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Covid-19 Live Updates: U.S. Seeks Tens of Millions More Vaccine Doses From Pfizer | The Trump administration is working on a deal that would enable the company to make additional shots for Americans early next year. A surge of infections in Sweden is fueling criticism of the government.
Here’s what you need to know:
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Hospital staff at the Jefferson Regional Medical Center receiving the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday.Credit…Andrea Morales for The New York Times
The Trump administration is negotiating a deal to use its power to free up supplies of raw materials to help Pfizer produce tens of millions of additional doses of its Covid-19 vaccine for Americans in the first half of next year, people familiar with the situation said.
Should an agreement be struck, it could at least partially remedy a looming shortage that the administration itself arguably helped create by not pre-ordering more doses of the vaccine Pfizer developed with its German partner, BioNTech. Pfizer agreed this summer to provide the United States with 100 million doses by the end of March, enough to inoculate 50 million people since its vaccine requires two shots.
The Pfizer vaccine is one of only two so far that have been proved to work. The Trump administration has locked in only enough doses of the two vaccines — the other, produced by Moderna, is on track to receive emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration this week — to cover 150 million people by the end of June, or less than half the nation.
The administration recently asked Pfizer to sell it enough doses to cover an additional 50 million Americans, but Pfizer said it had already found customers around the world for all the doses it can produce until around the middle of next year.
In recent days, however, Pfizer has indicated that it would be able to manufacture more doses if the administration orders the company’s suppliers to prioritize its purchase requests. The two sides are now negotiating a contract under which Pfizer would provide tens of millions more doses from April to the end of June.
According to one person familiar with the situation, Pfizer asked for that favored status with suppliers months ago. But before it was clear which vaccine trials would succeed, Trump administration officials were apparently worried about hindering other vaccine makers that had accepted billions of dollars in federal subsidies. Federal officials worked to prioritize orders for manufacturing supplies from those firms, including Moderna.
It is unclear whether the government’s concerns about squeezing the supply chain have now faded, or whether its interest in securing more of Pfizer’s vaccine has simply grown. Pfizer announced in November that clinical trials had shown that its vaccine was about 95 percent effective, and the firm was the first to win approval from the F.D.A. for emergency use of its vaccine.
After the company signed a contract last July pledging to sell the United States 100 million doses by the end of March, Pfizer officials suggested at least twice that the Trump administration reserve more doses, but were turned down, according to people familiar with the situation.
Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, told “PBS News Hour” on Monday that in early October, the government resumed negotiations with Pfizer about delivering more doses. But he said Pfizer “resisted giving us any date by which they would do it.”
Moderna, a small Massachusetts-based firm that developed a similar vaccine, agreed last summer to provide the United States with 100 million doses by the end of March. It has now pledged to sell another 100 million doses by the end of June.
— Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visiting the White House earlier this month.Credit…Evan Vucci/Associated Press
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in quarantine after coming in contact with a person who tested positive for the coronavirus, the State Department said in a statement on Wednesday. Mr. Pompeo has so far tested negative, it said.
The statement did not identify the person who had contact with Mr. Pompeo, or when it happened, citing privacy concerns. It was not immediately clear what kind of test Mr. Pompeo had taken or when he was tested, nor whether he was showing any symptoms. Mr. Pompeo is being monitored by the State Department’s medical team, the statement said.
Tests taken too soon after exposure may return false negative results, because the virus has not yet had time to build up to detectable levels. People are thought to carry the largest quantity of virus around the time their symptoms appear, if they experience symptoms at all.
Mr. Pompeo has not traveled abroad since a 10-day trip to Europe and the Middle East last month. His last publicly reported meeting with a foreign official was in Washington last week with the Slovenian foreign minister, Anže Logar.
Even so, he has hosted hundreds of people at several State Department holiday parties in recent days. He was slated to attend one on Tuesday afternoon for family members of diplomats who are stationed abroad, but The Washington Post reported that he canceled the speech he had prepared to give to guests. It was not clear whether he appeared and did not speak, or just skipped the event entirely.
Mr. Pompeo is the latest of the Trump administration’s most senior national security officials to have contact with people who tested positive.
Last month, the Pentagon was notified that Lithuania’s defense minister had tested positive after meeting Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary, and other top military officials. One of them, Anthony J. Tata, a senior Pentagon adviser who is performing the duties of undersecretary of policy, tested positive for the virus afterward.
At least 50 people with close links to the White House have contracted the virus, in addition to guests and others, and President Trump himself, who was hospitalized for a few days in early October after showing symptoms of Covid-19.
After a small White House outbreak in September and a wave of cases in early October, the coronavirus has returned to the top of the Trump administration.
— Lara Jakes and Katherine J. Wu
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A shopping area in central Stockholm in November. The city’s emergency services are overrun, forcing the authorities to recalibrate their looser approach to virus regulations.Credit…Fredrik Sandberg/EPA, via Shutterstock
Since the pandemic began, a debate has raged both inside and outside of Sweden over how to curb the virus. As other countries went into lockdown in the spring, Sweden stayed open out of concern that keeping everyone holed up at home would have long-term detrimental effects on children and adults and could lead to depression, suicide, postponed health care and job losses.
Now, a second wave has brought a new surge in infections and Stockholm’s emergency services are overrun, forcing the authorities to recalibrate their approach. They imposed new restrictions at the end of November that bring the country’s response somewhat more in line with the rest of Europe. They include drastic cutbacks on the size of public gatherings and some school closures.
But with ski lifts, restaurants and bars all remaining open, Sweden’s tougher restrictions still pale in comparison to the rest of Europe and there are mounting concerns that not enough is being done.
On Monday, the Swedish prime minister, Stefan Lofven, said the country’s experts had underestimated the likelihood of a second wave. On Tuesday, a special commission concluded in an initial report that the government had failed to protect older people and was unprepared for the pandemic. During the first wave, deaths were high, especially among those in older age groups.
Since October, infection numbers and deaths have been rising steadily. By Tuesday, the country had reached a total of 320,098 cases since the beginning of the pandemic and its death toll reached 7,667. The country now has 74 deaths per 100,000 cases, less than the United Kingdom, with 97, but far more than its neighbor Norway, with seven.
“I was hoping this grave situation would change things, but yesterday they opened the ski lifts in Sweden,” said Fredrik Elgh, a professor of clinical virology at Umea University.
Mr. Lovfen’s government can only ask, not order, people to follow the recommendations. Under Swedish law, the government isn’t allowed to force people to stay home or fine those who flout them. And face masks aren’t recommended because the Public Health Authority says there isn’t enough scientific evidence that they work.
“We are the only democracy in the world that does not recommend the use of face masks. There are more than 170 countries in the world that recommend using masks. But here they are saying there is not enough science behind that. That is nonsense,” said Mr. Elgh.
— Thomas Erdbrink and Christina Anderson
Mount Sinai hospital president David Reich administered the first COVID-19 vaccine to a hospital maintenance worker, John Gomez, Tuesday in what became something of a public event.Credit…Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Hospitals around the country who have been waiting months for the first doses rapidly scrambled to put together events after unknowns about the vaccine and its distribution made it difficult to perfectly plan for its arrival.
Some hospitals deliberately worked to spotlight the moment, picking a person — a Black or Latino nurse or doctor, a housekeeper — who would be among the first to receive the shot as a way to send a message to diverse communities about trusting the vaccine.
Others — like a hospital in Iowa that first vaccinated a health care worker who had a few upcoming days off, or a hospital in Pittsburgh that let staff members vote on who would get the honor — left the specifics of who would go first more to chance.
But each place was preparing for its own historic moment, the beginning of what they hoped would be the end of a pandemic that had devastated their communities. And in selecting who would be first, each sent a message in its own way about the importance of the vaccine — and recognized the courage of its medical staff.
That health workers in high-risk positions would go first was a common point of agreement through much of the country. An advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week recommended that health care workers should be among the first to receive the vaccine, along with nursing home residents and workers.
Hospitals, with their ability to store vials at subzero temperatures, were prioritized to get the first doses of the vaccine from Pfizer, which was the first drugmaker to get approval from the F.D.A.
— Sharon Otterman
GLOBAL ROUNDUP
A doctor preparing to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Cardiff, Wales, last week.Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times
A little over a week after Britain kicked off its mass inoculation program, the first in the world to approve and begin distributing a fully tested vaccine, more than 137,000 people have received shots, the government minister in charge of the rollout wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
Since the inoculations began last Tuesday, hospitals have distributed some 137,897 vaccines across the country, according to the minister, Nadhim Zahawi. He noted that the figure did not take into account shots administered by primary care doctors, the next phase of the rollout that is intended to reach a broader stretch of the population, which began on Monday.
The Pfizer-BioNTech shots are being prioritized in Britain for health care workers, those 80 years of age or older, and workers and residents at nursing homes. Those who have received the first dose require a second shot after 21 days to enjoy the full benefits of the vaccine.
Britain had an initial batch of 800,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is enough to vaccinate 400,000 people, but the vaccine’s complex cold storage requirements make it difficult to transport and store in smaller batches, so the rollout has been limited far.
Mr. Zahawi called the figures “a really good start” and said that the government would begin to publish weekly statistics starting next week. In the days since Britain began distributing the vaccine, the United States and Canada have also begun inoculation campaigns, and several other countries have approved the Pfizer-BioNTech shots for emergency use.
Emergency approval for the vaccine in the European Union could come as early as Dec. 21, when the European Medicines Agency meets. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, told the European Parliament on Wednesday that vaccinating enough of the population would be a “huge task.” She encouraged the 27 member states of the bloc to begin on the same day.
“As we have gone in unity through this pandemic, let us start the eradication of this horrible virus together and united,” she said.
Here’s what else to know from around the world: | https://medium.com/@snpranto62/covid-19-live-updates-u-s-seeks-tens-of-millions-more-vaccine-doses-from-pfizer-410afe724be9 | [] | 2020-12-16 18:10:13.098000+00:00 | ['Vaccines', 'Updates', 'Coronavirus'] |
Counselling of Intermediate Students | Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” — Nelson Mandela
Education is the key factor in any nation’s progress. Unfortunately, education system of Pakistan is surrounded by many problems. The problems associated with the education system of Pakistan are lack of adequate budget, lack of policy implementation, defective examination system, poor physical facilities, lack of teacher quality, lack of implementation of education policies, directionless education, low enrollment, high scale dropouts, political influence.
One of the loop holes I’ve identified is the rote learning which results in directionless education. The intermediate students lack the basics which are required to get admission in any university. Most students with good percentages in intermediate are unable to clear the entry tests of universities. Then there is also the state of confusion, students didn’t know which field to opt and what their capabilities.
Loop hole — Intermediate Education
The colleges with Cambridge system have an academic counselor, who is basically a psychologist. This counselor is responsible to help students in identifying their strengths and guide them in choosing their professional fields. While, in intermediate colleges there’s no such concept of counselling that’s why students face many problems.
In order to cater these problems, we can start a fellowship program in which we will be going to help students in choosing their fields and universities. The fellowship program can be virtual due to Covid-19 pandemic and the targeted audience will be the students enrolled in intermediate studies. This program will consist of mentorship sessions, Quick Maths classes, Psychological tests which will help students to become critical thinkers and goal-oriented people. | https://medium.com/@jawwadmehdi86/counselling-of-intermediate-students-d8269edc66cb | ['Jawwad Mehdi'] | 2020-12-26 07:46:00.764000+00:00 | ['University', 'Counseling', 'Education', 'Intermediate College', 'Critical Thinking'] |
Unhappy Endings | Let’s take our dataset for a test drive by first looking at something very simple. In our database of ‘finished’ TV shows, which ones have the highest overall series rating?
Even if its ending did sour things, Game of Thrones still enjoys a healthy series rating of 9.4, surrounded by the kind of shows you’d expect to see at the top of such a ranking (Breaking Bad, The Wire, and The Sopranos), as well as some you may not have even heard of (Leyla and Mecnun is a Turkish dramady currently available on Netflix, whilst Avatar, Death Note, and Fullmetal Alchemist are all Japanese animé).
Let’s go deeper on the top five series and track the individual episode ratings of each show’s run.
The first thing that jumps out, as we might expect, is the precipitous fall in ratings at the end of Game of Thrones. We should also note that this drop was not inevitable — there are plenty of examples of high quality shows not fluffing their lines at the very last. Indeed, the other shows here pretty much hit their respective peaks during their final episodes (with The Sopranos’ slight downtick perhaps caused by its infamous ‘cut to black’ ending).
The other less obvious thing that presents itself here is the relationship between the overall series rating (as defined in the original dataset) and the average of the episode ratings. We would expect these to be very similar, if not identical, though this doesn’t seem to be the case. For example, The Wire’s episode ratings, though consistently high, still average out at a whole point less than its overall series rating (8.25 vs 9.30, respectively).
Indeed if we compare these two measures for the whole dataset, we see that the correlation between series ratings and average episode ratings is actually quite weak.
The purple line here represents x = y. Very few titles sit on (or indeed especially near) it
Weirdly, we see that six out of the seven shows with the biggest discrepancies between overall series and episode ratings are animations, and five of these are Japanese Animé (Naruto, Cowboy Bebop, Death Note, and two helpings of Dragon Ball Z).
Looking at the episode trackers of the shows with the largest discrepancies, we see high standard deviations (and in the case of Batman and Dragon Ball Z, rather inconsistent quality on an episode by episode basis).
We can conjecture that there’s a certain ‘nostalgia factor’ at play here — people might have fond ‘overall’ memories of a show that aired more than a decade ago, which would result in high ratings for the series as a whole.
However, time might have erased memories of dud episodes, which then get lower individual episode ratings (we can assume that people rating on an episode-by-episode basis are more likely to have watched them recently with a more objective eye).
The data does bear this out to an extent. There is a negative correlation between a show’s end year, and the discrepancy between its overall series rating and average episode ratings.
The further towards the top of the chart a title is, the higher its series rating is compared to the average rating of its individual episodes. Older shows are likelier to have such discrepancies.
So, given we’ve seen inconsistent series with high variance in episode ratings, which shows manage to keep up a consistent quality throughout their entire runs? We can answer this question by plotting a show’s episode ratings’ mean against its standard deviation. | https://towardsdatascience.com/unhappy-endings-36e5fd157703 | ['Callum Ballard'] | 2019-07-16 15:13:40.161000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Python', 'Game of Thrones', 'Data Visualization', 'TV Series'] |
The magic ingredient that improves workshop collaboration | The magic ingredient that improves workshop collaboration
How I’m using the ‘alone together’ approach as a designer
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash
I love working collaboratively. I get a real buzz out of getting a group together, grappling tricky problems and bouncing around ideas. At its best, collaboration can be an energising experience. But is it always productive and inclusive for everyone?
My first experience with immersive collaboration was at Google’s +20 design workshop back in 2013. The all-day workshop was an experiment to see what would happen if you got a range of designers together to define and explore some truly blue sky concepts.
The whole day was carefully structured, even down to when and what we had for lunch. I left with 10 times the energy I started with and felt super productive, even though the whole day was a one-off experiment with no real follow-on actions. But in the years that followed, I rarely saw this impact from other workshops (and I’m sure it wasn’t just down to the copious amounts of free coffee they gave us). I wanted all the workshops I was involved in to be engaging and productive for everyone.
+20 UX Workshop with Google — Sydney 2013
So I did my research, undertook some training and began facilitating workshops for my team and others in the organisation. Through my experience, I realised that not all people enjoy workshops and team events.
Looking back on those experiences with my newfound learnings, the poor participation and workshop experience was not because they didn’t like collaboration, it was because not everyone was having the same experience. Some people were confident collaborating and sharing their thoughts publicly and others preferred more structure and time to provide their input.
It was clear that I needed a way to structure workshops so it gave everyone the same positive and productive experience, regardless of how participants preferred to work. How could I give people their own personal time and space, while also maintaining an open forum for collaboration and discussion?
Discovering ‘alone together’
One of the books I read on my journey to run better workshops was Sprint by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz. It’s a bestselling book that details a multi-day workshop structure for validating big ideas, fast. I could see subtle similarities between the design sprint process and that of the Google +20 workshop I attended in 2013. Both had very intentional plans for workshops.
The author constructs the week-long workshop so each activity has a specific purpose and they all interlink and build off each other. Most importantly, workshop activities are structured so that participants are given chunks of time working alone on individual contributions to a shared goal, as well as time for sharing and making decisions as a team. This approach to collaboration is called ‘alone together’.
‘Sprint’ by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz (2016). My first exposure to the principal of working alone together.
It sounds counterintuitive, but it means that as a team, we are working together towards a shared challenge but we’re doing it individually.
‘Working alone together’ allows everyone to contribute — everyone’s voice is treated equally and there is no judgment. It allows people with different working styles to be given time and space to think through ideas and problems, with an opportunity to share them with the team without the risk of being influenced by other people or workplace dynamics.
It also cuts down the unnecessary discussion and group think that can often happen in workshops. For example, there is a strong tendency for groups to converge on a single idea instead of evaluating a range of ideas against each other. Someone’s contribution to a group and the response can also be influenced by things like level of seniority, unconscious bias, confidence and personality type. This can lead to fewer ideas that are less original. For more on that, check out Why Group Brainstorming Is a Waste of Time By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and The Journey of Brainstorming by Hanisha Besant.
I still have the handouts from the Google +20 design workshop, and reading them again with years of experience attending, planning and facilitating workshops has made me realise why this standalone, all-day workshop was so effective. ‘Alone together’ was the magic ingredient that made it so special. We had the mental space to think through challenges in our own way, then come together as a team to decide on a shared direction.
Google +20 design lab workshop brainwriting handout (2013)
Practice, practice, practice
I have found this structure of alone time, combined with group collaboration windows, an effective approach to make sure everyone is included and given an opportunity to contribute during the workshop. So how does it work? Let’s step through a really basic example from one of my past projects at Xero.
One of our cross-functional product pods was looking to address some new business needs and customer insights for the project they were working on. They could only focus on one requirement at a time, so the team needed to get aligned on what they were going to work on first. This is basically how we approached it:
We listed all the business requirements and customer needs and put them in priority order. This reminded the team what they were working on and what to tackle first.
The top couple of business priorities were rephrased as How Might We? statements. For example, one of our priorities was to help partnering businesses grow. This was reframed as: how might we empower partners to reach more potential clients? This extra detail made it easier for the team to focus on the opportunity and generate ideas in response to the statement.
Everyone noted down their solution ideas for each statement on sticky notes. They did this alone, without speaking. This gave all the participants time and space to think individually without being influenced by each other.
The sticky notes were then put up on the wall and everyone had time to read through other people’s ideas. Again, this was done without discussion. We tried to save all questions for after the process, to mitigate any bias.
Everyone quietly took the time to place sticky dots (all the same colour) on the ideas they wanted to vote for (each participant got multiple votes, usually around 3–7). SILENCE AGAIN! The whole aim is to reduce the influence that participants have on each other. It can be a bit tricky at this point as participants can see the amount of dots on each idea and sometimes who is voting on what. It’s not a perfect system, but by giving participants multiple votes and all the voting dots being the same colour, it reduces the likelihood of groupthink. This is where running workshops digitally is actually an advantage, as tools like Miro have voting systems to keep everything anonymous.
The facilitator (me!) tallied the votes and read out the popular ones, sharing them with the team. I wasn’t involved in the voting process, so I could remain objective about the ideas being voted on.
The team then plotted these solutions on an impact effort matrix. Based on this, we could see what solutions had the least effort and most impact. This was a shared team process, giving the whole team ownership over the idea they would execute.
The team then discussed what action items needed to be assigned to each chosen idea, so we left the workshop knowing how we would move forward (rather than just a list of great ideas).
Everyone left the session feeling energised and aligned, and this continued in the following days when we started working on those actions. It worked because decision making was done anonymously and in silence, reducing the amount of influence that participants had on each other. But we also had the opportunity to plan our next steps as a team. It gave everyone a sense of ownership of our newfound direction.
Example of how to structure a basic remote workshop activity using the principles of ‘alone together’.
It sounds like everything in my workshop went perfectly, but of course it didn’t. There are a handful of challenges I’ve encountered while using the ‘alone together’ approach in workshops — here’s how I’ve tried to address them:
Sometimes people are uncomfortable with silence, so they try to have a discussion with their teammates, particularly while voting on ideas. This takes away many of the benefits, so try to enforce the silence — otherwise it can get out of hand. Another tip (from the AJ & Smart agency) is to play some background music to ease people’s discomfort with silence.
Participants may want to discuss items that didn’t receive a high number of votes from the team. This can undermine the people that didn’t vote for that idea, so as a facilitator it’s important to try and gently move the focus back to the ideas with the highest votes.
It can be really hard for a facilitator to try and run the workshop and enforce the structure, while also contributing ideas and voting. It can also seem a little biased to other participants. So try and have a dedicated facilitator who isn’t involved in the process.
There are always going to be people who want an extra few minutes here and there to finish their task. This time can really add up, so as a facilitator it’s important to try and keep each activity running on time. I like to keep 5–10 minutes up my sleeve just in case activities run over time.
Reimagining collaboration in a virtual environment
Of course, now that we’re all working from home due to COVID-19, the process can look a little different. But the approach remains the same (on the upside, you can mute participants to stop them chatting!). At Xero, we use Miro as a digital collaboration tool, so people can still put up their sticky notes and vote on them. There are a bunch of great templates available via Miroverse which can give you some great ideas and tips for improving your remote workshops.
Group discussion can be a little harder, but with a good facilitator it shouldn’t be any different to a usual remote standup. I still encourage the use of a timer to keep activities on track — I personally use the one in Miro, but there are some lightweight timers available online. If all else fails, just give people a verbal warning when an activity is nearing its end.
It’s still quite a new approach for me, but I can already see results. All participants have the opportunity to be heard, decisions are being made as a team, and everyone seems to leave the sessions energised. I encourage you to try the ‘alone together’ approach for your next workshop, so it’s not an energy-sapping talkfest, but a good collaborative experience for everyone involved.
Next on the reading list: The Workshopper Playbook by Jonathan Courtney
P.S. This just turned up at my front door as I was finishing this article: The Workshopper Playbook by Jonathan Courtney. I am looking forward to getting stuck into it! If you can’t get your hands on it some of the content is on the website workshopper.com. Happy collaborating alone… together 😉 | https://medium.com/humans-of-xero/the-magic-ingredient-that-improves-workshop-collaboration-6f14d8bc9aba | ['Will Lester'] | 2020-08-24 21:45:23.339000+00:00 | ['Alone Together', 'Collaboration', 'Facilitation', 'Workshop', 'Design'] |
Role of First Level IT Support Agents | The front line of a customer support system is extremely crucial as they are representing a business organization directly. It is also a busy environment for these agents with a string of phone calls, emails, etc. in the form of customer queries hurling towards them.
Rendering top-end support services depends a lot on the kind of individuals that are the first line to ensure customers enjoy an uninterrupted service. Top IT support companies like us, Sapizon Technologies, make it a point to assign this task to support professionals possessing valuable experience.
Here are a few pointers to explain how pivotal the role of a tech support agent is:
Representation:
The first point of contact to the customers, support agents can play a vital role in determining how an organization/company is being judged and perceived. The level of professionalism they maintain and the ease with which they interact with the customers is crucial here.
Let us suppose for an instance here that your customer is very happy with your support team and the way they are rendering services. They are very much impressed by you and will continue to seek your services on a continuous basis.
Knowledge Base:
Support agents are supposed to be familiar with most of the issues that customers encounter. This warrants them to possess sufficient knowledge of the domain that they are rendering services in. Agents who have comprehensive knowledge about the products/services are an asset.
They can help customers find solutions to their issues seamlessly. Quick and accurate resolutions to their queries are all that customers expect from a tech support team and having a proficient knowledge base goes a long way in helping customers achieve that.
Adequate Reports:
Creating reports and tracking the progress of certain products/applications is one of the major tasks that the support team performs. They can make a detailed report on what kind of queries they get regularly based on which the desired company can plan their upgrades.
With a contingent plan in place, it becomes very much easier for an organization to map their strategies for the future and improve the way they are operating. The reports that are made by customer support agents play a vital role in this as they provide valuable inputs.
Friendly Interactions:
Making their customers feel important is a must these days for every business because of the competitive nature of business. And experienced support professionals are more than well accustomed to doing that. They are well versed in how to interact with a customer and in what situation.
If customers feel valued, it also automatically increases the value of the desired business. Hence, this role played by the support agents can have a great effect on the progress of a developing and growing firm.
Ticket Management:
When customer issues start coming in at a brisk pace in the form of tickets, it is the support agents who are supposed to manage them in a smart and effective way to ensure the process does not lose its productivity. They can also use efficient CRM platforms like Zendesk and Zoho Desk to achieve this.
Seamless management of tickets paves the way for greater customer satisfaction and customer success. These are two attributes most of the tech support companies aim to achieve as part of their success strategy.
Conclusion:
The role of a first level support agent is more important than most of us assume it to be. They are a prime driving force in the CRM success model that companies aim to follow. Being one of the best tech support companies, Sapizon follows a similar path to success.
Ever since they started, they have completed more than 100 successful projects for their clients. With a flexible approach, they have managed to give their customers an impressive customer retention rate along with conversions. | https://medium.com/@sapnasapusapzion/role-of-first-level-it-support-agents-161b0db27fc8 | ['Sapna Sapu'] | 2021-02-09 09:38:14.447000+00:00 | ['It Companies', 'Support', 'Tech', 'It Support', 'Chat'] |
We See Things the Way We Are Not the Way They Are | In an attempt to save on delivery costs, Sendy can look at the data points about the road networks to know the optimum path to the delivery location. This can be based on various features such as distance, traffic conditions, road conditions among many other things. All these features can be passed to an AI model to extract the optimal path that will minimize costs of delivery as well as minimize time taken to deliver the items. Now consider you are in the savannah forest and you see a lion fast approaching. You need to find the fastest path through the forest that will lead you to safety in the shortest time possible. You quickly scan the forest and do your math and realize that the optimal path to your safety is…. oh shit, the lion pounces on you and that’s the end of you. You cry in pain as the lion devours you alive.
That is what happened to our forefathers who tried to be rational in the forests. When a lion is fast approaching, you do not have the time to think rationally on how you will survive the attack because then you will be dead before you even start the calculations. Our forefathers who survived are those who acted unconsciously; the ones who saw the lion and started running or climbing a tree immediately without giving it a thought and so in our DNA, the survival tactic that was encoded are those that favored the irrational mind; the mind that made decisions fast and with the least effort.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman — some of my most favorite economists — called it heuristics which are basically mental shortcuts that allow us to make decisions fast and with the least effort — a work for which Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (Amos had unfortunately passed at the time of the award). Mental Heuristics form the basis of cognitive biases — a set of conditions or factors that greatly distort our decision-making processes. Whereas humans rely hugely on heuristics for decision making, these mental shortcuts at times lead us to be polarized on various topics with different people picking a side depending on their cognitive biases.
Consider a simple Physics concept of charge polarization as show below:
Charge Polarization on a pair of conducting spheres: Illustration of how new information polarizes us based on our pre-existing cognitive biases
Initially, the two spheres have positive and negative charges within but they are not discernible (part a). When we bring in an external charged rod close to interact with them, the spheres become polarized ie electrons and protons move to opposite sides of the spheres as shown in part b. The charges on the sides that are in contact neutralize each other and when the spheres are separated then the external charged rod is removed, the spheres remain charged as shown in part d with one positively charged and the other negatively charged.
Human beings behave in a similar manner. We all have cognitive biases based on a set of information we have acquired over our lifetime. These biases may not be visible and some of us do not even know that they exist (actually reject their existence if others point it out). When we receive new information eg we read something on the news, or we watch the Trump vs Biden debate or we see forest fires in the Amazon, our reaction and/or interpretation of the news is not dependent on the news but our existing biases. The external news, in most cases, acts as an exciter just like the charged rod in the figure above. The news (ie charged rod) will interact with our innate cognitive biases making them to get activated and polarized. In the end, as shown in part d, what we finally make of the news is not dependent on the news itself but our biases. Just the same way the two spheres were influenced by the same charged rod but ended up with different charges with one being negative and the other being positive so do humans. The news only acts to publicize our biases with one group either supporting the news or opposing it.
The biggest mistake you can make is to assume that you are objective in your thinking and that you have no cognitive bias. We all have biases; the question is: how do we deal with them?
That takes me to my favorite question to my friends: “Why is it that we all watched the same debate between Trump and Biden but Trump supporters concluded that Trump outperformed Biden while Biden supporters concluded that Biden outperformed Trump?” Now let me get back to other issues; why is it that after the BBI report, those who were opposing it before — the Hustler Team — continue to oppose it while those who were supporting it before continue to support it yet we are all reading the same report? Why is it that when any forest fire happens, climate change fanatics are fast to blame climate change despite the numerous other factors that come into play to fuel a natural forest fire?
Cognitive biases make truth to be relative. The decision to either support or oppose an event is not dependent on the event or “facts” presented but our innate cognitive biases.
If you are a climate change fanatic, every forest fire, big or small, will be attributed to climate change and nothing else because we place too much significance to this evidence. When you are a Trump supporter, anything Trump says will be genius and anything Biden says will be trash. If you are a Ruto supporter then the BBI is the worst document that has ever been prepared in the history of Kenya. Hence the famed adage:
We see things the way we are, not the way they are.
Consider the mind map below:
Interaction between information and cognitive bias. Notice how the final conclusion is influenced more by the bias than by the information itself
Humans generally have a set of around 10 major cognitive biases. When we receive any new information, the information undergoes a “convolution transformation” with the bias. What this means is that, for the same information we receive, the resultant interpretation is dependent on the type of bias we already have and that is used to convolve the information. Since the convolution between two distinct function pair is distinct, based on the type of bias we already have in each of us, different people will make completely different conclusions from the same piece of information because they each have different biases. It is not surprising that people with the same bias will make the same conclusion from the same information and that’s the reason why people always end up polarized around the major issues in the world: matters of religion, politics, climate change, police shootings/brutality, abortion among so many other things.
In deep learning convolutional neural networks, we call this kind of transformer a convolution filter. Not to make a direct comparison as they are different concepts but cognitive biases transform the information through convolution filter operation; what I will call “information filters.”
In information filtering, an individual unknowingly ignores certain aspects of information, places undue significance on certain parts of the information or unknowingly searches for specific pieces of evidence to either support or discredit the information with the aim of having their cognitive biases take precedence.
As an example, if my bias is that the BBI is a ploy against Ruto and I am a Ruto supporter, I will read the document thinking I am being objective while in real sense, my information filters will ensure that I look for parts of the document that support my existing beliefs and place very high significance on them while at the same time, ignoring parts of the document that seem to oppose my beliefs and downplay them. In the end, after reading the document (even several times as some so called professors are saying on Twitter), it won’t change the beliefs they had before reading the document; it will simply enhance the cognitive biases they had before reading the document. The same is said of a Trump-Biden debate where Trump supporters are there to “confirm” that Trump is the best president and Biden is the worst and the same is true of Biden supporters. The Trump supporters will not objectively listen to the debate, they will ignore any thing that Biden says negative about Trump and place undue importance on the things Trump says against Biden — that is called confirmation bias — a phenomenon that makes us seek for parts of the information that confirms and/or support our existing beliefs. This is the same reason why Googling your symptoms will always show that you are indeed positive for whatever ailment you are searching; the problem is not Google, you are the problem; your confirmation bias is the problem.
So, how do we regain our objectivity when dealing with issues? How do we ensure that we don’t fall prey to cognitive biases? The first step is ensuring that we are aware of our existing biases. Denying the influence of our cognitive biases and thinking that we are being objective makes us wonder why others aren’t seeing things the way we are and sometimes trash talk them, labeling them as “stupid”, “racist” or any other derogatory names. Are you more likely to accept a person from the same tribe as you when conducting job interviews? The only way to eliminate tribal hiring is by first acknowledging that we have that problem so that we can fight it. If I know that my support for Biden may mask my view of Trump, I need to take a step back and take into consideration all my biases before making the final decision because chances are high that I am hugely wrong about Trump.
The first step to fighting the influence of cognitive bias on our decision making process is to acknowledge and appreciate their existence
To understand if we harbor these biases, we need to know what they are so that we can fight them and get back to objective discussions, objective reasoning and objective decision-making process:
1. Confirmation Bias is where people tend to listen more often to information that confirms the beliefs they already have; they tend to favor information that confirms their previously held beliefs.
2. Hindsight Bias is the tendency of people to see events, even random ones, as more predictable than they actually are.
3. Anchoring Bias is where we tend to be overly influenced by the first piece of information that we hear (or what you were introduced to; typical of religion).
4. Misinformation Effect is where our memories of particular events become heavily influenced by things that happened after the actual event itself. What we think we remember may not be the actual thing that happened.
5. In Actor Observer Bias, how we see things depend on if we are the actor or the observer; where we are the actor, we will attribute it to external influences (we don’t like blaming ourselves) and where we are the observer, we will attribute it to internal causes (we like blaming others). “I was driving carefully but the other driver was reckless hence the accident.”
6. In False Consensus Effect, we tend to overestimate how much other people agree with our own beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and values making us to incorrectly think everyone agrees with us and overvalue our own opinions.
7. In Halo Effect, our initial impression of a person influences what we think of them eg pretty teachers are smarter than the not pretty ones or a beautiful job applicant is smarter and hence more deserving of the job. Loosely put, the halo effect is a physical attractiveness stereotype.
8. In Self-Serving Bias, people tend to give themselves credit for successes but lay the blame for failures on outside causes.
9. In Availability Heuristics, we tend to estimate the probability of something happening based on how many examples readily come to mind. It is the reason why those who haven’t seen a close associate contract or die of Covid19 downplay the health risks of Covid19 or the reason why climate change fanatics place so much weight on climate change as a cause of natural forest fires.
10. Lastly, in Optimism Bias, we overestimate the likelihood that good things will happen to us while underestimating the probability that negative events will impact our lives. It’s the reason why we all downplay Covid19 and think that we cannot die out of it, only others can. It’s the reason why new lovers get mad when told “mtaachana tu” because to them, they are optimists and break ups only happen to others not them.
Cognitive biases are inevitable. In some cases, they are necessary for our primal instincts eg boosting our self-esteem, helping us make decisions fast and with least effort and so many other advantages that mental heuristics have to offer. However, in most circumstances that require rational thinking, the cognitive biases are our greatest enemies. Let us acknowledge the biases and fight to eliminate their influence on our decision-making processes by applying a correction factor for our biases before making the final decision. | https://medium.com/swlh/we-see-things-the-way-we-are-not-the-way-they-are-acbaa71acb06 | ['Phelix Juma'] | 2020-10-27 13:14:25.347000+00:00 | ['Heuristics', 'Daniel Kahneman', 'Decision Intelligence', 'Confirmation Bias', 'Cognitive Bias'] |
Here’s What’s Wrong With Your Great Idea | When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007, many pundits were less than impressed. Some said that its unusual shape made it unwieldy. Others thought that it was too expensive. Still others remarked that all the extra software made it a poor choice for its primary function — making phone calls.
But part of Jobs’s genius was his ability to recognize patterns that others couldn’t. Executives at Xerox, for example, didn’t see much potential in the Alto, but he built the Macintosh based on it. When music players seemed like a dead end, he reimagined them with the iPod and transformed the industry.
The problem with patterns is that it’s so devilishly hard to tell the good ones from the bad. What may look like a promising pattern is often out of context or incomplete. Sometimes, we think we see a pattern that isn’t really there. That’s what makes innovation so difficult, we can never validate new patterns by looking backward, we can only test them going forward.
The Importance of Context
In 2001, Fabio Rosati left his lofty position as Global Chair of Strategic Consulting for Capgemini to join a troubled startup called Elance. The idea behind the company was a familiar pattern, the disintermediation of a labor intensive industry by technology. In this case, the aim was to automate the market for freelance workers.
Unfortunately, the pattern was a false one. While it seemed to work well in the context of job boards for full-time positions, for some reason it just didn’t work for freelance jobs. So Rosati imagined a completely new pattern. It seemed to him that large enterprises, many of whom dealt with thousands of vendors, could use technology to keep track of them all.
It turned out to be a very good idea and today, vendor management software is a big business. Elance was soon profitable, but before long Rosati saw another familiar pattern emerge. The success of the vendor management business was beginning to attract stiff competition from the likes of SAP and Oracle. He decided to sell Elance’s software business.
However, in his five years running the vendor management operation, he noticed other patterns. The problem with many freelance contracts isn’t finding people to do the work, but creating a successful engagement. With the remaining staff at Elance, he relaunched the freelance marketplace, but this time instead of focusing on making matches, the platform was designed to create for successful engagements.
The idea took off and Elance grew at an astounding pace. Later, it would merge with its rival, oDesk, to create Upwork which is today a massive enterprise, encompassing 12 million freelancers, 5 million clients and $1 billion in annual freelancer billings.
Familiar Patterns Gone Astray
As the Elance story shows, being able to recognize important patterns is key to innovating effectively. The problem is that just because we recognize a pattern doesn’t mean that it’s worth pursuing or even that it’s really there at all. In fact, there is an entire branch of mathematics dedicated to identifying when distinct patterns arise from random points.
Consider the case of Coke executives in the early 1980s. They had been humiliated by the Pepsi Challenge, a blind taste test that showed consumers preferred their competitor. So the company developed a new formula that focus groups said they loved. The result was New Coke, one of the greatest marketing disasters in history.
Not to be outdone, in 2010 Pepsi dropped its Super Bowl ad spots and invested $20 million in Pepsi Refresh, a social platform that awarded grants to good causes. Pepsi’s social KPI metrics soared, but in business terms it was an unmitigated disaster. A Harvard case study showed that sales dropped 5 percent and, for the first time in 20 years, the brand fell to third in its category.
Both companies made essential the same mistake. They recognized a pattern that was out of context. A blind taste test told Coke’s marketers nothing about the loyalty customers felt about its branded product and while many applauded Pepsi’s social efforts, they did little to spur sales for a brand built on sugar water and good times.
The Power Of Embedded Patterns
Jim Allison spent his career learning the patterns of the immune system and made some key contributions himself. Yet when he imagined a new pattern, he soon learned how difficult it is to break an old one that’s been deeply ingrained in an industry.
Allison’s idea was that the human immune system was capable of recognizing cancer cells, but because of the way immune system works our defenses are turned off too soon. It seemed to him that if he could just turn off the “molecular brakes” for a while, the body’s own defenses could kill off cancer cells in the body.
He performed some studies on mice and they were hugely successful. So he began flying around the country to sell his idea to pharmaceutical companies, but all of them refused. They had seen this pattern before, lost a ton of money, and were unwilling to go down the same road again. “It was depressing,” Allison told me. “I knew this discovery could make a difference, but nobody wanted to invest in it.”
After three years pounding the pavement, a small biotech company, Medarex, invested in Allison’s idea and today, cancer immunotherapy is recognized as a miracle cure and has saved the lives of thousands of terminally ill patients who once would have no hope. Medarex was sold to Bristol Myers Squibb in 2009 for $2.4 billion.
You Can Only Validate An Idea Going Forward
Think about Steve Jobs and Appl for a minute and you will probably recognize the pattern and assume I mispelled the name of his iconic company by forgetting to include the “e” at the end. But I could have just have easily been about to describe an “Applet” he designed for the iPhone or some connection between Jobs and Appleton WI, a small town outside Green Bay.
The point is that we can only validate patterns going forward, never backward. That, in essence, is what Steve Blank means when he says that business plans rarely survive first contact with customers and why his ideas about lean startups are changing the world. We need to be careful about the patterns we think we see. Some are meaningful. Others are not.
Another important point is that recognizing a valuable pattern is necessary, but not sufficient to create a business. Fabio Rosati’s ideas about vendor management were only the start of what made Elance successful. It was later moves, such as offering certification and training for freelancers, building private talent clouds for companies and countless others that made the company a powerhouse.
Finally, we need to take a more Bayesian approach to strategy, where we don’t expect to always get it right, but to become less wrong over time. A flash of insight will not make you Steve Jobs, it just means that you’ve recognized a pattern that may or may not really be there.
– Greg
An earlier version of this article first appeared in Inc.com | https://greg-satell.medium.com/heres-what-s-wrong-with-your-great-idea-2a00c070110c | ['Greg Satell'] | 2019-03-31 12:09:41.680000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Test Network Script Walk-Through | Introduction
I began my learning journey of Hyperledger Fabric by studying First Network two years ago. It was a very good sample setup from which I have learnt a lot about this platform. I know many people are taking a similar path. This article written more than a year ago is still one of my most-read articles.
Fabric v2.0 came with a new sample network: Test Network. In a previous article I have already highlighted the difference between these two sample networks. Here I come up this article just about Test Network. My previous work on First Network was showing a step-by-step execution of script byfn.sh . I took a similar approach in this article as another step-by-step manual execution of script network.sh . During the process I will make some explanation and discussion on relevant items.
I wish this can also provide you a more complete picture of Test Network. Through this you can grasp some basic operation of bringing up a consortium network and deploying chaincode in Fabric v2.0.
Overview: Test Network
Without repeating what is in previous article, here is some quick information about Test Network,
A three-organization setup
One orderer organization: example.com , with one orderer
, with one orderer Two peer organizations: org1.example.com and org2.example.com , each of which has one peer (peer0)
and , each of which has one peer (peer0) One channel mychannel is created and joined by peers of both peer organizations.
Here is how Test Network looks like.
Test Network comes with a script network.sh . And here are commands
network.sh up : bring up network components, one orderer and one peer for each peer organization.
: bring up network components, one orderer and one peer for each peer organization. network.sh up createChannel : bring up network components, create mychannel and have all peers join mychannel.
: bring up network components, create mychannel and have all peers join mychannel. network.sh createChannel : create mychannel and have all peers join mychannel. applicable after network.sh up is executed.
: create mychannel and have all peers join mychannel. applicable after is executed. network.sh deployCC : deploy and interact with Fabcar chaincode. executable after channel is created with network.sh up createChannel or network.sh createChannel .
Note that the crypto material by default is generated through cryptogen . Test Network also supports another way to bring up crypto material using Fabric CA Server. In this article I am using cryptogen . For information about using Fabric CA Server you can refer to my another article.
While network.sh comes with several commands as shown above, I break the execution of network.sh script into several steps, showing how things are done manually. Here are the steps:
Generate Crypto Material with cryptogen Generate Consortium Genesis Block Bring Up Test Network Components Join Peers of Both Organizations to mychannel Deploy Fabric on mychannel Interact with Fabric Chaincode Functions
Demonstration
Step 1–3 is equivalent to executing command ./network.sh up .
Step 1: Generate Crypto Material with cryptogen
Configuration files
We generate crypto material using cryptogen in this tutorial. The configuration file tells cryptogen what type of components and users are needed. In Test Network there are three cryptogen configuration files inside organizations/cryptogen/ .
For orderer organization, organizations/cryptogen/crypto-config-orderer.yaml
For peer organization Org1, organizations/cryptogen/crypto-config-org1.yaml
For peer organization Org2, organizations/cryptogen/crypto-config-org2.yaml
Binary tools
All the tools and commands ( cryptgen , configtxgen , peer , etc.) are stored in fabric-samples/bin/ . Update the PATH to include this directory.
cd fabric-samples/test-network
export PATH=${PWD}/../bin:${PWD}:$PATH
Crypto material generation for all organizations
The resulting materials are all placed inside organizations/ . Orderer organization is stored in organizations/ordererOrganizations/ , and peer organizations in organizations/peerOrganizations/ .
cryptogen generate --config=./organizations/cryptogen/crypto-config-orderer.yaml --output="organizations" cryptogen generate --config=./organizations/cryptogen/crypto-config-org1.yaml --output="organizations" cryptogen generate --config=./organizations/cryptogen/crypto-config-org2.yaml --output="organizations"
Crypto material stored inside organizations/
Crypto material in network components
These crypto materials generated will be placed into the corresponding network components. It is done through docker compose file. Here is the docker/docker-compose-test-net.yaml .
Crypto materials are mapped to each component (container) as volumes
Step 2: Generate Consortium Genesis Block
Configuration file
The consortium configuration is in configtx/configtx.yaml . Here we only show the portion relevant to the consortium genesis block.
Profile for generating consortium genesis block
Consortium genesis block generation
Here is how we generate this consortium genesis block. We specify the profile TwoOrgsOrdererGenesis. The result is kept in system-genesis-block/ .
export FABRIC_CFG_PATH=${PWD}/configtx configtxgen -profile TwoOrgsOrdererGenesis -channelID system-channel -outputBlock ./system-genesis-block/genesis.block
Consortium genesis block in orderer
This consortium genesis block only appears in orderers. In Test Network, it only appears in orderer.example.com. Here is an extract from docker/docker-compose-test-net.yaml .
Consortium genesis block is mapped to orderer.
Step 3: Bring Up Test Network Components
Configuration file
Use docker-compose to bring up the three network components of Test Network. The docker compose configuration file to be used is docker/docker-compose-test-net.yaml .
Three components (collapsed for better display) defined in docker compose file.
Bring up all network components
IMAGE_TAG=latest docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose-test-net.yaml up -d
Here is how the three containers running in localhost.
Three containers are running in localhost with docker compose.
Step 4 is equivalent to executing command ./network.sh createChannel .
Step 4: Join Peers of Both Organizations to mychannel
In Test Network, creating and joining mychannel involves three steps
use configtxgen to generate transactions for mychannel, including configuration transaction and anchor peer update transactions prepare a channel genesis block for mychannel, which is a file join channel using the channel genesis block file
Note: Don’t mix up with this channel genesis block file with the consortium genesis block file in Step 2. Consortium genesis block file contains the setup of the whole consortium of member organizations. A channel is a subset (or a whole set) of the consortium. There can be more than one channels defined in a consortium, to reflect the real business relationship and logic. Each channel begins with a channel genesis block file. In Test Network, we only have one channel, mychannel, and all consortium members, org1 and org2, join this mychannel.
Unlike First Network, Test Network does not come with CLI container. The channel artifacts are generated and stored in localhost, and peer commands are issued directly from localhost.
Generate channel artifacts
Channel artifacts for mychannel includes a configuration transaction and anchor peer update transaction for each peer organization. Note that we are using the profile TwoOrgsChannel specified in configtx/configtx.yaml .
mkdir -p channel-artifacts configtxgen -profile TwoOrgsChannel -outputCreateChannelTx ./channel-artifacts/mychannel.tx -channelID mychannel configtxgen -profile TwoOrgsChannel -outputAnchorPeersUpdate ./channel-artifacts/Org1MSPanchors.tx -channelID mychannel -asOrg Org1MSP configtxgen -profile TwoOrgsChannel -outputAnchorPeersUpdate ./channel-artifacts/Org2MSPanchors.tx -channelID mychannel -asOrg Org2MSP
The material generated are all kept in channel-artifacts/ .
Channel genesis block file
The channel genesis block file, block #0 for mychannel, is generated using configuration transaction generated previously.
