, which may help to explain where the show went wrong.
Bang for your buck
First up, I’ve pulled together a graph to visualise what is mostly common knowledge anyway: the cost of producing a Game of Thrones episode is astronomical.
The graph below is very rough and the data is taken from various estimates across the internet, the veracity of which I cannot vouch for. However it at least gives an indication of the kind of money the producers have been working with each season.
Graph to show the estimated per-episode cost of production for Game of Thrones (i.e. the reported budget for each season divided by the number of episodes)
As is already widely known, despite Season 8 being by the far the least popular, it also cost by far the most to produce each episode. Here lies a source of contention for many disgruntled fans: when you’re spending 50% more than you ever have done before, the viewers should at the very least enjoy it as much as previous seasons. This was not the case.
There are a few obvious explanations for this higher cost: a) the increased level of special effects this season due to a more significant presence of White Walkers & dragons and larger battle sequences; b) the length of each episode was increased (see below), meaning more production time was required; and c) the salary of actors will have risen in line with the increasing popularity of the show.
One series, six movies
Season 8 of Game of Thrones was once described by an HBO chief as being like ‘six movies’. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly the high production costs but another reason is the length of each episode, which reached unprecedented levels. Below is a graph showing how the running time of each episode changed over the seasons.
3-episode moving average of episode length across all 8 seasons of Game of Thrones.
While it is clear that longer episodes were less popular it is not clear why. There are probably several reasons, many of which are intangible and impossible to quantify. One of the more plausible is that episode length was increased in order to condense the end of the story into a single season, leading viewers to be unhappy with a production they felt was rushed and unnaturally fast-paced.
A little less conversation a little more action please…
One of the more common complaints from viewers is that Season 8 was too ‘shallow’, in that it did not feature the kind of intellectual dialogue that was the trademark of earlier seasons.
To examine this I looked at the number of lines per episode and the number of words per line for each season. The idea being that (if all else remains equal) more lines suggests more dialogue and less words per line indicates fewer monologues, both of which likely indicate more emphasis on the spoken word and relationships between two or more characters.
Graph showing the number of lines per episode of Game of Thrones.
This graph shows an interesting result. Season 8 had by far the fewest number of lines per episode. This, despite the fact that the episodes were much longer. This is likely due to the increasing emphasis on fighting and battle scenes, rather than dialogue.
Graph showing the average number of words per line spoken.
Again, season 8 appears to be out of the norm for Game of Thrones. Not only does it have significantly less lines, it also has far higher words per line. This is why it would appear that Season 8 has a similiar number of words to previous seasons.
What has happened here is that the final season has seen far more battles and as such the number of lines spoken has fallen. To make up for this and allow for the end of the story to be condensed into a single season, the writers have allowed for more monologues and ‘rousing speeches’, something which was unheard of in previous seasons. Take Tyrion for example, who averages just under 15 words per line. You also have to take into account the characters who have few lines but manage get off a significant monologue in those few line - Gilly (4 lines, average 16.5 words per line) and Edmure (4 lines, average 19.5 words per line) are prime examples.
This kind of monologuing simply didn’t happen in previous seasons. It is arguably an unavoidable side-effect of ‘goodbyes’, but whatever the reason it is clear that this is another way in which Season 8 was unique and perhaps points towards an explanation for why it failed to meet expectations.
Every good hero needs a villain
Another area in which the final season was lacking, was the presence of a good villain. This could tie into the disillusionment surrounding both the surprisingly quick demise of the Night King and the development of Daenerys’ character. In a survey of fans, the top 6 favourite Game of Thrones villains (across all seasons) comprised of: 4 people who were dead at the start of Season 8 (Littlefinger, Ramsay, Tywin & Joffrey), Cersei & The Night King.
As has been mentioned by many commentators - and as I proved in my recent article ‘A Game of Words: Season 8’ - Cersei was at best a minor character in Season 8 with many of her appearances being non-speaking. The graph below is adapted from that article and shows how few lines Cersei had. The blue line and number indicates her average number of lines per episode from Seasons 1–7, showing how she played a significantly smaller part for the first time in this season.
Graph showing the number of words spoken per episode by Cersei Lannister, and her average number of words per episode in seasons 1–7.
Given that the Night King was also a non-speaking villain, this season was severely lacking a strong antagonistic character who could interact with the heroes of the show.
It could be argued that Daenerys was supposed to be the true villain of Season 8, but even if this is the case it wasn’t until Episode 5 at the earliest and she wasn’t a truly evil villain, so couldn’t replace those who actually were (i.e. Littlefinger, Ramsay, Joffrey).
Location, Location, Location
Season 8 was also by far the least diverse season in terms of locations. One of the most popular aspects of the show in earlier seasons was the multiple different storylines simultaneously occurring all across Westeros. It is perhaps inevitable that as the series drew to a close characters would gravitate towards each other geographically, but the graph below shows that this change was very sudden, giving further credit to the idea that the ending of the show was rushed.
The black line gives the actual number of different scene locations for each episode while the blue line gives an average number of locations per episode, for each season.
Graph showing the number of locations per episode and the average number of locations per episode for each season of Game of Thrones.
Aside from the final episode (which showed shots from various locations as the characters went their separate ways), Season 8 was by far the most static. This can be clearly seen by the averages, in fact if you argued that the final episode only took place in one location (Kings Landing) then Season 8 averaged 1.5 locations per episode, less than a third of the average of any other season.
As I mentioned this is partly inevitable due to characters dying and storylines being tied up but it is clear that there was no gradual coming together of characters over the final few seasons, instead there is a sharp decline in geographical (and therefore storyline) diversity in season 8 as the series rushed to its conclusion.
Overview
To summarise, I think the disappointment that fans have voiced over the final season of Game of Thrones stems from several origins. Many of these are impossible to quantify as they relate to an inherent emotion arising from storytelling that data cannot yet easily comprehend. However, there are some clear ways in which Season 8 did not live up to the standards set by the previous 7 seasons.
The data points to the final season being displayed as an expensive action/sci-fi, rather than a strategic drama. This focus on special effects and visuals over meaningful dialogue and well-developed storylines has contributed to the anger shown by many fans of Game of Thrones. It is also clear that there was no gradual development towards the finale, with Season 8 being vastly different from the 7 predecessors without any real intermediate step. This was most likely down to the reality of business but has disillusioned fans who have been devoted to the series since its inception.
Thank you for reading! I’ve written several analytical articles about Game of Thrones so if you enjoyed this or found it interesting feel free to check out the others! My most popular article looked at analysing scripts from the first seven seasons to see how the words characters spoke could represent their storylines. My most recent article continued this by looking at data for the final season to see how this compared to the previous 7. The results (as they were here) are extremely telling. | https://medium.com/data-slice/game-of-thrones-season-8-what-went-wrong-b54b8eb97403 | ['Chris Brownlie'] | 2019-08-05 19:46:28.819000+00:00 | ['Game of Thrones', 'Data Science', 'Television', 'Data Visualization', 'TV Series'] |
AI in Production: The Impact of AI on the Publishing Value Chain | A graph representing the metadata of thousands of archive documents. Source: Wikimedia Commons
AI is coming. AI is here. In the popular press, you read a lot of stuff about the future of artificial intelligence, and I do believe, as do many others, that it’s a technology that has a long way to go before it lives up to the hype (and the dread — cf. our companion Medium piece from this week, Retiring the T-700: Toward a Mandalorian Conception of Artificial Intelligence) of its name.
I’m reminded of a quote from Stack Overflow and Discourse.org co-founder Jeff Atwood when asked if he had any ideas for utilizing artificial intelligence algorithms. His short response: “I do not. I’m not sure ‘artificial intelligence’ is a particularly useful concept at this time. “machine learning” is at least a little more accurate in describing where we are. 😉” I think what Atwood’s perhaps curmudgeonly response points to is that we’re still seeing machines and algorithms trained to do only one thing or a couple of things well enough to be called intelligent or learning.
In a discussion with Hederis team members on the subject of AI in publishing, founding team member and head of operations Erica Warren elucidated one reason why some tech insiders like Atwood remain wary of the AI label:
Part of the issue is that when people think of AI/ML, they generally think of complete automation — and our experience with building our automation product in the past (at Macmillan) is that while even 95%–99% of cases might be straightforward, the 1% over the course of an entire book is actually a lot. So to go that route, publishers either have to (a) lower their standards of quality — which is a non-starter for professional publishers competing with self-publishing, or (b) review all of the changes manually anyway, which defeats the time savings of using AI in the first place.
So while much of the dread and fear around AI relates to too much unchecked autonomy, the healthy skepticism toward all these products labeled AI relates to the fact that the machines are just not autonomous enough.
But as Erica pointed out, when we stop expecting AI to do all the work and accept a symbiotic role with AI as assistant, we can start to understand the potential these technologies have for apps like Hederis and publishing in general:
And the way to do that is to avoid entirely automated “push-button” systems. What we strive for is the concept of an “AI-assistant.” Computers are good at processing large amounts of data quickly, and matching new data to patterns in historical data. The challenge with publishing applications, in fact with any application that deals with art, is that the heart of creativity is novelty. ML applications are NOT good with handling something new that they haven’t seen before. Humans, though, are great at problem solving with new information. What we’re not good at is doing rote, repetitive work accurately for an extended period of time. So you can see that this is an ideal situation to sort of share the load, with the computer being optimized for the repetitive work and the people handling the unique situations that the computer is not able to handle — and in the end we get a higher-quality product in less time.
In publishing, AI and machine learning seem to be trained, broadly, on doing a few sets of tasks fairly well, and your position in the publishing value chain will definitely affect how you benefit (or suffer) from AI’s impact. In a keynote for Digital Book World’s inaugural AI conference (held virtually in May 2020), Lee Huang, a former digital executive and AI expert, described some broad areas of problems that AI is typically trained on — namely, natural language processing, semantic analysis, disambiguation, classification, and taxonomy — and offered up his CAPA framework for utilizing AI in a publishing setting. CAPA stands for Content Creation, Answers & Predictions, and Automation. Giving examples from each category, Huang’s presentation offered clues to how C-suite executives at major publishers are thinking of AI: as a place to generate engagement and revenue at a lower cost. Much of the dread that surrounds AI involves the fear that intelligent machines will replace intelligent humans in the workplace. To Huang’s credit, he frames a lot of the cost-saving benefits of AI for publishers as ways for a publisher to expand into new experiences — automatically generated AR tied to what the machine reads in your text, “deep voice” audiobook narration, automatically generated plain-language summaries of data sets and bodies of research — as opposed to ways to downsize existing staffs. but it still equates to growth in profits and capacity without growing staff. The logic of downsizing is, of course, looming in the shadows, if it’s not outright staring us in the face.
Although the executive view of AI may give the folks grinding it out in content creation, editing, and production the feeling that they’re headed for planned obsolescence, the other keynote from the DBW panel, given by Jason Boog, a journalist who writes about and experiments with AI for outlets such as Publishers Weekly and Towards Data Science, offered a view to ways content creators, and writers specifically, can form personal and open relationships to AI. Boog wrote a step-by-step tutorial about how to use the OpenAI API to access GPT-2, a powerful, interactive NLP language model that allows users to train a computer to do various tasks, including generating pieces of longform fiction. He presented this and other examples of how everyday people without massive R&D budgets or computer science PhDs on staff can start building and training their own AI assistants.
One theme of Boog’s talk was that, while the output of many of these publicly accessible AIs is a predictably mixed bag, AI can provide enough raw material for the right creatives and editors to do great work with less rote effort.
Boog’s sentiments resonate with Hederis’s own philosophy of AI adoption and use, which we are excited to develop and roll out as we head into our third quarter out of beta. The sentiment was echoed by these final comments from Erica Warren:
With enough data, it’s definitely possible to help users get more books through their system quickly by automating the boring stuff and letting humans use their time to actually make meaningful decisions, and use their considerable knowledge and skills instead of just doing manual labor.
While some “classic” production problems, such as classification and tagging of manuscripts are getting the AI/ML treatment from established publishing players and startups (this is an area where Hederis will be developing further capabilities over the coming year), we believe there are other questions, about what constitutes “skilled” type design and other production decision-making scenarios, that have yet to be asked and answered with AI. We’re excited for the next year, and to be a part of this conversation around the future of book production. | https://medium.com/hederis-app/ai-in-production-the-impact-of-ai-on-the-publishing-value-chain-5674dd87193f | ['Hederis Team'] | 2020-12-21 21:15:47.246000+00:00 | ['Publishing', 'AI', 'Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
The Top 101 Consulting Frameworks of 2020 | At the end of each year, we publish a list of the top 101 consulting frameworks from the FlevyPro Library. We add new frameworks to FlevyPro each week based on market trends (e.g. Digital Transformation, Customer-centric Design) and customer demand. (See the top 101 consulting frameworks of 2019.)
Business frameworks are powerful tools consultants leverage to address their clients’ business issues in an organized, thorough, and efficient fashion. Each of our framework guides is a detailed PowerPoint presentation that provides a structured approach to analyzing and solving a common business problem, from issues in Strategy Development to Digital Transformation to Leadership Development.
Here are our Top 101 Consulting Frameworks, based on sales and downloads (as of December 2020).
1. Digital Transformation: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy (27-slides)
2. Strategic Management Office (SMO) Implementation (24-slide PPT)
3. Objectives and Key Results (OKR) (23-slide PowerPoint presentation)
4. M&A: Target Operating Model (TOM) (32-slide PPT presentation)
5. Best Practices in Strategic Planning (23-slide PowerPoint presentation)
6. Business Transformation Framework for New CEOs (22-slide PPT)
7. Digital Transformation Strategy (Primer) (21-slide PowerPoint)
8. 10 Principles in Leading Change Management (17-slide PowerPoint)
9. Influence Model for Change (23-slide PowerPoint presentation)
10. Post-merger Integration (PMI): Integration Checklist(27-slide PPT)
11. Value Creation Framework Series: Primer (28-slide PPT presentation)
12. Pathways to Data Monetization (27-slide PowerPoint presentation)
13. Consulting Proposal Structure & Template (23-slide PPT presentation)
14. Six Building Blocks of Digital Transformation (35-slide PPT)
15. Management Consulting Problem Solving Process (19-slide PPT)
16. Storyboarding and Presentation Writing (33-slide PPT presentation)
17. Digital Transformation: Value Creation & Analysis (21-slide PPT)
18. Business Model Canvas (22-slide PowerPoint presentation)
19. End-to-end (E2E) Operating Model Transformation (30-slide PPT)
20. Organizational Design and Capability Analysis (31-slide presentation)
21. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (21-slide PowerPoint presentation)
22. Business Model Innovation (BMI) (27-slide PowerPoint presentation)
23. Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) (26-slide PPT presentation)
24. McKinsey Feedback Model (21-slide PowerPoint presentation)
25. Moving from Data to Insights (26-slide PowerPoint presentation)
26. Leadership Competency Model (25-slide PowerPoint presentation)
27. Data Gathering and Analysis (26-slide PowerPoint presentation)
28. Employee Engagement Culture (17-slide PowerPoint presentation)
29. SMO Series: Strategy Management Processes (24-slide PPT)
30. Strategy Map (20-slide PowerPoint presentation)
31. Big Data Enablement Framework (22-slide PowerPoint presentation)
32. Greiner Growth Model: Stages of Evolution & Revolution (28-slides)
33. Defining Issues and Generating Hypotheses (22-slide PPT presentation)
34. Digital Organizational Design (21-slide PowerPoint presentation)
35. SMO Series: Strategic Management Office (SMO) Primer (21-slide PPT)
36. Supply Chain Resilience (23-slide PowerPoint presentation)
37. Crisis Recovery Strategy (21-slide PowerPoint presentation)
38. Quantifying the Size and Growth of a Market (16-slide PPT)
39. Analyzing the Competitive Landscape (33-slide PPT presentation)
40. Six Building Blocks of a Customer-Centric Organization (32-slide PPT)
41. Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy (22-slide PPT presentation)
42. Scenario Planning for Consultants (22-slide PowerPoint presentation)
43. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Best Practices (21-slide PPT)
44. 9 Principles of Organizational Design (21-slide PPT presentation)
45. Enterprise Architecture for Digital Strategy (14-slide PPT presentation)
46. Fit Transformation: Strong, Agile, Lean (24-slide PPT presentation)
47. Digital Maturity Model (13-slide PowerPoint presentation)
48. Theory of Constraints (19-slide PowerPoint presentation)
49. Developing Conclusions and Recommendations (21-slide presentation)
50. Profitability & Cost Structure: Internal Data Analysis (17-slides)
51. Transformation Journey (21-slide PowerPoint presentation)
52. Artificial Intelligence (AI): Machine Learning (ML) (22-slide PPT)
53. Key Account Management (KAM) in Healthcare and Pharma (23-slides)
54. Internet of Things (IoT) Decision Framework (21-slide PPT)
55. SCM: Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) Improvement (27-slides)
56. Customer Experience (21-slide PowerPoint presentation)
57. Six Sigma Maturity Model (17-slide PowerPoint presentation)
58. Go-to-Market Model Design (19-slide PowerPoint presentation)
59. Smart Organizational Design (27-slide PowerPoint presentation)
60. Key Account Management (KAM): Large Global Accounts (24-slides)
61. Customer-centric Culture (23-slide PowerPoint presentation)
62. Galbraith Star Model (24-slide PowerPoint presentation)
63. Effective Communication with Virtual Teams (23-slide PPT)
64. Risk Management: Cybersecurity Strategy (23-slide PPT presentation)
65. People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM) (18-slide PPT presentation)
66. First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies (19-slide PPT presentation)
67. Change Management in Post-merger Integration (PMI) (24-slide PPT)
68. Creating Value Propositions (12-slide PowerPoint presentation)
69. Employee Value Proposition (EVP) (20-slide PowerPoint presentation)
70. Blockchain: Key Evaluation Criteria & Solution Platforms (20-slide PPT)
71. Closing the Strategy-to-Performance Gap (20-slide PPT presentation)
72. COVID-19: 10 Trends in Consumer Behavior (22-slide PPT)
73. 8 Levers to Change Management (24-slide PowerPoint presentation)
74. Impact of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (21-slide PPT)
75. Removing Organizational Silos (23-slide PowerPoint presentation)
76. Team Turnaround Strategies (22-slide PowerPoint presentation)
77. Innovation Culture (22-slide PowerPoint presentation)
78. Workshop Facilitation Techniques (Volume 2) (27-slide PPT)
79. Workshop Facilitation Techniques (Volume 1) (28-slide PPT)
80. The Innovation Process (24-slide PowerPoint presentation)
81. Capability Development (21-slide PowerPoint presentation)
82. Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) (21-slide PPT)
83. Purpose-driven Organization Transformation (20-slide PPT)
84. Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model (15-slide PowerPoint presentation)
85. Virtual Teams: Challenges & Benefits (26-slide PPT presentation)
86. Digital Transformation Governance (27-slide PowerPoint presentation)
87. Digital Supply Chain Strategy (25-slide PowerPoint presentation)
88. Digital Transformation: Integrated Business Ecosystems (27-slide PPT)
89. 10 Principles of Customer Strategy (22-slide PPT presentation)
90. Facilities Management (FM): Top 10 Trends (22-slide PPT presentation)
91. Social Media Management (34-slide PowerPoint presentation)
92. Scenario Planning Primer (27-slide PowerPoint presentation)
93. FAST Method to Goal Setting (19-slide PowerPoint presentation)
94. Facilities Management (FM): 5 Major Growth Drivers (31-slide PPT)
95. Knowledge Management Primer (26-slide PowerPoint presentation)
96. Causal Model of Organizational Performance and Change (17-slides)
97. Digital Facilities Management (FM) (23-slide PowerPoint presentation)
98. Matrix Organization: Balance of Power (27-slide PPT presentation)
99. Manufacturing Strategy: Make vs. Buy (25-slide PPT presentation)
100. Supplier Management: Supplier Segmentation (24-slide PPT)
101. Lean Change Management (21-slide PowerPoint presentation)
For a list of the more traditional frameworks used by consultants (e.g. Porter’s Five Forces, GE-McKinsey Matrix, BCG Growth-Share Matrix), take at a look this article here.
We continue to add new business frameworks on a weekly basis. You can peruse our full collection of business frameworks and consulting guides here.
You can also learn more about FlevyPro here or read some testimonials below.
If you are interested in specific functional topics, check out our latest offering, called FlevyPro Streams. Streams are ideal for executives, consultants, and other business professionals who specialize in specific disciplines and desire to achieve Excellence in their fields. See our available Streams here.
Interesting in Strategy & Transformation (S&T) frameworks?
Take a look at our free giveaway of S&T templates here. The frameworks covered span a diverse array of S&T topics, from Growth Strategy to Brand Development to Innovation to Customer Experience to Strategic Management. | https://medium.com/@mark-bridges/the-top-101-consulting-frameworks-of-2020-3b9be58ce18e | ['Mark Bridges'] | 2020-12-25 15:14:30.700000+00:00 | ['Strategic Planning', 'Consulting', 'Digital Transformation', 'Leadership', 'Management'] |
Potty Training Dos and Don’ts | Potty training will require a lot of work form your baby and even more patience from you. The key to success is the right timing, consistency, and ability to keep your toddler well-motivated. How to do that? Here are some basics to start with.
Do read clues
If you can see that diaper is bothering your child, it is the best moment to start! Although there are other signs to look for: baby trying to dress and undress on their own, copies behavior of others, or at least stays dry for 2 hours or more — you are good to try!
Do not rush
Even if your child seemed eager to start the training, do not rush the next steps to happen. Take your time, stay as patient as your baby needs you to.
Do praise
Praise is a powerful tool during potty training! Remember you are rewarding using the potty correctly, not only going to the potty.
Do not punish
Whatever happens — you cannot yell or punish the baby. Potty training is a complicated process and a massive change in a baby’s life, and it can get messy (literally!), but you need to stay supportive.
Do talk about it
Remember to talk about it with your child at the beginning. Also, you need to speak with every other one taking care of the baby during the training — grandparents, nanny, friends staying overnight. You all need to remain consistent.
Do not ask too often
Try to recognize moments, when your child could need a potty, remind about it regularly but not too often. You don’t want the baby to get bored quickly or to connect the training with disturbing during playtime.
If you’re tired of continually changing diapers and willing to start the training, I recommend you my How to make your child love going potty guide with the whole sleep training process described and the best techniques showed.
Susan Urban | https://medium.com/@contact_96166/potty-training-dos-and-donts-b5255c83d429 | ['Susan Urban'] | 2019-04-12 09:23:58.206000+00:00 | ['Potty Training', 'Parenting', 'Toddlers', 'Moms', 'Baby'] |
Bread and Blessings: Healing Ancestral Wounds in Simple Ways | Interior altar of Brigid’s Holy Well in County Clare, Ireland. Image taken by author.
For Persis
In early April of 2019 my grandmother passed away. She was my dad’s mom, and I last remember seeing her at my great-great Aunt Jane’s funeral at age seven or eight. I can’t remember how old I was. In the years that followed my dad became estranged from my grandmother, and I became estranged from my dad. All of which, I believe, stem from the intergenerational trauma related to alcohol addiction.
A few months prior to my grandmother’s death I launched a blog, The Gnostic Witch, as a project to discuss my personal relationship with magic, and her death impacted that relationship in deeper ways than I could have anticipated. Throughout 2019 subtle events unfolded that taught me of a deep, quiet love that alchemizes emotional pain experienced during this finite lifetime.
Healing Ancestral Wounds
Ancestral wounds cut deep. They reach past any known point of conscious awareness we have about our current identities. They are greater than the individual egos we experience in our own lifetimes, and yet help to construct those very same egos simultaneously. They’re ancient wounds that live in our bones. But they’re also the doors in which our awareness can expand to know the wide spectrum of emotions each of us can experience as humans. A single event can create both deep suffering and profound empowerment, depending on how we choose to heal those wounds. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I think of salvation as the moment of release into emotional freedom and safety after a harrowing experience. The past happened. The pain and fear attached to the memory are valid. But now it’s time metabolize the pain — to take it apart, beak it down, and transform it into the remedy you need in this moment. I do this by taking an aspect of the pain and curiously ask questions about it, exploring it in thought processes. I imagine I walk side-by-side with the pain in the spirit of friendship, listening and tending to it in healthy and sustainable ways. And the more consistent I am, the more aware I am of my ability to choose an alchemizing emotional state. I witness and experience deeper layers of joy while walking in truth alongside the pain of my lived experience.
Inheritance
But healing ancestral wounds doesn’t have to be a solo task. In fact, it shouldn’t. Because these wounds are greater than us as individuals or even as family units, it’s necessary to call upon spirit allies to aide in the task. These could be ancestors, animal or plant archetypes, or beings from various cosmologies.
Days before my grandmother’s death I felt the presence of the Cailleach, the Celtic ancestor goddess, near and with me. At the time I didn’t know what to think of it, but in retrospect I believe the Cailleach heralded my Irish American grandmother’s passing. In the months that followed her death, more spirits, specifically the aos sí, also came forward petitioning a working magical relationship with me.
At first, I was very reluctant. The aos sí are notoriously playful and mischievous. Akin to fairies, they are a supernatural race of beings that occupy an ambiguous space of being part deity, part nature spirit, and part ancestor that are so old they’ve lost their humanness. But my hesitancy eased as I learned about the symbiotic relationship between the aos sí and witches in Irish folklore.[i] The witch channels the magic from the aos sí to read signs or enact change in the mundane world. It’s a relationship that allows the witch to bypass the limitations of the human perspective. When I learned that my grandmother also had identified as a witch (she was clairvoyant and read palms) and had a working relationship with the aos sí, my hesitancy disappeared altogether.
I was four when my dad left to start a new family, which began the deterioration of our relationship. Because that event happened so early in life for me, I cognitively don’t know what it’s like to not feel abandoned by a parent. I don’t know what it’s like to not associate a parent with emotional and psychological abuse. But the presence of the aos sí became an invitation to curiously play with ways in which I can find emotional healing and support. I could channel the magic of the aos sí, whose very nature is greater than myself, my dad, and my grandmother combined. This relationship could help me move beyond the pain that is so central to my identity and shift my worldview to a place of safety and empowerment.
The Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. The southernmost point is the embodiment of Cailleach, the Celtic ancestor goddess. Image taken by author.
Playful Acts of Courage
The first playful act I did in 2019 was bake bread. When I was kid, long after my parents divorced, my grandmother compiled a cookbook of family recipes, some of which dated back to our Irish ancestors. She gave my mom a copy to give to me when I got older, but it wasn’t until after her death that I found the courage to look at it. I baked a loaf of soda bread following the recipe in her cookbook and offered it to my ancestors on my alter.
The second playful act I did was speak blessings. I last spoke to my dad three years ago, a decision that was my own. Our relationship became too painful for me to continue, and I decided I needed space in order to find peace. But in 2019 I discovered my own need to access a place of forgiveness. I knew I couldn’t return to the destructiveness of our relationship, nor could I change my dad as a human. I needed a way to find forgiveness, while also respecting personal sovereignty. So I chose to daily speak blessings into the relationship (the spaces that exist between us), through prayer and with the help of the aos sí.
I share these anecdotes to demonstrate how mundane the most profound magic can sometimes appear. I think we often expect spectacle when it comes to validating spiritual experiences, but the most effective experiences, in my opinion, are deceptively simple and gentle. To the outsider, I baked a loaf of bread. But internally, that loaf of bread was the manifestation of a small act of courage I took to consciously shift emotions of sorrow that I inherited. It came from a cookbook intended to nourish me ancestrally and in turn I used the bread to nourish my ancestors. It allowed me to gain a feeling of support that was severely lacking in my paternal lineage, even if only accessed in the spirit realms.
Soda bread for Persis
Weaving Together the Ancestor with the Inner Child
In November I taught a workshop about weaving cailleachs, plated straw bundles that were traditionally hung in Irish kitchens or barns that also serve as effigies to the divine crone, Cailleach. At the time I didn’t realize how close Cailleach had stayed with me throughout the year, until I remembered her visitation to me in April. The bundles were made traditionally near Samhain (Oct 31), celebrating the end of the harvest, and were thought to bring nourishment to the household or livestock.[ii] But cailleachs can also be made at Imbolc (January 31), because securing two of them together makes a regional variation of a Saint Brigid’s Cross.[iii] Brigid, who is celebrated at Imbolc, is the Celtic goddess of springtime, fire, and sacred wells. Her saintly counterpart is venerated on February 1st and is the patron saint of children, especially those in need of care.
A cailleach braided by the author
It feels appropriate to end this post by sharing this simple but layered spell that venerates and nourishes both the ancestor and the inner child. To make a simple cailleach, take a bundle of straw (at least 12 pieces) and tie it just below the kernels. Divide the bundle into three sections and braid the stalks by crossing over the middle. Secure the bundle by tying another string at the end and repeat the process for the second cailleach. It might help to soak the straw in water first to make it more bendable, depending on the dryness of the straw. Tie the two cailleachs in the middle to create the Saint Brigid’s Cross, and hang near an entryway in the home.
[i] Buttler, Jenny. “The Sídhe and Fairy Forts.” In Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500 AD to the Present, 95–107. London: Gibson Square, 2018.
[ii] O’Dowd, Anne. Straw, Hay, and Rushes in Irish Folk Tradition. Sallins, Co. Kildare, Ireland: Irish Academic, 2015.
[iii] ibid | https://medium.com/@katiedemar/bread-and-blessings-healing-ancestral-wounds-in-simple-ways-fcfbd5cf4445 | ['Katie Demar'] | 2020-01-14 21:01:01.302000+00:00 | ['Healing', 'Ireland', 'Ancestors', 'Spirituality', 'Magic'] |
Using PGP Encryption with Nodejs | What is PGP?
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a cryptographic process used to encrypt and decrypt information. It combines concepts from symmetric and asymmetric key encryption, maintaining some of the best security and usability aspects of both.
One way PGP can be used is to protect the confidentiality of information. Once the information is encrypted, nobody will be able to decrypt it unless they have the right key. In practice, PGP is commonly used in sending and receiving emails, sharing information on the Dark Web, and others. This is because both on and off the Internet, there are ways to intercept information being sent, making encryption using PGP or similar critical.
On a high-level the process between a sender and receiver looks like this:
The recipient generates public and private keys. The recipient sends its public key to the sender. The sender encrypts the message using the given public key. The sender sends the encrypted message to the recipient. The recipient decrypts the message using its private key.
PGP Examples in Node.js
Now, let’s go over some examples in Node.js using the openpgp library.
We’ll go over some basic examples and show how to encrypt & decrypt large files using Node.js streams.
First, set up your Node.js project and install openpgp.js:
mkdir pgp-tutorial && cd pgp-tutorial && npm init npm i openpgp --save
Note: examples use openpgp v4.10.8
Generating keys
When generating private and public PGP keys with OpenPGP, you can define which curve to use in Elliptic-curve cryptography. In this example, we use Ed25519 for its performance and small key size. For the full list of curves, you can choose from, refer to OpenPGP.js docs.
You also need to define a passphrase used to decrypt files and the private key. In practice, this should be a strong, randomized secret generated for a single-use.
Running the above gives us our private key:
And the public key:
File Encryption
Now we can start encrypting information.
Create a text file:
echo 'This file contains secret information' > secrets.txt
Here, we act as the sender who received a public key from the intended recipient. We use their public key to encrypt the confidential information:
In the newly created encrypted-secrets.txt file, we have the contents encrypted like so:
Now, as the sender, we can send the encrypted file to the recipient.
File Decryption
Here, we act as the reciever. To decrypt the encrypted-secrets.txt file, we use our private key and passphrase:
Which logs the decrypted file contents:
This file contains secret information.
Using Streams for Large Files
If you plan on encrypting or decrypting large files, you won’t be able to fit the entire file contents in memory. In this case, you can use Node.js streams.
Here, we encrypt a large file called dataset-1mill.json using streams:
encrypt(); async function encrypt() { const encrypted = await openpgp.encrypt({ message: openpgp.message.fromText(fs.createReadStream("dataset-1mill.json")), publicKeys: (await openpgp.key.readArmored(publicKeyArmored)).keys, }); let readStream = encrypted.data; let writeStream = fs.createWriteStream("encrypted-dataset.txt", { flags: "a" }); readStream.pipe(writeStream); readStream.on("end", () => console.log("done!")); }
And then, we decrypt the newly created encrypted-dataset.txt using streams: | https://medium.com/@loginradius/using-pgp-encryption-with-nodejs-91f386759f17 | [] | 2020-11-12 07:02:48.629000+00:00 | ['Encryption', 'Nodejs', 'Coding', 'Developer', 'Cryptography'] |
Coffee shops and how to decide what city to travel to? | I bought a coffee the other day in a shop for a price that is vastly greater than that if I had bought the beans and made it myself — although I do not doubt that the quality of the product I could produce would be inferior to that bought at a coffee shop. The point is I paid for a coffee when economically it would make much more sense for me to buy a cheaper product and make the coffee at home why? The answer is commodification. When I buy the coffee from the coffee shop I buy 3 things: the experience of the coffee, the design and aesthetic of the coffee shop, and the coffee shop's “culture” of drinking coffee. If I was just paying for the coffee beans, the cup, the milk, and the sugar the price wouldn’t set me back as much however the coffee has been branded and sold to me so not only am I paying for the base ingredients I am paying for the brand of Coffee. In a globalized world not only do we pay to visit cities we pay to visit brands; places that are sold to us as much more than what they are.
When buying my coffee from a coffee shop. In the same way, cities sell their design and architecture to me as it is superior to the design and architecture of the town I live in. An example of this is the Nationale-Nederlanden building in Prague, or more commonly known as the dancing house. The dancing house was designed by Fred O’Ghery in 1996. The building follows ideas of other buildings in its region however its peculiar shape and post-modern ideas are designed to stand out against its mundane backdrop. The architecture is sold to Prague’s 8 million visitors with many taking pictures of or with the dancing building. The design of the city is curated through unique architecture like the dancing the house making Prague an attractive option to its visitors the same the coffee shop has a unique design that attracts me.
Photo by John Jacobson on Unsplash
One reason I drink my coffee at a coffee shop and not at home is that I like the idea of sitting in a coffee shop and reading a book whilst drinking my coffee. The idea of the coffee shop is sold to me, the “culture” if you like. Cities like coffee shops sell their culture. Cities create and nurture an attractive culture by cultivating cultural centers and businesses that attract the creative class to the city. Over time the creative class will create their own ideas of the city and an attractive cultural environment will form. An example of this can be seen in the £14 billion regeneration of Liverpool where money has been invested in cultural sites such as the Tate gallery in the Albert dock area which have helped push forward the culture of the city and make it more attractive to the 38 million tourists the city attracts.
Going to the coffee shop over drinking my coffee at home is an event I am paying for it is an activity. With the rise of the experience economy, more cities are now focusing on attracting tourists with memorable events. Cities want to offer a unique experience to a tourist to entice them to come and visit. Cities can do this in several ways. Restaurants, theatres, and sports events all sell experiences to tourists to name a few. In New York, the experience economy is sold in various for example food tourism (think New York pizza), theatres (Broadway) and large sports events such as watching the Yankees are all experiences that are sold to tourists.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Cities are branding themselves and selling themselves to you and this is important, why? Because cities like coffee aren’t made equal and if you know what to look for (culture, aesthetics, and experience) you can decide to invest your time and money in the best city for you. | https://medium.com/@jameshughes372/coffee-shops-and-how-to-decide-what-city-to-travel-to-fb661c6a3201 | [] | 2020-12-25 21:40:04.476000+00:00 | ['Coffee', 'Geography', 'Cities', 'Urban Planning'] |
Issue #1: Updates From the Dev Cave | Welcome to XYO Network’s very first installment of “Updates From the Dev Cave!”
This is where we’ll share what our awesome dev team is working on, and dig deeper into blockchain and other technology that keeps us coding — late into the night.
This content will be tailor-made for card-carrying github members, but even if you’re just a little curious about blockchain and all the cool projects in the works, hop on board and enjoy the ride. We’ll be posting (at least) every other week.
For our first installment, we’re highlighting the work of a few special guests who are the newest members of the XYO team!
From Caching to Quadhashing: Introducing LayerOne’s Tech
**We’ve just purchased LayerOne, a groundbreaking blockchain development firm. More on that below**
So, how is LayerOne’s location technology different than XYO’s? Here’s a breakdown from our announcement of the sale:
At XYO, we operate at the intersection of Internet of Things (IoT) and Location, which we combine to call “Location of Things” (LoT). But how we combine this with blockchain is where it gets really interesting.
XYO Network is a **Relative** location network — a network tied together by constantly moving nodes.
Yet as humans, we have a hard time reading location data this way, because it’s nearly impossible to understand location data unless one overlays maps as context. We need **Absolute location** protocols — latitude-longitude coordinates, for example — to see and understand exactly where things are in the world.
Need an example? Here’s how Relative location and Absolute location work together:
Relative location: Jim and Jenn are 1.5 meters away from each other.
Relative location AND Absolute location: Jim and Jenn are 1.5 meters away from each other…at Lat. 53.343813 and Long: -6.263538 (bonus points if you’ve been there — I hear the beer is amazing).
LayerOne provides the absolute location. Here’s a breakdown of what they’re working on:
Quadhashing
LayerOne created what we are now calling the Quadhash. A Quadhash is the fastest, most versatile storage protocol for saving locations on the blockchain. On the blockchain, every Bit counts, and location storage needs to be fast, efficient, and precise.With Quadhashes, everything about a location can easily be packaged in a single unsigned integer! We’ve also built a Quadhash library that solves complex location-related problems using simple math and bit-shifts. It is entirely extensible to be used for things like Geo-Indexes, Non-Fungible Tokens, Spatial aggregation, a 3D space representation, or anything that targets a specific point in space/time. We are going to be using Quadhashes at XYO to store real-world locations, events, and build spatially aware smart contracts on the blockchain.
Super cool sidenote: Quadhashes are accurate down to three meters, HOWEVER, if you wanted to use Quadhashes to get ridiculously granular, you can drill down to the nanometer.
Caching
While it would be nice to run a dApp entirely off the blockchain, in reality the responsiveness needed for a fully featured application just wouldn’t be up to today’s standards. This is where caching comes to save the day. By caching relevant blockchain transactions and events, we can provide a very responsive experience to the user as well as allow for more advanced operations not currently possible on the blockchain. In the end, the blockchain always remains the source of truth for all important data points.
React App
When we first started building the app, we tried a relatively new React-Blockchain library called Drizzle. After weeks of trying to figure out how to make Drizzle play nicely with our redux architecture, we decided to roll our own. The gist of it is simple — on app load, create a singleton instance of web3. This can be modified to be anything that talks to the blockchain, such as MetaMask and Portis. From there, we can treat web3 like an API. Combining this with Redux Saga, which allows us to chain actions and side effects together, we have a seamless flow from API request actions in the components, which trigger sagas to fire, which then call API success actions that update our local Redux store.
Dapp Deployer (Easily deploy your web3 dApps)
Development tools are seriously lacking for blockchain developers. The Dapp Deployer is a program that builds, migrates, and deploys your smart contracts to where they need to go. It also imports them with deployed configuration into your React project! Previously, in order to deploy an update for developers to test, our blockchain engineer would migrate the contracts, copy the ABI’s to the local React project, also copy them to our backend that watches the updated contracts as well. Then the React developer and API developer would have to update the addresses for the newly deployed contracts! Whew, all that copying, renaming, and deploying takes hours of developers time. That’s why we are building the Dapp Deployer, which automates the entire smart contract deployment process down to a few seconds!
With many more blockchain projects in the pipeline, you’ll be hearing lots more from the XYO Sacramento team.
Welcome, LayerOne Engineers and Developers!
Rebranded as XYO Sacramento, LayerOne is the latest addition to the XYO fold. Made up of some of the most talented blockchain developers in the location space, LayerOne made waves at ETHDenver Hackathon when they unveiled their innovative geospatial blockchain tech.
Here’s a breakdown of who they are:
Graham McBain: Co-founder, genius, believer that blockchain can pull people out of poverty.
Kevin Weiler: Co-founder, Lead Blockchain Engineer, helped NASA deploy a satellite, sold his last startup for more than $7 million.
CJ McGregor: Backend Engineer, single-handedly built a dating app that supported 30,000 users.
Rasheed Bustamam: React Developer, part-time coach and mentor to working professionals, conducted technical training and development for MIT (yes, that MIT).
Upcoming AMA: What Do You Want to Know?
We’ve thrown a lot at you today, between our LayerOne press announcement, this dev update, and our newsletter. And here’s one other thing: We’re going to start hosting regular AMAs on all things blockchain and geolocation-related!
This will be your chance to ask the tough questions, kick the proverbial tires, and just shoot the binary breeze with developers.
Have questions you want answered live during an AMA? Send us your questions via Facebook or tweet at us with the hashtag #XYOgeodev.
Thanks for reading our first issue of Updates from the Dev Cave. See you soon!
Jenn Perez
Senior Content Manager
XYO Network | https://medium.com/xyonetwork/issue-1-updates-from-the-dev-cave-d7e02fa9673c | ['Jenn Perez'] | 2018-08-02 16:26:53.042000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Crypto', 'Blockchain'] |
A Super Kind of Woman Taking Action & Cat Consequences | True power and generation shined in her eyes like glowing white hot suns being born. Her indecision vanished. Justice is not served by standing around and watching wrong go down unanswered.
Wanda’s anger peaked. They couldn’t just walk away. She knew about kid’s being forced to sling dope.
Growing up in a tough neighborhood, Wanda saw shot callers making kids into their mules and ruining lives forever. She made up her mind then and there to find the source of the heroin and to help the teenager still lying on the ground have a better life.
Thoughts on her the future of using her superpowers to help out those who couldn’t help themselves began forming.
First the thugs.
She ran in an electric blur of speed jolting to catch the unsuspecting heroin addicts. They were speeding away driving on Conway Road. The red Camaro didn’t have a chance.
They might have been going 80 mph but Wanda ran next to them effortlessly. She could hear their music blasting out open windows. Having good taste in music didn’t exclude them from feeling her wrath.
Before unleashing hell she had to listen for a moment. Maxwell’s beautiful song Pretty Wings almost calmed Wanda’s furious desires. But she was not to be swayed.
Because she moved with the sound of wind the occupants of the Camaro didn’t notice her at first. She screamed, “Hi fellas!”
As the two men looked to their left and noticed the blur of brown lightning zipping next to them Wanda became an electric ball of white and blue spark.
Comic Noise Paleness from Pixabay
She rammed the Camaro with a tremendous blast. The car took air in a violent flip and landed on its hood, thankfully, thirty feet down the road. Wanda didn’t intend to send the car smashing into a house or property.
Doing extensive damage to the surrounding area didn’t play well with her. All the superheroes in movies caused billions of dollars in damage with their exploits. Wanda wanted to avoid giving anyone a reason to think she was too much trouble to have around.
Before she could walk up to the car Charge ran past Wanda and jumped on the Camaro’s underbelly. The cat began a loud buzzing and hissing growl. Charge slashed at the car’s metal frame.
Super cat claws ripped into the car’s exposed transmission. Charge flew into the air and a laser of blue and green electric shock flowed from kitty eyes down to ruptured fuel leak.
The car exploded.
Boom Comics from Pixabay
Charge flew away unscathed.
Wanda knew there was only one thing to do. Get away! She flew back to the teenage boy lying on the concrete at her apartment complex.
“You okay?’
“Yeah, I’m alrigh. Who you? Some kinda freak. Out here in a costume.”
“I saw.”
“You ain’t seen nothin. I got to roll.”
“I just want to help you.”
“Nobody asking for help. Mind your own.”
Wanda didn’t know what to think and it pissed her off she was being abruptly dismissed. She thought the boy was kind of like Charge. He would only warm up to her on his own terms.
Letting him walk away wasn’t easy but she stood silently as he moved quickly off behind the apartments. Wanda’s interest was peaked and she took to the air flying some 50 feet above and 25 feet behind the teenage drug dealer.
The most probable course he would take would be right to the boss. Wanda wanted to nail her first big take-down. With a little patience, she could get rid of a shot caller and help the kid out without the kid knowing.
Thinking about the deaths of the two thugs in the Camaro would have to wait for later. Collateral damage.
Right now Wanda grasped a bit of get-back for all the years of misogyny and abuse she and other women dealt with at the hands of stronger men.
Being super strong and having electric emitting superpowers felt intoxicating.
Find the next episode here, #9.
Find parts of the story preceding this episode here: #1 A New Super Kind of Woman, #2 A More Than Deadly Supervillain Foe, #3 Terrific Tabby Tastes, #4 Stray Cat Shuffle No More, #5 Unleashing the Super Women In Wanda, #6 Wanda’s Superhero Costume Choices & Crazy Cats, #7 Grasping Super Responsibility, Wanda’s Dilemma | https://123gjprince.medium.com/a-super-kind-of-woman-taking-action-cat-consequences-a40e319a2fd6 | ['Greg Prince'] | 2020-05-11 04:07:06.053000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Flash Fiction', 'Women', 'Comics'] |
READ ME ! | Phase One
Hello there! Thank you for clicking on this post. My name is Nicholas Teague. Last year I quit my job so that I could devote full time focus to Automunge, a Florida startup building an open source platform for data scientists to automate a sizable chunk of the data preparation steps for machine learning pipelines that incorporate tabular data. How might you ask does an open source software project plan to make money? Well that’s a good question. The hope is that by providing as much value as we can for the machine learning community in the context of an open source package, it will facilitate visibility and trust such that future commercial offerings for data processing (such as might make use of external computing resources) will have a clear path to market — that’s phase two though, right now still focused on phase one. Since we are a fully bootstrapped enterprise we have a little more flexibility for playing the long game so to speak. That is not to say that we are not pursuing any revenue models, hey if you like what you see and want to show some support maybe you can buy a book or album from our music shop or book store, seriously check it out: Vinyl Records for Fun and Profit / Recommended Further Reading.
If you’d like to learn more about our software probably the best place to get started is the formal documentation available in our READ ME on GitHub. It’s admittedly a little dry, I mean that’s how software documentation is supposed to be written, just trying to be normal. We’ve also put together a few demonstration notebooks, for example if you’d like a walkthrough of implementation you can check out Automunge in the cloud (currently a Colaboratory demonstration notebook for which a user can upload your own data sets to try out if you like). Or another good starting point might be the essay An intro to Automunge which demonstrates several of the optional parameters and gives a good intuition for basic operation. Oh and of course you can always check out the book of essays, have been documenting the whole journey via a somewhat regular publishing schedule (along with various creative interests), I mean don’t want to overwhelm you or anything, several ‘not dry’ essays in our blog — it’s a lot of fun, seriously if you ever have some spare time check it out: the Automunge essays are collected in the Automunge publication / or for the full collections of essays, some a little more creative, check out the book From the Diaries of John Henry. | https://medium.com/automunge/read-me-ae3a58ce7915 | ['Nicholas Teague'] | 2020-01-09 06:59:25.539000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Freckles | In the morning, he used to count every freckle on my face and body, just to be sure I still had them all.
Photo by Mink Mingle on Unsplash | https://medium.com/letrasviajeras/freckles-30dea2ddaae | ['Leticia Estevez'] | 2018-12-10 17:44:01.593000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Short Story', 'Poetry', 'Lovestory'] |
Can you hire for soft skills? | One of the biggest flaws in the hiring process — and believe you me, there are quite a few — is the soft skills issue.
What does that mean?
Well, most companies tend to hire for competence — which is logical on face, but competence is overrated. It’s especially overrated right because with the rise of “the tech stack” and “disruption,” business models change (the buzzword is “pivot”) a lot. So you end up hiring someone with 17 specific skills that you wanted, but two years later, those skills are completely useless because the base model is pivoted. “Oh God, now we need more data scientists! But all we have are these account managers!”
Second problem of all this: when you hire managers off competence, oftentimes you have a “brilliant jerk” issue. It’s a guy or woman who’s very competent in a specific skill set, right? But they have no soft skills. They barely listen. No idea how to criticize or take feedback. Not an iota of respect. This is actually somewhat normative in employee-manager relationships now, which is why engagement statistics are slipping.
Leadership is mostly about soft skills these days, I’d argue. (And if you’d have 1–2 bad bosses, you know this drill too.)
But how can we hire for soft skills? That’s the challenge.
One way to hire for soft skills!
First, let’s quickly frame the challenge: because most hiring processes are low-context with a lot of generic interviews, it’s hard to assess if someone is, say, “a good communicator.” If you ask them, they’ll lie or game the answer because they want to take your revenue in the form of salary. But it’s very hard to track “good communication” on spreadsheets. Since “tracking on spreadsheets” is the only way most people in white-collar work know how to do anything, we’re doomed.
Or not!
First Round Review held a conference for CTOs recently and put together some of their best advice. Big-name, high-earning companies in there, so read it. It’s good stuff. This stands out:
Institute role plays in your interview process. For every engineering manager role, have the candidate sit with a member of the engineering team and play out a scenario 1:1. It can be about a technical process, an argument about prioritization or giving feedback with both criticism and praise. It’s an effective way to test softer skills and replicate what you’ll get in a ‘real’ situation. Of course, using your engineers’ time like this may seem expensive, but it’s more costly to bring on an engineering leader who doesn’t jive with your team. Plus, after doing it for a few years, you’ll find it becomes a rite of passage and engineers like participating in them.
Boom.
Why this matters
You’re about to dedicated $90,000+ to this person a year. Chances are your executives want that money back in their bonuses. You can’t whiff on this hire. But if the process is also generic “get to know you/gut feel” interviews, you never see candidates in real-time, real-world situations. That’s where you’d learn about soft skills.
It’s not hard to design situations like the one above. You could even find 20 managers in your company, ask them the most challenging managerial thing they do in a week, record the results, see where the overlap is, and then design a hiring exercise around those elements. Now before you hire someone, you’ve seen how they perform at something which challenges managers already at your company.
Bottom line: if we think everything now is “data-driven,” then we need a more formalized process for testing soft skills and collecting data therein.
… and the other perk
If you test for soft skills, you’ll get better managers in the door. Better managers will almost invariably mean less turnover. This will save you money. Remember: people quit bosses, not usually companies. And recruiting services/firms/etc. often fleece you. Better managers also means teams stay together longer, increasing the power of friends at work, and — provided you can avoid groupthink — likely making the team itself more effective.
How else have you seen people try to assess soft skills in the hiring process? | https://medium.com/@tedbauer2003/can-you-hire-for-soft-skills-fd7a26f250f2 | ['Ted Bauer'] | 2020-12-16 11:30:53.979000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Soft Skills', 'Management And Leadership', 'Future Of Work', 'Hiring'] |
Spaulding vs Winnacunnet | New Hampshire High School Football Live Stream 12/25/2020 | Spaulding vs Winnacunnet | New Hampshire High School Football Live Stream 12/25/2020 Caringinjaya ·Dec 25, 2020
Spaulding vs Winnacunnet | New Hampshire High School Football Live Stream 12/25/2020
Watch Here Live: http://syehkhambali.sportfb.com/hsfootball.php
Red Raiders
S
1–3
Warriors
6–3
The Winnacunnet (Hampton, NH) varsity football team has a home conference game vs. Spaulding (Rochester, NH) on Friday, December 25 @ 3p.
Game Details: Winnacunnett HS | https://medium.com/@caringinjaya4/spaulding-vs-winnacunnet-new-hampshire-high-school-football-live-stream-12-25-2020-4d85cca52a1f | [] | 2020-12-25 12:38:38.346000+00:00 | ['American', 'New Hampshire', 'American Dream', 'American Football', 'American History'] |
How to solve “ There are multiple heroes that share the same tag within a subtree.” in a flutter project | In this short article, I will explain how I solved a bug that looked like it will not go off 😂😂😂😂😂.
I was very happy trying out Flutter because it is easy and fast to build a huge app with less stress, but as we all know bugs are always around to give us a hard time. In my design, I have a Bottom NavBar(4 navbars) with Three FAB(Floating Action Button) on each screen. I never knew that Flutter has an Attribute called “heroTag” and it must be unique. to cut the long story short, I ran the code I got the error below:
And also when navigating to that screen I will be presented with a black screen like the image below.
The solution is to add “heroTag” attribute with unique names to the three FAB’s
floatingActionButton: FloatingActionButton(
onPressed: () {},
tooltip: 'Add',
heroTag: 'contact',
child: Icon(Icons.add),
backgroundColor: Colors.redAccent,
),
Thank you for reading my article.
Let’s connect on
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Joklinztech
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wisdom-nwokocha-76212a77/ | https://medium.com/@wise4rmgodadmob/how-to-solve-there-are-multiple-heroes-that-share-the-same-tag-within-a-subtree-a5146fdec2b8 | ['Nwokocha Wisdom Maduabuchi'] | 2020-12-25 18:38:15.382000+00:00 | ['Flutter Ui', 'Flutter App Development', 'Flutter Widget', 'Mobile App Development', 'Flutter'] |
3 important questions to ask before appointing a wedding DJ | When you have a special occasion like a wedding coming up, you should do something for making the day memorable. Well, there are different options such as arranging great menus, enjoying photo sessions that can make it possible Well, besides them if you are interested in some musical entertainment on that big day you should hire a wedding DJ. Yes, a reputed DJ can really add some specialty Wedding on Rugen a.k.a Hochzeit auf Rügen.
However, for choosing an eminent DJ it is important to ask some relevant questions. Check out these questions in the following part.
Questions you should ask before booking your wedding DJ
Here are some significant questions you should raise before any wedding DJ.
Are weddings your main focus?
Check whether he is a successful entertainer who can bring great enjoyment to your wedding. Besides, also make assure he is not a part-timer who takes this service casually. He should come with years of experience and expertise in this field. If you find he does not sound confident in providing a full time and efficient service, it is better to move on to another DJ.
Will you come with a customized playlist?
Choose a DJ who will play perfect tracks on your wedding day considering the style, vision, and taste. An eminent DJ should come with a wonderful playlist that will complement each happenings of that big day. For instance- he should play different tracks on bouquet toss or the cake cutting.
What is your service charge?
Well, like other instances when it is about hiring a DJ, service charge matters. You should choose a DJ who offers great services within your budget. In Rugen, different DJs who offer different service charges for their services. This service charge depends on the quality of equipment, experience and so on. Before finalizing anyone amidst them consider your budget.
Hope, asking these important questions will help you in finding a trustworthy DJ. Hence dont forget to ask them. Check the next part to contact a reputed DJ.
An eminent DJ company to contact
Contact DJ Rugen for availing the best quality service from a reputed DJ. If your wedding on Rugen a.k.a Hochzeit auf Rügen is approaching, you can hire a DJ from this reputed company with no more delay. Besides DJ service you can avail other services such as wedding photography, videography, from this reputed service provider. You can click on the link dj-ruegen.de to gather more information about this reputed company. | https://medium.com/@djrugen/3-important-questions-to-ask-before-appointing-a-wedding-dj-6fc41d89996 | ['Dj Rügen'] | 2019-11-14 10:41:43.912000+00:00 | ['Hochzeit', 'Weddings', 'Hochzeit Auf Rügen', 'Rügen', 'Dj'] |
10 Tips To Incorporate Community Suggestions Into Your Product Roadmap | If you manage a brand’s digital community, you’ve probably seen lots of customer feedback and suggestions. A user community allows your business to have access to customer insights and act on feedback.
But sometimes, you might be overwhelmed by all of your customers’ feedback, and it’s important to manage the flow of ideas and funnel them to your product team efficiently and effectively. Here are 10 tips to improve how you listen to customers and work with product teams, and that will come in handy if you manage communications in your digital community.
Set up processes with the product team
1. Understand what the team wants
If you send a lot of feedback to the product team, they might end up with an overwhelming backlog of ideas that are impossible to work with. Understanding what constitutes good feedback and collaborating to organize their backlog according to different scopes of work can help you drive better results for your customers.
2. Make it easy to access the suggestions
Your product team probably doesn’t have the time to view your community forums, so it’s your job as the community moderator or manager to make your members’ voices heard by collecting feedback. To do this, consider integrating your forums with a work management solution to label and send your customers’ feedback to the relevant teams.
3. Understand what it takes to get an idea implemented
Not every idea can be implemented, but it can help you understand the decision-making process. The issue can be around prioritizing customer input among dozens of other requests. Understanding your product team’s constraints while prioritizing different suggestions can help you be more transparent with your customers. At the same time, your product team can push back to verify how many users this requested feature might apply to, how often it’ll be used, and whether or not it impacts customer retention.
4. Advocate for the customers
As community managers often represent what customers want, it’s important to advocate for them. This means asking questions, regularly syncing with the product team with updates, and educating internal teams on how the community should be used as a resource to understand what customers want.
Look at how your community platform works
5. Make ideas searchable and categorize when possible
It’s usually a good idea to have a separate forum or even multiple forums for product feedback and suggestions. Having multiple forums might be helpful if you represent a product with many functionalities or verticals. Ensuring that suggestions can be found using the in-platform search engine can help you drive more interest for different posts. If possible, use tagging to help you categorize different suggestions and make it easier for your customers to find ideas relevant to their organization.
6. Reduce the number of similar ideas
Duplicated ideas clutter your forums, making it hard to understand the real interest for different suggestions. For example, there might be three or four similar ideas, and the combined vote count can show a huge amount of interest compared to if we look at them separately. Where possible, merge these ideas into one, or point users to the original idea to vote there. Always be on the lookout for duplicates and condense them.
Be open with your community members
7. Establish rules for submitting suggestions
Establishing basic house rules for submitting new ideas can help your customers understand the entire process better. Guidelines will let them know they’ll get more out of their idea if they first search for a similar one and upvote it instead of creating a new post, for example. You may also use different statuses, like “Planned” or “Not Planned,” to provide your customers visibility into scheduled updates and the conditions of taking on a suggestion and implementing it into the product.
8. Encourage collaboration
Your customers can not only submit ideas but also provide feedback on each other’s ideas and evaluate them. This can come in very handy — the customers can learn from each other and share some workarounds, and the product team will be able to not only review suggestions but also use cases supporting those suggestions. Encouraging collaboration can benefit everyone.
9. Ask the right questions
It’s great for a company and especially the product team to understand what your customers want, but ideally, you also need to understand why they want it. So, we’re back to the importance of understanding what your product team wants, but it doesn’t stop there. The next step is asking your customers questions, such as “What challenge are you trying to solve with this?” and “How are you planning to use this?” The more detailed the feedback is, the easier it is for the product team to understand the use case and act on it.
10. Be as transparent as possible
Managing expectations is one of the most difficult jobs when it comes to product feedback and ideas. Some customers assume that submitting an idea is all it takes for it to be implemented into the product. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually work like that. This is why it’s important to be transparent with your customers by explaining how your processes with the product team work, what it takes for the team to review suggestions, and the threshold for an idea to receive a “Planned” status, for example. It isn’t always possible to share the decision-making process there, but sharing some basic information that you’ve agreed on with your product team is definitely a good way to start.
Customer feedback is a great source of insight for a business, and that’s why it’s important to establish working processes when inviting your customers to participate in the decision-making process of the product. Understanding the needs of your product team as well as your customers, setting up the right level of expectation, and looking at how your community platform works can help you incorporate client feedback into your product. | https://medium.com/wriketechclub/10-tips-to-incorporate-community-suggestions-into-your-product-roadmap-e2bb6fd84c3d | ['Lisa Bogdanova'] | 2020-12-14 11:54:18.828000+00:00 | ['Product Feedback', 'Product Management', 'Feedback', 'Community Feedback', 'Community'] |
Parklets in Richmond District Gives Hope to Businesses | Disclaimer: This story was written before the latest red tier restrictions.
Over the last several months business owners all over the Richmond District have taken the initiative to build, in one form or another, an outside dining space as a means to keep their doors open. Many of these outdoor dining spaces have become a trend among residents who still enjoy going out to eat, and since indoor dining was again recently shutdown outdoor dining remains an option for people aside from delivery and takeout.
“On March 16 when they shut everything down we just basically had to shut all indoor stuff down and figure out what we were gonna do on the outside so I contacted a company and we got some metal barriers outdoors within a couple weeks after Covid so that’s how we got started initially” says Albert Lara owner of Chomp N’ Swig on Geary Blvd. Without wanting to “waste a lot of money,” Lara erected a basic form of a parklet by putting metal barriers, wine barrels, and chairs out in front of his restaurant and it worked out great for a few months. But it wasn’t until he saw Ireland 32 build their actual parklet that he filled out the paperwork to obtain a permit to officially build a parklet.
“We have more stuff that we’re building but it’s been a savior. It helped our business stay afloat. People really love it. Without the parklet, people would just be drinking on the sidewalk and it would probably be too congested for the sidewalk so that extra space out there makes a huge difference for us” Lara says.
According to SF public works website, the application fee for a permit is $306. This does not include the SFMTA processing or meter removal fee. The initial permit must also be renewed annually. The permit approval process takes 2 to 6 months and successful permits must pass certain conditions.
“I remember there were provisional things given initially right but it definitely took the City a little bit to start processing all the requests but once they did everything kind of just sprung up you know. So as soon as they pretty much assigned someone like hey we need to go through all this somebody just knocked all that out. But it did take a little bit just to get their attention about it. And then it picked up steam and they started giving everybody the permits” said Suket Mahal, bar manager at the Richmond Republic Draught House on Clement St Inner Richmond.
The Richmond Republic Draught House were one of the first businesses in the Richmond District to utilize an outside dining space. They’ve been open for outside dining going back to at least July when their permit got approved and have since gained popularity among their customers.
“I mean we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback over here so I’m definitely all about it, I love it and I wanna keep it going especially for the customers and regulars. The community has been fantastic so I’m all for it” Mahal says.
However, these parklets have sprung up arguably due to a strong necessity to keep shop fronts open amid the pandemic. Once things begin to “normalize” will there be less of a demand for parklets? A good indication that outside dining will remain prevalent into 2021 and so forth is felt in the community among customers and owners who seem to agree that they’ll exist in the long run.
Local Richmond resident Rick Kelly hopes that the parklets “stays permanent” on a long term basis. ”On the weekend I’ll go down to Eat Americana and get a burger and fries there’s quite a few good restaurants down there on Balboa St. Even in the Richmond there’s still plenty of places to go eat” states Kelly.
Johnny Luther, who doesn’t live in the neighborhood but visits frequently, states “I haven’t eaten at a parklet for dining” but adds “something that was really lacking in San Francisco was street side dining. Some places had it like North Beach a little bit. Yeah my personal opinion is that some people do enjoy sitting out and enjoying a meal.”
In other parts of San Francisco outside dining has become so trendy that some streets are closed off to vehicles allowing people to freely gather on the street and sidewalks. Moreover, the climate in San Francisco usually allows for street side dining with some restaurants putting heat lamps outside and others building full on walls to guard against the wind.
“I actually feel very strongly that having outdoor spaces and restaurants open actually kind of alleviate the social anxiety and pressure people have. If all this stuff were to shutdown tonight I think that it’ll only force more people to be indoors with other parties and larger parties and that will contribute more to case counts’’ says Mahal. | https://medium.com/@golivei2/parklets-in-richmond-district-gives-hope-to-businesses-652feb6d1e42 | ['Gui Oliveira'] | 2020-12-17 05:34:24.849000+00:00 | ['Restaurant Business', 'San Francisco', 'Local Business', 'Outdoor Dining', 'Richmond District'] |
Breaking | Breaking
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
Now this new disruption
begins eating at the heart
full of prophetic vitamins
cigarette smoke that clears
the sinuses
then the smarting of the tissue
that collides with glass
the mirror tired of Narcissian
antics
the full ignorance of Echo
as a character, as a love
the rum bottles have organized
the next protest march
unused recycling bins
providing the security
while the hairdressers
abandon the politicians en masse
everyone drooping with heavy
heads
and the silent trees
their winter nudity notwithstanding
look on with nothing to add | https://medium.com/the-rebel-poets-society/breaking-f71fd27dca8d | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-12-07 16:19:09.216000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Madness', 'Dissolution', 'Image', 'Poetry'] |
How to Attain True Liberation? (Non-Religious) | We don’t truly own anything, people or stuff. All these are outside of our control. We can lose these at any time. ‘Anithya / Anicca’ or ‘Impermanence’ as the Buddhists call it.
However, this does not mean that we should be Nihilists and think that everything is meaningless. True understanding of this reality will liberate us. How?
Enjoy truly what we have — We are so busy going after and collecting things, we don’t have time to truly enjoy those things. This is applicable for money, stuff or people.
— We are so busy going after and collecting things, we don’t have time to truly enjoy those things. This is applicable for money, stuff or people. Accept that we can lose everything we have — So if / when that happens we are ready to let go. ‘Amor Fati’, as the Stoics call it. It will be extremely hard not to be sad or disappointed when it happens. But at least we know it was inevitable, we had those only for a limited time. So we won’t get in to a vicious cycle of grief, anger and ignorance. We wouldn’t do anything rash which can make it worse.
If we can’t truly control anything, why are we having those at all?
Why should we love, be nice and kind to people if we know they may or may not treat us back the same? Because, we don’t have any control over how others may treat us. We may have some influence. But human nature or nature in general is unpredictable.
So is the alternative is not to care, love, be nice and kind? No. We should treat people or any living being in that way because it is the right thing to do. It’s common sense. anyway if everybody did that wouldn’t this world be lot nicer? So we care, love and be nice and kind, not that we expect them to do it for us, because it is the right thing to do.
Imaging having this level of understanding and control over our relationships. We can enjoy all the good things, while accepting everything that can go bad. A true ‘No Strings Attached’ relationship. Isn’t this the true liberation?
Now let’s talk about ambition. Is ambition good or bad? Simple. As long as our ambitions are within our control, it’s good. We all have heard or seen (In movie at least), horror stories of how people become too ambitious and lose sight of things that matter. Whether it’s family or health.
So how can we control our ambitions? Again, accept that everything we aspire for can lose at anytime. Whether it’s money, fame etc. Most people are too attached for these ambitions, any setback will lead them devastated. We all have heard stories of people committing suicide or dying of strokes during financial setbacks like a stock market crash.
Also, we must ensure that we don’t let go the real things that matter because of our ambitions. Which is living a virtuous and a harmonious life. For stoics, virtues like wisdom, courage, justice etc. are the utmost importance.
So do we actually need ambitions at all? Yes. We should have ambitions and pursue our goals. Simply because it is the right thing to do. That is our duty towards the world. By striving for excellence in things we do best, we can contribute to the progress of the world.
Thanks for reading until the end of the article. So this is my take on how to attain true liberation, influenced by Buddhist and Stoic philosophies. TL;DR, accept the inevitable impermanence and do what’s right. What you’re suppose to do. When in doubt, trust your common sense.
Do you agree or not? Feel free to comment or reach out to me at [email protected]. | https://medium.com/@janangapiyadasa/how-to-attain-true-liberation-non-religious-853a628cc226 | ['Jananga Piyadasa'] | 2020-12-12 16:17:29.665000+00:00 | ['Liberation', 'Attachment', 'Buddhism', 'Stoicism', 'Philosophy'] |
SM Street: Oru Theruvinte Katha. | Our 500+ year-old Sweet Meat Street aka Mitthai Theruve is one of the busiest shopping centres of Malabar/Kerala. The street’s sweet name comes from our Kozhikoden Halwa (called sweet meat by Britishers). Maybe our Kozhikoden values of compassion and love stem from the constant reminder that there is a sweet spot in the heart of our awe-inspiring Kozhikode.
Our SM street is recently renovated with cobblestone pavements, benches, beautiful lamps and lights. A stroll through our sweet street will definitely fill your lungs with our Kozhikoden Love.
Few random images: | https://medium.com/@Kovilakam/sm-street-oru-theruvinte-katha-d359061e59cd | ['Kovilakam Residency'] | 2020-12-14 01:08:57.158000+00:00 | ['Visit', 'Compassion', 'Kozhikode', 'Travel', 'Kerala Tourism'] |
Abortion, pro-life or pro-choice? | Abortion is a very touchy subject to many people. There is not a correct answer on if it should be legal or not around the world, but every one has their opinions. I am a strong pro-life supporter. By the end of this I am going to show you that abortion should be illegal because its murder, always consequences for your actions, and some might say it should be legal because of rape but i can prove its not worth it.
An abortion is a medical procedure done by a trained medical professional, to end a pregnancy, It uses medicine or surgery to remove the embryo or fetus and placenta from the uterus. Abortion is killing an innocent child that has done absolutely nothing. “…the murder of the defenseless child.” (catholic review) The child has done nothing and everyone deserves the equal chance to life. The child has no say on what they do with its life. No matter what anyone says it has DNA. “The DNA it has is not only human DNA but the DNA of an individual distinct from that of either parent.” (catholic review) The child already has DNA from both parents and therefore makes it a child. At the point that it has DNA it is murder of an innocent child.
www.Kaloloa-Abortion-Murder-Banner-Decoration/dp/B07XQ36Y3X
There are always going to be consequence's to the mistakes we make. If some one wants to have sex and not be careful about it they can end up with a child. There are many ways to prevent pregnancy's. “make sure your using a condom correctly.” (Healthline) condoms are just one of many ways to avoid getting pregnant. Other ways are the multiple different kinds on birth control and the plan-b pill you can take the next morning if you forgot protection. There is absolutely no reason for innocent children to have to face the cosequnseces of their parents.
Some people are all for abortion, and try to say that women that get raped should not have to deal with that. That child was just as innocent as the mother in that case and doesn't deserve to die. Only a small percent of abortions are from rapes. “just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape.” (dastagir) That fact that only 1% of all abortions is due to rape proves that's no excuse to keep it legal. Most abortions are because they are not ready but if your going to do that put the child up for adoption. everyone deserve the equal chance to life.
The Childs heart beats after 16–25 days and the brain works after 40 days, it takes at least 14 days to know if your pregnant so by the time they get to the abortion center the child or fetus already has a heartbeat. My friend was born at 26 weeks and is still living a wonderful life, people can still get abortions at 26 weeks pregnant, that is a child that is being killed not a fetus. | https://medium.com/@brownjenna61/abortion-pro-life-or-pro-choice-db4ae1283de5 | [] | 2020-12-04 04:16:52.446000+00:00 | ['Abortion Rights', 'Pro Life', 'Abortion'] |
Introduction to Levers for Digital Service Groups | Authors: David Eaves, Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Tom Loosemore, Partner, Public Digital; Lauren Lombardo, Master in Public Policy 2021, Harvard Kennedy School
A recurring question from every Digital Services Convening is how to help digital service groups effect change. While success on individual projects is important, scaled impact through shifting practices and behaviors across the government is the bigger goal. This paper seeks to share learnings garnered through interviews, surveys, and the discussion at the 2020 convening regarding the different levers digital teams use (or aspire to use) to push change across the enterprise.
To explore, identify, and ultimately define how digital service groups use levers, we socialized a preliminary list of levers for digital service groups before the convening. This list was updated as we received feedback from attendees about which levers they have and which they would like to possess. We then used this list (reproduced below) to discuss how levers can be earned and leveraged, as well as the risks of using them.
We adopt the word “lever” because it traditionally refers to as a simple machine that uses force to provide leverage. Professional schools, consulting firms, and strategists have adopted this mechanical term to refer to business initiatives, tools, or processes that force change. Two keywords from the definition — force and leverage — are particularly important.
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
Force means a lever should have some ability to enact change. One example could be modeling behavior to induce others across the enterprise to voluntarily comply with a new set of practices. Another would be policies or laws that mandate that others shift their behaviors or practices. Leverage, on the other hand, is about the scope of change. A lever should effect change across the enterprise. While a lever may help a specific project, it is a tool built not for a single project or initiative, but, rather, for use at the systems level.
List of Levers for Digital Service Groups
This is a working list, designed to better understand which levers digital service groups can use to influence their organizations.
Levers as a Spectrum
In our discussions with digital service groups, two salient points about levers emerged. The first is that levers are not all created equal. Some induce or attract voluntary compliance, while others are more heavy-handed and, at least in theory, mandate compliance. Voluntary and mandatory compliance can be thought of as the two ends of a spectrum.
Figure 3.1: Spectrum of Levers for Digital Service Groups
Second, one might infer that teams should want to seek out levers on the mandatory end of the spectrum, as this allows one to compel the enterprise to change practices. But the practitioners we spoke to painted a more complicated picture. Many government mandates are effectively ignored, while some voluntary norms are so universally adhered to that they achieve deep and lasting impact. As the expression goes, “culture eats strategy for lunch.”
Moving Between Voluntary and Mandatory
Some levers are static — they can only be used in a voluntary or mandatory way. Others can move from one end of the spectrum (or back) over time.
Communications power is an example of a static lever; it can only be used in a voluntary way. It’s a powerful lever: Organizations with communications power can push the media to ask certain questions or help build public and political support for an issue. Further, many digital service groups’ ability to “work in the open,” share alpha and beta versions of their projects, and talk openly of successes and struggles has helped foster communities of supporters across the government and the public at large. This support can be powerful, but it cannot be used to compel others to behave a certain way.
In contrast, other levers can transition. Let us return to the GOV.UK story discussed in the text box above. The United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service (GDS) initially chose to exert domain control as a voluntary, not mandatory, lever, to induce ministries to move services onto Gov.UK. GDS made this choice because, at the time, it aligned best with their political context and leadership style. However, over time, asserting domain control more formally — as a mandatory lever — became key to compelling holdouts to migrate their services onto the domain.
The same story can be told about service assessments. Often these start off as a voluntary lever — a way for a team to helpfully advise. However, over time best practices from these assessments may become codified and ultimately form the basis of a policy or formal process that projects must clear before being approved.
Gaining Levers
There are two ways in which digital service groups tell us they acquire levers. Some are capabilities the team builds itself without relying on powerful stakeholders or formal authorities. This might be establishing a voluntary standard, having the “cool factor,” or working in the open to gain communications power. Other levers must be granted through legislative action or by an executive sponsor. Examples of these include IT spend control (the ability to veto or stop projects), or a “magic wand” (the ability to forgo adhering to rules).
The most common way to get levers from outside the team is to cash in earned political capital. As outlined in the story about GDS, the team did this by generating wins up front. At the same time that GDS was working to gain enough political capital to be given the lever of domain control, it built up other levers independently. GDS could control its public profile and how it built its technological capabilities. By carefully crafting relationships with the media and hiring smart, capable people, GDS created its own communications power and technical capacity levers. This gave the group a reputation as trusted technologists and designers that was magnified through its international media connections.
Key Takeaways
1. Levers can be given or built
It’s essential to understand how each option for gaining levers works and how each applies to a given context. A digital service can build levers, particularly voluntary ones, by hiring the right people, establishing the right relationships, and sharing its work in the right places. However, other levers must be granted by an authority. Successful teams should collect a combination of both types, meaning they must simultaneously build levers and earn political capital that can be traded in for levers from outside authorities.
2. Voluntary and mandatory levers can be equally powerful
A group should not assume that mandatory levers are the eventual goal. The ability to influence decision-making through voluntary levers can be a powerful tool. Voluntary levers allow groups to change culture, set expectations, and reward good behavior. Further, too many mandatory levers — especially unpopular ones — can foster resentment or make the group a political target. Instead of only aiming for mandatory levers, a group should pursue the combination of levers needed to execute its transformation strategy.
3. Levers have to be used appropriately
Equally important to selecting the right levers is making sure that they are used effectively. Knowing when to use a power and when not to use it is primarily a matter of instinct. Overusing a lever can create resentment, but underusing it can cause other departments to ignore the group’s power. This is particularly true for unpopular levers, as these are the ones that can spark the most defiance. These levers need to be used, and they need to be used early so that expectations are set about how the group will exercise that power if needed.
At GDS, the most unpopular lever was IT spend control. As it began to use this lever, GDS faced pushback from departments that were upset about this oversight. However, GDS had solidified its control over this lever and learned how to use it swiftly and effectively to change departments’ behaviors. Specifically, GDS used IT spend control alongside complementary voluntary levers, such as communications power. By using the media to highlight the savings its work was creating, GDS undercut some of the pushback against its use of this unpopular lever. Because GDS didn’t hide its unpopular levers, it could use them to catalyze long-term change.
4. Levers compound over time
GDS used each of its levers to accumulate even more power over time. The team built communications power and technical capacity and then used these levers to generate political capital. GDS traded in this political capital for domain control, which in turn generated more capital due to the success of GOV.UK. The website’s success allowed GDS to get the additional levers of IT spend control and service standard, each of which led to more achievements and allowed for further accumulation of power and support. | https://medium.com/digitalhks/introduction-to-levers-for-digital-service-groups-6d95446caae7 | ['Lauren Lombardo'] | 2021-02-04 23:30:00.335000+00:00 | ['Change Management', 'Politics', 'Digital Transformation', 'Technology', 'Government'] |
How Can You Get Your Daily Cardio Dose When You Are Busy? | How Can You Get Your Daily Cardio Dose When You Are Busy? DailyStamina Follow Jul 15 · 3 min read
We live busy lives that can get overwhelming way too fast. Full-time jobs, family responsibilities, social events, and countless daily chores take a considerable amount of our time.
Yet, there is no reason not to take care of our health.
The meaning of health is not just the absence of disease. Health refers to complete physical, mental, and social well-being. Physical activity can make an extremely positive impact on our well-being. However, it could be challenging to make time for being active.
A short but regular aerobic activity might be the perfect option for busy adults. This type of exercise is also known as a cardiovascular activity, and it provides numerous health benefits.
Aerobic exercise involves large muscle groups, promotes blood circulation, and ensures efficient use of oxygen to produce energy for movement. Experts recommend getting at least 150 minutes per week of heart-pumping physical activity. Let’s look at the benefits these activities may bring to your life.
Top-9 benefits of cardiovascular activity
Strengthens the immune system
Regular aerobic exercise promotes immune health by increasing immunoglobulins, which are potent protective factors. And a strong immune system fights off a variety of disease-causing organisms.
Enhances cognitive function
Recent studies reveal cardiovascular exercise is associated with improved cognitive function and can slow down brain tissue loss. If you exercise regularly, you have better reaction times, better memory, and a higher concentration level than nonexercisers.
Reduces the risk of heart disease
Studies show that people who don’t exercise have twice the risk of developing heart disease than those who regularly practice cardiovascular activity.
Promotes better sleep
Researchers have found that exercisers go to sleep more quickly and sleep more soundly than individuals who don’t exercise.
Relieves stress and anxiety
Exercise generates an emotional and physical relaxation that sets approximately an hour and a half after a workout.
Increases HDL cholesterol, which is known as “good” cholesterol
An aerobic workout is an effective way of raising HDL cholesterol, which lowers heart disorders and stroke risk.
Burns body fat and shapes the figure
You’d surely want to burn calories and have a fit appearance after the workout. Engaging in aerobic exercise tones your body and helps burn excess fat.
Boosts your energy level
Sometimes, people get tired not because they do too many things but because they lack physical training. An active lifestyle makes your body produce more mitochondria, which leads to a higher level of available energy.
Enhances self-image
People who exercise regularly feel better about themselves than sedentary individuals. Develop the discipline to become active — this may give you a powerful self-esteem boost.
It is now clear why cardiovascular activity is crucial for you to stay healthy and energized. But how can you free up some time for workouts if you are always busy?
Continue reading this post:
Want to learn how to structure your interval workout and discover top-10 bodyweight exercises that don’t require any equipment? Then continue reading this story on our blog. Plus, you’ll get access to tons of productivity and health tips for busy career people.
Learn more in our free ebook:
If you’re curious to learn more about how to maintain a healthy and productive lifestyle when you’re always busy, we’ve got you covered. Download our free ebook “How to Increase Your Daily Stamina” and discover helpful suggestions on how to get the most of your work and life without struggling. | https://medium.com/daily-stamina/how-can-you-get-your-daily-cardio-dose-when-you-are-busy-8b584ebc7438 | [] | 2021-07-15 07:25:28.565000+00:00 | ['Life Hacking', 'Workout', 'Energy', 'Training', 'Lifestyle'] |
Case study on Kubernetes. | → What is Kubernetes ?
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Planet Scale
Designed on the same principles that allows Google to run billions of containers a week, Kubernetes can scale without increasing your ops team.
Never Outgrow
Whether testing locally or running a global enterprise, Kubernetes flexibility grows with you to deliver your applications consistently and easily no matter how complex your need is.
Run K8s Anywhere
Kubernetes is open source giving you the freedom to take advantage of on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure, letting you effortlessly move workloads to where it matters to you.
→ Why Kubernetes ?
Kubernetes is a powerful container management tool that automates the deployment and management of containers. Kubernetes (k8’s) is the next big wave in cloud computing and it’s easy to see why as businesses migrate their infrastructure and architecture to reflect a cloud-native, data-driven era. Container Orchestration. Great for multi Cloud Adoption. Deploy and update application at scale for faster and time-to-market. Better Management of application.
→ When to use Kubernetes ?
If your application uses a microservice architecture
If you have transitioned or are looking to transition to a microservice architecture then Kubernetes will suit you well because it’s likely you’re already using software like Docker to containerize your application.
If you’re suffering from slow development and deployment
If you’re unable to meet customer demands due to slow development time, then Kubernetes might help. Rather than a team of developers spending their time wrapping their heads around the development and deployment lifecycle, Kubernetes (along with Docker) can effectively manage it for you so the team can spend their time on more meaningful work that gets products out the door.
→ Pokemon Go’s Kubernetes story…
How was ‘Pokemon Go’ able to scale so efficiently & became so successful? The answer is Kubernetes. Pokemon Go was developed and published by Niantic Inc. 500+ million downloads and 20+ million daily active users.
Pokemon Go engineers never thought their user base would increase exponentially surpassing the expectations within a short time, they were not ready for it, and even the servers couldn’t handle this much traffic.
The challenge
The horizontal scaling on one side but Pokemon Go also faced a severe challenge when it came to vertical scaling because of the real-time activity by millions of users worldwide. Niantic was not prepared for this.
The solution
The magic of containers. The application logic for the game ran on Google Container Engine (GKE) powered by the open source Kubernetes project. Niantic chose GKE for its ability to orchestrate their container cluster at planetary-scale, freeing its team to focus on deploying live changes for their players. In this way, Niantic used Google Cloud to turn Pokémon GO into a service for millions of players, continuously adapting and improving. This got them more time to concentrate on building the game’s application logic and new features rather than worrying about the scaling part.
→ Conclusion
Around the world, many CIO’s and technologists have chosen to use Kubernetes, and it is expected to evolve much more in the years to come.
Containers are becoming more and more popular in the software world and Kubernetes has become the industry standard for deploying containers in production. We will expect a high growth rate of Kubernetes this year too. | https://medium.com/@ganeshkumar15115/case-study-on-kubernetes-9995bc13eb32 | ['Ganesh Kumar'] | 2020-12-27 05:23:06.731000+00:00 | ['DevOps', 'Automation', 'Containers', 'Kubernetes'] |
Programming a LIFX lightbulb | It’s Christmas and at the end of every year, I do a few things — revisiting goals, learning, relaxing, seeing family and friends and making something fun.
For this year, I’ve chosen to dive into an IoT project, to program my LIFX lightbulb. I’ve been eyeing the smart light for many months, and decided to use this project as an excuse to experiment.
The Idea
I find that I often fall asleep reading, so I wanted to automatically switch off my light at a particular time everyday.
I’ll be using Python to code a simple example and deploy the solution to Heroku.
In a nutshell, this is how I wanted the light to behave:
At 10PM: switch on the light at a specific brightness level
At 12PM: dim the lightbulb
At 1AM: switch off the light
Testing the light
Setup
The first thing you will need to do, is setup the lightbulb with the App.
Once you’ve set up, you can adjust settings of your lightbulb, for example the colour and brightness, as well as switching the device on and off.
Changing device settings
Understanding the API
You will need to log in to LIFX and generate a token to be used with the API.
Head over to https://cloud.lifx.com/settings to create a token.
Try It Out
The API https://api.developer.lifx.com/ lists the API requests available to test the lightbulb
Example:
List lights you have: https://api.developer.lifx.com/docs/list-lights
Setting light states: https://api.developer.lifx.com/docs/set-states
Toggling the device on and off: https://api.developer.lifx.com/docs/toggle-power
You can test out the API on the page or via the example cURL/code that is provided
Step 1: Finding the light ID
First thing we need to is find the light id so we can target the light
API to use: https://api.developer.lifx.com/docs/list-lights
Let’s make a cURL request to find the device id.
In the docs, the id field in the response is the device id to reference.
Step 2: Request the current state of the device
Let’s add some code.
Create a project e.g. light and add a file called main.py
import enum
import json
import requests
import os class State(enum.Enum):
Off = 'off'
On = 'on' def updateState():
print ("Running cron job") token = os.getenv('LIFX_TOKEN')
lightId = os.getenv('LIGHT_ID')
headers = {
"Authorization": "Bearer %s" % token,
}
lights = json.loads(response.text)
currentState = lights[0]['power']
currentBrightness= lights[0]['brightness'] response = requests.get(' https://api.lifx.com/v1/lights/' + lightId, headers=headers)lights = json.loads(response.text)currentState = lights[0]['power']currentBrightness= lights[0]['brightness'] print ("Current state and brightness: [" + str(currentState) + ", " + str(currentBrightness) + "]") updateState()
Next, set environment variables for LIFX_TOKEN and LIGHT_ID
export LIFX_TOKEN=XXX
export LIGHT_ID=YYY
Install the required dependencies (using pip or pip3 )
pip install requests
Then run the code:
python main.py
(if you are running Python3, you may need to run this via python3 main.py)
This will print something like
$ Current state and brightness: [on, 0.3]
Step 3: Check the time
The next part of the logic is to check the time so the light can switch on, dim and switch off at the right time.
Time is usually in UTC, but if you wanted to, you can also convert the time to your timezone.
First, add the following imports
import time
from datetime import datetime
import pytz
Then install required dependencies using pip or pip3
Next, under the code that printed the current state of the device, convert the time to your timezone, example:
tz = pytz.timezone('Europe/Vienna')
now = datetime.now(tz)
print ("Current hour: " + str(now.hour))
Now run the code python main.py , you should get something like:
$ Current hour: 11
$ Current state and brightness: [on, 0.3]
Next, let’s check the time. For brevity, I’ll demonstrate with a couple of conditions
if now.hour == 22:
power = State.On.value
brightness = 0.7
elif now.hour == 0:
power = State.On.value
brightness = 0.3
else:
power = State.Off.value
brightness = 0.1
Then add payload information for the request.
payload = {
"power": power,
"brightness": brightness
}
response = requests.put(' print ("Updating state to: " + power)response = requests.put(' https://api.lifx.com/v1/lights/d073d5627d36/state' , data=payload, headers=headers)
Putting that together, this looks like
For testing purposes, you can update the “hour” in the conditions to turn the light off and on.
Step 4: Setting up Scheduling
We next want to schedule the code to run in certain hours of the day
Add another file called toggle.py .
For this example, I’ve set this to run every hour, but you can set this to run at specific times (check https://crontab.guru/ for examples).
from main import toggle
from apscheduler.schedulers.blocking import BlockingScheduler print("Running scheduler")
scheduler = BlockingScheduler()
scheduler.add_job(updateState, 'cron', day_of_week = '*', hour='*', minute='0')
scheduler.start()
Next, remove the last line updateState() in main.py
I’ve chosen to deploy the project to Heroku, so we need to setup other files
In the same project, create requirements.txt and add
requests
pytz
apscheduler
Then create Procfile with the following contents
clock: python toggle.py
Lastly, create runtime.txt to set the python version. In my example, the file contents:
python-3.9.0
Step 5: Push your code to Github
In the project, initialise the project
git init
Then add and commit your files
git add .
git commit -m "Adding project"
In Github, create your repository (see: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/getting-started-with-github/create-a-repo)
After you’re done, add the remote to your project on the command line
git remote add origin <git repo url>
Then push the code to the repository
git push origin master
Step 6: Heroku Setup
Set up the Heroku CLI
See: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli
2. Create an app and pipeline
Go to: https://dashboard.heroku.com/ to add the project in the UI and connect to your Github repository.
To create a pipeline, refer to this page on how- https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pipelines
Example pipeline I have set up (only production for now):
Then add the environment variables under project settings (go to project name > Settings )
Then enable automatic deploys for your project (i.e. every time you add code, this will automatically deploy)
You should see this section from the Deploy tab: your project > Deploy
3. Add a Scheduler
See this guide as a reference: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/clock-processes-python
On the command line, type and run
heroku addons:create scheduler:standard
Then add a dyno
heroku ps:scale clock=1 --app <your app name>
Check the resources tab your project > Resources , you should see something like the following
Step 7: Check Logs
You should be setup now. To check if the app is running as expected:
heroku logs -t -a your-app
Here is an example run:
2020-12-30T11:00:00.836778+00:00 app[clock.1]: Current hour: 22
2020-12-30T11:00:00.836804+00:00 app[clock.1]: Current state and brightness: [off, 0.1]
2020-12-30T12:00:00.721686+00:00 app[clock.1]: Updating state to: on
2020-12-30T13:00:00.007372+00:00 app[clock.1]: Running cron job
2020-12-30T13:00:00.603605+00:00 app[clock.1]: Current hour: 0
2020-12-30T13:00:00.603733+00:00 app[clock.1]: Current state and brightness: [on, 0.5]
2020-12-30T13:00:00.603833+00:00 app[clock.1]: Updating state to: on
2020-12-30T14:00:00.007353+00:00 app[clock.1]: Running cron job
2020-12-30T14:00:00.789883+00:00 app[clock.1]: Current hour: 1
2020-12-30T14:00:00.790068+00:00 app[clock.1]: Current state and brightness: [on, 0.3]
2020-12-30T14:00:00.790171+00:00 app[clock.1]: Updating state to: off
That’s it. Happy coding, enjoy your LIFX light! | https://clairettran.medium.com/programming-a-lifx-lightbulb-b54dc96e91c9 | ['Claire Tran'] | 2020-12-31 06:26:19.838000+00:00 | ['Internet of Things', 'Smart Lighting', 'Engineering', 'Lifx', 'IoT'] |
Yield Farming Tutorial — Part 1. Smart Contracts Using Solidity and… | 2. PmknFarm Contract
touch contracts/PmknFarm.sol
In your PmknFarm contract, let’s build the skeleton of the project. We’re building a yield farming dApp; therefore, we’re going to need a function that allows users to stake their funds. We’re also going to need a function to unstake their funds. Further, users will want to withdraw their yield. So, three core functions. Import both the PmknToken contract and OpenZeppelin’s IERC20 contract. We also need to declare some state variable mappings and events for the front end. We’ll go over each aspect of the contract. First, let’s go over the constructor, state variables, and events.
The startTime and pmknBalance mappings may require a little explanation to better understand how they’ll be used in our functions. The startTime will keep track of the timestamp for the user’s address in order to track the user’s unrealized yield. The pmknBalance will point to the realized, or the stored amount waiting to be minted, PmknToken yield (not to be confused with actually minted PmknToken) associated with the user’s address. If you’re unfamiliar with mappings, they’re simply key/value pairs. For a more in-depth explanation, I encourage you to read the Solidity docs.
I always declare a name variable for testing; however, this is not required.
These state variable declarations precede with the type (ie IERC20, PmknToken) and visibility (public).
To avoid confusion, I encourage following this convention:
type => PascalCasing
state declaration => camelCasing
constructor parameter => _underscoreCamelCasing
When I first started working with Solidity, it took some time for me to understand what exactly was going on with utilizing ERC20 tokens. This is how I wish the concept was explained to me: The IERC20 and PmknToken consist of types; as in, the imported token type. The state variable declaration consists of the contract’s instance of the token type. Finally, the constructor’s parameter points to the address that fully creates a contract instance of the imported token.
The constructor, for those unfamiliar, is a function used once and only once during the deployment of the contract. A common use-case for a constructor includes setting constant addresses (just as we’re doing here). In order to deploy this contract, the user must input addresses for _daiToken and _pmknToken.
Onward to the heart of this article. | https://medium.com/coinmonks/yield-farming-tutorial-part-1-3fd5972ce717 | ['Andrew Fleming'] | 2021-08-15 00:36:29.379000+00:00 | ['Yield Farming', 'Solidity', 'Smart Contracts', 'Hardhat', 'Dapp Tutorial'] |
Microsofoft 365 Phishing Attack, well-crafted one | In this post i want to share one of the most very well-crafted phishing attack i have seen and certainly one of the most common nowadays that happen on Microsoft 365 platform and it aims to steal the user’s credentials.
First the user receive an email with the subject “Important Service Changes” and a fake display name of Microsoft, the email contain a PDF document with the email address of the victim and the purpose of the email which is applying some Microsoft update to the user account.
The PDF contain the Logo of the victim company and a link to a website.
The link point to the website bellow, it looks and feel like you are on the Microsoft website:
It has an SSL certificate but from Let’s Encrypt, valid and the browsers will not shows any error.
The URL start with “login.microsoftonlineservices….”, sure it is on another domain but it will confuse many users.
It asks you to accept the updated privacy terms which is very common with all the privacy laws around the globe.
The Privacy window has the company logo, Microsoft logo and some very legitimate text.
Once you accept the terms, the next window is to enter your credentials, in the back-end there is a script that will go and try to login to office.com with the user’s credentials and return the wrong password if you put anything there.
The script is using https://logo.clearbit.com/<domain.com> to grab the company logo and insert it into the web app so the user will feel secure and as if it is coming from his company and the webapp will work for any target, as the attacker can change only the domain name. | https://medium.com/@adil-bra/microsofoft-365-phishing-attack-well-crafted-one-f75c9f6eab0 | [] | 2020-12-11 20:06:37.191000+00:00 | ['Microsoft 365', 'Phish', 'Phishing', 'Email', 'Cybersecurity'] |
Give dumb devices brains with these killer deals on Kasa smart plugs and switches | Give dumb devices brains with these killer deals on Kasa smart plugs and switches John Aug 16, 2020·2 min read
If you’d like to expand the automation capabilities of smart home, today's deals can help convert your dumb devices and appliances into smart ones. Amazon is selling a three-pack of TP-Link Light Switch Works with Alexa and best">Google Assistant,UL Certified, 3-Pack(HS200P3)" data-vars-product-name="Kasa Smart Light Switch by TP-Link,Single Pole,Needs Neutral Wire,2.4Ghz WiFi Light Switch Works with Alexa and Google Assistant,UL Certified, 3-Pack(HS200P3)" data-vars-link-position-id="000" data-vars-link-position="Body Text" data-po="amazon-ajax" data-product-id="1444420" data-vars-product-id="1444420" data-bkc="HomeTech" data-bkmfr="KasaSmart" data-vars-bkmfr="KasaSmart" data-bkvndr="" data-vars-bkvndr="" data-amazon-ajax-link="true" data-amazon-ajax-link-loaded="false" data-amazon-ajax-link-asin="B07HGW8N7R" data-amazon-ajax-link-subtag="US-003-3567361-000-1444420-web-20">Kasa Smart Light switches for $40, and a two-pack of Kasa Smart Plugs for $15.
[ Want more great deals? Check out TechConnect, our home for the best tech deals, all hand-picked by the PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive editors. ]
The switches are at an all-time low and better than the $50 to $60 this three-pack was selling for earlier in the year. The smart plugs, meanwhile, are $5 off the most recent price and another all-time low. You may also see a coupon you can click to save an additional 15 percent on the plugs.
The light switches work with single pole switches, not three- or four-way switches. They also need a neutral wire and connect to Wi-Fi via a 2.4GHz connection. Kasa's devices play nice with Alexa and Google Assistant, and neither needs an expensive hub to work. The simplicity of TP-Link’s Kasa gear is that they connect directly to your Wi-Fi network via the Kasa smartphone app.
The smart plugs, meanwhile, are compact wall warts that only take up one outlet per face plate—meaning you can stack two in the same spot if you need it. Just like the switches, they work with Amazon and Alexa and connect to your home via the Kasa smartphone app. These switches are fantastic for small electronics around the home that would be better with scheduling such as a coffee maker or floor lamp.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our techhive.com/about/affiliates.html">affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@John22514197/give-dumb-devices-brains-with-these-killer-deals-on-kasa-smart-plugs-and-switches-c210595dfae1 | [] | 2020-08-16 18:09:15.900000+00:00 | ['Gear', 'Electronics', 'Chargers', 'Tvs'] |
Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard (Ep. 96) | Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard (Ep. 96)
Paul Romer makes his second appearance to discuss the failings of economics, how his mass testing plan for COVID-19 would work, what aspect of epidemiology concern him, how the FDA is slowing a better response, his ideas for reopening schools and Major League Baseball, where he agrees with Weyl’s test plan, why charter cities need a new name, what went wrong with Honduras, the development trajectory for sub-Saharan Africa, how he’d reform the World Bank, the underrated benefits of a culture of science, his heartening takeaway about human nature from his experience at Burning Man, and more.
Listen to the full conversation
You can also watch a video of the conversation here.
Read the full conversation
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone. Today I am chatting once again with Paul Romer, who needs no introduction. Paul, welcome.
PAUL ROMER: Good to be here.
COWEN: You have a recent article in the periodical Foreign Affairs about the failings of economics. Let me try to defend the economics profession. Tell me what you think. If I look at the big catch-up winners over the last few decades, it seems to me it’s Poland and Ireland, and they basically followed a neoliberal recipe. They more or less did what economists told them to do. What’s the failure in that?
ROMER: By the way, what about China? China caught up pretty well too, but they followed some of the basic insights from economics.
COWEN: And the Solow model.
ROMER: Yeah. But the origins of that article were that I read some books that said economists got a lot more influence and things got worse in the United States, and this was a really troubling argument for me because it’s not easy to dismiss. What I concluded in that article saying we should do a cost-benefit analysis — look at the big things that economics has done well, the things it may have done badly, and just see how it works out.
The point you’re alluding to is something that my colleague, Peter Henry, has also made, which is that one of the areas where economics may really have been helpful is in the development process or the catch-up phase of growth. So that should go on the plus side, I think, on the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis, no question there. And I think there’s some other ones that belong there too.
My point was that there may have been some things that have also been significant negatives, and it’s time to do the numbers and see what the net is.
COWEN: So if I ask myself, “What do I think has been the biggest negative?” I suppose I would say around 2000 date, economists for the most part did not understand the importance of the shadow banking system. What seemed to be a kind of ordinary real estate bubble, like the early 1990s, was far, far worse, and we totally missed that. That seems to be a defect of institutional knowledge, but you tell me what you think the greatest problem has been.
ROMER: I think this problem is an interesting one. I put a slightly different spin on it, but I think it’s in the class of things of a failure to understand or incomplete understanding. I don’t think that’s a sign of a science that’s failed. That’s a sign of a science which is just making progress. There’s some things it knows and things it doesn’t know. So I don’t view this one as a sign of a systemic problem that we’re not doing it right, in a sense.
For what it’s worth, we can come back and talk about this, but I think the lesson from the financial crisis, which we’re learning again now, is one about the fragility of extensive interconnection. We’ve paid attention to optimize efficiency with massive reliance on specialization and these complicated supply chains.
But the growth, the proliferation of connection means that our system is more fragile than we realize. A shock comes, and things happen that we didn’t anticipate. But again, that’s part of learning about a very new type of economy which is changing in real time.
The ones that struck me as being particularly worrisome were, first, I think the negative effect that economists have had in terms of protecting competition. Through the law and economics movement, we ratified this notion that big is okay as long as you can make some case that it’s efficient.
The upshot is, is that I think because of technical economics and the arguments of economists, antitrust is much more tolerant now of dominant firms, and if we believe that competition’s good in a whole bunch of ways, this could actually be very, very harmful. So that’s one.
COWEN: Doesn’t Amazon look pretty good right now in the midst of the pandemic? Do you wish we had split it up into different parts?
ROMER: My sense is that we’d be better off if we had five Amazons instead of one. And I don’t see why we couldn’t have five Amazons if we, as voters, say, “This is the kind of society we want to live in. Let’s just aim for that.” And same thing — the more worrisome positions are those of the tech firms that are so deeply connected now to many aspects of our lives and where there’s really very little competition and a lot of opacity about what these firms actually do.
COWEN: Let me try to defend the economics profession a bit more. If we look at climate policy, a lot of economists have recommended a carbon tax — not quite a consensus, but a very common view. Now, of course we haven’t done it, but it seems to me the profession, in some manner, is essentially correct there. So you would side with the profession on that?
ROMER: Yeah. Again, in some sense, the main point of the article that I’m making is that economists need to accept that our role is that of the technical adviser. We can say, “If you apply a carbon tax, carbon emissions will go down. Here’s what other effects we think they’ll have. But it’s up to you, the voters, to decide whether you want to follow that policy or not.”
So, if the voters don’t follow us, I think, to a first approximation, that’s not really our responsibility. And what I’m critical of is this tendency for economists to assume the responsibility of philosopher king and say to voters, “Well, we know better what a society should be like, what society should do. Listen to us. We’ll tell you the way things should be. We’ll tell you what you should do.”
And, in truth, I think we get into that mode a lot more than we realize. Certainly, some members of the profession get into that mode. And I think they’ve done, really, quite a bit of harm when they did that.
COWEN: When you, as a voter, judge policies, what normative or philosophical standard do you use?
ROMER: Well, I think all of us have some notions about self-interest, and then the well-being of those around us. Everything else equal, if our position is the same, we’re somewhat happier if those around us are happier as well. Different of us have either a bigger or smaller circle of those we care about, so there’s some mixture of making sure everybody is doing okay, and then making sure I’m doing okay. That’s the first thing that I look at as a voter.
But I also look at — this is a little bit of a tangent relative to your question — but I also look at the question of, in what direction will this policy take our norms, our beliefs about right and wrong? I think those change. I think there’s some beliefs about right and wrong which are better in an objective sense, in the sense that we economists think of in terms of efficiency. If everybody thought this was the right thing to do, then we would actually all be better off in some objective sense.
So those issues weigh heavily in my thinking about policies. Economists have been a little slow to take those up, but frankly, I guess that is a part of the problem with economic analysis. Because many of the arguments about, say, allowing the market to run and giving people more freedom make more sense if, when you do that, you don’t change norms. But if, when you do that, you encourage norms that are destructive, that kind of laissez-faire approach can be harmful.
Let me take a trivial example. Suppose the promulgation of laissez-faire makes everybody feel like it’s okay to litter. We used to have a norm that we shouldn’t litter because it was inconsiderate and it was just wrong. Laissez-faire convinces us I can litter if I want to. It’s somebody else’s problem to deal with the litter. That kind of laissez-faire would be bad because we’d live in a world that was full of trash all over the place. And I think in more important areas, economists have been inattentive to the effects that their policies have had on norms.
COWEN: But if you take, say, litter, why wouldn’t the economic approach be either create a private property right, which we do sometimes? Other times that’s not possible, so we want something like a Pigouvian tax or a cap-and-trade. And your view, then, is not really far from the standard economics view, if at all.
ROMER: No, but I think, actually, there’s enormous value in norms that are kind of self-enforcing. Suppose people think litter’s bad. Suppose they think it’s bad when other people litter. So they’ll kind of scold or criticize when they see somebody litter. Then, without police powers, without courts, without taxes, you actually get the outcome we want, which is we live in a world with no litter. And if we lost those norms, we’ve got to overlay these more heavy, expensive governmental solutions.
COWEN: Let’s look at macroeconomics. If I look at the current crisis, which is turning into a depression, it seems to me we were on the verge of a financial implosion in March. The Fed acted to limit that. The macroeconomic response, to me, from the Fed seems to be quite good. So, isn’t all well in macroeconomics?
ROMER: Yeah. When I was talking about this cost-benefit exercise, one of the positives we mentioned was in the sphere of development and catch-up. I think another is in stabilization policy. The kind of practical macro policy as practiced at the Fed is much better now than it was during the 1930s, and we get real benefits from that. I think it’s good that the Fed is trying to make sure that we don’t have this cascade of bankruptcies. There’s no question that economists have learned something and contributed to society.
Just as a side note, I’ve been critical of the more theoretical, rational-expectations macro, but set that aside because that really hasn’t had that much impact on policy. So macro policy as practiced at the Fed or as practiced by the Congress right now is, I think, a reflection of things we’ve learned relative to, say, the 1930s, and that’s good.
But let me come back to what are the minus sides of this balance sheet. I talked about antitrust and the failure of competition policy. The other one is in regulation. If you ask me who’s my representative of somebody, an economist who overstepped, overreached, and did real harm, it’s Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was this tireless advocate for cutting regulation. He was quoted at one point, saying he’s never met a regulation that he thought was valuable. And he played a very important role in deregulating the financial system for decades running up to the financial crisis.
That financial crisis cost us an enormous amount worldwide, and it’s because we unwound systems of regulation that kept our financial system from being as fragile as it’s become. You look across the board at other types of regulation — we’ve failed to support the kinds of regulations that we need alongside of Pigouvian taxes. There’s some bad things that people do, bad in a sense they’re inefficient. We can try and tax them. Other times you just use regulation. But one way or the other, we collectively want to stop people from doing things that are harmful.
COWEN: But if you look at the profession as a whole, wouldn’t most economists agree that, say, tax preferences for owner-occupied housing are a bad idea? And various other subsidies built into the system for housing are a bad idea? If they had been listened to on that, we still might’ve had a crisis of some kind, but it would have been far smaller.
Scott Sumner has argued if we had targeted nominal GDP, the crisis would have been milder. You’re picking a bit on the one thing that Greenspan got wrong, but there’s many other things economists have said that would’ve made it much better.
ROMER: Yeah, but we still should have been saying, “Given the choices that voters are making, which reflect your preferences as voters, like supporting owner-occupied housing, the regulatory choices that we’re recommending as economists are actually exposing us to just massive, massive harm.”
I don’t remember the number off the top of my head. Haldane did some calculation where the worldwide cost of the financial crisis was, I think, in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. This is a really huge, huge mistake. And we’re still, I think, exposed to a financial system which could just blow up on us at any point in time. It’s part of why the Fed has to be so active right now with providing funds.
So deregulation, especially of financial markets, I think was harmful, and competition policy was a failure. And then the bottom line is, you just look at one of the most basic ways to measure progress: how long do people live? People in the United States are not living as long as they used to. Life expectancy is declining, and life expectancy hasn’t been keeping up with other nations around the world.
COWEN: Sure. Is that a failure of economists?
ROMER: Well, I think partly. When the pharmaceutical firms that were trying to make money off of Oxycontin and these opioid-based painkillers — when they went to Congress to try and stop the DEA from shutting them down, what they used was the language of economics.
“You have to have innovation. You’ve got to let the market proceed. There’ll be some creative destruction, but you have to let us do our thing. You can’t interfere — it will be bad for growth.” So, to the extent that we lent cover, indirectly, for those kinds of arguments against regulation so firms could make money killing people, we really did something bad.
COWEN: But again, there are people out there who have misused your ideas or misrepresented them.
ROMER: Oh, yeah.
COWEN: I think they’ve done the same with mine. I don’t blame you at all for that, right? If something bad happens with a charter city, I don’t say, “Oh, Paul Romer gave them cover.” I say, “No, it’s the fault of the people who did it.” So I would say economists were pretty much not to blame for the opioid crisis.
ROMER: There’s a speech Greenspan gave, where he doesn’t cite me, but he could. It’s all about “We can’t have regulation because we’ve got to have growth. Growth comes from innovation. Regulation slows innovation. It’ll stop creative destruction. We just have to live with greater destruction.”
So, I feel like, yeah, some of my ideas could have been used to support bad policy, but instead of asking whether I’m personally to blame or personally a bad person, what I’m stepping back and asking is, did we create a system that let someone like Greenspan make recommendations under the cover of science? Like, “I’m a scientist, I’m telling you how it should go.”
But those recommendations were really based on a worldview he got from a novel by Ayn Rand. There was no technical scientific basis for them. And they turned out to be really incredibly harmful, so we need to make sure that the system that we’re building isn’t misused in that way.
COWEN: Do you think there should be an obsession with math GRE scores when admitting people into graduate programs in economics? We know there is, right?
ROMER: Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s not the only — put it this way . . .
COWEN: Is that part of the problem, or is that how we need to do it?
ROMER: It’s not the only thing I think we should be looking at. And I’m not sure what are the other predictors, but I don’t think just practice in math is going to lead to a successful career in economics.
COWEN: You’ve been interacting a lot with epidemiologists due, in part, to your arguments for testing. What’s your opinion of that field?
ROMER: There’s actually an interesting parallel in epidemiology with a technical kind of issue in economics. In macro, we shifted towards model-based reasoning about macroeconomics. So representative agent — the whole rational-expectations movement was a shift towards “Let’s see what the models say,” rather than “Let’s see what the data say.”
In epidemiology, there’s a very well-established model — this SIR model that is behind a lot of these predictions, but there’s an alternative — the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which has this model that’s been very influential, widely watched these days. The IHME is using a much more data-driven approach, kind of a curve-fitting approach. It’s almost like old-style Keynesian macro, where you just say, “Well, let’s just fit something to the numbers and see what comes out of that without imposing a lot of theory onto the estimation process.”
And I just found it interesting to see that tension in another field, from the outside. The way it looks to me is, it’s good to have both of those wings active in a discipline. And it’s good to have them in contention with each other.
If I have a criticism of macro in economics, it’s like the criticism in epidemiology — we may have biased things a little bit too much towards the models, and we’re not giving enough weight to just the facts themselves. And I think that’s because it’s actually easier to do models than to look at data, so we need to have a little bit of collective pressure to, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what your theory says, but let’s look at the numbers.”
On Romer’s COVID-19 testing plan
COWEN: Many people have supported mass testing plans. Of course, you’ve been in the lead here. Why do you think they’re not getting more support? Because the benefit-cost ratio, if you can pull it off, seems to be quite high.
ROMER: Yeah. I’ve actually been working — oddly, mind you, I’m the theorist criticizing the use of models, so, go figure — but what have I been doing recently? I’ve been using a model to try and figure out, what is actually the value of an additional test relative to its cost? Models definitely have their role, but you’ve got to stick to the idea that a fact beats a theory every time.
Now, the thing is, just very clear, that a test is worth a lot more than it would cost us to provide. Why aren’t we delivering more? I think there’s a genuine confusion and puzzlement about how to increase the supply of tests. And because people don’t know how to go about increasing it, they say it’s not possible. They treat it as if it’s just something beyond our control.
I think we have to look carefully at what changes should we make in policy to increase the supply of tests. One part of that, as I’ve been saying, is we just have to pay for them. If we put up enough money, we can get tests. It’s like I’ve been saying: if we spent about twice as much on tests as we spend on soda, we could have all the tests we need, like 23 million tests a day.
If we spent about twice as much on tests as we spend on soda, we could have all the tests we need, like 23 million tests a day.
So first, you’ve got to provide money. Because tests are a public good, this has got to be money that comes from the government. It’s hard to get there with having consumers pay. But the Congress has allocated $25 billion. There’s a proposal now for another $75 billion from the Democratic plan. So, we’re getting there on the money.
The other side, which frankly, I’m in this position — think about what I was saying before — I’m generally in the position of defending regulation. The more I’ve looked at the role of the FDA in holding back progress in testing, the more I’ve concluded this is a case where we have to say, as economists often say, “This regulation is just getting the cost-benefit tradeoff wrong.”
It’s way too restrictive. There’s little harm from tests. Tests don’t hurt people. It’s not like a vaccine or a pharmaceutical agent, so that the FDA is just needlessly slowing down innovation that could otherwise flourish. So, pay some money, and then get the FDA out of the way. And then all of these very clever researchers and university labs all across this country — they could give us all the tests we need.
COWEN: Germany has done a great deal with testing, as you know. But at least now, as we’re speaking, as of, I think, May 12th, their R is still over one. Does that worry you? Does testing really get you into the promised land if you’re not a small island?
ROMER: It does worry me. And I don’t think that, as well as they’ve done . . .
Let’s just pause for a second because this is a little tricky. If R is equal to one, that means that the number of deaths, the number of infections will stay constant over time. So you can have R0 equal to one at a low level of infection and low rate of deaths, which is where Germany is. We have R0 about equal to one at a higher rate of death.