As we need TLS CA certificates when reaching components, we can define these environment variables for tidy display.
export ORDERER_CA=${PWD}/organizations/ordererOrganizations/example.com/orderers/orderer.example.com/msp/tlscacerts/tlsca.example.com-cert.pem export PEER0_ORG1_CA=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/peers/peer0.org1.example.com/tls/ca.crt export PEER0_ORG2_CA=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/peers/peer0.org2.example.com/tls/ca.crt
We target this peer command from peer0.org1.example.com . Note the variables (in italic) applied in the beginning of this command. We will use this to specify where the peer command is issued.
export FABRIC_CFG_PATH=$PWD/../config/ CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org1MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG1_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:7051 peer channel create -o localhost:7050 -c mychannel --ordererTLSHostnameOverride orderer.example.com -f ./channel-artifacts/mychannel.tx --outputBlock ./channel-artifacts/mychannel.block --tls true --cafile $ORDERER_CA
We specify the following in this peer command
localhost:7050 as orderer. Use ordererTLSHostnameOverride to override with name orderer.example.com. Plus TLS material (orderer CA)
as orderer. Use to override with name orderer.example.com. Plus TLS material (orderer CA) channel name mychannel
channel configuration file ./channel-artifacts/mychannel.tx
output channel genesis block as a file: ./channel-artifacts/mychannel.block .
Now we have the file mychannel.block . We will use it to join peers of both peer organizations.
Join peers to mychannel
Peers of both organizations join mychannel using the block file.
CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org1MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG1_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:7051 peer channel join -b ./channel-artifacts/mychannel.block CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG2_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:9051 peer channel join -b ./channel-artifacts/mychannel.block
And both share the same blockchain, with height 1 (only block #0 exists).
Update anchor peers
Apply the update transaction.
CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org1MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG1_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:7051 peer channel update -o localhost:7050 --ordererTLSHostnameOverride orderer.example.com -c mychannel -f ./channel-artifacts/Org1MSPanchors.tx --tls true --cafile $ORDERER_CA CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG2_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:9051 peer channel update -o localhost:7050 --ordererTLSHostnameOverride orderer.example.com -c mychannel -f ./channel-artifacts/Org2MSPanchors.tx --tls true --cafile $ORDERER_CA
We specify the following in this peer command
localhost:7050 as orderer. Use ordererTLSHostnameOverride to override with name orderer.example.com. Plus TLS material (orderer CA)
as orderer. Use to override with name orderer.example.com. Plus TLS material (orderer CA) channel name mychannel
update configuration file ./channel-artifacts/OrgnMSPanchors.tx, which we generate in the beginning of this step
Check the blockchain of both peers: now it should be of height 3 (a new block is committed after each anchor peer update). Blockchain content (hash) in both peers remains identical.
With this, mychannel is created and joined by peers of all organizations.
Step 5–6 is equivalent to executing command ./network.sh deployCC .
Step 5: Deploy Fabcar on mychannel
We follow the process of lifecycle chaincode to deploy Fabcar on mychannel. In Fabric v2.0, chaincode deployment is done using lifecycle chaincode. For more detail about lifecycle chaincode, you can refer to my previous article.
Package Fabcar chaincode
We first install dependency on the chaincode if not done yet.
# install dependence if not done before
pushd ../chaincode/fabcar/go
GO111MODULE=on go mod vendor
popd CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org1MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG1_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:7051 peer lifecycle chaincode package fabcar.tar.gz --path ../chaincode/fabcar/go/ --label fabcar_1
The result is the chaincode package file stored locally.
Chaincode package file is created.
Install Fabcar to peers of both organizations
CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org1MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG1_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:7051 peer lifecycle chaincode install fabcar.tar.gz CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG2_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:9051 peer lifecycle chaincode install fabcar.tar.gz
We will get back package ID after chaincode package installation. Note that they are the same in this tutorial, but it is not necessary as v2.0 this process is done by each organizations separately. There are chances that individual organization extends chaincode. See this article for more detail.
We can check if the installation is successful.
Chaincode package is installed on both peers.
Meanwhile, a new chaincode container image is built, one for each peer. They are not instantiated yet (not running as a docker container yet). This is also why it takes some time as images are being built.
Chaincode container images are built, but no chaincode containers are instantiated yet.
For those who are interested in the chaincode container in Fabric v2.0, you can refer to my another article about this.
It is how the setup looks like. Two chaincode container images are built, but not running yet as container.
Two chaincode container images built in localhost.
Approve chaincode definition for both organizations
We first approve for Org1.
CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org1MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG1_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:7051 peer lifecycle chaincode approveformyorg -o localhost:7050 --ordererTLSHostnameOverride orderer.example.com --tls true --cafile $ORDERER_CA --channelID mychannel --name fabcar --version 1 --init-required --package-id fabcar_1:2939b5f219f516bc94df2253438bad440d6a91432f6b5bbd17ef05d2228766e8 --sequence 1
With this, we can check readiness of chaincode commit from both organizations. The approval is recorded and both organizations see the same result.
Both peers see the same result: only Org1 has approved chaincode definition.
Now we approve for Org2.
CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org2MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG2_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org2.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:9051 peer lifecycle chaincode approveformyorg -o localhost:7050 --ordererTLSHostnameOverride orderer.example.com --tls true --cafile $ORDERER_CA --channelID mychannel --name fabcar --version 1 --init-required --package-id fabcar_1:2939b5f219f516bc94df2253438bad440d6a91432f6b5bbd17ef05d2228766e8 --sequence 1
And check again the readiness of chaincode commit. Now both organizations approve the chaincode definition.
Both peers see the same result: both Org1 and Org2 have approved chaincode definition.
Commit chaincode definition on mychannel
As this satisfies the lifecycle endorsement policy (majority), the chaincode definition can be committed to mychannel.
CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org1MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG1_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:7051 peer lifecycle chaincode commit -o localhost:7050 --tls true --cafile $ORDERER_CA --peerAddresses localhost:7051 --tlsRootCertFiles $PEER0_ORG1_CA --peerAddresses localhost:9051 --tlsRootCertFiles $PEER0_ORG2_CA --channelID mychannel --name fabcar --version 1 --sequence 1 --init-required
And we can check the committed chaincode.
Chaincode is committed and ready for use.
And we see the chaincode containers for both peers are instantiated.
Two chaincode containers, instantiated from chaincode container images, are now running.
Now there are total five containers running in localhost, with the two new chaincode containers, one for each peer.
Chaincode container instantiated from the images after chaincode is committed
Now the chaincode is ready for use.
Step 6: Interact with Fabcar Chaincode Functions
Invoke Chaincode Function
We invoke initLedger() functions, specifying peer of both organizations as endorsers. (Note: in configtx/configtx.yaml , endorsement policy by default is majority. Therefore both organizations are required.)
CORE_PEER_TLS_ENABLED=true CORE_PEER_LOCALMSPID="Org1MSP" CORE_PEER_TLS_ROOTCERT_FILE=$PEER0_ORG1_CA CORE_PEER_MSPCONFIGPATH=${PWD}/organizations/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/[email protected]/msp CORE_PEER_ADDRESS=localhost:7051 peer chaincode invoke -o localhost:7050 --ordererTLSHostnameOverride orderer.example.com --tls true --cafile $ORDERER_CA -C mychannel -n fabcar --peerAddresses localhost:7051 --tlsRootCertFiles $PEER0_ORG1_CA --peerAddresses localhost:9051 --tlsRootCertFiles $PEER0_ORG2_CA --isInit -c '{"function":"initLedger","Args":[]}'
Query Chaincode Function
Then we query function queryAllCars() from both peers.
Both peers return the same result: the chaincode is running correctly.
Summary
We have walked through the script network.sh for Test Network, showing how to prepare crypto material and channel artifacts for a simple three-organization network. We also deploy Fabcar chaincode using lifecycle chaincode and after deployment, invoked chaincode functions to check if everything is working well.
Hope this tutorial helps you understand Test Network more, and you can use it for testing your own network setup or chaincode development. | https://kctheservant.medium.com/test-network-script-walk-through-95ca973bc676 | ['Kc Tam'] | 2020-06-03 02:03:16.872000+00:00 | ['Hyperledger Fabric', 'Tutorial', 'Test Network', 'Fabric V2'] |
That Girl | Photo by gryffyn m on Unsplash
That Girl
It doesn't feel weird anymore to spend holidays at home. I have been doing this since the past one year. It’s been a year since I have met my family in India. Now video call has become a new normal for me. They don’t get irritated by my calls. As if they know I am trying to fill in the gap with words. We all have become words and we are sharing stories with each other, my parents don’t write but they always have a story for me. I listen to them and fill pages in my book. I have again become a child who needs story to food her heart or maybe I never grew up. I am still that girl who loves to be lost. | https://medium.com/blueinsight/that-girl-edd2241bc101 | ['Priyanka Srivastava'] | 2020-12-26 17:00:56.400000+00:00 | ['Blue Insights', 'Pandemic', 'Life', 'This Happened To Me', 'Writing'] |
Why LinkedIn Groups Are Great for Businesses | How to create a successful LinkedIn Group
1. Pick a topic that your customers care about
A Group, however, should be focused around a topic that has a natural connection to your brand and less on directly promoting your brand or company. People should join the group because they are interested in the topic, not your company. Over time, the audience will create a natural connection with the topic and your brand, through an earned connection, which is much more valuable. — Charlie Lowe at Social@Ogilvy
HubSpot’s LinkedIn Group is about inbound marketing; Content Marketing Institute’s LinkedIn Group is about content marketing. They focused not on their own brand but on topics that their customers care about.
Your customers might be interested in discussing your products with fellow customers. They are, however, likely to be more interested in the wider topic instead. For example, if we had a LinkedIn Group, members would likely be more keen to discuss how to improve their social media marketing than chat about how to use Buffer.
Having a topic that your customers care about will not only attract them to be part of your LinkedIn Group. It will also help keep the conversations in the group focused and make it easier for you and your team to manage the group.
Here are some questions to help you decide on your group topic:
What are your goals for the community?
What conversations would be useful to your customers?
What are some questions that your customers often ask you?
What are the common topics that your brand is related to?
2. Create your LinkedIn Group
Once you’ve decided on your topic, the next step is to create your group on LinkedIn.
Creating a LinkedIn group is as simple as filling out a form. Navigate to your LinkedIn Groups and click on “Create group”. Or you can use this direct link if you’re logged in: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/create.
Here are the fields to fill out:
Group title
Group logo
Description
Group rules (optional but highly recommended)
Group membership (standard or unlisted)
One aspect that I would recommend focusing on is the group rules. Your group rules will help your members understand what’s encouraged and what’s not. Having your groups rules stated explicitly will also make it easier for you to manage your group and moderate conversations.
Here’s an example by Content Marketing Institute LinkedIn Group:
It might sound harsh that they would “delete any discussion submission which includes a link to posts and articles or are a promotion of services” and “Members who repeatedly submit links will be removed from the group.” From my personal experience, having such rules and enforcing them seem to be the key difference between a LinkedIn Group with meaningful discussions and one that is filled with spam and links.
If you want to check out more group rules for reference, I thought Search Engine Land, Step Into The Spotlight!, and Lean Startup Circle have pretty good group rules. (You’ll have to join the groups to see the rules.)
3. Set up message templates
One handy feature of LinkedIn Groups is its message templates. You can create custom messages that would be automatically sent to people interested in joining your LinkedIn Group. This is a great opportunity to let your brand tone shine. If you do not create a custom message, LinkedIn will send its default message accordingly.
Here are the various message templates:
Request-to-join Message (to people who requested to join your group) Welcome Message (to people whom you have approved their membership in your group) Decline Message (to people whom you have declined their request to join your group) Decline and Block Message (to people whom you have declined their request and want to block any further requests)
To access this setting, click on “Manage” on your LinkedIn Group homepage and select “Templates” on the left. Then, click on “Create Template” for the ones you want to customize. Here’s how customizing the template looks like:
Here’s an example of how a custom welcome message email looks like (the message is in the middle section while the other two sections are automatically generated, I believe):
If you would like interested people to fill out an application form to join the group, you could include an application form in your request-to-join message, like HubSpot did:
This way, you can ensure that only people that fit your target persona or people who are really interested would join your LinkedIn Group.
4. Invite your connections and grow your group
To help ensure that your LinkedIn Group remains a trusted place for you and your members to gather, you can now invite only people whom you’re connected to on LinkedIn.
To invite your connections, click on “Manage” on your LinkedIn Group homepage and select “Invited Users” on the left.
If you have other marketing channels, such as other social media profiles, email, or a blog, you could use them to promote your new LinkedIn Group. Alternatively, you could also share your LinkedIn Group on your personal LinkedIn profile and encourage your colleagues to do the same.
Here are a few more ideas from LinkedIn on promoting your group:
Optimize and edit your group information to include keywords that prospective members are likely to search for. Encourage group members to invite people. Advertise your group with LinkedIn Ads by clicking the Advertising link at the bottom of any LinkedIn page.
It might be tempting to think that the bigger your group is, the better it would be. Before you go about growing your group, here’s a thought to consider: many of the largest LinkedIn Groups have over a million members and are often filled with just links. It’s often the smaller groups with proper moderation that have meaningful discussions. (LinkedIn has now limited the number of members in a group to 20,0002.)
5. Start discussions and be active
This step and the next are the most crucial ones, which will influence how well your LinkedIn Group becomes. You ready?
Once you’ve created your LinkedIn Group and invited your connections, your group would likely still feel very empty. Members might not post anything if there aren’t any posts in the group (or they might just start sharing links).
I would recommend creating a “Welcome post” as the group’s first post, where you welcome new members, share what the group is about, and gently remind members to check the group rules.
Then, feature that post so that it stays at the top of the group feed for all new members to read. You can feature a post by clicking on the three dots in the upper-right corner of the post and selecting “Feature”. Here’s an example of how a featured post looks like:
The next thing to do is to start some discussions in the group. This serves two purposes:
It helps get conversations going in the group, and It signals to your group members the type of posts that are appropriate and encouraged.
The question-and-answer format seems to be the best way to start valuable conversations in LinkedIn Groups. According to Inc., James McDonald, who started a successful industrial water treatment LinkedIn Group several years back, posted a question every day and let his members respond to it3.
Besides starting discussions, you’ll also want to participate in relevant discussions by commenting or liking. This will encourage your members to post more and, again, let them know the type of discussions that are recommended the group.
Starting discussions and participating in them can be quite time-consuming. But your effort will pay off once you have created a culture of having meaningful discussions. New members tend to follow the actions of existing members. If they see only quality conversations and no self-promotional posts, they’ll more likely contribute to the discussions than promote their own things in the group.
6. Moderate all posts and remove spam
This next step is just as important as the previous. Once your members become active (yay!), it’ll be crucial to moderate the posts in your LinkedIn Group. My hunch is that most LinkedIn Groups fail because of a lack of moderation.
According to LinkedIn, “Spam is the top reason people leave groups” and, if I may add, the top reason people become inactive in groups4. Spam in LinkedIn Groups is usually in the form of links. So I would recommend being quite sensitive to members sharing links in your LinkedIn Group, and deleting the post or removing the member.
To remove a post or comment in your LinkedIn Group, click on the three dots in the upper-right corner of the post or by the comment and select “Delete”.
To help you reduce spam, LinkedIn also has an auto-moderation system that would flag promotional content. You could also encourage your members (or group managers) to flag posts that are not appropriate for the group. Then you can head to your group management page to moderate the posts under the sections, “Moderation Queue” and “Classifier Queue”.
Here’s a little heads up: building an engaged community can take some time and effort. You’ll likely have to repeat step five and six for quite some time so don’t be disheartened if your group isn’t very active after the first month or two.
If you would like to learn more best practices for managing LinkedIn Groups, there are a few good answers in this Quora thread (especially the answers of Alice Fuller, Andy Foote, and Jeff Martens). | https://medium.com/social-media-tips/linkedin-groups-955c2fa1805f | [] | 2018-03-28 09:01:01.720000+00:00 | ['Social Media Marketing', 'Social Media Engagement', 'LinkedIn', 'Social Media', 'Linkedin Marketing'] |
A Bedding of Algae | A Bedding of Algae
I pray to the waves
Photo by Nsey Benajah on Unsplash
Could you show me how to fall asleep again?
Like a child in a cradle
is there any step I forgot?
How was I doing it?
I rehearse all the steps:
the eyelids get heavy,
the muscles deflate,
the darkness lures me in,
the thoughts stop their ride.
I’m right between Here and There,
naked as a greek statue,
ready to slip into the nothingness,
and allow the world to do its thing,
free of my burdens,
free of my measuring the time.
Yet as I slip, I get pushed back
by a net of emotions
entangled on the handles of mind
it turns my free jump
into a flip of a fish,
failed whale on a sandy shore
suffocated by too much oxygen.
Who will come to save me?
Who will bear my weight?
My eyes sore beneath the silky eyelids.
I pray to the waves:
come and swing me,
make my repose
into a bedding of algae. | https://medium.com/loose-words/a-bedding-of-algae-4d9bf6266628 | ['Ana-Maria Schweitzer'] | 2020-12-07 13:02:47.726000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Self', 'Insomnia', 'Awareness', 'Control'] |
Why Do We Use 911 For Emergencies? | The number 911 is used for emergencies in North America, but why is that particular number used, and how did it all start?
The original 911 system began in the late 1960s, but the earliest system in the United States for someone to make a request for emergency assistance started just after the turn of the 20th century. The communications company, Ericsson Incorporated, developed a portable phone handset and crank in the early 1900s so people could communicate an emergency.
Their device used two metal hooks that were placed on bare phone wires to form a connection. The hand box was then cranked, a connection was made, and it was hoped that someone would answer the signal on the other end of the line. While it was a crude beginning to an emergency communication system, it was credited with success in reporting a train robbery around 1907 that led to the arrests of the criminals.
It took a series of tragedies to get to the basic 911 system we know today. The most prominent was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, which highlighted the need for better disaster communications. Radio communications were regularly used between ships, but when the Titanic had signaled an emergency, it was never received by the nearest ship because the radio operator was off duty.
In response to the disaster, the United States Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912. It required that all ships at sea had to have a radio operator on duty at all times so a possible distress call wouldn’t be missed. The passing of the Radio Act established a connection between the government and emergency communications.
It would be more than 50 years before the basic 911 service would be implemented, however. Prior to that time, if someone had an emergency, the person would dial zero to get an operator. It became apparent that the operators weren’t specifically trained to handle an emergency situation, and they didn’t have the necessary tools to answer or handle an emergency call effectively.
In response to these problems, the National Association of Fire Chiefs recommended a single telephone number to report fires in the 1950s. The request was never implemented, but it did highlight to the government the inadequacies of the current system.
In 1967, a report from the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice under President Lyndon Johnson recommended that citizens should be able to contact police departments using a single number. In January 1968, AT&T announced that 911 would be the universal emergency number. The first 911 call was made by Senator Rankin Fite the next month in Haleyville, Alabama. It wouldn’t be until 1999 and the signing of the Public Safety Act that 911 was officially designated as the nation’s emergency number.
But why was the number 911 picked to be used in an emergency in the first place? AT&T designated the numbers 9–1–1 because they wanted a number that was short and easy to remember, and one that hadn’t been used as an area code. Since rotary phones were the main phones being used at the time, a shorter number was also a lot easier to dial.
The 911 system allowed local control over emergency communications, but by the early 1970s, 911 operators were beginning to see the value of having a person’s name, phone number, and address show up when a person called in an emergency. This led to the Enhanced 911 system in the mid-1970s. This allowed a call to be routed to the proper authorities, it identified the location, and it also identified the number.
With the rise of cell phones, however, the ability of a precise location has become a problem. According to a 2015 report by USA Today, many places in the country report that the location of an emergency call is not showing up accurately. Operators can sometimes only locate the cell tower that was used for the call.
In California alone, just under 50% of the calls included a location. Since more than 70% of 911 calls originate from cell phones, the government has proposed a new 911 system called Next Generation 911. The technology is in place for the new system, but it has not yet been implemented.
While 911 is the emergency number for North America, in the United Kingdom, the emergency number is 999. The United Kingdom’s emergency number is actually the earliest. It was established in 1935 when five women died during a fire in London. Though neighbors tried to dial zero for the operator, they found that it was jammed, and they couldn’t alert anyone about the fire.
Another method for calling in an emergency was to dial the police by asking the operator for Whitehall 1212. In response to the tragedy, the General Post Office proposed a three-digit number of 999 that would alert operators through a special signal that the call was an emergency.
The system went into place in 1937 and first covered a 12-mile radius in London. One of the first calls was from a woman saying that her husband was chasing a burglar. The burglar was quickly caught. The United Kingdom and its territories still use the 999 number for emergencies today.
Sources: NENA, The Industry Council, PBS, USA Today, The Desert Sun, 911.gov, BBC
Want to delve into more facts? Try The Wonderful World of Completely Random Facts series, here on Medium. | https://medium.com/knowledge-stew/why-do-we-use-911-for-emergencies-fa657a60e6d5 | ['Daniel Ganninger'] | 2020-10-12 13:07:37.312000+00:00 | ['Police', 'Mobile', 'History', 'Fire', 'Government'] |
I am not concerned that I am not known, I seek to be worthy to be known. | I am not concerned that I am not known, I seek to be worthy to be known.
Daily three quotes from China classics
The Master said, “A man should say, I am not concerned that I have no place, I am concerned how I may fit myself for one. I am not concerned that I am not known, I seek to be worthy to be known.”
— The Analects, Confucius
Adherence to bond or covenant
When a reconciliation is effected (between two parties) after a great animosity, there is sure to be a grudge remaining (in the mind of the one who was wrong). And how can this be beneficial (to the other)? Therefore (to guard against this), the sage keeps the left-hand portion of the record of the engagement, and does not insist on the (speedy) fulfilment of it by the other party. (So), he who has the attributes (of the Dao) regards (only) the conditions of the engagement, while he who has not those attributes regards only the conditions favourable to himself. In the Way of Heaven, there is no partiality of love; it is always on the side of the good man.
— Tao Te Ching, Lao Zi
Analysis
At Savatthī. “Bhikkhus, I will teach you the Noble Eightfold Path and I will analyse it for you. Listen to that and attend closely, I will speak.”
“Yes, venerable sir,” those bhikkhus replied. The Blessed One said this:
“And what, bhikkhus, is the Noble Eightfold Path? Right view … right concentration.
“And what, bhikkhus, is right view? Knowledge of suffering, knowledge of the origin of suffering, knowledge of the cessation of suffering, knowledge of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: this is called right view.
“And what, bhikkhus, is right intention? Intention of renunciation, intention of non-ill will, intention of harmlessness: this is called right intention.
“And what, bhikkhus, is right speech? Abstinence from false speech, abstinence from divisive speech, abstinence from harsh speech, abstinence from idle chatter: this is called right speech.
“And what, bhikkhus, is right action? Abstinence from the destruction of life, abstinence from taking what is not given, abstinence from sexual misconduct: this is called right action.
“And what, bhikkhus, is right livelihood? Here a noble disciple, having abandoned a wrong mode of livelihood, earns his living by a right livelihood: this is called right livelihood.
“And what, bhikkhus, is right effort? Here, bhikkhus, a bhikkhu generates desire for the nonarising of unarisen evil unwholesome states; he makes an effort, arouses energy, applies his mind, and strives. He generates desire for the abandoning of arisen evil unwholesome states…. He generates desire for the arising of unarisen wholesome states…. He generates desire for the maintenance of arisen wholesome states, for their nondecay, increase, expansion, and fulfilment by development; he makes an effort, arouses energy, applies his mind, and strives. This is called right effort.
“And what, bhikkhus is right mindfulness? Here, bhikkhus, a bhikkhu dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. He dwells contemplating feelings in feelings, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. He dwells contemplating mind in mind, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. He dwells contemplating phenomena in phenomena, ardent, clearly comprehending, mindful, having removed covetousness and displeasure in regard to the world. This is called right mindfulness.
“And what, bhikkhus, is right concentration? Here, bhikkhus, secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhana, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion. With the subsiding of thought and examination, he enters and dwells in the second jhana, which has internal confidence and unification of mind, is without thought and examination, and has rapture and happiness born of concentration. With the fading away as well of rapture, he dwells equanimous and, mindful and clearly comprehending, he experiences happiness with the body; he enters and dwells in the third jhana of which the noble ones declare: ‘He is equanimous, mindful, one who dwells happily.’ With the abandoning of pleasure and pain, and with the previous passing away of joy and displeasure, he enters and dwells in the fourth jhana, which is neither painful nor pleasant and includes the purification of mindfulness by equanimity. This is called right concentration.”
— Saṃyutta Nikāya 45.8, Buddha | https://medium.com/china-three/i-am-not-concerned-that-i-am-not-known-i-seek-to-be-worthy-to-be-known-a51a07a072a | ['Jian Xu'] | 2020-10-27 07:57:09.694000+00:00 | ['Quotes', 'Religion', 'China', 'Culture', 'Philosophy'] |
Top Smart City Technology Companies In Europe | smart city solution companies
Smart cities have long been among the foremost actively mentioned realizations created doable by the combination of IoT, data, property, and by leverage a mixture of various technologies.
Driven by fast urbanization, increasing population, dynamic the surroundings, and restricted resources, countries around the globe area unit propellent the formation of good cities. But, because of increased property, the Smartphone area unit put time period data regarding transit, traffic, health services, safety alerts, and community news into uncountable hands. every instance of maintenance and improvement is making opportunities for brand new sources of feedback to yield advantages so much on the far side what’s presently on the market. This collected information is processed to envision a wise town infrastructure’s state of repair, utilization, and additional potentialities for improvement.
Smart City With Cloud
Smart cities are foretold to own centralized knowledge systems for the complete communities, which is able to be hopped-up by 5G transmissions and dependent on numerous technologies for functioning expeditiously. With huge volumes of information to method each second, generated by the complete town will solely be dealt with by cloud computing and massive knowledge. Cloud computing can give a sound digital infrastructure with a standard cloud as storage systems for the complete town, from autonomous vehicles to farms. every kind of information generated, from server files to communications by machine-to-machine, is going to be housed within the same cloud.
Migrating Cities to the Cloud
With simply the supply of storing knowledge on the cloud, a wise town doesn’t become economical. For a brief length, knowledge could also behold on and analyzed by the govt. and directors to create the proper selections. however, within the long-standing time, knowledge from one town on the cloud will be sold to a different, whether or not altogether or in elements to derive insights. These insights have the potential to remodel a normal town into a wise town, with the creation of example management systems, which is able to need minimum to no human involvement. The immediate challenge is to form that single good town, which is able to assume the stance of associate example by crossing borders, pooling knowledge, and facultative time period networks management all hopped-up by cloud computing.
These cities of the longer term are expected to enhance the standard of lives of voters if not; it’ll be of desiring to produce good cities. However, with in-depth studies on the results of the formation of good cities, the consulting cluster reports that the sheer size of the potential impacts is countless. The significant factors that indicate quality, public safety, and environmental quality look promising with complete reduction of urban fatalities, traveling times, improved public health services, and property environments.
At present, it appears crystal clear that good cities are on the horizon which they are available with bearing higher, improved, and property existence.
Below is the list of companies: | https://medium.com/@jackmathew/top-smart-city-technology-companies-in-europe-22926bb9f367 | ['Jack Mathew'] | 2019-11-27 05:26:12.305000+00:00 | ['Cloud Computing', 'Smart Cities', 'Solutions', 'Technology', 'Startup'] |
City Tools: shining a light on the technologies powering London’s boroughs | All London boroughs care deeply about providing amazing services for their residents. To do that, they need to have great technology and strong relationships with the best suppliers.
And yet, as anyone who has worked in the local government technology field will testify, that is not always the case.
Doing anything about this is challenging.
One reason is the sheer scale. Collectively, boroughs and the city spend over £14 billion a year delivering their services. The technology that powers those services is inevitably complex and difficult to track, decode and understand.
Second, the examples we hear — of good news stories and frustrations alike — are mainly based on anecdote. What we’ve lacked is an evidence base to more systematically look at how we can improve the system.
Until now.
On 13th November, the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) and Bloomberg Associates, a pro-bono municipal consulting service, released City Tools: London, an interactive dashboard that maps the technologies, suppliers and contracts used to power each service and function across London’s boroughs. The project is based on Bloomberg Associates’ Digital City Tools report, but adapted for a London context with the expert local knowledge of consultant CIO, Omid Shiraji.
22 boroughs submitted data on their technology via a survey, which was combined with open data from all 32 boroughs and the City of London to build up a richer picture. Data specialists Eden Smith have added a visualisation layer in Power BI to allow the data to be interrogated from different angles. In the public dashboard, you can filter by the supplier, system, service area, contract end dates and borough.
The City Tools Dashboard, available at http://loti.london/citytools
Some of the key insights from the data are captured in the accompanying report.
Among a list of potential benefits outlined there, I personally hope LOTI can facilitate the use of this data to:
Help boroughs see where their contracts for particular service areas or with a particular supplier end at a similar time. They could use this information to share their experiences, discuss their needs and improve their approach to the market, potentially exploring joint procurement opportunities. Enable boroughs to share their expertise with each other. In the survey to collect the data, many boroughs also shared their level of confidence in supporting and developing different systems. Seeing details of their individual and collective expertise should enable better peer support and the ability to form new partnerships. Make it easier for SMEs to identify which boroughs have contracts ending in service areas where they have products to offer. This should help them target their engagement at boroughs most likely to be receptive to new approaches. For those SMEs who offer products that integrate with legacy IT systems, knowing exactly which legacy providers are used and where should help prioritise product development. Understand and address some of the causes of dissatisfaction. A striking insight from the report is that boroughs with fewer vendors overall feel they aren’t getting good value for money. We want to understand what factors are at play there. This should be a chance to engage the market constructively, clearly stating what good looks like, and ruling out the behaviours that have a negative impact. Top of my list would be ending the practice whereby some suppliers charge local authorities to access their own data (where it’s not part of their standard dashboard). Clearly, suppliers have frustrations of their own, and we want to understand those, too.
What next?
We are under no illusions that data is a cure-all. We also know that the first version of the dashboard is just a prototype that needs to be enhanced and accompanied by many other things to deliver real change.
To that end, over the next few weeks, LOTI will be:
Engaging with boroughs to identify areas where the current data can provide immediate value. With the data revealing that a substantial number of contracts end in 2020, there is real scope to trial some new collaborative approaches to thinking about the technology they want to procure.
Exploring real user needs — from both the local government and supplier side — to inform how the tool is developed and used in future. We are not interested in building a platform for its own sake. We equally recognise that we need to understand what changes in process, policy, culture and mindset are required to make the data useful.
Working with the GLA’s Economic Development team to see how City Tools can be developed in a way that fully complements their recent initiatives to develop tools that help Govtech SMEs more easily navigate the London public sector market.
Based on all the above, making decisions on how to automate (where possible) elements of the tool, and properly resource the initiative so that it becomes sustainable.
In short, the dashboard and report are just the start, but I believe they provide a strong foundation on which much else can be built.
You can follow LOTI’s progress on this front on Twitter and Medium. | https://medium.com/loti/city-tools-shining-a-light-on-the-technologies-powering-londons-boroughs-d909a7d74a73 | ['Eddie Copeland'] | 2019-11-19 06:01:01.418000+00:00 | ['Local Government', 'Procurement', 'London', 'Government', 'Govtech'] |
How to Nail Your First Meeting With a Potential Investor | If I had to quantify the number of first meetings I’ve had with founders, it’d easily fall into the thousands. From video chats and calls with founders around the world, to in-person meetings in all three of our North American locations, I’ve seen quite a bit of it. Amidst those thousands of firsts, only a small portion make it through to a second and we’ve backed just a fraction of those. The buck doesn’t stop there. I’ve worked side-by-side with founders as they prepare for countless firsts with everyone from top tier investment funds to corporate purchasers and Angel investors. You could argue, I and the Acceleprise team have played a part in the production of what’s likely tens of thousands of first meetings. It’s a tough process, where presentation can often mean just as much as the contents of the pitch itself.
Getting the a first meeting is just the first step. Nailing the first meeting is what makes all the difference. You might have 30 minutes on the calendar, but your opportunity to build momentum and trust started when your request for an intro was forwarded.
This post is our digest of what we’ve learned from all of those data points. Here’s what we’ve learned.
Build trust quickly
At any investing stage, writing a check is an act of trust. Due diligence is a tool used by investors to increase their trust interval, but how you communicate is both the foundation and catalyst of trust.
Building trust through communication does two things for you as a founder:
It shows that you are approaching this relationship with the seriousness and honesty required to do business in good faith. It makes it easier to check issues with you instead of letting them fester. If an investor believes they can trust you, they will come to you quickly and often to assuage their concerns. If you don’t build trust, investors will instead rely on their own assumptions or fact checking.
Since you want investors communicating with you and checking their questions or concerns (not making assumptions), here are some tactics that will help you communicate in a way that builds trust.
Be consistent in how you communicate. An investor may email, text, or call, and having different styles for each is fine, but keep your tone and style consistent across the board. This includes things like:
The words you use
How you greet / sign off
Tone you use
Next, ensure consistency in the frequency of communication. This means your very first communications will set a precedent. If you’re known for lightning fast responses, then suddenly taking a day or two may give the investor cause for concern. On the flip side, consistent frequency should also be reasonable — you can’t take a week to respond to an email simply because that’s an expectation you want to set. A good rule of thumb is that all emails should be acknowledged within the same business day. Answer them if they are quick or acknowledge receipt and necessary actions for bigger asks.
This advice may fly in the face of what you’ve heard before about investor meetings, but we advocate complete transparency. Investors know startups are not perfect. They aren’t looking for perfection (not the good ones, anyway). Instead, investors are looking for people they can trust. If you’re hiding things and investors find out, that brings up two major red flags:
It signals to the investor that you’re either hiding from problems or trying to make yourself look better at the expense of your company. It begs the question: what else is being hidden that I haven’t yet found out about?
Being completely transparent also means you must be thorough in responses and do what you say you will. These two things alone provide a solid foundation of trust that, when lacking, cannot be earned in alternative ways. If you’re not doing what you say you will, investors may be scared off of the deal based on the assumption that you aren’t executing. And when you’re not thorough in responses to an investor, they will become concerned that you aren’t learning fast enough or not showing the vulnerability required to make the most of their money.
Finally, be polite to everyone. There’s never an excuse to be rude. And when we say everyone, we mean it. There’s a misconception that VC partners hold all the power and everyone else is an underling. The reality is that most investor partners will actively check how you treat their colleagues. If you get to the diligence stage, chances are an investor may want to talk to employees or customers as well. That’s not to say you can’t be tough, direct, or assertive. In fact, investors want to see that — but you don’t need to be rude to accomplish it.
Before the meeting
Heading into a meeting, you only need to send one email to do two things:
Send the deck ahead of time Confirm your meeting and share a win
1 — Send the deck ahead of time
Where a lot of advice suggests not sending the deck to avoid getting cancelled on, our advice is to send the deck to avoid the trap of a deck-read meeting. One of the fastest ways to kill investor interest is to ask them to enter a meeting totally blind and then spend the first 20 minutes going through your deck. Not only is the person caught unawares about the work your company does, they also are left trying to piece together how they ended up in that meeting — who made the introduction? Why did I initially say yes? Etc.
Sending the deck 2–3 days ahead of time (but no more) will give the investor time to read through, do some preliminary research, and come prepared with deeper questions. This is also the time you should confirm your meeting (see #2, below)
If they come into the meeting without reading the deck, that’s a sign that you’re facing an uphill battle with that particular investor. It doesn’t mean you can’t still secure the deal, but you should reset your expectations and buckle down.
2 — Confirm your meeting and share a win
Continuing the theme of being polite to everyone, confirm your meeting a two to three days beforehand, including your deck as an attachment, via email. When you do that, add in a very recent win if you have it.
Some examples of wins to share:
Landing a new customer
A new key hire
Impressive pipeline additions
A really good interaction with a customer that generated a referral or positive feedback
The goal is to create momentum leading up to the meeting. While there was obviously some interest (or they wouldn’t have agreed to the meeting), sharing a win so close to your conversation date will help get them to ‘lean in’ before the meeting even starts.
During the meeting
The meeting is your time to shine. You have about 5 minutes to capture an investors attention to keep them engaged for the remaining 25–40 minutes, so here’s how to make the most of your time.
Lead with your strongest card
In keeping with the principle of transparency, don’t hide your biggest win. If you secured a major enterprise client or poached a top executive, lead with that big win right after the intros. It is more likely to pique a VC’s attention and get them interested in the rest of the conversation.
Don’t have a major win yet? Speak to the size of the opportunity or strength of the team. Every company needs a strong suit to get them over the initial hurdles — lead with yours.
Explain the path
With clarity and conviction, explain how the market is evolving, what it looks like in 5 years and why your company will win in this evolving market. You want the investor to walk about from the meeting feeling like it’s inevitable that this is or will be a massive opportunity and then have confidence that you are the team to execute on it. If the market is expanding, where is it heading and how can you capture it? If the market isn’t expanding, what else has changed that means incumbent market share is easily up for grabs?
Have clarity on who you’re building for
It’s absolutely critical to know who you’re building for. This will identify the market, your marketing strategy, and guide your customer research. It will also heavily inform product development and could even lead to a strategic pivot into a new product or major new features.
As April Dunford talks about in her book on product positioning, you have to know your customers’ true alternative, which sometimes is a very manual process or simply dealing with the pain. If you don’t know as much as possible about your customer, you can’t build for them.
Know why your team will win
Chances are someone else is also thinking about the same problem or working to provide solutions to the same customer base as you. A VC with experience in your space is likely to have even met a few of those other entrepreneurs as well, making them zero-sum competition for VC dollars since most investors won’t invest in competitive products.
To combat this, you need to know your team’s secret weapon — the thing that sets you apart such as a key executive, hard-to-acquire knowledge, or a unique distribution channel. Having the right team — a secret weapon combined with the necessary expertise to execute — is another way that VCs increase their trust interval in a potential investment. Play this card wisely and always make sure it’s one of the strongest, if not the strongest, card in your hand.
Take notes and ask questions
The first meeting is a mutual assessment. You are fundraising and an investor’s job is to deploy capital. You need to know if they will be a good capital partner for your business, so don’t be afraid to ask about their timelines, process, and what they like to see in companies they invest in. Make sure you leave the meeting with a clear understanding of next steps in the process and the timeline of those next steps.
Asking questions (then noting the responses) will also help you with follow up later on, which can help secure the next meeting. In particular, make sure you take notes on what questions they asked and what risks they seem to be most worried about. After the meeting, write out the answers to those questions and get feedback on them from advisors and mentors, so you make sure to mitigate those risks in future meetings.
Own the narrative
A problem or challenge in your business is a chance to own your narrative and impress a potential investor.
Let’s say you’ve just lost a major enterprise client. At nearly any stage, losing a massive client is a bad thing. Instead of being worried that it will kill your investor deal when the investor finds out during diligence, get ahead of it.
Disclose the loss (again, transparency), but frame it this way: This loss happened. We did a post mortem that suggested the main cause of the loss was ABC. We believe XYZ systems were the root cause of ABC issue. We’re implementing DEF process to fix XYZ, which we believe will get rid of ABC issue, so we won’t have any more of this loss. Further, we’re trying QRS strategy to win back the client, showing them how we’re eliminating the issue that caused them to churn.
Extrapolating that out to a step-by-step:
Disclose the loss Explain the causes of the loss based on your post mortem Describe what you’re doing to mitigate or eliminate the causes of the loss so it won’t happen again Add in if you’re able to take any action to re-acquire the loss or make back the loss in another way
Have confidence and vulnerability
These two words — confidence and vulnerability — are often thrown around and have become buzzwords. Here’s what we mean by them:
Confidence is the knowledge that you have a legitimate opportunity to win. It’s a bold statement that you’re the one to take the gold.
Vulnerability is the source of your confidence. It’s the data you’re citing, the experience you’re bringing up, or the lessons learned from mistakes that make you believe you have it right this time. It’s also the part of you that is aware of the gaps in your own confidence and is open to taking in more data to fill those gaps.
After the meeting
Remember: the point of the first meeting is to get the second. Very few, if any, investment deals get done after only one meeting. If you met with a non-partner, in most cases they will have to develop a brief or investment memo to sell the partners of the fund on the investment. If you met with a partner, they will still need to sell the deal to their colleagues.
In this case, the best thing you can do is arm the person you met with any knowledge they need to make a case on your behalf. An investor developing a brief will need to show:
Why your space is exciting
What you’re doing in the space
Why they believe you can win
What risks or obstacles you’re facing — and how you will overcome them
The overall opportunity
This is where asking questions and taking notes during the meeting will come in handy.
Make sure to follow up on all questions and concerns they brought up. If they had a question, they will need an answer before submitting a brief. If you don’t send anything, they will do some quick googling and attach whatever they find. Chances are that won’t put your company in the best light, since you’re likely making a bet based on knowledge that not everyone has easy access to. Instead, send a thorough follow up with any relevant data points or stories so they can use the data you provided in their brief.
Further, send them a human-readable summary of your company. Chances are the other partners don’t have time — or won’t — read multiple pages up front. If you can provide an easy-to-read summary with key points, you make the investor’s work on your behalf a lot easier and more impactful for you. It’s yet another chance to own your narrative.
If the investor follows up asking for access to your data room, it may be a good idea to ask them what specifics they are looking for and share those documents manually. This will give you some more insight into what they are looking for. This is also stage-dependent and tends to work better the earlier the round is.
Investment is a process, but it can go very quickly
This guide offers you the tips necessary to nail your first investor meeting, but realize you’re still battling a miniscule conversion rate from meeting to funding. Not everything will work out, even if you did an amazing job in the meeting. Across all the rounds we have seen, first time founders on average need about 40 first meetings to get to a term sheet.
One way to tell if the deal has potential, though, is the speed with which investors move after the first meeting. Since investors are in the business of deploying capital, if they feel that your investment is worth making then they will move very quickly. As a rule of thumb, if you have an investor communicating with you almost daily to follow up, book next meetings, or ask for more information, that’s a great sign. The process itself still may take a few weeks since people’s schedules can be hard to pin down, the speed and frequency of communication after your first meeting is a good barometer of investor interest.
If the investor is dragging their feet, there may be something else at play. For example, they may be running it by other people in their network who know the market better than they do, or they may be running it by a portfolio company who could be a customer. But if you’re facing an investor moving slowly, keep going with your fundraising process, continue following up for their next steps and time frame, and continue to engage with positive updates as they happen.
Still not getting much from an investor after a few friendly follow ups? Move on. If you have a regular (monthly) newsletter for investors to keep them up to date about progress, ask the investor if you can put them on it to stay in touch. Otherwise, continue to be polite — you never know when you’ll run into them again and it will be the right time to talk. | https://medium.com/forumventures/how-to-nail-your-first-meeting-with-a-potential-investor-ed59513856c9 | ['Michael Cardamone'] | 2020-03-03 16:20:58.163000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Investors', 'Fundraising', 'Meetings'] |
Stuffed Pain | Anyways it never hurt outside
It was inside where it existed
The never ending pain
Stuffed around dark corners
which kept getting darker
It kept peeking around,
for some tiny light to be seen
raising it’s tiny ears,
like some lost little puppy
eager for a faint sound. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/stuffed-pain-57040e38dce9 | ['Jaya V'] | 2019-10-28 12:59:24.565000+00:00 | ['Accpetance', 'Poetry', 'Hurt', 'Turmoil', 'Pain'] |
A case for better financial products & services | Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
In the last couple of months, as a part of my customer development research, I have been interviewing and surveying people regularly to understand the top challenges they face when it concerns their personal finance and what is causing these problems. During these interviews, most people felt the same about one thing. There needs to be better financial products or solutions.
To see why better solutions are needed, we first need to understand what is wrong with the present ones according to customers.
Customer is not the priority
One question that constantly bothers the people I spoke to was, what is the priority of financial institutions? Is it me or my money? It is a valid question. Most salespeople from banks and other financial institutions eagerly follow up to sell their products. However, when the same customer reaches out to customer care to resolve a problem concerning the same product, they hardly share similar levels of enthusiasm. In this case, the customer has to follow up several times and get buried in paperwork to get the issue resolved. No wonder, people think these institutions are just behind their money.
Why is everything so complex?
If you have ever tried investing or getting a loan, you would be asking the same question. Why is everything so complex? The entire process requires you to go through numerous pages of brochures and documentation loaded with financial and legal jargon. When your customer feels like they need a specialization or a degree to understand your marketing content and accompanying documentation, you know you have a problem!
Everyone except the customer makes money!
Mis-selling financial products is not something new and has taken place as long as financial markets and institutions have existed. What annoys the customer is that companies rigorously innovate to make money for themselves instead of their customers. Firstly, the agents or partners cleverly misrepresent the product and sell it to the customer to take home a hefty commission. The classic example being insurance policies sold as investments. Institutions then slap on sizeable management and administration fees for delivering returns lower than low-cost index funds available in the market. Even if these low-cost index funds are available through them, customers hardly hear about them.
A problem of plenty
Just like the famous line from a poem, “Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink!” there are thousands of options out there. Nobody with a full-time job and a limited amount of time can figure out the right one for them. There are 5000+ mutual funds in India, thousands of insurance policies, and hundreds of credit cards and loan options. Why so many? Why can’t there be just a handful of great ones presented to customers in an easy-to-understand manner and help them make good decisions? It’s not that there are no answers to these questions. It’s just in the best interest of many players in the market to not answer them and maintain the status quo.
The devil lies in the details!
There are charges and then hidden charges. Nobody knows this better than anyone who has used a credit card. They allow us to happily spend the money we don’t have in the most seamless manner possible and then slap us with hidden charges in a statement which most people can barely understand. Also, why should one pay 3–4 times the interest rate of a personal loan to finance their spending on a credit card? Both of them are uncollateralized loans. Nobody knows why!
Why do we need better products and services?
In conclusion, we can see a strong case for better financial products and solutions. Firstly, we work hard for our money, and we shouldn’t be working harder to make it work for us. Secondly, making money without delivering good value to your customers is just not good business. Thirdly, prioritize your customers, and they will happily offer their money if they see the value. Lastly, financial institutions need to understand, there will be new players in the market willing to help their customers and disrupt them. If not today, pretty soon they will! | https://medium.com/@charanravindra/a-case-for-better-financial-products-deb00b77a98e | ['Charan Ravindra'] | 2021-09-09 11:55:53.516000+00:00 | ['Financial Services', 'Finance', 'Financial Inclusion', 'Personal Finance', 'Customer Experience'] |
Paputok Para sa Pasko: A Story of Christmas Brutality | Editorial
(TRIGGER WARNING: violence, murder, death)
Bang. Bang. Bang, These were not the sounds of the bamboo cannon that Sonya Gregorio and her son Frank Anthony had ignited to welcome the fast approaching Christmas celebration.