But in any case, it is worrisome because what we want for suppression is R0 significantly less than one. And Germany is not testing at the scale that I would propose, and I’m afraid that the way to get there is that even Germany is going to have to do more testing, including more testing where you’re just kind of fishing for people who were infected. You just test people who are asymptomatic. You’ve got no indication that they were in contact, but you test them anyway because that’s the only way to find some of the people who are currently infected.
COWEN: Do you worry that some of the countries that have done the best with testing have combined it with forced quarantine and that maybe you need forced quarantine for testing to work?
ROMER: Well, I was critical. It’s been very funny to go from that real kind of angst, almost like crisis of the review I wrote of what economists have done, but then to shift into economist mode where I think we can actually provide some real benefit and some clarity in these conversations.
The way I frame this on testing is, first ask, what would be the value of a particular piece of information? How valuable would it be if we know who’s infected and who’s not? Then, given that information, separately let’s think about, what’s a good way to use that information? And I think there’s some open questions about how best to use this.
I have some colleagues who I’ve written a paper on because they were also promoting this idea of test everyone. Their view is that one of the ways we might do this is, at home, get devices that can test you at home, so everybody finds out if they’re infected or not. Their attitude is, that may be all you need to do because once people know they’re infected, they’ll take decisions, take actions to protect their colleagues, the people they know.
Most people are responsible. Most people don’t want to inflict harm on others. They may well just self-isolate. So maybe with enough testing, we just let everybody know, are you infectious or not? And that’s all we have to do. You could go to the other extreme and have some government system where the test system has to report every positive, and the government forces quarantine on people.
I don’t think you need that. I don’t think you’d get that much benefit out of that. And it’s got a lot of potential costs. So let’s get that information, and then let’s use it very gently. First, just let people know and let them adjust. Second, maybe give someone like . . .
I keep talking about, recovery means I can actually go back to the dentist. Maybe my dentist will say, “Paul, I don’t want to be working in your mouth — and you can’t be wearing a mask when you’re in the dental chair — unless you have a recent test that shows that you’re not positive. Then fine, you can come on in, and I can work on your teeth.”
We might give other people the right and the ability to say, “There’s certain things you can’t do, certain services you can’t have access to unless you can show that you got a negative.” Restaurants might offer sit-down meals but say, “You can only get a reservation if you can show us you’ve got a negative test result in the last couple of days.”
We can use this information in ways that I think aren’t very oppressive, aren’t very risky. They could let us go back to going to the dentist and having restaurant meals and do it without big risks to our freedoms.
COWEN: Take the people who test positive. It seems that at some point they’re likely to be immune, and in a sense, they’re more valuable as workers.
ROMER: Yeah.
COWEN: When do we give them the clear? I read papers, “Oh, you can be infectious for up to five weeks, maybe more.” We’re in a very risk-averse society. Don’t you run the risk by getting a test at all that, in essence, you end up locked out of polite society?
ROMER: Well, again, this is where I’m defending science and economics as science. Here’s really the science of medicine. We need to help everybody know, “Here’s what the facts are. Based on these kinds of signals or this elapsed time, you can be confident that a person is not infectious any longer.”
And then people may still have some emotional aversive reactions. But I think if we can just credibly provide the facts, then that will start to change practice, and practice will start to change some of those deeper emotions.
COWEN: Should there be a liability waiver for businesses that test their employees? We all know there are false negatives and positives, in fact.
ROMER: Yeah.
COWEN: Say your business tests you. They tell you you don’t have it. It turns out you do have it. You infect your spouse. Should there be a liability waiver to encourage this testing?
ROMER: You know, for vaccines, we created a special compensation mechanism so that, instead of litigating, somebody who’s harmed by taking a vaccine — because there’s a small fraction of the population that has a negative side effect — there’s a separate compensation mechanism. I think there are many reasons to think that our judicial system is an ineffective way to address a harm or to provide insurance. And it slows down many important things that we need to do.
But I’d be more in favor of a broader look at ways to improve the functioning of the judicial system, rather than just do a . . . Actually, I don’t have a strong view on this. It may be that to move quickly, we want to have a special patch related to what firms do with test information. But I don’t think we should stop there. We really should be asking, how can we tune the judicial system to make it work better?
COWEN: Could it be that litigation is the ultimate reason why America is so slow in testing? That any big push for anything — someone can raise their hand and object. Someone could sue. “Well, this violates The Health Insurance Privacy Act (HIPAA).” I’m not even sure it does, but you would need a ruling. Someone sues on disabilities regulation. “Oh, I need to have this app. I can’t read it.” Someone sues about masks. “Well, I can’t do lip reading.” The actual solution — something we’re far from — and that’s to clear away all this emphasis on litigation in American policy. And economists have been mostly right about that, too. Or not?
ROMER: Yeah, yeah. Well, my dive into testing has persuaded me that the FDA is far more important as a force that’s slowing down progress there. There’s been speculation about lawsuits, but there’s really little indication that those will materialize. And the people I talk to who can’t do things they want to do in testing are failing to do it because of the concern about the FDA. So I don’t think the facts support that litigation is the big threat here.
Also, in terms of moving quickly, I think one of the things we could leverage — because this is a public good — is the sovereign immunity of the states. I think the states can actually just purchase the test, say, with money they get from the feds and then even give instructions about “here are ways to use these tests.”
Those could even be regulations. “Here is what you have to do. If you’re a restaurant, if your employees test negative, you can open. You have legal permission to open. And you have to require that people test negative. But if you do, that’s fine.”
If somebody who tests negative goes to restaurants and other people get infected because of that, the restaurant could actually have the protection of the mandate from the state that this is what you should do to protect public health. So I think the states could actually provide cover for firms to do — and individuals to do — what’s best in terms of how to use this test information.
COWEN: Let’s say we make you testing czar, and the Romer regime is put into place. Over the first month, what percentage of Americans do you think would show up to be tested?
ROMER: Well, I would try and do a calculation about where might tests be most valuable. And if the states are the ones who are buying tests and providing them, encourage states to use them for those high-value purposes. I think frequent testing in nursing homes might be all it would take to cut the death rate in half right now. The estimates are that as many as half of the deaths are actually taking place in nursing homes. And it seems to me that there’s no hope for contact tracing there.
There’s talk about rebuilding all of the nursing homes. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. But if you tested everybody, initially every day so you know exactly who’s infectious inside a nursing home — test all of the staff; test all of the visitors — then we should be able to isolate the few who are infectious and really bring down the deaths in nursing homes. So I’d use those, there, first.
Second, I think it would be great to get Major League Baseball started again. I think we should use the relatively small number of tests it would take to test all the baseball players every day, and let them start playing games in empty stadiums, because you need a lot more tests to test the fans, to have them come in. But we could be playing baseball in empty stadiums without any risks that we’re increasing this R factor, and people enjoy baseball.
It would be an important signal of how we go back to work in this regime. I think that could be an important complement to nursing homes. To keep going —
COWEN: There’s a study out. I think it came out May 10th or May 11th, and they did test everyone in Major League Baseball — a lot of the staff, not just the players. And hardly any of them are COVID positive. We tested so many of the NBA players. But given those sports are still not reopening, doesn’t that mean testing isn’t enough?
ROMER: Well, nobody made a plan, which says . . . Look, there was an initial plan, which is put all the baseball players in a big dome or something and isolate them. But obviously, they don’t want that. They’re going to be going home to their families. Some of them are going to get infected in their families, so you need a plan for testing and retesting the baseball players if you want to make sure that one player doesn’t infect another.
You need to do some calculations about, how frequently do we need to test? Also, you alluded to this point before, which is, how do we have to respond when somebody tests positive? How long should they be isolated, both from other players but also from the general public? But if we just put together the plan, I think we could safely restart baseball and do it with confidence, knowing that we’re not going to increase the number of infections.
COWEN: Not under the Romer regime, but in the world we live in, can we reopen our colleges and universities for this coming fall?
ROMER: Well that’s one of my list of plans to actually work out. So there’s Major League Baseball, but then universities and then K–12 education, I think, are the next two. Part of the reality is that people are afraid of opening universities and K–12 education right now.
If we had the tests, we can show everyone, if you test people frequently, isolate the few who are infectious as soon as you find out that they’re infectious, you can actually let people start to interact again without raising this R number. So I think it’s totally possible to reopen universities and reopen schools.
The universities — you may make some adjustments beyond just test and isolate. It may be that a 300-person lecture hall, unless it’s well ventilated, is just too risky because even just one person who’s infectious could infect many more, and we’d have to see if that’s true. So you might have to have better ventilation or not have those big lecture halls, but we could surely restart university education, restart K–12. And these would be very important things to do because we know how valuable human capital is. We know how high the returns are to those kinds of investments.
I said before, I was doing some calculations the last couple of days. The calculation I’m looking at is for each unit of testing capacity. And if we could test one more person each day, how many more jobs or how many more people could reenter, return to their previous activities?
The model suggests that it’s about nine. Testing one person per day throughout the year would free up about nine people who could go back to doing what they were doing before, get out of the shelter-in-place rules and have no net effect on the reproduction number R because the tests depress it. More people in circulation raise it. You just set those numbers so that they balance each other out. Nine economically active people is worth a hell of a lot more than it costs to provide one test a day for a year.
On Romer’s plan vs. Weyl’s
COWEN: How does your testing idea differ from Glen Weyl’s testing idea?
ROMER: I think Glen and I are in agreement that tests are very valuable. Glen thinks that we can target the tests. I’m saying just test everybody on a regular basis. Glen is saying you don’t have to test everybody. What you can do is target your tests to people who are more likely to be infectious. I agree that if you can target tests effectively, then you don’t have to test as many people because really all you have to do is find enough positives and get them into isolation.
But I think Glen is assuming that the way we’re going to predict safely and reliably who’s infectious is through apps that do digital contact tracing, and I’m skeptical that that’s going to be ready in time and ready in the sense that everybody will be comfortable using it.
I’m saying if we want to have a plan that we know we can execute now, where we know we’re not going to have a divisive fight and get stuck because we can’t make a decision, the way to do that is just don’t make the digital contact tracing part of the critical path. Just create a path where we get there, whether or not apps could work. If it works, great. I’m not opposed to targeting the tests if you’ve got a good way to do it, but don’t make that a requirement for the path that protects us all.
COWEN: Would you ever get involved in another charter city project?
ROMER: Actually, before I leave the testing — one of the things, as economists and scientists, I think we really can usefully bring to these debates is just quantification, just talk about the numbers. This morning, I was trying to think the best estimate, say, from New York State is that this infection fatality rate is about a half a percent. So if a half a percent of the people who catch an infection die, and if you look at where we have got about 2,000 people a day in the United States who are dying, that means there’re about 400,000 people a day who are newly infected.
Now, each of those 400,000 people has, say, 10 contacts, which I think is modest — it could be more. That means that there’s 4 million people a day that you’ve got to go out and find with your contact tracers. I’m not sure we’ve got the capacity to do that. But the real point here is that whether you follow Glen’s model or my model, you’re already up to 4 million tests a day, which is 10 times the capacity we’ve got.
So let’s not even argue about whether Glen’s right or I’m right. Let’s just get a lot more tests because both of us think we need way more than we have.
On trying again with charter cities
COWEN: Okay. Charter cities — would you try it again someday?
ROMER: Sure, absolutely.
COWEN: Under what conditions?
ROMER: I might rename it. I don’t know that, in communicating the idea, that charter city is the best name, but I think the idea is still a compelling alternative. And unfortunately — maybe this is now my shtick — it’s like a $100 billion a year on testing. It’s an unpleasant, bad idea that nobody likes, but it’s just better than the alternatives. The same thing is true, I think, on migration flows, as on dealing with the pandemic, which is that the alternatives are so terrible, the best option may be something that’s kind of bad, it’s kind of expensive — we just do it anyway.
I’m not sure we should call it charter city, but the thing I think we could do is create new cities that would solve the current impasse, where you’ve got 750 million people who say they want to leave the countries where they currently live, and the existing countries that say, “We don’t want to take that many people.”
So I’m saying, “Okay, what’s the middle ground here? What’s the deal we could do? Let’s create some new places that are still places that people want to go to, but where nobody in existing countries feels threatened by the creation of those new places. And let’s try and offer that as a solution to what seems like this impasse.”
COWEN: How do you frame what happened in Honduras, conceptually?
ROMER: I thought in selling this idea, to do this, you’d need both some country that is willing to volunteer or supply the location for a new jurisdiction, and then some countries — a country, or more than one country — that can help establish the new jurisdiction, like its legal systems and so forth, and administrative — all the systems you’d need. I thought the biggest risk constraint on this idea was that it would be hard to find countries that would be willing to say, “You could use our land to start something new.”
So I spent time in Madagascar. I spent time in Honduras. They were actually willing to try this, but what I think, in retrospect, I should have done, and what I’ll do now, is go first to the countries which are willing to help set something up because a country like Honduras was not — the reason it was willing to do something radical like a new charter city was that it did not have the internal capacity to do something like a charter city.
What went wrong was that we couldn’t get sufficient participation from outside of Honduras in setting this up. And then, frankly, in Honduras there was a little bit of lack of transparency. They didn’t really want outsiders either because it was kind of a small group that actually wanted to set these things up and control it internally.
So I think the scarce player, the short side of this market is going to be countries that are willing to say, “We will help set up a new place that people can go to.” It’s the citizens of those potential countries that we need to persuade. This would be worth trying. And if they’re willing to do it, then I think we can find locations where it could be done.
COWEN: Do you worry about a negative selection effect in the volunteers? In a lot of your work, you’re concerned with corruption, quite appropriately, I would say. And could it be, the countries that want to do charter cities — well, it’s one branch of the government wants to do something a little funny without the other branches of the government seeing, and, in essence, cut its own deal, and that there’s something intrinsically worrisome about a country volunteering to do it.
ROMER: I think this is one of these places where we have to be willing to just select from the feasible alternatives and not hold out for some ideal that we can’t achieve. It’s worth being specific here. My hunch is that China will eventually realize that the way to pay for the infrastructure that it’s building as part of this Belt and Road program is to do urban real estate development. The transport never pays for itself. It’s always the real estate that goes up in value that you use to pay for all of this.
So I think that the Belt and Road project is inevitably going to turn to a version of new city, city-scale real estate development to finance what they’re trying to do. In parallel, the United States could be offering its own version of cities around the world that are new. There’s gains in the value of the land that pay for the stuff you want to do.
Then to answer your question, would I be worried if that’s the way that China and the US compete with each other? Actually, no, I think that would be pretty good. The Chinese wouldn’t set up those cities and run them exactly the way that somebody from the United States might prefer. But if people who want to migrate could choose between a Chinese location and a US location, that would put some pressure on both the US and China to organize these new opportunities in ways that really benefit the people who will go there.
COWEN: How important is religion for explaining economic development? You said before, norms are important, and charter cities, in a way, are identifying laws, rules, norms as a public-good legal structure. So why isn’t religion also a key?
ROMER: Well, I think it’s important for us to think about what are the mechanisms that we use to try and shape norms over time. Some of them are just an invisible-hand process where nobody’s in charge and norms often, I think, go in directions that are beneficial and appropriate.
There’s a great book you may know of, called The Civilizing Process, that looked from the Middle Ages up to the present, looked at norms about just what it means to be polite or civilized, even just table manners. And it’s really a fascinating account.
Some of this happens automatically, but some of it happens because of activists and organizations and structures like churches, and we should be at least mindful of, what are the ways in which those different bodies can push norms? What are the ways that are beneficial to everyone, like that increase efficiency? What are the ones that might harm efficiency? How do we get more of the ones that increase efficiency?
COWEN: Say I’m a Christian missionary. I’m working in Nigeria, and say I’m fairly persuasive and effective. Is it possible I’m doing more for economic development than any economist?
ROMER: It’s possible, but you’d really want to look in detail and see which parts of the norms that are being conveyed there are beneficial and which parts are not. One also has to be thoughtful about the fact that you should ask, are the people who are being socialized into some new norms aware of what the transaction is? And are they agreeing in some sense? Do they actually have some agency and some ability to choose “Yes, I’m okay with this” or “No, maybe not”?
This is why I like the migration decision, because it involves a more affirmative choice. If some missionaries set up a city and said, “Here’s how this city will work. You’re welcome to come,” and people could choose to go to that city or not, and can choose to leave if they don’t like it when they get there — I’d be a lot more comfortable with it.
COWEN: How optimistic are you more generally about the developmental trajectory for sub-Saharan Africa?
ROMER: There’s a saying I picked up from Gordon Brown, that in establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest. I think some parts of this development process are just very slow. If you look around the world, all the efforts since World War II that’s gone into trying to build strong, effective states, to establish the rule of law in a functioning state, I think the external investments in building states have yielded very little.
So we need to think about ways to transfer the functioning of existing states rather than just build them from scratch in existing places. That’s a lot of the impetus behind this charter cities idea. It’s both — you select people coming in who have a particular set of norms that then become the dominant norms in this new place, but you also protect those norms by certain kinds of administrative structures, state functions that reinforce them.
We need to think about ways to transfer the functioning of existing states rather than just build them from scratch in existing places.
If we don’t pay attention to that and just keep doing what we’ve been doing in development assistance, I’m still fairly pessimistic about how many will make the radical transformation that China made.
On reforming the World Bank
COWEN: If you could reform the World Bank, what would you do?
ROMER: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think the Bank is trying to serve two missions, and it can’t do both. One is a diplomatic function, which I think is very important. The World Bank is a place where somebody who represents the government of China and somebody who represents the government of the United States sit in a conference room and argue, “Should we do A or B?” Not just argue, but discuss, negotiate. On a regular basis, they make decisions.
And it isn’t just China and the US. It’s a bunch of countries. I think it’s very good for personal relationships, for the careers of people who will go on to have other positions in these governments, to have that kind of experience of, basically, diplomatic negotiation over a bunch of relatively small items because it’s a confidence-building measure that makes it possible for countries to make bigger diplomatic decisions when they have to.
That, I think, is the value of the World Bank right now. The problem is that that diplomatic function is inconsistent with the function of being a provider of scientific insight. The scientific endeavor has to be committed to truth, no matter whose feathers get ruffled. There’s certain convenient fictions that are required for diplomacy to work. You start accepting convenient fictions in science, and science is just dead.
So the Bank’s got to decide: is it engaged in diplomacy or science? I think the diplomacy is its unique comparative advantage. Therefore, I think it’s got to get out of the scientific business. It should just outsource its research. It shouldn’t try and be a research organization, and it should just be transparent about what it can be good at and is good at.
COWEN: Do you regret the time you spent there? Or what would you have done differently?
ROMER: Well, I was brought in to reform the research group. People in the Bank could tell that research was dysfunctional there, but shortly after I arrived, the number two, who I think had been behind this initiative, left to go take a position back in finance minister in Indonesia, and a different number two came into the Bank.
In retrospect, what happened was that number two decided we’re not going to reform research. We don’t want any noise. Because you reform things, you’re going to get noise. You’re going to get complaints. All other parts of the Bank had been reformed. Research hadn’t. So I wasted 16 months talking to the number two and the number one and saying, “You understand if I’m really going to reform the research group, there’s going to be noise, and it’s going to be a little contentious. You really want to do this, right?”
And they, “Yeah, no, no, absolutely, full speed ahead. We’re totally 100 percent behind you. We totally agree with each other.” And they were just lying to me. So I would go out and try and do something, and they would undercut every simple thing I tried to do. What I regret is the dishonesty of the leadership and failing to just say what was true, which is, “We changed our minds. We don’t want to reform research anymore.”
So I spent months and months doing really simple things like trying to move two direct reports, who reported to me, who didn’t have the integrity to have the kind of responsibility that they had. But I was facing a bureaucratic system that opposed moving these positions — and I’m not even talking about firing them, just moving them out of the critical positions so other people could fill those roles and do them correctly.
I faced not only internal bureaucratic delays, but my bosses were undercutting me and stopping me from doing this. I finally figured it out and said I was going to resign. They told me, “Oh no, it’d do enormous damage to the Bank if you resigned.” And I still took what they said seriously. So then I went out and just got myself fired. I gave an interview in the Wall Street Journal, which I knew would make them mad.
Then they said, “Okay, well, you broke the rules, so we have to have an investigation.” I said, “No, you don’t have to have an investigation. I broke the rules.” They said, “Okay, well then we have to put you on administrative leave, and you have to sign this agreement where you won’t say anything without our approval.” “I’m not going to do that.” And then they said, “Okay, well then you have to resign.” And I said, “Well, that was what I tried to do on Thursday. I resign.” And that was the end of it.
COWEN: Why are you interested in the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce?
ROMER: Charles —
COWEN: Charles Sanders Peirce.
ROMER: Oh, is that how you pronounce his last name?
COWEN: People say it “Pierce” sometimes, but Peirce is —
ROMER: I was thinking “Pierce,” so funny. [This is better on the podcast -Ed.]
COWEN: The pragmaticist, yes.
ROMER: Because I’m really interested in science, and I think he was a very deep thinker about science from this pragmatic perspective of, how does it work? What does it accomplish? How can we get more of that? I think it was Tim Besley, actually, another economist, pointed me to him. I have to say, it’s heavy going to read his stuff, but I’m still quite interested.
If you go back to what we were saying before, about what could an existing successful society bring when it sets up a new one, I used to think a lot about — and as economists, we talked a lot about — the rule of law. Law is, in some sense, the basis for things like honesty and trust. I’m starting to think that science may have actually been more important for the West in developing a culture where a reputation for integrity and telling the truth became something that was valued. Science may have actually been more important than we realize for that.
COWEN: I very much agree with that — and engineering, right? And engineering also is a broader branch of science. And if you look today at software engineers who have to make things work, they tend to be blunt people who will frequently speak the truth.
ROMER: Yep. When you think about this level of norms — a commitment that it’s a good thing to be honest; it’s a good thing to be disapproving of people who were found not to be honest — that’s very helpful because it helps build trust, and trust is an important part of social interaction. I think we may have underestimated the value of science, so it’s all the more important to support it.
It isn’t just that it gives us some facts that feed into a discussion. It conveys norms about integrity. Also, there’s a harsh side to this, that when you are found to have misled people intentionally, those norms say you’re no longer taken seriously. You’re excluded. You’re not respected or listened to anymore. Those kinds of things are critical for supporting trust. I think that we should learn how to protect science and get it to do its job better in building those norms and encouraging trust.
COWEN: What do you find most interesting in French fiction?
ROMER: Well, actually, let me just bore on for one minute about this.
COWEN: Sure.
ROMER: One of my predecessors at the World Bank as chief economist, Justin Lin, has a very interesting paper on this puzzle of why didn’t China develop the industrial revolution. His argument is basically that China — because there were so many people looking and discovering; they discovered a lot of things, like gunpowder, steel, printing, and so forth — but what China didn’t do was invent the social system we call science. They had some knowledge and some technology. They didn’t invent science. And what was different in Europe was the invention of science.
I found that argument really compelling, and I’ve taken it one step further and think that part of what the West benefited from were notions about integrity and individual responsibility for what we say that fostered trust, and that science indirectly gave us those things.
For any country around the world, it’s worth thinking about — if you’re short on that, if there’s a tendency for a lot of people to cheat on their taxes, to lie about what’s true, if there’s norms that hold a society back in those ways, I think it would be good to think about, how do we rebuild a system where we respect and admire people who consistently tell the truth, and where we look down on, disapprove of people who are found to have intentionally misled us?
COWEN: Do you think the evolution of science in the West has much to do with Christianity and Christian norms, which do emphasize some of those values? And science evolved in the West, right? And out of the church.
ROMER: That’s a very good question. I speculated in one group meeting about a difference between the Old Testament version of Christianity and the New Testament version. And my conjecture was that some of the Old Testament norms were closer to the ones that matter for science.
Christianity really succeeded by competing with other religions, partly because it brought in redemption, forgiveness. The New Testament version of Christianity was a softer, kinder form of Christianity. It may be the older form of Christianity, which is a tradition shared with Judaism, where there was a little bit more strictness about truth and integrity and more harmful consequences from violations of that. It may actually be that earlier tradition that was the one that was most beneficial.
I tried to say this about Old Testament values, and somebody accused me of being anti-Semitic. I was talking about Christianity, and I was actually saying it was good, so I don’t really quite understand. But one has to be a little careful when you talk about these issues.
COWEN: French fiction — what do you find most interesting in that area?
ROMER: Oh, we have a division of labor in my house. My wife is the one who you should ask about French fiction. Right now, her goal is to get me to read any fiction at all. I’m heavily biased towards nonfiction, and she’s trying to broaden my horizons a little bit.
COWEN: But fiction is arguably one of the best ways to understand the norms of a society, right?
ROMER: Yeah, that’s true. So what am I going to cite to support that? A piece of nonfiction. A colleague of mine at NYU who had served as dean for many years — he looked at a large sample of promotion cases, and he then tried to generalize, what are the differences between the humanities and the sciences? What makes these things tick? Where are they similar? Where are they different?
He wrote a really nice book called The Geography of Insight that talks about what’s distinctive about humanities, as opposed to sciences, and how they both contribute to a better understanding of the world that we live in.
COWEN: Last question thread, what did you learn at Burning Man?
ROMER: Sometimes physical presence is necessary to appreciate something like scale. The scale of everything at Burning Man was just totally unexpected, a total surprise for me, even having looked at all of these pictures and so forth. That was one.
Another thing that really stood out, which is not exactly a surprise, but maybe it was the surprise in that group — if you ask, what do people do if you put them in a setting where there’s supposed to be no compensation, no quid pro quo, and you just give them a chance to be there for a week. What do they do?
They work. What people do at Burning Man is they go there and they work. They’ll do a different job, like they’ll work as part of the volunteer police force, or they’ll help maintain sanitation. They’ll work to set up something which offers a service to other people. But there’s enormous satisfaction that we draw from accomplishment and the provision of the output that we produce, making it available to others.
If somebody asked me, “What’s a post-scarcity society going to look like?” Somebody actually said this to me there. He was like, “What does post-scarcity society look like?” People work hard because they like it. They work on things that they care about and they think others will care about, and that’s an encouraging insight, I think, about people.
COWEN: We can leave it at that. Paul Romer, thank you very much. Hope we can do this again someday.
ROMER: Good. My pleasure. | https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/paul-romer-tyler-cowen-science-economics-covid-19-93276c8a57dc | ['Mercatus Center'] | 2020-05-20 12:40:29.865000+00:00 | ['Authors', 'Economics', 'Podcast', 'Covid 19', 'Coronavirus'] |
Q Acoustics Q Active 200 review: This high-end powered bookshelf audio system delivers impeccable performance | Q Acoustics Q Active 200 review: This high-end powered bookshelf audio system delivers impeccable performance John Feb 1·8 min read
Q Acoustics builds mighty-fine loudspeakers, and for its first self-powered offering, the company could have modified any of its existing designs by bolting on an amplifier and calling it a day. What it has wrought instead is a complete high-end audio system that can accommodate nearly any source: analog or digital, wired or wireless, streaming or locally sourced; one that can be incorporated into any of the most common home-audio and smart-home ecosystems.
The Q Active 200 system consists of a pair of self-amplified, wireless two-way bookshelf speakers and the Q Active Control Hub (the company will soon offer the same technology in a tower speaker system, the Q Active 400). The broad range of audio sources the Hub can handle range from a server on your network, to most of the popular streaming services, to a turntable equipped with a moving-magnet cartridge. It can then send that music both to its own speakers and to other audio systems on your network, using Apple AirPlay 2 or Google Chromecast.
[ Further reading: The best surge protectors for your costly electronics ]The company will soon offer a Works with Alexa variant of the Hub that will enable the speakers to be incorporated into Amazon’s smart home and multi-room audio ecosystem as well. The company tells me it might eventually produce a Hub that supports both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa in one box. As it stands, you can swap Hubs and keep the same speakers if you ever switch smart home ecosystems. The Hub by itself sells for $400.
This is an in-depth review. If you care more about performance than a deep dive into specs and what makes the system tick, just click here to go to the review’s performance section.
Bluetooth is just one arrow in the Q Active 200’s quiver, but it is nonetheless part of TechHive’s coverage of the best Bluetooth speakers, where you’ll find reviews of the competition’s offerings, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product. Michael Brown / IDG There are touch-sensitive buttons on the front of the Q Active Control Hub, but most people will hide this component in a cabinet and not think about it once the system is set up.
The Q Active Control HubThe Hub has an onboard Wi-Fi 5 network adapter, plus an ethernet port if you have the infrastructure to take advantage of a wired network connection. Audio inputs include HDMI with ARC, a Toslink optical digital audio, and analog stereo RCA. Connect a turntable equipped with a moving-magnet cartridge to these last inputs and you can flip a toggle switch to activate an onboard phono preamp. You can also connect your turntable to the Hub’s grounding terminal to prevent ground-loop-induced hum.
The only music source not supported is a USB storage device. The speakers deliver plenty of low-end oomph (I’ll get into their specs and performance later), but the Hub has a subwoofer output if that aspect of the system just doesn’t scratch your itch.
While the HDMI port supports ARC (Audio Return Channel), this is strictly a stereo audio system; the Hub won’t decode Dolby Digital or any other soundtrack formats. That said, the speakers’ incredibly wide sweet spot tends to present dialog as centered in the sound stage. HDMI CEC support means you can use your TV remote to control the volume when you’re watching the TV. The Toslink input auto-senses incoming audio and will power the system on as soon as a signal is detected.
Michael Brown / IDG The Q Active Control Hub can handle just about any audio source, digital or analog, including a turntable.
In addition to wired inputs, the Hub can play music via a UPnP server on your local network (e.g., a NAS box), and it supports all the leading streaming-audio services, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Qobuz, Spotify (via Spotify Connect), and Tidal. There’s also a Bluetooth 4.1 radio on board if you want to play music stored on your smartphone. The Hub can accept bitstreams with up to 32-bit resolution and 192kHz sampling rates, although it will downsample them to 24-bit/96kHz before sending the digital audio to the speakers.
The Q Active 200 is Roon Ready, too, so while it doesn’t offer native MQA support, it can perform as a Roon endpoint and play MQA-encoded tracks after they’ve been “unfolded” by a Roon Core (a Roon Nucleus server or a computer or NAS box on your network that’s running ROCK—the Roon Optimized Core Kit). This makes it possible to play MQA-encoded tracks stored on a server or streamed via Tidal’s Tidal Masters service tier.
Incoming digital audio from the HDMI or Toslink ports is run through a sample rate converter, where it is re-sampled to 24-bit/96kHz resolution to eliminate audible aliasing. Incoming analog audio is likewise converted to 24-bit/96KHz digital audio for the same purpose. To minimize jitter artifacts, a low-jitter master clock in the Hub times streamed audio, Bluetooth audio, and re-sampled data coming from the sample rate converter. Post processing, digital audio is streamed to the speakers using a dedicated 5.8GHz link, where a digital signal processor (DSP) outputs PWM (pulse-width modulation) audio to the Class D amplifiers powering each driver. I’ll discuss this aspect in more depth in the speaker section, but the upshot is that the audio signal remains in the digital domain until it’s amplified and sent to the speakers’ drivers.
Michael Brown / IDG The Q Active remote control uses Wi-Fi to communicate with the Hub.
Up to three Q Active systems can be deployed in a single home—each system will use its own discrete wireless channel, so they don’t step on each other—but you can also use Chromecast- or AirPlay 2-compatible components if you need coverage in more than three rooms, or if there are areas in your home where you don’t need such high-resolution audio. Bear in mind that when streaming to other components, you’re subject to the limitations of the components receiving the stream. Chromecast can support bit streams up to 24-bit/96kHz resolution, for instance, but AirPlay 2 is limited to 16-bit/48kHz resolution. Both technologies support lossless audio formats, including FLAC for Chromecast; AirPlay 2 uses the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC).
Touch-sensitive buttons on the front of the Hub let you control most aspects of the system, apart from volume control, but Q Acoustics provides a wireless remote control so you can hide the Hub in a cabinet. The 5.5 x 1.5 x 3/8-inch (HxWxD) remote has raised but non-backlit buttons for system power, mute and volume up/down, play/pause, track forward/back, and source selection. It communicates with the Hub using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, so there is no line-of-sight requirement.
Michael Brown / IDG Touch-sensitive controls on each speaker allow you to adjust the volume and select the audio source (the buttons on either speaker control both).
The speakers themselves also have touch-sensitive buttons for volume control and source selection. Alternatively, you can control the system using Google Assistant or Apple Siri voice commands (once the system has been added to your Apple Home app). The coming Works with Alexa version of the Hub will, of course, support Alexa voice commands. All of this obviates the need for a dedicated Q Active app on your phone.
Q Active 200 speaker designThe Q Active 200 speakers are wireless, self-powered, two-way bookshelf models. The only cables you’ll connect to them are power cords—there are no wires connecting the speakers to the Hub, and there are no wires connecting the left and right speakers to each other. In fact, there is no left or right speaker until you designate them as such by setting a toggle switch on the back of each speaker’s cabinet. Having the front drivers in each speaker asymmetrically mounted looks odd, but the design yields two important benefits: It enables the speaker baffles to be reinforced at the strongest points of the speaker cabinets—the tops and sides—and it gives the listener the ability to adjust the speakers’ sweet spot depending on where they’re sitting.
Michael Brown / IDG A three-way toggle switch lets you inform the speakers’ DSP where the speaker will be located in your room: Close to a wall, close to a corner, or in free space.
In a near-field listening environment—using the speakers with a computer, for example—you’ll get the best performance with the drivers on the outside edge. If you’re in a more conventional listening environment—such as sitting on a couch across the room—you’ll want the drivers on the inside edge. A second toggle switch on each speaker instructs its internal DSP to change the speaker’s voicing to compensate for speaker placement. The speakers are a ported design, so it’s best to allow some space between the speaker and the wall. If that’s not possible, or if you hang the speakers on the wall, you can set a three-way toggle to indicate if the speaker is close to a wall or close to a corner. The third choice is having the speaker in free space. Q Acoustics also provides foam bungs for the speaker’s ports if you still find the bass too boomy for your taste.
If you intend to hang the speakers, you’ll want beefy hardware: Each cabinet measures 11.2 x 6.7 x 11.4 inches (HxWxD) and weighs 16.5 pounds. Q Acoustics provided its trippy-looking, 3-foot-high Q FS75 stands ($499) for this review. They’re inspired by the Tensegrity speaker stands the company designed for its Concept 300 speakers, which we reviewed in the spring of 2019. The stands are designed to minimize unwanted reflections, and they come with spiked feet to reduce the surface area of the stand that contacts your floor, reducing unwanted vibration (rubber tips are provided so the spikes don’t damage hard-surfaced floors). Q Acoustics even provides cable-routing clips that keep the power cords strapped to one of the stands’ legs, so they don’t dangle.
Michael Brown / IDG Cable clips for the Q Acoustics’ Q FS75 speaker stands ensure the power cords don’t dangle and spoil the design aesthetic. .
Q Acoustics mounts a pair of 2.25-inch, full-range, Balanced-Mode Radiator (BMR) drivers in the front of each Q Active 200 speaker, behind a non-removable grille designed to prevent damage from curious children’s fingers. BMRs are valued for their ability to deliver a wide soundstage; plus, the ones in the Q Active 200 operate down to 150Hz, where crossover to the onboard subwoofer occurs. Sound at and below that frequency is non-directional, which enabled Q Acoustics to mount the 4.5-inch, high-excursion subwoofer in the rear of the enclosure, where it fires into a waveguide that directs airflow to the vents on the sides of the cabinet. Time-delay circuitry digitally delays audio signals from reaching the BMRs to keep sound from the front-mounted drivers and the rear-mounted subwoofer precisely time aligned.
Each of the two BMRs and the subwoofer are powered by its own Class D amplifier. Q Acoustics says the system puts out 100 watts of continuous power and 280 watts of peak power. The system’s frequency response range is 46Hz to 20kHz (-6db).
Michael Brown / IDG A pair of 2.25-inch, full-range, Balanced-Mode Radiators are stacked in the front of the speaker.
Click to read more about the Q Active 200's speaker performance | https://medium.com/@john45201170/q-acoustics-q-active-200-review-this-high-end-powered-bookshelf-audio-system-delivers-impeccable-d6cbd9067df5 | [] | 2021-02-01 03:13:00.196000+00:00 | ['Connected Home', 'Gear', 'Electronics', 'Deals'] |
The birth of Jesus shatters all myths | Man can only find his way with God. Jesus Christ’s existence has been confirmed through various researches by historians and researchers.
Some of them are in the Gospels — and there is also evidence coming from non-Christian sources.
For example, Mishnah is a collection of Jewish oral traditions known as the Oral Torah. In Mishnah, we can find evidence about Jesus’ existence.
The existence of God, Jesus, in addition to being contained in the Gospels, can be most understood through all the centuries in which his teaching and name have been maintained. Up to today.
The philosophy of Christianity has nothing to do with paganism. The mantra that Christianity has taken over the myths previously written by the Babylonians, the Sumerians is ridiculous for several reasons.
The Sumerians and other peoples were polytheists and had no structure of faith, and the persons they mention in their epics (the epic of Gilgamesh) cannot be historically confirmed.
Jesus, on the other hand, is a historical person, and his work is explained through historical proofs.
more: https://filipidiombloc.wordpress.com/2020/12/25/the-birth-of-jesus-shatters-all-myths/ | https://medium.com/@fdukic/the-birth-of-jesus-shatters-all-myths-9670c93859e | ['Filip Djukic'] | 2020-12-25 23:17:26.141000+00:00 | ['Christian', 'Jesus', 'Christianity'] |
Set Your Personal Finance on Autopilot | The paycheck part
You will likely have many obligations and bills to pay on a monthly or quarterly basis. I am talking of rent, utility bills, insurance fees, and other kinds of subscriptions. Set up automated money transfers that withdraw the amount from your account automatically and transfer it to your debtor on a specific date.
Setting up the transfer orders could be a bit of work if you do it all at once. Therefore, when you pay your next recurring bill, you set up the automatic transfer for this type of bill at the same time. Do this with every bill, and you will see a heavily decreasing amount of incoming bills over the next months. You can also permit your debtors to cash in every outstanding amount directly from your account.
Set a date for your automatic transfers a couple of days after your paycheck arrives. By this, you ensure that you have enough liquidity. Another advantage is to support your own budgeting. By paying all bills at the beginning of the month, you get an idea of how much you have left for the rest of the month.
This automated transfer system and permitted cash-in will save you a lot of time you formerly spent on paying bills. It also benefits you financially by saving the occasional reminder charge.
The savings part
If you want to save regularly and consistently, the best system is to treat your savings rate like a bill. Take some time and figure out how much money you need to save to reach certain goals like the down payment of a house. Translate it to a saving rate you can afford.
Set an automated money transfer order every month with this rate directly from your paycheck account to your savings account. Like in the chapter before, set a date for the withdrawal a couple of days after your paycheck arrives.
Just treat your saving rate as a regular bill to yourself. You will be surprised how little you miss the money that never sits in your paycheck account anyway.
The main advantage of a separate savings account lies not mainly in the higher interest rate. The benefit is that you seldom see that money, and it is harder to reach.
To make this more vivid, I will tell you about my savings account: I use a special account from which I cannot pay online or withdraw cash from it. The only possibility is to apply for a withdrawal to a specific reference account, which is my paycheck account. This process takes about three to four days to be completed.
To make it clear, nothing can stop me from withdrawing cash from my savings account to my reference account and buying that motorcycle I am craving. The forced delay will make me think twice and even a third time if it is really a good idea right now or just an impulse that will vanish over time. | https://medium.com/makingofamillionaire/set-your-personal-finance-on-autopilot-cf0a54f6f2d0 | ['Tom Fenske'] | 2020-11-02 20:26:31.823000+00:00 | ['Financial Planning', 'Investing', 'Saving', 'Money', 'Finance'] |
Younger Days: Santa Cruz & Berkeley Housemates | Me in the late 1970's
Santa Cruz Housemates
After my freshman year in the dorms at U.C. Santa Cruz (see Younger Days, Leaving Home), I felt giddy about living off campus. I found a room downtown in a small apartment of flimsy construction. The den mother of the household was Karen, a square-set young woman with a dirty blond pageboy haircut and a no-nonsense demeanor. I can’t recall her ever laughing, but I do remember her setting plenty of rules. Her partner, Sharon, was big-boned with a cap of tightly wound black curls and a demeanor that contrasted sharply with Karen’s: affectionate, emotive, moody, and prone to bursting into song. Sharon had a rich resonant voice and frequently belted out “Different Drum” (made famous by Linda Ronstadt). Our third housemate, Meg, was a beautiful vivacious redhead with a million freckles. She was constantly joking and laughing, running off to play sports or chase after young men. She and her sister often cozied up on the couch sharing secrets, exclaiming, and giggling. Sharon and I became close friends, a situation that aroused intense paranoia and displeasure on Karen’s part. When visiting Karen, Sharon often stopped by my room to discuss what seemed at the time compelling emotional and existential issues. We sang together and I played guitar.
I bicycled up to campus each weekday morning, an exhausting but triumphant climb from town. At the end of the day I cruised down the hills, hardly pedaling for the first few miles, invigorated by the wind and the views. I shopped for groceries by bike, tying bags of produce and tofu on my handlebars if they didn’t all fit in my backpack. The town was full of charming cafés, inexpensive restaurants, street music and art, with numerous beaches nearby. I enjoyed my new friendships. While I would have happily carried on in this fashion, the lease was up after one short quarter and we disbanded.
My next abode was considerably further from campus and downtown, in a somewhat neglected and sparsely furnished old Victorian near Seacliff beach. My housemates were three best friends, all upper classmen who had lived together for several years. Sarah was tall, slim, and athletic. Her main function appeared to be supporting and encouraging her housemates, Brad and Alec. They were tan, muscular, and strikingly handsome men, one blond, the other brunette. I wondered about the nature of the trio’s relationship. All three were enthusiastic beer drinkers and frequently hosted loud alcohol-soaked parties at the house. The unkempt garden contained a series of wooden hutches built by the trio where they bred rabbits to sell as food. The endeavor was apparently quite lucrative. I felt bad for the rabbits.
As the weeks went by, I became increasingly wary of the trio and grew more and more uncomfortable. We took turns with household chores including shopping for, preparing, and cleaning up after dinner once a week. Despite the rotating duties, the house was extremely dirty; I seemed to be the only one actually cleaning. My dinners were met with insults and laughter: “What is this, rabbit food?!?! We can’t eat this. Cook some real food!” The trio chortled heartily and exchanged knowing glances. Although I was invited to their parties, I had nothing in common with the beer-swilling chums who gathered for drunken revelry late into the night, leaving empty beer cans, wine bottles, and half-eaten food in their wake.
Near the end of the quarter, before 10 weeks had elapsed, I gave notice. I would miss the beach, where I could take long walks and struggle to jog in the sand, but I couldn’t bear one more minute living with the trio. My anger mounted as I packed my belongings and I devised a plan to retaliate.
Once I had emptied and cleaned my room, I cracked a handful of eggs, placed them in several shallow dishes, and scooted them far under the living room couch. Since the trio never vacuumed or dusted, I was certain it would take some time for the eggs to be discovered. The first few weeks after my departure, the trio routinely hand addressed my mail that the post office failed to forward. Shortly thereafter this ceased. I’d never done anything so devious before, but it was deeply satisfying.
I went for an interview at a home shared by three grad students in a quiet residential neighborhood near the base of campus. I was grilled as if for a high-level job: questioned regarding my household habits, how I interacted with others, my previous living situation, and techniques for saving water (California was experiencing a severe drought). My interviewers betrayed little, wondered aloud whether I wasn’t on the young side as a suitable roommate (I was an undergraduate and two years younger than my peers), and told me they would be in touch. It had been an unexpectedly intimidating experience and I descended the front steps wondering if I would hear from them again. As I continued down the sidewalk, one of the housemates came out the front door, calling me to return. They had unanimously selected me. I was surprised and delighted. We shared hugs all around and settled on the details of my moving in and completing paperwork.
Early my first morning, my belongings still boxed and my bed unassembled, I was awoken by my mattress sliding back and forth across the wood floor and the glass in my French doors rattling. For a few seconds, I was totally perplexed. Finally it registered that the movement was from an earthquake, my first in California. I was thrilled and concerned, but the tremor passed quickly.
Most mornings, I was in the kitchen when my housemate Lori entered to deliberately prepare her breakfast: chunky peanut butter from a large jar of Laura Scudder’s carefully and evenly spread on a very particular type of whole grain bread, a bowl of oatmeal, and a large cup of Roastaroma Celestial Seasonings tea (a dark heavy brew with chicory). Somewhere in the recesses of my tea cabinet I still have an old box of that tea. It smells musty and I have little interest in drinking it, but it brings back memories. I was intrigued by the fact that Lori always ate the same exact breakfast and that she took it so seriously. We would sit together at the kitchen table and converse earnestly, mostly about relationships and human interactions and motivations. It was Lori’s personal and professional obsession; she was working on her dissertation in statistical psychology. I was impressed by how sophisticated and worldly she was and I loved our long, intimate, and complex conversations.
My other housemates were a couple that had a semi-private wing at the rear of the house and almost always appeared together. They were affable, but I never got to know them. Occasionally, I had to use their bathroom when the one in the main house was occupied. The first time, I was taken aback when I realized what was depicted by the series of snapshots posted on the wall near the toilet paper dispenser: impressively large stools in that very toilet bowl. I tried to hurry my rare visits to their bathroom, feeling uncomfortable, as if I had inadvertently dropped in on a private joke.
I spent one happy quarter and part of the summer at that house before transferring to U.C. Berkeley as a junior.
U.C. Berkeley (internet photo)
Berkeley Housemates
I was tremendously excited about moving to Berkeley, happily anticipating the anonymity that Santa Cruz lacked with its small student body, looking forward to greater student diversity, an array of big city perks, and an endless menu of academic choices. Over the summer, I spent hours at the cramped old brown shingle housing office, rifling through index cards advertising rooms for rent. My mother visited from the East Coast for a few days to lend a hand. We purchased a skirt and blouse for my housing interviews and stayed at the moldering old Claremont Hotel for a several nights. Our hotel room was a relic, with a massive bathroom of tiny white hexagonal tiles and ancient fixtures, sad décor, but a spectacular view of the bay. The hotel was inexpensive and mostly unoccupied.
Given the high price of housing, I hunted for situations where I could exchange labor for low rent. I had appointments at three mansions where babysitting and a few chores would be required. I didn’t hear back after two of my interviews, but the third was eager to have me. I moved in to a small room on the third floor under the eaves of a severe brick edifice on Claremont Boulevard, the home of a divorcée who taught English at a local community college and her two young children (a girl age 10 and a boy age 6). Amanda was petite and assertive. She informed me that I was not to have boyfriends over because her son’s bedroom was down the hallway from me and it wouldn’t be appropriate. Her rules apparently did not apply to her: I recall quite distinctly one late afternoon while studying in my room, I heard loud and unusual sounds emanating from somewhere in the house. Tracing the noise to Amanda’s bedroom, I realized with a start that she was having sex with her boyfriend and retreated sheepishly to my garret room.
The first two floors of the home were grand, with high ceilings and massive windows, all freshly painted, a fancy restaurant style stove, costly fixtures, stately furniture, and heavy floral drapery. Though impressive, it felt cold and uninviting. The family gathered only in the dining nook next to the kitchen and never used the formal dining room or living room.
My room had a low-pitched heavily slanted ceiling to accommodate the roof; it required stooping over in the corners. In autumn, when Berkeley’s true summer began, the third floor was stiflingly hot and the air seemed to barely move through the tiny dormer windows. I had my own bathroom with an antique claw foot tub that would have been welcome had there been some hot water. Amanda had failed to have the hot water pipes connected in the bathroom and it would take many weeks and several requests on my part until I could enjoy a warm bath. Until then, I would partially fill the tub and steel myself, bracing for the shock and numbness that assaulted me when I finally eased into the cold water. I had very long thick hair, a considerable challenge to shampoo and rinse under the circumstances. I bathed as quickly as I could and attempted various psychological tricks to counter the discomfort, to little avail. Afterwards, the air felt wonderfully warm as I regained sensation in my extremities.
Amanda regularly spouted invectives toward her ex-husband. She ranted loudly, her children silent and seemingly oblivious. Every other weekend the children dutifully packed up their belongings to visit their father. Amanda complained frequently about how difficult it was to make ends meet. On several occasions she told me she was just waiting to sell the house for a million dollars (this was 1978, mind you). She had purchased and renovated the home with single-minded determination after leaving her grand San Francisco mansion post-divorce.
In exchange for my reduced rent, I supervised the children setting and clearing the dinner table and stacking the dishwasher on weekday evenings, along with occasional weekend babysitting. The siblings were so well behaved, it felt like I was cheating. I ate with the family several times a week. Amanda almost always served the same dish: tuna noodle casserole assembled from canned tuna, pasta, canned Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, and frozen peas. I had never tasted the dish before and was both intrigued and repulsed by the texture and taste. There were always congealed casserole leftovers in the fridge. Once in a blue moon, Amanda prepared a steak for dinner, usually when her boyfriend and his two children joined us. Over dinner one evening Amanda described how she had peeled off the price sticker of a less costly cut of meat and put it on the steak, something she admitted to doing regularly. She justified the action, explaining that the price she had affixed to the steak was more appropriate. I was horrified and wondered if I should continue living in the house. As it happened, I moved out not long thereafter when my father relocated to Berkeley and “requested” my brother and I move in to help pay the rent in his new home. | https://medium.com/its-about-time/younger-days-santa-cruz-berkeley-housemates-9e4e0d666ac9 | ['Rani Marx'] | 2020-06-11 23:01:05.059000+00:00 | ['Housemates', 'Bay Area', 'Young Adulthood', '1970s', 'College Life'] |
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How to Check for Undefined in JavaScript | What if a JavaScript value is undefined ?
In JavaScript programming, you will encounter the primitive data type undefined , which indicates the absence of a value.
“The global undefined property represents the primitive value undefined . It is one of JavaScript's primitive types.” — MDN Docs
JavaScript variables start with the value of undefined if they are not given a value when they are declared (or initialized) using var , let , or const . | https://medium.com/coding-at-dawn/how-to-check-for-undefined-in-javascript-bcedd62c8ad | ['Dr. Derek Austin'] | 2020-11-19 20:29:04.857000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Coding'] |
Handling Class Imbalance by Introducing Sample Weighting in the Loss Function | “Nobody is Perfect” This quote not just applies to us humans but also the data that surrounds us. Any data science practitioner needs to understand all of the imperfections present in the data and handle them accordingly in order to get the desired results. Once such imperfection is the inherent Class Imbalance which is highly prevalent in most of the real world datasets. In this blog we will cover different Sample Weighting schemes that can be applied to any Loss Function in order to cater to the Class Imbalance present in your data.
What is the Class Imbalance Problem?
The Class Imbalance problem is a problem that plagues most of the Machine Learning/Deep Learning Classification problems. It occurs when there are one or more classes (majority classes) that are more frequent occurring than the other classes (minority classes). Simply put, there is a skewness towards the majority class.
Consider the following dataset which we will use as the running example throughout this blog. This dataset contains 29 classes for a Multi Label Multi Class Text Classification problem.
As you can see, although not major but this dataset has a slight imbalance, where classes like category_6, category_4, category_27 can be considered as the majority classes and category_7, category_3, category_20 etc can be considered as minority classes.
Why is Class Imbalance a Problem?
So far, we have looked and understood what is the Class Imbalance Problem. But why is it a problem? What is the need to overcome this problem?
Most of the Machine Learning algorithms are based on the inherent assumption that the data is balanced, i.e., the data is equally distributed among all of its classes. When training a model on an imbalanced dataset, the learning becomes biased towards the majority classes. With more number of examples available to learn from, the model learns to perform well on the majority classes but due to the lack of enough examples the model fails to learn meaningful patterns that could aid it in learning the minority classes.
Let us look at how a RoBERTa Sequence Classification model performs on this dataset. Based on our business problem, we consider F0.5 as the evaluation metric which is a harmonic mean of Precision and Recall where Precision is considered twice as important as Recall.
The image above shows how most of the minority classes report a poor performance compared to most of the majority classes.
Why not simply ReSample the data differently?
One of most prominent methods for handling Class Imbalance in a dataset is to perform Undersampling for the Majority Classes or Oversampling for the minority classes.
When we perform Undersampling for the Majority Class, we essentially remove certain number of samples associated with the Majority classes. Oversampling for minority classes on the other hand entails repetition of samples associated with the minority classes.
Although either of the two strategies balance out the dataset, it does not directly tackle the issues caused by Class Imbalance, rather it risks introducing new issues. Since Oversampling introduces duplicate samples, it could easily slow down the training and also lead to overfitting in a model. Undersampling on the other hand removes certain number of samples. This could lead to the model missing out on learning certain important concepts that it could have learnt from the samples that were removed as a result of Undersampling.
So what we could do to overcome these issues is to play around with our Loss Function. We could essentially apply different weights to the loss computed for different samples based on the class these samples belong to. Let’s look at this in detail in the section below.
Sample Weighting in Loss Function
Introducing Sample Weights in the Loss Function is a pretty simple and neat technique for handling Class Imbalance in your training dataset. The idea is to weigh the loss computed for different samples differently based on whether they belong to the majority or the minority classes. We essentially want to assign a higher weight to the loss encountered by the samples associated with minor classes.
Let’s consider a Loss Function for our Multi Label Classification running example. I used PyTorch’s implementation of Binary Cross Entropy: torch.nn.BCEWithLogitLoss which combines a Sigmoid Layer and the Binary Cross Entropy loss for numerical stability and can be expressed mathematically as:
Often times, people get confused between Wn_c(weights) and Pc(pos_weights). Wn_c(weights) are the Sample Weights while Pc(pos_weights) are the Class Weights.
It’s Wn_c which is the Sample Weight that we wish to compute for every sample in a batch which enables us to weigh the contribution of a particular sample towards the overall loss. It can be assigned using the argument ‘weight’ and has to be a Tensor of size N*C (C is Total Number of Classes). ‘pos_weights’ is just the weight for positive examples which is determined based on proportion of samples labeled as a particular class. It weighs the contribution of a particular class towards the loss and must be a vector with length equal to the number of classes. As explained clearly in the Pytorch Documentation: “if a dataset contains 100 positive and 300 negative examples of a single class, then pos_weight for the class should be equal to 300/100 =3 . The loss would act as if the dataset contains 3×100=300 positive examples.” Therefore pos_weight in way acts as if we have resampled the data to account for the class imbalance.
There are different weighting schemes that can be used to compute this Sample Weight. As a part of this project, I tried three different weighting schemes. Inverse of Number of Samples and Inverse of Square Root of Number of Samples are two of the most simplistic and popular weighting schemes. The third one that I tried is a relatively new Weighting Scheme known as Effective Number of Samples weighting scheme.
Inverse of Number of Samples (INS)
As the name suggests, we weight the samples as the inverse of the class frequency for the class they belong to.
The function above shows a simple implementation that computes the weights and normalizes them over different classes. The lines of code below normalizes these sample weights across a batch of samples.
Inverse of Square Root of Number of Samples (ISNS)
Here we weight the samples as the inverse of the Square Root of class frequency for the class they belong to.
Rest of the implementation details related to normalization remains the same as that of INS.
Effective Number of Samples (ENS)
This weighting scheme was introduced in the CVPR’19 paper by Google: Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples. As seen in the weighting schemes above, the re-weighting strategies rely on the total number of samples present in each class. This paper on the other hand introduces a weighting scheme that relies on the “Effective Number of Samples”. As described in the paper the authors argue that:
“as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula (1−β^n)/(1−β), where n is the number of samples and β ∈ [0, 1) is a hyperparameter”
The authors suggest experimenting with different beta values: 0.9, 0.99, 0.999, 0.9999.
Putting it all together:
Finally, let us see how these different weighting schemes performed for our running example. Here’s what I was able to achieve by trying out different Sample Weighing Schemes (INS: Inverse Number of Samples, ISNS: Inverse of Square Root of Number of Samples, ENS: Inverse of Effective Number of Samples)
The best performance of 76.122% F0.5 was achieved with INS as the weighting scheme. This is 2.5% improvement over the model trained on the same dataset without any weighting schemes (73.422% F0.5).
Comparing this model with a model trained without any weighting scheme, we achieve a 2.5% improvement. But it is important for us to see whether this improvement is coming from the majority classes or minority classes? Has the model really become better for minority classes or not? The graph below will help us answer that question.
So if you observe the graph above you will find the percentage change in the F0.5, precision and recall for all the 29 classes, sorted in the order of support (frequency) for each class. You can clearly see how we have improved way more for minority classes which clearly shows how the inverse number of samples weighting scheme works better here.
The ISNS and ENS weighting schemes usually work well in case of extreme class imbalance which is not really the case with our dataset. Therefore, a simple weighting scheme such as INS works the best here.
Conclusion
In this blog, we read about the Class Imbalance problem and how it can adversely affect a model’s learning. We then saw how the simple resampling techniques such as Oversampling or Undersampling can only make the existing problem worse by either overfitting or by missing out on learning important concepts. We finally explored different weighting schemes and how we can apply them to solve the Class Imbalance issue.
About Me: Graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from ASU. I am a NLP Scientist at GumGum. I am interested in applying Machine Learning/Deep Learning to provide some structure to the unstructured data that surrounds us. | https://medium.com/gumgum-tech/handling-class-imbalance-by-introducing-sample-weighting-in-the-loss-function-3bdebd8203b4 | ['Ishan Shrivastava'] | 2020-12-17 00:18:08.220000+00:00 | ['Roberta', 'Deep Learning', 'Class Imbalance', 'Loss Function', 'NLP'] |
What I learned as a Product Manager at Google | tl;dr — While no longer as nimble as a startup, Google’s scale, strong culture and awesome people make it the ideal place to learn the nuts and bolts of product management and offers incredible opportunities to create products for millions/billions of users across the globe.
If you find my career development blogs interesting, you might also checkout:
I was a Product Manager(PM) at Google Health for the last ~2 years, launching health features on Search and Maps (like these features that help users find telehealth options on Search). I’m leaving Google to pursue an opportunity at a startup (more to come here). It’s a bittersweet moment since I loved my time at Google, so I decided to reflect on what I’ve learned as a Googler.
1) The “Googley” ethos is real and awesome
Everyone that interviews at Google is assessed for “Googleyness”. This includes being ambitious, humble, and doing the right thing. In addition to being whip smart, the large majority of Googlers I’ve met are so incredibly nice and helpful (every employee having the ability to give cash “peer bonuses” multiple times per quarter also helps :P). It makes working here a joy. Google corporate does everything it can to make our work environment as safe and comfortable as possible (e.g., the food, money to buy wfh accessories, lots of working hour flexibility, “face time” isn’t really a thing). An especially great part of the culture, is the “zero-blame” aspect. This transforms the company as it allows people to feel safe taking risks and when something does go wrong, teams can have transparent retrospectives and implement useful processes to prevent the mistake from happening in the future. Side note: imposter syndrome is real here — I constantly felt very lucky but also hopelessly unqualified to be surrounded by smarter/better people that I could learn tons from. Example, my manager was CEO of a Series B startup before coming to Google — so many ex-CXO examples like this!
2) Google is a large bureaucracy, launching something takes a village
Google is a $180B+ revenue company. The downside of doing something that harms its golden goose (ads, search, maps, etc.) is extremely high. Thus, there are very extensive processes in place to rigorously check/limit any potential user harm, production defects, PR risks. PMs need to be patient as this process can take months. As a result, things take a long time at Google. This is not unlike other large companies and I’d imagine Google is likely more agile than other companies of its size. These processes are important for the user experience, whether it’s making sure the search experience stays whip-fast or that user privacy is meticulously preserved according to various state and country-level regulations.
3) Core PM skills | https://medium.com/@lucyyin6/what-i-learned-as-a-product-manager-at-google-cef00f34b7ae | ['Lucy Yin'] | 2021-04-29 22:34:58.842000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Healthcare', 'Product Management', 'Technology', 'Career Development'] |
Architecture and Design — Unit Testing using ArchUnit | Most of the projects in their beginning phase have a well-written documentation that reflects the reality (the code).
As the projects evolve and new developers join, the well-written starting/opening documentation falls behind and becomes obsolete.
Wouldn’t be more useful to have this code-level documentation put together as unit tests? This is exactly what we are going to do here with ArchUnit.
This way, creating and maintaining the architecture will become a team sport for all programmers of the project.
Also, each new member of the team will understand and respect in an easier manner the project’s architecture, without having to read the fragmented, incomplete and obsolete documentation.
1. What is software architecture?
It is a very broad term and there are a lot of different definitions for architecture:
The design decisions that need to be made early in a project
Fundamental structural choices that are costly to change once implemented
“The shared understanding that the expert developers have of the system design” — Ralph Johnson
2. Why does the architecture matter?
Architecture is a tricky subject for the product owners and users of software products. It isn’t something that they immediately perceive, but a poor architecture is a major contributor to the growth of cruft.
Software that contains a lot of cruft is much harder to modify, leading to features that arrive more slowly and with more defects.
It is true that we can sacrifice quality for faster delivery in the short term, before the build up of cruft has an impact, but people underestimate how quickly the cruft leads to an overall slower delivery.
3. How does good architecture look like?
The architecture is into a continuous evolution and it depends on the moment in time when we are looking at it.
“A good software architecture is something that supports its own evolution, and is deeply intertwined with programming” — Martin Fowler
4. Software architecture styles
Nowadays the most important architecture styles for applications and APIs are:
4.1. Layered architecture / Multi-tier architecture
There are two important rules for a classical Layered Architecture to be correctly implemented:
All the dependencies go in one direction, from the presentation layer to infrastructure (top/down)
No logic related to one layer’s concern should be placed in another layer
4.2. Hexagonal architecture (Ports and Adapters architecture)
It divides the application into the inside and the outside parts:
In the inside part is the core logic of the application
In the outside part could be the UI, database, messaging connectors, etc.
The application’s business logic is isolated from outside concerns.
Communication between the two happens using so-called ports and adapters.
The port is simply a gateway to your application, allowing inbound and outbound flow.
Adapters are an implementation of ports.
4.3. Microservice architecture
Is a modularization approach that aims at dividing larger software systems into smaller components.
With a microservices architecture, an application is built with an independent group of components that run each application process as a service.
5. Architecture documentation
Why do we need architecture documentation?
Documentation is the starting point for interaction between different stakeholders
It is used for analyses and reviews of the project
Knowledge sharing — between people working in different functional areas of the project, as well for knowledge transfer to new programmers added into the project
When it is worth starting to create and maintain a documentation?
It is worth creating and maintaining a proper and updated documentation taking into consideration that the cost of the project with documentation plus the cost of maintaining that documentation is less than the cost of the project without this documentation.
There could be cases when the projects are very small and the cost of writing a documentation is greater than the actual development of the project.
How is the architecture documented?
The architecture can be documented using Confluence pages, diagrams or unit tests.
An example of an architecture diagram is the C4 model:
A tool that could help us to write architecture unit tests is ArchUnit:
What is ArchUnit?
ArchUnit is a free, simple and extensible library for checking the architecture of your Java Code.
It was originally created by Peter Gafert and in this moment the ArchUnit is mainly developed by TNG.
It can check dependencies between packages and classes, layers and slices, check for cyclic dependencies and more.
How does it work?
It is analyzing the given Java bytecode, importing all classes into a Java code structure.
ArchUnit’s main focus is to automatically test architecture and coding rules, using any plain Java unit testing framework.
Documentation
ArchUnit documentation can be found at: https://www.archunit.org/userguide/html/000_Index.html
Installation
To use ArchUnit, it is sufficient to include the respective JAR files in the classpath.
Most commonly, this is done by adding the dependency to your dependency management tool.
<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.tngtech.archunit/archunit-junit4 -->
<dependency>
<groupId>com.tngtech.archunit</groupId>
<artifactId>archunit-junit4</artifactId>
<version>0.14.1</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
Writing architecture tests
For example, if you want to write a rule that enforces services to be called only from controllers or other services you should follow the steps:
Import the classes you what to test into the Java code structures:
JavaClasses importedClasses = new ClassFileImporter().importPackages("com.demo.product");
2. Rule conditions
ArchRule rule = classes()
.that().resideInAPackage("..service..")
.should().onlyBeAccessed().byAnyPackage("..controller..", "..service..");
3. Check the rule against the imported classes:
rule.check(importedClasses);
The overall example:
@Test
public void servicesShouldOnlyBeAccessedByControllersOrServices() {
JavaClasses importedClasses = new ClassFileImporter().importPackages("com.demo.product");
ArchRule rule = classes()
.that().resideInAPackage("..service..")
.should().onlyBeAccessed().byAnyPackage("..controller..", "..service..");
rule.check(importedClasses);
}
If this test fails, it will report an AssertionError with the following message:
java.lang.AssertionError: Architecture Violation [Priority: MEDIUM] - Rule 'classes that reside in a package '..service..' should only be accessed by any package ['..controller..', '..service..']' was violated (1 times):
Method <some.packge.name.CallerClass.callerMethod()> calls method <some.package.name.service.ClassService.calledMethod()> in (CallerClass.java:33)
For more examples you can access:
Official ArchUnit examples: https://github.com/TNG/ArchUnit-Examples
Demo project written by me: https://github.com/g-dragomir/archunit-demo
Why should you use ArchUnit? | https://medium.com/ing-blog/architecture-and-design-unit-testing-using-archunit-f3ba6b5ae03b | ['George Daniel Dragomir'] | 2021-03-09 15:03:11.687000+00:00 | ['Best Practices', 'Architecture', 'Programming Languages', 'Testing Tools'] |
Why You Shouldn’t Have Imposter Syndrome | An Attempt at Inspirational Speaking
For any career switchers fretting your future
By the talented Lisa Engler
In my experience, “Imposter Syndrome” has been a rampant phrase in the world of my UX compatriots who are undergoing a career change. In school, they warned us that imposter syndrome will happen when we step foot into our first jobs. In speaking with other professionals in my industry, I hear that they, too, have felt imposter syndrome when they began their careers. I understand feeling less capable than my peers around me, I really do, but I want to say this one little thing: Imposter syndrome is completely avoidable.
First, what is imposter syndrome?
Adapted from Kyle Bianchi
In case anyone is unfamiliar with what imposter syndrome is, here is the definition from the psychologists who originally coined the term in 1978, Dr. Suzanne Imes and Dr. Pauline Clance:
Imposter syndrome is harmful to people, and the symptoms of it can manifest anxiety, stress, and depression. In a review published in December 2019, researchers across 62 studies found that the prevalence of imposter syndrome affects anywhere from 9%-82% of the general population. The review also stated that studies reflected the experience of imposter syndrome was common in both males and females.
This is something that affects nearly everyone.
When does it occur?
Imposter syndrome is generally felt when someone enters a situation where they must transition into a new or unfamiliar environment, such as:
A new city
Starting school
Beginning relationships
Entering into a new career
People tend to feel ill at ease while they have to adjust to a new experience, and the length at which imposter syndrome is felt can last from a few days to much, much longer. It is a very real thing that can have long-term impacts on your mental health, which is one of the most important things to take care of.
So why is imposter syndrome avoidable for career switchers?
Well I’ll tell you, but I want to state 2 caveats here before I move on:
I am not a psychologist/medical professional/a qualified mental health specialist. I am a person who has a particular mindset that I wish to impart with the goal of challenging the prevalence of imposter syndrome amongst my beloved peers. I am applying this mindset to people who are switching/have switched careers and are in the early throes (and I mean throes) of looking for a job or beginning their first position.
Thank you. Now to the why:
Imposter syndrome is ridiculous because there is no reason to enter a new career feeling as though you need to be an equal to those with more experience than you.
Seriously. There’s no need to feel incompetent amongst your newfound peers. When you enter into a new career, the reality is that you aren’t as experienced. That is OKAY. More than okay, really. It’s perfectly expected and normal. However I do understand that it is a difficult feeling to combat.
So, I’ve put together a list of things that I keep in mind (kind of like my rules to go by) to help me fight back against imposter syndrome, and I’d like to share it with you. I hope they help.
Combating Imposter Syndrome
By Yuri Kartashev
Understand your place and embrace humility
You’re new to this. You simply don’t know nearly as much as those who have been in your career for longer. Embrace that. Show people that you understand your limitations and still have more growth ahead of you. As long as you show enthusiasm for growing, people will respect that.
2. Be willing to learn from others
Ask questions! Ideally, you never want to stop learning, and it’s very likely that your colleagues share that mindset with you. Don’t be afraid to ask them for help. Not only does learning from others help you, but it helps others reinforce what they know. We can all learn through teaching! Besides, it’s very likely that you’ll have something to contribute to them, too.
3. Be yourself
Imposter syndrome can arise when you feel like you need to be someone who you aren’t in order to give off an impression that you think would be desirable to those around you. Or, perhaps when you feel a great deal of expectation to succeed. First of all, don’t pretend to be someone else because that will only increase the feeling of being fraudulent. Secondly, nobody got anywhere without help. If you feel mounting pressure to excel and it is wrecking you, open yourself to help from others. There is nothing contemptible about that. Human beings cannot get anywhere without other human beings, ya feel?
4. Trust yourself
You are a career switcher. You are in this position because you wanted to be. You are in this position because you worked for it. You are where you are because of what you know, who you know, and effort. Don’t mistake any of those things for lack of ability. You had a drive, you acted on it, and you’re going to make it pay off. You’ve earned nothing but respect from that. So trust that you did in fact have a hand in your own success, because you did.
5. Find people who you want to aspire to
It is so important to set goals and find role models who have achieved what you want to achieve. Identify who those people are around you, and learn from them. Find out how they’ve accomplished what they have and consider taking similar steps, even if it seems impossible from where you are at right now. Learn the milestones and take your path little by little.
Role models and mentors are invaluable because they can offer the wisdom that you have yet to achieve. Be sure to treat them with respect and gratitude.
Keeping these 5 things in mind have worked for me personally. I’ve been able to combat imposter syndrome by acknowledging where I am, what I want, and how much further I still have to go. Basically, I’m trying to be honest with myself and those around me. I know what I know and if I have a question, I’ll ask it.
Wrapping up
By Andy Forshaw
Again, if you are beginning a new career like I had been with UX, it is completely understandable that you feel overwhelmed. It’s also completely understandable that you may feel you need to impress and uphold a standard to make yourself fit the image you presume the company you work for wants. But nay! Be yourself! Show people who you are, and show them that you’re still learning, just like everyone else is.
Here’s the list once more:
Understand your place and embrace humility Be willing to learn from others Be yourself Trust yourself Find people who you want to aspire to
You don’t have to feel inadequate or fraudulent when you begin something new. Just understand and embrace your limitations, and show that you are eager to learn and grow.
Thank you for reading!
If you liked this article, I encourage you to add me on LinkedIn. Just be sure to say hi let me know where you’re from!
My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samueljaklich/ | https://medium.com/@samjaklich/why-you-shouldnt-have-imposter-syndrome-7fbe24095f5d | ['Sam Jaklich'] | 2020-10-12 13:58:26.607000+00:00 | ['Help', 'Career Change', 'Imposter Syndrome', 'Mental Health', 'Inspiration'] |
AES Java Encryption Performance Benchmarks | AES CBC+HMAC and GCM performance benchmarks for Java JCE, Bouncy Castle, Commons Crypto and Clojure Buddy.
Overview
When considering which encryption scheme and library to use, ‘correctness’ is always the most important factor. The next important factor is performance.
Why should we care about performance? encryption is slow anyhow right, but how slow? And how much is due to just library implementation decisions? A slow library doesn’t make the encryption scheme more secure.
Performance is important. So much that there even exists special processor instructions for it on some platforms¹-². Using a slow library or too slow a scheme will cause unnecessary response delays, require a higher hardware investment. and may just be impractical on some systems.
Native processor support can make a big difference in numbers, and libraries that use them, and when available, can show huge performance boosts over other libraries that do not. The most common of these instruction sets is Intel’s AES-NI. Java’s JCE providers make use of AES-NI when available since java 1.8⁵. For GCM PCLMULQDQ¹¹ instruction support was added in java 1.9¹²
For this exercise I wanted to run a series of benchmarks for the most common Java encryption libraries (and I sneaked one in from the Clojure community), and see how they perform with a practical configuration.
I used authenticated encryption only, so for AES CBC this means CBC+HMAC and GCM is already authenticated so is used as is.
Enough talking, show me the numbers:
Benchmark Results | https://medium.com/@gerritjvv/aes-java-encryption-performance-benchmarks-3c2cb19a40e9 | ['Gerrit Jansen Van Vuuren'] | 2019-09-06 17:28:06.869000+00:00 | ['Encryption', 'Security', 'Clojure', 'Java'] |
Radioactive highs | Radiation has been part of our history whether with a good or bad repertoire, examples that have brought disgrace to humanity such as the bombs of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and of course Chernobyl, and their use in the oncological field and chemical research.
Researchers such as Alexander Shulgin synthesized alterations of the Amphetamine molecule via DOI (2,5-Dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine) and 2C-I with the compound Iodine-125, a radioactive form of the compound Iodine. DOB is another mentionable example with the radioactive form of Bromine, Bromine-77 and hypothetic breadcrumbs blueprinted left from the 2C family, like 2C-A, 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-astatophenethylamine
DOI
2C-I
On a lesser extent [ 11 C] CIMBI-5 the radiolabeled form of 25I- NBOMe, unlike the compounds previously identified these compounds are formed with the radionated version of Carbon-11, an isotope from of 6C, this compound decays to Boron-11,[11B] an isotope of Boron that produces a nuclear spin in NMR spectroscopy. N1-([11C]-Me)-2-Br-LSD (11 C-MBL) which has a high affinity to the serotonin S2 receptors which also includes a Carbon-11 and various radioionated versions of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.
Noble gases with anesthetic proprieties like Xenon and its radioactive form Xe-133 [ 133Xe] used in the study of pulmonary function and organ blood flow, the radioisotope Xenon-135 [135XE], produced by the decay from Iodine-135 known for its role as a nuclear poison, this compound had a major role in the Chernobyl disaster, the Xe-135 poisoning accumulated on the fuel rods decreasing the power to 30 MW(Megawatts). The control rods withdrawn according to the increased neutron reactivity, as Xenon-135 is known to be the biggest neutron-absorbing compound, caused the reactor to become thermos-hydraulically unstable, therefore making the thermal power insufficient for neutron flux to burn the Xe-135 causing the following consequences.
Radon is naturally radioactive and predicted to act similar to Xenon as both are heavier than the air found in the atmosphere, although this compound was never tested for its anesthetic purpose as it is known that exposures to the compound may lead to lung cancer, therefore we can only have a prediction of its anesthetic Xenon-like behavior.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Plant is still haunted by radiation yet the locals reveal Babushkas who bravely harvest and feed on radiotrophic fungi soup growing by side of the vegetation surrounding the plant.
Excused to say that not many of these compounds were extensively used as a psychedelic besides 2C-I as the high rated price and scarcity determined them as novel compounds. These substances are often presented as chemical curiosities, have a clinical value or a value under the nuclear industry as there are very few to no recreational usage history.
This exemplification is a simple list of health hazards faced over time, humanity has faced several hazards through its evolution yet, various hazard chemicals are available in the market, substances like TTX (tetrodotoxin), Mercury, Phosphorous and Ciguatoxin, the toxin present in Pufferfish, yet substances known to have significate value on the quality of life are often considered illegal, often the same drugs that are considered illegal are used by impoverished society and minority races, being considered bad and life-destroying.
This Kafkaesque dystopian reality is presented in everyday court, people get arrested for possessing a small amount of Amphetamine that can be sold over the counter just sold by a different name and a label. The Sisyphean task fighting against the unexplainable ban of plants, vegetables, and research chemicals that can provide a better life and different solutions for the unsolved health issues and understanding the mind. | https://medium.com/@goncalovaladas/radioactive-highs-6bc70a2a00da | ['Goncalo Valadas'] | 2021-03-19 19:26:18.746000+00:00 | ['Psychedelics', 'Mushrooms', 'Radioactive', 'Xenon'] |
How an AV Company Thrives with PROLIFIQ Crush | Immedia has been adjusting to suit the needs of a transforming world. For an organization that offers commercial AV services based heavily on companies being in the office, COVID-19 has required Immedia to pivot its business objectives to keep customers satisfied. In addition to those challenges, Immedia has also focused on training its dedicated — but young — sales team. To stay one step ahead of customer needs, while also equipping salespeople with the necessary tools to thrive, Immedia turned to PROLIFIQ CRUSH, an account management app available on the AppExchange.
Chris Majoros, Vice President of Client Development at Immedia, began his career in sales as a Lanier copier salesperson, where it was commonplace to buy a van, haul around copiers, and cold call businesses. In other words, he’s learned a thing or two about how to sell over his career, and now he’s trying to impart those lessons onto his team.
We spoke with Chris about his career, Immedia, and the technology helping drive results for his youthful sales team.
Chris Majoros, Vice President of Client Development, Immedia
How has COVID-19 changed your business operations and the needs of your customers?
Chris Majoros: That’s a great question. Until about July, it was business as usual. Since Jeff Emmons founded the company in 2004, we’ve grown to a $25 million commercial AV integrator, so things have been going very well. That includes having a great second quarter. But when COVID hit, many projects were being put on hold and clients were waiting for guidelines on how to bring people back to work.
Many of our customers want to get back to the office, but they just aren’t sure how to do it. What we’re finding with our clients is that they want to make sure that the technology they invest in is going to meet safety requirements. For example, there is technology out there that can sense how many people are in a conference room. So if you have eight people in the conference room and you’re only allowed six, the technology will send an email that lets you know that the room is overcrowded.
What keeps you and the rest of the Immedia leadership team up at night?
Majoros: Before COVID, my main business objective was to contact the client directly and present our value proposition regarding why they should choose Immedia as a long-term partner. But right now, my role is to focus on locating new enterprise clients while maintaining the relationships we have with our current clients.
From a corporate standpoint, one of our challenges is that our sales team is relatively young. However, what they lack in experience is made up with fire in the belly. It’s my job to take that energy and teach them how to sell, how to manage accounts, and also get them focused on being able to develop relationships at the right level.
Are you using a different approach or a different technology for training your young sales team?
Majoros: We use Salesforce exclusively. It runs our entire business: from prospecting and sales to engineering, project management, and long-term service. Salesforce is deeply ingrained within our organization. Before, our salespeople were not trained in the art of account management. Now, over 70% of our revenue is from repeat enterprise clients, so we had to change our focus.
From an enablement standpoint, we are showing our sales team how to create and use the account management process by leveraging PROLIFIQ CRUSH, which we found on the AppExchange. We were fortunate to find a solution that gives us the ability to put everything in one place, and also map out our relationships. Now, we show the team where there are relationship gaps and create next steps to expand the relationships we desire in the account.
Most of our staff are younger, but they’re also highly technically oriented. Training on sales techniques for both selling and managing an account can be a slow process. That’s where CRUSH is really helping us by keeping it all in one area of account management.
Once up and running with PROLIFIQ CRUSH, what kind of results did you see?
Majoros: I think the most important results for us are collaboration, understanding our current relationships, and being able to map out next steps. After creating an enterprise account plan, we create six to eight objectives for that account, and we put them in CRUSH. Our salespeople must accomplish these objectives; in fact, their pay plan is tied to it.
We’ve measured a 100% increase in collaboration between departments and that has been incredibly important. From a relationship standpoint, the app allowed us to be able to map out who we know and who we don’t know. Or, better yet, who we want to know, and why we want to know them. It’s really been a huge part of our success.
We were also able to secure 52 new opportunities in just 60 days with PROLIFIQ CRUSH, which was really exciting for us. Additionally, being able to implement account management strategies in 90 minutes has allowed our sales team to gain a better understanding of their goals, while also making it easier for them to track their progress.
One of the other things we do is, prior to our company meetings, we distribute a survey. I’ve created the survey with about 30 questions. The results of the survey are incorporated into CRUSH prior to the meeting so that we can get the answers and be prepared to collaborate.
How are you planning to continue leveraging PROLIFIQ CRUSH, Salesforce, and other AppExchange apps moving forward?
Majoros: We continue to monitor the AppExchange. If we’re in a situation where we have different things that we need, whether it’s accounting software, software to manage our service department, or email marketing software, we always check the AppExchange first.
The vision going forward with PROLIFIQ CRUSH is to be able to not just accomplish those line objectives for an account, but also monitor performance, check how we’re doing against those objectives, and then turn it into a repeatable strategy. It’s all about building the relationship and knowing where you are within the account.
After working at companies like Xerox and RICOH in the past, what advice do you have for other organizations trying to build strong sales teams?
Majoros: Communication and being able to build trust within your team are the top priorities. Chances are good that they’re going to be younger than you for sure, and that requires a completely different management style than it did when I was starting out. So be open, have good communication skills, listen, and be humble.
For Chris Majoros and Immedia, utilizing Salesforce and technology found on the AppExchange has been a driving force behind growing as a business, and withstanding changing circumstances. Thanks to Chris discovering PROLIFIQ CRUSH on AppExchange, that young sales team seems to be growing up by the minute.
For account management and other solutions, visit the AppExchange today. | https://medium.com/inside-the-salesforce-ecosystem/an-av-tech-company-is-helping-its-young-sales-team-thrive-1b7c92cfc783 | ['Christian Connors'] | 2020-09-22 20:42:41.319000+00:00 | ['Apps', 'Sales', 'Covid 19', 'Salesforce', 'Trailblazer'] |
9 Easy Ways to Make Fitness Your Habit | My biggest lessons in life have come through personal experiences and coaching clients throughout their weight loss journey. Honestly, this is one of the reasons I love coaching so much. It is because I learn more from YOU than you learn from me.
I will tell you a little secret…
When it comes to turning short-term success to long-term sustainability it all comes down to building one thing; habits.
If you think about it, practically everything we do on a daily basis involves rituals and routines. Some might wake up and have a cup of Joe, while others might rush straight to work and eat something on the way. These are things that are constructed over time and practiced day to day.
You see…
We are all creatures of habit. These so-called “habits” impact the way we do things and the things we do. For a vast majority of us, getting started with fitness goes against all established habits. It is completely understandable and I get it!
I mean, eating healthy, working out, drinking water, and even limiting sugar can be really overwhelming for someone just looking to start. Why? because they’ve never done these things before and all of the sudden they’re bombarded with all these changes at once which ultimately leads to failure.
Instead, we must take each individual aspect and make it slowly a habit one by one. Slow and steady always wins the race.
That means avoiding all extremes and using moderation because balance is key.
Now, I’m sure you want to get to the bottom of this and start changing those habits for the better. Keep in mind this short list is by no means complete. There are lots of things that could still be incorporated here to make fitness YOUR habit.
For now, if you incorporate these 9 tips or even just some of them I can almost guarantee you’ll develop a healthier relationship with fitness:
1. Make sure to eat enough calories!
In order for our bodies to perform optimally, it needs to have all the necessary nutrients available to support daily functions.
Restrict calories too much and you’ll experience those irresistible cravings. It is a one-way ticket to binge city and we definitely do not want that.
2. Choose healthy foods YOU enjoy!
There are tons of quality nutritious foods out there. Find the ones you like most and the ones you feel you can stick to on a daily basis.
and the ones you feel you can stick to on a daily basis. Don’t like oatmeal? Have sweet potatoes instead. Don’t like brown rice? Have jasmine rice instead.
3. Don’t be super strict with your diet!
Even though we want to consume the vast majority of our food from nutritious whole-food sources it is perfectly fine to allow some room for YOUR favorite foods (ice cream, cookies, pizza, donuts, etc…)
(ice cream, cookies, pizza, donuts, etc…) This way you’ll develop a healthy relationship with food.
4. Don’t punish yourself with exercise!
Exercise should NEVER be viewed as punishment. It is a privilege.
Think about it you get to train and improve every aspect of your life (feel, look, and function)
5. Adjust exercise and food around YOUR lifestyle!
Remember, we are trying to build HABITS here. It makes no sense to implement something that is not going to work for your schedule or that is not convenient for you. So find something that works for YOU .
. What can you do for 21 days consistently? Make it work in your favor, not against it.
6. It is always better to do something than nothing!
Don’t think of fitness as an all or nothing mentality.
A 15-minute walk will always beat sitting on the couch watching T.V.
Find ways to move more.
7. Prioritize sleep!
Nothing sets you up for a more productive day than quality sleep.
Aim for 7–9 hours every night of uninterrupted sleep.
8. Don’t focus on others, focus on YOU!
Don’t worry about what someone else is doing. Who cares if Joe or Amy are fitter and leaner.
Your progress is what’s most important.
is what’s most important. Focus on beating the person you were yesterday and making constant improvements day in and day out.
9. Enjoy the process!
Make fitness fun for you. The more enjoyable you make it the more likely you will sustain it long-term and create a habit.
Never let it cause you stress . It is supposed to do the complete opposite.
. It is supposed to do the complete opposite. Find out what activities or exercises you enjoy and adapt accordingly. Mix it up!
As I said before, I could have so much more to add to this list but these are my top nine.
Do you have anything to add to this list?
Is there anything else that you might have tried that has increased your ability to adopt fitness as a lifestyle?
If so, I would love to know and make sure to grab your free guide to lose fat without counting calories and join my e-mail list to get more content like this weekly!
This post was originally published in https://eatwelltrainsmart.com/9-essentials-to-make-fitness-a-habit/ | https://medium.com/@davidcaviedes/9-easy-ways-to-make-fitness-your-habit-4b403598d8c8 | ['David Caviedes'] | 2019-02-07 19:51:32.169000+00:00 | ['Workout', 'Health', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Motivation', 'Fitness'] |
Product mindset for Software Engineers | Product mindset for Software Engineers
Are you a software engineer who wishes to take product decisions but is unable to due to the way your team functions? If your mind is screaming YES, then this article might help you to have a better grip on the product mindset while being in the shoes of a software engineer. Dhruv Agarwal Follow Dec 19, 2020 · 4 min read
credits: hackernoon.com
Truly speaking, a great software engineer is the one who can utilise his/her skills to make a great product.
Software engineers are the frontline in any tech company and more so in a tech product company. However, you would find that most of the software engineers lack good product sense despite being great in their software knowledge.
The fundamental problem lies in how the work is assigned in most organisations. Software engineers are given tickets to work on. Typical examples are:
“Create an API to login with email”
“Create a cron to put credits in customer’s accounts”
The issue is that tickets only carry an instruction to “implement” something. The person making the implementation decision could be your manager, your product manager or someone senior in the team.
That’s exactly where the damage starts! You don’t know
Who is going to use the login API,
is going to use the login API, When those credits need to be put,
those credits need to be put, What will be the frequency,
will be the frequency, Why login with email and not Facebook,
login with email and not Facebook, Why are we putting credits?
What happens next? The feature goes live but fails at some areas and it comes back to you with more requirements and again you’re given some improvements and directions from either your manager or product manager.
Do you see the problem here? The problem is you lacked context.
Had there been context, you’d have taken the right calls as per the situation. With less context, you go with the constraints that you can think of and take the decisions accordingly for the interface, complexity, architecture.
There is no silver bullet for either of the interface, complexity, or architecture. It depends on the scale of the problem you’re solving, the user who is going to use the product and the frequency of the use.
Here is how you can change a ticket to gain more context — Make it a story.
credits: jotform.com
Story
A story has a character, his/her motivation and their success. Let’s understand this by using the earlier example of a ticket — “Create a cron to put credits in customer’s accounts”. Now let’s ask some questions to build the story.
Who is telling our system to add credits? — Someone from marketing/growth
is telling our system to add credits? — Someone from marketing/growth Why are they adding credits? — To nudge customers to buy your services at some discount
are they adding credits? — To nudge customers to buy your services at some discount When do they want to add? — They might add towards month end when users might get their salaries and are more likely to make a purchase
do they want to add? — They might add towards month end when users might get their salaries and are more likely to make a purchase How are they most comfortable adding it? — They use a CRM tool to send us a list of users with the respective credits to be added.
Now, if you try to write this story, you’ll get something like this
“As a marketing manager, I would like to nudge prospect customers to buy our services. One way I can do that is by adding credits in their account around the payday and nudge them to make a purchase. Users are more likely to purchase during that time. If we can automate this flow from the CRM to add credits to prospect customers, it will help us drive more revenue from the users.”
As you may notice, there are no technical instructions at all, but has complete context.
Being a software engineer, you are responsible for thinking the best technical solution for this problem. Now you can make the best interface for the right user, understand complexity better, make the right architectural calls. For eg- this feature is more likely to have load around the month end only and you need to quickly finish that load.
How are stories better than tickets?
Stories as compared to tickets not only give complete context but also give room for innovation and guarantee success, whereas tickets just guarantee execution. Stories let you take the decisions too rather than just limiting the thinking part to your manager or product manager.
You can also challenge the proposed way and propose simpler ways to achieve success within your product.
So remember - next time you receive a ticket, try to convert it into a story. A story will have a character, his/her motivation and success.
Hope you find this framework useful and step ahead in your product-tech journey! | https://medium.com/shuttl-tech/product-mindset-for-software-engineers-e8213c47849f | ['Dhruv Agarwal'] | 2020-12-19 14:53:06.843000+00:00 | ['Product Engineering', 'Product Thinking', 'Product Development', 'Software Development', 'Product Management'] |
La bellezza della Complessità | We exhibit solo and group projects by emerging or international artists who use data to create artworks that transfigure complex information
Follow | https://medium.com/wildmazzini/la-bellezza-della-complessit%C3%A0-b1a0d977b052 | ['Dave Fuschi'] | 2020-06-02 05:53:00.053000+00:00 | ['Data Art', 'Arte Contemporanea', 'Wild Mazzini'] |
Agile Coach Learning Path by Agilemania | I am back again to talk about the Agile Coach Learning Path. I hope you have gone through the Scrum Master learning path. If not, then we highly recommend you to read the Scrum Master learning path. Our Agile Coach learning path is based on the ICAgile learning roadmap. The ICAgile program from Agilemania is created to help organizations attain business agility.
Before we dive into the program, let’s talk about the history of Agile.
Agile came into existence after the Agile Manifesto was published in 2001. Seventeen software developers got together and published Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The values highlighted in the Agile Manifesto laid the foundation for Agile Software development.
And, what are those values?
First: Individuals and interactions precede over tools and processes. That is to say, competent people need to work together, and there needs to be seamless communication between them.
Second: Working software over comprehensive documentation. While good documentation helps people understand how the software is built, the main focus should be building the software.
Third: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. A contract should be in place but shouldn’t be prioritized over work based on customer needs.
Fourth: Responding to change over following a plan. A project plan is the standard way to go, but it should be flexible enough to accommodate changes as per stakeholders’ requirements and customer pain points and solutions.
The agile way of working is not the same as agile software development. There is a paradigm shift in doing business, organization structure, policies, and operational activities when we talk about agile ways of working.
Firms need unorthodox coaches who deliver results instead of conventional bosses. There is a dire need for agile coaches who can understand organizational functions beyond IT. Coaches with extensive experience in marketing, HR, finance, sales, operations, and quality assurance are required. Likewise, organizational design consultants, process consultants, quality assurance, and people coaches should learn agile to use it while bringing positive change.
So, that was the brief history of Agile.
Now, let’s dive into the main topic that you’re eagerly waiting to hear.
Agilemania’s agile coach learning path has 4 phases.
The first phase is to learn the basics of agile mindsets and tips and tricks to facilitate agile ways of working.
In the agile facilitation phase, there are two training certifications. The first certification is Agile Fundamentals Bootcamp, an Agile basics workshop covering the Agile mindset, values, principles, and elementary concepts to start the Agile transformation.
The second certification is the Agile Team Facilitation certification. It focuses on the mindset and role of an Agile team facilitator and the provision of group facilitation tools and techniques. They will help in successfully designing meetings and workshops that will produce favorable outcomes.
The second phase is Agile Team Coaching to learn coaching conversation and business agility to connect leaders outside the team.
The second phase has two certifications. One is Agile Team Coaching, where attendees will learn foundational team coaching and team development concepts. It will help you build and grow your team.
The other certification is Business Agility Foundation. It will help you delight customers and bring innovation and constant improvement to your work and organization. You will be able to build a strong organization through team dynamics, adaptive planning, value-based development, and iterative feedback cycles.
The third phase is Enterprise Agile Coaching to learn how to introduce Agility in an organization and support change.
In the Enterprise Coaching phase, there are two certifications. The first one is Agility in the Enterprise, where participants will gain a concrete understanding of Agility at the enterprise level. This certification will teach you how firms become highly responsive and more purpose-driven.
The second certification is Coaching Agile Transition. The workshop will help attendees learn prime elements of an Agile Transformation, key enterprise coaching competencies, Organizational and human change processes, and transformational strategies.
The fourth and final phase is Business Agility Coaching to expand your coaching tools to help people working in different functions.
In the Business Agility phase, there are two certifications. One is Leading with Agility, where attendees will learn the need for business agility and personal key competencies to lead the Agile transformation. They will also learn about the organizational elements required to emerge victorious in today’s cut-throat competitive business environment. By taking this course, participants will be able to develop leadership skills. It focuses on transformational behavior and skills to increase business agility.
The following certification is Agility in Human Resources. This certification is for business leaders, personnel developers, recruiters who work closely with the HR department in organizations. They will learn about agile mindset, organizational design, roles, career paths, performance, goals & motivation, promotions, talent acquisition, retention, and learning and development.
And that brings us to the end of the Agile Coaching Learning Path.
We have the learning cohort program for all these four steps but don’t worry, that’s a topic for another day.
We hope you liked the learning path. See you soon with some more learning paths. | https://medium.com/agilemania/agile-coach-learning-path-by-agilemania-bbdc7fb09b13 | ['Naveen Kumar Singh'] | 2021-04-09 11:07:10.571000+00:00 | ['Agile Transformation', 'Agile', 'Agile Methodology', 'Agile Development', 'Agile Coaching'] |
Life-Changing Lessons From LinkedIn Accelerate-U Conference, San Diego | After two hours of scenic, reflective coastal driving, I stepped into the event to learn from top Linked[In] insiders about their development journey and what goes on inside their culture. The atmosphere is relaxed, welcoming, and professional. We munched on delicious cheese, pastries, and breakfast goods chatted up peers while waiting for check-ins.
Accelerate-U is described as:
“Accelerate U is our chance to get to know you past the typical 60 seconds in a Career Fair line. We want to know what drives you, where you see envision your career path leading you, and how we can help get you there. “
I walked in excited to meet new people and learn something new while branching out my scope of awareness of all the cool things college students were executing on out in the world. I attended workshops detailing methodologies on showcasing beyond the LinkedIn profile and listened in on stories and habits that contribute towards building a dream career.
LinkedIn Beyond the Profile
LinkedIn is often viewed as as a social media with a space to tack on a digital resume. There’s more to that now with more recent tools. It’s also a platform for accessing publishing, mentorship, and thought leadership. So what are some ways to leverage these tools?
Storytelling. LinkedIn publishing allows for short form feed posting and long form article posting. Short-form writing can be as simple as making a feed post updating your network on where your career is at and what the next moves are. Long-form articles are a great tool to sharing information that lasts longer since they will less likely become buried by more feed posts. Through both means, sharing your life story, goals, aims, and past experiences often lead to opening new opportunities. Check out the article writing publishing platform. Engage your networks and community. There are often always stories of landing new opportunities because recruiters and the perspectives candidates both share an interested in the same book. Both might share an interest in the same cuisine. Don’t be afraid of participation — join a #hashtag movement, reply and start (hopefully ad hominem free) debates within comment chains, like something that caught your eye, thank someone for sharing invaluable advice. Find mentorship directly and indirectly. It might be a little awkward if a student approaches a senior in industry with a blunt “Will you be my mentor?” Sometimes it works, sometimes it won’t. LinkedIn has the career advice and career interest features that are accessible while logged in to help navigate this. Thought leadership. Don’t let your age fool you. Don’t let your great ideas one day end up in a graveyard unexpressed. Don’t let naysayers prevent you from sharing. Thought leadership is the idea of chiming into vital conversations and becoming a stakeholder. It’s excellent to contribute to past, present, and future ideas. It’s like raising your hand in a college seminar classroom, except with the world, to see if it’s a great idea, something that could use revision, or something that’s feasible to be worked on immediately. Who knows, you could potentially find your next start-up team. Valuable team members have this trait.
Designing a Dream Career
Career paths are unique. It’s inefficient to spend time idealizing the careers that others have. Find your own original route. Mimicking, imitating, and trying to live the perfect life someone else has may become a mental block and create a less fulfilling path. Define your balanced work-life ratio. Dividing up work and play at around a 50–50 ratio is an illusion. Everyone can decide their own ratio. I learned this powerful technique. Sort out and prioritize things in life and career that are non-negotiable must haves and wants. How many sick days, vacations, and family time does it leave? What are your values? Achieving a 99–1 ratio for enjoyment and fulfillment to feeling burdened quickly became my ideal after hearing this concept. Bloom where you are planted. Everyone is under constant eyes from others, succeed where you at. It’s tempting and easy to complain about being a bad situation but flipping that mindset into “If I can thrive in this bad situation, imagine what I can do in a better situation?” may help turn a slumber into your pump for success. 1440 in a day. This magic number is the amount of minutes that pass by every single day. If invested wisely, it can determine the difference between having a successful day and reaching new milestones or simply remaining stagnant. Be selective about your influence. Influence happens all the time. Surround yourself with the right mindset to thrive. Work and support others and earn the learning lessons from them. Be with the friend that’s always ambitious with their new ideas, be with the friend always emotional and excited about new innovations. Support the friend going through an emotional wreck and build a new level of resiliency, trust, and rapport together.
Now with these ideas in mind, go empower and accelerate yourself towards your own success. | https://medium.com/@johnhuaexplores/life-changing-lessons-from-linkedin-accelerate-u-conference-san-diego-d0c1c4d9d832 | ['John Hua'] | 2019-03-03 22:14:41.514000+00:00 | ['LinkedIn', 'Conference', 'Life Lessons', 'Tech', 'Careers'] |
Top 6 + 2 Evergreen Books to Make You a Better Software Engineer | Online courses, videos, and Youtube are great resources to learn how to code and learn how to be a better software developer and engineer.
But here and there, you want to hold a book in your hand. Or even better, a Kindle.
There are books out there, that can give you a big boost in your career as a software developer, books you will refer to for decades.
These are the evergreens, meta describers, books about design patterns or mindset books.
Here are the top 6 books for software engineers, a must-read books. And two on the top to make you even better.
Here comes the no. 1. The most referenced and valued among developers, architects, engineers.
The programmatic programmer is a great non-technical book that goes into codifying the good practices about software development. The book is filled with both technical and professional practical advice.
It is a great book every software developer, architect, designer or even QA engineer should read. It examines what it means to be a modern developer by exploring topics that range from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques.
It’s written at a high enough level that very little material is outdated. It is highly relevant, especially with the new 20th Anniversary Edition.
The book will spark ideas when you read it. How can I do it more efficiently? And more elegantly? Can I make the computer do the work instead?
Software Architecture in Practice (3rd Edition)
by Len Bass
Software Architecture in Practice introduces many aspects of software architecture and the responsibilities of an architect.
It covers the soft and hard skills of being an architect. It goes into the different roles a software architect will have and gives thoroughly comprehensive advice. It is a great overview and a great starting point for anyone interested in becoming a software architect.
It describes the basic concepts: management of project requirements, especially non-functional, documenting the architecture, assessing the architecture in terms of success.
agile terms and changing requirements. Examples and an easy-to-read style of writing are good advantages of this book.
Domain-Driven Design
by Eric Evans
When you want to overcome the difficulty of creating complex software in a maintainable fashion, this Doman-Driven Design is a book for you.
It is an excellent software engineering book. The ideas in this book are incredibly useful. It presents a working strategy for writing and organizing software code in classes and packages in a clean and usable environment.
Also, the book contains useful guidelines on how to communicate between team members and between the team and all other stakeholders.
It is for anyone involved in the development side of software engineering, including programmers, designers, architects, even development managers.
This book is not just for refactoring, it’s for understanding how professionals are thinking about their code.
You will understand the process and general principles of refactoring that you can quickly apply to your codebase. You should also be able to spot “bad smells” in your teammate’s code that needs refactoring. You can use these methods even in writing the first line of your code.
Martin Fowlers ‘Refactoring’ is, in my opinion, the best book about this subject.
One note though: The book was written a decade ago. At that time IDE’s did not support advanced refactorings. Most of the methods described are fully automated in modern IDE’s.
Introduction to Algorithms
by Thomas H. Cormen
An essential book for every programmer. It’s an essential guide to algorithms of all kinds.
It covers topics such as data structures, fast algorithms, polynomial-time algorithms for seemingly intractable problems, graph theory, computational geometry, and much more.
The exercises after each chapter are very important to fully understand the chapter. The book in itself is an outstanding one, very organized and focused.
The concepts are laid out in an intuitive and are easy to follow.
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
by Michael Feathers
Legacy code is one of the most challenging problems for many companies.
Given that we have to deal with legacy code, how can it be made easier?
Top takeaway Michael Feathers writes:
You cannot work effectively with code unless it is covered by tests. When working with untested code you must be extremely careful, and even then the results are uncertain. It’s better to have tested code than untested code, and often the ugliness is an intermediate stage in unearthing the deeper structure of the code.
Overall, this was a valuable read for anyone who has to understand and change large, confusing, delicate code bases. If you want to make your life easier, this would be on your must-read books.
The Passionate Programmer
by Chad Fowler
The Passionate Programmer teaches about:
how to be better at your job and
how to plan out a good career in the IT industry.
It’s quite inspirational. Chad Fowler is a respected authority in the Ruby programming community. Some of you might not like the very friendly tone and the stories about his life, but for some that might make it funnier.
The author tries to explain what skills and habits a programmer has to develop in order to be successful.
This is one of those books that every programmer must read eventually. It provides you a full list of tips and to-do in your daily work that will improve your overall role in your current company.
Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions
by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
If you want to land such a job — the Cracking the Coding Interview book is a must. Book itself is good though if you just want to cover/refresh a list of IT topics.
Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Ex-Google Employee, and an experienced software engineer will help you pass the coding interview. She has completed Software Engineering interviews with — and received offers from — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Goldman Sachs, Capital IQ, and a number of other firms.
She can help you to look for hidden tricks, and break problems into a small chunk. Book will help you get better in learning concepts.
Here are some articles, you might also like:
If you liked this article, you can follow me on Youtube
Or check my courses about Chatbots and Voice Assistants, Javascript, and more: | https://medium.com/ucan-learn-to-code/top-6-2-evergreen-books-to-make-you-a-better-software-engineer-f6b5585839 | ['Jana Bergant'] | 2020-04-29 11:51:25.033000+00:00 | ['Book Recommendations', 'Life Hacking', 'Books', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development'] |
The future of Web Assembly (WASM): the hardware-execution revolution! | Wasm in blockchain implementations
Bitcoin and Ethereum (and some other blockchain implementations) use a stack-based architecture which has similarities to WebAssembly’s stack-based architecture.
There are of course some differences in each of the unique stack-based virtual machines. For example equivalents to the well known stack-item-duplication operations such as Bitcoin’s OP_DUP opcode and Ethereum’s DUP1 to DUP16 opcodes are not found in Wasm.
Pictured: Ethereum Yellow Paper’s duplication operations.
Thankfully, Wasm offers a fixed amount of local variables for each Wasm function. These variables store information inside single index spaces which are local to that specific function. Point being, there are other ways of emulating certain stack behaviours.
Another important difference relates to the number of items which can be pushed onto the stack, per operation. If you look closely at the Ethereum Yellow Paper (pictured above) you will notice two columns labelled δ and α.
The column labelled δ represents the number of items to be removed from the stack. The next column over, labelled α, represents the number of additional items to be placed on the stack. As you can see each of the operations on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is able to push many items onto the stack. In the above example DUP16 is capable of pushing 17 items onto the stack.
In the current version of Wasm however, only one single result value can be pushed on to the stack by a single instruction*see Update 20191128 in the Appendix* (webassembly.github.io, 2019).
With many other nuances like this, it goes without saying that building a compiler which is capable of converting any high level blockchain smart contract source code to executable Wasm-flavoured code is a seriously complex and onerous task.
Developers from SecondState recently built a compiler called Soll (video demonstration available here) which was the first compiler to allow Ethereum Solidity smart contracts to be, compiled, deployed and interacted with on the Ethereum flavoured Wasm (Ewasm) testnet.
Trail-blazing work, such as this, marks the beginning of exchanging digital value and data, as well as, engaging in rule-based interactions between devices across the decentralised web. The weaving of browser-based devices into blockchain’s already decentralised architecture could make permission-less, censorship-resistant, borderless, yet secure, web-based, transacting mainstream.
An article written after SecondState’s presentation at Devcon5 (an Ethereum conference for developers) illustrated that SecondState are also considering building a compiler from Ethereum’s intermediate language “Yul” to llvm to Ewasm.
This additional new work potentially allows for a wider variety of smart contracts (written in languages such as C++, Rust, Vyper etc.) to be deployed to Ethereum’s Wasm blockchain implementation.
It quickly becomes apparent that introducing new languages (across separate sections of compiler toolchains) leads to enormous potential in terms of language agnostic collaboration.
This is one of the great future benefits, which Wasm brings to the table. | https://medium.com/wasm/the-future-of-web-assembly-wasm-the-hardware-execution-revolution-4116eafa39a0 | ['Timothy Mccallum'] | 2019-11-28 03:43:23.999000+00:00 | ['Wasm', 'Wasi', 'Rust', 'Secondstate', 'Webassembly'] |
Steps to a successful AI implementation | Implementation Of Machine Learning
Organizations across every sector will continue to embrace ML and AI technology over the upcoming years, transforming their business models and core business processes to take benefit of machine learning systems for greater cost efficiencies and enhanced operations. It is necessary for the business leaders to remember that the road to ML (Machine Learning) and AI adoption is a journey, rather than a race, as the leaders draw up strategies and plan to make the best use of technology. Organizations should consider the following steps.
1. Define a use case
It is necessary for the project managers and business leaders to start by investing time in articulating and clearly defining the challenges or specific problems they would like AI to solve; the more particular the goal is, the more chance of success for their implementation of AI.
For example, stating that the enterprises would like to ‘rise online sales by 10%’, is not much specific. Instead, a statement such as ‘aiming to raise online sales by 10% by observing the demographics of site visitors’ is much useful in articulating the goal and ensuring that it is properly understood by the stakeholders.
2. Verify the availability of information
The second step is to make sure that the systems and processes are capable of tracking and capturing the information required to perform the needed analysis.
An amount of effort and time is invested in data wrangling and ingestion; thus, organizations should make sure that the right data is being captured with the right variables or features in sufficient volumes. The features that should be kept in mind are gender, age, ethnicity, but the most important is the quality of the information for a successful outcome.
3. Carry the basic information exploration
It might be tempting for an organization to leap into a model building exercise, but it is very important that it first handles a data exploration exercise in which it can verify its data understanding and assumptions.
This exercise will help the organizations to understand what the features could be, and the type of data categorizations that shall be generated for use as input for any models.
4. Define model-building methodology
It is necessary to concentrate on the hypothesis itself rather than focusing on the end goal the hypothesis might achieve. For determining the most significant variables or features tests should be run that could improve the execution or validate the hypothesis.
Continuous feedback of business and domain experts must be involved as the feedback is important for validation and for ensuring the stakeholders to be on the same page. A subject expert will always be useful for deriving better features for the success of any ML model.
5. Define model-validation methodology
The performance measures will assist the comparison, evaluation, and analysis of results from several algorithms which will help in refining specific models. Let us take an example, in classification accuracy, a superior performance measure will be when the number of correct predictions made is divided by the total number of predictions made and then multiplied by 100.
6. Production and Automation rollout
The model must be rolled into production, as soon as it is built and validated. Starting with a limited rollout of a few months, upon which the business users can give continuous feedback on the outcome and behavior, it can further be rolled out to the wider audience.
Data ingestion should be automated with the correct tools and platforms, to spread results to the audiences. The platform must give various interfaces to account for several degrees of knowledge among the businesses’ end-users.
7. Continue updating the model
The model must be continuously monitored, as it once gets published and deployed for use. Models can be out of date for many reasons. To predict future outcomes, the models are built on historical data, and thus, the performance of the model can be deteriorated. It is necessary to ensure that those processes must be followed which keeps the model up to date.
Enterprise Artificial Intelligence is quickly moving beyond hype and is fixed to have an impact on various business operations and efficiencies. Taking time in planning its implementation will put the businesses in a stronger position to enjoy its benefits further. | https://medium.com/@PureSoftware./steps-to-a-successful-ai-implementation-a5d945911ea8 | [] | 2019-10-18 05:52:02.046000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Technology', 'Revolution'] |
A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Data Warehousing | A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Data Warehousing
When I was first about to meet Ahmed Elsamadisi, the founder and CEO of Narrator, I decided to actually learn about data warehousing, star and snowflake schema, and all that fun stuff. But then I realized, there weren’t any quick guides for beginners like me! So I decided to make one, with the help of Ahmed!
Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash
Before we go any further, I need to share something critical that I learned while talking to Ahmed about the entire data world. Definitions won’t get you anywhere. You need to understand the problems that are present in the data warehousing space and address them and knowing just knowing what a star schema is won’t help you do that.
So just wanna learn some definitions and basic ideas? Read Part 1.
For a more in-depth look at the issues currently with the data warehousing field and how to shift your mindset to become better at analysis, go to Part 2. Or do both!
Part 1: The Bare Bone Basics
Data Warehousing: storing and connecting all crucial business/company data in a single space
The main purpose of organizing data in a go-to, easy-to-access way is so that it can be analyzed later on. Or in fancier terms, it should be able to support Business Intelligence (BI) actions later on, with the most important aspect being analysis. There’s no point in having huge amounts of data if it’s super messy and can’t be analyzed for optimization! That’s where the two most popular data warehousing models come in, star schema and snowflake schema.
Star Schema: a data warehousing model that consists of fact and dimension tables, where the dimension tables are denormalized
Let’s unpack that definition. In this model, you have pieces of data called measures and others called dimensions. The measures are numerical data like the number of units sold or the number of emails opened. Dimensions give context to the measures. The dimensions for the aforementioned examples could be UnitSales and OpenedEmails, respectively.
An example of a star schema. By SqlPac at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76901169
These measures are stored in fact tables and dimensions are stored in dimension tables. The fact tables have dimension key columns (that relate them to the dimension tables) and numeric measure columns, which store the measures.
Fact tables come in 3 distinct flavours.
Transaction fact tables: these store data about a specific, one-time event so the data is only stored once (Periodic) snapshot fact tables: as the name suggests, these store snapshot data or data at a given point in time, like the number of purchases per customer at the end of the quarter. This means the data is stored multiple times at regular intervals. Accumulating snapshot tables: and these store accumulating data, or data over time, like the total number of units of a certain product sold over time
Dimension tables can vary a lot across industries and companies but here are some of the most popular types.
Time dimension tables: these store the time at which the related measure in the corresponding fact table was true Geography dimension tables: these store, you guessed it, geographical data like city, country, postal/zip code, etc. Product dimension tables: these store information about the product like the productID, product name, and brand name Employee dimension tables: these store data about the employees like employeeID, employee name, address, etc. Range dimension tables: these store ranges of data like a time period or a range in price, which can help report later on
This is cool and all but what the denormalized thing from the definition before mean? Your data can be normalized or denormalized. Normalized data is when the data’s stored in multiple tables with relationships linking them to each other. It helps maintain more of the data’s integrity and reduces redundancy but it slows things down since the computer has to jump from one table to another, multiple times. Denormalized data which is how star schema’s organized is when everything’s organized into one main table along with some other dimension tables. The real difference is that there are only direct links to the fact table. However, normalized data can have multiple links.