In a video recording of the incident, Sonya and her son were shown sitting down, posing no threat to the policeman Jonel Nuezca or his daughter who was also in the scene. Sonya responded to the policeman’s young daughter, who was antagonizing her, with what could be described — at worst — as sarcasm. In response, the policeman shot her in the head, shot her son shortly thereafter, then once again shot the dead woman’s corpse out of spite.
This shooting was not Nuezca’s first. The cop is still under investigation for homicide charges filed in 2019 and in May of this year. And Nuezca is far from alone; earlier this year, policemen shot and killed unarmed Army veteran and PTSD sufferer Winston Ragos, among very many others.
The problems with Philippine law enforcement are systemic. Even if, as their apologists claim, the policemen that perpetrate these atrocities are a minority, the fact remains that their comrades do not stop them and their leaders defend them; this makes the “good cops” complicit, accomplices to the many crimes of the “bad cops.”
Take for example Jonel Nuezca. He had a history of misconduct in the police force, including two dismissed cases of homicide. Given the track record of the Philippine National Police (PNP), especially under this administration, it would not be unreasonable to question whether these two homicide charges truly lacked evidence, or if the evidence was buried by the “good cops.” Jonel must have felt like he could have gotten away with this murder; can you blame him? He got away with the previous two. (By the way, yes, you absolutely can and should blame him.)
The first instinct of the PNP is not to take accountability for their flaws, but to deny them. Even the Malacañang calls this case an exception (one of numerous; they seem to be pushing the scope of the word “exception.”), saying that policy cannot be formulated based on aberrations. This logic is flawed; wildfires are aberrations. Cancer is an aberration. Formulating policy that takes the worst case scenario into account and attempts to address it should be the least we expect from government policy, especially when human lives are at stake.
Clearly, the PNP will not resolve these issues internally. We cannot expect an institution to fix shortcomings that it does not acknowledge it has. But it has shortcomings in droves; a lack of training and mental health evaluations for officers, a lack of accountability, and far too much ease escaping punishments for gross misconduct.
The only way to end the bloody streak of violence, impunity and that the police of this country have maintained for years is a complete upheaval of the institution itself; every single cop must be evaluated for their fitness for duty. If they pass, they must receive new training emphasizing de-escalation and nonviolent resolution of conflicts. The leadership and organizational structure must be rebuilt from the ground up. Funds must be reallocated from the police to investments in local communities, which unlike extensive patrolling and iron-fisted punishment has been proven to decrease crime rates.
Some have taken to calling this murder a crime of passion. Indeed, passion was the spark, but the crime would not have happened if this murderer had been trained properly, or if he had been suspended and punished for his previous crimes. Passion is no excuse; it must be tempered by reason and data-based solutions. Reason will tell you that an officer of the law should never shoot two unarmed and nonviolent citizens. The data shows that authoritarian and disciplinarian methods do not reduce crime rates in the populace, but rather increase it among law enforcers.
Let reason and data guide this country towards passion for change. Cops must be held accountable. The culture of impunity and brutality in the police force must end. We demand better, more humane law enforcement; it’s the least we could do Sonya, Frank Anthony, and the countless others who have died at their hands. | https://medium.com/up-scientia/paputok-para-sa-pasko-a-story-of-christmas-brutality-cf334a0ec04b | [] | 2020-12-23 12:36:05.318000+00:00 | ['Stopthekillingsph', 'Opinion', 'Police Brutality', 'Philippines', 'Justiceforgregoriofamily'] |
Effective learning: the act of listening actively | “I only wish I could find an institute that teaches people how to listen. Business people need to listen at least as much as they need to talk. Too many people fail to realize that real communication goes in both directions.” — Lee Iacocca
© pressfoto
Effective communication is a skill that everyone needs, and it’s not only for work but also in your personal life. Your relationship with people will not be solid if communication is poor. However, communication is not all about talking. There are times when you also have to listen, and as simple as it may seem (a resting phase before you resume talking), active listening isn’t an easy skill to acquire. Have you ever attended a seminar or meeting, only to realize that it was a waste of time because you didn’t listen? Listening is different from hearing. When you listen, you are expected to deduce the message the speaker is passing and even more, depending n your abilities. Anything short of that is a waste of time, and that brings us to the concept of active listening.
Active listening refers to a listening pattern that keeps you engaging constructively with your communication partner. It is a method of listening attentively as someone else talks, paraphrasing and referring to what is said while excluding judgment and suggestions. You make others feel heard and respected as you use active listening. Therefore, it is the cornerstone of every fruitful dialogue. Active listening differs from critical listening in that you do not assess the other person’s message to give your view. Rather the aim is merely to hear the other person and maybe to fix their problems.
How to be an active listener
There are three key steps to listening actively; the first is attention, which involves avoiding any form of distraction when listening. The aim of paying attention is to find the direction of the conversation and the message. When you have that, then you can proceed with the other aspects.
The next is attitude. Here, it would be best to let the person know that you listen to the common gestures you make. Gestures like maintaining eye contact, giving regular nods, and being on the lookout for the speaker’s non-verbal gestures.
The next approach is to paraphrase salient points you noted while paying attention. Also, while listening, avoid any form of argument or judgmental statements. For example, if someone tells you about an unfortunate incident, do not ask questions like, “what were you thinking?” Or “why did you let it happen?” Such statements beat the purpose of active listening.
Conclusively, there are various methods of listening suitable for different purposes. And the reason for active listening is delicate, and when properly done, it can be advantageous because people will trust you at work, at home, and can easily make connections. | https://medium.com/@ujji/effective-learning-the-act-of-listening-actively-cea5ae15f62a | ['Ujji - Meet The Future You'] | 2020-12-23 14:09:43.766000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Ujji', 'Active Listening', 'Growth Mindset'] |
2020: A Brief Pause of Opportunity | “Hurray!! Whoaaa!” Everyone was completely mad with happiness and why wouldn’t we be happy?
Getting up everyday, attending early morning lectures in the university, slogging the whole day with studios, assignments and going home again to keep working on submissions until you are almost perished out on your bed! Imagine having this as your daily routine, no social life, no entertainment and just nothing but college and work! and then, on one of the breezy summer evenings; when you are in the middle of your studio discussions, you get a mail of a two week vacation! Here arrives the Covid-19 in India!
Wearing the mask for the very first time in my life, I somehow managed to adjust on a lower berth of the Gujarat Express going to Mumbai. I was feeling immensely happy for this vacation! I really enjoyed it for a week, treating it like summer holidays!
At the start for one month the lockdown felt really good! I would get up late, have mom-made lunch, spend quality time with my family and just relax around. But when the lockdown started extending, the fear started scaling up. Homesickness started building up in my mind and on some days it was extremely frustrating to not go out, meet your friends and just sit at home! Back then, no one knew that this mini vacation would extend into indefinite lockdowns with the virus becoming so deadly!
However good a vacation feels, however nice you feel at home but you cannot do it for a year! It becomes simply boring when you live in a box merely like a robot! The pandemic has totally changed the way we live, spend time with each other and our daily routine too! It stopped my travelogues, my bike rides, my pub outings and mainly it paused my entire life!
But you cannot give up, you cannot stop achieving your goals and dreams. One thing was sure, this pandemic has given us an opportunity to grow ourselves. It is important that at a time like that you are on the right side, behind the wheel moving it forward, not in front of it getting crushed. You have to make sure that you utilize this ‘Brief Pause’ in your life as an opportunity.
That is what I essentially did. I learned new soft wares, explored new apps and worked on my fitness and health. I started cycling and I really started loving it. I tried new recipes and developed my forgotten hobby of cooking. Most importantly, I tried to follow a healthy and happy lifestyle, while developing myself professionally. When I look back at the person I was at the start of the year and now, I realized It has helped me a lot.
Life nowadays is like playing out a new ball in test cricket and once the ball becomes old, you can score as fast as you can! But currently, YOU MUST PREPARE! YOU MUST UTILIZE THIS BRIEF PAUSE AS AN OPPORTUNITY!
I have started my preparations and already reaping the benefits of it. Have you started preparing? If not, you must start today! | https://medium.com/@saurabh17-sm/2020-a-brief-pause-b9d2a18056b | ['Saurabh Mehta'] | 2021-06-21 05:33:36.166000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Motivation', 'Covid 19', '2020', 'Life'] |
7 Steps to Goal Setting | 7 Steps to Goal Setting
Everything Starts With a Plan
What’s life without goals and ambitions? It’s like living a life without meaning or purpose. When was the last time you felt that you were living your life to the fullest?
Are you still desperately trying to figure out how to do that? If that is the case, you are not alone. Unfortunately, many people have been living their life without experiencing what life really has to offer.
Regardless of your business, career, life or relationship, it is crucial to set goals and be ambitious about them. Setting goals has always been the most fundamental step to take in order to achieve success. Many people approach me and ask, “How do you think of goals for yourself?”
Goals are like roadmaps that give us direction in our lives. They show us, what is possible in life. Setting goals is actually not complicated at all, it requires determination and perseverance. I have done much research and have spoken to many successful people on goal setting, in conclusion I have come up with 7 simple goal setting steps that can help you to effortlessly strive for success.
#1: Brainstorm
Oprah Winfrey
Setting goals gives us an aim to go all-out for our lives. The very first step to crushing your ultimate goal is to brainstorm your ideas or short-term goals that will eventually LEAD you to your ultimate goal.
Try this simple exercise:
1. Getting Ready
Pick up a journal and a pen, if you don’t have one; use a piece of paper or open up your notepad on your computer or phone.
It’s also advisable that you perform this exercise when you’re in a good state, (moments) when you’re feeling good, optimistic and positive. This attitude will affect the goals you produced.
2. Start Brainstorming
When you were just a kid on your birthday and you were asked what do you want as a present, I’m pretty sure that you’d say anything that comes right into your mind. So, BE LIKE A KID! Brainstorm all kinds of ideas that excites you! That is key of an effective brainstorming session; At the same time it eliminates any doubt or fear that is stopping you from achieving your goals.
Think and decide on what do you want. It doesn’t have to be too specific as it is just a brainstorming process. Brain dump everything out of your mind. Take 10–15 minutes and jot down everything you can think of in your journal. For instance:
Earn £1,000,000
Lose 100lbs
Travel around the world
Drive a Ferrari
Live in a mansion
Skydiving
Own an island
You should also think about goals for every part of your life, such as:
What do you want to achieve emotionally?
What do you want to achieve physically?
What do you want for your relationships?
What do you want to achieve for your business?
What do you want to experience in life?
What would you like to contribute?
Michelle Obama
3. Set a deadline for your goal
Some goals might take a year or less; some take 3 years, 5 years or 10 years. Jot it down next to each of your goals.
For instance, losing 100lbs might be a 6 months goal and owning an island might be a 10-year or 20-year goal.
Setting deadlines helps to build a sense of urgency and responsibility to perform the activities in order to achieve your goals in time.
I highly recommend using a journal for this exercise because writing down in a journal helps to keep track of your goals. A goal that is unwritten is simply just a wish or make-believe. It also leads to misperception, vagueness, pursuing your goals in the wrong direction and making various mistakes. Therefore, writing it down gives you a clearer path in reaching your goals.
Estee Lauder
#2: Setting Your Goals Right
After you’ve brainstormed your ideas and written it down in your journal, it is time to set it right. Many people have asked me, “How do I make sure you I have set my goals right?”
Audrey Hepburn
S.M.A.R.T Goals
Have you heard of the acronym SMART goals? It stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
I always suggest setting SMART goals in which your goals contains all the elements above. From your 1st step, you should ask yourself:
What is your ultimate goal?
What is the specific outcome you would like to accomplish?
The following phrases are the some of my examples of having a more specific goal than the one I brainstormed in Step 1:
· I will lose 100 pounds in 100 days by 31st of August, 2021.
· I will successfully earn £10, 000 per month consistently of passive income through my new business by 31st of January 2022.
Notice that my goals were written out in a very explicit way whereby my goals:
· Phrased in a way that it will happen instead of wanting it to happen.
· Written in a way that it can be repeated again.
· Using convincing words such as ‘easily’, ‘happily’ or ‘successfully’.
· Short-term goals are goals that can be achieved in less than half a year. These goals are smaller, more reasonable and realistic. This can be seen in the first example.
· Long-term goals are goals that can be achieved in more than six months or longer. These goals are more unrealistic and wild which can be seen in the second example.
· Meets all the element of SMART goals:
Specific — Clear, specific and well-defined goals are written down such as 100 pounds and £10, 000 per month.
Measurable — It has a time frame to be accomplished. Set everything in specific quantity — The amount of weight you want to lose in pounds or kilograms, the exact amount of money you want to make, etc.
Attainable — It is something I can afford to do when I put in much effort. If you know or feel that your goals are unattainable, most probably you’re going to procrastinate and not take any action because your subconscious mind will whisper to you that “IT’S USELESS!” So if the goal is Too Big or Unrealistic, chunk them down to smaller goals.
Relevant— By chunking down a 20-Year Goal into smaller yearly goals — I am certain that you can achieve anything you want because chunking will make unrealistic goals ATTAINABLE and REALISTIC.
Timeline — In my example, the goal has a timeline which I have to achieve them by 31st of August 2021 and 31st of January 2022 respectively. You should do the same as well when writing down your goals.
Florence Nightingale
By setting these SMART short-term and long-term goals, it builds your confidence and gives you the impression that these goals are 100% achievable and you’ll be extremely motivated to work on them right away. So how do you eat an elephant? Answer is one bite at a time. Chunking or setting short-term goals is the best way to achieve greater goals.
#3: Prioritize
Next, we’ll talk about Prioritization. Why are people nowadays stressed, overwhelmed and frustrated with so many To-Do’s in their list? The reason is because they don’t know how to prioritize their To-Do’s. They spent so much time on low-priority activities and they wonder why they don’t have enough time to handle the important stuff!
I’m sure you have heard of the Six-P Formula, namely “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.” The better your plan, the more productive you become. Prioritization gives you freedom, clarity and it builds up momentum. That’s why it’s always important to prioritize.
So here’s how you prioritize…
Have a Proper Plan and Prioritize
From your list of goals, choose 3 most important goals and determine which one of them is the most compelling to you in the long-term.
It is crucial to spend some time alone to think about the goals you would like to achieve in the long-term. Successful people always have clear future goals. They have vision and think five to ten years ahead of time about their goals. They then evaluate their decisions made in the present to ensure the things they are doing right now are consistent with the future goals that they desire. They are also willing to delay instant gratification and make sacrifices in the short term in order to gain much greater rewards in the future. Being selective towards your goals helps you develop a habit of setting clear priorities and completing important tasks in a more organized and efficient manner. It helps you make better decisions in life and time management and improves your decision making skills in short-term.
When you want to decide what to do next, try asking this question: “What ACTION can I take to help me make massive progress towards [YOUR GOALS]?”
And here’s a question to ask when you’re prioritizing your To-Do list: “Does this action serves my ultimate goal and purpose in the long term?”
If your answer is NO, get rid of it. If your answer is YES, take action immediately.
In order to be successful, time management in setting goals plays a significant role. As quoted by Roald Dahl, “We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.” Hence, setting your goals the right way by adopting the SMART goals theory and plan a timeline for all the goals you set are the best ways to get things done without procrastinating. You can complete everything that is urgent and have more time available for yourself. This creates more time for you to de-stress and have better mental clarity and focus.
Having a list of 3 important tasks is always better than having a list of 50 un-necessary tasks. The better you prioritize, the more time you create for yourself.
#4: Stay Motivated
Once you’ve planned your goals, write them down and hang it somewhere you easily access everyday such as your phone or on your fridge. It is also great to put it as your computer’s or phone’s wallpaper. It reminds you of your goal and pushes yourself to focus on them.
Motivate Yourself to Take Action Immediately
Don’t you think the hardest part of any important goal is to start working on it? However, you will naturally motivate yourself to endure it once you start working on the important task. Now, Imagine yourself completing an important goal. How does that make you feel? That feeling will jolt you and motivate you to do whatever it takes to accomplish your tasks. Guess what this is an awesome way to tackle procrastination.
Motivation is like a fire, it gets you excited in the beginning but it’ll never last. Self-Discipline on the other hand is the fan that keeps the fire going. Therefore, you need to practice self-discipline everyday to get your most important tasks done! Strengthen your grit by starting on the most important task the moment you wake up. Consequently, you will be more productive and effective in completing your goals and be able to achieve much better results.
Self-Discipline is doing whatever it takes whether you feel like it or not. So, you must encourage yourself to get yourself out of the comfort zone, play at the top of your game and push yourself to success and victory. You must ignore the naysayers and have tremendous trust in yourself that you can make it. Your emotions should not be affected by setbacks and unavoidable problems in daily life. Whenever you feel down or lack of motivation, you can do the following activities:
Give yourself a pep talk.
Meditate or Yoga.
Smile.
·Laugh it out. Think that the problem you encounter right now would be a great joke to laugh about in future.
Look for the good in all situations.
I personally think that giving yourself a pep talk every morning is one of the most effective ways in motivating yourself to work hard towards your goal and strive for success. Hypnotize yourself by telling yourself ‘I can do it!’ repetitively makes you believe that you can really achieve what you want and boost your overall confidence and performance.
Self-Affirmation is also a powerful way in overcoming your feelings of doubt or fear. Attitude means everything. By developing a positive mental attitude, you will be able to develop personal and professional success and happiness. Think of the setbacks you currently encounter as the stepping stones to success, lessons to learn and seek for the solutions instead of complaining your problems to other people or blaming others for what happened.
Pressure Yourself
Diamonds are made under high pressure — and the same goes to your success. In order to unleash your maximum potential, you must pressure yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.
You must raise your own standards, and the best way is to think of yourself being a role model for the others. Remember, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So decide and commit to mastery! Make your priorities a MUST, not a Should or Try.
You will feel satisfied about yourself whenever you push yourself to perform at your very best. For instance, you will feel great in losing weight after looking for methods to run the extra mile and pushing yourself to your maximum potential during workout. Only with pressure way past our limits will help us grow stronger to handle more adversities.
So, what is the first thing that came to your mind that you must complete today or it’ll cause you tremendous amount of pain? Whatever it is, start working on it right now. Hence, putting pressure on yourself will strengthen you in the long run while completing more significant tasks faster and prevent procrastination.
#5: Sharpen Your Saw
There are so many reasons for procrastination, to list a few:
· Lack of confidence.
· Feeling weak.
· Unable to perform in an important area of a task.
The feelings above discourage you and instill procrastination. These feelings cause death in productivity and accomplishments. I‘ve discovered that successful people do feel the same way too sometimes. However, they perceive these problems as challenges and work their ways through no matter what, even though the tasks can be too huge or intimidating. They constantly sharpen their saw everyday to tackle big tasks. Regardless of how skillful you are today, you have to sharpen your saw because it’ll turn dull eventually if you stay stagnant and practice negligence. Decide what are your key results areas in your personal and professional life and work on it daily.
Successful people never stop learning. They always remain curious and have a thirst for knowledge to do their best they gain it through learning. Lifelong learning is definitely the most fundamental step in becoming an outstanding and successful performer in life, career or business. Upgrading your skills isn’t complicated at all, it requires hard work and commitment. Here are some key traits that you should practice:
Be curious. Learning can be fun and stimulating. You should see success as a journey instead of a destination to keep them going.
Willing to try. You must be willing to learn and experiment new things.
·Not afraid to fail. You should learn from your mistakes and failures to be better at it the next time you encounter them.
Be Humble. Admit what you do not know and ask for help from your mentor or professional.
The following steps are one of the guides I highly recommend in upgrading your skills:
1. Identify the main skills which can help you achieve better and quicker results.
2. Identify your strengths and weaknesses.
3. Set a goal for it and plan to increase your ability in those areas.
4. Read something that is related to the areas you want to improve for at least one hour a day.
5. Attend courses or seminars that can help you in upgrading your skills.
6. Listen or watch self-development programs. It is also advisable to change your driving time to learning time by listening to audio programs in your car.
Once you gain knowledge or an additional skill, you will make a huge difference in your ability to perform. The improvement in your ability to perform will consequently lead you to be more motivated, more energetic and enthusiastic in performing that certain task. You will also find it much easier to overcome procrastination and be more productive in completing your task.
You must know that, the more you learn, the more confident and capable you’ll be in your area of expertise. There is no limit on how far or how fast you can excel in your skills. You are the only one who is stopping yourself from excelling in life and achieve the ‘once-impossible’. To sum up, you get to reap these benefits from sharpening your saw:
· More motivated and enthusiastic
· Higher performance
· Better results
· Prevent procrastination
#6: Reward Yourself
Once you have challenged yourself to complete a major task or accomplish a few important short term goals, it would be great to give yourself pat on the back and reward yourself. It makes you feel great and keeps you driven. However, your reward must be appropriate. You must consider how much it has impacted you and how great was the goal.
The small reward for completing small goals could be simple yet satisfying. For example:
· Coffee break
· Taking a walk near the park
· Having a cheat meal when you are trying to lose weight
· Take a power nap
· Go on a mini-vacation or field trip
· Watch a movie
· Pamper yourself with a massage session or spa treatment.
There will be even more to celebrate when you meet your larger goals or long term goals. It is essential that you did some advance planning to avoid disappointment. Disappointment leads to no good as it demotivates you and knocks down your morale. You should be able to afford it once you’ve accomplish your goals. The examples of larger reward for completing a milestone are:
· Throw a party.
· Go on a vacation.
· Buy yourself something you’ve been yearning for, such as a car, yacht or house.
Pretty Women “Rodeo Drive” baby
Setting goals is important in achieving success; nevertheless rewarding yourself for conquering them is just as important. Rewarding yourself gives you something to anticipate when you reach the goal and aim for higher goals the next time to continue to reward yourself.
#7 Revisit Your Goals
Once you have done #1 to #5, you are at a good start. However, you must be certain that you keep up with the plans. Therefore, you must review your goals habitually. I often check with my goals on a weekly basis, as well as reviewing my goals more thoroughly once a month. When I review my goals, I get to analyze on what wasn’t as effective as I hoped and what I can amend for further improvement. You have to think whether your goal is still relevant. The reasons to revisit your goals are:
· Things have changed over the month or the year.
· New opportunities.
· New challenges.
· Stay focus on your targets.
· Make sure you are on the right track to meet your ultimate goal.
If your goals are no longer desirable or practical, you have to accept it and change to a different goal or establish smaller goals along the pathway to your ultimate goal. I would like to share with you the 3 straightforward steps on how I check on my progress effectively.
1. Praise or reward yourself
· Look at what you’ve accomplished so far and take a moment to reward yourself as mentioned in #6.
2. Re-evaluate
· Dispose of goals that are no longer relevant.
· Identify the problems you encounter when you execute your goals.
· Find ways to improve the remaining goals.
3. Refocus your targets
· Ask yourself why did you set this goal initially?
· Recall what you’re truly aiming for in the long term.
The habit of revisiting and reviewing your goals helps you get much better in managing your time in setting goals. It keeps you flexible and realistic about what you can achieve.
Conclusion
It’s your choice to make your own decision in life. Would you like to reach for the stars or remained trapped in the endless loop of dull meaningless life. Are you willing to get out of the comfort zone and strike for success? Remember, nothing is holding you back except yourself. Start setting goals today and take actions to rekindle your passions, chase for your dreams and live your life to the fullest. I wish you the best of luck in overcoming procrastination and conquering your goals.
If you wish to learn more and crush all your goals once and for all sin up for my free newsletter https://hustling-trader-4367.ck.page/495decf79c and join women from all over the world, crushing through 2021 ! | https://medium.com/@kathrynhurt/7-steps-to-goal-setting-24e2994c4652 | ['Kathryn Hurt'] | 2020-12-20 21:46:39.012000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Women', 'Goal Setting', 'Goals', 'Female Entrepreneurs'] |
Mickey Mouse Broke 28,000 Hearts | Mickey Mouse Broke 28,000 Hearts
The Walt Disney Company announced the breaking news that they would be laying off 28,000 employees across the company. Amid a pandemic with no end in sight, this isn’t surprising, but it doesn’t make it any less devastating. A survey in 2018 found that three-quarters of Disney Land employees can’t afford basic living expenses. That number is a terrifying statistic of how many people can’t survive life with their jobs. How can they possibly survive without their roles?
Sadly, this fact is just the beginning of “the dark side of Disney”- but this isn’t surprising. After all, Disney is a corporation- and although they make money off your emotions, it doesn’t mean they care about them.
I learned this the hard way back in 2015. I’d applied the year before to the Disney College Program, not expecting to be accepted- I was hugely mistaken. Not only was I admitted to the internship program, but I landed a highly in-demand role- Fairy Godmother in Training.
Image by Dianna Carney
The glamorous side of the role included playing dress-up with little girls all day, making their dreams come true, and genuinely making them feel they had their very own Fairy Godmother! I’d spend approximately an hour with each child, doing their hair, makeup, and painting their nails. If the parents spent an additional $150, I’d escort their little Princess to a dressing room where they’d choose their favorite gown- the cherry on top for any Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique transformation!
Image by Dianna Carney
The other side of the role included 12-hour shifts on your feet, a point system for call-outs and “late-shows”; if you clocked-in even two minutes after your assigned start time, it counted against you (so if there was a line for the clock-in computer, you were screwed). And from my own experience, a system of authority that didn’t seem to care about the individuals working under them.
Image by Dianna Carney
Now, Mickey Mouse broke my heart- but like any breakup, I just needed some time for my heart to heal.
Conflicting feelings when I hear the word Disney doesn’t even begin to describe what goes through my head; it took me three months to finally signup for Disney+ just because I was unsure if I wanted a constant reminder of the best time of my life that was cut so short.
About two months into my internship, my apartment of six girls total got ill. Only half of us had health insurance from back home that still worked in the state of Florida. When a few of us returned with positive strep throat results, it became clear we had a problem.
Image by Dianna Carney
Throughout this, all six of us continued to show up for our roles. These roles involved kitchen roles in Magic Kingdom and Epcot, photography roles around the parks, and mine- working one-on-one with not only young children but daily we had Make-a-Wish children come in to make their dreams come true.
I began calling out of my role as soon as I heard it was strep throat; I couldn’t put children and their families at risk knowing I was contagious. Every day I called the phone number given to us, explaining to the person on the other end the position I was in- every time they explained this call-out would count against me.
Image by Dianna Carney
By the time I finally went to the doctors and got a prescription, I had become so ill that some of my organs had begun becoming inflamed. I had been paying per-a-visit in a local Orlando community health clinic as I had no health insurance in that state; Disney didn’t offer it to their interns or part-time employees. I remember one day I was walking to the laundry room in my apartment building, it was towards the end of my antibiotic prescription, and I had been feeling a bit better and was getting ready to go back to work. On my way to the laundry, basket in hand, I collapsed on the ground. I had gotten so dizzy from walking down the stairs that everything had gone black. When I came to a few seconds later, I looked around and began to cry. I was in the middle of a parking lot, alone, sick- out of medication, and out of options. I called my family in that moment, and they told me to come home to get medical help as soon as possible- beyond what a community clinic could offer me. I then left my dirty clothes basket in my car, walked to the housing office, and explained my dilemma; they simply told me to be out in 24 hours. It was a slap in the face.
Image by Dianna Carney
When I first left Disney, I was furious. How dare they throw me out for something beyond my control? The stars in my eyes I’d arrived with just a few short months prior were gone, replaced with tears.
Due to being so sick, I couldn’t drive my car the 956 miles back home. My family paid for an auto-train ticket that would depart in less than 24 hours. The plan was my grandfather would meet at the last stop in Washington D.C. and drive me back the rest of the way home.
I hate to make this sound like a sob story- but I think my story’s details are important, especially while living through a pandemic. I imagine that the employees that are left working in the park are now facing the same dilemma I once did.
Disney is a corporation with ingrained beliefs that putting money before their employees is how to succeed. They measure their success by stock prices and box office records. However, when it comes to the people who work tirelessly to make the real magic happen, they’re being tossed out of the Disney family without a second thought. | https://medium.com/illumination/mickey-mouse-broke-28-000-hearts-4ebb4b98a673 | ['Dianna Carney'] | 2020-12-10 14:37:55.043000+00:00 | ['Disney', 'Disney College Program', 'Internships', 'Internship Experience', 'Disney World'] |
My Cheat Sheet to Customer Service | My Cheat Sheet to Customer Service
Mostly we look at customer service like we look at cleaning out our garage; it’s something we have to do. The mess piles up. People complain. We want our customers to be happy and yet we find them impossible to please and incredibly annoying at times.
All of this happens because of the way complaints or upsets occur to us. Mostly complaints and upsets occur as something that is being done to us or happening to us.
We hear the feedback and before we know it, we’re assessing if we agree or disagree with it. We’re looking to see if this is our fault or not.
If it is our fault, we feel bad but it may not stop us from getting defensive.
If it isn’t our fault then we either get really defensive because MAN is this not on us OR we put on an act for our customers.
We pretend they’re being reasonable, we act as if this is our fault (even though it’s definitely not).
But whether or not it’s our ‘fault’ there’s a better way to relate to customer service.
Customer service is about being with our customers.
Whether they’re being reasonable or not. Whether they are right or not.
If you choose to have customers, you take the risk of dealing with unreasonable people. | https://medium.com/@tokumccree/my-cheat-sheet-to-customer-service-b1b7e3245142 | ['Toku Mccree'] | 2020-12-22 14:32:53.861000+00:00 | ['Small Business', 'Life Coaching', 'Coaching Skills', 'Customer Service', 'Entrepreneuriat'] |
The Digital Revolution We Are All Secretly Craving | Anna McCormack — Beacon Social Media — Social Media Consultant & Educator
When I was a little girl I had the perfect role model in my Pop. He was a family man who ran a stock and station business in a small town. He was all about people, and he ran his home and his business with integrity. I don’t remember ever hearing a critical word said about him and if there ever was one, I am certain it there would of been 100 to 1 in his defense.
He radiated a certain warmth that was magnetic and as a result was well respected in the town and surrounding country areas.
I cannot say for sure, but I get the sense that this gentleman never once tried to push his business onto anyone, but the people came to him anyway. Why? Because they knew he was a man they could trust. They knew he would get the job done, and he would do it well, and most importantly, they weren’t a sale, or a number — they were met as a person.
My grandfather wasn’t perfect by any means, and the point is not to put him up on a pedal stool, but rather to share the values that he lived as being a role model for how we can lead in business.
It really is as simple as this and yet the rise of marketing, and more recently digital marketing, has seen many replace this natural way of relating in business for a more methodical sales driven approach that can be at the very least pushy, and at other times, downright imposing. Social media is another perfect example of this, where the sale has become more important then the interaction itself.
Call me old fashioned, but do we not all look for businesses that are truly genuine. That offer a quality service where we actually feel met as a person and not just another sale?
In my own business, I often have people ask if its possible to market a product or service with integrity, and after questioning this myself, I genuinely believe the answer is yes. There is nothing wrong with sharing your business or service with others, but it is the approach we take to this that is important.
If we don’t first make it about people, but rather are driven by a desire to make a lot of money, or are governed by the fear of not making enough money, then these things will influence our business dealings and ultimately drive our marketing endeavours.
There is only one way around this and that is to lead in business from the heart. To make our approach about people first. This is not to say we don’t need a sound business plan, because we absolutely do, but only to say that our underlying intention holds the greatest value in terms of the potential success of our business.
Integrity is magnetic, we all love it, we all want more of it in our lives, and this is the digital revolution we are all silently craving — to see more integrity from our businesses online (and off), and this of course starts with ourselves. | https://medium.com/multiplier-magazine/the-digital-revolution-we-all-secretly-craving-a89f21ef3fd0 | ['Beacon Social Media'] | 2018-04-24 22:32:07.735000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Business Intelligence', 'Business'] |
A machine apprentice of the old masters? | In this short note, we will explore published research in the field of computer vision in code using PyTorch: image style transfer using convolutional neural networks. If you’re inclined, follow along with images of your choice; the source image should be by an artist and the target image a natural picture.
According to the authors of the linked paper the problem of transferring style from one image to another can be considered one of texture transfer. To me, as one who doesn’t make visual art but appreciates it, this is intuitive as paint layering is one of many processes that artists are consciously careful about in creating their paintings. Prior to this novel use of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) to extract semantic image content from the target image and inform a texture transfer procedure from the source image to render the target in the style of the source, the authors point to a fundamental limitation that spanned all algorithms utilized which is that they used only low level image features of the target image to inform the texture transfer. The math driving content and style representation, and style transfer is covered in some depth in the paper. For the purposes of this note, we will proceed with implementing the principles behind the DCNN style transfer concept:
Take objects/context from one image
Take style/texture from a second image
Generate a final image which is a synthesis of the two
High level image content and style extraction is done from both the input images; content from target image and style from source image. The generic feature representation learned by high performing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can be used to independently process these.
Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
For example, in the 19 layer deep VGG19 which we will be using here, an input image is represented as a set of filtered images at each processing stage of the CNN wherein the size of the filtered image is reduced by some downsampling mechanism like max-pooling leading to a decrease in the total number of units per layer of the network. Content reconstruction from lower layers is almost perfect whereas in higher layers detailed pixel information is lost while the high level content of the image is preserved. On top of the original CNN activations a feature space that captures the texture information is used. The style representation computes correlations between the different features in different layers of the CNN, and the style of an input image is reconstructed from a style representation built on different subsets of CNN layers. The layers being discussed here are those represented by conv1_1, conv2_1, conv3_1 et cetera.
Load the two images on the device and obtain the features from VGG. Also, apply the transformations:
Resize to tensor
Normalize values
Next, we obtain relevant features of the two images:
Image one: extract features related to the context or the objects
Image two: extract features related to styles and textures
The authors of the paper used correlations in different layers to obtain the style related features. These feature correlations are given by the Gram matrix G; every cell (i, j) in G is the inner product between vectorized feature maps i and j in a layer.
We can now perform style transfer using features and correlations. We set the weight of every layer used to obtain style features to transfer style from one image to another. As discussed above, the initial layers provide more information so we will set more weights for these layers. Additionally, we define the optimizer function and the target image which will be a copy of image one.
Finally, we start the loss minimization process by running the loop for a large number of steps and calculating the loss related to object feature extraction and style feature extraction. Using the minimized loss, the network parameters are updated which further updates the target image.
The good news: Using this method, machines can learn the style of not only the old masters but artists of other traditions too.
The bad news: Using this method, machines have learned the style of a single painting and not the whole or even a majority of the artist’s ingenuity. | https://medium.com/@abmiester/a-machine-apprentice-of-the-old-masters-b2a5740f657 | ['Abraar Ahmed'] | 2021-02-01 16:43:21.940000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Impressionism', 'Convolutional Network', 'Pytorch', 'Image Processing'] |
Can’t Sleep? Try Staying Awake Instead | Can’t Sleep? Try Staying Awake Instead
An unorthodox way to deal with your insomnia
Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash
We’ve all gone through periods of sleeplessness before. Regardless of whether it’s caused by external factors like discomfort or internal factors like stress, the experience of not being able to shut down for the night can weigh heavily on us the next day.
While most people would think of persevering and encouraging your body to fall asleep (any minute now, you can do it, Brain!), why not try doing the opposite and attempt to stay awake instead?
Yes, I know it sounds silly, but hear me out. Imagine that it’s currently 3 in the morning. You've been tossing and turning around in bed for the past 4 hours (since going to bed at 11) trying to fall asleep but to no avail. You have to get up at around 6 anyway, so would continuing on this path be wise when you’re going to have under 3 hours of sleep?
Based on my experience (and probably yours as well, assuming you've experienced nights with fewer hours of sleep than you can count on one hand), you’re probably going to end up feeling similar levels of dread once it’s time to get up. Whether it’s 2 hours of sleep or none at all because of insomnia, the end result (purely in terms of the sensation) will be similar.
Hence, why not put those few hours to use instead? You could start working on that presentation due at the end of the week, write some email drafts for the meeting later, or even watch that movie you've always wanted to but never found time for.
I mean, since you can’t sleep and probably don't have time to anyway, think of this as the next best thing to do. Sure you could try to fall asleep, but given that you’ve failed for the past couple of hours, how will the next few be any different? You might as well do something in the meantime.
What you do doesn't matter, as it doesn't have to be productive. You can think of those extra hours as more “me time” to spend on what you want. This allows you to occasionally squeeze more hours into your day and give you the opportunity to do the things you've always wanted to.
Another benefit (if you can call it a benefit) is that you won’t feel groggy after waking up because you never slept, and while you’ll definitely feel sleepy afterward. Some coffee and/or snack breaks should give you some short bursts of energy to last until the day is over. Then (and also the best part of this), you can have an early night, where you’ll definitely have less trouble falling asleep. You’ll also finally be able to enjoy the best sleep you’ve had(in two days anyway).
However, this isn't something that should be attempted often. Neither should it be your goal if it’s still early on in the night, as you still have time to get a decent amount of sleep.
If your insomnia does persist, do see a doctor and be open to taking sleeping aids. Your quality of sleep might decrease, but any sleep is still better than no sleep. At the end of the day (or night in this case), I hope this results in some interesting alternatives for you to consider the next time you’re suffering from insomnia. | https://medium.com/be-unique/cant-sleep-try-staying-awake-instead-fb0e0fc4b5fb | ['Dylan Chia'] | 2020-11-29 02:30:39.407000+00:00 | ['Insomnia', 'Sleep', 'Inspiration', 'Productivity', 'Help'] |
When did you say goodbye to your adolescence? | When did you say goodbye to your adolescence?
WHEN DID YOU SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR ADOLESENCE?
The Sunday New York Times has a half page titled “Metropolitan Diary” dedicated to readers’ vignettes of life in New York. I used to skip it thinking it was like inside baseball, something only New Yorkers would care about. Then I found some interesting humorous and occasionally moving stories, so I now include it in my reading. Last Sunday had a story by Lois Lowry that I want to share with you as it got me to thinking.
“Dear Diary:
From 1951 to 1954, from the time I was 14 until I was 17, I lived in a large yellow house on Governors Island in what is now called Nolan Park.
I returned for a visit during a recent summer and found that my former home was being used by artists. The paint was peeling and everything about the place that had once seemed so elegant now looked shabby.
But the people who were working inside welcomed me. When I explained my history with the house, they allowed me to go up to the third floor. Now roped off. It had once been my teenage domain.
One section of the house had just two stories, and from my bedroom window I used to climb, wearing a bathing suit, onto the flat roof of the adjoining wing, where I would spread out a towel and sunbathe.
I actually only did it until my father found out and issued the kind of order that a military man is accustomed to issuing.
Now over 80, I stood at that window and remembered the feel of the hot metal roof on my bare feet as I carefully arranged my beach towel and my tanning lotion. Then, as if from the past, I heard the voice of the Colonel; ‘Do not even think about climbing out on that roof ever again.’
I chuckled and murmured, ‘Yes, sir.’ I backed away from the window, descended the stairs and said goodbye to my adolescence.”
After a moment of reflection, I asked myself, “when did you say goodbye to your adolescence?” My answer surprised me.
I thought it would have been my late teen years when being a teenager was proudly about not being an adolescent. That is what makes the teen years the most hated part of being a parent.
If not as a teenager than surely in my twenties when all of life was seen in the front windshield of life and certainly not in the rear-view mirror, but that was not true for me. Then I posited that it was surely at marriage, for nothing says grown up as loud as saying, “I do”. (Ok Jews do not say “I Do” but go with the rhetorical flow).
The more I thought about it the more I realized I have not only never said goodbye to my adolescence, but at the age of 70 I think of it more often than at any other time of my life.
Maybe it is because I remember 60 years ago more clearly than ten years ago. Maybe it is because those experiences that I remember were foundational. They were the first drafts of what would later become the book of my life. Maybe it was because I had a good editor in charge of my memory who kept the good experiences fresh and hid or obscured the bad ones.
I remember the kids from the block, “my gang”, more clearly than many of the people whose lives intersected with mine over the years, even though I have not seen or been in contact with them for 50 years.
I remember my journey of discovery with girls. It started so strongly with the feeling of those yucky girls that developed into a shy awareness of their presence and the strange feelings they evoked. Then came dating with the apprehension of inviting a girl out on a date and the euphoria of an acceptance or the crushing feeling of a rejection. I remember fondly most of the girlfriends, and still ache at not being noticed by the girl I had the biggest crush on. I sometimes wonder where they are now and what has happened to them? Secretly I hope the ones that rejected me or worse never noticed me, are now old portly grandmothers, and the ones that connected have somehow maintained a youthful shine, a slim figure and a mature beauty.
Is it because as adolescents we are near empty, a table rosa so that many of the now deeply enmeshed ganglions were just starting to form? I remember my first car better than my fifth, even if my first car was quite simple and came with a mother who decided she had equal dibs on it notwithstanding it was my getting into college gift from her father.
A car was about true freedom, liberation from adolescence, transportation was jus a free add on.
With all the angst of growing up and adolescence morphing into an eventual adulthood, it seems as if it was an easier and simpler time.
Or maybe I am overemphasizing these memories because of a deep repression or denial of the reality that the pandemic daily makes me face death in the mirror. The peace and certainty of exuberant youth at least as it relates to existential crises, feels like a much better place to visit than the reality of 300,000 deaths of my fellow citizens.
At 18 the greatest fear of my life was not getting into college. Now I tell my wife that I risked my life for her yet again when I went shopping at Publix. There were no threats to my life in the late 60s because I was in Canada and the war in Viet Nam was a television show. There was unlimited time ahead, in fact time was cheap and plentiful.
My diet today is more sophisticated than anything my mother or grandmother could have imagined, even less cooked, yet I can not make a recipe that gives me that sense of home and love and being taken care of. I can still smell the houses I grew up in, the flow of activity in the kitchen when my mom and Bubie cooked together for a Yom Tov and I stood by like Oliver Twist, bowl in hand, “Please Bubs can I have some more?”
Sleep overs at Bubie’s meant candies, late bedtimes, and full anarchy as compared to my house. I was sailing on the SS Mine Kind, with a kids’ version of midnight buffet because diets were for home and indulgence was for the kinderlich.
In the end I think that adolescence for us is akin to archetypal memories. Remembering it is like reading a Biblical story in Genesis. It is familiar and universal. It is like reading mythology or fables or even nursery rhymes. They are greater than life and widely shared. They were often the first thing that gave us an insight on the greater world. They helped build our foundation of comprehension and navigation in a world that would later become more convoluted, more complicated, and more threatening. A place that gives us respite and escape, that calms and centers us, is a really good place to be able to go back to.
When did I say goodbye to my adolescence? Not yet, maybe never. Until then I invite you all to share your current life with your adolescence.
As always please share with friends and family and encourage them to join the list by emailing a request to me at [email protected] | https://medium.com/@rabbipaulplotkin/when-did-you-say-goodbye-to-your-adolescence-3979f5bba117 | ['Rabbi Paul Plotkin'] | 2020-12-15 23:09:59.723000+00:00 | ['Adolescence', 'Pandemic', 'Teenagers'] |
Shadab Khan Signs Sydney Sixers for Remaining BBL 2021–22 | Shadab Khan signed with Sydney Sixers for the remaining BBL 2021–22, has signed the Pakistan legspinner.
The Suffered Multiple Injuries :-
Khan’s signing would provide a substantial boost to the defending champions. Who was suffering from multiple injuries in addition to finishing second in the standings?
Also read:- Happy B’Day Pakistan Bowler Junaid Khan
In the spin department, the Sixers have lost off-spinner Ben Manetti for the season in addition to a neck injury. While left-arm spinner Steve O’Keefe has been sidelined due to a calf strain.
The Sixers also lost Tom Curran to a back injury, while Chris Jordan’s five-match stint has come to an end.
The Excellent Form in T20 WC :-
Shadab Khan, who was taking 197 wickets in 175 T20Is at an economy of 7.18, was in fine form in the recent T20 World Cup. taking nine wickets in six matches in Pakistan’s impressive run till the semi-finals.
The 23-year-old is also a capabling batsman and has been used in pinch-hitting roles in the Pakistan Super League.
“We welcome Shadab Khan’s mastery in all three aspects of the game and can’t wait to get opportunities for him in the coming matches.” Sixers coach Greg Sheppard said.
Shadab is the fifth Pakistani to play in the BBL this season apart from Haris Rauf, Syed Faridaun, Ahmed Daniyal, and Muhammad Hussain.
https://twitter.com/SixersBBL/status/1474213555759038464
The Lower-Order Batsman :-
A simple lower-order batsman, Shadab averages 18.33 with a strike rate of 136.81 from 64 T20Is and Khan also scored three half-centuries in his six Test careers.
The team now has a trio of exciting young spinners, with Lloyd Pope and Todd Murphy also forming part of the ranks.
Read more:- Happy B’Day New Zealand Bowler Geoff Allott
“All three young men are still learning their craft, but have shown at various associations that they can be world-class,” he said. “We welcome Shadab Khan’s proficiency in all three aspects of the game.”
Even though he has suffered serious injuries, the Sixers are second on the BBL ladder. Their next match against crosstown adversaries the Thunder — known as the ‘Sydney Smash’ — at the Sydney Showgrounds on 26 December. | https://medium.com/@babacric/shadab-khan-signs-sydney-sixers-for-remaining-bbl-2021-22-6a4bae8d612c | ['Baba Cric'] | 2021-12-24 09:26:33.361000+00:00 | ['Bbl2021 22', 'Pakistan', 'Shadabkhan', 'Sydneysixers', 'Cricket'] |
Five Online Public Speaking Courses for 2021 | Public speaking is an art form, and like all art forms, it can be taught. In fact, the best public speakers bring together a certain amount of natural aptitude and mix it with book learning, formal courses, and a whole heap of practice.
If you want to be the best public speaker that you can be, it’s important to take advantage of as many resources as you can, and online courses are a great way to uncover new insights and sharpen your skills. Better still, a lot of them are either free or partly available as a free trial.
And so with that in mind, in today’s article, we’re going to take a look at five of the best public speaking courses that you’ll want to consider for 2021 and beyond. Let’s get started.
#1: Alex Lyon: How to Open and Close Presentations Like a Boss
They say that you only have one chance to make a positive first impression, and this course will help you to do exactly that. But while making a positive first impression is important, it’s also a good idea to end with a bang, with one key takeaway that you want people to remember.
This handy course by Alex Lyon will cover both, using 13 video lessons that take an hour or so to cover all of the key points about opening and closing presentations, along with why you should use a story to create a narrative that makes your presentation more approachable and memorable.
One of the good things about this course is that it’s delivered via Skillshare, which is well-known for its aggressive marketing program in which it offers a month’s membership for free. That makes it easy for you to sign up and consume the course.
And of course, Skillshare has other advantages, such as its community features, which mean that you can discuss the course with other learners and share insights or ask them any questions that you might have.
Find out more about this course: PUBLIC SPEAKING: How to Open & Close Presentations Like a Boss
Course #2: Matt Abrahams: Managing Your Anxiety While Presenting
Provided by LinkedIn Learning and presented by educator, author, and coach Matt Abrahams, this course has a good pedigree and comes with a certificate of completion that can be displayed on your LinkedIn profile or downloaded and printed if you prefer a hard copy.
Anxiety is only natural, and we all experience it at times. It doesn’t usually become a problem until it starts to interfere with our day-to-day lives, but public speakers put themselves under more pressure than most, and so can understandably find themselves struggling with anxiety when they’re addressing audiences.
In fact, the U.S. National Social Anxiety Center says that the fear of public speaking is the most common phobia ahead of death, spiders, and heights. With that in mind, it’s perhaps a little less surprising that this course is so popular, with nearly 200,000 learners at the time of writing.
Even if you’re not normally an anxious person and you generally have no problem with public speaking, it can still be a good idea to take this course so that you’re familiar with the techniques and have them to fall back on. You can also access it for free if you take out the trial of LinkedIn Learning.
Find out more about this course: Managing Your Anxiety While Presenting
Course #3: Chris Anderson: Chris Anderson on Public Speaking
Chris Anderson is the head of TED, so he knows a thing or two about public speaking. He’s also a successful entrepreneur, having founded a company called Imagine Media, which created IGN and published 150 magazines with a staff of 2,000 people.
These days, he focuses exclusively on working with TED to bring the world’s best public speakers on a variety of different subjects together to share inspiration and education. Because of that, he has a huge amount of experience at spotting good and bad public speaking, and he’s distilled all of that knowledge into this super useful course on public speaking.
The course only takes an hour or so to complete and has an average rating of 4.5/5 from nearly 5,000 reviewers, so you know it’s a good one that’s well worth your time. Throughout the session, Anderson will teach you how to create an effective through-line and how to structure your talk, as well as how to leave your audience with a memorable impression.
Because of the limitations imposed by the length, it’s not the most comprehensive course on the market. Still, it’s a great introduction to some of the most important concepts in public speaking, and you’ll also take away a certificate of completion and a number of worksheets and exercises that you can use to plan your next speaking engagement.
Find out more about this course: Acumen Presents: Chris Anderson on Public Speaking
Course #4: Dr. Matt McGarrity: Dynamic Public Speaking Specialization
Dr. Matt McGarrity is a principal lecturer in the communication department at the University of Washington, and his course is dedicated to sharing the master techniques you need to know to design and deliver clear and compelling presentations.
With free enrollment and over 50,000 people already enrolled, as well as an average of 4.8/5 from over 1,000 ratings, you know that this course is valued. It’s particularly worthwhile if you’re looking for ways to improve your delivery, in terms of the use of voice, movement, and gestures, and it’s suitable for a wide range of presentation types, whether you’re trying to impart information or to persuade someone to buy from you.
The other thing to note about this course is that it has four different sessions, each of them covering a different aspect of public speaking:
Course #1: Introduction to Public Speaking
Introduction to Public Speaking Course #2: Speaking to Inform: Discussing Complex Ideas with Clear Explanations and Dynamic Slides
Speaking to Inform: Discussing Complex Ideas with Clear Explanations and Dynamic Slides Course #3: Speaking to Persuade: Motivating Audiences with Solid Arguments and Moving Language
Speaking to Persuade: Motivating Audiences with Solid Arguments and Moving Language Course #4: Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches
This all combines to make it one of the best courses when you’re looking for an overall understanding of public speaking and the different techniques that you can use in different situations. It’s definitely not one to miss.
Find out more about this course: Dynamic Public Speaking Specialization
Course #5: TJ Walker: 2021 Complete Public Speaking Masterclass for Every Occasion
TJ Walker is a bestselling personal development and habits expert who also happens to be a highly rated Udemy coach, with a 4.4/5 rating from over 100,000 reviews. He’s taught over a million students on Udemy alone and has 240 courses on offer, spanning everything from personal development and public speaking to presentation and communication skills and media training.
In this course, you’ll learn a little bit of everything, with highlights including:
How to look comfortable, confident, and relaxed in speaking situations
How to speak clearly and understandably
How to speak in a memorable way
How to influence your audience
How to know exactly what to do when speaking to any size audience
Speaking about the course, Walker says, “I put every ounce of experience and insight I’ve learned from 30 years of conducting public speaking training courses all over the world into this course.” He also dodged writing his own marketing copy, pointing instead to the testimonials of the many satisfied students who’ve taken the course.
And despite being one of the most well-known instructors on the Udemy platform, TJ also has a reputation for being approachable, and so if you want further support after the session is over, feel free to contact him.
The course is also a bargain at just £99.99, with benefits including 31 hours of on-demand video, four articles, eight downloadable resources, a 30-day money-back guarantee and full lifetime access, along with a certificate of completion.
Find out more about this course: 2021 Complete Public Speaking Masterclass For Every Occasion
Conclusion
Now that you know about these five public speaking courses that we’d recommend for 2021, we want to hear from you. Have you taken any of these courses? If so, what did you think of them? And do you think that we missed any outstanding alternatives?
Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments so that we can keep the discussion going, and come back soon for more public speaking tips, tricks, and advice. We’ll see you soon!
This was originally posted on SpeakerHub Skillcamp. | https://medium.com/@speakerhubhq/five-online-public-speaking-courses-for-2021-adffa05ba6d0 | [] | 2021-11-22 02:33:27.677000+00:00 | ['Public Speaking', 'Online Courses', 'Public Speaking Tips', 'Course', 'Speakerhub'] |
AR VR And What It’s Good For. A new augmented future | Co-author: Panayot Cankov
Augmented and virtual reality, plus derivatives like MR (Mixed Reality) and XR (Extended Reality) are today’s new kids on the block. But, besides gaming and entertainment, what these new fancy technologies are worth for? Here is a story for you:
Today
You have this legacy windows forms app. You had a choice to migrate it to WPF. And now to UWP. Chances are you’ve done beautifully so far and “Telerik UI for <your platform here>” was all along the way with you. But the world is rapidly changing, even as we speak. The inevitable question is “What is next?”
Technology Giants Vision
Microsoft at Build 2018
They simply love MR. “Mixed Reality” is something between AR and VR with emphasis on interaction. Unity3D with C# is the recommended solution from Microsoft to deliver AR VR experiences for head mounted devices — these helmets and the AR HoloLens glasses. Microsoft pushes at AI delivering Azure Machine Learning Service. Microsoft also participates in the open source community JavaScript, WebGL and WebVR cross-platform solutions.
Google at I/O 2018
They simply love AR. Google is heavily investing in ARCore. You can deliver AR experiences to modern hand-held devices — the mobile phone in your pocket. ARCore has Unity3D SDK. It is capable to provide world anchors to position virtual objects, share them through the cloud and experience them together with you friends. Google also develops WebXR. So WebXR is a better WebVR in terms of performance and hardware access. “Extended Reality” is an umbrella over AR, VR and MR.
Facebook at F8 2018
They simply love VR. Everyone at F8 got a free Oculus Go to take home. Facebook’s goal in the AR VR field is to make it possible for you to be in VR and feel like you were with someone thousands of miles away, so they are all about social interaction and communication. This comes with advancements in AI and announcement of PyTorch 1.0, applied in text translation and making avatars move realistic. And a plan to push forward the hardware.
Apple at WWDC 2018
You will have to wait to see what happens on Apple’s conference. But you’ve heard rumors Apple may be up to glasses with an 8K display for each eye by 2020. And Apple did file a patent application for an eye tracking system designed for its AR glasses. Also, today Apple has a huge share of the mobile market, as well as the ARKit and Core ML frameworks.
Is AR VR the Next Big Thing in The Software Industry?
You probably are not yet 100% sure that AR VR is the future. But it feels like it may disrupt your business.
Predicted market size of AR VR software for 2025 is huge, but you live in 2018. You are not sure your line of business application fits in any of these segments. You are not sure what are the potential AR VR use cases for your business. And chances are that you have the understanding about AR VR development being hard, with a steep learning curve and you not having the time and money to invest into learning and researching it. There is also the concern that investing in AR VR solutions too early may fail because the ecosystem has not picked up yet, but on the other hand if you invest too late competition may be already way ahead.
You Have an issue — how to approach AR VR?
We believe we can help:
Telerik UI for AR VR
We, Telerik, have been delivering UI control suites for various platforms through the years — ASP.NET (MVC), WinForms, WPF, UWP, Xamarin, Kendo UI, NativeScript — to name some
We feel confident about UI! We are now building development tools for AR VR, based on Unity3D with C#. Here is why:
We believe AR VR singularity is shortly ahead
We believe AR VR will play critical role in all kinds of business applications soon
We are confident that self-contained socially acceptable glasses are almost available
Microsoft’s HoloLens $3K AR headset is amazing as it is today
We want to ensure the future success of our existing and potential customers
We’ve been investing into R&D in AR VR for 6 months now and we have gained significant knowledge and understanding about these new technologies. You can check the HoloStock demo that we’ve built and demonstrated successfully at Microsoft’s Build 2018 developers conference.
Our mission is to guide you while you build your AR VR apps using Unity3D with C# and reusing your existing .NET skills. You can now make the leap with minimal investments and a solid partner to help. And while Unity3D is game centric, we will focus on a toolset of reusable components for line of business application development. We will provide tutorials. We will share our experience. And we will be happy to guide you through a successful AR VR journey. We will make sure your apps render at top frames per second and provide high quality UI like this:
HoloLens does not provide multi-sampling anti-alias and graphic is jagged (aliased)
Our GPU shader adds anti-alias on a per-pixel basis while keeping the 60 FPS rate
We will follow up with series of developer-centric blogs to back the technology excellence of our products. But it is you who will be building the vertical stacks and the actual applications.
So Here is a 2-steps Plan:
1 — Let’s stay connected
Communication and collaboration are key to the success in such an early emerging market.
We will be investing in Telerik UI for AR VR, but we are at the beginning, our Roadmap is flexible — make sure you will benefit the most out of it; the result of such collaboration can be only highly beneficial.
If you are building AR VR apps today, you can share your pain points. We’ve isolated some fundamental missing pieces while building our HoloStock demo, but we need to know your use cases to make sure that we can build a generic solution that fits multiple businesses. Or if you are already building some components internally you can safely offload these to us and focus primarily on the business logic of your applications. Otherwise the competition may be quickly catching up with you simply because the time you invest is not in solving your domain problems, but in filling gaps that we are going to fill.
If you are planning to build AR VR apps tomorrow, you can share your vision with us and put our components on your radar. Our roadmap is not set in stone. We are agile, especially in an early market. We will be happy to talk and realign our roadmap to deliver certain missing pieces, right on time for your successful AR VR solution.
Even if you don’t plan to build AR VR apps any time soon, you can play with the demo application just for fun and some experience. People usually identify certain opportunities only when they know the underlying technology in better detail.
Business today apply AR VR successfully in education, architectural and interior visualizations, real-estate, engineering, enhanced tour guides. And the segments AR VR is applicable to will only increase.
Delivering successful AR VR story may increase revenue, decrease operation costs, open new markets or keep you up with the competition. If you decide to skip the AR VR wave, chances are that your business will probably miss opportunities and stay behind the competition.
2 — Start Your Experiments Today
We, at Telerik, have always been fans of pragmatic thinking. That’s why our initial plans are to build solid data visualization components as starters. Data is across all business segments and not a property of a single vertical. We believe that every business application will have the need to visualize data in some way, that’s why we will be building charts, graphs, heatmaps, GIS shapefiles, gauges and more.
Our 3D Charts are ready for experiments, you can give them a try, see how it goes and share your thoughts with us.
The 3D chart scene in HoloStock, visualized in Unity
We have a comprehensive tutorial, part of the download package, that will help you get started in no time. Just navigate to https://www.telerik.com/ar-and-vr-ui and follow the download link.
Act Now!
Get connected:
[email protected]
Follow us: | https://medium.com/telerik-ar-vr/ar-vr-and-what-its-good-for-7fd9ed4e0af2 | ['Georgi Atanasov'] | 2018-05-25 13:42:03.332000+00:00 | ['Unity', 'Virtual Reality', 'Augmented Reality', 'Hololens'] |
Fintech’s final frontier — HANGAR49 | By Ebrahim Moolla, November 16, 2020
Africa’s mushrooming FinTech enterprises hold the key to meaningful upliftment on the continent as they deliver far more than just improved banking services to its massive unbanked market.
Some 330 million adults , or 60 percent of the adult population, in Africa lack access to the most basic financial services. The sheer size of the unserved and underserved market in Africa means that Fintech firms can make a bigger difference on the continent than anywhere else.
African startups and established companies face numerous challenges like poor or absent infrastructure, low internet penetration, funding issues, political instability, and gender stereotyping, but the Fintech environment on the continent does hold advantages not seen in other parts of the world.
A space for collaboration
African Fintechs are not disrupting the financial services sector, as in many regions, traditional financial institutions have not found it viable to serve the market in any way at all. This means there is greater scope for collaboration, rather than direct competition.
And because the financial services market has such a low base on the continent, Africa is leading the world in sector convergence, the convergence of new technologies to solve logistical challenges and the potential impact of big data.
Based on Crunchbase data, the African Fintech sector comprises over 400 active companies, 80% of which are local companies, enabling payments, funds transfer, lending, and even wealth management. Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa are the top Fintech hubs on the continent, accounting for the larger proportion of Fintech firms and attracting the lion share of investments.
In view of these environmental factors and developments, every year for the past 3 years, no other tech sector has attracted more funding in Africa than Fintech. In 2019 alone, African Fintech startups raised a combined $678.73 million in funding .
Government support needed
Fintech is spearheading the reshaping of the financial sector, with several key sectors benefitting from the development, and African governments are under pressure to maximise potential benefits by committing to infrastructure development, education and an equitable regulatory framework.
And the coronavirus pandemic may yet prove to be the catalyst for Africa becoming a digital economy, with resulting benefits for the Fintech sector. In a bid to curb the spread of the virus, the World Health Organization has been cautioning against the use of hard currency and encouraging the use of digital payments. This move has prompted African governments and regulators to enforce measures aimed at facilitating more cashless transactions.
Now more than ever before, Fintech is poised to become a crucial stepping stone that will propel Africa into becoming a truly digital economy. The sector remains a key driver for what many hope will be an African Renaissance marked by peace, prosperity, and cultural rejuvenation.
HANGAR49, as an outreach optimization business focused on building valuable human connections with the aid of digital technologies, is committed to supporting and partnering with Fintechs in Africa and around the world in their financial inclusion mission. Speak to us today to look at your options for uncovering revenue opportunities. | https://medium.com/@bl_29764/fintechs-final-frontier-hangar49-c945896240e | ['Bradley Laubscher'] | 2021-09-15 08:24:21.411000+00:00 | ['Financial Services', 'Fintech', 'Technology', 'Business Development', 'Lead Generation'] |
K-means Clustering as a Matrix Factorization problem | Pic Credits to Mohit Khera
As you know that the optimization problem in k-means clustering is to minimize the equation given below. Here, “k” is the total number of clusters that we want to find and the problem is to minimize the intra cluster distance(squared). This equation says that we want to find the centroids “Ci’s” which minimizes the distance between the data point belonging to a cluster and its centroid.
k-means optimization problem
Now, to convert it into matrix factorization problem, I have to define a matrix “Z”, such that in this a value will be equal to one if that data point belongs to a particular cluster otherwise zero. Here, each row represents a cluster and each column represents a data point. So,”Z[i][j]” will be equal to one if jth data point belongs to ith cluster.
Data Matrix “Z” values
Data Matrix “Z”
Now we can modify our optimization problem as follows:
Modified optimization problem
Here, “Z[i][j]” will be one only for those data points that belong to that particular cluster. For Example, when “K” is equal to one “Z[1][j]” will be one only for those data points that belongs to cluster one, rest it will be zero. So, we are minimizing the intra cluster distances similar to normal k-means optimization problem.
Now, in order to convert this formulation into matrix factorization form, I will write this equation into matrix form as follows:
Optimization problem in Matrix Factorization form
This is the matrix representation of the previous vectored form. It is similar to the Non Negative Matrix Factorization(NMF/NNMF) equation where matrix “A” can be seen as a product of two matrices “B” and “C”. Here also, I can write matrix “X” as a multiplication of matrices “C” and “Z”.
Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Equation
Matrix Factorization form for clustering
Here, “X” is my data matrix which represents the data points in d-dimensions, where I have total “n” data points. Matrix “C” is the centroid matrix where each row represents a centroid. It is a “k x d” matrix as I have taken “k” centroids each of d-dimensions. Matrix “Z” is the same matrix that I defined earlier.
Input Data Matrix “X”
Centroid Matrix “C”
Relationship Matrix between data points and Centroids
I can use Gradient Descent to find the optimal “C” and “Z” using the above equation(Optimization problem/Matrix Factorization form) as my loss function.
You can easily understand it from the example of one data point. Lets say I take first data point “X1” which will be first row of “X” data matrix of dimensions ‘1 x d’. I want my centroid to be very close to “X1” to reduce the intra cluster distance. We will randomly initialize both “C” and “Z” matrices. So, I will take first row of “Z.t” matrix(because it corresponds to first data point), it will be a one hot encoded vector(i.e., a vector with only one value to be ‘1’ and rest all zeros) as one data point can only belong to a single cluster(each row representing a data point and each column representing a cluster).
Optimization problem for one data point
When I will do the dot product between “Z.t” and “C”, I will get a vector of size ‘1 x d’. Now, according to the optimization problem or loss function, I want the difference between data point “X1” and this centroid to be very small. So, gradient descent will learn the matrices “C” and “Z” by reducing the loss or intra cluster distances. | https://medium.com/@1993jayant/k-means-clustering-as-a-matrix-factorization-problem-ce1de56c6ec6 | [] | 2019-09-29 01:35:47.801000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Matrix Factorization', 'Clustering', 'K Means', 'Machine Learning'] |
Forging Stronger Relationships while Social Distancing — Shopee Design Virtual Team Bonding | The two posters depict Shopee designer’s eureka moments before and after conceiving an idea. Where the designer sits is shaped like a question mark when she is deep in thoughts. Upon achieving eureka, however, she then leaps out of her seat, and it changes to an exclamation point.
The most exciting and fulfilling times in Shopee as a designer, for me, is when creating the right design solutions to the problems raised. It feels like overcoming a challenge that no one has ever done before. Hence, I wanted to portray that ‘ah-hah!’ moment as truthfully as I could.
I deliberately omitted descriptions from the poster to leave the audience with a sense of curiosity of wanting to find out the meaning behind the illustration. I really enjoyed listening to all the different views that people had after seeing the design.
This activity has really brought us closer together despite the social distancing regulations. With just a simple exercise, it had us gathering around, guessing and sharing ideas with one another. The shared views brought us more inspirations for future poster designs, and we look forward to designing more!
Team 4
As soon as we received the assignment, we held a meeting to brainstorm ideas together. Our team lead settled on the theme ‘We Are One’. Meaning to say we, as team members, are one and the same, using the same five senses to perceive, judge, make decisions, and act.
For me, though, I think while everyone is part of a whole, they have their own souls and personal wills. Maintaining this diversity gives the team more creativity and vitality, enabling us to support many complicated and unpredictable tasks in our daily work. That was how we created the man in this poster; his every feature was carefully designed and uniquely coloured to reflect the different personalities of each team member.
Each piece of paper represents a team member. When stacked together, they form a more significant, multi-faceted person made up of many smaller individuals. Then, using Figma’s pen tool, I gave this man an arm to represent myself as part of this team.
Team 5
My work is presented in a flat illustration style depicting the local fast food cuisine of Vietnam. I was mostly inspired by my business trip to Vietnam, where I came across a lot of local snacks that were new to me. I recorded some of them on my camera, and upon returning to Singapore, I referred to some images online to complete this illustration.
I think Southeast Asia has a lot of fun places to visit. The food in each area often connects us to fond memories. Hence, I wanted to use food to evoke interest in the local culture. This activity has reawakened my passion for drawing and gave me a great sense of vitality. Instead of repeating the work that I do daily to realise someone else’s ideas, I was able to express mine through illustrations. It not only helped me but also allowed more people to learn about our team’s work.
Although the illustration was presented as a poster, it can also be used in the team’s work on app design, for example, as an empty page illustration.
Team 6
This poster illustrates all the rare gems one can find in Singapore. Since COVID-19 has halted our travel plans, it forced us to take a step back and see the world through new eyes. This made us realise just how beautiful and incredible Singapore is, and we wanted to tell that story through Shopee’s perspective. Therefore, we designed the poster using bespoke illustrations we created for our branding project.
End Product | https://medium.com/shopee/forging-stronger-relationships-while-social-distancing-shopee-design-virtual-team-bonding-83ac38b41b40 | ['Shopee Design'] | 2020-12-08 07:49:23.297000+00:00 | ['Behind The Scenes', 'Team Building', 'Design', 'Teamwork', 'Illustration'] |
There are two sides of me. I discovered them in quarantine back in March 2020. | There are two sides of me.
Photo by author
I discovered them in quarantine back in March 2020.
The first side is the one who basked in the green growth of the jungle that surrounded the house we were quarantined in. We were in Minca, Colombia and everything in my visual field was a giant leafy plant. The green was a comfort until the rain came and the jungle lashed back.
Then came the blue side. The one who is child-like and sad. But she can’t, of course, BE sad lest she cause everyone else trouble. So she sits quietly waiting for the optimism to fade, for there to be a weakness in the force. For the sunlight to fade into shades of blue-grey and expose the under-belly.
Two halves of my whole — split during the troubled times when nothing made sense, not even the ground I stood on. | https://medium.com/@gmmichele/there-are-two-sides-of-me-i-discovered-them-in-quarantine-back-in-march-2020-e6ac2850fda9 | ['G. M. Michele'] | 2020-12-16 21:20:55.206000+00:00 | ['Prose', 'Quarantine', 'Self', 'Life Lessons', 'Inspiration'] |
In the dark | Without the presence of light you’re unable to distinguish colour, texture, depth and that’s how we understand some aspects of loneliness and battles with seasonal depression.
We are unable to understand the meaning of a helping hand and one that may be detrimental because it is not presented the same way we see it in the light. So we wonder, we wallow and attempt to find that glimmer that is encapsulated by a freshly lit candle. We know what it is but we’re unsure, as we question it’s validity in the situation we find ourselves in.
In some moments we distance ourselves in the hopes of waking up with more light in our lives and sometimes we do but in tough seasons we don’t. So you continue to maneuver in the dark, holding onto routine in the hopes of building momentum and in some of those moments we find the familiarity that comes with the light.
We step outside for the first time, breathe in new air and the will to make a change. Even if it is minimal, but it’s a step in the right direction. The night time presents many possible dangers and some are mostly due to not being able to see beyond our current circumstances. So as you wonder in dark. I offer you a lantern of hope, one that guides you to healing, forgiveness and understanding.
From the darkness you rise to your former self, one that walks with the authority of knowing who you are and what you’re able to overcome. Someone who understands themselves a little better in the dark. | https://medium.com/@bnkonde1/in-the-dark-9d6109f50bf | [] | 2021-06-08 16:30:47.755000+00:00 | ['Hope', 'Seasonal Depression', 'Light', 'Darkness', 'Strength'] |
Asterisk Week 48: About The Blink of an Eye | I think its eyes just blinked
The National Museum of Ireland-Natural History— Photo: Ana Azevedo
Asterisk Project: International Creative Writing
One more writing prompt heavily inspired by Sci-fi! Gabriela sent us the prompt: I think its eyes just blinked so we could write about it in the week 48 of our creative writing project! Check out the results:
Gabriela Prado
I already lost my sanity. I’m already locked in this tower. I’m already a part of the asylum. I look to all those white walls, all these fancy chairs, all the dust in the corner of the door.
Oh, look, there’s an image in the mirror. Is it looking at me! What should I do? Oh no, I think its eyes just blink. Everything’s black right now. Should I open my eyes? | https://medium.com/asterisk-project/asterisk-week-48-about-the-blink-of-an-eye-3a357afad261 | ['Ana Luíza Azevedo'] | 2019-01-06 21:46:20.939000+00:00 | ['Edgar Allan Poe', 'Weekly Prompts', 'Poetry', 'ESL', 'Creative Writing'] |
Here’s why your morning coffee may be very unethical | Here’s why your morning coffee may be very unethical
Photo by Rodrigo Flores on Unsplash
I will take the chance of coming across as blasphemous to the coffee lovers out there, but I have to admit that coffee had never been really part of my life, at least before University. Once I stepped into college world I soon understood that, without coffee, I would have not gone very far ahead. Eventually coffee became for me, as it does for thousands of students around the world, the perfect ally to shake off the morning tiredness caused by countless nights of late studying and partying.
Although the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has left its mark also on the coffee industry, causing, according to the International Coffee Organization, a fall in the year 2019–2020 by 0.9% in the global coffee consumption to 167.59 million bags, against the 169.11 million bags of the year 2018/2019, it is a matter of fact that nowadays, coffee became a major component of our lives and for most of us it is an indispensable drug, on which we get high on a daily basis.
Data from http://www.ico.org/
However, given the nature of this blog, rather than dwelling on the emotions that coffee generates in us in the morning, I am called to address the bitter reality of (most) coffee production: highly unsustainable and environmental impacting. Before you stop reading and leave this page in rage (now we can’t even drink coffee in peace!), let me clarify from the start that an environmentally friendly coffee production is possible and it is already a reality in several areas of the world. But first, let’s see what makes coffee so impacting…after all, it is just a crop as any other, isn’t it? Well, not exactly.
Why mono-cropping coffee plantations are not sustainable
Given the high demand of coffee for the global market, the necessity to expand production areas, in the form of mono-cropping plantations, led to an increased deforestation activity with consequent ecosystem damage, loss of biodiversity and soil erosion (Karamage et al., 2016). In tropical soils, the loss of soil organic matter can take place within 5 years after the land use change occurred, causing a rapid decline in the soil fertility: what was before a rich soil is doomed to become, in the long run, a sterile soil unable to support a proper production (Raich, 1983). Sure, the high use of nitrate fertilizers in intensive coffee systems make it possible to achieve the desired yield for some time but causing, as a side effect, the contamination of the nearby water bodies due to leaching effects, impacting the aquatic wildlife. However, once the soil cannot sustain the production anymore due to erosion, loss of physical structure, nutrients and microorganisms, it is time to clear out another forest area, and the process starts again.
Photo by Sander Steehouwer on Unsplash
Water has a big impact on coffee production
Water demand is another big issue related to coffee production. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), estimated that one cup of coffee requires 140 liters of water for its production, processing, packaging and shipping. A study conducted in 2003 by the Institute for Water Education of UNESCO pointed out that more than 99% of the coffee water footprint is to actually grow the plants. This makes clear that the coffee sourcing area is vital, to reduce the water footprint: rain-fed production systems where precipitation is 3000 mm/year have a much lower impact than coffee grown (and irrigated) in areas were there is a 400 mm yearly rainfall.
Social issues
Problems related to coffee production are also of social nature: according to the International Coffee Organization,
Between 20% and 30% of coffee farms are female-operated and up to 70% of labour in coffee production is provided by women. http://www.ico.org/documents/cy2017-18/icc-122-11e-gender-equality.pdf
However, despite the importance women play in coffee production, they have lower access to land, credit and information than men, resulting in a gender gap in economic outcomes, yield and productivity. Studies reported that women-led farms in Africa were between 23 and 35% less productive in terms of yield than male-headed systems (Aguilar et al. 2015) (Tiruneh et al. 2001). Revenues from selling coffee were also correlated with women empowerment, resulting in 39–44% lower income for female-headed households, than the male counterpart, in Ethiopia and Uganda respectively.
The role of costumers
Finally, at the consumer level, the use of coffee pods make the whole process of coffee production from “cradle to grave” even more impacting. Although it is true that brands, such as Nespresso, have started to produce fully-recyclable pods, the energy used to make them and the fact most consumer do not actually bother in reality to recycle the pods, arise the question if there may be better ways to drink coffee? Maybe a mocha machine for your coffee is a better solution.
Photo by Jisu Han on Unsplash
In addition, most of the pods, despite being recyclable, are made up of different materials, which, after use, should be separated by the consumer and each of the components disposed in the correct bin: how unrealistic, for that to happen, does it sound?
So, what can we do to drink our coffee without feeling like we are committing an awful crime? Much easier than you may think: get certified coffee!
There are several International Coffee Certification Programs, each one with specific objectives, but all of them share a series of basic features.
Certification provides economic incentives to farmers The coffee production is followed to check if it complies with certification guidelines (in terms of environmental and social sustainability) Before certification takes place, a verification step must be completed by an inspector from an independent certification agency
Now, next time you go to the grocery store, you know how you can keep drinking your coffee paying attention to your environmental (and social) footprint!
Question is, will you do it?
P.S.
If you are interested about coffee, in the next article I will talk about how climate change will impact coffee production, stay tuned!
If you want to know more on (agro)ecosystem preservation techniques, you can find some useful information here:
References
Aguilar, Arturo, Carranza, E., Goldstein, M., Kilic, T., and Oseni, G. “Decomposition of gender differentials in agricultural productivity in Ethiopia.” Agricultural Economics 46.3 (2015): 311 334.
Karamage, F., Shao, H., Chen, X., Ndayisaba, F., Nahayo, L., Kayiranga, A., Omifolaji, J., Liu, T., & Zhang, C. (2016). Deforestation Effects on Soil Erosion in the Lake Kivu Basin, D.R. Congo-Rwanda. Forests, 7(12), 281. https://doi.org/10.3390/f7110281
Raich, J. W. (1983). Effects of Forest Conversion on the Carbon Budget of a Tropical Soil. Biotropica, 15(3), 177. https://doi.org/10.2307/2387826
Tiruneh, Addis, et al. “Gender differentials in agricultural production and decision making among smallholders in Ada, Lume, and Gimbichu Woredas of the Central Highlands of Ethiopia.” International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT),(2001).
http://www.ico.org/documents/cy2017-18/icc-122-11e-gender-equality.pdf | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-bitter-reality-of-unsustainable-coffe-and-what-you-can-do-to-stop-it-5f6260fd0219 | ['Mattia Bradley'] | 2021-01-12 08:51:14.982000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Environment', 'Agriculture', 'Farming', 'Coffee'] |
Wavelet & Fourier Analysis on the ENSO and monsoon data in Python | A wavelet series represents a real or complex-valued function by a certain orthonormal series generated by a wavelet. We cannot easily explain wavelet transform with a basic understanding of the Fourier Transform.
Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash
Fourier Transform
The Fourier Transform is a useful tool to transform a signal from its time domain to its frequency domain. The peaks in the frequency spectrum correspond to the most occurring frequencies in the signal. The Fourier Transform is reliable when the frequency spectrum is stationary (the frequencies present in the signal are not time-dependent). However, the Fourier Transform of the whole time series cannot tell the instant a particular frequency rises.
A quick fix is to use a sliding window to find a spectrogram that gives the information of both time and frequency (famously known as Short-time Fourier transform). However, this uses the rigid length of the window and hence limits the resolution in frequency. This is due to the uncertainty principle (duration-bandwidth theorem) in signal analysis with a tradeoff in the frequency and time resolution (Papoulis 1977; Franks 1969), similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics for position and momentum of a particle.
Wavelet Transform
Since in geosciences, we work mostly with dynamical systems, most of the signals are non-stationary in nature. In such cases, the Wavelet Transform is a much better approach.
The Wavelet Transform retains high resolution in both time and frequency domains (Torrence & Compo 1998; Chao et al. 2014). It tells us both the details of the frequency present in the signal along with its location in time. This is achieved by analyzing the signal at different scales. Unlike the Fourier Transform that uses a series of sine waves with different frequencies, the Wavelet Transform uses a series of functions called wavelets, each with different scales to analyze a signal. The advantage of using a wavelet is that wavelets are localized in time unlike their counterparts in the Fourier Transform. This property of time localization of wavelets can be exploited by multiplying the signal with wavelets at different locations in time, starting from the beginning and slowly moving towards the end of the signal. This procedure is known as convolution. We can iterate the whole process by increasing the scale of the wavelet at each iteration. This will give us the wavelet spectrogram (or scaleogram). The scales are analogous to the frequency in the Fourier Transform. The scales can be converted to the pseudo-frequencies by the relation:
This relation shows that the higher scale factor (longer wavelet) corresponds to a smaller frequency. Hence, scaling the wavelet in the time domain can be used to analyze smaller frequencies in the frequency domain.
Wavelet Analysis applied on El Niño-Southern Oscillation sea surface temperature & Indian monsoon rainfall dataset
I apply the Wavelet analysis concept on the quarterly dataset for El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) sea surface temperature in degree Celsius (1871–1997) and Indian monsoon rainfall in mm (1871–1995) (Torrence & Webster 1999). The color pattern in the wavelet spectrogram is taken as log2(power). The wavelet used for this analysis is the complex Morlet wavelet with bandwidth 1.5 and normalized center frequency of 1.0. If the scale is too low, then aliasing due to the violation of Nyquist frequency may occur. If the scale is too large, the wavelet computation maybe is computationally intensive.
import pywt
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
plt.style.use('seaborn')
dataset = "monsoon.txt"
df_nino = pd.read_table(dataset, skiprows=19, header=None)
N = df_nino.shape[0]
t0 = 1871
dt = 0.25
time = np.arange(0, N) * dt + t0
signal = df_nino.values.squeeze() #to get the scalar values
signal = signal - np.mean(signal)
scales = np.arange(1, 128) #set the wavelet scales
def plot_signal(time, signal, average_over=5, figname=None):
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(15, 3))
ax.plot(time, signal, label='signal')
ax.set_xlim([time[0], time[-1]])
ax.set_ylabel('Signal Amplitude', fontsize=18)
# ax.set_title('Signal + Time Average', fontsize=18)
ax.set_xlabel('Time', fontsize=18)
ax.legend()
if not figname:
plt.savefig('signal_plot.png', dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight')
else:
plt.savefig(figname, dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight')
plt.close('all')
plot_signal(time, signal) #plot and label the axis
In the above code, I used the pandas read_table method to read the data in the monsoon.txt I'm not sure where I originally obtained the monsoon dataset, so I cannot cite the source. If anyone knows, please comment below. The above script uses the module wavelet_visualize for computing and plotting the figure below.
Signal Plot (Image by Author)
def get_fft_values(y_values, T, N, f_s):
f_values = np.linspace(0.0, 1.0/(2.0*T), N//2)
fft_values_ = np.fft.fft(y_values)
fft_values = 2.0/N * np.abs(fft_values_[0:N//2])
return f_values, fft_values
def plot_fft_plus_power(time, signal, figname=None):
dt = time[1] - time[0]
N = len(signal)
fs = 1/dt
fig, ax = plt.subplots(2, 1, figsize=(15, 3), sharex=True)
variance = np.std(signal)**2
f_values, fft_values = get_fft_values(signal, dt, N, fs)
fft_power = variance * abs(fft_values) ** 2 # FFT power spectrum
ax[0].plot(f_values, fft_values, 'r-', label='Fourier Transform')
ax[1].plot(f_values, fft_power, 'k--',
linewidth=1, label='FFT Power Spectrum')
ax[1].set_xlabel('Frequency [Hz / year]', fontsize=18)
ax[1].set_ylabel('Amplitude', fontsize=12)
ax[0].set_ylabel('Amplitude', fontsize=12)
ax[0].legend()
ax[1].legend()
# plt.subplots_adjust(hspace=0.5)
if not figname:
plt.savefig('fft_plus_power.png', dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight')
else:
plt.savefig(figname, dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight')
plt.close('all')
plot_fft_plus_power(time, signal)
Fourier Transform plot (Image by Author)
def plot_wavelet(time, signal, scales, waveletname='cmor1.5-1.0', cmap=plt.cm.seismic, title='Wavelet Transform (Power Spectrum) of signal', ylabel='Period (years)', xlabel='Time', figname=None):
dt = time[1] - time[0]
[coefficients, frequencies] = pywt.cwt(signal, scales, waveletname, dt)
power = (abs(coefficients)) ** 2
period = 1. / frequencies
scale0 = 8
numlevels = 10
levels = [scale0]
for ll in range(1, numlevels):
scale0 *= 2
levels.append(scale0)
contourlevels = np.log2(levels)
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(15, 10))
im = ax.contourf(time, np.log2(period), np.log2(power),
contourlevels, extend='both', cmap=cmap)
ax.set_title(title, fontsize=20)
ax.set_ylabel(ylabel, fontsize=18)
ax.set_xlabel(xlabel, fontsize=18)
yticks = 2**np.arange(np.ceil(np.log2(period.min())),
np.ceil(np.log2(period.max())))
ax.set_yticks(np.log2(yticks))
ax.set_yticklabels(yticks)
ax.invert_yaxis()
ylim = ax.get_ylim()
ax.set_ylim(ylim[0], -1)
cbar_ax = fig.add_axes([0.95, 0.15, 0.03, 0.7])
fig.colorbar(im, cax=cbar_ax, orientation="vertical")
if not figname:
plt.savefig('wavelet_{}.png'.format(waveletname),
dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight')
else:
plt.savefig(figname, dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight')
plt.close('all')
plot_wavelet(time, signal, scales)
Wavelet Transform plot (Image by Author)
Final Result
For the analysis of the ENSO dataset [Figure below (a-d)], we see that most of the power is concentrated in a 2 to 8 year period (or 0.125–0.5 Hz). We can see that up to the year 1920, there were high fluctuations in power, while there were not so much after that. We can also see that there is a shift from longer to shorter periods as time progresses. For the Indian monsoon dataset [Figure below (e-h)], although the power is evenly distributed across different periods, there is also a slight shift in power from longer periods to shorter periods as time progresses. Thus, the Wavelet Transform helps in visualizing this kind of dynamic behavior of the signals.
The wavelet analysis for the ENSO (a-d) and Indian monsoon rainfall (e-h) time series
(a) and (e) shows the time series in °C and mm, respectively for ENSO and Indian monsoon. (b) and (f) shows the Fourier Transform, (c) and (g) show the Power spectrum of ENSO and Indian monsoon respectively. (Image by Author)
References | https://towardsdatascience.com/wavelet-fourier-analysis-on-the-enso-and-monsoon-data-in-python-31504eeadc2c | ['Utpal Kumar'] | 2021-04-05 12:17:48.427000+00:00 | ['Wavelet', 'Time Series Analysis', 'Data Analysis', 'Data Science', 'Fourier Transform'] |
Read This Before Sharing Another Human Trafficking Post on Facebook | Every few days, a well-meaning Facebook friend shares some random post from a woman on the platform who insists that she or her children — sometimes she and her children — have been targeted by human traffickers.
The story is usually a predictable one. There’s the frazzled mother with her children in a parking lot, usually at a mall or other shopping center. She claims that some unknown person approached her and tried to lure at least one person in her family over to their car. Often, there’s a van with tinted windows involved, or at least, nearby. The mom, sensing that something is “off,” gets herself out of the situation and doesn’t comply with the sketchy stranger’s request to come closer. When it’s all over, the would-be victim tells us that she’s positive her family just dodged another tragedy in human trafficking — often claiming that local law enforcement agreed with her.
The author of the post typically finishes up her sordid tale with a warning to stay vigilant and asks everybody to share the story. And people do.
They share and then they add their own comments about how that’s “such a scary experience,” and “the danger is everywhere.” With each share, a popular urban legend gains greater ground.
Here’s one example currently circulating my newsfeed:
Facebook screenshot by Shannon Ashley. Original poster’s name intentionally omitted.
The comments are predictable too. Things like, “That’s terrifying — I have been more scared of this than anything else! I’m glad you are all safe. I am so worried about this stuff, Iike so so worried... it’s real.”
Or, “Omg I can’t believe this happened! This is one of my biggest fears, and the fact it’s happening in our own back yard... it makes me not want to go anywhere and just do homeschooling forever. We were at Capital Mall today as well! I’m just glad you are all ok...you can’t help people anymore it seems like. You just never know who to trust.”
Posts like these fill up with comments from — mostly white and well-off — moms all in agreement that this was a human trafficking plot, and that nobody is safe. It’s a seemingly natural reaction to a frightening story, sure. There’s just one problem.
It’s not a human trafficking story at all. | https://medium.com/honestly-yours/read-this-before-sharing-another-human-trafficking-post-on-facebook-a44b7b104699 | ['Shannon Ashley'] | 2020-09-09 17:50:50.653000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Society', 'Culture', 'Crime', 'Social Media'] |
Heroku Review Apps: Custom Domains | The app.json file
An app.json must exist in your project directory to enable Review Apps. This configuration file specifies how each app should be built. At Clutter, our app.json file looks like this:
Sample app.json file with scripts specified
The app.json file gives us the ability to specify a postdeploy script to run after the release of the app has succeeded, and a pr-predestroy script that will deregister the domain when the Review App is destroyed.
The postdeploy script
In our postdeploy script, we utilize the open source Ruby gems dnssimple-ruby and platform-api to make the API calls for the domain and subdomain configurations.
The platform-api gem is provided by Heroku to interact with its platform via code, rather than manually. We use it to tell Heroku that Review Apps should not only be available at clutter-pr-NN.herokuapp.com, but also available at a custom domain pr-NN.clutter.com.
The dnssimple-ruby gem is provided by DNSimple to set up CNAME records via code, rather than manually. We use it to tell DNSimple to create a CNAME for the new custom domain pr-NN.clutter.com.
The resulting script looks like:
An example postdeploy script that will be executed through our app.json configuration
The pr pre-destroy script
Our pr-predestory script handles the cleanup of the CNAME record in our DNSimple account so that it is not polluted with old records.
A sample pr pre-destroy script that cleans up our CNAME records
Heroku Review Apps are a powerful tool to help our engineering and product teams here at Clutter continuously deliver new features. With the postdeploy script capability, we can continue to add more functionality to Review Apps such as third party integrations with other services.
If you enjoyed this article, please share with your friends. If you are looking to join an amazing team of Ruby developers, check our current openings at Clutter. | https://medium.com/clutter-engineering/heroku-review-apps-with-custom-domains-8edfc0a2b153 | ['Gilbert Fu'] | 2019-04-16 20:18:11.086000+00:00 | ['DNS', 'Heroku', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Ruby on Rails', 'Custom Domain'] |
When the Night Falls | The last thread
of honey-hued sunlight
stretches across
the edge of sky,
reluctantly fades in
the thickening darkness.
Hesitant birds
loiter on the
vibrant branches
and hum in the
wavering cool air.
Their silhouettes cast
neat shadows,
against the translucent night canvas,
like dark-colored cutouts
on flimsy paper,
with the finest detail. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/when-the-night-falls-db9e49f98af | ['Lorna Ye'] | 2019-09-03 17:23:37.024000+00:00 | ['Moments', 'Poetry', 'Nature', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Life'] |
God Doesn’t Work | Not in the way 99.0% think He does. And by God, I mean whatever you choose to believe in and the name you call it.
How God Works In A Twisted Way. LOL
In this day and age, it’s a pity that people believe or think about “God” as this life saver who just swoops in and takes care of your problems in an instant. Many men use this as an excuse not to put in work; it’s their own reason for being a lazy swine.
Men weren’t made to be lazy and God won’t do the work you are meant to do. Men who choose to be lazy should understand that there is a place for God and a place for Man. The same reason you can’t ascend into heaven to take the place of God is why He won’t come down to earth to take your place.
This is something I experienced firsthand with my dad. He was and still is the best physiotherapist I know. Every case that was brought to him was always treated. One of the feats he performed in my face was making a man who the whole hospital had left for dead walk again. While he was doing it, everyone mocked and watched but he kept on. Everyday in his ward, bones cracked, men shouted and cried. I always felt the man’s pain because my dad never took pity as the cracked his bones. But you know what?
On the day my dad told him he would walk for the first time the next day in over ten years, the man didn’t believe it. He laughed his head off and my dad bade him goodbye. On the next day, everyone gathered in the ward and the man stood up on his feet and walked unaided. You should have seen the tears, smiles and laughter in people’s face.
That was how good my dad was in his field but you know what? He kept hoping God would help him develop his company. I mean how is that possible! A company you don’t have the slightest idea how to run? A company you are not even sure you are ready to start? A company you don’t have a plan for? How will God help exactly?
The fact is that God doesn’t work when a man won’t work. The reason for this is that God needs our hands and feet on the earth before He can work. Let’s look at some examples.
When He wanted to save the Israelites, did He come down from heaven? He called Moses to do the job. When He wanted to redeem the world to Himself, did He just perform one magic and everyone got redeemed? No. In fact, He had to send his son in human form to do the work. I hope you see the pattern there. God won’t work if there is no man willing to work.
Believe me, if Jesus came in spirit form, then I think we all know that nobody will listen to a spirit. Just seeing a spirit will send chills down your spine let alone a talking and walking one.
Therefore, as a man with a vision, stop expecting God to swoop down in his blazing chariot and make your vision a reality. It falls on you to be at work then God will show up. You should be willing to take the dive; no, you should have dived already and know that God is already putting things on the ground for you to land safely.
God is a miracle worker; there’s no doubt about that but miracles happen when there is something in place for it. Every miracle you have read or heard about had a work done by a human and then, God showed up. Shall we cite examples?
The fall of Jericho’s wall. Christ birth. Ruth saving the Jews. Water from a rock in the wilderness for the Israelites. David overcoming Goliath.
Now, I am not here to preach about Christianity; I am speaking to all males. Don’t and stop expecting for miracles without your input. For your vision to become a reality, you need to work for it. If God will show up, it will be at places where you have no say anymore. Yes, that is how he works.
God is already at work where you have no say
God doesn’t work when man doesn’t do his part. As a male, you were created to conquer, rule and overcome and achieving any of those three things requires you get off your buttocks and put in work. Alexander the great wouldn’t have conquered if all he did was think about how he was going to conquer without actually conquering.
If all you do is think about your ideas, then that is what it will continue to be. IDEAS. God won’t swoop in to take that idea and establish it in real life. If your idea needs investors, get in the grind and search for them. Learn how to write business plan and keep moving. If you dream of building a website that will knock out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp at once but you are too lazy to learn how to code or can’t hire someone to do it for you, stop expecting God to perform miracles for the website.
You wouldn’t be reading this article presently had someone not put in work to create what you are reading it on — the smartphone, laptop or PC, iPhone, tablet, website, network etc. The world is waiting to use your service or product; you just have to put in work and let God do what He does best and what is that? HE SHOWS UP AND WORKS IN PLACES YOU CAN’T.
Be a MAN ON THE RISE. | https://medium.com/@man-on-a-rise/god-doesnt-work-5ddb99b15c8f | [] | 2020-12-12 14:41:06.740000+00:00 | ['Manhood', 'Masculinity', 'Masculine', 'Spirituality', 'Self Improvement'] |
Don’t Follow JavaScript Trends | Rewriting Your Code
Some time ago, a cover for an imaginary book surfaced on the @ThePracticalDev Twitter account. Back in 2016, it was fashionable to make fun of the ever-changing world of JavaScript in a bit of a different manner than folks do today.