Things should be clicking into place now as to why this model is called star schema. It’s because it looks like a star with a central fact table and dimension tables “fanning out” from it.
Snowflake Schema: a multidimensional data warehousing model that consists of fact and dimension tables, where the dimension tables are normalized
It’s helpful to think of a snowflake schema as having the same so-called base as a star schema. It also has a central fact table and dimension tables connected to it. However, to reduce redundancy, optimize storage, and generally clean things up, snowflake schemas have dimension tables connected to their first layer of dimension tables.
A “template” for a snowflake schema. By SqlPac — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4285113
Don’t be scared off by the jargon. Here’s how Ahmed would explain a star schema to a 7-year-old! | https://medium.com/swlh/a-complete-beginners-guide-to-data-warehousing-4a925b17283d | ['Parmin Sedigh'] | 2020-10-23 05:42:50.474000+00:00 | ['Beginners Guide', 'Data Warehouse', 'Data Analysis'] |
Why You Should NOT Use ARIMA to Forecast Demand | Are you using (S)ARIMA(X) to forecast supply chain demand?
I see five reasons why you should not.
💾 ARIMA requires a long historical horizon, especially for seasonal products. Using three years of historical demand is likely not to be enough. Short Life-Cycle Products. Products with a short life-cycle won’t benefit from this much data. Forecasting demand at a higher hierarchical level might help. But it will come with other challenges (reconciliation, loss of accuracy). 💻 Running ARIMA on a wide dataset is (extremely) time-consuming as each SKU needs to be optimized separately. If it takes 1 second to optimize one SKU, that’s nearly 3 hours for 10,000 SKUs. You will need a lot of computing power (and parallelization). 📐 ARIMA is assuming time series to be “Stationary.” It means that ARIMA is assuming your demand to have a constant mean, variance, and covariance over time. Let me know if this description matches any of your products. 📈 At its core, ARIMA is powered by linear regressions. ARIMA assumes each product's trend to be constant over time. Would you agree that this is the case for all your products?
Other statistical models like exponential smoothing with (damped) trends can deal with changing trends. That’s much more realistic. 🎯 I like to play with forecasting KPIs (did you read my article about forecasting metrics?) You cannot optimize ARIMA for MAE, only for RMSE. That’s a pity.
Finally, I see one good reason for using ARIMA: it can (easily) deal with external demand drivers (such as marketing events, pricing, and so on). But, again, assuming a linear relationship between these drivers and the demand.
Want to learn more? | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/why-you-should-not-use-arima-to-forecast-demand-196cc8b8df3d | ['Nicolas Vandeput'] | 2021-04-01 08:16:32.172000+00:00 | ['Arima', 'Supply Chain', 'Forecasting', 'Demand Forecasting'] |
Sequence of life | As the COVID crisis evolves, there is much interest in finding an efficient and portable way to study DNA on a mobile device. A recent study reported in the journal Gigascience describes the first mobile genome sequence analyzer by pairing an iPhone with a handheld DNA sequence — think — the “tricorder” as featured in Star Trek.
According to the study, iGenomics algorithm can potentially map DNA sequences of viral pathogens, such as a flu virus or Zika virus, and identify mutations important for diagnosis and treatment or even for analyzing other viral genomes, such as from a SARS-CoV-2 patient. It would be similar to an iPhone camera replacing the need for a professional camera — well, iGenomics could do the same for DNA sequencing.
*This is part of the #sciku challenge — science-inspired haiku ( so #sciku?) prompts to get you inspired — Our dear readers — why not spend some time each day creating and having a little fun — if you do — publish it anywhere on medium, just tag it with — #30DaysOfScikuChallenge.
**If haikus/scikus aren’t your jam, feel free to exercise your artistic creativity and write another form of a science-inspired story — I can’t wait to read what you come up with.
Tagging Joan O'Donnell KK Malukani, PhD Cody James Howell PhD (Raiden)and anyone else who feels inspired to play along with this fun #30DaysOfScikuChallenge and today’s prompt: Nucleic Acids
Also, check out the latest by ScienceDuuude | https://medium.com/science-soul/sequence-of-life-bab450a32247 | ['R. Rangan Phd'] | 2021-01-12 14:17:54.587000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Haiku', 'Covid 19 Crisis', '30daysofscikuchallenge', 'Dna'] |
Anticipating your Opponent with Minimax Search | ARTICLE
From Deep Learning and the Game of Go by Max Pumperla and Kevin Ferguson
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Save 37% off Deep Learning and the Game of Go. Just enter fccpumperla into the discount code box at checkout at manning.com.
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This article shows you how to use the minimax algorithm to help your game bot decide its next move.
How can we program a computer to decide what move to make next in a game? To start, we can think about how humans would make the same decision. Let’s start with the simplest deterministic perfect information game there is: tic-tac-toe. The technical name for the strategy we’ll describe is minimaxing. “Minimaxing” is a contraction of “minimizing and maximizing”: you are trying to maximize your score, while your opponent is trying to minimize your score. You can sum it up the algorithm in one sentence: assume your opponent is as smart as you are. Let’s see how minimaxing works in practice.
Figure 1. What move should X make next? This is an easy one: playing in the lower right corner wins the game.
Take a look at figure 1. What move should X make next? There’s no trick here; taking the lower right corner wins the game. We can make that into a general rule: take any move that immediately wins the game. There’s no way this plan can go wrong. We could implement this rule in code with something like this:
def find_winning_move(game_state, next_player):
for candidate_move in game_state.legal_moves(next_player): ❶
next_state = game_state.apply_move(candidate_move) ❷
if next_state.is_over() and next_state.winner == next_player:
return candidate_move ❸
return None ❹
❶ Loop over all legal moves
❷ Calculates what the board would look like if we pick this move
❸ This is a winning move! No need to continue searching
❹ Can’t win on this turn
Figure 2 illustrates the hypothetical board positions this function would examine. This structure, where a board position points to possible follow-ups, is called a game tree.
Figure 2. An illustration of a algorithm to find the winning move. We start with the position at the top. We loop over every possible move and calculate the game state that would result if we played that move. Then we check if that hypothetical game state is a winning position for X.
Let’s back up a bit. How did we get into this position? Perhaps the previous position looked like figure 3. The O player naively hoped to make three in a row across the bottom. But that assumes that X will cooperate with the plan. This gives a corollary to our previous rule: don’t choose any move that gives our opponent a winning move.
Figure 3. What move should O make next? If O plays in the lower left, we must assume that X will follow up in the lower right to win the game. O must find the only move that prevents this.
def eliminate_losing_moves(game_state, next_player):
opponent = next_player.other()
possible_moves = [] ❶
for candidate_move in game_state.legal_moves(next_player): ❷
next_state = game_state.apply_move(candidate_move) ❸
opponent_winning_move = find_winning_move(next_state, opponent)❹
if opponent_winning_move is None: ❹
possible_moves.append(candidate_move) ❹
return possible_moves
❶ possible_moves will become a list of all moves worth considering
❷ Loops over all legal moves
❸ Calculates what the board would look like if we play this move
❹ Does this give our opponent a winning move? If not, this move is plausible
Figure 4. What move should X make? If X plays in the center, then there will be two different ways to complete three-in-a-row: top middle and lower right. O can only block one of them, so X is guaranteed a win.
Now, we know that we must block our opponent from getting into a winning position. Therefore we should assume that our opponent is going to do the same to us. With that in mind, how can we play to win? Take a look at the board in figure 4. If we play in the center, we have two ways to complete three in a row: top middle or lower right. The opponent can’t block them both. We can describe this general principle as: look for a move where our opponent can’t block from setting up a winning move. Sounds complicated, but it’s actually easy to build this logic on top of the functions we’ve already written:
def find_two_step_win(game_state, next_player):
opponent = next_player.other()
for candidate_move in game_state.legal_moves(next_player): ❶
next_state = game_state.apply_move(candidate_move) ❷
good_responses = eliminate_losing_moves(next_state, opponent) ❸
if not good_responses: ❸
return candidate_move ❸
return None ❹
❶ Loop over all legal moves
❷ Calculates what the board would look like if we play this move
❸ Does our opponent have a good defense? If not, pick this move
❹ No matter what move we pick, our opponent can prevent a win
Of course, our opponent will anticipate that we will try to do this, and also try to block such a play. We can start to see a general strategy forming:
First, see if we can win on the next move. If so, play that move. If not, see if our opponent can win on the next move. If so, block that. If not, see if we can force a win in two moves. If so, play to set that up. If not, see if our opponent could set up a two-move win on their next move…
Notice that all three of our functions have a similar structure. Each function loops over all valid moves and examines the hypothetical board position that we’d get after playing that move. Furthermore, each function builds on the previous function to simulate what our opponent would do in response. If we generalize this concept, we get an algorithm that can always identify the best possible move.
Solving tic-tac-toe: a minimax example
In the previous section, we examined how to anticipate your opponent’s play one or two moves ahead. Here we show how to generalize that strategy to pick perfect moves in tic-tac-toe. The core idea is exactly the same, but we need the flexibility to look an arbitrary number of moves in the future.
First let’s define an enum that represents the three possible outcomes of a game: win, loss, or draw. These possibilities are defined relative to a particular player: a loss for one player is a win for the other.
Listing 1. An enum to represent the outcome of a game.
class GameResult(enum.Enum):
loss = 1
draw = 2
win = 3
Imagine we had a function best_result that took a game state and told us the best outcome that a player could achieve from that state. If that player could guarantee a win—by any sequence, no matter how complicated—the best_result function would return GameResult.win . If that player could force a draw, it would return GameResult.draw . Otherwise, it would return GameResult.loss . If we assume that function already exists, it’s easy to write a function to pick a move: we loop over all possible moves, call best_result , and pick the move that leads to the best result for us. Of course, there may be multiple moves that lead to equal results; we can just pick randomly from them in that case. Listing 2 shows how to implement this.
Listing 2. A game-playing agent that implements minimax search.
class MinimaxAgent(Agent):
def select_move(self, game_state):
winning_moves = []
draw_moves = []
losing_moves = []
for possible_move in game_state.legal_moves(): ❶
next_state = game_state.apply_move(possible_move) ❷
opponent_best_outcome = best_result(next_state) ❸
our_best_outcome = reverse_game_result(opponent_best_outcome) ❸
if our_best_outcome == GameResult.win: ❹
winning_moves.append(possible_move) ❹
elif our_best_outcome == GameResult.draw: ❹
draw_moves.append(possible_move) ❹
else: ❹
losing_moves.append(possible_move) ❹
if winning_moves: ❺
return random.choice(winning_moves) ❺
if draw_moves: ❺
return random.choice(draw_moves) ❺
return random.choice(losing_moves) ❺
❶ Loops over all legal moves
❷ Calculates the game state if we select this move
❸ Since our opponent plays next, figure out their best possible outcome from there. Our outcome is the opposite of that
❹ Categorizes this move according to its outcome
❺ Picks a move that leads to our best outcome
Now the question is how to implement best_result . As in the previous section, we can start from the end of the game and work backward. Listing 3 shows the easy case: if the game is already over, there’s only one possible result. We just return it.
Listing 3. First step of the minimax search algorithm. If the game is already over, we already know the result.
def best_result(game_state):
"""Find the best result that next_player can get from this game
state.
Returns:
GameResult.win if next_player can guarantee a win
GameResult.draw if next_player can guarantee a draw
GameResult.loss if, no matter what next_player chooses, the
opponent can still force a win
"""
if game_state.is_over():
if game_state.winner() == game_state.next_player:
return GameResult.win
elif game_state.winner() is None:
return GameResult.draw
else:
return GameResult.loss
If we’re somewhere in the middle of the game, we need to search ahead. By now, the pattern should be familiar. We start by looping over all possible moves and calculating the next game state. Then we must assume our opponent will do their best to counter our hypothetical move. To do so, we can just call best_result from this new position. That tells us the result our opponent can get from the new position; we invert it to find out our result. Out of all the moves we consider, we select the one that leads to the best result for us. Listing 4 shows how to implement this logic, which makes up the second half of best_result . Figure 5 illustrates the board positions this function will consider for a particular tic-tac-toe board.
Figure 5. A tic-tac-toe game tree. In the top position, it is X’s turn. If X plays in the top center, then O can guarantee a win. If X plays in the left center, X will win. If X plays right center, then O can force a draw. Therefore X will choose to play in the left center.
Listing 4.4. Implementing minimax search.
best_result_so_far = GameResult.loss
opponent = game_state.next_player.other
for candidate_move in game_state.legal_moves(): ❶
next_state = game_state.apply_move(candidate_move) ❷
opponent_best_result = best_result(next_state) ❸
our_result = reverse_game_result(opponent_best_result) ❹
if our_result.value > best_result_so_far.value:
best_result_so_far = our_result
return best_result_so_far
❶ See what the board would look like if we play this move.
❷ Find out our opponent’s best move.
❸ Whatever our opponent wants, we want the opposite.
❹ See if this result is better than the best we’ve seen so far.
If we apply this algorithm to a simple game such as tic-tac-toe, we get an unbeatable opponent. You can play against it and see for yourself: try the play_ttt.py example on GitHub (https://github.com/maxpumperla/deep_learning_and_the_game_of_go). In theory, this algorithm would also work for chess, Go, or any other deterministic perfect information game. In reality, it’s far too slow for any of those games.
That’s all for now. If you want to learn more about the book, check it out on liveBook here and see this slide deck.
About the authors:
Max Pumperla and Kevin Ferguson are experienced deep learning specialists skilled in distributed systems and data science. Together, Max and Kevin built the open source bot BetaGo. | https://medium.com/@manningbooks/anticipating-your-opponent-with-minimax-search-e7383d1a6953 | ['Manning Publications'] | 2019-03-27 21:27:46.271000+00:00 | ['Search', 'Deep Learning', 'Programming', 'Minimax Algorithm', 'Go'] |
“One also supposed that the general public would like to have a president who clearly exhibits the… | “One also supposed that the general public would like to have a president who clearly exhibits the capacity for rational thought and exposition, and the ability to remember major policy directives for more than eighteen months.
We’re not going to get that from Trump.”
Ya think? I’m not trying to be snarky here. It’s been crystal clear to anyone with their eyes and ears open that the man in the White House, that wannabe fascist, is off his rocker and doesn’t remember from one minute to the next what he has said (like going to the moon, er I mean Mars!) or believes. His obsessive tweeting at all hours of the day and night should show everyone just how insecure and delusional he is.
I mean who the hell makes policy by tweet? What president attacks a country they are visiting and makes a complete fool of himself walking beside Queen Elizabeth in that horrific tux he was wearing? What president doesn’t read the daily briefing prepared for them?What president doesn’t allow his handlers to take care of logistics, talking points, or be there when he meets with another head of state so there is a record of what was said? What president in recent history has curtailed press conferences or only allows reporters from FAUX News or other right wing publications to ask questions or even attend the press conference? What president plays footsie with our sworn enemies and and invites them to attack our election system? What president ignores and refuses to comply with legal subpoenas issued by the House? And the answer is only a delusional, narcissistic wannabe fascist, authoritarian, or dictator would do those things.
It’s time to start impeachment hearings and show the world America is not the laughing stock other countries believe we are with that man in the White House. Most importantly, it’s time to show this and future presidents that they ARE NOT ABOVE THE LAW and are subject to the checks and balances that our Constitution explicitly gives to Congress.
I’m looking right at you Speaker Pelosi. | https://medium.com/@msprogressive/one-also-supposed-that-the-general-public-would-like-to-have-a-president-who-clearly-exhibits-the-36b50116df9d | ['Sally Pina'] | 2019-06-09 00:29:44.749000+00:00 | ['Impeachment', 'NASA', 'Moon', 'Donald Trump', 'Mars'] |
Fear of the Shapeshifter | Fear of the Shapeshifter
We, as a species, are pretty obsessed with form. Appearance is everything to us. We judge people based on uniforms more than actions. We judge animals based on how vaguely their proportions mirror that of our own offspring rather than their ecological role. We are so convinced we can accurately divine an objective reality based on imagined platonic forms that we end up becoming cartoonish. Maybe it is this obsession with these worlds of ideal forms that has led to such consistent themes in how we utilize shapeshifters in fiction.
Fictional cultures and civilizations of shapeshifters are, almost exclusively, villains. In tabletop games dopplegangers, changelings, skulks and their ilk are uniformly described as sociopathic parasites, incapable of creating their own culture or art and instead using their abilities to usurp the positions of the humans (or elves or whatever) that were truly capable of creation and innovation. They steal identities, rather than create their own. The best role these fantasy races could hope for in the official narratives is that of a craven trickster, amoral but not overtly evil by birth. The idea presented here is that if people were free to take any form they wanted, they would be either unwilling or unable to stop. If you could be anyone as needed, why would you ever be anything for longer than it remained the most useful? Why would you slow down and make one form your own if you could just instantly be one more useful? Not putting the time into improving and changing one form, the argument goes, would translate into not putting the time into improving and developing an individual identity. Dopplegangers of D&D steal identities because their powers prevent them from developing a proper identity, and then the creativity to develop their own new forms. Its a pretty dim view of the fantasy of shapeshifting.
There have also been heroic shapeshifters in myth, folklore and pop culture as well, but those of modern culture all tend to be easy to identify even as they change forms. Stretchy super heroes Mr Fantastic, Ms Marvel and Elongated Man can change their body to any shape but it’s always still their body. Plastic Man has a wider range of forms, able to disguise himself as nearly anything, but still is always locked to the same color scheme and rad shades. He may be an end table, but his tell-tale color scheme means he’ll never be mistaken by the audience for an end table that isn’t him. There are exceptions, but they tend to be much more obscure (is anyone outside of a narrow slice of an already narrow slice of comics fandom going to recognize Chameleon Boy the way they might Ms Marvel or Plastic Man?). The one big name, the Martian Manhunter, is unique enough that he merits his own explanation later. As a rule, heroic shapeshifters change their forms, but not their identity. That is what separates the heroic, individual figure and the formless, identity-free masses.
Identity is hardly a static concept, but the idea that it is a single, unchanging form is pretty deeply ingrained in modern culture. Western civilization is not fond of those who don’t . Its even harder on those able or willing to shift between identities, or even just what western civilization has decided “should” be an identity. This is reflected in pop-culture, where cultures of shapeshifting villains are a mainstay of science fiction including the Marvel Skrulls and Star Trek’s Dominion Founders. Both of these space empires posit a formless existence as being the root cause of each culture’s descent into fascism and paranoia.
For the most part, the Skrulls serve primarily as faceless masses of aliens for the Marvel heroes to fight. Sometimes they are vaguely racist caricatures of whatever culture the average American citizen is expected to dislike at the moment. Sometimes they are not-so vaguely caricatures along those lines. Sometimes they’re just a convenient way to show super heroes murdering someone while still saying “see, they’re not human so our heroes aren’t, y’know, murderers for real!” We haven’t seen many specifics of Skrulls history or culture in the comics, and what we have seen tends to be from isolated writers not working together along any single storyline or plan. Yet it is from these isolated stories that interesting themes have emerged about why the Skrulls are who they are.
The Skrulls have the potential to take any form, and yet in their “natural” state they are all identical. Skrulls all wear the same uniform, all have the same basic anatomy, and even tend to have the same (aggressively sociopathic) personalities. Skrulls are also essentially parthenogenic. They have no “natural” gender or sexes, as any Skrull can become “biologically” male or female at will, complete with working reproductive organs. In addition they have been shown able to become any other possible sex present in any other species, complete with functional reproductive organs. Yet despite this, Skrull culture recognizes a very rigid cultural gender binary and is incredibly misogynist. Aside from a few notable Skrull queens, the glimpses of Skrull society we have seen have shown that women are second class citizens at best, barred from most positions of authority and constantly talked down to by aggressive male war leaders. Skrull women are expected to present themselves as possessing large mammalian breasts, despite being reptiles who cannot produce milk, solely for the purposes of differentiating them and of titillating the male skrull population. This weird dichotomy between a biology that explicitly rejects the gender binary and a society obsessed with it is rarely made part of the Skrulls’ appearance in the comics, but has provided several interesting Skrull “facts” in the background of two specific comics: Runaways and The Incredible Hercules.
Runaways (created by Brian K Vaughn and Adrian Alphona) is the story of a group of kids who, upon discovering that their parents are really a gang of horrible cross-genre super villains, run away in hopes of finding their own non-evil path. While their parents are quickly removed from the board, the legacy of their villainous ancestry continues to hang over them. One of the Runaways, a girl named Karolina Dean who discovers she is actually a rainbow-colored alien, ends up having to deal with her parents’ legacy of war and betrayal in a shocking way. A skrull named Xavin arrives claiming to be her fiance, and that their union is the only thing politically that can end a war her parents engineered that is destined to destroy two worlds. While at first she agrees only to halt the destruction of two people, Karolina and Xavin eventually grow to genuinely care for each other and remain involved even after the arranged marriage becomes unnecessary. Karolina is a lesbian, and Xavin originally presents as male. Despite Xavin’s insistence that skrulls can “change gender” at will, it still uncomfortably seems like a story of a male character tricking a gay woman into a romantic relationship. As we learn more about Xavin, this problem does get dealt with. Xavin was raised in the most mysoginist part of Skrull society, and learned to present as whatever would get them less abuse. In Skrull society this means male, and among the mostly-girl team of the Runaways looking out for their teammate and not trusting a space-bro this means presenting as female. As Xavin learns that on Earth they can present as whatever they want, they admit that they do not actually see themselves as either male or female as either humans or skrulls define it. It is not actually the story of a deviant shapeshifter using their power to trick women, but the story of a character learning to come out as non-binary due to love and friendship.
But while Xavin’s story shows us insight into an individual Skrull, it still doesn’t answer the question of why Skrull civilization is so fascistically uniform despite the potential of its power. For that, we have to look at the second comic I mentioned, The Incredible Hercules (by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente) and its tie-in to the 2008 “major event” Secret Invasion. Secret Invasion was, overall, a pretty dumb crossover event that mostly existed to do a comic about superheroes murdering vaguely Muslim foreigners without getting in trouble. So now the Skrulls were all religious fanatics for the first time in comic history, and in the main series this religion was as thinly-veiled a reference to how the average American viewed Islam as could be. The one actually good comic to come out of the boring alien splat-fest was the Hercules tie-in, where the various gods of Earth put together a squad of divine superheroes to fight the Skrull gods. Ironically, the one comic that actually dealt with the Skrull religion was the one to NOT stick to the lazy stereotypes of Islam. Instead, it created a new mythology that finally sought to explain the dichotomy of the Skrulls. When ancient Skrulls purged the non-shapeshifting members of their species, the last “Skrull Eternal” argued he must be left alive to serve as the template for all skrulldom. Without him, he argued, they would have no form to return to and be left without identity. The “default” Skrull form we see in all Marvel comics is an attempt to emulate this iconic Skrull eternal. His followers argue that through their devotion to him, they remain Skrull even when they take on the myriad other forms of the universe. Through their adoption of his presented gender, they remain male even when they take on the myriad other sexes of the universe. Ironically, Skrull fascism is based on the same obsession of idealizing form that makes Skrull shapeshfiting and rejection of form so terrifying to Earth culture.
Interestingly, the Skrulls debuted around the same time as another Marvel alien, the Kree, and the two became mortal enemies. The famous Kree-Skrull War storyline of the Avengers (1971–72 by Roy Thomas, Sal Buscema, Neal Adams, and John Buscema) told the story of the two space empires, locked in an interstellar cold war, who were more than happy to use our planet as a tool for proxy battles. The most advanced species in the galaxy were essentially barbaric, un-knowable, nationalist despots who cared not a whit if we lived or died other than as a tool for the embarrassment of their political enemies. Its a great old comic that brilliantly satirized the Cold War-era “nation building” our own country took part in. Both the Kree and Skrull were acting like Americans and Russians, though neither species could be pointed to as “oh THESE are us, the others our enemies.” The Kree were introduced as just as evil as the Skrulls, and arguably their history in the Marvel universe has been even more damaging to Earth. The Kree are genocidal, ultra-conservative space-racists who have repeatedly tried to wipe out our species to cover up their genetic tests on our ancestors. But while the Skrull remain perennial Avengers punching bags, the Kree became all but celebrated allies. The only difference between the two is that while the Skrull are deviant shapeshifters, the Kree are essentially humans, only sometimes they are blue. Marvel’s humanity would rather ally with a species that gloriously revels in fascism, so long that they appear attractive and consistent in form.
The Founders of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 are also ironically obsessed with form for a species without any of their own. The natural state of these beings is an orange goo that naturally takes the form of whatever it is in and effortlessly blends with any others it comes in contact with. The Founders only have identities when they are away from the “Great Link” they all congeal in. The Founders are also head of a far-reaching fascist empire, and see beings of other species, the “solids”, as barely sapient and unworthy of consideration other than how they can potentially harm real, amorphous people. The reason for this is once again tied to their shapeshifting’s effect on their culture and psychology. In the Founder philosophy, to take on a subject’s form is to truly know it. You take the form of a square, you ARE the square and you understand its square-ness in a way no being of another form could. To the Founders, humanity (and Klingons, Bajorans, Cardassians, etc) is no different than any other shape. There is nothing to know about other beings than their shape, and it is inconceivable to the Founders that anything could exist in one of the solids other than what their physical form reveals. Despite being a species without form, they have become sociopaths unable to see the world through any other lens. Like the Skrulls, it is only by teaching one of their outcasts, Constable Odo, that they can learn how our culture can liberate them from their myopic view and allow them to become individuals. Also like the Skrulls, their battle with Earth takes the form of sabotage and infiltration and leads to mass panic and paranoia.
While they are often used as a science-fictiony way of talking about cultural witch hunts, the truth is that races of identical shapeshifters do not tend to make very effective ones when we look at them too deeply. Sure, it is shocking that Star Fleet so quickly begins tossing aside its hard-won utopian ethics and establishes martial law to combat the threat of shapeshifters infiltrating Earth, but… There really WERE shapeshifters infiltrating Earth in that story. Witchhunts from Salem to McCarthyism are terrifying because there is NO real enemy to hunt. As soon as you introduce actual evil shapeshifters into the mix, especially genocidal fanatic ones, you create an actual justification for the witchhunt. It might be more “morally ambiguous” to give space McCarthy an actual space communist threat to fight, but real witchhunts aren’t ambiguous. McCarthy was wrong, and he destroyed lives. None of the women in Salem were brides of Satan, they were simply murdered. The moments where both the Kree-Skrull War and the Dominion War are most effective is when they focus on the sinister shapeshifters not using their power to actually infiltrate and debase society, but instead provoke the already paranoid, racist, murderous humans into doing the job for them.
The only big-name shapeshifting people that stray from the “lack of true form leads to sociopathy” template are DC’s martians. Usually, J’onn J’onzz the Martian Manhunter is the only surviving member of his species, but even when he’s not we rarely see any glimpses of his society. Whenever we see flashbacks to J’onn’s family and the destruction of his people, it always presents the same picture. Martians are all naked, identical and live in unremarkable, unadorned simple dwellings with no obvious art or aesthetics of any kind. They are pacifists who invariably get wiped out, either by natural disaster or alien invasion or their own evil twins depending on the story. J’onn always looks like every other identical martian until he comes to Earth and has to define a new form for himself. Is the best a “good” shapeshifting people can hope for a doomed life without individuality, art or even personality? Is J’onn allowed to be a hero without form because he’s so aggressively non-threatening and the last of his people?
The martians are not simply shapeshifters, but are also telepathic and have every power Superman possesses minus the heat vision. The reason they all walk around naked and identical is because they give no thought whatsoever to physical form. Like the villainous species described above, they simply adapt whatever streamlined form is best for the moment, and so most of the time on boring, empty Mars they all have the same form. Their skin is tough enough to not worry about sandstorms and they cam fly without wings, so a bland biped shape is fine. At the same time, they all possess incredible, worldwide telepathy, and so all their individual expression is mental. We create art of all kinds to try and convey ideas or feelings that are otherwise impossible yo express, but martians can’t even conceive of that problem. Why bother expressing yourself through physical fashion, art or speech when you can be understood so much easier and more intimately through telepathy? At the same time, the fact that everyone’s minds are open means its impossible to lie to anyone. The concept of deception and private thoughts are as alien to them as pants. Not that there would even be reason to lie, as you feel what everyone else is feeling and wouldn’t want to feel any hurt you caused by your deception. Nor would you worry about what other people think, because it would always be open to you. Shame as we know it doesn’t exist on Mars. It couldn’t if society could even exist in that telepathic environment.
Its easy to then write the last martian in Earth as a calm, paternal figure. One who sees our fear of our own weakness even as they see the strength we won’t acknowledge. Often J’onn ends up the bland “dad” of the Justice League, and this may be why J’onn is so often an important supporting character in team books, but has struggled to carry his own title. Its harder, but potentially more rewarding, to write the culture shock. The most interesting J’onn stories focus on just how frustrating the adjustment is. He can’t understand why we lie all the time. Even the little lies we tell each other that he can’t help but overhear drive him nuts and make us look immoral and petty. He could communicate with any martian more easily than he can with the people on Earth he’s grown closest too. In that interpretation he appears stoic not because he’s a wise, zen sage but because he is still learning how to communicate physically and verbally with people who are put off by “invasive” contact between open minds.
This dichotomy helps other martian characters than just J’onn, fleshing them out as interesting, unique characters in their own right rather than just a tragic backstory. One of the ongoing themes in DC martian stories is that martians LOVE trash Earth TV. Why? Because its impossible to read the mind of a recorded image, and the irrational and goofy behavior of badly written characters is pretty much the only art form that can surprise a martian. Teenage Miss Martian flees to Earth because its the only place she can lie about herself, but the allure of human deception is as dangerous and leading to sociopathic behavior in as humans imagine shapeshifting to be. Like the other sci-fi shapeshifters, they’re in a culture where they’re able to express themselves through form in a way he never could before, but unlike the others it isn’t a liberating experience. The awkwardness of a form-based identity for a being who intimately knows how that mindset is contrary to peoples’ true thoughts allows martians a chance to fear and distrust humans just as those humans project the normal shapeshifter fears onto them. | https://medium.com/videogames-of-the-oppressed/fear-of-the-shapeshifter-56740b52ab2c | [] | 2016-10-27 19:39:44.002000+00:00 | ['Comics', 'Star Trek', 'DC Comics', 'Marvel', 'Science Fiction'] |
We All Descend From Charlemagne | According to the myth of creation in the Abrahamic religions — that is, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — Adam and Eve were the first man and woman. In other words, according to these religions, we all descend from them. However, as previously stated, this is a myth and, as such, there is no evidence of it. Nevertheless, as far as genealogy is concerned, the “scientific tools” we have at our disposal nowadays can tell us really interesting things.
A common link
The Western Europeans are all direct descendants of Charlemagne, founder and Emperor of the Carolingian Empire from 800 to 814. This is what the geneticist Adam Rutherford claimed during a meeting at the Chalke Valley History Festival in 2017. Rutherford and his team at the University College London traced back through the European lineages to reconstruct a family tree that eventually links all of the Western Europeans to the first Carolingian Emperor.
Europe in 814 at the death of Charlemagne — The Public Schools Historical Atlas by Charles Colbeck. Longmans, Green; New York; London; Bombay. 1905
Charlemagne in pills
Charlemagne has been called the “Father of Europe” as he united most of Western Europe for the first time since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Before founding the Carolingian Empire, he had been the King of the Franks from 768 and the King of the Lombards from 774. His dynasty ruled over the Carolingian Empire until 888, when the Empire was divided into partitions.
A statistical evidence
The development of DNA analysis techniques has allowed Rutherford and his team to go back for hundreds, and even thousands, years along the patrilineal “paths” thanks to the Y chromosome and matrilineal “paths” through the mitochondrial X of the mother. If we consider that, as we go back in time, human beings are fewer and fewer and that among the “distinctive signs” of royalty there were fertility and descent — Charlemagne had at least eighteen sons — there are high chances of a connection. However, as over the generations there is a sort of genetic remixing, even if one were actually a descendant of the Emperor, he or she might not possess any of his genes.
The Coronation of Charlemane — von Carolsfeld — 1840
Conclusion
Yet, if one has been a European for a few generations, the possibility that he or she is a descendant from Charlemagne is statistically very high. We all have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. The number grows exponentially as we go back in time. However, this numerical expansion of the ancestors going back in time does not continue indefinitely. If this was the case, at the time Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor, our family tree would count 137.438.953.472 people, many more than those who were alive at that time, or today, or in the entire history of humanity. This means that, once we go back a few generations, the ancestry lines begin to “wrap” around themselves and look less like a tree and more like a web. As a consequence, each of us descends several times from the same individual. Anyone who lived in the 10th century and left a lineage is an ancestor of every European today, including Emperor Charlemagne. | https://historyofyesterday.com/we-all-descend-from-charlemagne-f7eeff988b52 | ['Michele Caimmi'] | 2020-12-22 09:03:22.069000+00:00 | ['Middle Age', 'Europe', 'Science', 'History', 'Genetics'] |
Dave Majesty Releases New Album “Born Official” | Dave Majesty Releases New Album “Born Official”
Written by: Julz Mancini
When we think about today’s music industry it is apparent that it has changed drastically over the years. With the introduction of social media, an artist’s ability to remain independent, and forever evolving sound and presentation of music, many forget about the fundamentals of hip-hop. Although many of today’s artists sound alike, if we listen attentively, we can still pinpoint the utilization of primary techniques initially developed during the boom bap era. There are still rappers, however, whom remain true to the boom bap foundation, instilling strong messages into the minds of their listeners. Many of you reading this may not hear of these artists and I feel it is my duty and honor to bring them into the spotlight, ensuring they do not go unnoticed. Lyricism, word play, extended metaphors, samples…all imperative traits of a true hip-hop artist. Dave Majesty is a hip-hop artist whom puts his heart and soul into his music ensuring that he leaves his listeners in deep thought.
Dave Majesty had a pure love for hip-hop at an early age. Being located in places like New Jersey and New York, Dave was constantly surrounded by the culture. With persistence, consistency, and talent, Dave has made a name for himself as an artist whom remains true to Boom Bap. Working with lyricists such as, Royal Flush, Miilkbone, DooWop, and Jus-One to name a few, Dave Majesty has developed his album “Born Official”.
Dave Majesty introduces his album with the perfect overview which includes different samples and scratching giving the listener a taste of his style. Following the intro, the listener is met with the song, “Friends” featuring artists Miilkbone and Royal Flush. “Friends” discusses the realities of their lives, portraying the importance of remaining cautious of whom they keep close to them. The track also touches on political and socioeconomic issues in which we are all affected by.
“It’s all hypocrisy. Democracy’s a mockery, from government rapes and robberies that keeps us all in poverty.”
Royal Flush and Miilkbone certainly add depth to “Friends” as their seasoned abilities enhance the dynamic of the song.
“I pay a lawyer and judge to beat the institution. You leaving stripping on poles to credit card boosting. You gotta jump shot to sell rocks. Whatever you do, you gotta dodge cops.” “My best friend’s 11; nothing less than a blessing. The exception, he ain’t have a real life lesson.”
There are a plethora of gems and lessons within this song. The artists’ delivery and story-telling combined with pure lyricism, keeps the listener on their toes as they await the next line. “Friends” is definitely a personal favorite within Dave Majesty’s album, “Born Official”.
As I streamed “Born Official”, I came across the song titled, “Living in Reality” featuring Jus One. This song was captivating from the very beginning, expressing the struggle and actualities of a hard life. With excerpts and samples displayed throughout the track, the listener can hear politicians, media, and celebrities perfectly detailing the realities we are currently facing. Dave Majesty touches the listener’s soul from the first lyrics he spits.
“Dear mom and dad, I’m writing you this letter because I’m stressing. Did you ever really think about your children is the question. I wasn’t there when God became your adversary. Everything about your evil ways became hereditary.”
Starting the song with these lines immediately introduces the listener to the hardships Dave Majesty has been faced with. It is lyrics such as these that, not only lure in the audience, but also allow them to reflect on their own lives further proving that Dave conveys strong messages within his music.
“Goodbye Sis” featuring Ashley Cox relays a heartfelt vibe as the listener can hear a guitar in addition to the soft and beautiful vocals of the songstress. Experiencing the loss of someone close to him, Dave Majesty pours his heart out in this song. Music such as this is a necessity due to its ability to assist the listener in reminiscing and coping with a loss they have experienced also.
“As long as I am alive and breathing, you’ll always be in my memory.”
During my journey through, “Born Official”, I was happy to come across “The Way I Spit It” featuring Doo Wop. This track is a prime example of both artists’ lyrical ability. From line to line, I was captivated by their presence, delivery, and talent.
“I’m calm, collected. My craft is well respected. I bring the pain with so much energy when it’s injected.”
Dave Majesty’s confidence enlightens and excites the listener as they embrace his lyrics. The title of this track is a flawless explanation of the content. Doo Wop certainly adds a vigorous feel to the song as he shouts out Dave Majesty and himself during the beginning of “The Way I Spit It”; another favorite for sure.
When we reflect on music during the 90’s and early 2000’s, hip-hop and R&B were an immaculate partnership, enhancing the vibe of both genres. Dave Majesty included the voice of Anna Peterson in his song, “Show Me The Way”, inviting the listener into the partnership in which many of us miss dearly. The listener can hear Anna sing, “Lord if you could show me a sign, then I will follow it”. This song reveals a sense of loss and purpose while trudging through the mud yearning to find your way in addition to revealing the fraudulence of those whom surround you.
“Some people artificial when the human mind strictly superficial. Their words be cutting through your skin tissue.”
It is with great excitement and relief, that I share Dave Majesty’s “Born Official” with the reader. The project is filled with crucial components in which typically deems an album a success. Well-known features, skits, samples, and true lyricism all coincide astoundingly to take listeners on an adventure through the mind of Dave Majesty. I am a firm believer that music is medicine; not only to the listeners but to the artist as well. To have the ability to create music is a pure gift. To have the ability to share it without fear of the unknown is pure strength and courage.
Be sure to check out Dave Majesty on all platforms! Click on the links below!
Instagram
LUM- an app for artists!
Spotify
Bandcamp
LISTEN TO “BORN OFFICIAL”! | https://medium.com/@yourdailyjulz/dave-majesty-releases-new-album-born-official-7eb421ba34ff | ['Julz Mancini'] | 2020-12-10 22:02:18.248000+00:00 | ['Hip Hop', 'Boom Bap', 'Rap', 'New Music'] |
SAM: Strategic Asset Manager | This blog is written and maintained by students in the Professional Master’s Program in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University as part of their course credit. To learn more about this unique program, please visit {sfu.ca/computing/pmp}.
1. Motivation & Related Work
Financial markets investment decisions are more than just crunching numbers. It is tough for the majority of us without any formal training to gain the necessary information to make investment decisions. An uninformed investor has various questions on where he should put money and how much should he risk. Hence, an intelligent system is required that can make use of the hypothesis that stock market prices are a function of information, rational expectations and the newly revealed information through news and financial reports about a company’s prospects. Therefore, we have an opportunity to leverage the power of machines to build intelligence harnessed from symbiosis of numerical and textual features.
Stock Prediction has been a famous problem but it isn’t solved yet, else the richest person in the world would not have been Mr. Bezos. Though there is a lot of work focusing on building models that can predict prices for the next day, there are shortcomings in the work for forecasting prices for a longer time period. Being able to forecast future values, and using these to further forecast values ahead is the strategy we adopted to help investors with their financial decisions. This strategy overcomes the low significance of a next day prediction for an investor who needs information bound on a longer time frame to make investment decisions. SAM is able to guide investment strategy by being able to analyse the trends of the market and help you decide BUY and SELL strategies to maximize profits.
2. Problem Statement
We aim to build a system that can evaluate an investment decision taking into account the stock’s historical performance, global news sentiment and company’s Edgar reports. While doing so, we have a few hypothesis that we aim to confirm. The questions we try to answer are:
Q. How can machine learning suggest investment decisions?
Q. How do changes in a company’s annual reports reflect a change in the company itself?
Q. How do uncertainty, sentiments and emotions help in analysis and prediction?
Q. Do global news and economic indicators play a role?
2.1 Challenges
Processing Edgar reports poses a huge challenge due to the size of the files and the variability in syntax differences among companies in their reports. [1] helped us gain a formal understanding of the processing of these files to download & process them. It was tricky to merge our analytics and ML work with a AWS backed chatbot into a single application to provide a fluid user experience in making stronger investment decisions. There can also be many short term factors that influence a company’s immediate stock price which is not easy for the model to capture accurately. In addition to this, feature performance varies for each stock and there cannot be a single solution to forecast stock prices for all the companies. Attention and efforts are required to hyper-tune prediction models for each company to capture insights and make accurate predictions.
3. Data Science Pipeline
Figure 1: Data Science Pipeline
To understand the pipeline defined above, we can break it into 4 components:
1. NLP on Edgar:
Using the quarterly IDX files, we were able to generate a master file for the companies of our interest. This file had the location of Edgar reports filed by the companies which were programmatically downloaded from Edgar servers. These files were pre-processed eliminating the HTML formatting instructions among others leading to a reduction in their size by upto 50%.
Uncertainty reflects a company’s imperfect or unknown market factors whereas sentiment would involve its positive and negative outlook. Both the features were generated to calculate a polarity score and uncertainty score used as features in the model.
Particular sections of the document had to be extracted to run other checks to test our hypothesis. Legal Proceeding section had to be extracted to perform text similarity and find if the changes in this section over the years reflect a change in the company itself. Similarly, Management’s Discussion and Analysis section was extracted to analyse emotions of the management’s outlook.
2. Data and Machine Learning
The stock price data extracted from Yahoo Finance API consisted of open, close, high and low features. All these four were averaged to calculate the mean price for the day. All the NLP features were combined with this price to prepare a time series data. After evaluation, LSTM model was chosen to make the predictions because it resulted in a lower RMSE compared to XGBoost. The model was hyper-tuned for parameters such as lookback days, batch size, optimizer etc. to get a better accuracy of predictions. Features such as economic indicators had to be dropped from the model to get a better output.
3. News and Wikipedia scraper
Global news was accessed using Google Cloud Platform and mined using BigQuery. Sentiment processing was done on 100 daily articles for data over 5 years to generate the global news sentiment feature. Introductory paragraphs and logos were scraped from wikipedia for S&P 100 companies to allow for a comparison tab in our dashboard that can help us contrast the average stock price and top stock holders for the companies.
4. Chatbot
Figure 2: Chatbot Architecture Design
We designed a chatbot using AWS services to help the user gain more information from a company’s Edgar report. We used AWS Comprehend which is a natural language processing service to find insights and relationships in text using machine learning. AWS Lex was used for building conversational interfaces into the application. BERT was hosted on AWS EC2 and files were stored on AWS S3 which were used to answer user questions on Edgar reports. AWS Lambda was used to run code without provisioning or managing servers and acted as the central co-ordinator between all the components to work with Lex and deliver the output. The UI was provided by Kommunicate IO and the javascript was embedded into the application.
4. Methodology
4.1 Data Collection
Stock Data: Yahoo Finance API was used to extract stocks data for each company from the year 2015–2019. It was then stored in a PostgreSQL database and merged with company information scraped from wikipedia. Data for top 30 mutual funds was also accessed through the API and stored in the database.
Edgar Reports: The 10-K files from 2014–19 were accessed from Edgar servers. A total of 483 10-K reports were processed and analysed.
Economic Indicators: Data for leading indicators such as BCI(Business Confidence Index), CCI(Consumer Confidence Index) and CLI(Composite Leading Indicator) were downloaded from OECD web portal.
4.2 Text Similarity
We used regular expressions to extract sections of interest from Edgar reports. For finding a change in company’s legal proceedings, a cumulative text similarity was applied over the years using Jaccard Similarity, Cosine Similarity and fasttext’s pre-trained model accessed using Gensim.
Jaccard Similarity has an inherent flaw due to which as the size of the document increases, the number of common words tend to increase even if the documents talk about different topics. Cosine Similarity, on the other hand calculates similarity by measuring the cosine angle between two vectors. This approach is advantageous because even if the two similar documents are far apart by the Euclidean distance (due to the size of the document), chances are they may still be oriented closer together. The smaller the angle, higher the cosine similarity.
During our evaluation, we found the feature cosine similarity to give more accurate results compared to the similarity obtained by using a pre-trained fasttext model.
4.3 Sentiment analysis
It is the interpretation and classification of emotions(positive, negative and neutral) within text data using text analysis techniques. Sentiment analysis allows businesses to identify customer sentiment toward products, brands or services. We applied sentiment analysis on 10-K filings to calculate the report’s polarity for the specific company and year.
4.4 Emotion Analysis
We extracted the Management’s Discussion and Analysis section to analyse the management’s outlook. To do so, the Sentiment and Emotion Lexicons developed by the National Research Council of Canada were used to give us text association with certain categories of interest such as joy, trust, fear etc. This can help us evaluate if the management is happy with, angry at and fearful of the market positioning and their targets.
4.5 Machine Learning & Forecasting
All the features from the Edgar reports, sentiment analysis on news data, mean price of financial instruments and economic indicators were combined to create data for time series analysis. The data was split into training and testing set. Before converting it into time series data, the features were normalized using Sklearn’s Standard Scaler.
LSTMs are very powerful in sequence prediction problems because they’re able to store past information. This is important in our case because the previous price of a stock is crucial in predicting its future price. We modeled a neural network using Keras with two LSTM layers, two dropout layers and a rmsprop optimizer with a dense layer for the output.
Generally a lookback value ranging between 20–30 days was used depending on the model’s evaluation for a particular company. The approach is to generate a prediction for one future time step using the 30 past values, adding the new prediction to the array and removing the first entry from the same array to predict the next time step with an updated sequence of 30 steps. Predictions are made for 90 days window to evaluate the returns from a financial instrument.
Figure 3: Rolling Window
4.6 Chatbot
BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is used to perform a wide variety of NLP tasks including question answering among others. Here we used a pre-trained model (BERT-Large), trained on SQuAD v1.1 dataset to answer our specific questions from the company’s Edgar reports. BERT is deployed on an EC2 instance and interacts with AWS Lambda function to provide the answer to the chatbot via AWS Lex.
Entity recognition is the process of identifying particular elements from text such as names, places, quantities, percentages and times/dates. Identifying the general content types can be useful to analyse the data in Edgar reports to compare them over the years and find changes.
Key phrase extraction can be used on a string containing a noun phrase that describes a particular thing. It generally consists of a noun and the modifiers that distinguish it. Each key phrase includes a score that indicates the level of confidence that AWS Comprehend has that the string is a noun phrase. Scores provided by Comprehend is then used to determine if the detection has high enough confidence and the top 10 values are returned.
Figure 4: Features of chatbot
Figure 5: Sentiment extraction
5. Evaluation
The features from the Edgar reports and features from sentiment analysis from news data does have an impact on stocks prediction. We compared our LSTM model against predictions that we got from using the mean prices as the only feature. RMSE and prediction for 90 days were used as a factor to evaluate the model. Depending on the model prediction, model hyper-parameters were tuned to get the accurate prediction.
Figure 6: Prediction over 90 days
Figure 7: Trend Capture for Segments
The model is able to follow the trend of the stock prices giving us an indication if the market will go above or fall in the future so that BUY and SELL strategies can be made. A single new prediction is made using past 30 days and a rolling window is applied to get the next prediction each time having the previous 30 days as an input.
6. Data Product
Below is a demo of our user interface where we can run analytics and interact with SAM.
Video 1: Frontend Demo
7. Lessons Learnt & Future Work
This project allowed us to explore the background of financial markets and experiment with factors that may influence price forecasting. We were able to apply NLP techniques to work with metrics of text similarity, sentiment analysis and emotion extraction. The machine learning cycle is an iterative process to experiment with a variety of features and parameters which guaranteed us to build a stronger knowledge base. Using the services by AWS, we were able to build an intelligent automated system to parse Edgar files and mine relevant information for analysis. We also gained exposure working with Dash which provides an easy to integrate application with Python.
In addition to this, we can conclude that more work can be done in the same field to generate better features. A company’s 10-Q filings can be equally important to have more accurate predictions. Also, company specific news should play a better role in influencing the stock price and we would look at ways to gather this information for better accuracy.
8. Summary
Our machine learning approach uses NLP features generated from Edgar reports, global news sentiment and historical price data to forecast future values. LSTM model was used in conjunction with a rolling window approach to forecast 90 days values. Based on the returns, BUY and SELL strategies are then offered to the investors. SAM provides an easy to use interface to make investment decisions. It allows us to analyse a company's historical performance as well as compare its uncertainty and emotion results. Live executions of AWS services makes it possible for it to mine NLP features as well as answer user questions on Edgar reports based on a pre-trained BERT model. We have achieved knowledge from this project with a future scope of further building new features and hyper-tuning models. The problem of stock prediction is far from over, still more features can be analysed to give a stronger result and capture short term volatility to secure investments.
References
Ashraf, Rasha, Scraping EDGAR With Python (June 1, 2017).
Journal of Education for Business, 2017, 92:4, 179–185. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3230156
2. Time Series Forecasting: A Deep Dive
3. AWS Documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ | https://medium.com/sfu-cspmp/sam-strategic-asset-manager-dd2d680a52dc | ['Anuj Saboo'] | 2020-04-20 07:33:30.344000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Chatbots', 'Stock Market', 'Big Data'] |
SEO Guide For Marketers | How to use SEO to draw customers to your brand | SEO Guide For Marketers | How to use SEO to draw customers to your brand EliteStart Dec 27, 2021·3 min read
The Quest for a Great Brand
A shout-out to those who attended our recent webinar on brand and SEO. EliteStart’s editorial purpose is to provide meaningful content that helps you with leadership, effective tools and other relevant information to support your marketing and business development strategy.
Here are answers to your questions posted during the webinar. There’s also a link to the recording.
Our next webinar will be about how to use content marketing to support sales and business development. Stay tuned.
Participant Questions
Does Google recognize title tags and keywords in sliders?
Yes
What does it mean by “own your brand” online?
The beauty of B2B is that the content on your website, with associations and directories, can most often be controlled by you. You can control the narrative; therefore, the messaging can be relevant (great for organic search), building prospects’ confidence and set the tone and voice for your culture.
Any opinions on ADA compliance for all websites (not just government) and if that may affect search engine rankings?
This is a good ADA Compliance article to read.
Anything to know about page names?
I believe you’re asking about the url for individual pages. Yes, these are relevant to search, and WordPress lets you customize the page name to align with your keywords and the content on that page. i.e.
How much does a person’s search activity determine the search engine results they see?
Google maintains a history of your queries and must allow access to it if a court order is obtained. For anyone that figures out your password (which easier than you might think), they could simply visit http://google.com/history and to see all of your personal web histories, it is even neatly categorized.
Where do you find good content to link to?
This is all dependent on what kind of content you want. Just linking to another website from your site is not the best thing to do. It’s better to curate the content that is relevant to your business and services offered. Because I work in A/E/C, sustainability and biotech, I search for content relating those industries. I use Arch Daily, Instapaper, RSS feed, LinkedIn. I primarily use the information for social media and write my own content then link to the full article.
What is the easiest way to differentiate you online from another company with the same name?
Obviously, you’ll have different URLs, which helps. If you’re in the same business, that’s a problem. The best way is to make sure your website clearly differentiates you from the other. We worked with a company and encouraged them to change their name, but another company had that name. Because the name of the company was three letters that they had for many years, they approached the newer company and asked them to stop using those three letters. They agreed. It does depend upon what the name is and how the problem might be worked around. To conclude, it’s always best to change your name to avoid the confusion. At one point, the studio was named Skyline Design Group. I changed the name because people were confusing my company with the trade show display company that just moved into town.
Is it an annual cost or monthly cost?
I’m not sure of the context, but I believe the question is relating to the tools for SEO research.
FREE
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Interested in Developing a More Robust SEO Strategy?
We can help. As an important part of your overall seo strategy, we know that search engine optimization can help set you up for success. If you’re interested in learning more, visit our website https://seattlewebdesigns.co/ to contact us and one of our SEO Strategists will reach out! | https://medium.com/@elitestart/seo-guide-for-marketers-how-to-use-seo-to-draw-customers-to-your-brand-54f7e0b028f6 | [] | 2021-12-27 00:56:50.790000+00:00 | ['Seo Agency', 'SEO', 'Search Engine Marketing', 'Seo Services', 'Seo Tips'] |
After 18 Months of Speculation, It’s Time for Answers on the Lab Leak Theory | After 18 Months of Speculation, It’s Time for Answers on the Lab Leak Theory Kyle Lamb Jun 21·49 min read
Since the beginning of the pandemic, questions have been persistent as to the real origins of COVID-19, but concrete answers have been virtually nonexistent. Skepticism of natural origins has been doused with fierce resistance before it ever reaches the tarmac for liftoff.
The official stance — that COVID-19 originated in bats, jumped species, wound up in a wet market in Wuhan, and infected an unknown patient zero — has never actually been substantiated after nearly 18 months of regurgitation.
It begs the question…why? As much as some in the media and public health want to paint any skeptic as a half-baked conspiracy theorist, they haven’t been able to prove a natural origin or disprove an unnatural one.
To be clear, despite a limitless number of anecdotes and enormous amount of circumstantial evidence, there is no ‘smoking gun’ that COVID originated in a lab in Wuhan. There is even less evidence of the notion that a possible lab escape was intentional, meant to bring worldwide destruction. But the fact there is so much evidence that research was being done in Wuhan on coronaviruses begs questions and demands answers.
Individually, these anecdotes cited that support a lab leak could easily be shrugged off as merely coincidental. But these are not isolated examples. That they are many, and collectively, you see holistically a larger pattern that makes it abundantly and undeniably clear that “gain of function” research — or enhancement of bat-origin coronaviruses meant to increase transmissibility in a lab — has been ongoing and persistent before and leading up to the outbreak of COVID-19.
What precisely is gain of function, anyhow? That’s really the crux of the story. We’ll get to that, and the events that follow gain of function, in a moment. But first, let’s meet a few of the key players you will keep hearing about to help provide background to the persistent drumbeats.
ANTHONY FAUCI, M.D.
Of course, by now, everyone knows Fauci. The 80-year old director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has never met a media opportunity he didn’t like. Fauci revels in his newfound popularity and through a series of discoveries through Freedom of Information Act requests performed on his emails, we’ve learned he also has Google Alerts set on his own name.
From The Daily Wire:
Revealed in journalist-obtained emails, Dr. Anthony Fauci had a Google alert for his full name and passed along an article about his sex appeal. Fauci pulled a classic humble brag via email in April 2020 when he complained to someone about a write-up talking about the Internet’s “sexualization” of the bureaucrat, titled, “‘Cuomo Crush and ‘Fauci Fever’ — Sexualization of These Men Is a Real Thing on the Internet.”
Oddly, the appeal to authority granted to Fauci-ism is not consistent with the common pleas heard over the past year such as the infamous refrain, “follow the science.” Often, anyone speaking out against the accepted narrative is shouted down if they are not an epidemiologist.
But remarkably, Fauci himself is not an epidemiologist. Nor is he a virologist. Despite this being the most popular criticism of other prominent figures such as oft-tarnished former White House Coronavirus Task Force Advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, Fauci is actually an immunologist by trade. Not to discredit or downplay his achievements or knowledge, but he has not actually practiced medicine in many years.
No, indeed, Fauci is a bureaucrat. He’s been nothing more than an unelected politician for many decades, who has moonlighted as a quasi-celebrity that enjoys his COVID-created fame. It’s important to note, by the way, the NIAID is one of 27 institutes and centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health (NIH). So any and all directives that from from NIH, apply to NIAID.
ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE INC
The ‘about’ section of the EcoHealth Alliance website describes the organization as being in existence over 45 years as a “global environmental health nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergence of disease.” Indeed, it maintains 501(c)(3) nonprofit tax status as a charitable organization.
We’ll see much involvement of EcoHealth Alliance in this story, as well as its principal players. For instance: the Daily Mail reported the Pentagon gave $39 million to the organization between 2013 and 2020. EcoHealth also funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the lab suspect of having leaked COVID-19.
The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells. A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA. But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government — from 2017 to 2020 — and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013. Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.