Psst, I’ve invented the time machine (don’t tell anyone)! Let’s quickly travel back in time to 2016. SWOOSH! We are there. The JavaScript landscape looks like this:
If you’re using a JavaScript framework or want to use a framework, Angular.js is probably something you’d choose. But the news about Angular 2 that’ll make you rewrite almost everything is just around the corner. Also, this new kid on the block — React.js — is coming up and getting ripe. Of course, there’s Vanilla JS, and no-framework-folks are there. Not using a framework is still a popular opinion in 2016, but it’s slowly fading.
Knowing all of this, what would you do? Which path would you choose, and why? The answer might seem obvious now that you come from the future: React. But if you decided Angular.js, a couple of years down the road, you’ll get tempted to use new Angular versions and have to rewrite your code. If you chose to use React, you’d be a lucky winner since everyone is riding the React train nowadays.
Now, you get tempted to drop class components and use functional components with those sweet, sweet hooks, right? Well, at least it’s not a whole new API to learn as with the Angular.js — Angular 2 change, right?
So many choices, so little time. What to do?
It doesn’t matter what we choose now or what we chose back in the day. We’ll still get tempted or have to rewrite our code later down the road. Reasons to do it might vary:
Your company was using [insert framework name] and is unable to hire new folks
You feel the old solution isn;t working out for you anymore, and you want something new
You succumbed to the industry trends and want to use the latest and greatest
Unless we break the cycle. | https://medium.com/better-programming/do-not-follow-javascript-trends-ca2f0dc19ec1 | ['Nikola Đuza'] | 2020-06-30 12:56:38.745000+00:00 | ['Angular', 'Nodejs', 'JavaScript', 'React', 'Programming'] |
Russia forming coalition of neo-Nazi forces across Europe | On the eve of World War 2, only fascist Italy was closer to Nazi Germany than the Soviet Union, but the interests and ambitions of the two major players collided into a bloody confrontation that claimed tens of millions of lives. Meanwhile, Moscow’s genetic and historical sympathy toward nationalism and the highest manifestation of misanthropic ideology, Nazism, hasn’t gone anywhere.
The modern ideology in Russia is nothing but a hypertrophied symbiosis of Orthodoxy, communism and … Nazism. So there’s no surprise that officials in Moscow regularly receive at the highest level delegations representing a range of fringe organizations — from Taliban terrorists to separatists from various world regions (one of such recent events was entitled “Dialogue of Nations. The right of peoples to self-determination and building a multipolar world”). Members of political parties professing ultra-right views are also frequent guests in Russia.
This week, representatives of the Alternative for Germany party, which may well be renamed to Shame on Germany due to a number of scandals around it, met with Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov.
The meeting was held at the Metropol Hotel — coincidentally, the same site where in October 2018 someone secretly recorded conversations between Russian military intelligence operatives and Italian politicians with the Lega Nord. That recording has ultimately confirmed earlier allegations of the Italian party being funded by Moscow, through oil deals with the Italian energy company Eni, where tens of millions were being raised on discounts.
Incidentally, the AfD has a similar reputation as Lega Nord as a party fully supported by Russia. The visit to Moscow of party co-chairman Tino Chrupalla and their foreign policy expert Armin-Paulus Hampel, was clearly not about “opening a new chapter in relations between Russia and Germany,” as politicians claimed, but rather about coordinating financial issues.
It’s quite remarkable that the visit of this political force to Moscow was accompanied by yet another scandal involving an assassination attempt, namely, the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. That is, against the background of the traditional attempt by the Russian intelligence to get rid of the adversary through poisoning, a number of European politicians, whose native Germany has ultimately become Navalny’s salvation, were shaking hands with Lavrov in the Metropol…
Although, this is no surprise either — after all, AfD member Bjorn Hocke, for instance, considers the monuments to the “Holocaust” a “shame”, while the party’s founder Alexander Gauland calls on supporters to be proud of the successes of the Wehrmacht soldiers in both world wars. So some petty poisoning is nothing for them to consider seriously!
On the other hand, a similar manifestation of hypocrisy is being observed in Russia, where a Chechen terrorist Abdulakh Anzorov, who had slayed a French teacher, was buried just the other day with full honors with no condemnation of his crime in mainstream media.
As for France, we shouldn’t forget that ultra-right forces from the National Association (formerly known as National Front), led by Marine Le Pen, have long been acting in Russia’s interests and recently even strengthened their positions through the Yellow Vests campaign. Moreover, Marine Le Pen, unlike the leaders of Lega Nord and Alternative for Germany, doesn’t even hide the fact of being sponsored by the Russian Federation.
Doesn’t it look like the gradual formation of a new neo-Nazi coalition across Europe, under the Russian patronage? I believe it does… Indeed, Germany and France will start their election campaigns in 2021 and 2022, respectively, where Russian agents will undoubtedly meddle. This will be interference at all levels, from financing puppet parties, to direct meddling in the electoral process, which has already been practiced more than once.
Now we can’t bur recall a famous phrase of U.S. politician Huey Long, which is mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill: “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag!” | https://medium.com/@zloyodessit2.0/russia-forming-coalition-of-neo-nazi-forces-across-europe-f922b70f068d | ['Злой Одессит'] | 2020-12-11 16:13:45.552000+00:00 | ['Germany', 'Russia', 'France', 'Nazis', 'Europe'] |
Haiku Growing Tree | Haiku Growing Tree by Mirela Popoveniuc, December 2020
Sit on your butt or
stand up and watch it in the
mirror now, yes, you.
The tree rings show the
wisdom you have been working.
This empire is yours.
Growing and shrinking,
living, doing, feeling. Yes,
you, I fancy you! | https://medium.com/@mirela.popoveniuc/haiku-growing-tree-e9c99539ba3d | ['Mirela Popoveniuc'] | 2020-12-22 18:41:17.722000+00:00 | ['Naive Art', 'Butts', 'Growing', 'Body Positivity', 'Trees'] |
Aim for the root | ‘Once I felt like glass, then I improved and felt like wood. But now, at this very blessed moment, I feel like a tree. Rooted and ancient, branches pointed towards the sky.’ | https://medium.com/@truth-teller/once-i-felt-like-glass-then-i-improved-and-felt-like-wood-8be5a6bd9fcb | [] | 2020-12-03 15:53:43.571000+00:00 | ['Roots', 'Quotes', 'Sequoia National Park', 'Self', 'Trees'] |
A Green ‘Catch 22’: Cleve Hill Solar Project Clashes with Rewilding | A Green ‘Catch 22’: Cleve Hill Solar Project Clashes with Rewilding
As renewables projects grow ever bigger in scale, the desire for clean energy is rubbing up against the needs of wildlife.
There’s a lot of talk of a “Green Revolution” for the post COVID-19 world. What does this mean?
With the UK economy likely entering an historic recession, there’s a search for ideas to kickstart the country. A green recovery is one driven by investments in clean energy to tackle carbon emissions, lower air pollution and restore nature. A noble goal.
So then, it’s “all systems go”, solar panels in every field, a wind turbine on every hill, right?
It’s what renewables advocates have been telling us we should do for years. But this week something weird happened. There was a glitch in the matrix, you might say.
The Green Party, RPSB, Greenpeace and the Campaign to Protect Rural England came out in opposition to a proposed new solar farm in Kent. If that didn’t seem strange enough, Friends of the Earth then came out in support of it.
A schism in the green movement? What’s going on?
Salt marsh — will Cleve Hill ever be restored to something like this? (Photo by Biel Morro on Unsplash)
The proposed solar “power plant” (as opponents are calling it — apparently “solar farm” is too bucolic for such a monster) would see Cleve Hill in Kent host almost one million solar panels plus batteries (one million of these too, according to the Green Party) over 900 acres (600 football pitches) of Kentish farmland.
Green NGOs oppose it because it is just too BIG. Kent Wildlife Trust claim “significant numbers of Brent geese, lapwing and golden plover use the farmland. Marsh harrier breed and feed in the area, and may be displaced by the presence of the solar panels.” Local activists say the farmland should be restored to salt marsh, not turned into a solar plant.
Most of these NGOs support the construction of solar farms. And solar clearly has its place, especially on rooftops. But as soon as panels move off rooftops and into the fields, whether the panels are all together on a single, huge farm or spread out across many small ones, they still mean taking the same amount of land from nature. In fact, given that there is a minimum set of electrical equipment and power lines for a solar farm, a larger one is likely to be more land efficient than a smaller one. Cleve Hill has made many people realise for the first time that grid-scale solar power is a land-hungry pursuit.
In the same week, EDF was also in the news for publishing its planning application for Sizewell C, a proposed carbon-copy of Hinkley Point C. Chris Packham (of whom I’m generally a huge fan) and the RSPB splashed all over Twitter their opposition to Sizewell C. A quick search reveals Chris has never tweeted about Cleve Hill. This doesn’t seem to add up given the environmental impact of Cleve Hill compared to Sizewell C.
Kirsty Gogan (Energy for Humanity) responded “If @RSPBMinsmere and @suffolkwildlife don’t want #SZC (7 hectares) and want #solar to supply the same amount of energy as #SZC this would require 77 solar projects the size of #CleveHill or a total 298 square kilometres…Achieving #netzero means hard choices.”
Note: My understanding is that Sizewell C will occupy 32 hectares, not 7, but the point stands.
The peak output of Cleve Hill would be 350 MW; that’s more than nine times less than Sizewell C’s 3260 MW. Not only that, but UK government calculated the average capacity factor for solar in UK in 2018 was 10.8%; i.e. most of the time, the plant would deliver a tiny fraction of that headline 350 MW number.
There is a paradox here: a drive to renewables to save nature is itself putting pressure on nature. And with Greenpeace facing off against Friends of the Earth, it seems green NGOs don’t yet know how to resolve it.
With anti-nuclearism such a core part of green identity, environmental NGOs may never see the solution to the paradox lies with nuclear power. The general public, on the other hand, would probably quickly grasp that using 32 hectares of land for reliable nuclear power is better than 29800 hectares for intermittent solar power.
Since reading George Monbiot’s book Feral, I’ve been hooked on the idea of rewilding; giving land back to wildlife and restoring natural systems. Unlike George Monbiot, I see us achieving rewilding through science, technology and progress rather than through de-growth and “going back to the land”.
The energy density of nuclear fuels allow us to power advanced civilisation on a tiny footprint. Not only that, but plentiful clean electricity could unlock vertical farming and other land-saving (but energy-intensive) tech. Getting this message out is hard when the rise of TikTok and Instagram has made the 7-second memory of a goldfish seem like a high bar to aim for.
I put together the below infographic, which you can also download as a pdf here.
Get sharing, I guess? | https://medium.com/generation-atomic/a-green-catch-22-when-clean-energy-and-rewilding-clash-781ca996ee47 | ['David Watson'] | 2020-06-05 14:24:58.735000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Nuclear', 'Technology', 'Solar Energy', 'Environment'] |
Top Javascript Courses Online for beginners to advanced learners 2020 | JavaScript is a must learn programming language for those who want to become web developers/App developers and take their careers to next level. And, to help you in this, we list some of the top JavaScript courses in this article.
These courses are not only comprehensive but affordable as well. Curated from various resources, these courses are 100% online, do give a look and enroll if you find them interesting!
For each course we have added stats that change overtime. Kindly go to the course page to view the real-time data.
Following are the top JavaScript courses
These JavaScript courses are lined up in random order, we took course ratings, subscribers count and the content into consideration before selecting.
This is the most up to date JavaScript online at the moment. Created by two of the most popular instructors Colt Steele and Stephen Grider. This course was published in 2020. Within a short span of time, it has been subscribed by over 16,000 learners.
Absolutely anyone with no prior knowledge of JS whatsoever can enroll in the course. All you require is the willingness to learn.
Here’s what you learn
Learn how to build beautiful web apps to add to your portfolio
Become job ready by acquiring the deep knowledge of JS
Learn how to use Node JS and Express
How to create your own custom testing framework and thereby automating the code testing
How to create your very own physics-based JavaScript game
How Javascript developers work on daily basis
Learn about async and arrow functions
Some of the course stats:
Over 16,000 students
52 hours of on demand video
344 downloadable resources
4 articles to read
Rating of 4.7/5 after 2089 ratings
This is one of the best selling JavaScript courses on Udemy. The instructor assumes that you are a complete beginner, so you learn everything from scratch!
Course stats and content:
Around 71,000 subscribers
Course feedback score 4.6/5 after 11,000+ ratings
17.5 hours of on demand video
113 total lectures
10 articles and 13 supplemental resorces
You get life time access to the course once you enroll. The course can be accessed through Desktop, Mobile and TV at any time you want.
Another Javascript course that teaches you the language from scratch. You will find it very interesting and fast paced.
Course stats and content:
Total 23,650 students as of January 19, 2018
Course feedback 4.2/5 after 1100+ ratings
2.5 hours long course
49 total lectures
13 supplemental resources and 3 articles
Another gem of a course that will not only teach you JS from beginning but also how to build real world JS apps. We highly recommend this course!
Another gem of a course that will not only teach you JS from beginning but also how to build real world JS apps. We highly recommend this course!
Course content and stats:
Total 37,225 students
Feedback score 4.5/5 after 1100+ ratings
12.5 hours of on demand video
Total 85 lectures
79 coding exercises, 1 article and 9 supplemental resources
Other Notable JavaScript Courses
Another Top JavaScript Course => JavaScript from Beginner to Expert by Arkadiusz Włodarczyk
by Arkadiusz Włodarczyk Accelerated ES6 JavaScript Training by Maximilian Schwarzmüller
by Maximilian Schwarzmüller Understanding the Weird Parts by Anthony Alicea
by Anthony Alicea JavaScript the Basics — JavaScript for Beginners by Rob Merrill
by Rob Merrill Javascript for Beginners Learn by Doing Practical Exercises by Edwin Diaz
Once again, these course are from Udemy at the moment, we will add more resources here shortly. Once you enroll in these javascript classes you get lifetime access. And, the best part, Instructors constantly update these courses so that they meet the present day standards. You get those updates for free, no recurring charges at all.
Conclusion
The above classes are the best for anyone who wants to master javascript from all aspects, right from affordability to content they cover. We highly recommend that you consider a course from the above resources and strengthen your knowledge of programming websites and apps.
Hope you find this post helpful and you take the right Javascript course. We look forward to adding more posts like this in coming days, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get the updates!
Happy learning. | https://medium.com/@programminggirl/top-javascript-courses-online-for-beginners-to-advanced-learners-2020-e70d38798c3d | ['Anna Nichols'] | 2020-12-04 13:39:15.383000+00:00 | ['Javascript Frameworks', 'Javascript Development', 'Javascript Tips', 'Javascript30', 'JavaScript'] |
DeFi + Universa = United.FI | Universa Blockchain Founder and CEO, Business angel, accredited investor, serial entrepreneur, addicted to travel and decentralized tokenized economy | https://medium.com/@borodich/defi-universa-united-fi-b70eaf67ed68 | ['Alexander Borodich'] | 2021-01-10 20:27:55.824000+00:00 | ['Defi', 'Universa', 'Ethereum', 'Défi'] |
How AI Could Help Solve the Last Mile Delivery Problem | Photo by Drew Beamer
E-commerce, which already accounts for nine percent of total retail sales, is growing at a double-digit clip according to the U.S. Census Bureau. What’s also growing at a rapid rate? The use of artificial intelligence in business. Here’s how AI could help solve e-commerce’s last mile delivery problem.
Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business, estimates 11 billion packages will be delivered in 2018, and that number will jump to 16 billion by 2020. The consultants further expect e-commerce will represent two-thirds of that volume. After all, e-commerce provides:
Wider choice
Easier price comparison
Added convenience
Yet a challenge for retailers is that consumers are also expecting ever faster delivery of what they’ve ordered. The last mile delivery problem is that retailers need to efficiently distribute products to consumers globally, often relying on external partners (FedEx, UPS, mom-and-pop delivery service in random white vans) to get that package into the customers’ hands. And not everyone has the budget or tech to try out delivery drones or robots!
How AI Could Help
Amazon is obviously the behemoth player in this area, and it is going to have its own fleet of local vans (operated by independent companies) on the roads soon. This leaves other businesses looking for ways to compete while relying on a transportation system that was not built to meet the needs of rapidly evolving e-commerce. Obstacles include:
Current system’s cost efficiencies focused on long-distance travel
Inability to address fluctuating demand
Shortage of local delivery services
Little overlap between national and local transportation providers
Difficulty coordinating efforts on a smaller scale to remain profitable.
As, the Strategy& consultants observed, “Profitability remains highly dependent on two key factors: (1) route density — how many packages can be delivered on a given delivery run, and (2) the drop size — how many packages or items are delivered at each stop.”
At the same time, customers don’t want to pay much for shipping — even same day shipping. According to Small Business Trends, 28% of online shoppers will abandon their cart if the shipping price seems excessive.
Yet, having artificial intelligence doing the coordination and managing of last mile delivery can make a positive difference. With AI doing powerful computing and machine learning analyzing and observing historical trends and predicting patterns, options could be aggregated with the AI doing a quick cost-benefit analysis to determine how to get that package delivered.
AI could help route deliveries more efficiently, which is key to profitability. Along with streamlining processes, AI could help e-retailers and their transportation partners to better predict shipments based on historical data, which could help delivery services to plan ahead to ride out the fluctuations between a Black Friday shipping period and say a dead-zone in mid-February.
Along with AI impacting the last-mile delivery problem, blockchain too may come into play. For instance, it could provide the backbone for an exchange seeing last-mile delivery services bid on packages in real-time. Blockchain could also offer the security retailers and transportation companies seek on the back-end.
Studies show that the final mile can be at the root of one-third of shipping costs. With delivery and route management algorithms powered by AI driving logistics innovation, streamlining processes, and finding efficiencies, the last mile delivery problem could become a less daunting one. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/how-ai-could-help-solve-the-last-mile-delivery-problem-f01823d0cd30 | ['Jeff Meade'] | 2020-02-01 04:15:17.612000+00:00 | ['Delivery', 'AI', 'Machine Learning', 'Ecommerce', 'Marketing'] |
How to prepare to hike Sigiriya | Believed to be the capital of the 5th-century monarch of Sri Lanka, Sigiriya is a well-preserved example of urban planning of the time. Fittingly Sigiriya is now a world heritage site in recognition of its amazingly urban design concepts that took into consideration the natural elements at the site and the existing lay of the land.
Planning the Visit
It will be a pity to make a rushed visit to Sigiriya as there is so much to see and understand. Reading up on the site should help to put it in perspective. The success of spending a day there will depend on where visitors set off from as it takes at least four hours to get to Sigiriya from Colombo. Arrive early to beat the crowds and the heat and to have the time to walk around. Spend some time at the onsite museum to further understand the site. School holidays and long weekends should be avoided as Sigiriya tends to get very crowded.
Getting There
Staying overnight in Sigiriya and visiting the archaeological site the next day is the most advisable course of action for those wishing to spend a day at the site. It takes over 4 hours by car from Colombo to get to Sigiriya although the route through the Colombo — Negombo expressway is said to be faster. However, it takes only 30 minutes by air from Colombo and perhaps this mode of transport should be considered if spending the day there. Sigiriya can also be reached by public bus, minibuses, vans and tuk-tuks. Trains call at Dambulla from where visitors can take a bus.
Getting about
The surroundings of Sigiriya can be easily explored by car, a 4WD, by bicycle and tuk-tuk. Bicycles can be hired from hotels and many other places. Rates have to be negotiated before getting into a tuk-tuk.
The best time to Visit
The nicest time to visit Sigiriya is between October and February when it is dry, and temperatures are in the high and mid-twenties. The rest of the year the weather is hot and muggy. May to September is very wet due to the south-west monsoon.
Accommodation
Sigiriya, Dambulla 20 km away and Habarana 15 km away have a selection of accommodation to suit backpackers to posh tourists. They range from luxurious hotels with spas and pools to simple and cheap guesthouses and home stays. Look to stay at the best hotels in Sigiriya and choose a prominent local hotel the likes of Sigiriya Jungles to enjoy easy access to the archaeological site.
Travel Tips
If planning to spend only a day at the site buy tickets early from the Central Cultural Fund offices that allow the visitor to enter and photograph Sigiriya and other archaeological sites in Sri Lanka. They have offices in Colombo and four other cities including in Sigiriya itself. Don’t forget the sunscreen, sunglasses and a hat and remember to stay hydrated. Other things that may be useful are a bug repellent and a long-sleeved shirt to cover up during the day. A sturdy pair of walking shoes is a necessity. For the best photos of Sigiriya rock, climb Pidurangala a rock a few kilometres north of Sigiriya almost opposite the rock and of a similar height.
Exploring Sigiriya
Start the visit to the onsite modern museum. It will help to understand how the site was originally planned. If getting to the top of the rock to see the frescoes and panoramic views is the priority, do that first before the day gets too hot and as it may take some time. Once down from the rock give some attention to the extensive archaeological remains at its foot where water gardens with ponds, channels and gravity fed fountains, the cobra hood cave, the boulder gardens with an entranceway through a boulder ‘archway’ and a 5-metre-long hand carved seat in a comfy nook continue to amaze visitors. Other interesting things to see are the moat and old city walls. | https://medium.com/@peaushan/how-to-prepare-to-hike-sigiriya-ec1d7c9284e7 | ['Lucifer Goodman'] | 2019-03-18 06:55:36.278000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Sri Lanka', 'Vacation', 'Sigiriya'] |
Welcome To My City Part:-1. | The people of my city called 'Amdavadis”. Amdavadis proudly boast of it as the safest city in the world, the main reason being…. it is a dry state.
Amdavadis are foody people. They love food. Ahmedabad is famous for Gujarati food.
Here, are some of the food items which are widely famous. Khakhra, khaman dhokla, Paani Poori, Dalvada, samosa, jalebi and fafada, pav bhaji, vadapav and many more.
As food items, we have so many festivals to celebrate. For example, Uttarayan, Diwali, Navratri, Holi, Janmashtami and Ganesh Utsav and so many others.
In Ahmedabad there are so many places to visit and explore.
(1) Sabarmati Ashram:- Undoubtedly, the most popular landmark of Ahmedabad, Sabarmati Ashram is a colony established by Mahatma Gandhi to initiate many activities like khadi Udyog, animal husbandry and others. Tourists come here today to look at the famous hand-operated charkha, eyeglasses, wooden slippers, books, letters and other memorabilia of Mahatma Gandhi.
There are so many other things to do in the Ashram.
(2) Sarkhej Roja:- To witness the rich legacy of the Muslim rulers who ruled Ahmedabad, you should visit Sarkhej Roza. This is a stunning complex of tombs and mosques, built around an artificial lake. A major archaeological landmark of Ahmedabad, Sarkhej Roza has elements of Persian and Mughal designs in its construction.
By Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash
(3) Kankaria Lake:- This is one of my favourite spot. This is the place where we used to go with our friends on weekends.
This lake is a favourite spot for picnics, leisure walks, recreational activities, evening strolls, and fun. The lakefront has been developed into a top entertainment zone with attractions like boating, zoo, toy train, water rides, water park, food stalls, Kids City, and other entertainment facilities.
In December, Kankaria Carnival is held here, which is a fabulous cultural mix of many events like magic shows, scuba diving, painting competitions, dog and horse show etc.
(4) Manek Chok:- This city square is the most famous area of Ahmedabad. It is a bustling vegetable market in the morning, jewellery market in the afternoon, and foodie destination in the night. It is surrounded by historic monuments and commercial buildings. If you love to try different food, I urge you to visit this place. You will find each and every famous cuisine of Ahmedabad in this place.
(5)Jhulta Minara:-A very mysterious but still most attractive landmark of Ahmedabad is the Jhulta Minara or Shaking Minarets. They are so called because when one minaret is shaken, the other minaret begins to vibrate on its own. This fact has puzzled archaeologists since a long time, and research could not yield the answers to this day. Apart from the mystery attached to it, the two minarets are the most beautiful piece of architecture, with intricate carvings.
Ahmedabad is a city of people and food. It is the city where you can find your home. There are so many other things to do and visit. I will cover other important places of my city in the next part of the article.
I hope that after reading this, you will might make a trip to Ahmedabad. | https://medium.com/show-your-city/welcome-to-my-city-part-1-103e627f7281 | ['Sahil Patel'] | 2020-12-18 09:11:19.314000+00:00 | ['Medium', 'Travel', 'My City', 'Ahmedabad', 'Show Your City'] |
First Thoughts on Kaggle | About two weeks ago, I registered for my first Kaggle competition, the Mercedes-Benz Greener Manufacturing contest. My code can be found here, and a log of what I attempted can be found here. Here’s my first impression of Kaggle:
The Learning Curve
Entering the contest, my only knowledge in machine learning came from MIT’s introductory class (6.036). So, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Kaggle contests are perfectly accessible to those with minimal prior experience. This is largely due to Kaggle’s kernels, which allow the more experienced Kaggle users to publicly share their code with others. Kernels allow even those completely new to machine learning to be competitive in the rankings — by simply copying code, anyone can achieve results at par with Kaggle veterans.
I found that from my attempts to improve code from kernels, I received a brief introduction to multiple concepts in machine learning, many of which I hope to write about more thoroughly in the future:
Gradient Boosted Trees
Hyperparameter Tuning
Dimensionality Reduction: PCA, ICA, tSNE, Logistic PCA, TSVD, GRP, SRP
Overfitting, K-fold cross validation, Out-of-fold predictions
Ensembling, Stacking, and Averaging
Sklearn Models: LassoLars, ElasticNet, etc.
Basic Feature Selection and Feature Engineering
Likelihood encoding (post-contest)
This contest seemed to me like a great way to quickly ‘learn by doing’. It would be hard to find any other resource online which facilitates learning concepts in data science as well as Kaggle does.
Unpredictability of the Leaderboard
As evidenced by the massive shakeup from the final rankings, the public leaderboard was entirely unreliable for predicting the private leaderboard: almost everyone in the lead throughout the contest dropped hundreds of ranks at the end. However, even cross-validation proved to be useless: my final model, evaluated with 5-fold CV, performed no better than my heavily-overfitted XGBoost model made on my 4th day.
Public and Private LB scores for my 36 submissions — a few past models made it over the bronze cutoff!
In the end, it turned out that there were reliable ways to test a model — for the most part, though, contestants (including me) weren’t thorough enough with evaluating their model’s performance.
Kaggle’s Contest Community
I have nothing but positive things to say about Kaggle’s community. User-submitted Kernels and threads about the competition do a lot to encourage collaboration between the contestants. During the contest, many users worked together in open forums, improving each others’ models and discussing properties of the dataset. This competition, one of the many results of the contestants’ combined efforts was the discovery of 32 y-values from the test dataset, obtained through leaderboard probing.
Conclusion
I found participating in this contest to be very enjoyable! While my final ranking (~1400th place) was a bit disappointing, the competition was extremely fun and allowed me to learn a lot, and I plan on becoming more active on Kaggle in the future. Please let me know if you have any feedback — perhaps more Kaggle write-ups will be coming soon. :) | https://towardsdatascience.com/first-thoughts-on-kaggle-326a6c4dc005 | ['Alex Yang'] | 2017-07-12 21:28:23.296000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Kaggle'] |
A Playlist for the End of the World | A Playlist for the End of the World
Music reflects the apocalyptic feel — and abiding hope — of the COVID-19 pandemic
Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash
As Covid-19 has continued to spread worldwide — and much of the United States’ population remains under lockdown, many people are turning to music for solace.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, music streaming is up overall. But the kind of music we’re listening to has changed, too. Out are catchy, upbeat pop tunes, and genres like hip hop. In are chiller, moodier songs.
This makes a lot of sense. In the early days of the pandemic, there was a suggestion that streaming services should play happy songs to help people through the crisis and lift their moods. This prompted an immediate backlash, as artists and listeners alike pointed out that listening to happy music in challenging times tends to only make things worse.
People experiencing anything — positive or negative — want to hear music that accurately reflects and builds on their experience.
Right now, Covid-19 can make it feel like we’re facing the end of the world, or an apocalyptic (or at least radically changed) version of it. So I’ve made a playlist to match that collective feeling: a Playlist for the End of the World.
The playlist was originally inspired by R.E.M.’s The End of the World as We Know It. R.E.M. has been my favorite band for a long time, and in many ways this is the quintessential apocalypse song.
It’s also one of those songs that, 1,000 years hence, I could see people analyzing for its hidden, prescient messages--like Nostradamus, but with more grunge influences.
There’s nothing specifically about a pandemic in the song, but there’s plenty of other apocalyptic symbolism to choose from — hurricanes, earthquakes, war. The song also captures the idea of the apocalypse becoming political, which we’ve surely seen with Covid-19.
Next we move to the present (or nearly) with the Decemberists, who are a bit like a modern-day R.E.M. Their Calamity Song — an upbeat pop tune about the end times — is from the King is Dead, which was the band’s attempt to make their own version of R.E.M.’s iconic album Reckoning. R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck evens plays on several of the album’s tracks.
Keeping with the theme of apocalypse-tinged semi-love songs, we go back a bit in time to 1980s one-hit-wonder Nena, and their classic 99 Red Balloons. The song was originally written in German, and captured the attention of American audiences with its frantic pace and synth-backed vocals once it was translated into English in 1984.
The translation also revealed its true meaning — a couple playfully releases red balloons, which are mistaken for an incoming squadron of enemy planes, and prompt a nuclear war. The song was apparently inspired by a concert where the band’s guitarist saw balloons released, realized that they looked like a UFO, and wondered what would happen if a bunch of balloons drifted over the Berlin Wall.
Going back even a little further, we get to Bob Dylan’s Talkin’ World War III Blues. It’s also about nuclear war, and details — through the singer’s dreams — what it would be like to wander around after the apocalypse had arrived.
The protagonist muses about life after war, and wanders through a “lonesome town” that is forever changed by calamity. I found myself involuntarily humming this while walking around the empty streets of San Francisco and documenting them as part of my work as a photographer.
Interestingly, many of the songs on this list reference the apocalypse in the form of a dream. Talkin’ World War III Blues is explicitly about a dream (perhaps, the lyrics suggest, a madman’s dream) about the end times. Calamity Song starts with the lyrics “Had a dream…”. And parts of It’s the End of the World as we Know It, including the iconically weird line “Birthday Party! Cheesecake! Jelly bean! Boom!” were inspired by Michael Stipe’s dream about a post-apocalyptic birthday party.
Before, the end times were only accessible as part of a dream, or a departure from reality. Now, the reality feels more and more present for us.
Next up is CCR’s iconic Bad Moon Rising. The song has plenty of references to specific elements of the apocalypse, including hurricanes, floods and the like.
But the spookiest part is the non-specific idea of a “bad moon”. It captures the feeling of something creepy and poorly understood waiting outside your home to “take your life”. Covid-19 has a similar all-present, barely-understood, creepy feel. And the line “Don’t go around tonight” captures the feeling of staying locked down to avoid this poorly understood threat.
The Clash’s London Calling is another great apocalypse song that many people don’t realize is about the end times. It blends elements of World War 2 imagery of sheltering underground to avoid the blitz with the concept of a new (presumably nuclear) war.
The title likely refers to the BBC World Service’s “London Calling” radio program, and captures the idea of humanity making a list-ditch communication (in this care, to the underworld, which references either hell, or people locked down underground) in the face of a catastrophic event.
Towards the end of the playlist, we take a more positive turn with Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, another song about nuclear war. Many songs on the list assume the end times will come in the form of nuclear annihilation. This likely reflects the climate in which they were written — when this felt like the primary threat, rather than the slow burn of contagion. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
I know it sounds strange to say that a song with lyrics like “I walked ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard” has a positive message. But the ultimate conclusion of the song is that the end times have not yet come — they are avoidable, through collective action and resistance. The protagonist concludes by saying:
I’m a-going back out ’fore the rain starts a-falling…
And I’ll tell it, and speak it, and think it, and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking
But I’ll know my song well before I start singing
This is a message of resilience, and defiance. The apocalypse is imminent, but the protagonist doesn’t give in to the end times. They resolve to do whatever they can, for as long as they can, to resist it — to “stand on the water until I start sinking”. There’s also a concept of collective, organized resistance, with the idea of knowing your song well before you start singing — to have a plan, and to move forward together in a coordinated way.
This captures the hope inherent in crisis. By banding together and collectively resisting the end times, we can prevent them from coming to pass. With Covid-19, I see this every day in the collective action of staying at home, the heroism of front-line workers and the medical/scientific community, and the resolve of volunteers who help their neighbors, shield the most vulnerable in our community, and help those around them through the pandemic.
This is ultimately a very positive message. And the song also captures a swing from the darkest imagery (“I met a young child/Beside a dead pony”) to a message of positivity, defiance, resolve and resilience. By banding together and never stopping the fight, we can make it through this impossible time together.
Finally, the playlist concludes with the Decemberists’ simple, rousing ballad Sons & Daughters. The song captures the joy of a community leaving lockdown, moving beyond an apocalyptic present, and rebuilding their lives on a new, promising shore.
Filling their mouths with cinnamon (to ward off nuclear fallout) and standing arms to shoulders, they disembark into a changed world that they resolve to make, once again, familiar and hopeful — to make home. Even the title Sons & Daughters suggests moving beyond an apocalyptic present, and making a better world for our children and those that come after us.
It’s a powerful message of hope for a better future, in the darkest of times. As we navigate a present that can feel radically changed and often apocalyptic, I hope that we too can band together, and move forward towards a better, brighter future. | https://medium.com/bay-area-covid-19-quarantine-log/a-playlist-for-the-end-of-the-world-3ed9cb6ff8e4 | ['Thomas Smith'] | 2020-04-19 14:46:53.222000+00:00 | ['Apocalypse', 'Playlist', 'Music', 'Covid 19', 'Resilience'] |
#WhereToBe: 3.31–4.6 | Each Friday, Epicenter features a special “where to be” post on their blog to make sure every day of the week has some sort of cultural event to check out. We hope that you all can come out into the community, learn, and commemorate some influential people and events around Boston! Have something coming up that you’d like to see here? Tweet us @epicentercom and follow the hashtag #WhereToBe.
Friday 3.31
Paint night at Dudley Café
Hosted by: Dudley Café
“Recreating a Frandy Suero Art Original “Remembering happiness”
-Canvas will be prepared in advance with the outline of the event image you see
-Guest will paint freely”
When:7pm
Where: Dudley Café 15 Warren St Boston, MA 02119
For more info, go to: https://www.facebook.com/events/257710134680011/
Saturday 4.1
Kreyol TRUNK SHOW Spring Fling Queen Tings
Hosted by: Iam Kréyol
“It’s that time of year again folks!!!
Join us for our first Kreyol Trunk Show of the season, where we will be celebrating with art, music, fashion and as always- good vibes. This spring we are featuring some dynamic women entrepreneurs:
Ayana Mack of Ayana Mack Designs,Mavis Hicks of Beauty N Simplicity
INTRODUCING the lovely Raspberry Beret Cornet of Kuronne, a NEW hat line that’s soon to be all the rave and many more!
We are having this 1st show of 2017 at our new studio space and would love for you to come check it out and support some local talent with great products. MEN, don’t feel left out. There will be accessories, designs and skin care just for you as well :)
Can’t wait to see you!”
When: 12pm
Where: Fairmount Innovation Lab 594 Columbia Road, Boston, Massachusetts 02125
For more info, go to: https://www.facebook.com/events/119503391918837/
Sunday 4.2
Boston Ballet presents: Kylián/Wings of Wax
Hosted by: Boston Ballet
“Boston Ballet’s spring season continues with Kylián/Wings of Wax, a trio of ballets by three choreographic masters. The program opens with George Balanchine’s charming and spirited Donizetti Variations set to excerpts from the composer’s final opera Don Sebastian, followed by Jiří Kylián’s hauntingly beautiful Wings of Wax with a score of musical selections by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, John Cage, Philip Glass, and J.S. Bach. Alexander Ekman’s delightful and witty Cacti closes the program accompanied by a collage of orchestral music performed by the Boston Ballet Orchestra and a string quartet. Kylián/Wings of Wax runs March 23–April 2 at the Boston Opera House.
Tickets start at $35. For more information, visit bostonballet.org or call 617.695.6955.”
When: 1pm
Where:Boston Opera House 539 Boston, MA 02111
For more info, go to: http://www.thebostoncalendar.com/events/boston-ballet-presents-kylian-wings-of-wax
Monday 4.3
Studios@Sorel Presents: Valerie Prosper Imparato
Hosted by: Tremont 647 & Sister Sorel
“Join us April 3rd in welcoming Valerie Prosper Imparato and her cultural works of art to Studios@Sorel.
(Co-hosted by Controlled Kaos Productions — http://www.controlledkaosproductions.com/events.html)
“Valerie Prosper Imparato is an attorney by trade with a passion for art. She is originally from Haiti but has lived all over the world. Valerie’s aesthetic draws from the diverse cultural influences in her upbringing, with an emphasis on East-African and Caribbean art. Valerie’s art teeters on the balance between the ethereal and the earthly; the fantasy of the whimsical and the perspective of the realist. She hopes to make art that inspires dialogue on issues of Faith, Race, immigration, feminism, and the plight of the oppressed. Her most recent work is focused on the surreal and themes of identity and self-awareness.””
When: 6pm
Where: Sister Sorel 645 Tremont Street Boston, MA 02118
For more info, go to: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/studiossorel-presents-valerie-prosper-imparato-tickets-33030326596?aff=es2
Tuesday 4.4
Zuesday! Queer Dance Party with DJ Leah V
Hosted by: ZuZu Bar
Celebrate Tuesdays at ZuZu
$3 Cover, 21+ only
“Leah McFly, aka LeahV, is an award-winning, Boston-based DJ/producer/event coordinator who has been working in nightlife for over ten years. Recently nominated a fifth time for a Boston Music Award (and a win in 2011/DJ Artist of the Year) , Leah is riding a wave of substantial and steady bookings to the top of the DJ game. After 16 years of learning the craft, she’s still out to perfect each set and give it her all at every party. ”
When: 10pm
Where: ZuZu Bar 474 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA 02139
For more info, go to: http://www.thebostoncalendar.com/events/zuesday-queer-dance-party-with-dj-leah-v--15
Wednesday 4.5
HOPE Inc Open Mic Night Featuring Shamoore & Howard
Hosted by: HOPE Inc
“We are so excited to announce our April feature!!! We have a treat for National Poetry Month!! We have not one but TWO features!! They’re a duo that will blow you AWAY!!! Please review their bio below !! Show them some love and support!!
“Howard dePass Jr. and Shamoore Simpson started Caretakers of Humanity in 2014 as a poem honoring a group of inspiring peers and has since developed into a community focused art collective. COH is a spoken word collective connecting with community leaders to build a network of communities where creative culture is highly valued. Whether it’s hosting community events or selling apparel to raise money for social justice issues, COH connects art to people to show the power of community.”
When: 7pm
Where: 15 Warren St, Roxbury, MA 02119–2465, United States
For more info, go to: https://www.facebook.com/events/1869413306615018/
Thursday 4.6
Quincy’s House of Comedy
Hosted by: Revel Bar’s
“This hilarious standup comedy show is only $5 @ Revel Bar’s “Quincy’s House of Comedy” Tickets can be purchased at http://quincyhouseofcomedy.brownpapertickets.com/ Show goes from 7pm — 8:30pm, doors open at 6pm. Must be 21. T accessible just two blocks from Quincy Center, lots of free parking as well, good food, drinks, and comedy. For info/tables call 310–850–7212.
FYI — online purchases closes an hour before the show starts at 6pm. After 6pm you’ll have to pay with cash at the door. Thank you :) See you there :)
Lineup includes: Dennis Maler, Dylan Uscher, Alex Giampapa, Kevin Doug Fitzgerald, Marlen Baker, John Such, Mike Bain and Hosted by Comedienne Awet Teame ”
When: 7pm
Where: Revel Quincy 79 Parkingway Quincy, MA 02169
For more info, go to: http://www.thebostoncalendar.com/events/quincy-s-house-of-comedy--5 | https://medium.com/tcproject/wheretobe-3-31-4-6-e2b4dbd7877d | ['Transformative Culture Project'] | 2017-03-31 16:26:30.554000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Art', 'Fashion', 'Wheretobe', 'Community Engagement'] |
The Unofficial Weekly Stratis Retrospect #21 — Khilone | It’s time for The Unofficial Weekly Stratis Retrospect #21.
For anyone wanting to read my previous blogs, you can find them all here.
Disclaimer: Never take anything I say (or anyone else on the Internet says) to be investment advice. Consult with a professional, and extensively do your own research before ever investing into anything.
Stratis Full Node GUI Mainnet Beta Release
On April 11, 2018, Stratis announced their Stratis Full Node GUI Mainnet Beta release. You can read Strat’s full announcement over here.
I told you about the Stratis Full Node Mainnet Beta Release in the previous weekly update.
So, what’s new?
The Stratis ‘GUI’ is!
GUI means ‘graphical user interface.’ For example, a crypto wallet, which is the graphical interface where users can click on buttons to send or withdraw coins, etc. The GUI is the layer on the Full Node so that it can be used by everyone. GUIs were introduced to bypass the steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require complex computer code commands to be typed on a computer keyboard. GUIs make software user friendly for most of us.
So what does the new Stratis GUI look like? These are the most recent screenshots, and I have to say I am impressed!
Blockchain Delhi
Stratis kicked off their busy conference month in India. They attended the Blockchain Conference in Delhi on 12 April, 2018. These were the speakers on behalf of Stratis:
Jordan Andrews presented smart contracts in C#.
Dan Gershony spoke about the Stratis Full Node and Blockchain as a Service (BaaS).
Mahesh Chand, the founder of C# Corner, did an Introduction to Blockchain for Developers.
Sameer Misson, CEO of GLUON, talked about Integration of Blockchain into Legacy Industry.
Chris Trew joined a panel discussion with Mahesh.
Dan Gershony speaking about the Stratis Full Node and Blockchain as a Service (Baas)
Jordan Andrews speaking about Smart Contracts in C#
Mahesh Chand with his Introduction to Blockchain for Developers
Paul Bogle, Dan Gershony and Jordan Andrews
Impressions of Blockchain Delhi
Sameer Misson CEO of Stratis First Verified ICO GLUON talking about Integration of Blockchain into Legacy Industry
Panel discussion with Chris Trew and Mahesh Chand
Blockchain Delhi 2018 was a great success!
I talked with the team members who went to India, and they were all excited about this event. The event was properly organized and sent out lots of media coverage.
C# Corner Conference
The second conference was in India, as well. The C# Corner Conference
2018 is North India’s largest developers’ conference, with over 60 speakers and 40 technologies represented. It was a three-day event that happened on 13–15 April in Delhi.
Here were the Stratis speakers at that conference
Dan Gershony did a presentation about Blockchain for Developers.
Jordan Andrews talked about Smart Contracts in C#.
Chris Trew and Mahesh Chand were Keynote speakers.
Dan Gershony speaking about Blockchain for Developers
Jordan Andrews having his presentation about Smart Contracts in C#
Mahesh Chand speaking at the C# Corner Conference
I also found some new Stratis supporters in the crowd
Dan Gershony and Mahesh Chand encouraging and rewarding MVPs at the C# Corner Conference
Chris Trew talking to the audience and giving away prices to the winners together with other team members of Stratis
The end
I talked with Mahesh and Strat’s team members about their experience at the C# Corner Conference. Blockchain is still a very new thing for most developers, so there is still a long way to go, however, many of them are excited by the prospects! Also, many of the developers in attendance were first introduced to blockckchain through Stratis, so a lot of viable seeds have been planted for the future.
Those who attended the conference also told me some of the higher ranking members within C# Corner really loved the idea of working with smart contracts in C#. That really turned them on!
Blockchain Expo Global
Last, but certainly not least, Stratis ended April’s conference month with the Blockchain Expo Global held at London’s Olympia Event Center on 18–19 April, 2018. This was the second time Stratis exhibited at the Blockchain Expo. Stratis was a highest ranked sponsor, and this resulted in the best location and size for their booth. Believe me, sometimes size does matter ;).
To read more about the full experience of the Blockchain Expo, you can do so over here.: https://medium.com/@khilonecrypto/recap-of-the-london-blockchain-expo-2018-6878a321fb64
I’m not the only one who wrote about the Blockchain Expo in London. Long-term community member, ‘Freeme62410,’ also wrote a story about his own experience there. You can find his story over here.
Smart Contracts team
One of the coolest things about the Blockchain Expo was that all of the Stratis team members were there. They flew from all over the globe to represent Stratis. It was also the first time the full Smart Contracts team was fully united in person!
The day after the Blockchain Expo
After an amazing (but exhausting) two days at the Blockchain Expo, the Stratis team did what they always do… They went into their office to continue working on the platform they all truly believe in. There was also a final meet-up of all the community and team members that had flown in from all over the place, a great end to a great week!
GLUON
GLUON announced their ICO a few months ago, which will be the first ICO to launch from the Stratis ICO platform. This week, GLUON released new information about their project:
Beyond Global Trade
Beyond Global Trade (BGT) announced their ICO, which will be the second ICO to launch from the Stratis ICO platform. This week, BGT also released new information about their project.
That’s it for last week’s news. All the best to everyone!
Khilone
Follow me on Twitter to get all the news right away: https://twitter.com/Khil0ne
And be sure to read all my stories on Medium over here:
https://medium.com/@khilonecrypto
Other things to keep an eye at: | https://medium.com/khilone/the-unofficial-weekly-stratis-retrospect-21-khilone-9f3324dcdbd1 | [] | 2018-11-08 12:21:47.370000+00:00 | ['Stratis', 'Blockchain', 'Stratisweekly', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
How to use NFC Tags: Detect, Read and Write NFCs with Android Studio | How to use NFC Tags: Detect, Read and Write NFCs with Android Studio
Introduction
Near-Field-Communication (NFC) isn’t new technology. With the events of Covid 19, there has been a surge in contactless NFC usage as seen by the new trend of mobile payment like Google Pay and Apple Pay. This is similar to its well-known brother, QR codes.
It has come a long way. First used in 1997 for Hasbro Star Wars toys, the now highly accessible tech which currently exists in around 73% of smartphones, is an untapped source for innovation.
Similar to my previous article on installing TF lite for Raspberry Pi, finding useful NFC material was a chore. This is meant to be a quick and clear guide for the general-use cases of NFCs.
Complete Code on my Github: starter code
Prerequisites
Android Studio — Installation guide here.
An Android Phone with NFC capabilities (How to check if I have NFC?)
NFC Device (Note: I used an NFC card)
NFC Detection
We will first detect the NFC device information:
1. NFC id
2. NFC Technologies
3. NFC type (Mifare Classic/Ultralight)
Note: We will be using the Mifare Ultralight C for this guide.