The $3.7 million grant cancelled by Trump came from the NIH. The NIH said at the time the grant, meant to study how coronaviruses in bats transferred to humans, did not “align with…agency priorities.”
However, in August, 2020, the NIH awarded a $7.5 million grant to the organization despite the uproar.
The suggestion that EcoHealth’s work no longer fit NIH priorities appears to be at a minimum ironic, given that at the time its award was canceled, the group was in an evaluation process for the grant announced Thursday. Research teams and institutes that wanted to be considered for part of a new network — called the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases or CREID — had to apply in the spring of 2019. EcoHealth was chosen as one of 11 institutions or research teams to be funded for work to determine how and where viruses and other new pathogens emerge from nature to begin infecting people. EcoHealth’s portion of the five-year, $82 million award will focus on Southeast Asia and the emergence of coronaviruses; filoviruses, the family responsible for Ebola; and paramyxoviruses, a family of viruses that includes measles and mumps. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH, said the new network will help the world prepare for future Covid-19 like events. “The CREID network will enable early warnings of emerging diseases wherever they occur, which will be critical to rapid responses,” Fauci said in a statement.
Concerningly, a 2011 tweet by EcoHealth surfaced recently where they rhetorically asked if China ran a better form of democracy than the kind found in the western world.
This is irrelevant to the tangible evidence of a lab leak, of course, but it is certainly an odd circumstance pointing to deep involvement with Communist China.
Random note: Google also funded EcoHealth Alliance. But it’s not clear that’s directly relevant to this particular story. It’s just one of many odd sidebars we find along the way.
DR. PETER DASZAK
EcoHealth’s president is Dr. Peter Daszak. Daszak is a British zoologist who also sits on the National Research Council’s Advisory Committee to the U.S. Global Change Research program. Ironically, or perhaps not, the NRC was one of two organizations tasked with reforming funding procedures to gain of function research after the 2014 pause. But more on that momentarily.
The ties between Daszak, EcoHealth, and China are not merely speculative or distant. They’re direct and he himself has been forthcoming about the relationship.
Appearing at a September 2018 roundtable hosted by the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN), Daszak is seen on a video that surfaced earlier this year boasting over his ties to China. He was asked about whether the involvement of the Chinese in U.S. business, academic, and scientific research affairs was worrisome.
“I think the rhetoric of the politics doesn’t reflect the science that I see. Our organization has been working in China, in collaboration with Chinese scientists and the government of China for over 15 years, supported by federal funding from the U.S. and federal funding from China, and it’s true global cooperation. We work on emerging diseases ever since the SARS virus emerged in China. It’s been a key issue for public health.”
Here, Daszak not only mentions his collaboration with Chinese scientists and government, but reiterates the involvement of the U.S. government in funding his organization and research. Keep that in mind.
His work in coronavirus research runs deep; probably too deep to be a trustworthy, nonpartisan source on the virus origin. We’ll see later that’s one of the reasons these questions persist. He’s been more of a roadblock to truth than an open highway.
WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY
A core component of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. This lab is a BSL-4 clearance, which means it’s permitted to handle the world’s most dangerous pathogens. It’s also the only one in China permitted to do so.
The biosafety lab is reported to be just 32 kilometers (~20 miles) from the Hunan Seafood market — which is the wet market said to be the genesis of the disease migration to humans. The official story is that no bats were ever kept at the lab, which has been echoed by the World Health Organization investigators, but a recent report from Sky News Australia has a video purporting to show live bats being kept in cages at the BSL itself.
The footage aired by Sky News was said to be from a Chinese promotional video released in 2017, which coincided with the opening of WIV.
It is unquestioned this lab has been known to have performed coronavirus research. That in itself is not particularly concerning. In fact, China is home to well over 100 bat species, and they carry over 400 known coronaviruses. So it goes without saying that research is important in that field, especially after the 2003 SARS epidemic.
It’s the enhancement of pathogens where the problems arise. The Wuhan National Biosafety Lab is reported to be a breeding ground of that type of research.
DR. SHI ZHENGLI, AKA, “BAT WOMAN”
The most well important person at WIV when it comes to coronavirus research is famed virologist Dr. Shi Zhengli, also fondly referred to as “bat woman.” Dr. Zhengli’s work at the center focuses on coronaviruses of bat origin. Her research was profiled in a March 2020 article published by the Scientific American.
Here, she details early concerns she had as to whether the virus could have escaped her lab.
On the train back to Wuhan on December 30 last year, Shi and her colleagues discussed ways to immediately start testing the patients’ samples. In the following weeks — the most intense and the most stressful time of her life — China’s bat woman felt she was fighting a battle in her worst nightmare, even though it was one she had been preparing for over the past 16 years. Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the team found that samples from five of seven patients had genetic sequences present in all coronaviruses. Shi instructed her group to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another facility to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.” By January 7 the Wuhan team had determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered — a conclusion based on results from analyses using polymerase chain reaction, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus, eventually named SARS-CoV-2, was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan. Their results appeared in a paper published online on February 3 in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.
Not surprisingly, you see the reference to Daszak. It won’t be the last we hear of him.
But despite the ‘golly gee, we were worried it could have come from here but relieved to find out that it didn’t,’ kind of harmless admission, more reasons to be skeptical have since surfaced. In May, a U.S. intelligence report released by the State Department noted three researchers working at WIV fell ill and were hospitalized in November 2019 with COVID-like symptoms. The official position by China and WHO is that the first patient with known symptoms was treated on Dec. 8, 2019.
Although the link to the lab performing research on coronaviruses is undeniable, it’s unknown to what extent they were carrying out this work. Speculation on motives of the Chinese ranges from a possible honest mistake trying to research coronaviruses for development of vaccines to a more sinister possibility — performing biowarfare research for a possible weapon to be released intentionally at some point later down the line.
RALPH S. BARIC, PhD
A professor in the Department of Epidemiology and also the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ralph Baric is another figure seen in almost every angle of links to Wuhan. Baric can be traced to involvement in gain of function research as early as 2013.
It was on Sep. 2013, UNC announced a $10 million grant from NIH “to study the pathogenic activity of viruses,” which is believed to include his now infamous gain of function studies.
“This new research promises to identify novel genes and genetic functions that promote virus pathogenesis in the host, leading to new targets for antiviral development and vaccine design,” Baric said. “Our group will focus on genes that contribute to highly pathogenic coronavirus infections, using SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV as a model.”
In December of 2014, he was a featured speaker at a symposium in Washington, D.C. to discuss the risk and benefits of gain of function research. In fact, after the Federal pause of funding in 2014, he was still apparently authorized to continue his own research contrary to the funding stoppage. But it’s not clear as to how or why because he specifically had said the opposite.
Baric told NPR on Nov. 7, 2014, that “it took me 10 seconds to realize that most (of the research projects) were going to be affected.”
“The NIH has asked me to stop those experiments,” says Baric, “and so we have stopped those experiments.”
This statement becomes especially more alarming when you see the events that follow.
In the interview, he denied trying to change the way SARS or MERS are transmitted. But at the same time, his answers were confusing and contradictory.
Still, his group has recently been tweaking the genes of the MERS virus. So is he making it more dangerous? “If you’re a mouse, the answer is probably yes, or at least I was trying to,” says Baric. Scientists study viruses in mice, so they can test vaccines and drugs. MERS doesn’t make mice ill. Baric wants to alter the MERS virus so that it can make mice as sick as it makes people.
GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH: WHAT IS IT?
Before we can go further, we must establish what exactly “gain of function” research really is. In short, it’s the enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). This makes them more transmissible and/or more dangerous for purpose of studying possible impact on humans.
Here is a brief background provided on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website:
Certain gain-of-function studies with the potential to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs) have raised biosafety and biosecurity concerns, including the potential dual use risks associated with the misuse of the information or products resulting from such research. On October 16, 2014, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced the launch of the U.S. Government (USG) gain-of-function (GOF) deliberative process to re-evaluate the potential risks and benefits associated with certain GOF experiments. During this process the USG paused the release of federal funding for GOF studies anticipated to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility among mammals by respiratory droplets of influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses. The NSABB served as the official federal advisory body on the GOF issue and was tasked with providing recommendations to the USG on a conceptual approach for evaluating proposed GOF research. The NSABB finalized its recommendations on May 24, 2016. The U.S. Government considered the NSABB’s findings and recommendations during the development of policy on gain-of-function research. In January 2017, the U.S. Government released policy guidance for the review and oversight of research anticipated to create, transfer, or use enhanced PPPs.
As mentioned in the aforementioned background, in 2014, the practice was paused by the Federal government in order to further study the procedure for funding the research safely.
The dangers of gain of function came to the forefront both in the United States and globally in 2011 after a pair of researchers announced they had modified and enhanced the H5N1 avian influenza virus into a genetically altered strain that spread among ferrets. The study created immediate an immediate stir.
OCT. 17, 2014 — U.S. GOVERNMENT ISSUING A PAUSE TO ASSESS THE RISK AND BENEFITS OF LIFE SCIENCES GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH
S ummary: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Department of Health and Human Services today announced that the U.S. Government is launching a deliberative process to assess the potential risks and benefits associated with a subset of life sciences research known as “gain-of-function” studies.
The White House Office of Science and Technology announced the pause, turning over recommendations to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to further study the issue and “begin the process of developing recommendations.”
Source: White House press release
Following this decision, the NIH codified the pause on funding of gain of function in NOT-OD-15–011 that same day.
The purpose of this Guide Notice is to notify applicants that in accordance with the October 17 White House announcement, the National Institutes of Health is instituting a funding pause on the provision of new funding for certain gain-of-function research projects, Federal-wide, so that a deliberative process can be undertaken to assess the potential benefits and risks associated with these types of studies.
An additional statement was provided by Director of NIH, Francis Collins.
After the pause, the government began the process of vetting gain of function. Although several projects were halted, not all of them were stopped. The research by Baric fell through the cracks somehow, although he stated publicly that his too had been halted.
In research that predated the pause, Baric continued to collaborate with the bat woman — Zhengli.
NOV. 9, 2015 — “A SARS-LIKE CLUSTER OF CIRCULATING BAT CORONAVIRUSES SHOWS POTENTIAL FOR HUMAN EMERGENCE” PUBLISHED BY RALPH BARIC, ZHENGLI-LI SHI, ET ALL
Baric, Zhengli, and others co-authored a study that published findings from work with the “spike protein,” commonly found in coronaviruses, in a genetically modified strand of SARS-CoV that was adapted to mice.
Abstract: The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.
Source: NIH / PubMed, Nov. 9, 2015
Immediately, the study was criticized. Concerns over the then-paused gain of function research resurfaced with questions of how this study was endorsed in the first place. Remember Baric himself had told NPR in 2014 that he was asked to pause his research.
Less than a week after going online, on Nov. 15, 2015, Nature Magazine penned a scathing OP/ED titled, “Engineered Bat Virus Stirs Debate Over Risky Research.”
The argument is essentially a rerun of the debate over whether to allow lab research that increases the virulence, ease of spread or host range of dangerous pathogens — what is known as ‘gain-of-function’ research. In October 2014, the US government imposed a moratorium on federal funding of such research on the viruses that cause SARS, influenza and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, a deadly disease caused by a virus that sporadically jumps from camels to people). The latest study was already under way before the US moratorium began, and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed it to proceed while it was under review by the agency, says Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a co-author of the study. The NIH eventually concluded that the work was not so risky as to fall under the moratorium, he says. But Wain-Hobson disapproves of the study because, he says, it provides little benefit, and reveals little about the risk that the wild SHC014 virus in bats poses to humans. Other experiments in the study show that the virus in wild bats would need to evolve to pose any threat to humans — a change that may never happen, although it cannot be ruled out. Baric and his team reconstructed the wild virus from its genome sequence and found that it grew poorly in human cell cultures and caused no significant disease in mice. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” agrees Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Both Ebright and Wain-Hobson are long-standing critics of gain-of-function research.
Although in general the funding on gain of research was still officially paused (apparently only for most), Daszak brazenly discussed it and his other coronavirus-related work in a February 2016 workshop in New York.
FEB. 23, 2016 — DASZAK DESCRIBES WORK DONE WITH THE “SPIKE PROTEIN” OF CORONAVIRUSES AT A FORUM ON THE ‘HISTORY & FUTURE OF PANDEMICS’
The forum, hosted by Sonia Shah at the New York Academy of Medicine, was aired on C-SPAN. Daszak spoke at length about the importance of identifying possible coronaviruses in nature that could make a leap to humans.
At the 1:15:38 mark of the video, which can be seen online, Daszak says:
“Some of these viruses will be killers and some of them won’t. How do we work that out from a viral sequence? It is not straightforward. So first of all, we are only looking at viral families that include those that have gotten to people from animals. We have narrowed it down straight away. Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative to the known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS — we found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them — some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein — the protein that attaches to cells — then we, well I didn’t do this work but my colleagues in China did the work, and then you create pseudo-particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses; see if they bind to human cells. Each step of this, you move closer and closer to could the virus become pathogenic in people. You narrow down the field. You reduce the cost and end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.”
Here, Daszak specifically mentions gain of function through the insertion of the spike protein. More notably, he says his Chinese colleagues were doing the work. That is an inference to gain of function research being done most likely at the lab in Wuhan and by the group run by Dr. Zhengli.
In an unrelated, yet sort of odd, twist, that forum panel was shared with Amy Maxmen, a PhD and reporter for Nature.
Earlier this month, a screenshot of Maxmen and Daszak on the dais together surfaced on Twitter. Maxmen, responding to a press inquiry from investigative journalist Katherine Eban, quickly fired back the screenshot was doctored. She claimed she had never met Daszak.
After Maxmen was bombarded with references to the symposium, where she can be seen on the previously mentioned C-SPAN video, and also a tweet on Feb. 23, 2016 where she proclaims excitement meeting Daszak and the panel, she acknowledges her ‘error’ and claims she simply forgot meeting him.
Although there is no linkage of Maxmen to the gain of function or COVID-19 story, it’s another in a long line of obfuscation and lies by public health officials.
Daszak, meanwhile, has continued to spill the beans on gain of function like a gossip columnist.
Making an appearance May 19, 2020 on Ep. 615 of the “This Week in Virology” podcast, Daszak tells host Vincent Racaniello how they had been enhancing a virus by inserting the spike protein, helping to prepare vaccine development.
“You can manipulate (coronaviruses) in the lab pretty easily. The spike protein drives a lot of what happens with coronaviruses — zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein — and we worked with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this — insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab.”
This is important. He is once again saying explicitly they’re taking the spike protein and inserting it into the backbone of a lesser virus. The spike protein is the cause by which COVID-19 has been so transmissible and so deadly. This is not proof they caused COVID-19, but this is admission they had certainly been engineering these viruses in labs.
JAN. 9, 2017 — WHITE HOUSE LIFTS PAUSE ON FUNDING OF GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH BY AUTHORIZING “POTENTIAL PANDEMIC PATHOGEN CARE AND OVERSIGHT” (P3CO) PROCEDURE
After the NSABB released their final report in May 2016, the White House evaluated the report and elected to permit the restart of funding of enhancing potential pandemic pathogens, or gain of function, but under the guidelines that each project must come with a benefit analysis that the rewards outweigh potential risks.
The White House said in the statement:
In particular, the recommended policy guidance implements the NSABB’s call for a pre-funding review mechanism for certain research proposals. Toward that end, the policy guidance recommends that Federal departments and agencies establish appropriate review processes if they plan to fund studies anticipated to create, transport, or use enhanced PPP. In their reviews, Departments and agencies are asked to establish that such projects satisfy eight specified principles, to assess the projects’ risks and benefits, and to develop risk mitigation plans that are commensurate with the projects’ risks. They are also requested to report the outcome of any such reviews to the OSTP Director, along with the associated risk-benefit analyses and risk mitigation plans. Projects that have been paused under the existing moratorium will now be reviewed utilizing a process consistent with the recommended policy guidance. Any projects that are determined suitable to proceed will do so with appropriate risk mitigation measures in place.
The full text of the new regulations can be found here.
DEC. 19, 2017 — NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH FOLLOWS WHITE HOUSE GUIDANCE, RESUMES FUNDING FOR GAIN OF FUNCTION THROUGH P3CO FRAMEWORK
Over 11 months after the White House issued new guidance, NIH followed suit announcing the resumption of funding through the P3CO process. the Director of NIH, Francis Collins, issued this statement:
We have a responsibility to ensure that research with infectious agents is conducted responsibly, and that we consider the potential biosafety and biosecurity risks associated with such research. I am confident that the thoughtful review process laid out by the HHS P3CO Framework will help to facilitate the safe, secure, and responsible conduct of this type of research in a manner that maximizes the benefits to public health.
The new procedure was codified by NIH with NOT-OD-17–071. In the background section of the notice, the text states:
On October 17, 2014, the U.S. Government announced that it would be instituting a funding pause on gain-of-function research projects that could be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the resulting virus has enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility (via the respiratory route) in mammals. During the funding pause, the U.S. Government undertook a deliberative process to assess the potential benefits and risks associated with these types of studies. Completion of the deliberative process resulted in the Department of Health and Human Services issuing the HHS P3CO Framework on December 19, 2017. The HHS P3CO Framework is responsive to and in accordance with the “Recommended Policy Guidance for Departmental Development of Review Mechanisms for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight” issued on January 9, 2017 and supersedes the previous “Framework for Guiding U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Funding Decisions about Research Proposals with the Potential for Generating Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Viruses that are Transmissible among Mammals by Respiratory Droplets.” The HHS P3CO Framework is intended to guide agency funding decisions on proposed research that is reasonably anticipated to create, transfer, or use enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). A PPP is any pathogen that satisfies both of the following: It is likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations; and It is likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans. An enhanced PPP is defined as a PPP resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.
The bolded portion is key. Any agency funding decisions on proposed research that reasonably anticipates to create, transfer, or use enhanced PPPs, must use the P3CO process. It is a PPP if the pathogen is likely highly transmissible and likely of wide and uncontrollable spread, and it’s likely virulent and to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality. Enhancing a PPP is anything that would increase transmissibility and/or virulence of said pathogen — such as inserting a spike protein, which is the mechanism by which COVID-19 and other coronaviruses are so dangerous.
Simply, if any research meets this criteria, it is supposed to pass through P3CO process.
DEC. 12, 2019 — UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL RECEIVES MATERIAL TRANSFER AGREEMENT FROM NIAID AND MODERNA FOR “mRNA CORONAVIRUS VACCINE CANDIDATES DEVELOPED AND JOINTLY-OWNED BY NIAID AND MODERNA”
It’s unknown where the documents came from, but a purported leak of Moderna transfer agreements made with the NIAID — Fauci’s organization — show a series of transfers made from NIAID and Moderna to recipients for the purpose of vetting and researching mRNA vaccine candidates. This in itself isn’t surprising, as Moderna has been targeting mRNA technology as a primary platform for commercial distribution.
However, one particular agreement stood out.
On. Dec. 12, 2019, this specific transfer agreement made to UNC-Chapel Hill was signed for by…Ralph Baric. The document specifies beginning on p. 105 the provider(s), NIAID and ModernaTX, Inc, “agree to transfer to Recipient’s Investigator the following Research Material: mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly-owned by NIAID and Moderna.”
Again, in a vacuum, this isn’t necessarily a big deal. Moderna had been performing mRNA research in collaboration with NIAID on many fronts, and one would assume a coronavirus vaccine was in demand due to the SARS epidemic in 2003. Still, given the questions surrounding gain of function research, the timing on this is extraordinary.
The agreement goes on to say the research material may not be used in human subjects. Although the type of research model is redacted as proprietary info, also redacted in the exhibit attached, one can reasonably guess this is likely “human mice lung” research, as Daszak has alluded to previously and references can be found in emails to and from Fauci. Baric signed off on the recipient page of this document on Dec. 12, with UNC’s Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) signing off four days later.
Then, a few weeks later…
DEC. 31, 2019 — “NOVEL CORONAVIRUS EMERGES IN CHINA”
In a press release issued in early January, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) country office in China was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. A preliminary determination of a new coronavirus was identified in a hospitalized patient with pneumonia.
The reported link to a wholesale fish and live animal market in Wuhan could indicate an exposure link to animals. According to media reports, the concerned market was closed on 1 January 2020 for environmental sanitation and disinfection. No specific measures for travellers are recommended. In case of symptoms suggestive of respiratory illness either during or after travel, travellers are encouraged to seek medical attention and share their travel history with their health-care provider. WHO advises against any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the current information available on this event.
Of course, this is not the full story. Even then, we didn’t know who was patient zero, nor did the wet market theory ever get fully vetted, clearly, as questions still persist.
But in addition to the intelligence report of three lab workers getting sick in November, we have ample evidence the virus could have been spreading sooner than the December outbreak timeline suggests.
In June 2020, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS) said traces of the new coronavirus were detected in that country as early as Dec. 18, 2019 in samples from Milan and Turin.
In their study, ISS scientists examined 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between last October and February. Samples from October and November came back negative, showing that the virus had not yet arrived, ISS water quality expert Giuseppina La Rosa said. Waste water from Bologna began showing traces of the virus in January.
Furthermore, health officials in France said a patient was known to have the new coronavirus in Paris on Dec. 27, 2019. Importantly, the patient said he didn’t know where he caught the virus as he had not travelled abroad.
In the United States, there is credible evidence showing the virus was here at least in December, if not earlier. From a report by the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal, published Nov. 30, 2020:
Methods
To determine if SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies were present in sera prior to the first identified case in the United States on 19 January 2020, residual archived samples from 7389 routine blood donations collected by the American Red Cross from 13 December 2019 to 17 January 2020 from donors resident in 9 states (California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin) were tested at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for anti–SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Specimens reactive by pan-immunoglobulin (pan-Ig) enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) against the full spike protein were tested by IgG and IgM ELISAs, microneutralization test, Ortho total Ig S1 ELISA, and receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity assay. Results
Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states.
If the virus was beginning to show signs of community spread in December in places such as France, Italy, and the United States, it assuredly was already being spread in China in November or earlier. And that is precisely what intelligence officials have said. In addition to three lab workers falling ill, they were warning a contagious of unknown origin was sweeping through the Wuhan area.
Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents. The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia — forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home. “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. “It was then briefed multiple times to” the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the “product/assessment” existed.
One can only speculate as to the reason(s) why China has attempted to delay, obfuscate, and hide the true nature of the COVID-19 outbreak since the very beginning. Sadly, however, they had help suppressing the truth.
JAN. 27, 2020 — CHINA AGREES TO WHO SENDING AN “INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF LEADING SCIENTISTS” TO BETTER “UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT” AND RESPONSE OF THE OUTBREAK AND CONTAINMENT MEASURES
The team was assembled initially to have frank conversations beginning in February 2020, when the WHO deployed representatives for the “WHO-China Joint Mission” to rapidly inform national and international planning on next steps in the response to the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19.
From the mission, the 40-page final report was issued Feb. 28, 2020. It included a variety of findings — some now known to be inaccurate — ranging form origins, to early mitigation by China, to transmission dynamics. More concerning was the international team, which took part in the February mission, that was reassembled in November 2020 to study the “origins” of the virus.
The investigation aims to find out how and when SARS-CoV-2 first infected people. Strong evidence suggests that the coronavirus originated in bats, but its journey to people remains a mystery. Scientists say the team is highly qualified, but its task will be challenging. “This is an excellent team with a lot of experience,” says Martin Beer, a virologist at the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health in Greifswald, Germany. The group will be working with researchers in China and professionals from several other international agencies, and will start the search in Wuhan — the Chinese city where the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was first identified — and expand across China and beyond.
But when we see the membership roster in full, a familiar name pops out: one with an exceptional conflict of interest — Peter Daszak.
From the WHO “Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus” page, we find members of the international team:
It’s remarkable that Daszak did not or would not have disclosed his ties to China and specifically, research done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in studying coronaviruses. We cannot expect an honest, or at least entirely fair, accounting of the true origins of the virus with someone with such a financial and vested interest in the outcome. Yet, here we are.
JAN. 31, 2021 — FAUCI RECEIVES AN EMAIL THAT SETS OFF A CHAIN OF FRANTIC AND POTENTIALLY ALARMING COMMUNICATIONS REGARDING THE ORIGINS OF COVID-19
It started with a simple link to a story, no text, just a reference to an article in Science Magazine forwarded to Fauci by NIH Chief of Staff Greg Folkers. That story, “Mining coronavirus genomes for clues to the outbreak’s origins,” authored by Jon Cohen, is mostly rejecting of the lab leak theory.
Naturally, Daszak was Johnny-on-the-spot to deflect and downplay any theory against natural origin.
Concerns about the institute predate this outbreak. Nature ran a story in 2017 about it building a new biosafety level 4 lab and included molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, Piscataway, expressing concerns about accidental infections, which he noted repeatedly happened with lab workers handling SARS in Beijing. Ebright, who has a long history of raising red flags about studies with dangerous pathogens, also in 2015 criticized an experiment in which modifications were made to a SARS-like virus circulating in Chinese bats to see whether it had the potential to cause disease in humans. Earlier this week, Ebright questioned the accuracy of Bedford’s calculation that there are at least 25 years of evolutionary distance between RaTG13 — the virus held in the Wuhan virology institute — and 2019-nCoV, arguing that the mutation rate may have been different as it passed through different hosts before humans. Ebright tells ScienceInsider that the 2019-nCoV data are “consistent with entry into the human population as either a natural accident or a laboratory accident.” Shi did not reply to emails from Science, but her longtime collaborator, disease ecologist Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, dismissed Ebright’s conjecture. “Every time there’s an emerging disease, a new virus, the same story comes out: This is a spillover or the release of an agent or a bioengineered virus,” Daszak says. “It’s just a shame. It seems humans can’t resist controversy and these myths, yet it’s staring us right in the face. There’s this incredible diversity of viruses in wildlife and we’ve just scratched the surface. Within that diversity, there will be some that can infect people and within that group will be some that cause illness.”
However, it did include a quote from Scripps researcher, Kristian Andersen, saying they couldn’t be sure.
“Until you consistently isolate the virus out of a single species, it’s really, really difficult to try and determine what the natural host is,” Anderson added.
Behind the scenes, Andersen was more doubting. After receiving a link to the article at 8:43 PM, Fauci had forwarded the email along to Andersen. Within two hours, at 10:32 PM, Andersen expressed his concerns as to the natural origin theory (on p. 3187 of the Buzzfeed email release).
“On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look
really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered. We have a good team lined up to look very critically at this, so we should know much more at the end of the weekend. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent wit h expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.”
Earlier that very same day, before telling Fauci the virus appeared to be possibly engineered, Andersen responded to a tweet by Senator Tom Cotton expressing doubts about whether the virus could have escaped a lab in Wuhan. He snapped back at the suggestion, saying the analyses are “completely flawed and wrong. They can safely be ignored.”
Shortly after the BuzzFeed emails were released, Andersen deleted over 5,000 of his past tweets before imploding his own account. Now if you attempt to point to Andersen’s twitter, the account does not exist.
Questioned before he deleted the account, Andersen tried saying his old tweets “auto-delete.” Yet the screenshots captured by several researchers, Twitter users, etc., were still being found right up to the end of May 2021 when the emails surfaced. Yet another bizarre claim in a long list of them we have seen the past year to explain away suspect behavior.
In addition to Andersen, Fauci forwarded the email to John Mascola, Director of the Vaccine Research Center at NIH, Jeremy Farrar, Director of Wellcome Trust, a British NPO and research organization, and HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), Robert Kadlec.
In the early hours of Feb. 1, Fauci sent a panicked message (p. 3221, BuzzFeed emails) to Hugh Auchincloss, the NIAID Principal Deputy Director telling him to keep his phone on and read the paper attached to the email so they could discuss. The attachment is titled “Baric, Shi et al — Nature medicine — SARS Gain of function.pdf,” which is the Nov. 9, 2015 paper mentioned earlier.
Fauci quickly followed up a minute later sending Auchincloss the Science article from the day before. Then at 8:19 AM, Fauci forwarded the 2015 Nature article to NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak marked “IMPORTANT” with the text, “Here it is.”
At 10:34 AM that morning, Farrar sent a group email to 12 others including Fauci, German virologist Christian Drosten, who was later appointed to the European Commission’s advisory panel on COVID-19, Andersen, and Collins. The email advised there would be a conference call forthcoming and, “(I)nformation and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps.”
A little over an hour after the Farrar conference call invitation, at 11:47 AM, Auchincloss responded to the Fauci email asking him to read the attached paper.
“The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH. Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work bas gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”
This is critical to understand. Remember after the pause, all resumed gain of function research was to be approved by the P3CO framework. Baric himself said initially he shut down his research by order of NIH, yet somehow, quietly, the study resumed with approval by NIH before the P3CO process was put in place in 2017. Further, they were concerned about “distant ties to this work abroad.” They were fully aware of the connections to labwork in China.
Fauci replied to Auchincloss with “OK. Stay tuned.” At 1:13 PM, Farrar sent an email about an upcoming 2 PM call saying, “Kristen and Eddi have shared this and will talk through it on the call. Thank you. Hope it will help frame the discussions.”
At 2:56 PM, Farrar sent an email to Fauci, Collins, and two others, asking if they could shut down the call and then redial in, advising it would be just a 5–10 minute break.
After Fauci responded six minutes later with a quick “yes,” Farrar rejoined the call, sending an email saying, “I have rejoined so a line is open if any help to rejoin.”
Then at 3:50 PM, Collins appears to reference WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in an email to Farrar with Fauci CC’d.
“Hi Jeremy, I can make myself available at any time 24/7 for the call with Tedros. Just let me know. Thanks for your leadership on this critical and sensitive issue. Francis.”
At 3:59, Farrar sent out an email to the group that was part of the call.
“There is clearly so much to understand in this. This call was very helpful to hear some of our current understanding and the many gaps in our knowledge.(redacted portion) I hope that is a reasonable approach, please send any thoughts or suggestions.”
A minute later, Farrar followed up to the previous email from Collins sent at 3:50.
“We are altogether as you know! Conversations with you and Tony, and Patrick and others — always great working with you both.”
An early morning Feb. 2 email from Ron Fouchier was almost entirely redacted, thanking Farrar for participation. Farrar responded later (p. 3128) to Andrew Rambaut with the other participants on CC, with a heavily redacted email adding, “this is a very complex issue.” He closed, “I suggest we don’t get into further scientific discussion here, but wait for that group to be established.”
At 5:27 AM on Feb. 2, Collins sent an email to Farrar, with Fauci and Tabak copied, saying he was available “for a call to Tedros.”
“Let me know if I can help get through his thicket of protectors,” Collins added.
Later, at 7:13 AM, Colins then emailed Farrar with Fauci and Tabak copied, saying “Really appreciate us thinking through the options…,” with a single line redacted after that.
Then, at 11:28, Farrar responded to Collins and Fauci with Tabak copied.
The link references a Feb. 1, 2020 story that appeared on ZeroHedge by Tyler Durden. The article published public discussions on Twitter from Trevor Bedford, Eric Feigl-Ding, and several other sources as to whether there were HIV-like insertions inserted into the virus genome sequences.
One day later, on Feb. 3, 2020, ZeroHedge was banned from Twitter
Meanwhile, on the same day ZeroHedge was banned, and one day after Collins, Fauci, and Farrar were attempting to get in touch with the Director-General of the World Health Organization, the official WHO twitter account tweeted about “rumours & misinformation.”
Another interesting email to Fauci came a day later. On Feb. 4, 2020, Farrar forwarded a message to he and Collins from an Edward Holmes, with the subject “Prevalence of infection and stage of the epidemic in Wuhan.”
Holmes, a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, sent a draft of a paper he wrote to Farrar stating it’s “fundamental science and completely neutral as written,” adding it was also “excellent basic science, which is a service in itself.”
Also in the email, Holmes noted that he did not mention other anomalies “as this will make us look like loons.”
Farrar asked for the draft to be treated in confidence. Collins responded that it was very thoughtful analysis, with the rest of his reply being redacted. Then, a response from Farrar was entirely redacted.
It’s not clear as to which draft Holmes was working on, as he was included in a few publications shortly thereafter. However, on Feb. 17, 2020, Holmes, Andersen, and W. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist from Columbia University, were already pushing back on the idea that the virus came from a lab.
Despite days earlier Andersen saying the virus did not appear natural, and Holmes saying the anomalies would make them look like “loons,” they were confident the evidence pointed to natural evolution.
“The SARS-CoV-2 spike appears to be the result of selection on human or human-like ACE2 permitting another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of genetic engineering,” the researchers wrote.
FEB. 19, 2020 — DASZAK, FARRAR, DROSTEN AND 24 OTHER PUBLIC HEALTH PROFESSIONALS PUBLISH LANCET PAPER ASKING FOR A SIGNED PETITION ASKING FOR PUBLIC SUPPORT AGAINST “CONSPIRACY THEORIES SUGGESTING THAT COVID-19 DOES NOT HAVE A NATURAL ORIGIN.”
The paper, published online Feb. 19, 2020 and included in correspondence in Vol. 395, Issue 10226, E42-E43, March 7, 2020, goes on to declare no competing interests by the authors. Daszak clearly wasn’t being truthful on that front. Like the World Health Organization international team inclusion, he had several conflicts of interest.
We are public health scientists who have closely followed the emergence of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and are deeply concerned about its impact on global health and wellbeing. We have watched as the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact, and share their results transparently with the global health community. This effort has been remarkable. We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),1 and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 as have so many other emerging pathogens.11, 12 This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine13 and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.14 We want you, the science and health professionals of China, to know that we stand with you in your fight against this virus. We invite others to join us in supporting the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of Wuhan and across China. Stand with our colleagues on the frontline! We speak in one voice. To add your support for this statement, sign our letter online. LM is editor of ProMED-mail. We declare no competing interests.
This was a clear push to downplay the narrative of the virus originating in a lab.
It’s important to note that on Feb. 6, 2020, Fauci received an email from Folkers advising him of an opportunity to be a part of another paper from Daszak, with the subject title of the email, “ASF — Morens+Daszak+Taubeneberger paper.”
Although the email Folkers is quoting is redacted, he adds,
“So the question to you — do you want to be part of this? ie be a
coauthor? I would vote no — it would look weird to add you as a coauthor now. Plus,
plate too full. …..”
This appears to be an invitation to participate in and a reference of an article later published by Daszak, David M Morens, and Jeffery K Taubenberger in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 2, 2020. The paper itself, titled, “Escaping Pandora’s Box — Another Novel Coronavirus,” isn’t terribly controversial but it also isn’t informative, either.
If anything, the paper reads like a subtle push against the narratives of being engineered or modified in a lab and a defense of Daszak’s own research into bat-originated coronaviruses occurring in nature.
Of course, scientists tell us that SARS-CoV-2 did not escape from a jar: RNA sequences closely resemble those of viruses that silently circulate in bats, and epidemiologic information implicates a bat-origin virus infecting unidentified animal species sold in China’s live-animal markets. We have recently seen many such emerging zoonoses, including the 2003 bat-coronavirus–derived SARS (an earlier severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by a closely related coronavirus), which came terrifyingly close to causing a deadly global pandemic that was prevented only by swift global public health actions and luck.1 Now, 17 years later, we stand at a similar precipice. How did we get to this point, and what happens next? We must realize that in our crowded world of 7.8 billion people, a combination of altered human behaviors, environmental changes, and inadequate global public health mechanisms now easily turn obscure animal viruses into existential human threats.1–3 We have created a global, human-dominated ecosystem that serves as a playground for the emergence and host-switching of animal viruses, especially genetically error-prone RNA viruses, whose high mutation rates have, for millions of years, provided opportunities to switch to new hosts in new ecosystems. It took the genome of the human species 8 million years to evolve by 1%. Many animal RNA viruses can evolve by more than 1% in a matter of days. It is not difficult to understand why we increasingly see the emergence of zoonotic viruses. We have actually been watching such dramas play out in slow motion for more than a millennium in the case of pandemic influenza, which begins with viruses of wild waterfowl that host-switch to humans and then cause human-to-human transmission. A bird virus thereby becomes a human virus. Coronavirus emergence takes a different trajectory, but the principles are similar: SARS, the Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS), and Covid-19 all apparently have their origins in enzootic bat viruses. The parallels between the two SARS viruses are striking, including emergence from bats to infect animals sold in live-animal markets, allowing direct viral access to crowds of humans, which exponentially increases opportunities for host-switching. Such live markets have also led to avian epizootics with fatal human “spillover” cases caused by nonpandemic, poultry-adapted influenza viruses such as H5N1 and H7N9. One human cultural practice in one populous country has thus recently led to two coronavirus near-pandemics and thousands of severe and fatal international cases of “bird flu.”
To be fair to Daszak, there was one line included in the paper that may have been a bit Freudian.
Cartoonist Walt Kelly had it right decades ago: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
MARCH 17, 2020 — ANDERSEN, LIPKIN, HOLMES, ANDREW RAMBAUT AND ROBERT F. GARRY PUBLISH “THE PROXIMAL ORIGIN OF SARS-COV-2”
In a public reversal of what was communicated the previous month in confidential emails, Andersen, Holmes, Rambaut, and others that had been communicating with Fauci came out with a definitive pushback against the lab leak possibility. The paper, published in Nature Medicine, suggested evidence supported natural evolution.
While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation. Theories of SARS-CoV-2 origins
It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone20. Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.
The remarkable part of the email communications is it’s never clear there was a change in their stance on the virus looking engineered. It would make sense why you would keep communications confidential for something embarrassing — or worse — but you would think they would be entirely eager to share great news with one another if they believed the theory was baseless. A breakthrough definitively pushing back on a lab leak possibility would be something scientists should be eager to share with one another. Instead, emails were sparse, dodgy, ambiguous, and vaguely self-congratulatory in the weeks that followed.
After weeks of no communication found in email correspondence, on March 6, 2020, Andersen thanked Fauci, Collins, and Farrar on their leadership and advised the forthcoming paper was accepted by Nature pending final edits.
By April, Fauci was pushing Andersen and Holmes’ papers to the media.
MAY 11, 2021 — ANTHONY FAUCI TO SENATOR RAND PAUL IN SENATE HEARING TESTIMONY, “DR. BARIC IS NOT DOING GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH AND IF IT IS, IT’S ACCORDING TO THE GUIDELINES AND IS BEING CONDUCTED IN NORTH CAROLINA.”
In a May 11 senate hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rand Paul had another of his many verbal confrontations with Fauci, this time regarding the origins of the virus. Fauci became agitated and defensive over the line of questioning.
When asked by Paul if Fauci still supports NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan, he counters:
“Senator Paul with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Picking up on Fauci’s attempt at a technicality, Paul quickly interrupts…
“Do they fund Dr. Baric?”
“We do not fund gain…”
“Do you fund Dr. Baric’s gain of function research?” Paul pins Fauci down further.
“Dr. Baric is not doing gain of function research and if it is, it’s according to the guidelines and is being conducted in North Carolina.”
Paul asks, “you don’t think inserting a bat virus spike protein that he got from the Wuhan Institute that he got from the SARS virus is gain of function?
“You must be in the minority because at least 200 scientists have signed a statement from the Cambridge working group saying that it is gain of function.”
“Well, it is not. And if you look at the grant and you look at the progress reports, it is not gain of function, despite the fact that people tweet that and write about it.”
“So do you still support sending money to the Wuhan Virology Institute,” Paul asks.
“We do not send money now to the Wuhan Virology Institute.”
“Do you support sending money? We did under your tutelage. We were sending it through EcoHealth, it was sub-agency and a sub-grant. Do you support that the money from NIH that was going to the Wuhan Institute?”
“Let me explain to you why that was done. The SARS-CoV-1 originated in bats in China. It would have been irresponsible of us if we did not investigate the bat viruses and the serology to see who might have been infected.”
“Or perhaps it would be irresponsible to send it to the Chinese government, who we may not be able to trust with this knowledge and with these incredibly dangerous viruses. Government scientists like yourself who favor gain of function research…”
“I don’t favor gain of function research in China. You’re saying things that are not correct.”
“Government defenders of gain of function, such as yourself, say that COVID-19 mutations were random and not designed by man. But interestingly, the technique that Dr. Baric developed forces mutation through serial passage by cell culture that the mutations appear to be natural. In fact, Dr. Baric named the technique the ‘no-see-m’ technique because the mutations appear naturally. Nicholson Baker of New York Magazine said nobody would know if the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature.
“Government authorities in the U.S., including yourself, unequivocally deny that COVID-19 could have escaped a lab. But even Dr. Shi in Wuhan wasn’t so sure. According to Nicholson Baker, Dr. Shi wondered could this new virus have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records frantically and found no matches.
‘That really took a load off my mind,’ she said. ‘I had not slept for days.’
“The director of the gain of function research in Wuhan couldn’t sleep because she was terrified it might be in her lab. Dr. Baric, an advocate of gain of function research, admits the main problem that the Institute of Virology has is the outbreak occurred in close proximity. What are the odds? Baric responded, could you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer is in this case, probably not.
“Will you, in front of this group, categorically say COVID-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory?”
“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done and I’m fully in favor of any investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“But you do support it in the U.S. We have 11 labs doing it and you have allowed it here. We have a committee to do it here, but the committee has granted every exemption. You’re fooling with mother nature here. You’re allowing super-viruses to be created with a 15 percent mortality. It’s very dangerous and it was a huge mistake to share this with China and it’s a huge mistake to continue to allow this in the United States. We should be very careful to investigate where this virus came from.”
“I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from. But again, we have not funded gain of function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology no matter how…”
“You’re parsing words. There was research done with Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric. They have collaborated on gain of function research where they enhanced the SARS virus to infect human airway cells and they did it by merging a new spike protein on it. That is gain of function. That was joint research by Wuhan Institute and by Dr. Baric. You can’t deny it.”
Fauci finishes by saying they did not fund gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It’s obvious in this exchange that Fauci got backed into a corner. He started off saying they have never funded gain of function research and by the end, he winds up making the distinction they’ve never funded gain of function in Wuhan. But he’s clearly arguing only a technicality as the evidence shows that gain of function research was being conducted, it was funded, and they certainly were aware it was being done in Wuhan.
Furthermore, he started off by saying they haven’t sent money to Wuhan and then he changed to we don’t now send money to Wuhan. This exchange, with his emails and previous knowledge as a backdrop, show Fauci had every reason in the world to be concerned. He knew there was gain of function research being done. He knew there were links to the lab in Wuhan. He knew Baric, Daszak, Shi, and others were involved. As Fauci has done so often, he’s denying and deflecting.
MAY 2, 2021 — ORGIN OF COVID — FOLLOWING THE CLUES
“Did people or nature open Pandora’s Box at Wuhan?”
As we pour through pages and pages of evidence, which only scratch the surface of what may have really happened to cause the COVID-19 global pandemic, we have only a fraction of the information necessary to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Still, it is obvious there is a mountain of circumstantial and tangible evidence to conclude a lab leak is a very real possibility. Whether it was purposeful or accidental in nature is less pressing by the information available, but the alarm bells are ringing and it’s time to put forth a thorough and honest accounting.
Nicholas Wade probably best summed the scientific evidence on May 2, 2021 with his Medium piece raising the issue. Although the scientific explanation is compelling, his opined conclusion is equally fascinating.
If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years. Nor have other scientists stepped forward to raise the issue. Government research funds are distributed on the advice of committees of scientific experts drawn from universities. Anyone who rocks the boat by raising awkward political issues runs the risk that their grant will not be renewed and their research career will be ended. Maybe good behavior is rewarded with the many perks that slosh around the distribution system. And if you thought that Dr. Andersen and Dr. Daszak might have blotted their reputation for scientific objectivity after their partisan attacks on the lab escape scenario, look at the 2nd and 3rd names on this list of recipients of an $82 million grant announced by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in August 2020. The US government shares a strange common interest with the Chinese authorities: neither is keen on drawing attention to the fact that Dr. Shi’s coronavirus work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health. One can imagine the behind-the-scenes conversation in which the Chinese government says “If this research was so dangerous, why did you fund it, and on our territory too?” To which the US side might reply, “Looks like it was you who let it escape. But do we really need to have this discussion in public?”
Dr. Fauci is a longtime public servant who served with integrity under President Trump and has resumed leadership in the Biden Administration in handling the Covid epidemic. Congress, no doubt understandably, may have little appetite for hauling him over the coals for the apparent lapse of judgment in funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. To these serried walls of silence must be added that of the mainstream media. To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces. One might think that any plausible origin of a virus that has killed three million people would merit a serious investigation. Or that the wisdom of continuing gain-of-function research, regardless of the virus’s origin, would be worth some probing. Or that the funding of gain-of-function research by the NIH and NIAID during a moratorium on such funding would bear investigation. What accounts for the media’s apparent lack of curiosity?
The virologists’ omertà is one reason. Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses. So when their sources won’t help, these journalists are at a loss. Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory. During the Trump Administration, they had no trouble in rejecting the position of the intelligence services that lab escape could not be ruled out. But when Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of National Intelligence, said the same thing, she too was largely ignored. This is not to argue that editors should have endorsed the lab escape scenario, merely that they should have explored the possibility fully and fairly. People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true. And then let the reckoning begin.
The reckoning needs to begin. If a small number of scientists, researchers, and public health officials directly or indirectly led to a global pandemic with their reckless disregard for safety, we need these answers. And we need to know why, then, they were allowed to cover their tracks if that is indeed what happened. From Google to Twitter, to the New York Times to the rest of corporate media, to the CDC to WHO, to NIH and everyone in between, if there is an untold story, it is because it was censored and many people were dismissed as deranged conspiracy loons along the way.
It’s time to investigate this once and for all. | https://medium.com/@kylamb/after-18-months-of-speculation-its-time-for-answers-on-the-lab-leak-theory-a3f3fa1e3fc0 | ['Kyle Lamb'] | 2021-06-21 23:04:08.875000+00:00 | ['Covid', 'Lab Leak', 'Anthony Fauci', 'Gain Of Function', 'Coronavirus'] |
Microcopy: an essential guide to becoming a more literate designer | The obvious difference between these two onboarding visuals is that option A is devoid of words and is absolutely useless. No direction, no guidance, or calls to action, nada. This point is so blindingly obvious (I’m yelling at the screen), that it’s impossible to deny.
Over many years, I have noticed designers having a blind spot for words and language, leaving it till the last minute to dollop text unceremoniously from a height onto the beautifully rendered design. Not through any malice of designers, but through the demands and expectations of the job. I have been guilty of doing this myself. We are all sinners and I am now flagellating myself in public.
Make or break the user experience
Microcopy is the small text you find on websites and apps such as button text, section captions, page titles, form labels and error messages. Small words have a big impact, visually and psychologically, but this separation of words and image in our visual mind is an easy trap for designers to fall into.
I like to think of microcopy and textual content as another design element that can make or break a user experience.
Good microcopy helps the user navigate their way through a digital experience, maximising meaning in a condensed manner, and with space at a premium, every word should count.
Don’t be mere decorators, be literate designers
Being a literate designer means paying attention to the text, thinking of microcopy as an essential consideration in the design process, an element that can alter the concept, and influence the solution. Aesthetics and words go hand in hand. It is also a basic skill that all designers should cultivate.
Why don’t we do it? Well, it can be bloody hard work to write good microcopy that serves the user well. If the budget allows, we can bring on UX writers to our team, which is ideal, but in reality, many companies see this as a luxury they can’t afford.
In the absence of those dedicated UX writers out there, we need to become more rounded designers and start crafting better microcopy.
Graphic designer Lucine Robert wrote some time ago that, ‘Designers are not just decorators and aesthetes — pattern-makers using letterforms as their palette of marks — but individuals responsible for the intake of information.’
Examples of microcopy
I’m almost fond of these classic and spectacularly awful error messages you see from time to time, even though they cause heartburn.
Really?
Arghhh, I don’t know what to read. My eyes are bleeding.
But let’s not concentrate on the bad. When done correctly, we immediately reposed to well written, clear, and concise microcopy.
Mailchimp signup
Mailchimp is renowned for its friendly tone using clear titles, unambiguous supplementary text, and clearly presented password rules.
FigJam onboarding
Figma’s whiteboard tool uses attractive tooltip onboarding to guide the user. What works here is the combination of good visuals with clear text.
Asana Messages
The well-considered input placeholder text guides the user. I like the hint text on the side panel. The well-placed text to the left of the Discard and Send buttons gives reassurance, and alerts the user to the number of people being notified.
The Noun Project password reset
The Noun Project injects a little dry humour in what is an inconvenience, yet it is also clear what will happen next.
What all these screens have in common is clarity, with well-written sentences that tell the user what to do or what will happen. Yet they also have a hint of personality, and don’t feel like an afterthought.
The important roles of microcopy
Microcopy fulfills a wide brief and has many roles | https://uxdesign.cc/microcopy-an-essential-guide-to-becoming-a-more-literate-designer-2472d02b4eb8 | ['David Hall'] | 2021-05-29 21:38:47.456000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'Ux Writing', 'Writing', 'User Experience', 'Microcopy'] |
Why a Small Business Website is Critical in 2017 | Websites are the most important communication channels of the Digital Age.
The Verisign research conducted in 2015 has determined that 9 out of 10 consumers rely on the internet when trying to locate companies, products, and services they need.
With this in mind, we can’t understand why more than 46% of small businesses don’t have their web presentations.
If you run a company, there are dozens of reasons why you should create a small business website and start promoting your services online.
In this article, we sum up these reasons and list all the benefits a website can bring to a small or a medium-sized enterprise.
A small business website will help you…
#1… To present your work
Companies spend thousands of dollars on creating and distributing their marketing materials.
Small businesses usually don’t have enough money to print good-quality brochures and give them out to potential customers.
The easiest and the most affordable way for bypassing this complicated printing and distributing operation is to upload your brochure to your website or (even better) to create a new mini-website, which serves as a one-page product or service presentation.
In addition to these benefits, websites also offer lots of customization options and a long list of content formats.
For example, online presentations can include videos and audio recordings, while the printed brochures are limited to photos, graphics and text.
#2… To sell your products
Both production and retail businesses need a website to enter the dynamic and highly profitable eCommerce market.
eCommerce is one of the fastest growing digital niches.
This business model allows small companies to overcome the distance gaps and offer their products to international customers.
Unlike classic retail business models, eCommerce doesn’t require entrepreneurs to rent stores or hire salespeople.
Therefore, it drastically cuts their costs and allows them to reinvest the money they’ve saved.
There are thousands of small retail businesses that are being run from home offices and even more production companies that exclusively use the eCommerce model for selling their goods.
Setting up an online store is now easier than ever.
Webmasters can create online stores on WordPress by using the WooCommerce plugin.
The eCommerce beginners and those who find this CMS too difficult can also use all-in-one commercial solutions, like Shopify or Volusion.
These platforms allow them to upload product information, set their prices, conduct sales and communicate with their customers.
Related Article: How to Brand a Small Business
#3… To use content marketing
Content marketing is the key to many successful branding strategies.
In the Digital Era, consumers are bombarded with commercial offers.
Content marketing answers consumers’ need for useful and interesting stories, and according to Jayson DeMers, it represents the best digital marketing strategy for the long run.
Posting relevant and good-quality content on the company’s website and social media timeline increases the domain authority and improves the page’s SEO.
The content can also be used for social media advertising and for establishing relationships with other small business websites, by building and sharing links.
Some social networks offer blogging features to their users.
Facebook recently introduced its Notes app and Tumblr is a crossover between a social network and a standard blogging platform.
Article posting on these networks can also boost company’s brand visibility, but with a standard on-site blog, you’ll have much better chances to the content marketing benefits.
Of course, you shouldn’t stick to the classic text blog format.
If you want to improve your content marketing strategy, start adding other forms of content, like videos, podcasts, infographics, photos, etc.
#4… To produce more revenue
Many successful companies use their small business website and blogs as an alternative revenue source.
You can monetize your website in many different ways.
These are some of the business models you can use to turn your website traffic into revenue:
Affiliate marketing — uses your website to promote other people’s products. You earn money from every purchase your website visitors make. Affiliate marketing is a classic PPC scheme, and it’s a pretty straightforward, especially if you use it through bigger affiliate marketing platforms like Amazon Associates or Google AdSense.
Selling banner space — can bring significant revenue if your website attracts a lot of traffic. You can advertise the banner space directly on the website and wait for other companies to give you an offer. Of course, you shouldn’t accept offers from your competitors.
Become a consultant — and advertise your offer through your website. Experts from various niches are becoming consultants because this is an interesting and hassle free way for earning an extra buck. An attractive website, with a helpful and interesting blog section, is the best channel for advertising your consultancy services.
Auction your website — and sell it to the best buyer. If you decide to quit your business or transfer it to another web page, you can easily sell your website to the highest bidder. The websites with very high traffic can be sold for millions of dollars.
Related Article: How Small Businesses Can Work With Designers
#5… To increase the value of your business
In the Digital Era, the looks and the UX of your website have become relevant criteria for evaluating your whole business operation.
For example, if you’re applying for a small business loan, the bank manager will take into account the information they find on your website and compare it with other business and financial data, before making the decision.
Customers prefer companies with attractive and usable websites, to those with outdated web presentations or the ones that use various social media accounts for promoting their services.
The website also gives you more influence.
With interesting and useful content, you can influence consumers’ decisions and draw them into your sales funnel.
#6… To keep your customers informed
Websites are the number one communication tool for businesses today.
They can serve as digital bulletin boards, through which entrepreneurs can inform their customers about new products, features, and discounts.
Every price change should be displayed on the company’s websites to avoid any misunderstandings.
ECommerce websites should also have attractive and informative product pages.
These pages display more information about the products.
They often contain detailed imagery, various certifications and declarations and product videos. Some product pages also contain the links to product manufacturer’s website, where visitors can find more details about the production process.
Related Article: Custom Logo design for a Small Business
#7… To acquire leads
The website is the best lead generation tool.
Entrepreneurs should collect visitors’ emails by offering various promotional packages in return.
These promotional packages should include gift cards, free eBooks, free software, a newsletter service or various other incentives.
Once you generate an email contact list, you can use it as a basis for the future email marketing strategies.
Entrepreneurs can further customise these lists with the help of email marketing programs and tools, like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor or Constant Contact.
Collecting leads also allows small business website owners to implement remarketing strategies and target the checkout dropouts.
#8… To improve customer service
Although the social networks are often used for different forms customer communication, company websites are still the main customer service hubs.
Website customer service should start the long before the first (human) contact is established.
Unlike, Facebook and Twitter, websites can contain FAQ and Troubleshooting pages, which allow customers to search for answers themselves.
They also contain detailed guidelines for ordering products and services, as well as eCommerce platforms that allow customers to buy products without getting in touch with company personnel.
Customers who need support can directly contact company’s support department through website contact forms.
If you are using WordPress, you’ve probably heard about the Contact Form 7.
It is the simplest and the most brilliant contact form plugin, built out of a few customizable lines of HTML code.
Some business websites also include a live chat feature, which allows visitors to directly contact the website administration, Sales or Support department and receive answers to their queries.
Related Article: How to Create a Portfolio Website Using Wordpress
#9… To expand your business
Brick and mortar businesses have their limitations.
They are focused on local communities and people who pass through the area.
Websites can be viewed from any part of the world, and they work 24 hours per day.
The ability to expand the market is one of the most lucrative benefits, which can help entrepreneurs to turn their small businesses into large corporate enterprises.
New CMSs come with wide variety of localisation features.
It means that the website navigation, commands, calls to action and content can be automatically translated to match the visitor’s language and other regional preferences.
#10… To analyse your business operation
The websites have incredible analytic capabilities.
Even if you use a free Google Analytic tool, you can find out: your visitors’ browsing patterns, operational systems and the search queries they’ve made.
All this data can be used for adjusting the website’s navigation to achieve the best possible conversion rate.
Advanced analytics also help entrepreneurs to adjust their product and service features with customers’ needs and wishes.
Related Article: 3 Ways Effective Web Design Increases Your Ecommerce Conversions
Do you need a small business website?
The days when consumers needed to browse the bulky Yellow Page books to find small businesses of their choice are long gone, and they won’t be coming back.
Many people thought that social networks and third-party platforms would eventually make small business websites outdated and obsolete.
But easy-to-use CMSs came to the rescue and turned websites into digital entities with the highest promotional significance.
Today, both the biggest corporate entities and one-man businesses need to operate the great looking web presentations to attract consumers to keep them loyal and engaged. | https://medium.com/inkbot-design/why-a-small-business-website-is-critical-in-2017-82568ea5502e | ['Inkbot Design'] | 2017-02-09 12:58:46.214000+00:00 | ['Affiliate Marketing', 'Small Business', 'Ecommerce', 'Web Design', 'Web Development'] |
Real Example of ROI in Supply Chain Automation | Everyone is talking about automation these days. You have probably heard of Robotic Process Automation, Digital Transformation, AI, Blockchain, IoT, and many other tech themes. But what is the ROI of leveraging this kind of technology? Is it actually valuable, or a way for vendors like Microsoft to grow your invoice every month?
Dow Chemical as a Case Study in AI
Dow Chemical recently shared information on an automation project focused on improving tariff reporting. Dow has 150,000 shipments per year that must be classified using codes from the Harmonized System (HS). To do tariff classification, an analyst has to have an understanding of the components in the materials, the properties of the materials, regulations of the materials, and many other factors. Dow utilized the documents their analysts had generated for years, to train an AI system capable of labeling shipments with the correct HS code.
If we are generous and assume that the average analyst at Dow can classify a shipment in 5 minutes, Dow will need to dedicate 12,500 man-hours a year, solely to classification. However, the errors also come with a penalty. Dow estimated that 30% of their classifications had errors. For the sake of simplification, we will assume customs will apply a penalty of 40% of the shipment value for each incorrect filing. But realistically, we can assume customs will only notice the error 1 out of 1000 times. We will fix the average dollar value of a Dow shipping container at $38,000, based on insurance information. For the sake of simplicity, we will underestimate and assume Dow only ships one container per shipment
Total Fines = Shipments x Error Rate x Customs Catch Rate x Shipment Value x Penalty
The full-time employee hours per year is 2080 hours, according to the US Office of Personel Management. The current task of tariff classification, therefore, requires 6 analysts. Assuming this task is given to junior team members, each would cost $53,000 a year, ignoring benefits. That means $318,000 of personnel costs.
Total cost = Cost of Fines + Cost of Labor
Tariff classification could cost Dow nearly $1 Million per year between manpower and fines. We’ll assume 80% of the cases are easy enough to be automated because of the 80/20 rule. We will also conservatively assume that errors were reduced by half and the cost to maintain the automation is $100,000 a year. That still yields nearly $650,000 in savings per year. Even if we assume they had a sizable implementation budget of $500,000. That is still a 650% ROI on a 5-year time horizon.
You don’t have to be Dow Chemical to Benefit
Most firms simply do not have the operational scale of Dow Chemical. However tens of thousands of dollars per year are spent on repetitive tasks that could be automated such as tariff classification. Like Dow Chemical, the information necessary to build automated systems already exists but is likely trapped in websites, documents, and siloed datasets that enterprises don’t have the tools to leverage. For the longest time, only the largest enterprises had access to cutting edge technology by spending large sums on innovation hubs and data science teams. Companies such as Constellation are making this technology more affordable for all enterprises.
To our Supply Chain community: we’re curious to hear about your experiences in automating manual processes, especially those involving documents. Please get in touch at [email protected] if you have a point of view to share.
Constellation is a platform to integrate, link, and enrich enterprise data; to learn more, visit our website. | https://medium.com/constellation-technologies/real-example-of-roi-in-supply-chain-automation-938d26c2b53b | [] | 2020-07-21 15:50:52.654000+00:00 | ['Logistics', 'Manufacturing', 'Digital Transformation', 'Supply Chain', 'Roboticprocessautomation'] |
An Irrevocable Condition: First Pitch in Oxford | Fly away home, little boy. Fly from school and the people you don’t know and the games you don’t understand to a television transmission from inside the ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field. When the old stadium still did not have lights, so they played their games during the day. When even the World Series was played during the day. When Florida did not have a professional team but Montreal did. Fly to the warm and reassuring Windsor-knotted voice of Jack Brickhouse. To the inexplicable Hall of Fame anger of Leo Durocher and the studied uncouth of the bleacher bums. To teach yourself this game and insert it into your consciousness during dull afternoons, because, if truth be told, during these pre-cable, Nixonian days, it’s the only thing on television after school that even a five-year-old can watch without losing his mind. Fly away to all of this to grow up in America in this way.
Now drive, little boy, out of the years, out of the City of Brotherly Love, past old Fort Duquesne, across the good river and the crossroads and onto the prairie to the gateway. Then down through the cradle of the civil war, past Elvis and the Lorraine into the Delta, to prove to yourself again that the old man was right, that the past is not dead, it’s not even past. To where Meredith walked. And Manning played. And to where your ninety-year old uncle will throw out the first pitch tonight at his alma mater.
I am back in Oxford again, back after many years, for a family occasion, as they are all always family occasions. The last time was to watch my cousin play his last college baseball game. Decades have spun past since that spring day, marriages and families and deaths and lives and now I am back, to watch his father, who also attended this school but in those pre-civil rights days, to watch him take the field, finally.
Because it was supposed to happen before. Two years ago he began warming up, amidst the snow and ice in what passes for spring in Chicago, his hometown. Getting in shape because he refused to be like the other alumni he’d seen throw out pitches. Old withered half-men standing nearly at the batter’s box, making some pathetic, arthritic lob that the catcher has to field like some damn shortstop on the second or third hop. He was going to throw from the pitcher’s mound, and send a strike into the catcher’s mitt that you’d hear in centerfield. He was going to throw from the pitcher’s mound, or he was going to die trying.
Which is how he ended up in the hospital. And why now, two years later, I am making this cross-country pilgrimage to this dark county of the Old Moster’s vision, north of Parchman, and east of the crossroads. Where the air in April is sweet and heavy with the scent of magnolia and wisteria. My uncle is down there on the field already, in front of the Ole Miss dugout, warming up, throwing to players. I watch him talking to the kids around him as he throws, as easy and smooth as if he’s been doing it all his life. Which he has, of course.
This is not his first time back of course, not by a long stretch. Many is the time he will load up his big car and drive down for golf, for camaraderie, for the games. He used to stop off in Vicksburg and see his old pal Kayo Dotley who set football records for Ole Miss and did a stint with the Bears in the Papa Bear years. My mom is always getting a call from him while he’s on his way south, chastising her for not coming with him. Hell, he even has season tickets to the baseball games.
Just around the time I begin to worry that he’s about to pitch himself out, the handlers begin to direct him out to the pitcher’s mound. My cousin walks with him as the Public Address Announcer begins recounting his sporting life to the eleven thousand who have packed Swayze Field. Of his feats here at Ole Miss. Of his years as an umpire and referee in the Big Ten. Of the accolades and the awards he accumulated over his ninety years. And then the PA mentions the tryouts with the major league teams and his life for a few years in the minors, and I am reminded of a family story, which may be apocryphal, or which may not. The story is this.
After my uncle graduated from Ole Miss, he attracted the attention of some big league teams. Mostly around the Midwest because this was mid-century America when geography was destiny. And he was invited to try out. So he did, because you do. And he did well. Fielding, hitting, running the bases. I don’t know, maybe I’m embellishing here. But baseball stories are like fishing stories, so let it be. He was doing well. Not well enough to be a lock, but well enough to be a part of the team.
And then this kid gets up and starts hitting batting practice. And my uncle is watching. And these balls are just sailing out of the park. Tape measure stuff. And my uncle looks at the kid and he says to himself, well, if that’s the standard, I’m done. Because I’m not in that kid’s league. So he packs up and heads home and marries my aunt and begins his life.
And it’s quite a thing, to have the clarity to stand in the middle of your dream and see a greatness beyond your own. For it is one thing to see it from the sidelines, as the spectator, with no skin in the game. I’ll give you an example. I recall watching my cousin — my uncle’s son who now stands on the infield as my uncle throws out the first pitch — play his last game at this very university when he was a senior. All the players on both sides were good — you don’t play Division I anything without having game. But there was one kid on the opposition, a shortstop, and you could just tell, just by looking at him, that this kid was Major League stuff. It was that obvious. And then when he played, the way he moved on the infield, the way you could see him seeing the game, you knew. It wasn’t posturing. It wasn’t bravado. It was just a different level. Clear as day.
So I understand being able to see that, because I saw it in that shortstop. But it’s different, it takes a terrific level of self-knowledge and awareness and even confidence in who you really are, to see it in yourself. To measure yourself against someone else, and, without jealousy or bitterness, with only the appreciation of a true professional and with a profound level of integrity, to find yourself wanting. And to accept that.
But here’s the thing. The kid my 22-year-old, post-graduate uncle was watching effortlessly pound the ball over the wall? That kid was Frank Robinson. Frank “only guy to win the MVP in both leagues” Robinson. Frank “First Black Manager in baseball” Robinson. The guy who hit for the triple crown in 1966. Who was number four in home runs when he retired (behind Ruth, Aaron and Mays). Who was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. That’s who my uncle was watching. Who made my uncle say, well, maybe not. Maybe not me.
Later, as we sat in the stands, watching Ole Miss beat the stuffing out of the Gators, I said to him, “You know, there are a lot of guys who had great careers in baseball who weren’t as good as Frank Robinson.” I said, “Hell, there are a lot of guys in the damn Hall of Fame who weren’t as good as Frank Robinson.” I said, “You could have played. You still could have played pro ball.”
He just looked out at the field, and so I watched him look at the game. And I thought about the family he started, and the life he’d had, the ups and downs, the slings and arrows. And I thought about the family he made out of everyone he knew. The neighbors, the guys he has breakfast with every morning up in Chicago. The guys in his reffing crew. All the players who played in all the games he’d reffed. I thought about those kids he’d warmed up with before throwing out his pitch — kids who’d lined up to shake his hand after he did, dozens of them, every one of them wanting to show respect. I thought about the people here in this stadium who know him, who call him by name, a good six hundred miles from his home.
And I thought, he made his choice. We make the choices we make because of who we are when we make them. And these choices don’t just end up defining us, they are defined by us. And they tell us — even without our knowing it at the time — who we are. Who we will be. So that in a way, our lives are lived to decode what we already knew.
And look, I’m not foolish enough to think that baseball is a metaphor for anything. It’s a game, a child’s game we grow up with and play, some of us. But it can be a reminder. A reminder of the often circular nature of things. You don’t watch as many games as some of us have watched, you don’t play as many games as some of us have played, without admitting that that circadian rhythm of leaving home and returning home resonates in some deep parts of your soul.
The mistake, perhaps, is to think that the circle has to lead you just to home. Or to be so damn simplistic about what home can be. Must be. Sure, it can be a geographic place. The territory you have always lived in, like the Chicago of my uncle and my cousin. Or it could be where your friends are. Or where your comfort is. Or where your past was. Or where your future is. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s where your freedom lies.
I think about this last part as Florida makes its last out of the inning, as Ole Miss comes in to bat. As the PA begins to play the at once weirdly incongruous and yet ironically relevant “Rebel, Rebel”. I get up and shake my uncle’s hand. “You’re not leaving, are you?” he says with a worried look.
“No, I’m not leaving” I tell him. “It’s just time to go home.” | https://thewatertoweronline.com/an-irrevocable-condition-first-pitch-in-oxford-ac0f3d18c76b | ['Martin Bihl'] | 2020-03-03 16:17:46.853000+00:00 | ['Baseball', 'Ole Miss', 'Family', 'University Of Mississippi', 'Twto'] |
The Weekly Top 3 (11.23.2020) | Welcome to The Weekly Top 3 — our look at the top 3 things on our mind this week — for the week of November 23, 2020.
The Weekly Top 3 is a regular weekly segment on The Michael Dukes Show. The Show broadcasts on FacebookLive and via streaming audio from the Show’s website weekdays from 6–8am. I join Michael each week on Tuesday’s show, from 6:20–7am, for a discussion between the two of us about the three issues.
This week our Top 3 are these: 1) now that we know the legislature will be closely divided, all eyes turn to the Governor’s budget (1:52); 2) the Alaska Municipal League says its weighing in on state fiscal policy, and that may be a good thing for the PFD (14:48); and 3) with the federal government proceeding to sell leases, we take a realistic look at the potential for ANWR development (23:40).
The segment is at the YouTube clip above. For those that prefer the audio version, it is available both on our Spotify and Soundcloud pages. For this and other complete podcasts of The Michael Dukes Show, go to the Show’s Soundcloud page here. | https://medium.com/alaskans-for-sustainable-budgets/the-weekly-top-3-11-23-2020-3253fc2b63f7 | ['Brad Keithley'] | 2020-11-26 01:43:45.420000+00:00 | ['Alaska', 'Budget', 'Fiscal Policy', 'Oil'] |
Have A Good Trip: 5 Tips for Your Psychedelic Journey. | One should not adventure the psychedelic landscape without proper preparation. I recommend that you find for yourself the perfect way to prepare the environment in a way that gives you the confidence to face even the most challenging experience.
I prepared 5 topics to keep in mind before, during, and after the trip:
Joseph binder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
1 — Have a Clear Objective
Scientific research reveals that the psychedelic state is one of increased disorder.
This means that to get meaning out of a psychedelic experience one must have a clear idea in their minds of what they want to achieve and exactly what kind of growth they are looking for.
Psychedelics can help you tremendously, but you need to know how to direct the trip.
I recommend that you write down your objectives and mentalize them during the experience.
2 — Find The Appropriate Substance
Each person has a different objective and to each objective, there is a different substance.
You must study your objectives and make an educated decision on what substance you should use.
Don’t worry about availability. The psychedelic world is brand in the sense that there is a legal psychedelic option available to every person in every country in the world. You must find what is available to you.
The main trouble is to discover what substance induces the experience that you are looking for.
As we rekindle the psychedelic research this choice will get easier and easier, but meanwhile, if you need some assistance, please visit: Cabbanis Psychedelics
3 — Find A Familiar Place With People You Trust;
Carl Gustav Carus, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
To me, this is the most important point.
The best way to have a firm grip on the psychedelic experience is to set the environment before the trip.
If you consume the substance in a place where you feel comfortable and with no chance of being interrupted by someone else, you will be able to handle even the most intense self-confronting mystical experiences.
If this is not true, chances are that you will subconsciously fight against the effects of the substance and you will:
a — Limit the experience;
b— Create an uncomfortable situation for yourself;
It’s important to be with someone you trust because you don’t want to be with someone you can’t be yourself with. Especially because the sacred substances that induce psychedelic journeys have the notable characteristic of bringing to the surface intimate sides of ourselves that are hard to reveal to strangers.
4 — Prepare Your Inventory
I always tell my customers to understand and always keep in mind during the voyage that they already carry all the tools they need to handle any level of challenges the psychedelic world can offer them.
The issue is that during the trip it may seem extremely hard to get a grip on reality and the beginner usually needs time and practice to successfully navigate the psychedelic landscape.
Because of this, I recommend that you carry with you some external tools to serve as a psychological crutch in the moments that we feel like panicking.
Increase Serotonin
Bring with you foods that can increase your serotonin levels, like chocolate, nuts, fruits, among others.
Decrease Cortisol
The most popular psychedelic substances act on the serotonin receptors. This being so, during the metabolization of the substance the patient's body may reach a point in which it stops producing serotonin and instead balances the system out by increasing the Cortisol levels.
Cortisol is a hormone that can make us sad, angry, on the verge of panic.
To decrease Cortisol: Vitamine C.
Vitamine C can be found in most citric fruits and it helps the body to metabolize Cortisol. So if you feel like you are about to engage in a Bad-Trip, I think it’s a good idea to consume sources of Vitamine C.
Bring with your clothes for the ocasion. Prepare to spend the entire day in the place that you choose to trip in.
5 — Explore In Real-Time
An effective way to have the journey under control.
Elizabeth Shippen Green, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I found that a good mindset to trip is to see it as a self-exploration. I see myself as a mind-explorer and go into the trip with a beginner’s mind.
I try to forget everything that I think that I know about psychedelics and the experience and go into each journey like it was the first. If things don’t go the way that they usually go I will not be surprised, I’ll just explore it in real-time.
In order to do this, the psychonaut must train their spirit to stay present. They must have the flexibility of mind to end verbalization and focus on what is going on externally. | https://medium.com/cabbanis/have-a-good-trip-5-tips-for-your-psychedelic-journey-4692284bcf06 | ['Alexandre Porto'] | 2020-12-17 17:06:14.081000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychedelics', 'Journey', 'Mindset'] |
#getfiredthenfireup | Finally, if the vibe turns sour and the company decides to clean house, don’t sweat it. It could be the best thing that ever happened to you. Consider some of the most influential people in their fields — Anna Wintour (fashion), JK Rowling (literature), Sallie Krawcheck (finance) — they have all been let go and are now at the top of their game.
Anna Wintour was fired… but is now the most influential figure in fashion
It may feel like shit at the time — and it is. You feel rejected and dejected, as if no one appreciates your value or talent. It may make you question whether you have that talent at all. That slowly eats away at your confidence and begins a downwards spiral from which it can be hard to recover.
But try to get into a different headspace by focusing on the good stuff — the skills you gained, the good leaders you met, the industry rules you learned. (Plus you want to ensure the bastards don’t win.) You should leave any job with a reasonably healthy self-esteem. If your spirit has been broken, you’ve invested too much in a firm that hasn’t invested in you.
Remember that if you’ve been fired for being too avant-garde in your field, you are a pioneer. You’re ahead of your time. You think different. All geniuses are compelled to be irreverent — that’s how progress is made.
Think Anna getting booted by US Harper’s Bazaar for fashion shoots that were ‘too edgy’. As a junior fashion editor at Harper’s in the mid 1970s — her first job in New York after moving over from London — she was told she was too ‘European’ and would ‘never understand the American market’. She lasted nine months before the Editor-in-Chief cut her loose. Clearly, suffering this setback pushed her to be better, improve her game and enjoy a little humility. (We all need that, genius or not.)
Think also of Sallie getting the sack as CEO of Citigroup’s wealth management business for being ‘too honest’ in speaking up for investors getting their money back after receiving bad advice. That’s despite the character trait earning her the reputation of being ‘the last honest analyst’ on Wall Street years earlier. Ouch.
Sallie Krawcheck recast her rep after high-profile dumpings. Credit: Ellevest
Yet another firing was around the corner. Just two years later, Sallie was dumped as President of Global Wealth and Investment Management for Bank of America. Double ouch.
But the Wall Street titan-turned-entrepreneur took charge and simply recast her fine reputation in the wake of these high-profile dumpings. As Chair of Ellevate, a woman’s network, and CEO of Ellevest, a digital investment platform she co-founded for women, Sallie has shifted her rep from ‘one of the most powerful women in finance’ to ‘one of the most powerful women in finance working for women’. Much better fit, much cooler gig.
Anna, JK and Sallie now lead their fields for a reason. Your talent belongs elsewhere. You too will find a better home for it.
Getting fired is an obvious (and painful) kick that you can’t ignore. But it tells you less about you and more about the fearful, ignorant, cowardly or backward-looking manager or organisation that you worked for. Don’t look back. You’re better off without them — your talent would not have developed while you worked there because small minds fail to see greatness or, if they do, are challenged by it and seek to get rid of it. Those managers will never become leaders and never inspire; they are destined for mediocrity. And they would have held you back. Be grateful they set you free. | https://medium.com/winningatlife/getfiredthenfireup-3a22c2f91090 | ['Arti Kumria'] | 2020-11-10 06:27:58.535000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Anna Wintour', 'Gender', 'Career Advice', 'Women In Leadership'] |
Grid-Based Movement in a Top-Down 2D RPG With Phaser 3 | Movement
This section will cover the tile based movement that claims to be the core of this article.
Let us first add a yet unanimated player to implement to movement. We will come back to collisions and player animations later. We are using a free player sprite from the time fantasy game assets: Download Free Player Sprites. Download the sprite set and save the file as characters.png in your assets folder. The single frames of the character sprites have a width of 52 pixels and a height of 72 pixels. However if we take a close look at the graphic files of the character sprites, we can see, that what looks as one pixel are indeed 4 pixels:
What does that mean for the scaling of our character sprites? Remember that we scaled our map tiles by a factor of 3. This means, that every pixel got scaled into an area of 3x3 pixels. So a previously 16 pixels wide tile got scaled into a 48 pixels wide one. Our character sprite is already scaled by 2 so we need to scale it again by 1.5 to get the desired scale of 3 (because 2*1.5 = 3 ).
That gives us a scaled character sprite frame width of 52 pixels * 1.5 = 78 pixels . As you might have noticed that is much wider than our tile size of 48 pixels. This is because the character sprite frames are a little larger than our tile size and have some transparent space around them as you can see when you open the characters.png image. Since this is only whitespace we can simply shift the player sprite a bit and everything is fine as we will see soon.
Scaled dimensions of our player sprite
Now that you know where all the widths, heights and scale factors are coming from, we can start declaring some constants for them. Add the following code to your main.ts file:
Create a file Player.ts with the following content.
startTilePosX and startTilePosY define the starting position of the player on our tilemap. So the player will start on the 8th tile from the left and the 8th tile from the top.
Next we set the player sprite to the correct position. To get the position in pixels we need to multiply the starting position with the tile size. As discussed before we need to shift the player sprite a bit to cope with the additional whitespace that surrounds our player sprites. We will come to the calculation of the player offset soon.
After adding the sprite we scale it by the previously mentioned scale factor and set the start frame of the sprite which is 55 (starting at 0) in our case. You can also take any other frame if you like.
Next, we need to preload our downloaded player sprite:
Let’s now add our player sprite and set the corresponding depth such that it appears between tile layers 3 and 4.
Further we configure the main camera to follow the player sprite. This will be important when we move the player later. This saves us some logic, because otherwise we would need to move the map (and everything on top of it) instead of the player. Moving the player, however, is much more intuitive.
Finally we create an instance of our Player class, initiating it with the player sprite and the tile coordinates of the player’s starting position.
What about the players offset?
We need to shift our players x-position by half a tile width, because its positioning is based on the sprites center.
The y-offset is a bit different. Our player sprite begins at the bottom of the sprite frame. However, our sprite frame has a scaled height of 72 pixels * 1.5 = 108 pixels but this is more than two tile sizes 2 * 48 = 96 . Since our sprite is positioned based on its center, we need to subtract half of the difference between two tile sizes and our scaled sprite height:
Move the player
Let’s start by moving our player. Before we implement the movement we create an enum for directions in our 2D grid world. Create a file Direction.ts with the following content:
We will create a GridControls class that is responsible for handling the user input and telling our physics engine what to do. That GridControls class will get an instance of our physics engine that we call GridPhysics .
On every update of the Phaser 3 game engine we will check for pressed cursor keys and start a movement in the corresponding direction. We wire the GridControls and GridPhysics classes as follows in our main.ts :
It is as easy as creating both instances in the create() method and calling their update() methods in Phasers update() hook. Phaser calls the update method with two arguments: time and delta . While time represents the current time, delta is specified as “The delta time in ms since the last frame”. We will see later why we need this value.
Grid Physics
Movement on a 2D surface can best be described with two-dimensional vectors. Phaser 3 already offers a Vector2 class with x and y coordinates and many useful calculations. Therefore we will take advantage of that Vector2 class a lot in our implementation. Let’s first take a look at the movePlayer() method of our physics engine.
Whenever a movement is started, the engine checks if there is already an ongoing movement. If so, nothing happens until that movement has finished. That ensures that you can’t change direction until the player has not walked a distance of at least one tile. If there is no ongoing movement, a new one is started by setting a movement direction.
We keep a variable movementDirection holding the current movement direction of the player, while a value of Direction.NONE means that the player is not moving. We initialize it with a Zero-Vector (x = 0, y = 0). Additionally we create a mapping between our Direction enum and their representations in the 2-dimensional vector space. Phaser 3 already offers predefined Vector2 objects for this case. These vectors are of the following shape:
Vector2.UP: (x = 0, y = -1)
Vector2.DOWN: (x = 0, y = 1)
Vector2.LEFT: (x = -1, y = 0)
Vector2.RIGHT: (x = 1, y = 0)
These vectors are special because of their following mathematical property: if we add a multiple of one of these vectors to any position in our coordinate system (which is also a vector), we will get a new vector that is shifted in exactly the corresponding direction. So if our player is standing at position (x = 5, y = 6) and we add Vector2.UP to that position vector, it will have the coordinates (x = 5, y = 6 + (-1)) = (x = 5, y = 5). That is equivalent to moving our player up by one position in our coordinate system. You might ask, why we did not simply take the players y coordinate and added 1 to it. That is a fair question, since the above calculations seem to be more complicated. But in fact these vector calculations will keep our code simpler, shorter and less error prone. You will see later that this more general vector operations will save us writing several if-else statements checking for the movement direction and handling each case separately.
Our update() method contains a similar logic:
If the player is moving it will update his position.
Let’s take a look at updatePlayerPosition() :
We need a constant speedPixelsPerSecond that will determine how many pixels are added to the current player position per second. This will eventually manifest as the speed of the player moving on our map.
As a parameter to our update method we give the delta in milliseconds since the last update. This will be provided to us by Phaser and the exact number depends on the frames per seconds of the machine. Therefore we can’t simply add a fix speed value to the position of our player, unless we want the player to move with different speeds on different machines. We need to update the position of the player with respect to the passed milliseconds since the last update. We use the helper method getSpeedPerDelta() for that.
But unfortunately we can’t just add that value to the players position for two reasons:
1. We want to move in whole tile sizes
We keep a variable tileSizePixelsWalked that keeps track of the pixels of the tile that we already walked. This way we can make sure that we never exceed a tile border. Our method willCrossTileBorderThisUpdate() will tell us if the player will cross a tile border in the current update or not.
Whenever the player will cross a tile border this update, we only move him to the end of the tile. Otherwise we will move him by the speed of the current delta.
2. We want to move in whole pixels
On every update we want to move in whole pixels. For example, if getSpeedPerDelta() will return 5.6 for this update, we want to move only 5 pixels and not 5.6. Otherwise we will get ugly rendering issues. But we can’t simply drop the decimal places. Our movement would not be fluid anymore and also our speed in pixels per second would not be correct. Therefore we need to keep track of the exact movement distance including the decimal places, but only render the integers. We solve this by keeping a variable decimalPlacesLeft that we use to keep the decimal places for the next update:
Let’s now look at the actual movement of the player sprite:
To move the player sprite we take the current pixel position of the player and add the corresponding direction vector multiplied by the movementSpeed . This is a quite elegant way to move the player leveraging simple linear algebra. That saves us juggling with several if-else statements that cover the different cases for each movement direction.
We provide two methods in our Player class to simplify operations on the players position:
We should now be able to move the player on our map in a grid-based style. But it looks very weird if the player is not animated so let us add some animations next. | https://medium.com/swlh/grid-based-movement-in-a-top-down-2d-rpg-with-phaser-3-e3a3486eb2fd | ['Johannes Baum'] | 2020-12-12 17:24:13.521000+00:00 | ['Game Development', 'Typescript', 'JavaScript', 'Phaser 3', 'Phaserjs'] |
A Government that Can Imagine, Try, and Scale | If “possibility government” and “public entrepreneurship” are not to be the oxymorons skeptics make them out to be, we have to be effective in their practice. This requires public leaders to do at least three things: generate new ideas, try them, and ultimately scale these efforts up to make a large and lasting difference.
Sourcing Ideas
Cast a wide net for ideas. Bring in traditional experts, non-experts, and experts from other domains.
Look to the crowd: leverage challenges, competitions, and contests.
Engage residents. Look for their workarounds. “Nothing about them without them.”
Be most interested in the quality of the best idea that crosses your desk, not the average quality of all the ideas. More ideas + different ideas = better ideas.
Don’t settle for “best practices” when “best” isn’t good enough.
Experimenting
Maximize learning while minimizing the waste of resources and time. Follow five steps (↗️ Detailed worksheet at the bottom here):
Envision: Set a vision, translate to a falsifiable hypothesis. o BUILD: Develop a “minimum viable product” — i.e. the smallest set of features or activities needed to test a hypothesis.
Measure: Run tests, using the real service with the real users. o LEARN: Was your hypothesis validated or not?
Decide: Persevere, pivot, or perish?
Experiment with the public, not on them.
Promise learning, not success.
Consider portfolios of experiments, then aim high so the “wins” cover the losses.
Scaling
Think about how you can use government as a platform: a way to bring individuals together in ways that create value for other individuals — and for the broader public.
Work to generate positive network effects, where user two makes user one better off. Look to mitigate negative network effects, where users make each other worse off (e.g., congestion, fraud, etc.).
Use four sets of tools to make your platforms function well: rules, process, software, and hardware.
Generate and preserve trust in the platforms.
Organize for Probability and Possibility; Craft an Ambidetrious Response
Possibility is fraught in public organizations. Expectations are high. Risk aversion abounds. Trying things that will only possibly work cannot and should not be the sole strategy. Public leaders must keep an eye on the present and the future; on doing what they already do well, and looking for new things worth trying. The crisis response should combine possibility and probability approaches. “Ambidextrous” leaders can perform this mental balancing act. They can also separate these approaches somewhat within their teams’ operations so that innovation streams canbenefit from “cross-fertilization” with other parts of the organization, but neither approach suffers from “cross-contamination” by the other.
Pursuing new — and therefore risky — efforts is difficult in public life and especially difficult in a crisis. But innovation can not simply be left to the private sector or philanthropy. Both can play key roles in catalyzing new efforts, but they cannot effectively solve public problems without the co-participation of governments. Governments are often better positioned to do this work, and they can lead meaningfully (as they have before) in the pursuit of novel approaches. | https://medium.com/covid-19-public-sector-resources/a-government-that-can-imagine-try-and-scale-7afc2c4e750d | ['Harvard Ash Center'] | 2020-05-01 20:47:19.433000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Leadership', 'Crisis Management', 'Cities', 'Coronavirus'] |
Shedding Some Light on Ray Tracing | For starters, rather than straight-up jumping into what ray tracing is and how it works, let’s try to understand how traditional computer graphics and rendering techniques work.
Rasterization
Rasterization is probably the most commonly used rendering algorithm.
Images in computer graphics are presented on some kind of “raster display”. Raster displays show images as rectangular arrays of pixels, the monitor you are using is an example of a raster display, which is made up of an array of “pixels” (short for picture element), these pixels can be set to different colours(RGB) to achieve any desired output image.
In rasterization the GPU, is fed with instructions to “render”(draw) 3D scenes onto 2D planes using simple polygons(triangles are the most widely used ones, though a few other polygons are also often used), these polygons are then “rasterized”(transformed) onto individual pixels, and then further processes such as colouring, shading, textures are added on top of it.
One nice trick that rasterization uses to render 3D objects and scenes is that it associates every vertex/polygon with a depth factor, meaning when viewing objects from different angles, only that part is visible which is at the top.
Vertices (and by extension polygons formed due to these vertices) located nearer to the “camera” are drawn above objects located far from the camera. The depth factor is inversely proportional to the distance of the object from the camera.
The process of calculating the vertices that make up the object, then joining them to make polygons, and then applying textures and shading is part of a special software-hardware subsystem called the Graphics Pipeline, and these are usually implemented using graphics API (a few of them are OpenGL, Vulkan etc..).
Phew!.. now that rasterization is out of the way, why don’t we have a look where traditional rasterization lacks…
As you might have been able to point out, the most notable difference is that, since rasterization is geometry-based rendering, simulating real-life or photorealistic imagery through rasterization is quite difficult.
For example simulating reflections, refractions, realistic shadows and textures are difficult through rasterization, because this method has a hard time tracking exactly how light should bounce in and around an image space. | https://medium.com/@acmiitr/shedding-some-light-on-ray-tracing-67bb34bf79b9 | ['Acm Roorkee'] | 2021-07-02 08:04:39.952000+00:00 | ['Rendering', 'Graphics', 'Computer Science', 'Computer Graphics'] |
Sparsity in Online Learning with Lasso Regularization | Forward Backward Splitting (FOBOS)
Note: The method was named Forward Looking Subgradient (FOLOS) in the first draft and later renamed since it was essentially the same as an earlier proposed technique, the Forward Backward Splitting. The authors abbreviated it to FOBOS instead of FOBAS to avoid confusing readers of the first draft.
First, a little background. Consider an objective function of the form f(w) + r(w). In the case of a number of machine learning algorithms, the function f denotes the empirical sum of some loss function (such as mean squared error), and the function r is a regularizer (such as Lasso). If we use a simple gradient descent technique to minimize this objective function, the iterates would be of the form
where the g’s are vectors from the subgradient sets of the corresponding functions. From the paper:
A common problem in subgradient methods is that if r or f is non-differentiable, the iterates of the subgradient method are very rarely at the points of non-differentiability. In the case of the Lasso regularization function, however, these points are often the true minima of the function.
In other words, the subgradient approach will result in neither a true minima nor a sparse solution if r is the L1 regularizer.
FOBOS, as the name suggests, splits every iteration into 2 steps — a forward step and a backward step, instead of minimizing both f and r simultaneously. The motivation for the method is that for L1 regularization functions, true minima is usually attained at the points of non-differentiability. For example, in the 2-D space, the function resembles a Diamond shape and the minima is obtained at one of the corner points. Each iteration of FOBOS consists of the following 2 steps:
The first step is a simple unconstrained subgradient step with respect to the function f. In the second step, we try to achieve 2 objectives:
Stay close to the interim update vector. This is achieved by the first term. Attain a low complexity value as expressed by r. (Second term)
So the first step is a forward step, where we update the coefficient in the direction of the subgradient, while the second is a backward step where we pull the update back a little so as to obtain sparsity by moving in the direction of the non-differentiable points of r.
Using the first equation in the second, taking derivative w.r.t w, and equating the derivative to 0, we obtain the update scheme as
(Note: The equation above looks suspiciously similar to the Nesterov Accelerated Gradient (NAG) method for optimization. The authors have even cited Nesterov’s paper in related work. It might be interesting to investigate this further.)
This update scheme has 2 major advantages, according to the author.
First, from an algorithmic standpoint, it enables sparse solutions at virtually no additional computational cost. Second, the forward-looking gradient allows us to build on existing analyses and show that the resulting framework enjoys the formal convergence properties of many existing gradient-based and online convex programming algorithms.
In the paper, the authors also prove convergence of the method and show that on setting the intermediate learning rate properly, low regret bounds can be proved for both online as well as batch settings. | https://medium.com/explorations-in-language-and-learning/sparsity-in-online-learning-with-lasso-regularization-f65f97e08e4e | ['Desh Raj'] | 2018-02-24 09:47:53.669000+00:00 | ['Online Learning', 'Machine Learning'] |
Suicides by Firearms + FB LIVE | Built using data from the CDC (hit the link for source)
Suicides by firearm increased 29.5% between 2005 and 2015. In fact, suicides now account for 61% of all deaths by firearms. We’re actively looking for reasons why and will be posting a response. Also looking at mental health data. If you have any thoughts, please let us know!
A part of a collaborative series with AJ+ on “24 hours of guns in America”, streaming live on Facebook through Thursday, March 9 at midnight EDT. Check out how we dug into the numbers with AJ+ on their Medium post over here. | https://medium.com/grafiti/untitled-2dca889d72fe | ['Kyle Suess'] | 2017-03-09 21:28:16.215000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Guns', 'News', 'Live Streaming'] |
Inside the Brain of an Atheist | Inside the Brain of an Atheist
DEFINITION FROM OXFORD ADVANCED LEARNER’S DICTIONARY OF ATHEIST
This is exactly how Oxford defines it, but give this a good read there is more to that bland incomplete definition. My friend, I just need one thing from you being open minded person and do not abuse in the comments (I know these are 2 things I am asking.)
Well, no issues, I asked my deist friends and fellow mates about their perceptions/opinions/definitions of god.
Some of them said, god to them is the creator of the universe, one who built every natural thing we can imagine, and blah blah blah… No wonder, none of those idiots had a bit of liking of science. Then the second set of creatures replied by saying — God is the one who watches you every time and keeps a record of what you do, but let me tell you, the one who watches you every time is not god, it’s a damn CREEP WITH A CAMERA following you everywhere. And then at last my deist best friend gave her opinion, and to my great surprise, it was a sensible satisfactory answer. She said, and i am paraphrasing, God is the power, she gets when she prays or embraces his/her existence (Note — here his/her may seem weird to most of the religions as there is only a male deity, but here Hindus have freakin’ 33 million gods and goddess #genderequality and new ones are in yet in procedure). Well, anyways, I was not sure if I had any counter to that and I felt enlightened… Haha! No, I am kidding.
See, there is no harm if you feel powerful or motivated but here’s something you must consider (it may sound cliche and Newton would be cringing right now, but he’s dead) if you do not believe in gravity and in faith jump from a 69 story building, then my dear, even your mighty god will not be able to save you, only fire fighters could or maybe doctors if your skull did not opened up from that great fall.
Well, my hysterical jokes aside, living your life in ignorance is still right thing to do instead of living your life in denial. And if you believe in something perhaps untrue or not necessary then not only me, but the physics community feel sorry for you and if you are not willing to even look onto the bright side and try to correct yourself, then PLEASE LEAVE THIS WEBSITE right now, there is no need to make knowledgeable people feel ashamed. This is no disclaimer, this is a WARNING. Believing in mystery and mystic does sound a lot of dopamine and oxytocin but it ain’t reality, in fact it’s quite equivalent to jumping from 69th floor in faith that Newton was a silly man.
Some “great” mystic and “gurus” always claim that there’s something beyond something science can understand and I must appreciate their “magical” selection of words, usage of TRANSFERRED EPITHET was quite unreal and have you guys ever heard of evolution, i guess not. We used to eat raw meat until knowledge of fire generation was discovered, we used to walk miles until knowledge of wheel, aeroplanes, ships, mechanism emerged. We understand, we discover, we invent and thus we evolve. And if there are things that humans can never understand, then how the heck do you guys know about spirits and ghosts dancing around mountains. SHMUCKS!!
And before you try to threaten me in the comments or at my social media handles, do remember the creepy god of yours is watching you. And if you have turned into an atheist, WELCOME TO THE BBC (Big Brain Community). And if you are thinking of turning into one, or if you liked, laughed, giggled, smiled, blinked, inhaled, exhaled or whatever you did while reading this great masterpiece just click that ‘clapping hands’ button.
If this article receives a desirable response, i will post a scientific follow up next week.
Note from the Author — I tried to keep my first article simple, thus i did not stuffed it with a tonne of facts and numbers and references.
now SHUSH!! | https://medium.com/@amraditya/inside-the-brain-of-an-atheist-948516fbda4 | ['Amraditya Pradhan'] | 2021-08-26 04:36:38.843000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Atheism', 'Life', 'First Post', 'Mythology'] |
4 Noku insights you have missed | 4 Noku insights you have missed
New features available, New platform coming soon, Blockchain World Summits.
Welcome to our community weekly recap, where we sum up the main news from Noku.
Noku Custom ICO platform under development
Last week we announced the upcoming launch of the Custom ICO platform, dedicated to businesses and individuals who want to launch their customized ICO but don’t have:
· Coding skills
· Blockchain developers in their team.
Find out more!
Noku Swap now available on the Platform
For those who didn’t see it yet, you can now swap your ETH for NOKU tokens directly on wallet.noku.io.
Thanks to the new Noku Swap Service you can bypass the Exchanges and get Noku tokens directly from the Noku Platform 👉 https://bit.ly/2N1ZRh2
Coming Up: Blockchain World Summit in London
We announced last week that we are attending the Blockchain World Summit in London on Wednesday and Thursday this week (12–13 September). Anyone else is going? We hope to see you there!
The relationship between Blockchain and Banking System
As interest towards Blockchain grows, the biggest question is: will the traditional banking industry adapt to this new technology or be replaced by it?
We address the issue in one of our last posts: have a look and share with us your thoughts!
👉 https://bit.ly/2oS8zQq | https://medium.com/nokugroup/4-noku-insights-you-have-missed-a025036cb0e0 | [] | 2018-09-10 15:20:05.108000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Technology'] |
'Waiting to Exhale' Oral History and 25th Anniversary of the Iconic Film | Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon on ‘that scene” from ‘Waiting To Exhale’
In the 25 years since Waiting to Exhale’s debut, the ground has shifted for Black female representation. The film, which was written by Terry McMillan and brought to life by Forest Whitaker, was the catalyst for that change.
Savannah (Whitney Houston), Robin (Lela Rochon), Bernadine (Angela Bassett), and Gloria (Loretta Devine) entranced audiences as they navigated life, love, and the bonds of sisterhood. It was a welcome and refreshing anomaly amid a slew of films that focused on narratives from the inner city — mostly centering Black men. The film changed the industry and catapulted the stars of nearly everyone who touched it. Now, on this pivotal anniversary, the key female players — plus the guys who portrayed their boyfriends, husbands and sons — talk to ZORA about making one of the most iconic films in history.
When McMillan first optioned the film, she had one name in mind to play Savannah. However, Bassett couldn’t envision herself as anyone but Bernadine.
“I fell in love with the drama,” Bassett tells ZORA. “[Bernadine’s] fractured relationship with her husband, starting over and learning to invest in herself in every way, rediscovering who she is and what matters most to her, putting herself first. The idea was so badass.”
The moment she read Waiting to Exhale, Rochon knew she was destined to play Robin, the high-powered executive who picks the wrong men. “I fought so hard for it because I felt very right for Robin, and the fact that Whitney was already cast was huge to me,” she remembers. “It was my first time in a lead role.”
Devine also recalls the frenzy surrounding the novel and the film’s production.
“I read the book when it first came out,” Devine says. “Everybody in Hollywood was auditioning for [the movie]. It was an exciting time. We were in Arizona for three months, and some scenes were cut out that people never saw. I had to learn to swim because [Gloria] was supposed to have a heart problem throughout the movie.”
With McMillan’s words to anchor them, it was Whitaker who carefully cultivated this story for the screen.
WAITING TO EXHALE, from left: Angela Bassett, director Forest Whitaker, Whitney Houston, on set, 1995. Photo: Nicola Goode/20th Century Fox Film Corp/Everett Collection
“Putting him at the helm as director could not have been a more excellent choice,” Bassett says. “He had such an enduring and apparent love for women, for ‘sistas’ in particular. I still think he is wondrous to this day. He’s always shown up for me, and I show up for him.”
While Waiting to Exhale is undoubtedly a story about Black women, Black men are still present. For Rochon, the memories with her male co-stars are some of the most unforgettable.
“My most difficult scene and one of my best scenes was with Wendell [Pierce],” she remembers. “It took two days to film, and he was sweating on top of me, but he was the sweetest, nicest guy. The stuff with [Mykelti Williamson], that was a lot of fun banter and fighting, and then when we got to Leon [Robinson], I just enjoyed every moment of it.”
Leon’s character Russell is a fu*kboy personified. Robinson was actually hesitant to accept the role, but Whitaker was insistent. “I asked about other roles,” Robinson says. “Forest said to me, ‘Listen, there’s no doubt you could play this role or this role, but if you do, who would I get to play Russell?’”
In the end, the electricity between Robinson and Rochon was worth it. “Forest had to call cut twice on the first time we kissed,” Robinson laughs. “We definitely had chemistry from the very moment we were together.”
While Bernadine, Savannah, and Robin struggled with love in Waiting to Exhale, Gloria literally struts up to it during a chance encounter with her neighbor, Marvin (Gregory Hines). “It was so romantic in a crazy kind of way,” says Devine of that infamous scene. “I had worked with Gregory before on Broadway, and he was such an incredible leading man. He brought me flowers my first day, and none of the other guys did that, so all of the women were jealous. I loved that.”
WAITING TO EXHALE, Gregory Hines, Loretta Devine, 1995. Photo: 20th Century Fox Film Corp/Everett Collection
While there are moments of levity in Waiting to Exhale, McMillan didn’t shy away from the pain many Black women have experienced. The image of an enraged Bernadine lighting her husband’s BMW on fire will forever be embedded in our collective memory.
“I remember the flames being really hot!” Bassett recalls. “I thought of my mom and the way she held herself. I thought of her strength. It’s an honor that the scene resonated in such an impactful way and has stood the test of time. I love all the memes.”
As timeless as it’s become, some of our favorite scenes from Waiting to Exhale could’ve looked very different. Costume designer Judy L. Ruskin was brought in at the eleventh hour when a previously hired designer couldn’t proceed with the job. “I was hired the day before filming started,” Ruskin reveals. “I hit the ground running.”
Ruskin recalls dressing Bassett in a plush white robe and lingerie for that glorious fire scene. “In a heartbroken moment, you might not take off your jewelry,” says Ruskin, explaining her approach. “You might not want to get completely undressed, and you just collapsed in your bed. Then, when you get up in the morning, you put on the most comfortable thing you have.”
Another iconic look that has been emulated year after year is Robin’s keyhole white dress. Ruskin knew she had a gem on her hands when she spotted it. “I felt it was a gift from heaven,” she explains. “[Lela’s] so statuesque and that dress is like a pillar in itself. I adored that dress.”
While Black women are depicted in Waiting to Exhale as multidimensional, there were still concerns about “respectability” and “good representation.” Black men were quite outraged with the movie’s male characters.
“I don’t think the male characters were fully developed, and I’m not sure they were meant to be,” says Michael Beach, who portrayed Bernadine’s philandering husband, John. “When you introduce [John] by having him tell his beautiful Black wife that he was leaving her for a White woman, that character becomes irredeemable. I was often verbally attacked and a couple of times smacked on the shoulder or the back of the head by strangers in public.”
Still, as Beach notes, Waiting to Exhale is not a romance film. “Waiting To Exhale is not about the relationships between Black women and Black men,” he says. “It’s really about the relationships between Black women, and that hadn’t been seen before on movie screens. That fact alone makes it a classic. That’s why I never made a stink about John not being a more complete character. I also believe that if it weren’t for Exhale, Soul Food wouldn’t have been made.”
Bernadine isn’t the only woman to experience a heartbreaking moment in the film. When Gloria is faced with the truth about her ex, David (Giancarlo Esposito), and his sexuality, she’s crushed.
“He’s honest, and it breaks her heart,” Esposito, who is currently working with Whitaker on The Godfather of Harlem, reflects. “This was early on in my relationship with Loretta as an actor, and I found that she is so very sensitive because she has a way of emitting emotion through her eyes. She’s also a very light spirit. The fun for me was to see her establish herself as a powerful Black woman, but also someone who had a sense of humor and who was not afraid of allowing us to see her pain.”
Faison, who played Gloria’s teenage son, Tarik, recalls the connection he built with Devine. “Loretta was in the original cast of Dreamgirls, and my mom’s college roommate was Sheryl Lee Ralph,” he says. “Because of that, Loretta and I got really close. Working with her was amazing; it was a joy.”
In addition to Devine, Faison also formed a deep bond with Hines, who took him under his wing. “I smoked a cigar with him on a boat,” Faison recalls. “He was always awesome and would take the time to talk to me and hang out with me no matter where we were. His energy on set and his chemistry with Loretta was powerful.”
Waiting to Exhale didn’t just elevate Black women; Hollywood began churning out more female-centered stories. For Bassett, the cherished friendships on- and off-screen mean the world to her. “The scene at the end of the movie with the women listening to the radio and singing in the car was not scripted,” she says. “It was organic moments like these in which we found comfort with one another.”
That feeling of being seen has remained with Devine to this day. “It’s really affected, the way people look at Black women,” she says. | https://zora.medium.com/angela-bassett-and-her-waiting-to-exhale-co-stars-on-that-scene-967263cc58e2 | ['Aramide Tinubu'] | 2020-12-17 15:46:28.407000+00:00 | ['Film', 'Culture', 'Movies', 'Waiting To Exhale', 'Black Women'] |
12 Software Companies to Watch in 2021 | As we approach the final quarter of 2020, it’s time to start casting our minds to the future. In the tech and product worlds, 2020 has been another rollercoaster of a year, with a few more bumps and loops than usual!
Some software companies have seen a massive increase in usage, thanks to the ‘new normal.’ Major European cities had to severely limit bandwidth speeds in the spring, to stop their locked down and Netflix-hungry residents from crashing the system. Nike’s app, Nike Training Club, experienced a significant boost in usage as it provided home workouts for many in quarantine. Let’s not even get started on Zoom and Animal Crossing!
Outside of these household names are other software companies who thrived in 2020, and who we can expect bigger and better things from in 2021.
Airtable
What do Netflix, Tesla, and Time have in common? The answer is Airtable.
Many of you may be familiar with Airtable’s platform, a spreadsheet-database hybrid, which officially reached unicorn status in 2018. In September 2020, they raised a $185 million series D funding round. Today, the company is worth over $2.5 billion.
What do people love about Airtable? The product is hailed for its no-code capabilities, allowing managers of all disciplines and backgrounds to create spreadsheets tailored specifically to their workflows without needing to ask for help. The company recently also started adding low-code features and integration with JavaScript through the new Airtable Apps, allowing more tech-savvy users to make the most out of the platform.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? CEO Howie Liu is building Airtable to last. According to TechCrunch, he’s working to ensure that Airtable is in it for the long haul, throughout the pandemic and beyond.
With 200,000 customers, many the biggest brand names on Earth, and a valuation that doesn’t seem to be slowing down, we’re keen to see what the next year brings for Airtable.
Canva
Canva has been on the scene for the last 8 years, providing marketers and freelancers with the tools to create their own marketing materials. Run by CEO Melanie Perkins, the company has risen from a $3.2 billion valuation in $6 billion in 2020, a massive 87.5% increase. They also recently launched a desktop app for Mac, and earned a spot on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, making them one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? Along with new releases and a huge boost in their B2B growth (50% since the start of COVID-19), Canva has also announced some high-profile partnerships. In 2019, Skyscanner used Canva to roll out a full rebrand to its 100 million global users in just six months.
For budding Product Managers wanting to work in the design space, it’s also ranked pretty highly on Glassdoor as a great place to work, with employees citing a great company culture and the perfect work/life balance.
Check out: Product Managers, Here’s How to Make Your Designers Love You
Chartio
Chartio, a data management, analysis and visualization platform is already well loved by Product Managers. Their mission is to make data accessible for everyone, as democratized data empowers product teams of all sizes and capabilities.
They have an impressive list of technology and data partners. Based in San Francisco they’ve to date won $6.8 million in funding, and thanks to the rising growth in data democratization within tech teams.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? Data is on the rise, there’s no question about it. Companies know that they need weave data into every level of their organization, and with their data school and above-par customer service, Chartio is leading the charge.
Dave
The goal of Dave is to help their users ‘thrive, not just survive, between paychecks.’ They use a tip-based system rather than mandatory fees and operate on a system of transparency. The name is derived from David and Goliath, Goliath in this case being traditional banks.
They launched in 2017, making them relatively new on the Fintech scene, to a 50,000 strong waitlist. Their main mission is to help solve the problem 1 in 4 Americans have, as they pay exorbitant fees on their overdrafts.
At their latest valuation they were worth $1.2 billion, with $76 million won in funding from investors including Mark Cuban of Shark Tank fame.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? With 3.5 million users, a rapidly growing team, and a spot on Forbes top Fintech newcomers in 2020, this LA based startup is set to make waves in the new year and beyond.
You might also be interested in: Unpacking Fintech: Impactful Product Mangement
Drift
Drift didn’t exactly invent conversational marketing, but they coined the term and made it into the powerful marketing movement that it is today. So without Drift, conversational marketing as we know it simply wouldn’t exist. Their AI powered solutions make automated marketing simple, easy to integrate into teams’ stacks, and their chatbot remains one of the best in the business.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? In July 2020 they closed out the best quarter in company history, and this year have made it onto a number of high-profile lists, including Forbes’ top 50 AI companies, Inc’s Best Workplaces, and Gartner’s Top 50 enterprise software companies. As the situation in 2020 forces more companies to automate their processes, and adopt more conversational tactics with customers, Drift’s future seems very bright.
Figma
Figma is a tool which enables in-browser, real-time collaboration for distributed design teams. It’s not hard to make the leap to figure out why that would be useful nowadays! But even before the new normal, Figma were on the rise!
The tool allows everyone from designers to marketing teams to work in-browser, eradicating the problem of ‘who has which version of the software.’
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? CEO Dylan Field stated that 2020 has been an ‘acceleration period’ for the platform, with Figma being used for everything from wireframing for new digital products, to virtual whiteboarding, to making skins for video games. With a new valuation of $2 billion, and rapid adoption across a multitude of disciplines, you’d better keep your eye on Figma!
FullStory
Every good Product Manager knows that retention is just as important for successful growth as acquisition. But that can’t be hard to do when you’re not sure why your customers are leaving you. FullStory is a powerful analytics engine which helps to pinpoint where customers are struggling along their journey.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? Recently raising a $10 million funding round, FullStory has got big things on the horizon. Founded by former Google engineers, no one knows customer retention like FullStory, and we fully expect to see great things from them in 2021.
Heap
Predicting the future is hard to do, but Heap’s analytics platform provides an infrastructure which automatically captures customer interactions, makes sense of them, and helps make them actionable.
They also went out of their way to empower their customers to make the right decisions in 2020, in part with their eBook ‘ Top 10 Product Questions for Times of Rapid Change.’
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? 2020 saw a series of very successful funding rounds for Heap, as well as expansion of their team. With ambitious scaling goals and an army of loyal users, the rest of the quarter and the year to come will surely see great things for this analytics giant.
Miro
There’s a barely a Product team in the world that wouldn’t benefit from Miro, and many of them already do. Gone are the days of having to work on a physical whiteboard, and make sure someone remembers to take a photo before vacating the meeting room for the next team to come in!
Miro’s online collaborative platform lets teams collaborate together in real time, planning projects, working on wireframes, taking votes on prioritization, and brainstorming.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? Miro have 8 million worldwide users, including Dell, Salesforce, Netflix, Deloitte, and Spotify. Lauded as a company ‘ in the right place at the right time ‘ Miro are helping distributed teams at a time when they’re needed most.
Notion
Notion has been hovering around Silicon Valley for the last year or so, and is now spreading its wings across the rest of the world as well. The new workplace productivity app can be used for work, school, daily life, hobbies, and side projects, with a community of template-builders making and sharing new ways to use the platform. You can even hire a professional freelance Notion designer to set you up.
Why it’s a company to watch in 2021: In 2020, Notion reached a $2 billion valuation, and enjoyed rapid growth, with its user base nearly quadrupling in a very short amount of time. A great asset to the company is the community that has been built around it, with people making an actual living off of teaching others how to make the most of it.
This rapid, community-driven growth is a sign of great things to come in the future for Notion.
Pendo
Pendo’s Product Cloud is a must-have for product teams, giving them all of the tools needed to plan, build, and grow something great. With tools used to power feature adoption, customer retention, company growth, user onboarding, and much more, Pendo’s mission is to help you understand your product’s journey from one single platform.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? Product Managers in particular will benefit greatly from keeping an eye on Pendo. Their free learning resources and their Productcraft community are an endlessly valuable source of knowledge for PMs and their teams. As for the company itself, Pendo ranked #54 on the prestigious Forbes Cloud 100 list, and enjoys a growth which seems to just keep accelerating.
Roadmunk
When you want to validate how impactful a tool is, take a look at their client list. If Roadmunk powers the teams behind the products at Nike, Slack, Amazon, Expedia, Ubisoft, Mastercard, and more, you can trust them to get the job done right.
It’s a powerful tool, which focuses on capturing feedback and keeping you customer-focused, making prioritization easy, and providing ‘boardroom-ready’ roadmap templates. Their podcast, Product to Product, is particularly well loved within the community.