Step 0: AndroidManifest.xml, Allow NFC permissions for our app
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.NFC" />
<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.nfc" android:required="true" />
Step 1: onCreate, Initialize the NFC adapter and define the Pending Intent
public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity { //Intialize attributes
NfcAdapter nfcAdapter;
PendingIntent pendingIntent; final static String TAG = "nfc_test"; @Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.activity_main); //Initialise NfcAdapter
nfcAdapter = NfcAdapter.getDefaultAdapter(this); //If no NfcAdapter, display that the device has no NFC
if (nfcAdapter == null){
Toast.makeText(this,"NO NFC Capabilities",
Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
finish();
} //Create a PendingIntent object so the Android system can
//populate it with the details of the tag when it is scanned. //PendingIntent.getActivity(Context,requestcode(identifier for
// intent),intent,int)
pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this,0,new Intent(this,this.getClass()).addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP),0);
}
}
Step 2: onResume(), Enable the Foreground Dispatch to listen for NFC intent (Waiting for NFC card to be tapped)
enableForegroundDispatch allows your current (foreground) activity to intercept our NFC intent and claim priority over all other activities both within the app and other apps.
@Override
protected void onResume() {
super.onResume();
assert nfcAdapter != null;
//nfcAdapter.enableForegroundDispatch(context,pendingIntent,
// intentFilterArray,
// techListsArray)
nfcAdapter.enableForegroundDispatch(this,pendingIntent,null,null);
}
Step 3: onPause(), Disable the foreground dispatch (Stop listening for NFC tag)
protected void onPause() {
super.onPause();
//Onpause stop listening
if (nfcAdapter != null) {
nfcAdapter.disableForegroundDispatch(this);
}
}
Step 4: onNewIntent(), Process our new NFC Intent (Card detected)
After getting the intent, you have to parse the intent to detect the card: Code here for external helper functions.
These are our NFC Intent filters
nfcAdapter.ACTION_TAG_DISCOVERED — NFC tag discovered.
nfcAdapter.ACTION_TECH_DISCOVERED — NFC tag discovered and activities are registered for the specific technologies on the tag.
nfcAdapter.ACTION_NDEF_DISCOVERED — NFC tag discovered with NDEF payload discovered.
TAG_DISCOVERED is meant to be a fallback if no apps can handle TECH_DISCOVERED and NDEF_DISCOVERED . The same for TECH_DISCOVERED which is meant to be a fallback for NDEF_DISCOVERED .
For our case, we don’t want any filters as such we will be using TAG_DISCOVERED and TECH_DISCOVERED for global detection of the NFC.
@Override
protected void onNewIntent(Intent intent) {
super.onNewIntent(intent);
setIntent(intent);
resolveIntent(intent);
}
private void resolveIntent(Intent intent) {
String action = intent.getAction();
if (NfcAdapter.ACTION_TAG_DISCOVERED.equals(action)
|| NfcAdapter.ACTION_TECH_DISCOVERED.equals(action)
|| NfcAdapter.ACTION_NDEF_DISCOVERED.equals(action)) {
Tag tag = (Tag) intent.getParcelableExtra(NfcAdapter.EXTRA_TAG);
assert tag != null;
byte[] payload = detectTagData(tag).getBytes();
}
}
Step 5: Helper functions, to detect and parse our NFC Tag Data
private String detectTagData(Tag tag) {
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
byte[] id = tag.getId();
sb.append("ID (hex): ").append(toHex(id)).append('
');
sb.append("ID (reversed hex): ").append(toReversedHex(id)).append('
');
sb.append("ID (dec): ").append(toDec(id)).append('
');
sb.append("ID (reversed dec): ").append(toReversedDec(id)).append('
');
String prefix = "android.nfc.tech.";
sb.append("Technologies: ");
for (String tech : tag.getTechList()) {
sb.append(tech.substring(prefix.length()));
sb.append(", ");
}
sb.delete(sb.length() - 2, sb.length());
for (String tech : tag.getTechList()) {
if (tech.equals(MifareClassic.class.getName())) {
sb.append('
');
String type = "Unknown";
try {
MifareClassic mifareTag = MifareClassic.get(tag);
switch (mifareTag.getType()) {
case MifareClassic.TYPE_CLASSIC:
type = "Classic";
break;
case MifareClassic.TYPE_PLUS:
type = "Plus";
break;
case MifareClassic.TYPE_PRO:
type = "Pro";
break;
}
sb.append("Mifare Classic type: ");
sb.append(type);
sb.append('
');
sb.append("Mifare size: ");
sb.append(mifareTag.getSize() + " bytes");
sb.append('
');
sb.append("Mifare sectors: ");
sb.append(mifareTag.getSectorCount());
sb.append('
');
sb.append("Mifare blocks: ");
sb.append(mifareTag.getBlockCount());
} catch (Exception e) {
sb.append("Mifare classic error: " + e.getMessage());
}
}
if (tech.equals(MifareUltralight.class.getName())) {
sb.append('
');
MifareUltralight mifareUlTag = MifareUltralight.get(tag);
String type = "Unknown";
switch (mifareUlTag.getType()) {
case MifareUltralight.TYPE_ULTRALIGHT:
type = "Ultralight";
break;
case MifareUltralight.TYPE_ULTRALIGHT_C:
type = "Ultralight C";
break;
}
sb.append("Mifare Ultralight type: ");
sb.append(type);
}
}
Log.v("test",sb.toString());
return sb.toString();
}
private String toHex(byte[] bytes) {
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = bytes.length - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
int b = bytes[i] & 0xff;
if (b < 0x10)
sb.append('0');
sb.append(Integer.toHexString(b));
if (i > 0) {
sb.append(" ");
}
}
return sb.toString();
}
private String toReversedHex(byte[] bytes) {
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = 0; i < bytes.length; ++i) {
if (i > 0) {
sb.append(" ");
}
int b = bytes[i] & 0xff;
if (b < 0x10)
sb.append('0');
sb.append(Integer.toHexString(b));
}
return sb.toString();
}
private long toDec(byte[] bytes) {
long result = 0;
long factor = 1;
for (int i = 0; i < bytes.length; ++i) {
long value = bytes[i] & 0xffl;
result += value * factor;
factor *= 256l;
}
return result;
}
private long toReversedDec(byte[] bytes) {
long result = 0;
long factor = 1;
for (int i = bytes.length - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
long value = bytes[i] & 0xffl;
result += value * factor;
factor *= 256l;
}
return result;
}
Step 6: Compile and Run the app → Go to Logcat/Run
NFC Read and Write
From our Mifare Ultralight C NFC Tag specifications: https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MF0ICU2.pdf
We can only use the 4th to 39th-page address. Each page is 4 bytes, thus, we have at most 140 bytes of storage page.
Since each String letter in UTF-8 takes up around 1 byte, We only at most 140 words to work with assuming that none of our user memory pages are used. In my case, we only had 137 bytes in our card. Some had experimented with gzip to compress this data.
Each readPages reads 4 pages (16 characters/16 bytes).
To read pages 4–12, we have to readPages(4) [pages 4–7] and readPages(8) [pages 8–11] and readPages(12) [pages 12–15]. We would then have to remove the extra 3 pages(12 characters/12 bytes) from our String.
Each writePage writes 1 page(4 characters/4 bytes).
public void writeTag(MifareUltralight mifareUlTag) {
try {
mifareUlTag.connect();
mifareUlTag.writePage(4, "get ".getBytes(Charset.forName("US-ASCII")));
mifareUlTag.writePage(5, "fast".getBytes(Charset.forName("US-ASCII")));
mifareUlTag.writePage(6, " NFC".getBytes(Charset.forName("US-ASCII")));
mifareUlTag.writePage(7, " now".getBytes(Charset.forName("US-ASCII")));
} catch (IOException e) {
Log.e(TAG, "IOException while writing MifareUltralight...", e);
} finally {
try {
mifareUlTag.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
Log.e(TAG, "IOException while closing MifareUltralight...", e);
}
}
}
public String readTag(MifareUltralight mifareUlTag) {
try {
mifareUlTag.connect();
byte[] payload = mifareUlTag.readPages(4);
return new String(payload, Charset.forName("US-ASCII"));
} catch (IOException e) {
Log.e(TAG, "IOException while reading MifareUltralight message...", e);
} finally {
if (mifareUlTag != null) {
try {
mifareUlTag.close();
}
catch (IOException e) {
Log.e(TAG, "Error closing tag...", e);
}
}
}
return null;
}
Next, simply change our previous detectTagData(Tag tag).
private String detectTagData(Tag tag) {
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
byte[] id = tag.getId();
sb.append("NFC ID (dec): ").append(toDec(id)).append('
');
for (String tech : tag.getTechList()) {
if (tech.equals(MifareUltralight.class.getName())) {
MifareUltralight mifareUlTag = MifareUltralight.get(tag);
readTag(mifareUlTag);
writeTag(mifareUlTag);
}
}
}
Log.v("test",sb.toString());
return sb.toString();
}
To learn more on reading and writing: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/nfc/advanced-nfc#read-write
Global NFC Usage
If you want to be able to read and write your NFC in the background or outside your app, simply add this intent filter in your AndroidManifest.xml.
The idea of global usage is to have NFC presence at anywhere on the phone.
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="android.nfc.action.TAG_DISCOVERED" />
<action android:name="android.nfc.action.TECH_DISCOVERED" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
</intent-filter>
Complete Code on my Github: starter code
If any of my work has helped you, donations would be greatly appreciated!
BTC: 16Z1wZaL3NkmYW8ydJk6A2VNsZJxyzB56H (BTC Network)
ETH: 0x214e3f9a3cc96a44bf93f03b401cc88d10f9693d (ERC20)
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BCH: 16Z1wZaL3NkmYW8ydJk6A2VNsZJxyzB56H (BCH Network)
References:
Special credits to Mika Baumeister for the image on Unsplash! | https://itnext.io/how-to-use-nfc-tags-with-android-studio-detect-read-and-write-nfcs-42f1d60b033 | ['Cawin Chan'] | 2021-02-23 16:26:25.097000+00:00 | ['Android App Development', 'Android', 'AndroidDev', 'Nfc', 'Android Studio'] |
Main health benefits of honey? | The health benefits of honey are not widely known to this day. Honey is healthier and purer than artificial sweeteners or sugar and offers more than just taste for those with a sweet tooth. Honey benefits your health and your body both inside and out.
>>https://bit.ly/3r0fplt
Honey production
How do bees make honey? The process starts in the flower when the bee collects the nectar from the peak. Most of the nectar is made up of water and a minority of complex sugars. The bees have to store the sugar and make it usable to convert the nectar into honey. To accomplish this task, a worker bee flies to the beehive with a stomach full of nectar to regurgitate the modified nectar for a bee in the beehive. The bee in the beehive ingests the nectar to break down the sugar. As soon as the beehive has completed this task, it spits the nectar back into a honeycomb cell. The bees in the beehive are responsible for flapping their wings to evaporate any remaining water. When the sugar is ready, it will turn into honey. A worker bee will produce 1/12 teaspoon of honey during its lifetime, but if the bees work together in a colony, more than 200 pounds of honey will be made in a year.
https://bit.ly/34kvcSx
The hard work of the bees provides us with healthy and useful food. However, it consists of 80% natural sugar, 18% water, and 2% vitamins, minerals, and pollen. Remember, honey won’t drain as it doesn’t contain bacteria. So as long as you need it, you can keep it on your shelf.
Health benefits of honey
Because of its carbohydrates, it is nature’s energy booster. These carbohydrates provide both energy and strength. The glucose in honey also plays an essential role as it is quickly absorbed by the body to provide instant energy. Unlike refined sugar, honey keeps the body’s sugar levels somewhat constant instead of increasing blood sugar, resulting in low energy levels.
https://bit.ly/381mXMr
Its antibacterial, antiviral and contains antioxidants to help boost the body’s immunity. Raw honey contains around 5000 enzymes and many vitamins, amino acids, and minerals. Honey helps fight breathing problems and has improved the quality of life for cancer patients.
It does not contain empty calories, Unlike refined white sugar. Use honey instead of white sugar to reduce blood sugar spikes and fill those empty calories with vitamins and minerals. Honey has also been observed to suppress your appetite. A teaspoon of honey has around 21 calories and is sweeter than sugar, which means you can use less to get the same sweetening effect that may promote weight loss.
When applied topically, honey’s properties can heal wounds, including burns and ulcers. The two sugars in honey, fructose, and glucose attract water. So when honey is applied to an injury, the honey absorbs the water from the wound. This action dries the wound to inhibit and prevent bacterial growth.
The ten best ways to cook and eat honey
Use it as a healthy sweetener in your hot tea.
Mix it with your plain yogurt instead of buying less healthy pre-sweetened yogurt.
Scatter some peanut butter, honey, and cinnamon toast to start your morning routine.
Instead of sprinkling sugar over the cereal, sprinkle honey over it.
Replace sugar in a cookie, bread, and muffin recipes.
Use it as a condiment for meat. Before cooking, apply honey to chicken or pork chops to give the core a unique flavor.
Create a salad dressing with olive oil, vinegar, and honey to use in salads.
Add honey and lemon to hot water as a cooling and soothing drink.
Eat it straight from the comb! Bite the comb and chew like gum. The more you chew, the more honey comes out of the comb. When all of the honey is out of the honeycomb, spit or swallow the wax. The wax is safe to eat and non-toxic.
Danger
While this is a healthy addition to any diet, some people need to take precautions. People who are allergic to pollen should be careful when eating, although severe reactions are rare. The stores sell honey filtered and pasteurized, which reduces the amount of pollen in honey. If you have a pollen allergy, avoid eating it straight from the comb because it is in its natural form.
How to choose honey
To get all the benefits, choose raw honey. The natural version hasn’t been filtered or pasteurized, meaning it hasn’t been stripped of its powerful vitamins and minerals. To select the best quality and enjoy all of the health benefits of honey, find one that says “100% Raw” and enjoy your way to nutritious sweetness. | https://medium.com/@mijanur1975/main-health-benefits-of-honey-434f37a7e48 | ['Md Mijanur Rahman'] | 2020-12-23 13:44:00.618000+00:00 | ['Honeybees', 'Beekeeping', 'Benefits', 'Honey', 'Blogger'] |
The Science of Marketing | This is a google trend graph from 2004 to the present year 2020 with the location set as INDIA. See the rise in Digital Marketing. But why do we still see a lot of ads on TV?
You have always thought that Digital Marketing is your only way to market your product then why does Google, Facebook and now Instagram is showing ads on TV?
Digital Marketing works on analytics and statistics and this is the most knowledgeable way to market but if you know that your product or service can be used by anyone then why not Traditional Marketing. In fact, traditional marketing would be a lot cheaper if you compare it with Google and Facebook Ads.
But do you think your ads will be successful? What makes you think that?
It’s all based on customer’s needs. If your product or service is needed by customers then marketing is worth it. The product or service is the main deal. Marketing is just a way to build trust so that people can buy from you. If your product is really that helpful and people trust you they will buy from you.
For example, if you refer to an amazon linked product that you recently bought, let’s say a trimmer and you really liked it and its price is also good then if you share that link to your friend and if he needs it now or in the future then he will first ask you or go through your link and probably buy it, right?
That’s because he/she trusts you. If you can build that trust with 1000s of customers then?
Your product should be of high quality otherwise you won’t create return customers that would shut down your business soon. If you create good trust with your customers but your product/ service is not that expected then they won’t come back to you for new products or services and you won’t be able to sell anything in the future.
But keep this in mind, that unlike other jobs or services that can be automated in the future, SALES & MARKETING can’t be automated and hence no one can take away this job.
How will you stand out in this huge Market?
In today’s market where almost everyone is at the top in every huge niche the chances of you getting alongside them are tough until you are able to provide that same information and people trust you that much as compared to those big bulls.
So, if I was in your place I would see 2 options,
(a) Try being the first one in a very micro-niche like go deeply specific in the main niche and become the first one as the competition drastically reduces.
(b) Go with the huge niche option but provide something so unique that people will think of giving a try to your product/service.
These 2 options might be yours too and you can choose from these 2 and go with it. But for these options to execute you need research so that you shouldn’t get stuck in the future. And also keep in mind sometimes the way you think wouldn’t work might be the one that works.
For example, when Digital Deepak started the internship course, he had a unique way of attracting visitors. He said that he would take Rs 12000 but would return small amounts of money when we finish each assignment. Well, this sounds crazy, right? Would you do it? Probably not. But see some of you got into it. I got into it. It worked.
So, be thorough in your research and include every point, every way that comes to your mind, and test it.
The Importance of n^CATT
n^CATT = Niche, Content, Attention, Trust & Transaction
You have to keep this cycle in mind. That’s it.
Niche: This is the part where you select the niche you are passionate about. Might be bikes, information related to certain topics, making money online, etc. But keep in mind, if your niche you want to go with doesn’t have a market then, you are just moving on a dead road.
If you have that immense passion, the talent and also has a huge market then the potential is there for you to succeed. That should be your niche. Your niche should meet all 3 conditions for you to make money.
2. Content: When it comes to content, people start thinking about copywriting, content writing, and have this in mind that we are not made for this. We can’t write high converting sales copies and blogs that can attract visitors to try our service/ product. Let me tell you a secret, this is the 2nd blog that I have written and if you have read this blog till here that meant that I have potential. You have potential too. You have to understand that
GOOD MARKETING MEANS GOOD COMMUNICATION.
That’s it.
You have to write as you talk. Let’s assume, you are explaining your service to your friend in front of you. How would you go for it? Just think that you are writing to your friend and explaining to him how your product/service works and see results. I am not saying that you will get your dream results, but you sure will get some customers.
3. Attention: Now, writing a copy is ok but how will you attract your visitor's attention? The best way to go with grabbing attention is to write what your customers are thinking. For example, if you are selling an ebook explaining how to earn through Instagram so you can write like “How to earn through Instagram with 0 Followers” This will attract customers. This is called Joining the Conversation.
People are using Instagram and they do think how can people earn through Instagram and there you can grab some attention. In this way, you can gain some visitors and after reading your content, they might opt-in and try your product/service.
4. Trust: People trust other people easily than a brand. If you are doing personal branding then, you can easily earn trust by providing content that actually helps people. If they get results, they start believing in your service or product and would be happy if you put something new on the table to try. This is the Power of Personal Branding (I will talk about this later in this blog).
5. Transaction: To convert your visitors to leads and paid customers is the ultimate goal of your business. After people trust your free content and their problems get solved they can purchase your course/product and this way you can earn the dream money you thought of. The power of trust can create good and loyal customers for life.
Now after you start getting money from your visitors you might want to scale it up, but how?
The Fundamentals of Integrated Digital Marketing | https://medium.com/@ecomsubrat/the-science-of-marketing-3ce4b334bef8 | ['Subrat Behera'] | 2020-11-16 04:21:29.221000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Business', 'Personal Branding', 'How To Get Clients', 'How To Make Money'] |
Another way to Find Product Ideas | Start to Work on Something
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself — Paul Graham
Photo by Joshua Earle
A good idea always starts with a problem, especially the one you have. That way, you can develop something to solve it, while being an actual user. But nowadays, most common problems are solved. We don’t often face new problems anymore.
There is another way to find problems is to start working on something. Because often, you will start to see problems that only a few people have worked on, or there isn’t a satisfied solution yet. And there can be good product ideas.
Find problems by starting to work on something
In 2018, I rent a 3 bedrooms apartment not far away from Sydney city. One small bedroom is for me, and I rent out other spaces.
But there was one problem, some tenants don’t pay on time and don’t keep the payment logs. We had a few issues with late payments, needed to go through the payment log, again and again, to figure things out.
I started to look for an app to manage rental payments, but not seeing anything interesting. Then I decided to build the app myself, with React Native. Since it supports cross-platform, and I was comfortable using it.
Though, I realized React Native didn’t have many database options. AsyncStorage was slow, RealmDB was buggy for debugging, firebase wasn’t so offline support.
So I started working on Vasern, a database for React Native.
Validate the idea with the audience
Even though it was an actual problem I have, it’s always a good idea to test with the audience — the developer community.
When the MVP ready, I posted it in a few places. But most of the attention arise from Reddit, and 2 Slack channels.
Then, people started to talk about Vasern in a few Facebook groups. And it got noticed by a few medium-size tech news/blogs. I remember the first 3 websites wrote about it were Jaxeter, programmer, and Entwickler. Which sent a bit of traffic to the landing page.
News and blog websites often get their source ideas from other websites. Which lead Vasern to start spreading out to other medium-size tech news website too. It was a great experience.
Fast forward to today, there are apps in production use Vasern as a local database. One I closed with was Litely. And the database still gets mentions on news, blog articles, or in some presentations once in a while. | https://medium.com/@hieunc/finding-product-ideas-84e888388149 | ['Hieu Nguyen', 'Jack'] | 2020-08-11 02:39:26.254000+00:00 | ['Getting Started', 'Startup', 'Product', 'Ideas', 'Startup Ideas'] |
The Voice of God? | 2 Samuel 16:23 (KJV)
And the counsel of Ahithophel, which he counselled in those days, was as if a man had enquired at the oracle of God: so was all the counsel of Ahithophel both with David and with Absalom.
The saying goes something like, “He began to believe his own press reports.”
As a counselor Ahithophel had enjoyed great favor and success. It seemed like everyone took his counsel as synonymous with the voice of God.
He was popular
He was respected
He was followed and apparently
He was unchallenged
The problem with all of that is that it is never appropriate to give a man that sort of authority. Worse, it is a huge mistake when the man begins to expect it.
Ahithophel’s advice to Absalom was good, but he was not the only advisor. He believed that, when his counsel was rejected, his hopes for a victorious outcome were squelched.
2 Samuel 17:23 (KJV)
And when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried in the sepulchre of his father.
I heard something the other day about the trouble with the internet and social media, we were not meant to be omniscient.[1] We have not been wired to handle all the news we receive these days, and it is driving many of us to the brink of depression. The same can be said of Ahithophel. No one is wired to be trusted as the voice of God. We simply can’t handle it. | https://medium.com/daily-visit-with-god/the-voice-of-god-5bbe0cf97fa4 | ['Marvin Mckenzie'] | 2021-07-02 14:17:25.633000+00:00 | ['Bible Study', 'Proud', 'Devotion', 'Faith and Life', 'Christian'] |
Text Alignment Best Practises | Typography UI Tips
Text Alignment Best Practises
Make your UI more effective and easy to read with text alignment.
Text alignment is a small but significant part of the interface. Alignment affects how our brain scans the content on a screen. A proper text alignment is one of the most distinct indicators of a professionally crafted digital product.
Any interface is 90% text. So that’s why when you see a duly aligned typography, you get the impression that you’re using a more thoughtful interface. And when something is not in its place, it hurts our perception immediately.
In this episode, I want to share practical tips to help you create a neatly aligned interface typography.
Tip 1 — Avoid center alignment for long text
When text is longer than two or three lines, it is always recommended to ignore center alignment.
When you center-align a longer text, you will force the reader to make additional eye movements on both sides of the content. This causes unnecessary eye fatigue and results in lower reading focus.
Tip 2 — Always left-align long text
The left-aligned text results in much better content readability, so all books, articles & newspapers are written this way. The left-aligned text helps to avoid unnecessary eye jumps, making the whole copy much easier to follow.
Note: When localizing UI for right-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, or Persian, used the right-alignment instead of the left one.
Tip 3 — Use center alignment for headlines or small blocks of text only
Use center alignment if the headline is one to two lines short. If the text block is longer than two to three lines, it will always look better left-aligned.
If you need to center more than one block of text, but one of them is a little longer. The best solution is to modify/rewrite the content to make it shorter:
Tip 4 — Use the hanging alignment to connect with UI elements
Use the hanging alignment to establish a clear visual hierarchy for UI elements that don’t have the same visual weight as the text, such as icons, bullets, or quote commas.
Hanging alignment helps to create a clear eye path for the text, eliminating zig-zag eye jumps.
Tip 5 — Right-align data & numbers
Right-align numbers and timestamps when designing tables, cards, or dashboards. The numbers are easier to compare at a glance with corresponding left-aligned information when they are placed right opposite it.
Tip 6 — Balance whitespace for justified text
Justified text works great in print, but for the web, when you want to have a more formal vibe, it may leave many uncomfortable spaces between words. To avoid these gaps, consider enabling hyphenation.
The hyphens property controls the hyphenation of text in block-level elements. Note that <hyphens> class is language-sensitive. It helps to find break opportunities depends on the language defined in the font attribute of a parent element. Not all languages are supported, and support depends on the specific browser.
Note: If the hyphenation is not an option, please ignore the justified text and stick to left-aligned text. | https://blog.prototypr.io/text-alignment-best-practises-c4114daf1a9b | [] | 2021-08-09 12:47:07.826000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Design', 'Typography', 'UX', 'UI'] |
7 Simple Ways to Improve Your SQL Query Performance | 7 Simple Ways to Improve Your SQL Query Performance
Understand what’s happening behind the scenes
Image by Simone_ph from Pixabay
As a full-stack developer, I often deal with databases. The database is one of the major parts of an application that can make or break it. Also, it demands proper optimization to make your application lightning fast. SQL optimization is a process of using SQL queries in the best possible way to get accurate and fast database results.
For better database performance, you need to emphasize your queries. An inefficient query might drain the resources and cause slow performance or loss of service for other users if the query contains errors.
It’s vital to optimize SQL queries for minimum impact on database performance. Some of the biggest performance bottlenecks usually boil down to several causes like missing indexes, poor schema design, and inefficient queries.
There are simple steps that you can take while writing queries to improve the overall performance of your application. In this article, I am going to discuss a few techniques that you can opt for to achieve better database performance.
Let’s get started. | https://medium.com/better-programming/7-simple-ways-to-improve-your-sql-query-performance-546cb6e29882 | ['Shubham Pathania'] | 2020-12-18 15:33:03.524000+00:00 | ['Database', 'Software Development', 'Sql', 'MySQL', 'Programming'] |
How To Address A ‘Picky Eater’ Kid Without Compromising On Vital Nutrients. | Being a “picky eater” is a new normal
There are no official medical criteria for the “picky eater,” but you probably know if your child qualifies for the diagnosis. During the toddler and preschool years, picky eaters are the norm, rather than the exception. Food can fall in and out of your child’s favor with amazing speed, and for no apparent reason. Food jags are extremely common in this age group — almost every child becomes devoted to a particular food at some point in time, steadfastly refusing to eat almost anything else.
While you definitely won’t want your child to continue these behaviors forever, there’s usually no reason to worry in the short term. In some cases, a certain degree of selectivity is protective for children. Some kids may instinctively avoid specific foods because they’ve learned that they don’t feel well after eating them.
Look for an alternate source of nutrition
If your child doggedly refuses to drink milk, it may be because your little one might be lactose intolerant, or has a mild allergy to dairy products. You can still help your child with sufficient intake of calcium by offering dairy foods that are more easily digested and better tolerated by sensitive stomachs, like yogurt or cheese. If your child refuses to eat broccoli or green beans because of their taste, that’s OK too — there is a whole spectrum of vegetables in your cold storage that can compensate for the required nutrition that your child needs at the time.
Introducing new foods in a subtle manner
It’s a good idea to introduce new foods regularly, but at every meal or snack, you should always include at least one familiar item that you know your child likes. By offering a new food, but not forcing your kid to eat it, you’re allowing to maintain freedom of choice while expanding your child’s dietary horizons. If your child doesn’t like the new food, at least there’s something nutritious on the table that your child will eat, and you can take comfort in knowing that your loved one will not starve. It also prevents you from having to jump up and prepare an additional dish that you know your kid likes. Giving in to requests or demands for “special” foods that aren’t on the menu is a bad habit to develop — both for you and your child.
Never ever bribe or force-feed
If your child refuses to eat the new foods and the old standby at a given meal, that’s fine. Parents should try to resist the temptation to bribe or beg their kids to eat, and they should never punish them for not eating. After a less than successful meal, it’s generally best to wipe the slate clean and start over again at the next meal or snack.
Being a picky eater, just because your child doesn’t like a particular food the first time around, it doesn’t mean the end of the matter forever. It may take two, three, or even ten tries before your little one gets used to the new taste and texture. Kids are more willing to experiment with a new food when they know that they have the option of tasting it without eating it. Try asking your child to conduct a taste test with the tip of the tongue, and assure your little one that he/she will not be forced into eating if it doesn’t taste good.
Keep reviewing your child nutrition on a regular basis
You’ll be relieved to know that no matter how little food your child may consume at a given meal, or even on a given day, starvation and malnutrition are virtually nonexistent among kids who are routinely offered a balanced selection of nutritious foods. When you analyze your child’s diet, be sure to review the food intake over a period of several days, rather than just one meal or a single day. Kids may not eat everything you want them to eat every day of the week, but with your consistent encouragement, they usually manage to build a complete and balanced diet over the course of a week.
Seek pediatrician advice, if nothing works out
If you’re worried about your child’s appetite and eating behaviors, be sure to discuss your concerns with the pediatrician. If the doctor feels that your kid’s growing and gaining weight falls within an acceptable pattern, you can rest assured that your child is getting plenty to eat.
Conclusion
Coping with a picky eater can try the patience of any mom or dad, but in the grand scheme of things, finicky appetites rarely affect a child’s overall health. With parents’ continued patience and persistence, plus a little tincture of time, even the pickiest kids will eventually expand their dietary horizons.
Citation: https://bloomposts.com/diet/child/best-practices-for-picky-eater-kids-keeping-up-with-their-vital-nutrients/ | https://medium.com/@bloomposts/how-to-address-a-picky-eater-kid-without-compromising-on-vital-nutrients-57d14623f7cc | ['Navjot S'] | 2021-08-07 19:00:56.298000+00:00 | ['Picky Eaters', 'Kids Diet', 'Parenting Advice', 'Parenting', 'Picky Eating'] |
Postgresql compression | Which options do we have?
— Auto-compression TOAST-able data
— Postgres Pro compression / encryption
— Cstore_fdw columnar store extension
— ZSON extension for jsonb format
— Compression file systems (like ZFS or Btrfs)
— TimeScaleDB for time-series data
This article is divided into 4 parts:
— First (about auto-compression, postgres pro & Cstore_fdw)
— Second (about ZSON)
— Third (TimeScaleDB)
— Fourth (Compression file systems)
Postgresql auto-compression
Briefly: Postgresql hasn’t row- or page-compression, but it can compress values more than 2 kB. The compressor with default strategy works best for attributes of a size between 1K and 1M.
In detail: Postgresql uses TOAST (The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique).
“PostgreSQL uses a fixed page size (commonly 8 kB), and does not allow tuples to span multiple pages. Therefore, it is not possible to store very large field values directly. To overcome this limitation, large field values are compressed and/or broken up into multiple physical rows.” ©
In simple words, TOAST is about how your data stores and compresses.
The TOAST management code is triggered when a row value is wider than TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD bytes (2 kB by default), and will compress and/or move field values out-of-line until the row value is shorter than TOAST_TUPLE_TARGET bytes (normally 2 kB) or no more gains can be had.
You can set TOAST_TUPLE_TARGET in storage parameters when creating or altering table:
ALTER TABLE … SET (toast_tuple_target = N)
Valid values are between 128 bytes and the (blocksize — header), by default 8160 bytes.
Also, you can use ALTER COLUMN | TABLE SET STORAGE … to change the strategy or disable toasting on the column entirely. Let’s check the manual for storages description:
— PLAIN prevents either compression or out-of-line storage; furthermore it disables use of single-byte headers for varlena types. This is the only possible strategy for columns of non-TOAST-able data types.
— EXTENDED allows both compression and out-of-line storage. This is the default for most TOAST-able data types. Compression will be attempted first, then out-of-line storage if the row is still too big.
— EXTERNAL allows out-of-line storage but not compression. Use of EXTERNAL will make substring operations on wide text and bytea columns faster (at the penalty of increased storage space) because these operations are optimized to fetch only the required parts of the out-of-line value when it is not compressed.
— MAIN allows compression but not out-of-line storage. (Actually, out-of-line storage will still be performed for such columns, but only as a last resort when there is no other way to make the row small enough to fit on a page.)
The compression technique is a fairly simple and very fast member of the LZ family. Let’s see at the ‘pg_lzcompress.c’ source code for more details:
The compressor with default strategy works best for attributes of a size between 1K and 1M.
And here is a difference between two included strategies:
static const PGLZ_Strategy strategy_default_data = { 32, /* Data chunks less than 32 bytes are not compressed */ INT_MAX, /* No upper limit on what we’ll try to compress */ 25, /* Require 25% compression rate, or not worth it */ 1024, /* Give up if no compression in the first 1KB */ 128, /* Stop history lookup if a match of 128 bytes is found */ 10 /* Lower good match size by 10% at every loop iteration */ }; static const PGLZ_Strategy strategy_always_data = { 0, /* Chunks of any size are compressed */ INT_MAX, 0, /* It’s enough to save one single byte */ INT_MAX, /* Never give up early */ 128, /* Stop history lookup if a match of 128 bytes is found */ 6 /* Look harder for a good match */ };
What about jsonb?
Some time ago jsonb had a problem with the TOAST compression, because the leading portion of the object consisted mostly of a strictly-increasing series of integer offsets. It was fairly incompressible, because the code in pglz_compress() gives up if it’s found nothing compressible in the first first_success_by bytes of a value (this is 1 KB in the default strategy, you can see it above). So, in this thread guys solved this problem by changing item offsets to item lengths and that’s why now the jsonb header looks like this:
* JEntry format. * The least significant 28 bits store either the data length of the entry, or its end+1 offset from the start of the variable-length portion of the containing object. The next three bits store the type of the entry, and the high-order bit tells whether the least significant bits store a length or an offset. * The reason for the offset-or-length complication is to compromise between access speed and data compressibility. In the initial design each JEntry always stored an offset, but this resulted in JEntry arrays with horrible compressibility properties, so that TOAST compression of a JSONB did not work well. Storing only lengths would greatly improve compressibility, but it makes random access into large arrays expensive (O(N) not O(1)). * So what we do is store an offset in every JB_OFFSET_STRIDE’th JEntry and a length in the rest. This results in reasonably compressible data (as long as the stride isn’t too small). We may have to examine as many as JB_OFFSET_STRIDE JEntrys in order to find out the offset or length of any given item, but that’s still O(1) no matter how large the container is.
Conclusion:
Postgresql has normal balanced default auto-compression, but it’s not always enough.
Postgres Pro Compression
You can find official info about compression on database level here.
Postgres Pro brings the page-compression to postgresql world and uses zstd (from Facebook with love) compression library on Linux and zlib on Windows. Developers claim that their implementation can reduce database size from 2 to 5 times.
To use compression you need to create a tablespace:
postgres=# create tablespace compressed_tables location ‘/var/data/cfs’ with (compression=true);
Compressed once the tablespace can’t be decompressed. And also you can’t compress tablespace which was created earlier.
Cstore_fdw compression
You also can look at cstore_fdw — is an open source columnar store extension for PostgreSQL. it may compress data 6x-10x (according to the developers).
But anyway I didn’t try it, because it has some restrictions, like:
“We currently don’t support updating table using DELETE, and UPDATE commands. We also don’t support single row inserts”
So, I leave to try it to you.
Common conclusion.
As I said above, Postgresql has normal balanced default auto-compression, but it’s not always enough. If you have large tables with many rows and many columns, where each value does not exceed 2 KB, you may face a storage problem, because your data won’t be auto-compressed.
In the next articles we’ll consider the rest of compression options.
Feel free to shake hand on Medium or Telegram or Twitter. | https://medium.com/@lk.snatch/postgresql-compression-854a4647ee43 | ['Alex Kuk'] | 2020-01-20 08:20:32.082000+00:00 | ['Postgresql', 'Compression', 'Jsonb'] |
3 Planning Strategies Writers Should Explore | 3 Planning Strategies Writers Should Explore
Photo by Paico Oficial on Unsplash
I’ve been in pursuit of the “perfect planner” for as long as I can remember. And I suspect a lot of other writers are similarly obsessed/perplexed.
Writing life just isn’t a good fit for standardized, calendar-focused planners — at least not usually. If you happen to have the sort of writing job that involves lots of deadlines and editorial meetings, you probably need an hour-by-hour daily view.
But.
If you are writing on your own — whether part or all of the time — you need a strategy that can combine big goals, small tasks, lots of notes, ideas to investigate or organize, and more. The key is finding a format that balances structure with freedom.
Ideally, a structure that nourishes rather than restricts creativity.
If there’s one thing I’ve figured out in my quest for the perfect planning strategy, it’s that different approaches work for different people, at different times in their writing life. Some writers find a fit with the bullet journal method, or with one of the designed planners that combine a little bit of everything.
At one point in my quest, I was so determined to understand the whole range of approaches that I compiled a database of all the planner products I could find out about. And there are a lot of them.
That was a great exercise, and still has some value I think. But in the end, I never found my soulmate planner. I ended up creating my own approaches — methods and templates that I go back to again and again.
I mix and match them to meet changing needs, and I freshen them up with new tweaks when they no longer seem satisfying.
So here are my three go-to strategies. The first is an inexpensive and not-obvious online tool. The second combines several different paper resources. And the third (my core approach) uses a simple but powerful graphic form to organize everything — from parts of the day to parts of a novel to parts of life.
1. SuperNotecard
I tried many online planning products before eventually deciding that my love of paper is stronger than my desire for a cross-platform strategy. Of all the popular tools I tried, Trello was the only one that clicked, and I used it quite a bit for a while. But I was continually frustrated by the fact that you can only arrange/move cards horizontally. And it’s rather complicated to combine cards with calendars.
As for OneNote and its various cousins — don’t get me started. I’m pretty savvy, but I never figured out the organizational metaphor. So after putting a ton of stuff in, I took it all out.
And then . . .
I stumbled on a tool that’s not particularly meant to be a planner, but works well if you want to use it that way. To be candid — it’s a rather “old” product (started out as a flashcard-maker in 2011), and may seem a bit clunky at first. There are a lot of features, which are reasonably well organized, but the interface isn’t entirely intuitive.
So there’s a small learning curve. Once you catch on to the metaphor, though, SuperNotecard is a lot of fun. To give you a general idea of the approach, here are a few screenshots from projects I experimented with last year.
Top level — card stacks
Next level — stack opened up to show cards
Single card view
You can customize the cards with colors, tags, flags, etc. You can format card text with bullets and tables, embed images, add line numbers and links, apply a variety of styles, search for text.
You can filter views in a variety of ways — and best of all, for my taste, you can move the cards any which way, just as you would move paper notes laid out on a desk or pinned on a corkboard.
Within a project (SuperNotecard’s basic organizational unit), you can stack groups of cards into decks. Double-click on the deck to see all the cards, rearrange them, edit them, etc.
There’s also a reference library feature where you can create cards for any kind of material, then link to the reference from any card in the project. But each library is part of a specific project, so you can’t have a “master” that’s accessible to all projects. (This was a significant limitation for me, but might not bother most people.)
The product is geared toward writers, and provides slightly different toolsets depending on whether a particular project falls into the category of Fiction, Nonfiction, or Script. But the basics (project, deck, cards) are the same for all three categories.
So — how is this a planning strategy?
Simple enough. Just create a “Today” deck, add cards for whatever you like (appointments, goals, tasks, etc.) and arrange them. Add keywords to the cards if you want to be able to view ad hoc groups, and/or color-code them to create a better visualization. You can copy cards from other decks into “Today,” so it’s easy to keep track of ongoing or unfinished tasks.
You can also nest decks within decks — so you can have a “Week” deck containing “Monday,” “Tuesday,” etc. decks. If it suits your personal approach, add a “Goals” deck for the week, and an “Assessment” decks. Or zoom further out with a “Month” or “Quarter” decks.
With SuperNotecard, you can have everything in one place — ideas, text blocks, reference materials, planning tools — which has a lot of potential advantages for writers.
On the plus side, you can tinker up a completely customized personal system. On the negative side, you will have to put some effort into figuring out what works for you, and getting it set up that way.
Their how-to texts are a bit cumbersome, and you won’t find help outside the program, as it’s pretty much a niche product. But it has some of the features in a high-end product like Scrivener, while being more broadly useful and much less complicated.
So! Some of you might already be in love with SuperNotecard, while some already hate it, just from that description. If you’re somewhere in the middle, take it for a free 30-day spin (limited to five projects). And if it clicks for you, the annual subscription is just $19.
2. Spiral notebooks, 3-ring binders, sticky notes, and “real” index cards
If that looks like a list of school supplies — true enough! And you can add in some ordinary office supplies for good measure. The creative part derives from how you combine basic items into a personally perfect planning system.
Full disclosure: I love anything that falls into this category, and will amuse myself if time permits by building a new “kit” for a new project. Candidly, I don’t end up using most of them — their usefulness comes from the process itself. From thinking through a project by deciding what sorts of working structures I might want to create, what color seems to fit, and so on.
Which might seem ridiculous. If so, jump ahead to strategy 3! But if the general idea has some appeal, I’ll share a short list of things in this category that have made me happy.
I like to get a really big picture sometimes. And as I don’t have room for a giant whiteboard at home (sadly!), I’ve taken to buying several desk-sized calendars as soon as they get marked down (often by the end of February). I rarely use the dated sides — I just turn the pages over and use the blank side for notes I want to see in mind-map relationships, or all in one place.
Ordinary 3x5 index cards are insanely cheap — often less than a dollar per hundred. And they can be used for almost anything. Sometimes I just put a single word, phrase, task, or goal on each card and lay them out Kanban-style. There’s something about the physical act of making them and moving them around that has a clarifying or focusing effect.
For a couple of extra dollars, you can get index cards in a riot of colors! And you can get bigger ones (4 x 6) and biggest ones (5 x 8).
Jumbo, color-coded index cards can be a lot of fun.
If you are fond of index cards, Post-Its makes sticky ones that can be used in various ways. And there are spiral-bound sets (the cards are perforated for detachment), and sheets of cards that can go in a 3-ring binder (ditto).
Speaking of 3-ring binders — they have three great advantages. First (and obviously), you can easily rearrange the pages, and separate them into groups by using dividers. Second, you can equip them with various accessories, such as pocket tabs, sheet protectors, zippered cases, and so on. Third — and this is most important for me — you can have three different kinds of pages: blank, rules, and grid. (There’s more in Strategy 3 about why that might matter.)
I put this notebook together (mostly with $1 items) for a bit of portable color.
Since there are calendars and planner pages designed to fit them, binders offer an easy way to combine structured and freeform approaches. Etsy is awash with page templates if you don’t want to make your own.
Over the years, I’ve collected a lot of “art cards.” Galleries used to send them out to announce new shows, though of course that’s mostly not happening now. But if you happen to have a stack of them — or something equivalent — tuck them into pockets of notebooks, or cut them up and hide them in your index cards. Just a nice visual refreshment!
If these old-school approaches appeal to you, a couple of famous writers offer inspiration. Check out Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” (in the 1968 collection Slouching Toward Bethlem) and Anne Lamott’s “Index Cards,” found in Part Three of her wonderful book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
Didion and Lamott both focus more on writing than on planning. But there’s a lot of overlap between the two processes, I think.
3. Quadrants, circles, and triangles
Until fairly recently, I always used ruled pages when I wrote in a notebook. Then I started to feel very restricted by the lines. I’d already experimented with some planner styles that offer open parts of the page for freeform notes, as well as the use of a blank journal for bullet-style pages.
Neither worked for me — mainly because there was no consistent approach to the structural part of planning. I didn’t want to be faced with a completely new set of organizational decisions every day . . . .
So I adopted a strategy from my experience in corporate communications: the quadrant chart. Truly the Swiss Army Knife of information organization! Once you put any kind of content into a quadrant format — it might be grossly over-simplified, but it will communicate very effectively with most audiences.
Basically, I create a quadrant chart every time I start to plan anything. Some examples . . .
From a calendar perspective:
Plan the day (4 time blocks, e.g., 7–10 AM, 10 AM-2 PM, 2–5 PM, 5–8 PM)
Plan the month (4 weeks)
Plan the year (4 quarters).
From a project perspective:
Big picture (e.g., preparation, design, development, deployment)
Project elements (e.g., plot, characters, scenes, themes)
Project requirements (e.g., people, budget, infrastructure, materials)
The beauty of dividing everything into fours is that it usually makes you think harder. So if you can’t immediately come up with four equal categories, keep trying — because there is almost always something else that needs attention.
For example, when I was sketching out this story on planning for writers, I knew right away that three quadrants would contain strategies, because the story is part of an informal series organized in three's. But I needed to fill four slots, so realized the fourth square should be “Introduction/Conclusion.”
Now all I had to do was drop in notes for each part, and I had a roadmap. Plus a head start on writing the story efficiently.
Very often I just raggedly draw a quadrant on a sheet of graph paper or a blank page, and go from there. But I’ve also created a PowerPoint deck with ready-made quadrants in different sizes, and some with pre-defined labels.
It’s actually a bit of a pain to draw an exact quadrant in PPT, but you can grab this image, drop it on a blank slide, and stretch/shrink it to the desired size. | https://medium.com/the-book-mechanic/3-planning-strategies-writers-should-explore-3460838274a3 | ['Cynthia Giles'] | 2020-12-14 15:38:03.042000+00:00 | ['Planning', 'Writing Life', 'Productivity', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips'] |
Niantic AR開発者向けキット（ARDK）の事前登録を開始 | Currently working for Niantic. Ex-Google, ex-NTT, ex-Interscope, ex-Technorati and ex-Digital Garage. 日本語ブログはこちら。http://t.co/YkUC0Lcwch | https://medium.com/@fumi/niantic-ar%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BA%E8%80%85%E5%90%91%E3%81%91%E3%82%AD%E3%83%83%E3%83%88-ardk-%E3%81%AE%E4%BA%8B%E5%89%8D%E7%99%BB%E9%8C%B2%E3%82%92%E9%96%8B%E5%A7%8B-94abb906f561 | [] | 2021-01-04 07:53:45.756000+00:00 | ['AR', 'Niantic'] |
Best 10 Forex Signal Softwares with High Win Rate and Lifetime Access | Best 10 Forex Signal Softwares with High Win Rate and Lifetime Access Ricky Brown Sep 7·8 min read
What is Forex Signal Software?
It is a software developed by trading professionals who trade in the foreign exchange market. The software aims to make the process of trading currencies accessible for almost anyone — even if they don’t have any substantial knowledge of the market. Trading analysts will take data from the market and provide recommendations on how to profit from it, which is then sent to users via various methods.
The channels can range from regular SMS messages to signals inside an actual trading platform. The software essentially provides you with all the information required to make an informed decision when trading on the market. Rather than spending endless hours trying to understand the ins and outs, they can provide information and guides on how to navigate the Forex market easily and successfully.
If you are looking for a dedicated forex signal provider, see our list of forex signal providers below. Not all traders want a full broker to go along with their forex signals, for example, if you are already signed up with a broker that you’re happy with and you just want the trade signals. In these cases, there are dedicated signal providers that only specialize in generating forex signals.
1) Triumph Scalper
What’s “Triumph Scalper”?
“Triumph Scalper” is exclusive software for trading on the forex market. Its main goal is to make your trading really profitable, saving your precious time and nerves!
It is created for fast trading, so it works on M1, M5, M15 Timeframes, and all major currency pairs. All you need is simply to follow the stable BUY and SELL signals which “Triumph Scalper” gives to you and then enjoy your splendid beneficial trades.
Consider that life has given you a great chance to go over to the side of successful people. It’s high time to take this unique chance and make the long-awaited first step that will change your life. Go ahead!
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2) Forex Spectrum
What’s “Forex Spectrum”?
This awesome indicator is made to gain great profit being absolutely easy to use.
With “Forex Spectrum” you’ll constantly feel confident whether you’re a newbie in trading or an experienced Forex trader.
It works on all major pairs and M30-D1 timeframes. Three adaptive Take Profit levels clearly depicted and colored corridors on your chart together with other features will assure you to make the right choice.
All you need to do is just choose the trading style you’re comfortable with, and “Forex Spectrum” will notify you when it’s high time to make your splendid trades.
You’re just one step ahead of undreamed-of profitability!
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3) Forex Triple Hit
“Forex Triple Hit” System is a unique combination of algorithms developed by Karl Dittman and his team, which will allow you to move to the next level of trading with highly profitable trades.
It works on all major currency pairs and M15-H1 timeframes.
“Forex Triple Hit” includes:
Oscillator that tracks the largest trends and gives signals to enter & exit trades Buy & Sell Arrows which simultaneously act as the trend confirmation and show additional entry points within one big trend, allowing you to make money on one price movement more than once Support & Resistance Levels represent key junctures where the forces of supply and demand meet, helping to analyze price movements and trade successfully.
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4) Fx Trend Stalker
What is FX Trend Stalker?
“FX Trend Stalker” is a powerful indicator for the Forex market fully loaded with such features that will lead you to success in trading. The indicator works on M1-M15 Timeframes and on all major currency pairs.
“FX Trend Stalker” consists of:
Buy & Sell Neon Lines giving signals to enter & exit trades. Unique Powerful Entry feature that goes along with the wide Neon Line on the chart when the trend direction is confirmed and the trend is strong according to the unique algorithms, which you can also see in the Trend Power bars of the informer. Super accurate Trend Power Detector with 8 bars in the informer displaying the power of a trend on the current TF. Special Arrows in the informer showing trend directions on the larger timeframes (M5-M30), so that you don’t need to switch the TFs every time you want to check them for entry confirmation.
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5) Exynox Scalper
What is Eqynox Scalper?
Highly Profitable & Easy-To-Use, so that both newbie traders and
experienced ones can enjoy it.
Exynox Scalper works on all major pairs and M1-M30 timeframes.
This superintelligent forex tool is based on a unique algorithm that makes power to pinpoint the BEST time to enter & exit trades with a GREAT ACCURACY!
Simply BUY/SELL when Exynox tells you and ENJOY MAKING MONEY! Exynox Scalper will assist you to make HUGE PROFITS QUICKLY & EASILY, so all you need is just to enjoy the process, resting on your comfy couch.
Exynox Scalper indicator is your unique key to SUCCESSFUL TRADING!
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6) Fibo Quantum
How does it work?
It’s a brand new Forex indicator that is based on scientific and more importantly natural laws.
These laws are very powerful but are often discarded.
Our GOAL was to help traders make reliable profit in such a way that it is consistent over the long run and easy even for beginners.
With Fibo Quantum indicator, you will always know with a lot of confidence…
…When Exactly To Open And Close Your Trades To Make The Biggest Possible Profit From Almost Every Price Movement!
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7) DNA Scalper
How It Works?
DNA Scalper with its built-in self-correcting, adaptive algorithm allows you to generate amazing results by pinpointing the EXACT times for you to enter & exit trades with great accuracy!
All you have to do is tell it the trading style you are comfortable with, and DNA Scalper will notify you of the perfect time to make your trade.
It is a way to make an income while keeping your time exactly that: YOURS. No more working hard just to have someone else make the profit!
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8) X Trend Premium
How It Works
Based upon ages of in-depth research, X Trend Premium is a forex indicator that uses an adaptive algorithm working in real-time. It’s a way to earn money easily, safely, and from the comfort of your own home. No more punch cards, no more work schedules, just strong and steady income on your own time.
X Trend Premium is unlike any other indicator on the market. It requires no outside knowledge and utilizes cutting-edge technology that makes trading more accurate, more reliable, and as effortless as possible.
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9) Fibo Quantum Scalper
Scientific Scalper
It’s based on scientific and MORE IMPORTANTLY natural laws that powered Fibo Quantum which pinpoints winning trades on the
15 Minutes to Daily timeframes.
If you’re not familiar with Fibo Quantum Indicator, the internet is bursting with rave reviews of its performance
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10) Forex Monarch
How It Works
You simply BUY or SELL when the indicator tells you to. There is NO chart reading. NO technical analysis. NO thinking. Just click BUY or SELL when you’re told to and make money. It’s that simple.
You can use it on ANY currency chart anywhere from the 15-minute to daily time-frames and it will pinpoint profitable trades for you all day long.
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Disclaimer: I don’t Represent the product/Ebook/course shown in my article. this is for educational purposes only. Results are not typical.
AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: this Article may contain affiliate links, which means if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission. I won’t put anything here that I haven’t and /or personally verified. | https://medium.com/@rickyolo/best-8-forex-signal-softwares-with-high-win-rate-and-lifetime-access-9883382d83b5 | ['Ricky Brown'] | 2021-09-08 02:32:28.680000+00:00 | ['Forex', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Forex Trading'] |
A beginner’s guide to creating desktop applications using Electron | Architecture of Electron
Electron uses multi-process architecture to manage the application state and user interface. The main process controls the state of the application while the renderer process controls the user interface. Electron uses GPU process to perform graphically intensive tasks but it’s optional.
When an Electron application is launched, the main process is created. We can only have one main process per application. This process can talk to native system APIs and start renderer processes. A renderer process is responsible to display UI using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
An Electron application’s entry point is a JavaScript file (let’s call it main.js ) that runs inside the main process. The main process has default access of Node.js APIs but not the chromium APIs. Therefore you can use any Node.js API inside such as fs.writeFile() or require() but not the document or window.addEventListener() .
An Electron application like a browser. The main process is like a browser and renderer processes are like the browser tabs. The main process can open as many browser tabs a possible meaning as many renderer processes as possible. In the Electron world, we call a tab a window since it’s literally an application window as shown below.
(macOS application window)
From the main.js file ( main process), we create a window (like a tab with our previous analogy) by instantiating BrowserWindow class provided by the electron package. This instantiation creates an application window just like above but it will be empty by default.
💡 The electron package provides Electron related modules (such as BrowserWindow ) and high-level system API modules (such as notification, dialogs, touch bar, etc). Modules provided by this package is available in the main as well as in the renderer process but not all modules provided by this package are accessible in these processes (more on that later).
We load an HTML web page inside this window (win) by calling win.loadFile(path) or win.loadURL(url) method. After this call, Electron creates a renderer process and renders the web page from a local file or the remote URL (which could also use the file:// protocol).
// main.js
const { BrowserWindow } = require( 'electron' ); // create a window
const win = new BrowserWindow( { width: 600, height: 300 } );
win.loadFile( './index.html' );
So in a nutshell, JavaScript running in the main process is an orchestrator of the entire application but it can not display UI. It needs to create a renderer process through BrowserWindow interface to do that.
BrowserWindow is just a high-level interface for rendering and controlling the webpage but it itself can not render web pages. The webContents interface is a low-level API that is responsible for rendering and controlling the web page using Chromium’s renderer process.
The renderer process is an operating system process that is associated with the webContents interface. You can access webContents interface from the BrowserWindow interface using win.webContents property. To get the OS PID, use the win.webContents.getOSProcessId() method and to get Chromium’s renderer PID, use win.webContents.getProcessId() method.
💡 Since BrowserWindow is just a high-level interface for the webContents interface, you can use win.webContents.loadFile() call instead of win.loadFile() to render an HTML page inside a window.
Though it seems like there is one renderer process per window, but that’s not always the case. A renderer process is created when we load a web page inside a window. A window may spawn another renderer processing by using <webview> HTML tag (provided by Electron) or adding a BrowserView object to an existing window.
Main vs Renderer Process
It’s pretty clear that the main process manages the application state and the renderer processes control the user interface of the application. Though there are several things renderer process can not have access to.
The main process has access to Node.js APIs by default. While creating a renderer process using new BrowserWindow(options) , we can specify if the renderer process should have access to Node.js APIs as well. This is controlled by the options.webPreferences.nodeIntegration property.
The default value of this property is false so we would need to set it to true if we want JavaScript running inside a renderer process to have access to Node.js APIs such as fs.writeFile() or require() .
💡 The reason why Electron doesn’t grant access to Node.js APIs from the renderer processes by default is that malicious third-party JavaScript code (such as a third-party library) can get access to the user’s system by calling the Node APIs. Therefore you should be careful while using this option.
Also, you can’t create a browser window from another browser window. This means JavaScript running inside a renderer process can’t instantiate new BrowserWindow(options) to create a new window. The creation of windows must be done by the main process.
💡 However a window.open() call will create another window by instantiating BrowserWindow class which will start a renderer process. However, this window has limited functionality as described here.
Another difference is that all native system APIs (outside Node.js) are only accessible from the main process. For example, if you want to open a system dialog, you can only use the dialog module inside the JavaScript running in the main process and not inside a window ( renderer process).
There are a few modules that can be accessed from main and renderer process. Here is a list of modules and APIs that can be accessed from main , renderer and both the processes. You can find documentation of each module on this page.
(Module Accessibility Table / source: gist.github.com)
Inter-Process Communication
Now that we established that main process is for the orchestration of the application as well as for the communication between system resources and the application while the renderer process is for rendering the user interface of the application, we need to figure out how we can deal with the limitations.
For example, as a renderer process can not create another window by instantiating BrowserWindow class, how we can open another application window let’s say when the user presses a <button> element in the window to see let’s say an image with zoom controls. This is where inter-process communication (IPC) comes into the picture.
We can ask the main process to open a window by sending a message from the renderer process or by invoking a function written in the main process (JavaScript running in the main process). Communication between main process and renderer process happens through the IPC modules. The main process can access ipcMain module while renderer process can access ipcRenderer module.
The ipcMain module can listen to events sent by the renderer process using ipcMain.on() function or it can handle function execution invoked by the renderer process using ipcMain.handle() method. Similarly, the ipcRenderer module can send messages to the main process using the ipcRenderer.send() method or invoke a procedure inside the main process using ipcRenderer.invoke() method.
A good example of the main process depending on the renderer process would be the network connectivity status. We can listen to online or offline events in a browser (documentation), so it’s possible to get network connectivity of user’s device in the renderer process but we can’t do the same in the main process. So the only way main process can get the status of network connectivity is by asking the renderer process. Therefore, a renderer process can send a message to the main process every time this status changes (using the ipcMain and ipcRenderer modules).
💡 These communications can happen synchronously or asynchronously depending on the module methods you use.
If you want to communicate between two renderer processes, then you would need to use main process as a bridge or if you have access to webContents interface of a renderer process then you can use webContents.send() method to send a message to another renderer process and use ipcRenderer.on() method to listen to that message.
Background Jobs
If you want to perform a CPU-intensive task, then you wouldn’t want to run the long-running JavaScript code inside a renderer process which would block the UI and leave the UI dead for a few seconds or minutes. However, if you do, let’s say by accident, other windows won’t be affected since they are running in separate renderer processes.
But still, blocking UI is not good as it’s bad for the user experience. What good is your app if the user can not interact with the UI of the application? You would say, let’s use the main processes since it’s not linked with the renderer process but unfortunately blocking the main process would leave your application (and all its windows) dead as well.
To run background jobs, we don’t need to invent the wheel. We already have a few tricks up our sleeves. We can use the WebWorker API from JavaScript running inside renderer process to start a background task. We could also use the worker_threads built-in Node.js module to start a worker thread just like a WebWorker thread.
Some people might suggest using a frameless transparent window that users can’t see to carry out background and CPU-intensive tasks. Here is an article that describes exactly that. However, we should avoid using such tricks when we have better ways to do things.
A web worker does not automatically get access to Node.js API. We need to set options.webPreferences.nodeIntegrationInWorker property to true while creating a BrowswerWindow object. This property works irrespective of the nodeIntegration property.
💡 Though we can access all Node.js APIs inside a web worker, it’s not possible to access Electron’s native APIs. For more info on multithreading in Electron, follow this documentation.
10,000 Foot View
What we discussed so far is just an overview of the Electron’s architecture. If you wanna dig deeper, then you might want to give this a read. Let’s sum up what we have discussed so far with a simplified diagram. | https://medium.com/jspoint/a-beginners-guide-to-creating-desktop-applications-using-electron-824da5665047 | ['Uday Hiwarale'] | 2020-12-27 18:14:14.902000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Web Development', 'Electron', 'Electronjs', 'App Development'] |
Shopify’s Success in Using RoR for its One Million Plus Users | Most of us have used Shopify to buy something for our home, a personal item, or any useful tool. Shopify was started in 2004 by three Canadians, inspired by a poor online shopping experience with snowboarding equipment. From then until now, it has achieved great recognition and this year reached more than 1 million users. By 2021, global e-commerce is forecast to be $4.97 trillion — almost a 400% increase in seven years.
Shopify has become an inspiring example of a complex, well-structured, and user-friendly e-commerce platform made with Ruby on Rails (RoR). And it’s absolutely rocking. In short, it’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides entrepreneurs with the opportunity to create a secure online shop with a broad range of functionality and choose from about 100 payment gateways. For advanced users, there’s also an opportunity to edit design templates.
Source: Shopify data for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
But why does Shopify use Ruby on Rails?
Ruby on Rails is a web development framework for building web applications. Even though RoR has reached its maturity, it’s still preferred by developers all over the world.
Shopify was launched when RoR was at its most popular. It seemed to be a promising framework at the time, and it is. RoR has allowed Shopify to grow at the same time as the number of its users has increased, it is called scalability. The architecture of an RoR application has great scalability potential due to its modularity, which means the system can be divided into engines, modules, and gems. It also conforms very well to the twelve factor app principles, which allow it to be scaled horizontally in a natural way.
This fact can be well appreciated when popular Platforms as a Service (Paas), such as Heroku, help you to scale the applications by just clicking a few buttons or interacting with simple slider control.
Why is RoR relevant in 2020?
In 2020, e-commerce solutions are in high demand. The pandemic and the need for convenience and safety has led to many companies turning to e-commerce platforms to serve their customers. The RoR framework is a highly stable, powerful platform for building an e-commerce website.
“Shopify offers a lot more than an e-commerce sales platform. This tool is more like a product database or inventory management system, allowing you to sell items on a website through channels such as Pinterest and Facebook, and in a point of sales situation. I use the portable card reader when I go to craft shows and sell items directly from the online store inventory. This tool helps me to manage inventory and sales tax collection.” — Jennifer Boaro, The Cat Ball
Using Ruby on Rails web development for e-commerce makes sense because the framework is an affordable way to build web applications. On top of that, it provides much faster development than other frameworks, so you can build B2B, B2C, and subscription-based e-commerce projects without any hassle.
If you are thinking of building an online shop, RoR is one of the best frameworks you can find, as it has lots of gems developed specifically for e-commerce. RoR has it all: helpdesks, payment gateways, email campaign platforms, and more. This is why Shopify, as well as other e-commerce platforms like Etsy and Brandless, are built in RoR.
Ruby on Rails pros and cons
At Codescrum, we have worked with HeadBox, the UK’s first online marketplace for inspiring meeting, off-site, and event spaces. It enables users to easily search, book, and pay online for venues.
Today, e-commerce with Ruby on Rails is more relevant than ever. Due to the imminent losses companies face, you may want to save money but still, reach more customers. With a mobile e-commerce app built using RoR, you can reduce the burden on your existing operations.
We have helped companies worldwide with their Ruby on Rails projects. Check out our case studies HERE. | https://medium.com/@codescrum/shopifys-success-in-using-ror-for-its-one-million-plus-users-7c49beffcc3e | [] | 2020-12-14 14:39:05.374000+00:00 | ['Pros And Cons', 'Apps', 'Ruby on Rails', 'Shopify', 'Advantages'] |
[Scylla] 세상에서 가장 빠른 NoSQL의 Architecture | ScyllaDB’s Benchmarks에서 Scylla 측에서 제공한 Benchmark 결과를 확인할 수 있습니다. Scylla 뿐만 아니라 삼성 SDS에서 진행한 POC에서는 ScyllaDB가 속도, 처리량에서 카산드라 대비 8배에서 최대 37배의 고성능을 보인 것으로 나타났습니다.
Cassandra가 JVM 기반이라 JVM이 갖는 장점들을 갖지만 동시에 메모리 관리나 Garbage Collection 같은 필수 작업을 해야하기에 단점도 존재합니다.
하지만 ScyllaDB는 C++기반의 High-performance framework인 Seastar기반으로 개발되었습니다. 또한 CPU Core 별 Data Sharding과 단일 thread 기반 processing으로 Cassandra가 갖고 있던 lock 관리나 Context Processing이 원천적으로 불필요하다고 합니다.
삼성 SDS Report에서는 다음과 같이 ScyllaDB를 정리합니다.
분산처리에 효율적으로 설계된 DB답게 Scylla Server는 Cluster, Node, Shard로 구성됩니다. 확실히 Scale out이 효율적으로 될 수 있도록 설계된 것 같습니다.
Cluster
ScyllaDB에서 Data는 한 곳에 저장되지 않습니다. 여러 노드에 나눠서 저장되고 그 노드의 묶음을 Cluster라고 합니다. Data는 multi-datacenter replication을 이용하여 물리적으로 같은 곳에 있지 않은 Node들에 배포됩니다.
Node
Node는 Cluster를 구성하는 인스턴스의 단위입니다. Cluster는 안정성을 위해 같은 데이터를 여러 노드에 나눠서 저장합니다.
Shard
ScyllaDB를 공부하면서 놀랐던 것이 데이터를 노드 단위로 관리하는 것에서 더 나아서 CPU Core 단위로 관리한다는 것입니다. 특정 CPU에 RAM과 저장공간, 노드의 데이터를 나누어 할당하여 Shard를 생성합니다. Shard는 아무것도 공유하지 않고 독립적으로 작동하는데 이것이 Lock의 필요성을 크게 줄여준다고 합니다.
각 CPU 별로 Memory를 할당하기에 일반적인 차단이나 Memory Lock을 피할 수 있도록 합니다.
S cylla’s data model has led to it being called a “wide column” database, though we sometimes refer to it as a “key-key-value” database to reflect the partitioning and clustering keys. | https://medium.com/@whitekiwi/scylla-%EC%84%B8%EC%83%81%EC%97%90%EC%84%9C-%EA%B0%80%EC%9E%A5-%EB%B9%A0%EB%A5%B8-nosql%EC%9D%98-architecture-67fff59dccdf | ['Daily Kiwi'] | 2020-12-14 06:43:44.546000+00:00 | ['Scylladb', 'Scylla', 'Architecture', 'Scylladb Architecture', 'NoSQL'] |
Angelina Eonni88 is listening to K-Pop and recommends NordVPN discount | Angelina Eonni88 is a relaxed YouTuber, and she’s obviously into K-Pop. K-Pop is a musical style that originated in South Korea, its roots can be traced somewhere around 90ts, but the term has been popularized on the verge of the new millennium, the year 2000. Her playlist is full of reactions videos like Japanese video clips reactions, Vietnamese reactions, Filipino reactions, but you’ll also find Babymetal videos, which are super cute, and, of course, K-Pop reactions. Among this musical treasure, you might notice one more thing — a discount for a premium privacy protection service NordVPN.
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As you can see with this 70% discount NordVPN cost is reduced to just $3.49/month for a three-year deal, which is very nice considering that NordVPN is one of the most popular VPN service providers out there.
What can you get from NordVPN?
First and foremost, NordVPN is a cybersecurity software, and you will get online protection. It will obfuscate your IP address and add additional encryption to your online data-flow, repelling those who would love to track you online and get their hands on your data. Also, it has a robust cybersecurity tool called CyberSec, which will disable trackers, protect against phishing attempts, and defend against malware. All in one professionally packed software pack.
But there are more use cases for a VPN. Surely you must’ve heard of geographical restrictions, when some content is available in one country but not the other. Furthermore, a lot of far-east content is geo-blocked to that region only, so there’s a chance you might miss a K-Pop or Chinese song that you’d really like. NordVPN allows changing the server, and you can select one in those countries, and this way all geographical restrictions will be gone. You will also be able to get Google search results from that country, making it easier to know their online culture and search for content.
Haven’t heard of Angelina Eonni88?
Even though this channel has 165k subscribers and is entertaining, to say the least, K-Pop might not be the musical style for everyone. If you don’t really like the far-east music you might’ve missed this channel, luckily, there are tons and tons of other channels to check out on YouTube.
For example, mayhap you like video games? Check TBAG [Epic Gaming] YouTube channel for some hilarious and high-quality gaming videos that will keep your eyes locked for hours. Or maybe history if more of your thing and you like to spend countless days analyzing what humanity has gone through? Then The Armchair historian is just the place for you to be. | https://medium.com/@ronsonalfie/angelina-eonni88-recommends-nordvpn-fac784a63e65 | ['Alfred Ronson'] | 2020-04-06 13:29:14.814000+00:00 | ['Deal', 'Kpop', 'Discount', 'VPN', 'Cybersecurity'] |
Sizzling Hot | Sizzling Hot
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
Ewan winced, flinching away from Drew’s touch. Lifting his hands away from Ewan’s skin, Drew said, “Sorry. Sorry.”
Ewan grimaced, trying to relax his tense shoulders. “It’s not your fault. I’m the dummy who forgot sunblock.”
“Hey, don’t call my husband a dummy.” Drew squirted a generous blob of aloe vera gel on his fingers — alcohol free, of course. They’d only made that mistake once, and the “soothing” remedy had burned Ewan’s sensitive skin worse than the sun had.
“What else do you call a redhead who forgets to apply sunblock?” Ewan hissed and bit his lip as Drew carefully smoothed cool gel across Ewan’s shoulder. Raw reddened skin shivered with equal parts pain and pleasure at Drew’s touch. “I was supposed to cook the burgers, not me.”
“The burgers were delicious,” Drew said loyally, squirting more aloe vera gel on his fingers.
Ewan twisted his head, trying to see over his shoulder. “How much of that are you putting on me? How bad is it?”
“It’s fine,” Drew replied soothingly. “I’m just making sure every bit of red is covered.”
Ewan snorted. “We could be here all night then.”
“I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
Ewan let a gust of air out of his lungs. “If it had actually been sunny, I would’ve remembered sunblock and a hat. But I’ve been burned on a cloudy day before, so I really should’ve known better.” He flinched again as Drew touched the curve of his ear.
“Sorry, but you’ve burned your ears too.” Drew waited for Ewan to relax again, then gently spread gel over the shells of his ears. “Is there any part of your body you didn’t manage to burn?”
Image by Vickson Santos on Pexels
A snort of laughter escaped Ewan. “Well, there’s a few parts, yes. I could show you.” He tried to waggle his eyebrows suggestively, but probably just looked ridiculous.
Drew hummed thoughtfully, examining Ewan’s reddened skin. “As much as I hate to say it, I think you’d probably better take it easy until this heals.”
Ewan turned his head to look over his shoulder at Drew, and winced as his skin pulled. He sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Drew leaned forward to gently touch his lips to Ewan’s. Pulling back a bit, he said with a glint in his eye, “Then we can make it sizzle in here for a different reason.”
Laughing, Ewan leaned in for another kiss. “I look forward to it.” | https://crossingenres.com/sizzling-hot-d0c9d880f96b | ['Esther Spurrill-Jones'] | 2020-02-19 15:44:49.171000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'LGBTQ', 'Summer', 'Flash Fiction', 'Sizzling Hot'] |
7 gadgets under Rs 7,000 to make your home ‘smart’ | 7 gadgets under Rs 7,000 to make your home ‘smart’
Bury network of gadgets makes life simple. Envision how torment free it is the point at which you can handle your water spring with your cell phone. In the year 2020, brands like Xiaomi and Realme extended their Internet of Things (IoT) item portfolio. Gadgets dispatched incorporate savvy speakers, brilliant attachments, programmed cleanser distributor and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Here are 7 items dispatched in 2020 that can help turn your home 'keen'.
1. Realme smart Cam 360: Rs 2,599
Realme brilliant camera accompanies a sticker price of Rs 2,599. It is outfitted with 1080pixel FHD recording capacities and accompanies 360° omni-directional turn. The keen camera has separate IR night vision mode.
2. Realme Smart Plug: Rs 799
Realme savvy plug is valued at Rs 799. The shrewd attachment offers brilliant Wi-Fi control and works with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. It is furnished with five-layer wellbeing security.
3. Realme N1 electric toothbrush: Rs 1,499
Realme N1 oscillating brush can be bought at Rs 1,499. The gadget is asserted by the organization to convey a battery life of as long as 130 days on single charge. It is outfitted with high-recurrence sonic engine and highlights DuPont 99.99% antibacterial fibers.
4. Realme Soundbar: Rs 6,999
Valued at Rs 6,999, Realme Soundbar is furnished with 60watt full-range speakers and 40watt subwoofer. The audi gadget offers Bluetooth variant 5.0 for remote availability.
5. Xiaomi Smart LED bulb (White): Rs 799
Xiaomi Smart LED bulb (White) conveys a sticker price of Rs 799. The bulb is a 7.5W B22 bulb. The gadget is viable with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. The bulb offers 16 million tones.
6. Mi Automatic cleanser container: Rs 999
Mi Automatic cleanser allocator is selling at Rs 999. The gadget offers without contact cleanliness and is furnished with infrared sensors. It is guaranteed by the organization to be solid and strong.
7. Mi Smart speaker: Rs 3,999
Mi Smart speaker is accessible at Rs 3,999. The speaker can be utilized to control savvy home gadgets, for example, refrigerator, fountain. It houses a 63.5 mm driver speaker and offers both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth network choices.
https://worldtechmobi.blogspot.com | https://medium.com/@singhsonia615/7-gadgets-under-rs-7-000-to-make-your-home-smart-e7bf0b622a00 | [] | 2020-12-26 03:01:55.096000+00:00 | ['Gadgets', 'Mobile', 'Realme'] |
Protecting audio and music assets with Node and Javascript | In my previous post I discussed my latest small project of building an external music player for Bandcamp. What I realized is that many similar sites and services can easily be abused for pirating content, in particular copyrighted audio, music and video. In this post I will discuss several strategies for protecting such content.
Obtaining mp3 files (and other digital content) can usually be done by looking at the HTTP requests that are being made upon playing/using that particular content. In Bandcamp’s case I only had to look at the network traffic and spot the “mpeg” data type of 5.37MB in size, then by copy pasting the GET URL you can download its corresponding mp3 file.
Today it’s nearly impossible to fully secure digital content, there’s always some way of obtaining it. But the purpose of security systems is to make the hacker’s / pirate’s life very painful. Either by making the process very long and/or complex, in the hope of them giving up.
A very basic, yet quite effective method is to encrypt the sensitive assets. In Bandcamp’s case, they can encrypt the mp3 contents server-side using some key, send it to the client, and let the client’s JavaScript code decrypt and play it. The client can still download the encrypted mp3 file, but without the proper decryption algorithm it’s a useless file. This method is only as effective as our ability of hiding and obfuscating the decryption function.
In the code below I show my prototype for doing all of this.
NodeJS server code
"use strict";
const express = require("express")
const app = express()
const { Readable } = require('stream')
const fs = require('fs') app.get("/audio", function (req, res) {
res.setHeader('Access-Control-Allow-Origin','*')
xor_encrypt(res)
}) function xor_encrypt(res) {
// read audio file to buffer
let buff = fs.readFileSync('./audio.mp3') // determine encryption key
let key = buff[buff.length-1] // encrypt buffer contents
buff = buff.map(x => x ^ key).map(x => ~x) // store the encryption key as last element
buff[buff.length-1] = key // transform buffer to stream
let readStream = Readable.from(buff) // send stream to client
readStream.pipe(res) readStream.on('end', () => {
res.status(200).send()
})
} app.use(express.static('.')) const serverHost = "localhost"
const serverPort = 3007
app.listen(serverPort)
JS client code
let curr_track = document.createElement('audio') var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest()
oReq.open("GET", 'http://localhost:3007/audio', true)
oReq.responseType = "arraybuffer" oReq.onload = function(oEvent) {
xor()
}
oReq.send() function xor() {
// convert arrayBuffer to regular Array
const arr = oReq.response
var byteArray = new Uint8Array(arr) // obtain encryption key
let key = byteArray[byteArray.length - 1] // use key to decrypt contents
byteArray = byteArray.map(x => x ^ key).map(x => ~x) // restore key
byteArray[byteArray.length - 1] = key // convert byteArray to Blob
const blob = new Blob([byteArray], { type: 'audio/mp3' })
// create playable URL from Blob object
const url = URL.createObjectURL(blob) // memory leak possible! curr_track.src = url
curr_track.load()
} // now you can bind 'curr_track.play()' to some click-event
The code above contains comments for each step, so it should be self-explanatory. The method for encryption relies on simple yet highly efficient bitwise operators (xor and not).
In the client code, the url variable points to a temporary in-memory Blob object representing the mp3 file. If you print this url to console you will get something like this:
blob:http://localhost:3007/9a2ffb47-72af-4c58-a0f9-08b9a63b81d0
If you then copy paste this into a new tab you'll be able to play/download the decrypted mp3 track. This Blob object exists in-memory as long as your website window remains open, else it gets garbage collected; this also means that creating many Blobs can lead to memory leaks (but there is a method for cleaning them up manually).
This encryption strategy works fine, we made it harder for users to download mp3 files. It’s still possible once a user figures out how the decrypt function works, then they can automate it. Or by debugging/editing the JavaScript code they can similarly obtain the mp3 file.
Alternatively, instead of using a Blob object, you could use base64 encoding, but that’s just as trivial as Blobs are at decoding and downloading the binary contents.
A further improvement is to use many different encryption/decryption methods (instead of one) at random, but then again some kind of identifier will be needed to determine which method should be used client-sided. Once again the hacker/pirate can figure this out. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/protecting-audio-and-music-assets-with-node-and-javascript-5898683fa035 | ['Ilya Nevolin'] | 2020-12-01 06:56:03.244000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Security', 'Software Engineering', 'Nodejs'] |
Pretend | Six Years of poetry-only publishing, PoetsUnlimited was a diverse, engaging and authentic poetry magazine. For most of that time a daily publication, it was always diverse and original, and free-to-read by all.
Follow | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/pretend-a1add0435d09 | ['Saugat Acharya'] | 2017-07-02 11:41:16.815000+00:00 | ['Haiku', 'Smile', 'Poetry', 'Love', 'Relationships'] |
Does a Feudal Democracy Qualify as a Democracy? | Lots of people assert that Democracy has it’s origins in Greek Culture, specifically in Athens. What they do not make any effort to delineate is the reality that, in Greek Culture, while there indeed was Democracy, it never amounted to more than a Feudal Democracy.
What then is a Feudal Democracy?
In a Feudal Democracy, only those who are rich and influential are electable. Everyone represented by the elected hopes on willingness of the elected to look out for their welfare. When hope breaks down, mob mentality takes over.
The Greek Feudal Democracy was built, in entirety, on hope, not capacity of the people for holding of their representatives accountable. Clearly, Greek Feudal Democracy falls short of the modern definition of Democracy. In this respect, consider that Greek Feudal Democracy does not look that much different from the Feudal Lordship arrangement of ancient England. In England, if the lords were benevolent, the people prospered, the people were happy. If the lords were malicious in their treatments of people, the people were exploited, the people were unhappy. Naturally, the Feudal Lordship arrangement was a microcosm of the relationship between the lords and the English Aristocracy. If the king of England was benevolent, the lords had it easy. If the king of England was malicious, if he demanded that it was his right to sleep with the wives of his lords — and this did happen at least once — the lords had things rather difficult.
A Feudal Democracy is not much different from a Feudal Aristocracy.
In 427 BC, when Athens debated what to do to Mytilene, an ally that had revolted, the recommendation by the leader of Athens at that time, Cleon that everyone in the city be executed only was narrowly defeated, and this not because the punishment was draconian, rather because it could portray Athens in a very bad light to other ally cities.
By 415 BC, the Greek Feudal Democracy had devolved into mob rule, meaning the Feudal Democracy had broken down. Having been instituted about 510 BC, within 75 years, the Greek Feudal Democracy had lost any semblance of effectiveness. The sacking by Athens, of her best General, Alcibiades, would lead to his defection to Sparta, and provide Sparta with genius required for winning the war against Athens. In 406 BC, with mob rule in full swing, eight Generals who fought for Athens were executed for failing to rescue navymen who fell into the sea in course of a naval battle.
It was the Greek Feudal Democracy that, in 399 BC sentenced Socrates to death by poisoning for, atheism and corrupting the young. A Democracy within which individual lives do not matter is not much of a Democracy.
Upon winning the war against Athens, having not prepared itself intellectually, and having never even approached a Feudal Democracy in it’s political organization, Sparta’s desire for world domination, a desire contrary to any sort of Democracy, would lead to squandering of opportunity, would provide Philip of Macedon with opportunity to become protagonist of Greek culture all over the then known world.
So then, if Athens was no more than a Feudal Democracy, and Sparta sought world domination, with focus on rights of individuals, clearly, Greek Feudal Democracy left much to be desired.
The mere fact that Greek Feudal Democracy was way ahead of arrangements for political governance in either of ancient Iran or India ought not to induce the assertion that it can be characterized as foundation for modern day democracy. A democracy within which representatives could not, in reality be held accountable cannot be deemed foundational for institution of modern day democracy.
The fact that Greek Feudal Democracy did not survive domination of the world by the Roman Empire is telling. Under Rome, the whole world would devolve into a worse form of Democracy — Democracy via Agitation.
In reality, foundations of modern day Democracy are traceable to arrangements that were put in place in context of the Aristocracy that was the Eastern Roman Empire. While peasants answered to Lords, Barons, and Nobles in all of Western Europe (the Western Roman Empire), that is, farmed lands owned by lords, barons or nobles, and were allowed to keep only a fraction of the produce for themselves — a fraction barely sufficient for sustenance — in the Eastern Roman Empire, peasants farmed lands that were owned and protected by the king himself, and kept all of their produce for themselves. All they had to do in exchange, was, as required by the king, be willing to provide a male family member of fighting age for protection of the Empire. Since children of Barons or Nobles also had to fight for protection of the empire, this because they were leaders of sections of the military, peasants were required to do no more than Barons.
When the rights of peasants (commoners) are protected by the king himself, with outcome, much like the baron, the peasant has rights in relation to the king himself, as opposed to through the baron, we arrive at democracy that is implemented in context of an Aristocracy. The definition of Democracy? Government of the people, for the people, by the people. The most important of the three criteria? For the people.
If an alien in human form governed, such that the United States of America arrived at full employment and the best standards of living the world over for 50 years, would you care that he is not of the people? Is it the form of government that is most important, or the rights that are protected in context of any form of governance? Democracies that are not anchored on debates around factual knowledge, mathematical truth, and individual rights devolve into no more than mob rule that is anchored around mobs’ favorite rich and influential people. Ring a Bell?
The reason people keep on attributing modern day democracy to Greek Culture? With a plethora of Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Seneca etc., attribution of foundations of modern day Democracy to Greek Culture rings as if it is true, perhaps can be said to sound philosophically sexy.
But if the philosophers were as respected as they seem to be made out to be in context of their association with democracy, how exactly did Socrates arrive at being executed by the same vaunted democracy?
The truth of the matter? Ancient Greeks were no better at appreciating truths they did not want to hear, truths offered by true philosophers, than people of modern times.
It was the Library of the Eastern Roman Empire, not Greek Culture, that made possible your access and mine to writings of Aristotle.
Some ‘associations’ that are pushed intellectually today are nothing more than fables that sound philosophically sexy, that sound good to the ears, that make people feel good. Some other associations are rooted in truth.
Clearly, a society willing to execute it’s philosophers, a society which despised writings of it’s most accomplished philosopher, Aristotle so much, the writings were, at some point, lost, could not simultaneously have implemented teachings of same philosophers for arrival at form of governance evoked by their teachings. | https://oghenovoobrimah.medium.com/does-a-feudal-democracy-qualify-as-a-democracy-9da62f03300a | ['Oghenovo Obrimah'] | 2019-11-14 02:41:07.688000+00:00 | ['Feudalism', 'Politics', 'Political Philosophy', 'Equality', 'Democracy'] |
High-definition Data | Verifiable Claims are a new type of data resource with high-definition qualities. This is an important novel class of information, as high-definition data has very many useful applications in the digital world that could profoundly change how society operates in the physical world. This is the basis for establishing webs of trust, between people, machines and information.
Data captured in this format can be high in resolution and high in fidelity.
This article explains the core concepts of these new standards and proposes how thinking about data having ‘high-definition’ qualities could produce engineering and data-science breakthroughs.
Let’s start with some easy information theory
Information theory is a way of explaining how information gets quantified, stored and communicated. I would add to this scope how information gets valued.
Graphs
A particularly useful sub-domain of information theory is Graph Theory. This helps us explain the ways in which information is inter-connected.
We can use the analogy of friendships to understand how information (about people) is connected by describing their relationships (such as friendship).
In Graph Theory, the terminology Nodes and Edges provide basic abstractions for describing information objects (Nodes) and their connections (Edges). You can mentally build the components of a graph by thinking of people as nodes and their relationships as edges. In this analogy, people are dots and relationships are the lines connecting them.
Friendships are usually reciprocated, so the edges connecting two friends will have arrows at each end. This is cyclical and dynamic. It recognises interactions as information flows (including feelings!) — both ways, between friends.
But if someone thinks of you as a friend and you think of them as just an acquaintance, the edge between you could point only to you, as a one-way edge. Nodes that are connected exclusively by one-way edges create a directed graph. The fact that each individual is unique and has unique edges, means that the graph is acyclic. The graph does not repeat as you traverse it. In technical terms this is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).
Why this distinction between general graphs and directed acyclic graphs is relevant becomes more obvious when we look into specific applications of graph theory in information technologies, such as the Web and blockchains.
Linked-data graphs
Linked-data is a new web specification that has been formalised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), with the belief that this can organise and connect data in ways that will create a better Web.
Linked Data empowers people that publish and use information on the Web. It is a way to create a network of standards-based, machine-readable data across Web sites. It allows an application to start at one piece of Linked Data, and follow embedded links to other pieces of Linked Data that are hosted on different sites across the Web.
Generally speaking, the data model for linked-data (encoded as JSON-LD) is a generalised, labeled, directed graph that can have cyclical connections, be acyclic, or both. The graph contains nodes that are typically data such as a string, number, typed values (dates, times…), or a resource locator (IRI).
This simple data model is incredibly flexible and powerful. It is capable of modelling almost any kind of data — including the example of networks of friends with reciprocal relationships!
Directed acyclical graphs
In the data model for directed acyclical graphs (DAGs), each node is unique and has unique edges.
This simple data model is also incredibly flexible and powerful, as it is capable of modelling almost any kind of data. In our human relationship analogy this describes the one-way relationships between a network of people who are only acquaintances — when there is no reciprocity!
Where DAGs have the edge over general linked-data graphs, is that they are a deterministic. This is the reason that DAGs are the basis for blockchain-type data structures, where the ordering of information is consequential.
Merkle DAGs
A Hash is a practical abstraction of information. It is produced by algorithmically transforming any data input into a deterministic fixed output — such as a 256 character string of letters and numbers.
Data has higher degrees of fidelity when it can be reliably reproduced and the information it encodes does not become corrupted or decayed through the forces of entropy over time. We say the data is verifiable. Cryptographically encoding data, using a hash function, provides mathematically provable informational fidelity. This also makes data easier to find through content addressability. The uniqueness of each data resource, represented by its hash value, gives the information an identifiable fingerprint. This makes the data non-fungible, which is a big deal for reducing data errors and accounting fraud, such as double-counting.
Ralph Merkle made a massive contribution to information technology when he proposed a method of hashing data and then linking this data using its hash-value. The hash value of a node of information is added to the header of a new node of information, which is then hashed. This creates an encoded relationship between the nodes. The data is linked through the hash reference directing back to the previous node, in a chain of links. As each node (represented by its hash value) is unique, the edges between these nodes are also unique. As information can only be added deterministically, this creates a directed acyclic graph. In this case, we refer to it as a Merkle DAG.
A Merkle DAG solidifies digitally-encoded information into a series of unchangeable state representations.
The content address of any node of claims data can be defined by the cryptographic hash of the data. The direction of the graph flows from children to parents. Nodes with no parents are considered leaves and must have at least one child vertex in order to be connected to the graph.
This is represented in the figure, where each node representing a claim can be attributed to another claim node. The relationships between nodes are represented as edges in the graph of the nodes (the lines that connect nodes on the visual representation of this graph).
These data structures add a powerful new capability to capture the state of a whole graph of information — including the state of all the nodes and the state of all their relationships. We will see how this elevates both the resolution and fidelity of information — especially when this information is about a uniquely identified subject. This produces high-definition data which can be used for a range of applications that were not previously possible!
Decentralised Identifiers
Identifiers can be thought of as record-locators. In the context of databases, these are the Primary Keys of the database. The problem is that each database has its own set of record locators and the keys are owned and controlled by owners and administrators of the database. This results in records being ‘trapped’ — which is not great if they contain personal information about us, or if we want to share records across database systems.
Limitations of traditional (Web 2.0) Databases
A new identifier standard has been born out of the work of the Rebooting the Web of Trust community. This is now being formalised through the W3C as the Decentralised Identifier (DID) specification. A DID is a universally unique identifier (UUID) that is derived using a specific method (such as hashing other specific information). This could be placed on a decentralised public key infrastructure (DPKI), such as a blockchain, where it is available as a record-locator.
A DID enables records to be created with data resolving to this unique identifier (or to deterministic derivatives of this identifier). These records do not have to be trapped in any one database. Multiple records about the same subject identifier can be correlated across systems and over time. This potentially means more nodes and more edges. It increases the density of the data, which effectively elevates the definition of this data to higher degress of resolution. Now finally we have the prospect of truly ‘high-resolution’ data — much liken we have seen the evolution of ever higher-resolution cameras for capturing images! The technological advance from here is to further liberate data from Web 2.0 databases, to grow more connected and increasingly useful graphs of information.
A further characteristic of DIDs is that they enable records to be located by using associated URIs in a DID Document record. They also enable the controller (owner?) of the DID to be authenticated, using cryptographic signing keys that are recorded in the DID Document. These are powerful features, but a topic for another article.
Verifiable Claims
What brings this together is Verifiable Claims. This provide a new way of collecting, communicating and storing data about an identified subject, using a data structure that can be reliably reproduced and proven not to have changed.
Note: Verifiable Claims are now referred to as Verifiable Credentials by the W3C working group that is formalising this specification. Although this is semantic, I feel it limits interpretation of the scope of applicability of this important new data standard. We continue to use the term Verifiable Claims for the general use-case and refer to Verfiable Credentials for the sub-set of claims about identity.
Verifiable Claims use Linked-data in the JSON-LD format, to provide context to information being claimed. This relates the data contained in the claim to external information sources. For instance: in the context of claiming that the “name” attribute value of this person is “Alice”, we are referring to the “schema.org/person” definition of “name”.
A Verifiable Claim embeds the decentralised identifier (DID) of the subject. This enables specific attribute values to be correlated with the subject across multiple claims.
The claim is hashed to secure the information it contains and this produces a unique identity for the claim. Further fidelity is added to the claim by the issuer adding their DID to the record and cryptographically signing the claim, which means this can be authenticated.
Higher-definition Verifiable Claims
Now we get to the innovations that could be made possible by thinking with the paradigm of High-definition Data.
What if we combine Verifiable Claims with Merkle DAGs?
DAGs work well for recording claims (which could include statements, attestations, opinions, or other observations) that are attributed to identifiable things that already exist — including abstract things. This is because DAGs can only be created by hashing existing information.
DAGs can therefore be used to establish graphs of verifiable claims that are correlated with decentralised identifiers.
Claims exist as temporal (point-in-time) opinions or factual states. Past claims may not be changed, regardless of subsequent events, so the edges of an attribution DAG only point upstream, to earlier claims or events.
For this reason, DAGs are ideal for describing how a given claim is connected to past claims about a target subject. This provides the information for building graphs of claims wherein chains of attribution can add levels of assurance for each claim.
Verifiable Claims could be connected through multi-class attribution networks. This will product graphs of different classes of attribution pointing to a credential that will have a deterministically higher level of resolution and fidelity. We can achieve this by adding classifying meta-data to Verifiable Claims and then linking this metadata through Directed Acyclical Graphs. Think of this as adding colours to the graph, where colours represent a spectrum of possible metadata classes. Classifiers could include different types of attestations, or attestation weightings.
The density of these graphs increase as a function of both the number of unique data points, as well as the strength of the relationship ties between nodes and the target identifier. As more data points become linked together into this graph and as these become reinforced through chains of attribution, claims become higher-definition.
Recording the existence of a Verifiable Claim, by referencing its hash value in a Merkle DAG (or blockchain transaction), also adds provenance to the credential by recording an original state of the claim that can be compared to future states of the claim.
Applications and use-cases
For digital identity applications, the high-definition format of Verifiable Claims could increase both the informational value and the utility of identity credentials. For instance, by using attribution networks to increase the level of identity assurance (which is the probability that a credential is both true and positively correlated with a subject).
These principles equally apply to applications beyond identity. We have proposed the concept of High-definition Impact Claims in the ixo protocol.
For recording impact, the Verifiable Claims format generates valuable digital assets that have provable attribution and statistical integrity. These types of assets can be further enriched through intelligent transformations — adding more information to the claim. For instance, claims of carbon emission reductions from Kilowatt hours of clean energy generated can now be used to quantify carbon credits.
Through the verification process, uniquely identified digital assets get produced. These assets can be cryptographically tokenised. Carbon Credits become Carbon Tokens. This has the advantages of decreasing the fungibility of the data, whilst increasing the financial fungibility — which gives these assets more liquidity, as they can now be trustlessly traded through low-friction digital transactions and exchanges.
Initial thoughts on how to engineer a High-Definition Data system
A DAG encodes the relationships between claims in a way that can increase both the resolution and fidelity of each claim in the chain. Each claim in this construct attributes information to the identified subject in a way that is measurable and that can be relatively valued for its degree of attribution. This mapping can be encoded and stored in a hash table or IPFS.
The graph is read by using the hash address of the data to return the data itself. The attribution metadata can be statistically weighted and rated to calculate probabilistic determinants about the identified target claim.