Why is it a company to watch in 2021? Roadmunk is a platform built specifically for product people, by product people. As Product Management grows in both scope and popularity, the tools built for it and loved by its users will continue to grow alongside it. Product Managers love Roadmunk, and the future loves Product Managers! | https://villaumbrosia.medium.com/12-software-companies-to-watch-in-2021-2a4411a57ba8 | ['Carlos G De Villaumbrosia'] | 2020-10-15 09:14:08.693000+00:00 | ['Software', 'Product Management', 'Product Manager', 'Product Development', 'Tech'] |
10 Women-Run Startup Founders You Should Know | Over the past few years, both the total number and overall percentage of female founders at GAN Startups have increased drastically. One data point that proves it: In 2014, only 17% of GAN Startups had a female member of the founding team. In 2017, that number increased to 46%. Meaning, 46% out of all the 1,700 founders who were in a GAN Accelerator in 2017 identified as female.
There are a handfull of reasons I think this is happening:
We’ve made an intentional effort to invite more accelerators into the GAN Community who are focused specifically on female- and minority-run startups (Rowad, Hillman, and VVM, for instance).
Accelerators already in GAN for years are increasingly focused on female- and minority-run startups. We’ve seen a lot of strategic partnerships that are providing more opportunities, like the ones between Tampa Bay Wave and Nielsen or Start Co. and The Jump Fund.
Though still a disproportionately small chunk of the pie, more women and minority founders are getting access and opportunity to run companies overall, thanks to funding from groups like Backstage and Kapor. And, more women and minorities are at the table to make funding decisions, like the inaugural class of VCs in the First Round Angel Track.
The stories of women entrepreneurs are being shared, not only centering the voices of women running companies but building greater community between them. Like in this new magazine, Good Company, from the well-known blogger and entrepreneur who started Design*Sponge, Grace Bonney. It features stories of women and non-binary entrepreneurs at every stage of life.
And, back in 2016, GAN made a five-year commitment, along with Obama’s White House Startup America Initiative, to see parity reached among women holding executive roles at accelerators and startups in the GAN Community. Based on the numbers we’re seeing, we’re getting close to hitting that goal. And we expect continued improvements in the years to come. For now, it’s encouraging to know that so many female founders are not only finding more of the support they need, but they’re thriving because of it (often requiring less funding to make even more revenue).
Just to Name a Few
So I wanted to hear some stories of GAN Startups who are building amazing companies, have a unique product, or have accomplished something that’s worth sharing — who all happen to be run by women. To do so, I reached out to a bunch of Managing Directors at GAN Accelerators and our startup engagement contacts at GAN Partners to hear some of their favorites. And I didn’t want to keep those stories to myself. Here’s what they said:
Melanie Igwe
Founder and COO of Ilerasoft
Accelerator: Hillman Accelerator
llerasoft is the brainchild of two passionate co-founders who both saw waste and inefficiency in one of the most cost-intensive areas of healthcare, capital planning, and budgeting. The founders of Ilerasoft agreed that — for true financial discipline to be actualized — there needed to be a standard. The Efficiency Score is that standard. The Efficiency Score, which is like a credit score for medical equipment, harnesses IoT/RTLS, along with 15 other unique data points, to provide financial metrics and recommendations for enhanced operations and to improve future purchasing decisions.
Shuchi Yvas
Founder of GuestBox
Accelerator: Tampa Bay WaVE
GuestBox is a tool to help hotels, vacation rental managers, and Airbnb hosts boost guest loyalty. They provide immense value to a host’s listing with curated amenities for them to welcome their guests. Each box comes with luxury items, a combination of toiletries, skincare items, and snacks. Products are natural, organic, healthy and welcoming. Many are by female-founded and female-led companies. Going forward, they plan to showcase more products from up-and-coming female and minority entrepreneurs from across the US.
Lindsey Tropf
Founder and CEO of Immersed Games
Accelerator: Tampa Bay WaVE
Immersed Games is an EdTech company with an audacious vision for how games can be used to empower student learning. They’re building an inspiration platform where students can spark their love of learning and be empowered to reach their full potential. One day, while playing World of Warcraft, Lindsey turned to her husband Ryan and asked where to find something. When he rattled off the right character, in the right city, on the right continent in the game, she realized how much we all learn, simply through the act of play. But, while she knew so much, that information didn’t really matter outside of the game world. So, enamored with the concept, she Lindsey went through a doctoral program to study learning theory, where she increasingly realized that online game could prove to be an incredible platform for learning and eventually created Immersed Games.
Yasmine Mustafa
Founder at ROAR for Good
Program: Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs
Every day, women face the threat of harassment, assault, and violence. So Yasmine and her team set off to do something about it. What started off as a solo journey of a lifetime turned into a global mission to impact generations. After a trip to South America, Yasmine returned to Philadelphia and developed a wearable product that pairs with users’ phones, allowing them to share their location with trusted networks via mobile text alerts.
Kristian Kimbro Rickard
CEO of doyenne360
Accelerator: Start Co.
Kristian’s company, doyenne360, is working to increase access and understanding of STEM by deploying IoT, analysts, and workforce training solutions. Beginning in the education space, doyenne360 is striving to close the technology gap in Tennessee (USA).
Stephanie Cummings
CEO of Please Assist Me
Accelerator: Start Co.
Stephanie started Please Assist Me with the vision to create a work-life balance for the working professional. Her vision is that personal assistants are not something just for the power brokers of the world, but a resource for working single parents, injured veterans, the elderly, and anyone else who you might not traditionally associate with having a personal assistant.
Felicity Conrad
CEO and Founder of Paladin
Programs: Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs & Techstars Chicago
Paladin takes the busy work out of pro bono so that your team can focus on making an impact in your community. Their platform eliminates the need for hand-crafted emails to track down individuals who want to get involved.
Najma Ghuloom
Co-Founder of Majra
Accelerator: SeedFuel Rowad
Majra is a recruitment platform with a focus on matching based on culture and personality fit. What separates Majra from various other employment channels is its emphasis on the personal aspect of recruitment processes — often overlooked by other services. Be it enabling job seekers to highlight their personalities beyond their professional work or encouraging companies to share their culture and environment, their objective is to connect young people with purposeful careers.
Akshaya Shanmugam
Founder of Lumme
Accelerator: Valley Venture Mentors
Akshaya developed a platform combining wearable technology, machine learning, and behavioral psychology for smokers who want to quit with broader applications for addiction treatment. Wearable devices sense the smoker’s movements and predict a likely relapse. A notification tells them not to light up and suggests helpful interventions and alternatives to smoking — about six minutes before cravings hit with 90%+ accuracy in recent trials. Akshaya and Lumme have raised $1.7 million in non-dilutive SBIR funding and she was recently named a Forbes 30 under 30.
Laurel Wider
Founder of Wonder Crew
Accelerator: Valley Venture Mentors
Laurel shared her outlook on the VVM process: “I pitched a crazy idea, dolls for boys, and this community met me with sheer support. VVM helped me actualize my concept into a successful business. The grant that I won was instrumental in bridging a funding gap until I found the right partner. Prior to Wonder Crew, I didn’t know a thing about business. One of the coolest things about VVM is that no experience is required.” Now, her dolls are on the shelves of every Walmart and Target store in the country. She recently won Doll of the Year at the TOTY Awards. And is now a sought-after thought leader on gender, toys, and early education. Check out this recent NYTimes article for more on Laurel and Wonder Crew.
Photo Credit: CreateHER Stock | https://patrickriley.medium.com/10-women-run-startup-founders-you-should-know-358b1eb97455 | ['Patrick Riley'] | 2018-06-28 20:26:32.279000+00:00 | ['Community', 'Startup', 'Founders', 'The Future Is Female'] |
Sex Doll Brothels: Beyond Good & Evil | Sex Doll Brothels: Beyond Good & Evil
Did you say sex doll brothel?
It’s incredible to think that the future is here, unfolding in the present. Concepts that were once the dreams of science fiction are happening now, and are becoming more commonplace. Take, for example, sex doll brothels.
Picture this:
You’re walking down the street, minding your own business. You might even be a little horny. And then, a big red sign pulls your attention away from your inner thoughts. You turn your head, and there it is: “Sex Doll Brothel.”
Even if the thought of hiring a sex worker has never been your thing, the idea of a sex doll brothel is intriguing. Maybe you disregard the sign and move on with your day, or perhaps you step inside to see what it’s like.
But are these brothels any more controversial than prostitution, which Rudyard Kipling described as the oldest profession in history? [i]
Sex doll brothels are a contentious subject, both politically, socially, and morally. Despite these concerns, brothels are opening around the world, mostly in Europe, with a few located in North America and Asia. Some countries grudgingly permit their existence, but others, like China, draw a hard line, citing that sex doll brothels “disturbed the social order with vulgar activities.” [ii]
A new industrial revolution
Concerns regarding automation and the eventual replacement of human workers with robots are nothing new. Since the Industrial Revolution, fears of mass employment caused by machines have plagued workers and economists alike. [iii]
Advancements in AI and the gradual adoption of robotic workers in grocery stores, factories, and other jobs does little to quell these anxieties. And it’s almost a guarantee that improvements in these technologies will ramp up the range of services robots will be able to perform.
However, the use of sex dolls and sex robots in brothels raises a whole new host of concerns that goes deeper than unemployment. In an article discussing sex workers’ concerns about sex doll brothels, Uproxx contributor Alia Stearn perfectly sums up how this “new” industrial revolution of AI is more than jobs:
“The issue is particularly interesting because we’re witnessing the industrial revolution of a basic physiological drive. Whereas installing self-checkout eliminates some jobs, it doesn’t fundamentally impact the sexual relationship between humans, which is one of the potential pitfalls of this tech. Sex workers worry the dolls will encourage an unhealthy sexual mindset, warping a man’s ability to relate to living partners.” [iv]
A touchy subject
We don’t know much about what goes on inside the head of a person who regularly uses sex dolls, so it is difficult to say what damage precisely if any, happens to users.
The lack of literature about this subject isn’t from lack of trying. For years, psychologists and others who have wanted to study the effects of sex dolls on people, but several factors have deterred them, such as [v]:
> population resistance
>manufacturer resistance in disclosing sales information
> language barriers
> a lack of professional literature and methodological issues in studying human sexual behavior and in investigating marginalized populations
> Censorship which limits access to material pertinent to the study of the modern sex doll-owner
As sex dolls become more common, it will be easier to study. However, it is likely to take many more years before ascertaining anything concrete.
A glorified fleshlight, or something more?
Source: huffpost.com | Photo by Christophe Bertolin/IP3/Getty Images
Understanding why people visit sex doll brothels is challenging and elicits more questions than answers. Do clients do it for companionship? Do they do it for the novelty? Are sex dolls just sophisticated, glorified fleshlights, or something more?
About the brothels themselves, should authorities or the public be concerned?
When choosing between a human sex worker and a sex doll, why do some men want the doll?
Not every question has a definite answer, and we may never know for sure. For now, we can only speculate.
Cost
Source: womenintheworld.com | Greg Baker /AFP/Getty Images
One possibility is price.
Sex dolls are often less expensive than their human counterparts. Prices vary from brothel to brothel, but at Dolly Parlour, the UK’s first sex doll brothel, it is £50 for a half hour or £130 for two hours. [vi]
In 2006, the average global price for an hour with a human sex worker was about $340. While that number has plummeted to $260, it is still much more expensive than the services offered at a sex doll brothel. [vii]
Even if men (or women) choose to purchase a sex doll rather than visit a brothel, it is still cheaper than dating. Plus, having a doll has the potential to turn the focus during a date from having sex to getting to know the other person better.
Safe spaces
Secondly, sex doll brothels offer a safe space for those who wish to “explore their sexuality without the emotional, physical, or potentially criminal ramifications that come from seeking similar services from an actual human.” [vii]
According to Ontario-based sex doll brothel Aura Dolls’ website,
“Our vision is to bring you an exciting new way to achieve your needs without the many restrictions and limitations that a real partner may come with. We hope that way you can enjoy any fantasy or fetish you desire without judgment or shame.”
Sex, for all its complexities, is a basic human need, and some may have trouble meeting that. Mental or physical disabilities, performance anxiety, fear of rejection, or difficulty opening up to others could play a role. Sex doll brothels offer a way for people struggling with these things to fulfill their needs.
Benefits for couples?
Lastly, couples who wish to experiment sexually without infidelity can find that a sex doll brothel satisfies that curiosity.
In a press release for her work Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, Marina Adshade, professor at the University of British Columbia, explains how sex dolls could benefit couples by taking the pressure off of partners to feel solely responsible for fulfilling each others’ needs, whether they are sexual or not.
Without the obligation of sexual compatibility, couples could focus on building up other qualities in themselves and each other. This shift in thinking would put greater focus on different aspects of the relationships outside of the bedroom.
“I predict their availability will give couples greater opportunity to define their own types of marriages. One example might be that more couples could choose ‘companionship marriages’ that do not involve sex, but focus solely on the creation of a family.” [iv]
It can be easy to criticize those who visit sex doll brothels, but it’s unfair to think that the clients who frequent them want to force violent or unhealthy fantasies on the dolls. Similarly, it’s wrong to place judgment on men who call upon human sex workers.
Drawbacks and consequences
For all the good things one can boast about sex doll brothels, it would be naive to brush aside the negative effects these places have, especially regarding the human psyche.
The biggest concern is the lack of human intimacy when it comes to having sex with a love doll. Sex worker Alyssa from Sheri’s Ranch in Nevada said about sex and intimacy:
“When a client sees a human sex worker, he has a real, two-way experience with a woman that gives him feedback and enhances his ability to be intimate with other women in his current or future life. A man who becomes comfortable with a sex doll is alienating himself from healthy sexual experiences with real women and distancing himself from any possibility of a healthy sex life.” [x]
Sex workers also worry that sex dolls will condition men to want a more docile, submissive partner for which to act upon, rather than interact with. This coincides with a very real fear that sex dolls will train men to lose empathy and treat women like objects and act out violently against them. [xi]
Others are apprehensive about the cleanliness of the dolls, which can lead to the spread of STIs.
During high-traffic days with lots of bookings, the teams responsible for cleaning and sanitizing both the doll and the bedroom may only have as little as an hour. And while condoms are offered and strongly encouraged at many sex doll brothels, there is no guarantee that customers will use them.
Many brothels spend a large part of their budget on a well-trained cleanup crew that ensures maximum cleanliness. [xii]
The land beyond good and evil
Technology in sex doll development and AI will continue to grow. And whether we like it or not, sex robots are coming. It is very likely that sex dolls will become less of a novelty and more common as this happens.
(If you already own one, feel free to read How To Care For Your Sex Doll.)
Some people fear that sex dolls will increase isolation in an already lonely population. However, there are benefits to using a sex doll. These benefits just haven’t been backed by the research yet.
Sex doll brothels are morally and culturally complicated and shrouded in gray areas. But ultimately, it’s the choice of those who visit them. Just as sex work with real humans persisted despite efforts to eradicate it, the same will happen with dolls.
Who knows what changes the future can bring? We can only imagine.
So, what are your thoughts? Do you think sex doll brothels are an alternative to hiring a human sex worker? Or will they do more harm than good?
Are dolls going to help us last longer, both in bed and as a species? There are so many new and deep questions we as a society must ask not only ourselves, but each other.
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Sources
[i] Stearns, A. (2018, September 21). Sex Doll Brothels Are Coming And Legal Prostitutes Aren’t Happy. Retrieved January 6, 2019, from https://uproxx.com/life/sex-doll-brothels-concerns/
[ii] Future of Sex. (2018, November 14). Map of Sex Doll Brothels Around the World. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from https://futureofsex.net/robots/map-of-sex-doll-brothels-around-the-world/
[iii] Rogoff, K. (2012, October 01). King Ludd is Still Dead by Kenneth Rogoff. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/technology-unemployment-jobs-internet-by-kenneth-rogoff?barrier=accesspaylog
[iv] Stearns, A. (2018, September 21). Sex Doll Brothels Are Coming And Legal Prostitutes Aren’t Happy. Retrieved January 6, 2019, from https://uproxx.com/life/sex-doll-brothels-concerns/
[v] Valverde, S., & Moreno, J. K. (2012). The modern sex doll-owner: A descriptive analysis: A thesis(Unpublished master’s thesis). California State Polytechnic University. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1893&context=theses.
[vi] Future of Sex. (2018, November 14). Map of Sex Doll Brothels Around the World. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from https://futureofsex.net/robots/map-of-sex-doll-brothels-around-the-world/
[vii] Tuttle, B. (2014, August 12). Sex Keeps Getting Cheaper Around the Globe. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from http://money.com/money/3103806/sex-prices-prostitutes-cheap/
[viii] Paget, S. (2018, September 17). PAGET: Why a sex doll ‘brothel’ might actually be a good thing. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from https://torontosun.com/life/sex-files/paget-why-a-sex-doll-brothel-might-actually-be-a-good-thing
[xi] Ibid.
[x] Stearns, A. (2018, September 21). Sex Doll Brothels Are Coming And Legal Prostitutes Aren’t Happy. Retrieved January 6, 2019, from https://uproxx.com/life/sex-doll-brothels-concerns/
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Dickson, E. (2018, November 26). Sex doll brothels are now a thing. What will happen to real-life sex workers? Retrieved January 6, 2019, from https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/26/18113019/sex-doll-brothels-legal-sex-work | https://medium.com/@info_63007/sex-doll-brothels-beyond-good-evil-46196fbf4e4c | ['Earth Erotic'] | 2019-05-22 13:20:50.963000+00:00 | ['Sex Positive', 'Sex Work', 'Sex', 'Sexuality', 'Sex Doll'] |
The Heart Grows Weary | 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/chalkboard/the-heart-grows-weary-f64060a9da50 | ['Daniel A. Teo'] | 2020-12-22 16:25:34.933000+00:00 | ['One Line', 'Time', 'Prompt', 'Heartbreak', 'Poetry'] |
A Healthy Island Economy Is Self-Sustaining | Many countries look at their economy through import, export glasses. And they stimulate their economies by motivating entrepreneurs to export goods or offer services in tourism. Whatever brings in the money from outside.
The effects can be seen all around. We have linear business models, so yes, the money flows in. But the problems related to these businesses flow in as well.
And who needs to solve those? Society. Mass production of goods ruins a lot, mass tourism ruins even more. Why is that?
Mass anything has no close connection to a local place. The benefits are limited to the company, while the local society pays the price of pollution, waste, transport movements, noise, etc.
Tourists are often separate from local people. They do not interact, have no connection to the local culture, let alone contribute to the local community
Mass anything has surpassed the human scale. It is too big for its shoes. Mass tourism is often combined with mass buses, mass waste, mass noise-levels, etc.
Job creation, yes. But are they inspiring, soul-satisfying jobs? Often that is not the case…
What if there would be another way? What if we could give an impulse to the economy and at the same time improve the ecology in a region? This article gives some explorations and explanations.
A monitor lizard on Gili Air eats discarded waste. Photo by author.
Exports and Imports
In a globally oriented economy, there are exports, and also imports. And it might just be a good idea to start minimizing imports to give our economy the impulse it needs. How does it work? Let’s look at an island to clarify.
In my recent travel through Indonesia, I was for some time on Gili Air, an island just off Lombok. And with my eye for regeneration, I see opportunities arise on every corner.
Okay. What’s regeneration? The term originally comes from the biological field. I quote Wikipedia.
“In biology, regeneration is the process of renewal, restoration, and growth that makes genomes, cells, organisms, and ecosystems resilient to natural fluctuations or events that cause disturbance or damage” — Regeneration, wikipedia
Okay. So what is it in an economic sense? Regeneration is a movement that’s taking us beyond sustainability. Regeneration combines economy and ecology and finds ways to reinvent our economic system in such a way that we stay within the boundaries of our planet.
The regeneration movement wants to restore ecosystems and learn together as humans how to live without damaging them. Humans as part of ecosystems. Economy and ecology aligned.
Basic Needs
But that’s a sidetrack. We were going to talk about Gili Air. What if this island would work on becoming self-sustaining in some basic needs first?
E.g. energy, water, and food. It would keep a lot of money inside of the economy that would otherwise have gone out.
No import, no spending. The money saved can be invested in new projects. And the projects will feed on each other moneywise by using synergy instead of scale as a driver. And there will be less need for export and its devastating effects.
In practice: what could Gili Air do as a start? In the picture at the top of this article, you see one of the horse carts that inhabit the island. On Gili Air, transportation is only done on foot, by bicycle, by horse cart, or electric scooter. Great first step!
But what if the island would dedicate itself to producing the fuel for these means of transport inside their own economy? What if they would have a small-grid system of renewable electricity, so the houses could have light and the electric scooters would have their renewable fuel?
El Hierro Real-life Example
On the island of El Hierro in Spain, they have even taken it one step further. They have merged the electricity and water company and made all inhabitants co-owners.
The advantages?
Electricity and water companies don’t compete anymore. They collaborate.
The electricity system could be combined with the desalination process for drinking water. Normally desalination is an expensive process because it needs lots of energy. But if you produce your own energy, it is not costly anymore. This is the synergy at work!
When all inhabitants are co-owners, they care. They will not overuse or waste freshwater and electricity.
And even more importantly: if all inhabitants are co-owners, the money stays on the island, people have more to spend and that will trigger other entrepreneurship.
Food and Feed
The picture at the top of the article is there not only to illustrate transport, and electricity for electric scooters. Every day at around ten in the morning, a boat full of sacks of grass for the horses is arriving. The sacks are carried out manually (as is every other bit of import, also the very heavy stuff…)
It is a daily ritual involving many people as unloaders. Feet in the water, and sacks with heavy stuff on the back of men. Or on the heads of women.
What if the island was capable of farming the feed needed for the horses? And the food needed for the people?
There are many empty patches on the island where the soil is laying bare. Large heaps of organic waste (palm leaves, branches, etc.) are stacked and towards the evening burned for no other reason than that it is seen as waste.
Space enough for some regenerative farming. Organic matter will be burned in the evening. Photo by author.
What a waste! Organic matter is one of the most important ingredients to regenerate the soil. We need organic matter, we need micro-organisms, we need mycelium networks in the soil.
And as a very important side-effect, we need to capture carbon in the soil to reverse climate change.
Here’s some inspiration about food and regenerative farming, including practical tips on how to start creating healthy, living soil.
Fisheries
Islands are surrounded by water. So how neat would it be if islanders found ways to enjoy self-sufficiency with what the ocean provides.
On El Hierro, they have shielded part of the ocean and allow fish to become as old as they can be. The spillover effect is tremendous. Because the fish lay millions of eggs every year, the ocean is being regenerated.
The fishermen cooperatives decided to fish only with lines. As a result, the communities thrive and we can eat really sustainable tuna fish on El Hierro.
Restoration of the Corals
On the Gili isles, the dying of the corals is a problem. Corals provide very important functions within the ecosystems. As the Queensland Museum, Australia explains, corals:
protect coastlines from the damaging effects of wave action and tropical storms
provide habitats and shelter for many marine organisms
are the source of nitrogen and other essential nutrients for marine food chains
assist in carbon and nitrogen-fixing
help with nutrient recycling
Gili Eco Trust is trying to do something about this problem with Biorock technology.
From what I’ve seen underwater, I think they use the same geo-therapy methods Daniel Christian Wahl describes in his interview with Tom Goreau.
“Over more than 30 years, Tom has been a pioneer in experimenting with the use of very low (direct current) electrical stimulation applied through fine steel grids to increase the settlement rate and growth, “and reduced mortality for a wide variety of marine organisms, including corals, oysters, sponges, sea-grasses, and salt-marsh grasses.” — Daniel Christian Wahl about Tom Goreau.
When snorkeling, I saw the metal structures. And yes, the corals upon it looked healthy. Vibrant colors. Flourishing…
Transition Steps
So, what are the steps toward transitioning an island (or another bioregional area) toward a regenerative economy?
1 Get together with a group of people and explain the regenerative-economy-mechanisms I’m describing. Brainstorm together about a cool future for your area. What do you want to be?
2 Visualize that future in words and preferably also illustrations. Make it as tangible as you can. And have fun doing it! The fun will show in the variety of words, videos, pictures, infographics, illustrations…
3 Tell the story as widely as possible to groups around your community. Light the spark in as many diverse people as you can. Involve lots of young people. It’s their future! Involve primary and secondary schools, entrepreneurs, universities, and just light the spark…
4 Help each other to get some real action going. Bottom-up projects that create value upon value. Link these projects (profit, non-profit, all of them) to each other and share proceeds to invest in new initiatives.
5 When the group is big enough, go to your local government and demand some action. Let them invest in the first steps for local basic needs production: renewable energy, restoring water cycles for drinking water, regenerative farming…
6 Make sure the money is kept local. Use economic principles to convince people. If the whole community will be profiting, they will have more money to spend locally.
7 On a personal level: stop buying from multinationals. Keep your money local and active, as much as you can. No more large beer brands like Heineken or InBev. Start local beer breweries with all kinds of tastes. Start partying with local beer and fruit juices. Make it fun with a message!
8 Then you can attract outsiders in. Outsiders, travelers, with respect for what you’re doing. Tell the stories and they’ll want to be part of the fun! Their outsiders’ money can help you fund new projects too.
Happy transitioning! | https://medium.com/activate-the-future/a-healthy-island-economy-is-self-sustaining-d65085d8d1d6 | ['Desiree Driesenaar'] | 2020-06-02 06:21:04.560000+00:00 | ['Regenerative Economy', 'Systems Thinking', 'Tourism', 'Island'] |
The Revolution will not be Televised, it will go Viral — The #EndSars Movement | The Revolution will not be Televised, it will go Viral — The #EndSars Movement
My thoughts are all over the place, I am sad, I am angry, I feel helpless. Bear with me, while I try to piece together my thoughts.
On Tuesday, October 20, 2020, the Nigerian Military opened fire on unarmed protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate and turned what had been a relatively peaceful protest into a bloodbath, with internal organs and bullet wounds on display. These are protesters like thousand of others across the country who had gone out to demand an end to police brutality, and the rogue police unit, SARS.
Even if protesters were violating a curfew, which they weren’t, who declared the punishment execution by the military?
“We have no Leader”
Organic is the best way to describe the #EndSars movement. A common sentiment held by the protesters is that there is no leader, and the leaders are the many who have lost their lives as a result of police brutality. If there was a leader it would be the young people killed at Lekki Toll Gate today. If there was a leader, it would be Jimoh Isiaq or it would be Chijoke Iloanya. If there was a leader, it would be the countless lives cut short at the hands of rogue police officers during this protest, and the unknown number lost before the protest. But they are all dead, so there is no leader.
“Na Person Wey Dey Alive, Dey Make Money”
The Critics, Verse 1: One of the oddest things during this protest has been comments about how the protests have been disruptive and affected business and commerce in the country, particularly in Lagos. Well, Sherlock, that’s the point. For months, the government has inconvenienced Lagosians with bridge repairs, for weeks we were in lockdown because of COVID, and no one seemed to complain. But the youth in Nigeria are demanding their rights as stated in the constitution and suddenly, it’s a problem?
“Every person has a right to life and no one shall be deprived intentionally of his life, save in an execution of the sentence of a court in respect of a criminal offence of which he has been found guilty in Nigeria.”
Now that tens of people were shot at the toll gate, and the government has called for a 24-hour curfew, I wonder if those same people will have complaints about the government.
The Critics, Verse 2: Many young people, myself included, have also been critical of the generation before us. “If they had protested, then we won’t have to protest today.” While I initially agreed with this sentiment, I now think it is somewhat unfair.
We have a tool that was not available years ago, Social Media — Twitter has made itself the home for all voices. Where everyone is a reporter and storyteller in their own right, with the right words and phrasing your thoughts put into 280 characters or less can reach millions. You can assemble, you can motivate, you can elicit global support.
Today, the world got to see peaceful protesters, singing the National Anthem, executed. Media Houses in Nigeria have largely kept mum about the protest and the killings, this is no surprise. But we no longer have to depend on them to tell our stories. Even if the revolution is taking off the streets by government-sanctioned bullets, the revolution will not end, the revolution is viral.
The Critics, Verse 3: “They have no leaders, the demands are unclear.” The demands were clear when the protest started. It’s clear now.
#EndSars
It’s simple. It’s justice for the many killed.
“Soro Soke”
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
We will remember what was said. We will remember those who were silent. | https://medium.com/@bukayo/the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-it-will-go-viral-the-endsars-movement-b2305df565f6 | [] | 2020-11-14 21:22:21.593000+00:00 | ['Nigeria', 'Life', 'Police', 'Police Brutality', 'Revolution'] |
Here’s What Happens If Your Number Is Found On A Drug Dealer’s Phone | Here’s What Happens If Your Number Is Found On A Drug Dealer’s Phone
You paranoid, bro?
I’ve never smoked weed (primarily because I’m a nervous loser). For me, the risk of getting in trouble outweighs the reward of getting high. I know a comical effect of smoking marijuana is paranoia, but some of us don’t need bud to freak out (can I say “bud” if I don’t smoke)?
When I imagine smoking weed, I can’t help but imagine getting caught. Here are a few of the weed-related scenarios that keep me up at night:
My shitty downstairs neighbor smells weed and reports me, causing the police to raid my house. My drug dealer is an undercover cop. An emergency occurs and I’m too stoned to react. I pull a Christopher Moltisanti and sit on a Maltese. My drug dealer gets caught, and I go down because my number is listed on their phone.
If you also suffer from weed worries, I can offer you a bit of relief. I reached out to Jef Henninger, a New Jersey Criminal Defense Attorney to ask, “What would happen if my number was found in a drug dealer’s phone?”
wtnh.com
The first thing Henninger tells me is that police don’t prioritize investigating drug dealers’ phones. Drug dealers, he reminds me, get a lot of calls. Unless you’re buying from Pablo Escobar (you can’t—he died in 1993) or a similarly significant drug lord, it is unlikely authorities will spend any time digging through your dealer’s phone.
According to Henninger, TV does not accurately portray the way police handle drug busts. Most of the time, law enforcement doesn’t even ask dealers where they obtained their product.
“Police don’t usually cast a wide net unless that was the goal in the beginning. It’s one thing if they’re trying to take down a drug ring, but if it’s a common drug deal, they don’t typically try very hard to find out where it goes or where it came from.”
I wasn’t convinced. “So, what you’re saying,” I ask, “is the chances of police going through a casual dealer’s phone at all are pretty slim?”
“Slim to none,” he answers.
Let’s say police did dig through my dealer’s phone. What might cause them to investigate me?
There are some factors that could make my presence in a drug dealer’s phone appear suspicious. Henninger says the number of times I’ve called or the length of my calls might pique police interest. Heavy call volume could suggest that I’m actively involved in illicit activity, as opposed to a casual friend or someone from Craigslist looking to buy a love seat.
Can police look through our text history? Apparently not. A phone constitutes a container (like a purse, computer or car) and police would need my consent or a warrant to search it. There are some exceptions, of course—if there was an emergency or if police were engaged in “hot pursuit,” it’s possible evidence could be moved or destroyed before a warrant was issued. As a general rule, however, investigators need probable cause in order to search personal items. Unless the suspect is linked to a bigger crime, authorities probably won’t bother.
And lest you think you can avoid any potential texting pitfalls by utilizing code words, think again. Henninger says police know all the codes, so swapping “an eighth of bud” for “eight birthday balloons” can still be used against you.
Via Giphy/Pineapple Express
What do I do if police find my number in a drug dealer’s phone and ask to question me?
By this time, you probably feel like purchasing weed from a dealer is a fairly low-key crime. Not I — weed anxieties still firmly in place, I ask Henninger what I should do if police were to find me guilty by association and ask to question me.
“The best thing anyone should do any time they’re contacted by police is call a lawyer first,” he advises. “The vast majority of people are convicted by their own words.” Henninger tells me that as long as a client hasn’t confessed, the odds of winning a case are very high.
“Some people are just dumb enough to go in and say ‘Yeah, I bought drugs from this guy,’ or ‘Yeah, I supplied him with drugs.’ Thats how they really catch their convictions,” says Henninger.
What if I’m called upon to act as a witness against my dealer?
I pose this question to Henninger and I’m surprised when he responds with a chuckle. He tells me:
“Most drug cases never go to trial. They’re won and lost based on whether the police violated your constitutional rights.”
What he means is that if the police do an illegal search or if they have a search warrant that ends up getting thrown out, the case is over. Most drug cases that go to court involve a person who was caught red-handed. In these instances, the evidence is generally so strong, there’s no need for witnesses.
The major takeaway? Police give very few F’s about casual drug deals. I’m still crippled by drug neuroses, but if you’re a recreational drug user, rest easy in the knowledge that your text history isn’t going to bring you down. | https://medium.com/omgfacts/heres-what-happens-if-your-number-is-found-on-a-drug-dealer-s-phone-a89bfb01eaed | ['Paige Moomey'] | 2017-05-03 21:44:38.838000+00:00 | ['Criminal Justice Reform', 'Drugs', 'Police', 'Law', 'Life'] |
Pandemic School Closures Made Perfect Food Bank Pop-Up Sites. What Happened to Them? | My last piece for The Bold Italic documented the anguish I was having processing the (still climbing) spike in anti-Asian violence, especially against our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) seniors. After much ruminating and nights of lost sleep, I decided that volunteering with the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, which serves a large population of AAPI seniors, would be a good way to turn my worrisome and angry energies into a positive, non-violent action response to all the craziness.
It’s been a few months, with near-steady weekly shifts. I’ve worked at five sites so far, mostly at pop-up pantry locations at public schools in the city. The school closures made perfect venues for the food bank. Huge yards and parking lots provided enough room outdoors for delivery trucks, dozens of pallets of groceries, and space to socially distance both volunteers and a record number of food bank participants.
Aside from the service aspect of each shift, I enjoy the fresh air, the chance to get in some steps (10,000 is a rarity in these times), and the choice to either zone out while putting together 18-to-23-pound food bags in an assembly line, or engage with fellow volunteers from a distance.
We knew the pop-ups couldn’t remain at the schools forever.
Speaking of volunteers, the Bay Area—heavily populated with bleeding heart, overachieving do-gooders—produces the perfect one. Nearly everyone is early and proactive. Admittedly, that combination can yield behavior that’s not much in the spirit of service. There’s sometimes competitiveness amongst volunteers, like who can go down the line and fill grocery bags the quickest, impatiently waiting for six feet behind the slowpoke holding up the line because grabbing four handfuls of tangerines takes longer than the other stations.
(Actually, I’m mostly describing myself and just a few others. I’m guilty of this rude behavior and try to check myself, though my years working in the service industry means I’m used to performing repetitive, manual labor with speed. I am a beast. Or maybe I just think I am. Either way, I need to be a beast with patience and remember that we’re all there for the same good purpose.)
When I step outside of my self-perceived beast mode, though, I quickly glance at the line outside of the school property, which never seems to get shorter. Some food bank participants show up two hours before the pantries open for distribution, not wanting to be hungry for the next week.
There are currently 29 SFM Food Bank pop-up pantries, and the food bank is keeping in communication with participants on shifting locations, trying to give two weeks’ advance notice about changes.
At every site I’ve worked thus far, I see time and again that the participants are overwhelmingly AAPI seniors. I know this, but seeing it makes me feel a twinge of sadness inside. I look at the bilingual distribution volunteers working the front of the line, fluidly switching between Cantonese and English. As I throw a giant turnip into my bag and grab some celery, I am envious of those volunteers and embarrassed that I don’t know enough Cantonese to fill that role, which the food bank always desperately needs. Still, I tell myself that I am serving Asian seniors like I wanted, just from a greater distance.
Having settled into this new routine, I was surprised to receive an email a few weeks ago. ”Thank you for signing up to volunteer at Abraham Lincoln High School this Friday. Unfortunately, this week’s shift has been canceled,” it read.
That food bank location, with less than a week’s notice, had to quickly pivot to distributing disaster boxes outside of school grounds, but could only have staff work due to pandemic safety protocols. I hopped on to another shift for that day at A.P. Giannini, seeing some of the volunteers from the Lincoln site had done the same. Shortly afterward, the volunteer sign-up section of the food bank website stated that my newly chosen volunteer site was going to cease operations this month in June.
We knew the pop-ups couldn’t remain at the schools forever.
And of course, the news of schools reopening was a relief for some parents and students. While the economy has been slowly reopening as vaccine rollouts reach more communities, unemployment has also been shrinking, though the reasons may not be so great. That’s partially why hunger isn’t disappearing from the Bay proportional to the rate of the rest of society reopening. During Covid-19, SFM Food Bank participants jumped from 32,000 households per week to 62,000 last summer. While the need “leveled at 55,000 households per week during the last several months, we’re not seeing any kind of decline at all,” said Keely Hopkins, SFM Food Bank Communications and Social Media Manager.
While the food bank is no stranger to shifting operations, having served the city and North Bay for more than 35 years, this major change amidst a crisis presents an added layer of urgency to our city’s hunger problem. There are currently 29 SFM Food Bank pop-up pantries, and the food bank is keeping in communication with participants on shifting locations, trying to give two weeks’ advance notice about changes. It’s not only schools reopening that is affecting many of the pantries, though, “it’s across public spaces,” Hopkins shared. “Schools were the first ones to move. Right now we have the street closures, and we’re going to lose those locations as traffic returns. Our poor pop-up pantry team has been in full scramble mode the last couple of months,” she continued.
Not to fear, though. Some new locations are next to or very near the school pantries, and some neighborhood pantries with whom the food bank partnered pre-pandemic have been reopening. Logistics are being smoothed out as you read this, and no pantries will actually disappear. Eventually, the food bank hopes to return to the farmers market-style of food distribution, instead of the current distribution model. Participants can choose what they want instead of being handed a blind box full of pre-packaged groceries, which may contain foods not commonly eaten in some cultures, like peanut butter or boxed macaroni and cheese that are more common in the mainstream white American diet.
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As for the do-gooder volunteers, perhaps like myself, Hopkins emphasizes, “We’re still here, we still need volunteers…we’re still outside and are social distancing.” Volunteers are needed more on the weekdays than the weekends, especially on Mondays and Thursdays. | https://thebolditalic.com/pandemic-school-closures-made-perfect-food-bank-pop-up-sites-what-happened-to-them-c58b543a79ef | ['Margot Seeto'] | 2021-06-17 17:52:49.456000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Volunteering', 'Foodbanks', 'Bay Area News'] |
How Bruce Lee and Russian Trains Can Shake Up Your Self Care Right Now | 1. Wu Wei (China) — “Non-Action”
Wu Wei (無為) is a Taoist principle which roughly translates as non-action or without effort. Rather than conveying a sense of laziness or apathy, the real message behind Wu Wei is about swimming with the tide instead of against it. It’s a concept of letting go of our ego and not forcing our will unto the universe. If you were a boat in the open ocean and the wind started blowing, applying Wu Wei would be to put up a sail instead of attempting to row against the wind. So, a better way of phrasing Wu Wei could be “effortless action.”
This quote from Bruce Lee describes it best:
“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
It’s important not to mistake fluidity for submission or giving up. Anyone who has observed a mighty river carving its way through mountain ranges has seen the awesome power of fluidity and can appreciate that the river did not submit to anything. Wu Wei simply means to thrive by going with the flow.
How You Can Apply This Right Now
Acknowledge that the pandemic has been a huge disruptor in your life and that there are days in which you will just not be productive. Instead of forcing yourself to be productive, allow yourself to just read a book or watch a movie. A big part of moving forward is also accepting that there is now a new normal. Instead of investing your energy into trying to reclaim your old life, find opportunities in this new situation that were never possible before. Maybe you could use your previous commute time to finally launch your side hustle.
Created by the author
2. Pule ’Ohana (Hawaii) — “Family Prayer”
Pule ’ohana translates to “family prayer” and is a simple ritual where a family gathers to talk about their day, to apologize for any wrongdoing, and to express gratitude. At its core, the ritual is about creating a safe and consistent way to openly bring up grievances, resolve them in a spiritually mindful way, and to heal relationship wounds. As we are forced to spend more time together than we previously had, there is bound to be friction between household members which will need to be resolved. However, grievances don’t have to be present for the ritual to have value. The practice could also be used as a forum to validate each other’s feelings, understand personal boundaries, and to have thoughtful dialogues about life.
There are several reasons why this ritual is so powerful right now. Almost everyone on earth has been touched by anxiety, grief, or a sense of isolation recently. This simple act of coming together on a consistent basis alleviates all three emotions. This practice taps into a fact that anthropologists have known for decades — which is that rituals are powerful in reducing anxiety and grief. It also reduces isolation as research shows that structured rituals like this one have the ability to create strong bonds when it is performed together.
How You Can Apply This Right Now
A ritual is defined by a certain rigidity and repetitiveness. Set aside a set time or specific meal and establish a rough structure of discussion. Go around the table with your family (or housemates) and create a safe space to discuss feelings and any grievances. It’s helpful to establish some rules of engagement to resolve differences prior to initiating the practice. Try to end each day with a component of gratitude, especially for one another.
3. Razgovory v Poezde (Russia) — “Train Talks”
The phrase “razgovory v poezde” translates to “train talks” and has its birth in the Trans-Siberian Railway. The concept describes the authentic and raw conversations you are likely to have when a bunch of people are crammed together in a small space for an extended period of time to endure a tough journey. Sounds like a perfect mirror of our quarantine experiences to me.
The part I love most about the “train talks” is the way Russians describe it as skipping the small talk and immediately diving deep. The bond is initiated through sharing food, swapping stories, and experiencing some degree of suffering together but it is cemented by a healthy dose of authenticity. You board the train as strangers but in the end, you leave it as friends. We could all benefit from leaving the quarantine experience with stronger relationships than when we went in.
The reason cultivating connections beyond the superficial is important is that research shows that being able to be our authentic selves is important to our wellbeing. It is also central to our ability to have satisfying connections. What’s more, establishing a sense of stability and alignment with our true selves is actually linked to a higher level of grit and the ability to withstand challenges and pursue goals.
“Small talk is for small people. Conversations are for the elite.” — Salma Farook
How You Can Apply This Right Now
Move beyond small talk and superficial conversations with the people around you. Seek to ask more questions and practice going deeper. If you don’t know how to start, there is a whole movement on authentic relating that provides a host of free resources. In return, allow yourself to be vulnerable and to truly express how you feel and where you’re at with the people that you trust. According to the Russians, a bit of Vodka helps.
4. Fika (Sweden) — “Coffee and Friends Break”
The root of the word “Fika” comes from an old slang word for coffee: kaffi. Transposing the two syllables gives you Fika. Though it is broadly translated as a coffee (and usually cake) break, it is very different from the American version of a grab-and-go coffee fix.
For one, Fika involves an intentional mindset of stepping away and actually taking a real break — not distractedly sipping coffee while you frantically try to meet that deadline. Swedes practice Fika not just to pause but also to focus on indulging. Traditional pastries and sweets are usually an integral part of the break. Secondly, Fika also typically involves socializing and connecting with those around you. You don’t Fika by yourself at your desk.
An interesting distinction between a Fika and a coffee break as we understand it is that Americans tend to use coffee as a means to continue working while Swedes use it as a reminder to take a break. Research suggests that the Swedes may have the right idea as prolonged focus on a task has been found to eventually be detrimental to productivity. Numerous studies have also shown that socializing, particularly informal socialization greatly increases creativity.
How You Can Apply This Right Now
Remember that Fika is a mindset. It involves prioritizing breaks and actually allowing your mind to refresh instead of just physically stepping away from your computer. The other key components of Fika are companionship and a yummy, indulgent snack. Try to make sure you always have time for at least two Fikas a day. It will not only help you be more productive but it will strengthen your relationships as well. | https://medium.com/curious/how-bruce-lee-and-russian-trains-can-shake-up-your-self-care-right-now-5446767f3aac | ['May Pang'] | 2020-11-23 23:14:52.436000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Life'] |
Scott Boland has been Included in the Ashes Squad | Australia has included Scott Boland in the Ashes squad ahead of the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne.
The Fast Bowling Group :-
Cricket Australia said in a notification on Tuesday (21 December), “Scott Boland is training with the team in Adelaide and has joined the team.
Also read:- Ryan ten Doeschate has been Appointed as Kent’s Batting Coach
Whereas the medical team represents the fast bowling group after the second Test victory.”
Marsh has been in excellent form for Victoria this summer with 15 wickets at an average of 10 in two matches against Sheffield Shield Player of the Year, Boland, New South Wales in 2018–19.
The England Lions Game :-
He was also engraved in the game against the England Lions in Brisbane. Before meeting with the national team in Adelaide.
Before the pink-ball Test in Adelaide, Hazlewood sustained a side strain in Brisbane.
He played against the English Lions with Test debutant Michael Neser in Brisbane before joining the group in Adelaide.
Australia leads 2–0 in the Ashes present, apart from winning the second Test at the Adelaide Oval.
While Cummins was out at a restaurant in Adelaide after coming into close contact with one of the COVID-19 positive subjects.
A Bowlers’ Charge Management :-
Another fast bowling misconception could be in the mix as to how to manage the charge of Australian fast bowlers.
Read more:- K Srikkanth a Very Happy Birthday, Biography and Personal Life
As Mitchell Starc has played both the Tests so far, it has helped Australia take a 2–0 lead in the 5-match series.
Australia Teams Name:- 1. Pat Cummins (Captain), 2. Steve Smith, 3. David Warner, 4. Scott Boland, 5. Alex Carey, 6. Cameron Green, 7. Marcus Harris, 8. Josh Hazlewood, 9. Travis Head, 10. Usman Khawaja and 11. Marnus Labuschagne, 12. Nathan Lyon, 13. Mitchell Starc, 14. Michael Neser and 15. Jhye Richardson, 16. Michelle Swepson. | https://medium.com/@babacric/scott-boland-has-been-included-in-the-ashes-squad-99d5e4f82d1d | ['Baba Cric'] | 2021-12-21 07:08:11.031000+00:00 | ['Cricket', 'Australia', 'Melbournestars', 'Scottboland'] |
Home Alarm System Suppliers In Hyderabad | Godrej gives the best home alarm system like Infrared LED for night vision, Audio-video recording, water&dust resistant outdoor unit, Built-In loudspeaker for the siren and two way talking and much more equipment which we do bring the best.
We provide the top class service to be done by the highly talented technical personnel which consists of the highest quality products. We build a quality relationship with our customer without any loopholes in our work system. We make a good investment of time and service with customer
Our MNR Global Technologies will give the best home Alarm system suppliers in Hyderabad and will become the most trustworthy service to our customers | https://medium.com/@mnrglobaltech/home-alarm-system-suppliers-in-hyderabad-b740d8983911 | [] | 2020-12-26 10:04:48.382000+00:00 | ['Hyderabad', 'Home', 'Homealarms', 'Mncglobal', 'Technology'] |
Exploratory Data Analysis on Anime Data | Now looking at this we can see that actually speaking, comedy is the most common genre unlike hentai which was supposedly the most common before we did the preprocessing and plotting.
Barcharts
When we have a categorical variable and a numerical variable, we can resort to using barcharts. Depending on whether the categorical column is on x-axis or on y-axis, the chart is synonymously called vertical bar-chart or horizontal bar-chart respectively.
Let’s study rating and episode(numerical variable) with respect to the type(categorical variable). This is a good use-case to study from the perspective of a barchart.
Utils.barplot(data, 'type', 'rating')
Utils.barplot(data, 'type', 'episodes')
Episodes as a function of type
Rating as a function of type
We can see that on an average, the rating is pretty much between 5 and 6 for any type of anime.
However, for TV, the number of episodes seems to be on the higher side of around 35 episodes per anime on an average. For movies, specials and OVA, it is around 1 or 2 and for ONA, it’s around 5 episodes per anime respectively.
Piecharts
To visualize the distribution of counts of a categorical variable, we can use piechart as an alternative to countplot to better understand the relative proportions in a percentage-wise manner. Let’s see the pies of types and genres.
from collections import Counter
typedata = Counter(data.type) all_genres = []
for item in data.genre:
item = item.strip().split(', ')
all_genres.extend(item) genredata = Counter(all_genres) Utils.pieplot(typedata, "type")
Utils.pieplot(genredata, "genre")
Image by Vinayak
Image by Vinayak
Looking at the charts above, we can see that when the number of levels in a category is high, the pie-chart is not a good way to visualize the data because the data cannot be aesthetically and semantically analyzed well. Going for the traditional countplot is a good idea then.
However, for a relatively small number of levels, it is quite effective in communicating a percentage split which colloquially strikes close to the understanding of many folks. We can see that TV, OVA and Movies are predominant in the anime industry whereas Specials, ONA and music anime are relatively less in number.
Boxplot and Violinplots
Boxplot
A histogram is a good way to study the distribution of data however it’s sometimes extraneous and most of histogram’s information could be conveyed more concisely with another plot called boxplot or a box & whisker plot. It is a compressed version of histogram where you come to know about the median and quartiles and you can use the same for flagging potential outliers. A detailed explanation of how to use the boxplot can be found in this article.
Basically we’re interested in finding out quartiles and confirming that most of the data lies within the IQR and the whiskers. Those that lie outside these range are potential outliers, they need to be investigated and if found alright, they will be considered in future analysis, else these records are blocked.
Interpretation of a boxplot
So, let’s visualize the boxplot of ratings and see how it varies with the type variable as well.
Image by Vinayak
We can see that there are a substantial amount of outliers especially on the lower side for TV, OVA and specials. This calls for attention at those points which are far outside the normal rating margins. Why were they rated the way they were? Were the ratings forged, did some negative publicity impact these set of anime, were they rated by enough number of people or was the rating obtained only on the basis of 1 or 2 reviews for those anime?
This plot thus helps us identify the records which could be anomalous and we need to further dig in to make sure those anomalies are genuine and make a call on whether to keep those for our analysis or not.
One more thing to note is that sometimes the range of the y-variable can vary exponentially. In such cases, taking a log transform before plotting the boxplot could really help make things more interpretable.
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize = (15, 6)) Utils.boxplot(data, "type", "members", ax[0], log = False)
Utils.boxplot(data, "type", "members", ax[1], log = True) plt.savefig('./img/boxplot_members_type')
plt.close() fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize = (15, 6)) Utils.boxplot(data, "type", "episodes", ax[0], log = False)
Utils.boxplot(data, "type", "episodes", ax[1], log = True) plt.savefig('./img/boxplot_episodes_type')
plt.close()
Image by Vinayak
Image by Vinayak
We can see that for the plain figure, it’s very difficult to interpret the boxplot since most of the data is concentrated in such a short interval and the spread of data is huge. In order to mitigate this, we can take a log transform and then study the distribution.
We can see that with respect to members, there’s a few potential outliers in OVA and music and when it comes to episodes, there’s several issues with most of the categories.
A movie must have only 1 episode, any more calls for suspicion. The graph says there are some such datapoints. Probably it was mislabelled Movie when it should’ve been TV or vice versa. Let’s find out.
Image by Vinayak
Although I haven’t personally seen all these, I have seen Byousoku 5 centimeter. It is a movie with 3 short stories. That is probably why the number of episodes are 3 in this case which in my opinion is considerable.
However, Goman-hiki and Kami Usagi Rope are controversial with 100 and 14 episodes respectively for a movie premiere. They are questionably TV series but since they have an underlying story and are very short episodes, collectively they could be clubbed as a movie.
Now, it’s the discretion of the data scientist here whether to consider these records as movies, or series or to drop them completely. No approach is wrong it’s just the thought process of an individual and his way of reasoning to justify the exclusion/inclusion/alteration of records that count here.
Violinplot
Imagine the best of histogram and boxplot coming together — that’s what violinplots are. The kernel density estimate that we saw in histograms is overlaid on top of the box and whiskers plot. Not only this gives us the median, IQR and whiskers but also an overview of the nature of distribution all in one single plot.
Although it’s so information dense, the aesthetics and a lack of simplicity are what limit their use in the real world; however, for presenting information to people who’re aware of this plot and what it represents, I personally can’t think of a better alternative than a violinplot.
Let’s make a violinplot for the categories for ratings.
Image by Vinayak
We can observe clearly the spread and the potential outliers. Although movies have most dispersed ratings, they don’t have a lot of outliers whereas in OVA, we can see that a substantial portion of data extends beyond the whiskers which suggest presence of several outliers.
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize = (15, 6)) Utils.violinplot(data, "type", "members", ax[0], log = False)
Utils.violinplot(data, "type", "members", ax[1], log = True) plt.savefig('./img/violinplot_members_type')
plt.close() fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize = (15, 6)) Utils.violinplot(data, "type", "episodes", ax[0], log = False)
Utils.violinplot(data, "type", "episodes", ax[1], log = True) plt.savefig('./img/violinplot_episodes_type')
plt.close()
Image by Vinayak
Image by Vinayak
From the violinplot of members, we can see in addition to most of the data being contained within IQR, the concentration of data is not only around the mean but dispersed quite a bit across the range.
On the other hand, when we compare the violin plot of episodes wrt type, most of the types have ridiculously some records with ridiculously large number of episodes for that particular type of anime (as we saw above from the box plot).
Scatterplots
When we need to study the variation between two continuous variables, we resort to using scatterplots. They help us understand the correlation between these two variables i.e. if one variable increases, does the other increase, decrease or stay unaffected.
They serve a good visual check to gauge the performance of linear regression model or rather set expectations for the performance of a regression model before actually building one. Seaborn provides a good functionality of overlaying a regression line on top of the scatterplot to address this point.
Let’s see the correlation of ratings as a function of members, presumably I expect that they should be directly proportional since highly rated anime will have more members following the anime and vice versa.
Utils.scatterplot(data, "members", "rating")
Image by Vinayak
As we can see the bulk of datapoints concentrated in 0 to 400000 members show a positive relationship i.e. increase in one causes increase in another.
Keep in mind that the y axis, in reality is constrained in between 0 to 10. There can’t be a score greater than 10, this is why although a lot of people love some anime, they will be forced to give a rating not more than 10, even if they liked it a lot. In absence of this constraint, I predict that the line and the points in higher 100000s of members would have been still more close to one another.
Let’s do one more, let’s see the relationship between number of episodes and the rating of a show.
Utils.scatterplot(data, "episodes", "rating")
Image by Vinayak
It does seem that there’s a positive correlation between episodes and rating but it’s not as strong as observed between members and ratings. Also, the 95% CI band is wider for this model which means, the regression line isn’t as good a fit as the one between members and ratings.
This is how we can use scatterplots to gain an understanding of how two quantities vary with respect to one another.
Heatmap
Another useful visual is that of a heatmap. When we have two categorical variables and a numerical measure associated with each pair of those two categorical variables, heatmaps are a very good tool to visualise the same. We could see how many anime belong to a particular genre and a particular type and build a heatmap of the counts of same or a heatmap of the ratings of the same and show it aside as a colour scale.
Let’s first look at making a heatmap of counts of type and genre of anime to get a feel for the heatmaps. | https://towardsdatascience.com/exploratory-data-analysis-on-anime-data-468cc15e13b8 | ['Vinayak Nayak'] | 2020-08-31 14:25:33.780000+00:00 | ['Seaborn', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Anime', 'Data Analysis'] |
Why We Tend to Try and Escape Reality. | SELF LOVE
Why We Tend to Try and Escape Reality.
Sometimes our lives are so scattered or busy that we tend to daydream and long to escape reality. Tatiana Santana Follow Dec 22, 2020 · 3 min read
Photo by Olivier Miche on Unsplash
Sometimes our lives are so scattered or busy that we tend to daydream and long to escape reality. Imagining and creating a life in our minds sometimes can be a good thing though it is kind of odd. Our minds are so puzzling and confusing sometimes, creating a strong desire to escape that we turn to our inner minds. The science of the mind is very complex but well understood. The mind is so complicated that most people do not understand some of the most basic concepts of the brain and its functions.
What does it mean to escape reality?
The American Psychology Association has a dictionary term for “escape from reality” it states that escaping from reality is “a defensive reaction involving the use of fantasy as a means of avoiding conflicts and problems of daily living.” sometimes escaping reality is not something that is initiated or thought out, sometimes our complex minds do this involuntarily. Why do we try to escape reality?
Some reasons we try to escape reality
This involuntary act can be caused by:
Trauma
An uneasy mind
A mental illness
Abuse
Stress
These are some of the reasons we try to escape our realities. | https://medium.com/resonates/why-we-tend-to-try-and-escape-reality-a18cf82a1bb6 | ['Tatiana Santana'] | 2020-12-22 03:47:41.723000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Life', 'Mental Health', 'Reality', 'Personal Development'] |
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