Further ideas to explore
Now that we have this generic structure for attributing chains of claims with target identifiers, we could start considering how new classes of claims metadata might add degrees of informational definition to a claim and make it even higher-defintion in both resolution and fidelity. Think of this as increasing the spectrum of colours available for each pixel of information. In future we could have high-definition, full-colour, machine-readable information about any subject. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/high-definition-data-eeab16b055a3 | ['Dr Shaun Conway'] | 2018-12-23 19:12:45.095000+00:00 | ['Digital Identity', 'Web3', 'Data Science', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptography'] |
Book Review: “Philip and Alexander” | Book Review: “Philip and Alexander”
The new book from acclaimed historian Adrian Goldsworthy examines antiquity’s most famous father and son in a new light.
As everyone knows, I’m always on the lookout for a new book about antiquity, in particular anything having to do with Alexander the Great. This particular figure has always sort of cast a spell on me, perhaps because he’s become something of a queer icon.
So, when I saw that NetGalley had a copy of noted historian Adrian Goldsworthy’s new dual biography of Alexander the Great and his father Philip II, I knew that I had to get a copy for review.
As its title implies, this is a book that is very much about both Alexander and Phillip. Indeed, the book’s most noteworthy contribution to the already vast library of books about Alexander the Great is its dual emphasis on the father and the son. Poor Philip always seems to get short-shrift in the history books, the curse of having a son who would become one of the most famous men from antiquity. As Goldsworthy documents, however, were it not for Philip and his efforts to consolidate his power in both Macedonia and Greece, it’s very unlikely that Alexander would have been able to accomplish even a fraction of what he ultimately did.
In fact, one can’t help but admire Philip for his tenacity, his political skill, and his military abilities. Indeed, it’s something of a miracle that he managed to survive the cutthroat world of the Argead court for as long as he did, particularly since so many of his predecessors were cut down by those closest to them. Having managed to ascend to the throne, Philip set about forging Macedonia into a formidable force, and the book documents the way that he managed to first defeat the various tribes that sought to exploit Macedonia, before moving on to Greece. Philip’s genius was that he was able to take advantage of the Greek city-states’ chronic unwillingness to band together. By the time they realized just how much of a threat this “barbarian” was, it was far too late.
Philip’s great misfortune is that his perception in the present has been shaped by Hollywood’s representation of him. Two major films have so far been made about the life of Alexander, one in the 1950s and one in the early 2000s. In both cases, Philip comes across as a debauched sot unable to carry a sword or control what’s going on in his own home. By the time he’s cut down during a ceremony, it almost comes as a relief. Fortunately, Goldsworthy’s book goes a long way toward correcting this perception, allowing us to see the man in all of his complexity.
One of the book’s other great strengths is that it does give a pretty thorough examination of the broader world into which Philip was born, particularly Athens. Of all the city-states, this most famous city-state had arguably the most vexed relationship with the Macedonian king, due in no small part to the inveterate hatred born toward Philip by the famed and influential orator Demosthenes. We also get a glimpse into the workings of Macedonian court life which, Goldsworthy points out, centered around the king and his nobles. Understanding these contexts is vital for grasping the type of ruler that Philip went on to be. Personally, I would have liked to see more of these parts of the book, particularly since such context is so important to understanding Philip’s and Alexander’s role on the geopolitical stage.
When it comes to Alexander, however, the book falls a bit flat. Goldsworthy seems to have an almost pathological avoidance of anything having to do with Alexander’s personal life, and so those looking for illumination about the great man’s relationships with his mother Olympias, his friend and lover Hephaistion, or his lover and confidant Bagoas the eunuch are certain to be disappointed. Unlike almost every other historian I’ve read on the subject, Goldsworthy refuses to accept that Alexander had deeply physical relationships with men, and even at the end he can only bring himself to refer to Hephaistion as his dearest friend (he has a similarly prudish attitude toward Achilles and Patroclus). While his rationale for doing so is sound as far as it goes — we simply can’t know for sure whether the relationship was sexual — it does at times seem as if Goldsworthy is letting his own prejudices regarding same-sex eroticism color his understanding of Alexander.
What the book lacks in exploration of Alexander’s personal life it more than makes up for in discussions of battles, soldiers, and tactics. Quite frankly, I find those parts of the book the least enjoyable, mostly because I’m just not that much of a fan of military history. However, for those who want a detailed analysis of Alexander’s military exploits, particularly one he crosses into Persia and begins his conquest of that mighty, sprawling empire, this book more than fits the bill.
Throughout the book, Goldsworthy is very open about the fact that there is much that we don’t know about Alexander and his life. The sources are often written many years after his death. This is, of course, the danger in writing a narrative history about people who lived several millennia ago, but there were times when I began to wish that Goldsworthy would just move on from the constant uncertainty and tell the story that he wants to tell.
That being said, I found the concluding chapters to be the most compelling, in part because they make a convincing case for the need to continue exploring the lives of these two men. For better and worse, Philip and Alexander fundamentally reshaped the world that they found. Alexander in particular would cast a huge shadow over the rest of antiquity, and prominent men like Julius Caesar and Augustus would continue to yearn to achieve the same level of greatness (and, in Goldsworthy’s estimation, fail).
For the most part, I enjoyed this book. It’s a useful account of the lives of two of the ancient world’s most important rulers, men whose fame continues to shine down through the millennia. | https://medium.com/cliophilia/book-review-philip-and-alexander-6d0503ed20e9 | ['Dr. Thomas J. West Iii'] | 2020-09-04 16:09:45.669000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Biography', 'History', 'Greece', 'Classics'] |
NEVER, NEVER TRY TO ERASE THE PAST! | (Continuation of THE PERPETUAL GIFT Semanawak Part Three)
Caroline’s paternal side of the family lived in the northern state of Coahuila, simple country folks, who spent a lot of time at grandpa Clemente’s ranch (my great grandfather), a rugged place high in the mountain range people were reserved, healthy, strong and wise, among them gifted healers. My mother Caroline, takes after her maternal family the Martinez, a lofty Pachuca town dwellers descendants of gold miners, who lost everything during the revolution, our people were murdered, property was stolen and poverty was even greater than before.
Great grandfather Clemente Garza was head of a big clan; twenty-four children, eighteen with Guadalupe Guzman his first wife and six more with Apolonia. The Garza clan spread all over, a few stayed at the ranch. Caroline and Ramona moved to the US because of their husbands, but the majority stayed in Mexico and did very well. Ramona was five years older and managed to survive successfully after the passing of her husband almost forty years ago, a successful home renter in the San Gabriel Valle. About a month after Tex’s funeral, we were invited to Mona’s 80th birthday celebration.
I drove Caroline to the party, we meet with family whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years, but right there and then she decided to impress her cousins celebrating their sister Ramona (we all kindly called Mona), begging them to come have dinner at her home before they left California.
Every five years or so, I would take Caroline to visit her cousin Mona. According to Caroline my sisters never had time to take her there. Mona and Caroline, both were attractive woman, petite figures with unusual light turquoise eyes, but they each other kept to themselves. Well into my early fifties, I discovered what really set them apart. Caroline was crafty and selfish, while Mona was naturally gifted; a diligent, mindful soul and extremely clean, she designated a good part of her income to support her parents, sisters and brothers, taking in nephews and friends even from her husband’s side, they worked at odd jobs till they saved enough cash and return to their hometown.
Caroline didn’t support any member of her family, she would always invite people to stay at her home, when somebody ventured out to California to stay with her, she showered them with attention the first week and then demanded a “small fee”, a rent of a hundred fifty dollars which was a lot in 1982 really covered the entire utility bills for the whole house; gas, water, electric, phone. The situation never lasted, because of her rotten disposition, people avoided her like the witch in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. And without a notice Caroline would evict them asking them to leave because she needed the room to accommodate another guest.
We all felt embarrassed knowing her outrageous greed, poor Tex, how much time he wasted trying to talk some sense into her. We learned to stay out of her sight and out of her mind. People who didn’t know we were related, complained about her when she owned a garment store down in Baja: perhaps lack of social skills; such as like welcoming people when they walked in the store, things like asking if they needed or were looking for something, she had a petty way of snapping at people for inquiring, always suspicious, expecting them to shoplift from the store.
I made hundreds of excuses for her lousy behavior: things like her missing thyroid was that what drove her so crazy? Did she resent life for a small height? Why did I need to convince myself? Why did I find it all meaningless?
Years later my son just proclaimed; “YOU, you are the problem! Your always trying to make sense of of things! Can you see they are all so stupid! It is impossible to make sense of stupid people… And I realized he was right!
I insisted to find the source of her frustration; did her disappointed with the cost of the liquor license she wanted but couldn’t afford, because it really was more of a bribe than a license? Or the fact that U.S. tourists in general were cheap and brought their own booze across the border. Could it be that the local insurance company swindled store owners, after thieves broke in and stole most of her inventory, or that the corruption of the police and authorities was overwhelming. No she was very stupid and I felt stupid too.
All this was projected onto people, in hindsight I guess she couldn’t trust anyone because when she was fifteen her father Jesus a promente Senator for Nuevo Leon, suddenly died of a heart attack and she never forgave him, fueling an empty existence
After investing huge amounts of money and years of effort to build the liquor store in Baja California, it turned out that none of her cousins or family wanted to visit her at her beach house. She didn’t earn the locals trust or sympathy, they started calling her “la Chilanga”, a denigrating label for persons from the capital.
Five years later Tex had enough of the nightmarish ocean front lifestyle, packed up and went back to Los Angeles. Caroline stayed on another year attempting to salvage her an unfulfilled dream, selling everything after a year of emotional stagnation she reunited with her husband under the condition that inside their home they wouldn’t talk to each other and she wouldn’t meld with Tex’s finances any more. They appeared “normal” to the outside world, hermetically concealing their failure, no one, not even the grandchildren would suspect just how miserable they were.
Caroline’s lived in the South bay area, a two-hour drive from San Gabriel Valley. Her plan was to be the center of attention and need me to cook supper and bring the audience to her. Also for the evening to be a smash hit she decided on the menu; a traditional seasonal dish from the central part of Mexico, “Chiles with Nogada” that requires Poblano peppers, stuffed with a mixture of ground beef, onions, garlic, tomato paste, candied citron, almonds, raisins, pear and spices, topped with white walnut sauce and garnered with pomegranate seeds, an exquisite old recipe. It takes fifteen hours to soak and peel the walnuts, another seven hours to prepare the whole meal for ten guests, knowing that my uncles rarely traveled to the US or to the southern part of Mexico, they had never tasted such a dish.
This alone was good reason to take on the laborious endeavor, a once in a lifetime occasion. We agreed and planed; my mother brought out her best china, dinnerware and tablecloths, I cleaned the house, patios and cooked. By ten a.m. everything was ready, I was dressed and just before leaving the house to pick them up, a woman knocked at the door, and stated she had brought the “chiles rellenos” for Caroline. I asked my mother why did she order those “chiles”? She responded that they were for my sister. I could not stay and argue with her, I felt very disturbed over the fact that she never said a word about these other “Chiles”.
Hoping the traffic wasn’t too bad, I got in Tex’s big SUV and drove two hours to pick up my uncles in San Gabriel and drove another two hours back to Caroline’s home and took them back after supper, an eight-hour journey. When we arrived my sister and husband were not at my mother’s home. I asked Caroline if she forgot to tell them the time because I knew Victoria was always casually late? She simply said; “I told them to come after six, because she didn’t want them to eat any of the “Nogada chiles”; Why? I thought to myself, if I had prepared thirty peppers and enough walnut sauce to spare. Why did she order more of the regular “chiles rellenos” from that woman? This was so unexpected but there was nothing I could do or say, it was her home and her food.
Such was the situation when my uncles happily sat at the beautiful table set for eight, they ate the “Nogada chiles” with amazement and delight, they said; “Lucia you’re a fantastic cook! In Coahuila food isn’t this sophisticated”, they kindly inquired how did you learn to cook like this? Caroline of course told them about her ex, my father and that his family came from the state of Tabasco where women cook with elaborate ingredients.
Mona knew that Caroline didn’t like cooking and then she admitted that there was a period of my life where I was doing all the cooking for my father, after their second divorce, because Lucia didn’t want to live with her and Victoria. Putting me on the spot as the “ungrateful child”. Despite the fact that my father was a narcissistic, medieval, tightwad macho, no one could understand why on earth I decided to stay with him and not sweet, loving Caroline. They were baffled, I turned to look at my mother and asked her; well you know why I stayed with my father, why don’t you tell them? Caroline opened her eyes wide and exclaimed, “I really have no idea why you chose to live with him!” Well then I said, looking at my perplexed and inquisitive family, eager to hear what the hell happened.
Obligated and uncomfortable to be the center of attention, I started to explain; alright my sister Victoria was fourteen and I was thirteen when she overdosed on drugs at a football game, casting a grim tone to my story, I continued; but the story does not start there, eight or nine months before that, money started disappearing from Caroline’s purse, remember? I remarked while looking at my mother. You do remember that? I said and continued my story: At first it was a five-dollar bill that mysteriously disappeared, then twenty, you kept asking me if I took it from your purse? Perhaps you didn’t want to ask Victoria because she would probably deny it, or at least that was what I thought.
One day in our bedroom, Victoria showed me a jar of pills and told me I should have one, moving my head to say no thanks, and ignore her offer, but I knew then where the money was going. That went on for months, until one Friday evening the police called, you answered and then asked me to translate because someone wanted to speak to my father, but he was at the university so, I spoke to the police officer who said Victoria was pick up from the football game and taken to a hospital, that they saved her after pumping out her stomach. He told us to pick her up at the waiting and well, since it was her first time she was off with a warning.
Carolina and I went to the hospital brought Victoria home, in a very drowsy state put her to bed just in time before my father came home. He was studying psychology and of all the people in the world, he alone was the right person who could have helped and understand my sister. It wasn’t about paying attention to Victoria’s addiction, for Caroline it was about covering up the months of denial and misbehavior. We all knew if my father found out about Victoria’s stealing and overdosing, he would go ballistic and probably try to slap some sense into her, so Caroline begged me to say nothing to pretend had happened.
One might like to believe that Victoria’s escapades were over, and that she had learned her lesson. But no, and nobody mentioned the “incident”, she was regarded as a silly teenager trying to fit in with the other silly people her age. Did Caroline understand the scoop of Victoria’s substance abuse which almost killed her? Well no, and that was not the end of money disappearing either, Caroline simply stopped asking where her money went.
My uncles intrigued with the story begged me to continue, so I did. Ah yes; two months later after the first overdose, we got another call, but this time my father answered the phone and talked to the police and again Victoria was in the hospital recovering from having her stomach pumped. This time she was detained and could have ended up in juvenile hall for drug abuse, my father declared he was a psychologist and convinced the police that he was dealing with the problem and wanted to protect Victoria.
Needless to say this ordeal ended in another divorce. And this will answer your question, looking straight at my uncle’s eyes. That was when I told my father I did not want to live with my mother nor my sisters, I knew he had mood swings, dealing with his nasty temper was stressful, but for me that was less painful than watching my sister kill herself and with a deep sigh I ended my story. Their compassionate gaze held the understanding of my predicament.
At that precise moment my sister Victoria arrived with her husband to meet the uncles and sat at the table to have dinner, Caroline went into the kitchen and served them the other “chiles rellenos”. Around seven they all said their good byes and got into the SUV; I drove my aunt Mona, uncles and wives. The trip felt much shorter this time around, perhaps the sincerity and intimacy of my story ignited a warm conversation, the resilience our blood line.
They were sons of European migrants second generation that learned how to survive in the middle of wilderness, rugged country folks that never encountered a rattle snake they couldn’t cook. I asked them about the life on the ranch, they spoke in a simple way but conveyed enchanting stories of grandpa Clemente, the forest the fact that there had been a revolution and they never knew about it till it was over. Lovely tales of hunting and lace making much more interesting than the greed ridden and drug infested suburbs of southern California.
I dropped them off at Mona’s, wished them a safe trip back to the ranch. On my way to Caroline’s house, I realized my story was forty years old. That evening the untold truth encapsulated from 1971 was opened, an agonizing decision forged a different path for us all came forth again as a gift.
(Continuation of THE PERPETUAL GIFT Semanawak Part Four)
My work as writer is an extension of my culture. The design and visualization of projects has not taken been seriously, I find that our needs are ignored and relationships are few. May you have a moment to share this, if you wish to connect with me personally, or to Collaborate with these websites:
https://www.sustainablemovement.org/
https://www.centinelasdelacultura.org/
https://www.laciudaddemexico.com/
https://www.iiidescoop.org/ | https://medium.com/@natitachulita/never-never-try-to-erase-the-past-d39eace2c319 | ['Natalia Aguilar'] | 2021-02-26 16:07:47.606000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Food', 'Mothers', 'Sensemaking', 'Greed'] |
React-Redux-Saga Fish model | Can you please “dumb down” this and explain again?
I have come across this request many of the times when i had to explain the technology to someone who was from different background. Here dumbing down was basically, making them understand a specific topic by superimposing the process of how a technology works with the words or phrases that they can easily grasp.
For ex, If you had to explain a back end developer what Redux is, you will dumb down the explanation and tell him, “Redux is like a smaller and simpler version of database”.
The reason i am writing this article is, I wanted to dumb down the entire framework in use for front end development. I use React, Redux and Redux-Saga as the core technologies in my framework. Whenever I used to explain my colleagues and junior the same, I used to draw the diagram on a whiteboard.
During this process, i went a little creative and came up with “React-Redux-Saga Fish model”.
Trust me.. It looks like a fish to me
So, what i see is, The blue dotted area represents the face of the fish. The green area represents all other organs like brain, digestive system etc. And the orange area represents the tail.
Here, the Redux store is compared with the brain, react components with the face and redux saga with the tail of the fish.
See…. it looks like a fish!!
Now let us break the technologies and see what they are.
React:
So, React is a library which helps you in creating UI components using JavaScript. Here, an entire Web page is built by combining various smaller components which can be reused in some other page as well. The main reason, why React is loved by everyone is that it is comparatively faster than any other libraries out in the market. The reason for its speed is, the Reconciliation algorithm and Virtual DOM. The virtual DOM (VDOM) is a programming concept where an ideal, or “virtual”, representation of a UI is kept in memory and synced with the “real” DOM by a library such as ReactDOM. This process is called reconciliation.
That is the main reason i picked React to be the face of the fish.
Redux:
Redux is a global state management system. Here all kind of computation happen whenever you click a button or load a page. Redux kind of serves as a small database to all the components in your web page.
Redux-Saga:
Redux-Saga is a middleware that is used between react and redux. Redux Saga helps in capturing all the async HTTP request and responses that are bundled with the entire application and then divert it into Redux actions.
Thus, completing the fish anatomy i believe i have helped my colleagues and juniors to understand how the framework works.
If there are any mistakes in the above concepts, I am open for suggestions. If you have any doubts we can discuss as well.
I will be writing a detailed version of how these technologies interact with each other to form a framework.
K.Thanks.bye | https://medium.com/codemax/react-redux-saga-fish-model-d61c40236f31 | ['Ashish Kirodian'] | 2019-11-14 12:23:46.496000+00:00 | ['React', 'Redux', 'Redux Saga', 'Front End Development'] |
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Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription. | https://medium.com/merzazine/k%C3%B6stnersche-intelligenz-20aa381c7ee1 | ['Vlad Alex', 'Merzmensch'] | 2020-11-15 21:37:55.378000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Merznlp', 'Art', 'Published Narrative'] |
How To Send Data From A Rails Application To An IoT Device? | Today, our phones are smarter, the internet is a lot more accessible, and even our pets have connected accessories. These devices aren’t all built by prominent organizations. Most are associated with young engineers, programmers and up until now, obscurely funded start-ups. With a decent grasp of programming and equipped with the right tools, you can make your own connected device in no time.
Ruby on Rails has been used to power modern websites for about a decade now, including many of the sites built here at CognitiveClouds. Ruby remains one of our favorite languages to code in through the years since Rails has made it increasingly easy to build fully functional websites and applications in a short time. Ruby is a beautiful and elegant programming language. It is easier to learn and understand, faster to code in, well documented with an active community behind it, focusing on Object-Oriented Programming and comes with a lot of helpful packages and frameworks, especially concerning web applications.
Ruby on Rails and the Internet of Things: Is there a future?
If you choose to run on low power endpoints, then no. However, a lot of IoT is not low power endpoints. But instead, if you are running Ruby on a RasPi-Zero type of platform, there’ll be no problem, and this platform is quickly gaining popularity with IoT projects. In a low power, low CPU environment, it’s best to use compiled languages. You can use a compiled language like C and sometimes lightweight scripting languages. Soon, Ruby could be primarily used for fast prototyping web API for connected devices.
How can I send data to an IoT device? | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-send-data-from-a-rails-application-to-an-iot-device-fc47a709d267 | ['Amit Ashwini'] | 2018-02-07 12:38:06.812000+00:00 | ['Internet of Things', 'Rails', 'IoT', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development'] |
Watch :: Promising Young Woman :: Full Movie 2020 [HD 1080p] Online | A young woman haunted by a tragedy in her past takes revenge on the predatory men unlucky enough to cross her path.
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Its somewhat ironic that a movie about time travel can’t be reviewed properly until your future self rewatches the movie.
It’s bold of Nolan to make such a thoroughly dense blockbuster. He assumes people will actually want to see Promising Young Woman more than once so they can understand it properly, which some may not. This movie makes the chronology of Inception look as simplistic as tic-tac-toe.
Ergo, it’s hard for me to give an accurate rating, without having seen it twice, as I’m still trying to figure out whether everything does indeed make sense. If it does, this movie is easily a 9 or 10. If it doesn’t, it’s a 6.
It’s further not helped by the fact that the dialogue in the first 15 minutes of the movie is painfully hard to understand / hear. Either they were behind masks; they were practically mumbling; the sound effects were too loud; or all of the above. The exposition scenes are also waayyy too brief for something this complex — a problem also shared with Interstellar actually.
(Interstellar had this minimalist exposition problem explaining Blight, where if you weren’t careful, you’d miss this one sentence / scene in the entire movie explaining that Blight was a viral bacteria:
“Earth’s atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, we don’t even breathe nitrogen. Blight does, and as it thrives, our air gets less and less oxygen”).
I guess it’s a Nolan quirk. Hopefully, a revision of the film audio sorts the sound mixing out. I do like the soundtrack, but it’s too loud initially.
I liked all the actors. You think John Washington can’t act at first, but he can, and he grows on you as the film progresses. And Pattinson is his usual charming self. Elizabeth is a surprise treat. And so on.
Its worth a watch either way. See it with subtitles if you can. And definitely don’t expect to fully understand whats going on the first time around.
Its one hell of a complicated film. It will be very hard for an average viewer to gather all the information provided by this movie at the first watch. But the more you watch it, more hidden elements will come to light. And when you are able to put these hidden elements together. You will realize that this movie is just a “masterpiece” which takes the legacy of Christopher Nolan Forward
If I talk about acting, Then I have to say that Robert Pattinson has really proved himself as a very good actor in these recent years. And I am sure his acting skills will increase with time. His performance is charming and very smooth. Whenever he is on the camera, he steals the focus John David Washington is also fantastic in this movie. His performance is electrifying, I hope to see more from him in the future. Other characters such as Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth, Himesh Patel, Dimple Kapadia, Clémence Poésy have also done quite well. And I dont think there is a need to talk about Michael Caine
Talking about Music, its awesome. I dont think you will miss Hans Zimmer’s score. Ludwig has done a sufficient job. There is no lack of good score in the movie
Gotta love the editing and post production which has been put into this movie. I think its fair to say this Nolan film has focused more in its post production. The main problem in the movie is the sound mixing. Plot is already complex and some dialogues are very soft due to the high music score. It makes it harder to realize what is going on in the movie. Other Nolan movies had loud BGM too. But Audio and dialogues weren’t a problem
My humble request to everyone is to please let the movie sink in your thoughts. Let your mind grasp all the elements of this movie. I am sure more people will find it better. Even those who think they got the plot. I can bet they are wrong.
Promising Young Woman is the long awaited new movie from Christopher Nolan. The movie that’s set to reboot the multiplexes post-Covid. It’s a manic, extremely loud, extremely baffling sci-fi cum spy rollercoaster that will please a lot of Nolan fan-boys but which left me with very mixed views.
John David Washington (Denzel’s lad) plays “The Protagonist” — a crack-CIA field operative who is an unstoppable one-man army in the style of Hobbs or Shaw. Recruited into an even more shadowy organisation, he’s on the trail of an international arms dealer, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh in full villain mode). Sator is bullying his estranged wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) over custody of their son (and the film unusually has a BBFC warning about “Domestic Abuse”). Our hero jets the world to try to prevent a very particular kind of Armageddon while also keeping the vulnerable and attractive Kat alive.
This is cinema at its biggest and boldest. Nolan has taken a cinema ‘splurge’ gun, filled it with money, set it on rapid fire, removed the safety and let rip at the screen. Given that Nolan is famous for doing all of his ‘effects’ for real and ‘in camera’, some of what you see performed is almost unbelievable. You thought crashing a train through rush-hour traffic in “Inception” was crazy? You ain’t seen nothing yet with the airport scene! And for lovers of Chinooks (I must admit I am one and rush out of the house to see one if I hear it coming!) there is positively Chinook-p*rn on offer in the film’s ridiculously huge finale.
The ‘inversion’ aspects of the story also lends itself to some fight scenes — one in particular in an airport ‘freeport’ — which are both bizarre to watch and, I imagine, technically extremely challenging to pull off. In this regard John David Washington is an acrobatic and talented stunt performer in his own right, and must have trained for months for this role.
Nolan’s crew also certainly racked up their air miles pre-lockdown, since the locations range far and wide across the world. The locations encompassed Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and United States. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is lush in introducing these, especially the beautiful Italian coast scenes. Although I did miss the David Arnold strings that would typically introduce these in a Bond movie: it felt like that was missing.
The ‘timey-wimey’ aspects of the plot are also intriguing and very cleverly done. There are numerous points at which you think “Oh, that’s a sloppy continuity error” or “Shame the production design team missed that cracked wing mirror”. Then later in the movie, you get at least a dozen “Aha!” moments. Some of them (no spoilers) are jaw-droppingly spectacular.
Perhaps the best twist is hidden in the final line of the movie. I only processed it on the way home.
And so to the first of my significant gripes with Promising Young Woman. The sound mix in the movie is all over the place. I’d go stronger than that… it’s truly awful (expletive deleted)! Nolan often implements Shakespeare’s trick of having characters in the play provide exposition of the plot to aid comprehension. But unfortunately, all of this exposition dialogue was largely incomprehensible. This was due to:
the ear-splitting volume of the sound: 2020 movie audiences are going to be suffering from ‘Promising Young Womanis’! (LOL);
the dialogue is poorly mixed with the thumping music by Ludwig Göransson (Wot? No Hans Zimmer?);
a large proportion of the dialogue was through masks of varying description (#covid-appropriate). Aaron Taylor-Johnson was particularly unintelligible to my ears.
Overall, watching this with subtitles at a special showing might be advisable!
OK, so I only have a PhD in Physics… but at times I was completely lost as to the intricacies of the plot. It made “Inception” look like “The Tiger Who Came to Tea”. There was an obvious ‘McGuffin’ in “Inception” — — (“These ‘dream levels’… how exactly are they architected??”…. “Don’t worry… they’ll never notice”. And we didn’t!) In “Promising Young Woman” there are McGuffins nested in McGuffins. So much of this is casually waved away as “future stuff… you’re not qualified” that it feels vaguely condescending to the audience. At one point Sator says to Kat “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?” and she shakes her head blankly. We’re right with you there luv!
There are also gaps in the storyline that jar. The word “Promising Young Woman”? What does it mean. Is it just a password? I’m none the wiser.
The manic pace of Promising Young Woman and the constant din means that the movie gallops along like a series of disconnected (albeit brilliant) action set pieces. For me, it has none of the emotional heart of the Cobb’s marriage problems from “Inception” or the father/daughter separation of “Interstellar”. In fact, you barely care for anyone in the movie, perhaps with the exception of Kat.
It’s a talented cast. As mentioned above, John David Washington is muscular and athletic in the role. It’s a big load for the actor to carry in such a tent-pole movie, given his only significant starring role before was in the excellent BlacKkKlansman. But he carries it off well. A worthy successor to Gerard Butler and Jason Statham for action roles in the next 10 years.
This is also a great performance by Robert Pattinson, in his most high-profile film in a long time, playing the vaguely alcoholic and Carré-esque support guy. Pattinson’s Potter co-star Clemence Poésy also pops up — rather more un-glam that usual — as the scientist plot-expositor early in the movie.
Nolan’s regular Michael Caine also pops up. although the 87-year old legend is starting to show his age: His speech was obviously affected at the time of filming (though nice try Mr Nolan in trying to disguise that with a mouth full of food!). But in my book, any amount of Caine in a movie is a plus. He also gets to deliver the best killer line in the film about snobbery!
However, it’s Kenneth Branagh and Elizabeth Debicki that really stand out. They were both fabulous, especially when they were bouncing off each other in their marital battle royale.
So, given this was my most anticipated movie of the year, it’s a bit of a curate’s egg for me. A mixture of being awe-struck at times and slightly disappointed at others. It’s a movie which needs a second watch, so I’m heading back today to give my ear drums another bashing! And this is one where I reserve the right to revisit my rating after that second watch… it’s not likely to go down… but it might go up.
(For the full graphical review, check out One Mann’s Movies on t’interweb and Facebook. Thanks.)
As this will be non-spoiler, I can’t say too much about the story. However, what I can is this: Promising Young Woman’s story is quite dynamic in the sense that you won’t understand it till it wants you to. So, for the first half, your brain is fighting for hints and pieces to puzzle together the story. It isn’t until halfway through the movie that Promising Young Woman invites you to the fantastic storytelling by Christopher Nolan.
Acting is beyond phenomenal, and I’d be genuinely surprised if neither Robert Pattinson nor John David Washington doesn’t receive an Oscar nomination for best actor. It’s also hard not to mention how good Elizabeth Debicki and Aaron Johnson both are. All around, great acting, and the dialogue amps up the quality of the movie.
The idea of this movie is damn fascinating, and while there are films that explore time-travelling, there’s never been anything quite like this. It has such a beautiful charm and for the most part, explains everything thoroughly. It feels so much more complex than any form of time-travelling we’ve seen, and no less could’ve been expected from Nolan.
Oh my lord, the score for this film fits so perfectly. Every scene that’s meant to feel intense was amped by a hundred because of how good the score was. Let me just say though, none of them will be found iconic, but they fit the story and scenes so well.
In the end, I walked out, feeling very satisfied. Nevertheless, I do have issues with the film that I cannot really express without spoiling bits of the story. There are definitely little inconsistencies that I found myself uncovering as the story progressed. However, I only had one issue that I found impacted my enjoyment. That issue was understanding some of the dialogue. No, not in the sense that the movie is too complicated, but more that it was hard to make out was being said at times. It felt like the movie required subtitles, but that probably was because, at a time in the film, there was far too much exposition.
Nevertheless, I loved this film, I’ll be watching it at least two more times, and I think most of you in this group will enjoy it. I definitely suggest watching it in theatres if possible, just so you can get that excitement.
(4/5) & (8.5/10) for those that care about number scores.
At first, I want to ask Christopher Nolan one question, HOW THE HELL YOU DID THIS? Seriously I want to have an answer, How did he write such as this masterpiece! How did he get this complicated, fabulous and creative idea? What is going on in his mind? The story is written and directed perfectly, the narration style was absolutely unique. I have no idea how can anyone direct such as this story, that was a huge challenge, and as usual Nolan gave us a masterpiece that we’ll put beside (Memento), (Inception) and (Interstellar) The movie is so fast-paced in a good way, there was no boring moment. The chemistry between John David Washington and Robert Pattinson was great and funny and both of their performance was really good. Elizabeth Debicki performance was the best in the movie because she had the chance to show her acting abilities and she cached up that chance and showed us an A level acting.
The music wasn’t unique and distinct as the music of Interstellar for example and I think this movie needed the touch of Hans Zimmer, I’m not saying that Ludwig Göransson failed but Hans Zimmer in another level.
If there was something I’d say that I didn’t like it in the movie would it be that Nolan discarded any set up or characters backgrounds except Elizabeth Debicki dramatic story but it wasn’t that bad for me, I didn’t care about that, the exciting story didn’t give me the chance to focus on it. But the actual problem was the third act, it was really complicated and I got lost and I convinced myself to discard the questions that were in my head and enjoy the well-made action sequences and Elizabeth Debicki performance.
I think this kind of movie that gets better with a second and third watch.
I honestly don’t quite know where to begin with Promising Young Woman. I love Christopher Nolan’s work but I have never seen a more complicated film (and I understood Memento). After nearly three hours, I came away from Promising Young Woman not knowing myself, my mind reduced to nothing more than piles of ash.
Was there time travel involved? Hmm, there was definitely something about time inversion. I mean, does Nolan even understand what he wrote? Look, I give credit to the director because he’s one of the few directors left who knows how to create a compelling and intelligent blockbuster. Promising Young Woman is full of Nolan trademarks — the gratuitous Michael Caine cameo, a loud, really loud score, complete with stunning cinematography and slickly inventive action set-pieces.
This time around however, Nolan has finally managed to ‘out-Nolan’ himself: the palindromic plot, whilst creatively ambitious, is simply far too complicated for its own good. Promising Young Woman is overlong, overstuffed, pretentious and too exhausting to comprehend in its entirety — it makes Inception and Interstellar look like Peppa Pig by comparison.
I’m aware of the technical wizardry and creative mastery in this film and lord knows I’ll have to watch this again. For those who want a puzzle, Promising Young Woman at least provides a unique cinematic experience. But to actually enjoy solving it Nolan wants you to work very very hard | https://medium.com/@cretenlzdtih/watch-hd-1080p-promising-young-woman-full-2020-full-m-o-v-i-e-s-online-3d3a387ab70d | [] | 2020-12-22 07:56:51.692000+00:00 | ['Drama', 'Crime', 'Movies', 'Comedy', 'Thriller'] |
The disruption of the automotive industry (3/5) | The automotive industry is one of the last remaining industries that didn’t undergo a full transformation yet. Reason being, the slow adoption of new technology and long lifespan of the products. But nonetheless, slowly the disruption is kicking in hard for the traditional OEMs.
In this series of articles I discuss the different trends and movements that impact what, until recently, seemed to be a stable industry. I talk about the challenges and opportunities.
(Don’t forget to read up on part 2 here: https://medium.com/@kristofdrossaert/the-disruption-of-the-automotive-industry-2-5-e2dc6891de9e)
Autonomous cars and data monetization.
Based on the new technology impulse that electric driving has given to the car industry we see more and more OEMs launching their autonomous driving projects. The fact that ‘new kid on the block’ Tesla showed the world that it was possible, created a mind shift for the younger customers.
The fact that now in Europe it becomes more ‘acceptable’ to drive an automatic gearbox gives a big boost to full automated driving. Because all of us spend hours and hours in traffic jams every, why not spend that time more useful.
Levels of automation
Although it often comes across as something new and futuristic, we already had different levels of automation in most of our cars. Adaptive cruise control, emergency braking and pedestrian detection were features I already had in my Volvo 7 years ago. Currently also mainstream car brands have these features on their well-equipped cars and it’s no longer a toy for the rich.
The current step for the industry is assisting while driving, active lane-keeping, improved collision prevention, fully automated parking, …. This is no longer a gimmick but already available on a lot of cars. For now it’s often still an expensive option, but over time this will also become mainstream. And as always you see luxury brands taking the lead, while their audience is willing to pay for these extra’s.
Next step will be the car making important decisions for the driver, active overtaking/lane-changes, autonomous highway driving and active speed limiting are closer than you might imagine. Some OEMs are already experimenting at some level with this technology and it will not be long until highway driving is autonomous in most newly build cars.
Fully autonomous driving is not yet something for tomorrow, but will surely follow. Most complex challenges to overcome will be interconnectivity between cars, cars that are still from a previous generation (thus not autonomous) and people. Because the most unpredictable factor in the equation is human. If you let computers do all the decision making and communicating amongst each other, there would not be any issue. But pedestrians, people behind the wheel in non-autonomous cars and other unpredictable situations make autonomous city-driving a real challenge.
But even to this respect, there is no single doubt that it’ll not happen in the future. The speed with which computers can make calculations, predictions and different scenarios of outcome far exceeds the human brain. The impact of automation on behavior and car use will be touched upon in the next article of this series.
Legislation and moral choices
As with all new evolutions, legislation and government are lacking behind. But the technology will drive the decision making. At the time the first car was introduced there were no laws either. So I’m quite confident that under pressure of the innovations new legislation will follow. Even so that the laws will not be very limiting, because currently car accidents are responsible for a very high number of deaths and injuries every year. Autonomous driving can drastically decrease this number.
Remarks often heard are; ‘What about moral choices?’, ‘What will happen if an accident is non-avoidable, what decision will the computer make?’, ‘Who’s the computer trying to protect, the driver or the pedestrian?’ This is indeed a pain point very difficult to answer. But the same question actually goes with a human driver. Only in that case you have someone accountable.
The philosophical question could also be; “If we can limit the number of injuries by 95%, should we then still care about the morality of the car?” It’s a very touchy and difficult debate that withholds a lot of OEMs to really go full out on the development of autonomous cars. Because of course every injury is one too many. That’s why brands strive to 0 fatalities, it’s a goal, but in the end extremely hard to reach.
However this will not stop the evolution towards full autonomy, but it is surely slowing down the progress.
Big data and data monetization
With these changes the engine no longer is the center of your car. No, the computer, the brain of your car, is. In this process this brain is collection tons of information from different datapoints, inside your car and outside.
Part of a future business model for car manufacturers is the sales of this data. Information about traffic, environment, your driving behavior, your cars vitals, your media use inside the car, … can help different suppliers/partners. Think about insurance companies, car aftersales programs, city-mapping, commuting patterns, new store locations, weather channel optimization,… the potential is endless.
Not only car manufacturers will be able to sell data, but also the owners will be able to. Because in a fully autonomous car, you’ll have time to kill, making it very interesting for media-providers and game developers to connect with you. As with all data in the future it’ll become a trade. You give up a part of your privacy by sharing data, you’ll get extra services and value in return.
(Also read up on the next article in the series on new mobility business models: https://medium.com/@kristofdrossaert/the-disruption-of-the-automotive-industry-4-5-2ac95db0e768) | https://medium.com/@kristofdrossaert/the-disruption-of-the-automotive-industry-3-5-9c22a0870f27 | ['Kristof Drossaert'] | 2019-05-14 09:18:39.428000+00:00 | ['Self Driving Cars', 'Mobility', 'Cars', 'Disruption', 'Automotive'] |
Practical Asynchronous Iteration in JavaScript | Recap of Synchronous Iterators and Generators
In this section, we will do a quick review of synchronous iterators and generators in JavaScript so we can more easily extrapolate them into the asynchronous case.
What is an iteration anyway?
Let us look into this question by self-realizing what we usually have at hand when iterating. For example, on one side, we have our arrays, strings, etc. being basically our sources. On the other side, we have what we usually use as our means to consume our data via an iteration — namely our for loops, spread operators, etc.
Based on this, we can look at an iteration as a protocol that, when implemented by our sources, will allow consumers to sequentially “consume” its contents using a set of regular operations. This protocol could then be represented by the following interface:
1.1 Interface for defining a synchronous iterable, iterator, and subsequent result for every iteration.
So, putting it verbosely for those readers who may not be familiar with TS interface descriptions:
A SynchronousIterable provides a method via a Symbol.iterator that would return a SynchronousIterator .
provides a method via a that would return a . Our SynchronousIterator would then return our IteratorResults from its implementation of the .next() method.
would then return our from its implementation of the method. The IteratorResults would then contain a value to hold the current iterated value as well as a done flag that is set to true after the last item is iterated through (and false while iterating).
Note: You can find out more about this by reading the ECMAScript 2021 Language Specification documentation.
An example of using this interface can be easily showcased by manually iterating over an array:
1.2 Simple manual iteration. Notice the fact that “done” is set to true when we are over-transversing the object.
Sources that implement this interface can also be iterated via a for..of iteration directive that you have probably made use of at some point:
1.3 Using for..of to iterate over our source.
Of course, we would expect sources like the built-in array (as used above) to be iterable naturally. To then showcase it differently, we’ll implement that interface, for example, to generate a range of numbers:
1.4 A custom implementation of an iterable source that generates a range of numbers from “start” to “end.”
What about generators?
Usually, functions return either a single value or none. We can think of generators as entities that can return, in sequence, multiple values. To this holding of values, it was attributed the concept of yielding.
1.5 Defining a generator function that yields at the time the same 1, 2, 3 sequence.
These generator functions do not behave as regular functions, as they are lazily evaluated. So when called, they will return you a generator object that will be responsible for managing its execution. These generators are also iterable, meaning they also implement our interface so we can actually loop over them similarly as above:
1.6. Checking the values from our generator function. And yep, the main method of a generator is also .next().
Also, it is also very important to denote that the .next() function is key to obtaining the next yielded value for these generator objects. This will then produce the expected outputs.
As we can now yield values (instead of state), we can then re-implement our iterable range from Figure 1.4, but now using a generator function:
1.7 Our ranged iterable source now implemented using a generator function.
As we can see, we can now leverage a generator function to simplify our original ranged iterable. | https://medium.com/better-programming/practical-asynchronous-iteration-in-javascript-a-hackernews-stories-iterable-f3c7a70466d | ['José Tapadas Alves'] | 2020-09-01 15:35:47.917000+00:00 | ['Typescript', 'JavaScript', 'Asynchronous', 'Ecmascript2018', 'Ecmascript'] |
Origins #36 — The Responsibility Is Real | Origins #36 — The Responsibility Is Real
Delivering value and creating reactions with the product, while building relationships
The last week prior to launching our online store, we put in a lot of effort to make sure that everything works fine, mostly payments and that the product inventory is displayed correctly on the website.
We also approached testing the website, the same way we did developing our product. We had people from our community go on it and then communicated the feedback.
Thanks to all the people who took the time to help us out!
Feelings
I felt a very strange sudden rush of responsibility, minutes after the store was live. All the work and content produced so far, was pointing towards this day, on which we start shipping the product we’ve been working on for a while.
After some self talk, I managed to ease the tension and come to an understanding that it’s a false sense of a milestone event, as it is just the beginning, instead of an end goal that has been accomplished. So, thinking through it, I was able to get back into a more stoic mindset, ignore the self-imposed “importance” of the event and mentally move on to the next tasks at hand.
First Shipments
Luckily and thankfully we’ve been keeping people in the loop about what we are doing, while also building relationships through the podcast and other social networks. To many of those people, we sent out samples of the product, while it was still in development.
A very good sign was that many of those early testers, liked the product so much, that during our first days of operation they bought a few shirts.
This enabled us to go through the whole process of accepting an order and fulfilling it, making sure everything works and do so in a volume that is manageable, but not overwhelming.
Having an established relationship, also allowed us to check in with them and ask how the payment process was, what the automated emails from our system look like and other customer facing communication.
As of the day of writing this post, those initial shipments are traveling towards their final destinations and we’re eager to ask about initial reactions to a now finalised product + packaging.
With the web store, everything has been very smooth so far, which gave us the green light to mentally step into the next stage of building this brand, which is figuring out how to market the product and get more people to hear about it.
Online Marketing Strategy
As I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we think about marketing in two ways, short-term/transactional and long-term/brand building one.
We consider that in the short-term, in order to start generating some volume or orders, Facebook Ads will be our main mass marketing channel.
Our expertise and interests naturally lie more into creating and investing more time in the long-term projects, which would be creating content and building relationships.
So we’ve decided that we will outsource our Facebook marketing efforts to an agency, or a person, which would enable us to focus on brand and relationship building.
We played with some Facebook Ads, before launch, but we realise that in order to be effective there, we either have to invest a lot of time to learn it, or get someone who knows what he’s doing. We choose the latter, which opens up time and focus to work on our naturally stronger points.
That’s what we are currently up to, looking for a partner to take care of our online marketing efforts. We will let you know how that goes ;)
Marin’s story on the DULO Instagram. Sourcing the community for knowledge ;)
If you know anyone, or are someone who might be interested in working with us, let us know ;)
Thank you for your time! Please give a few 👏 and/or leave a comment. It means a lot us and helps other people hear about our journey!
Also, say Hi on Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Snapchat | SoundCloud | https://medium.com/the-needle/origins-36-the-responsibility-is-real-aad5576bfac1 | ['Julian Samarjiev'] | 2020-09-02 10:49:01.267000+00:00 | ['Business Development', 'Marketing', 'Online Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Social Media'] |
Inspired Writer’s Christmas Challenge Winners Announced! | Inspired Writer’s Christmas Challenge Winners Announced!
The best of the best of our third writing contest
Image source: Massonstock on Freepik — Caption: Canva
We’re happy to announce that our third writing challenge was a success and that we have chosen our winners!
Thanks to all those who participated and went the extra mile to make their stories shine like diamonds! You gave me and our dear chief editor Kelly Eden a wonderful time as we immersed ourselves in your creative and thought-provoking stories. That alone makes all of you winners in our hearts.
Naturally, having dozens of outstanding entries to choose from, it was tough to make up our minds for our twelve finalists. Selecting the winners was even more challenging. To see what I mean, imagine being asked which of your children you love most. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that hard or dramatic, but you get the idea.
Before we unveil the names of our winners, we would like to thank The Writing Cooperative for making this possible. It was great to see so many of you in The Writing Cooperative’s Facebook group supporting each other with entries.
Enough chit-chat! Here’s what you came here for: These are Inspired Writer’s 2020 Christmas Writing Challenge winners, editors’ pics, and honorable mentions! | https://medium.com/inspired-writer/inspired-writers-christmas-challenge-winners-announced-9058e3fdbd49 | ['Joe Donan'] | 2020-12-22 05:37:17.561000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Nonfiction', 'Challenge', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips'] |
Renewable Energy and Industrial Electricity Demand — Production in Turkey | Looking into Turkey’s current electricity consumption compared to the pass years, there has been a decrease in the yearly growth of electricity since the 2008 Crisis (according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers 2020). Post-crisis growth only averaged to about 4–4.5% yearly with only development in the generation stage of industrial plants.
Industrial production affected electricity consumption due to the correlation between GDP growth and electricity demand . In addition, industrial user’s IPP (Independent Power Plants) investments decreased the demand from the grid with inner electricity production systems known as CHP (combined heat and power) and solar rooftops. Unlike renewables, CHP investments were not subsidized at all. Energy prices increased in the beginning of mid 2000s, resulting in popularity of the IPPs.
In 2005 the Turkish Government announced the YEKDEM (Renewable Energy Sources Support Mechanism) which granted investors with subsidies and power purchasing guarantees. But due to the high investment costs of renewable systems, investments were scarce. Until 2014, the total generation from renewables did not exceed 5 GW annually. In the mid 2010s, investment costs for renewables had begun to decrease. Solar photovoltaics (PV) showed the sharpest cost decline over 2010–2019 at 82%, followed by wind (offshore and onshore average) at 34.5% .
The government subsidies accelerated investments in hydropower, solar plants and wind turbines. Especially investments from the industrial consumers toward renewable and IPP’s increased in the beginning of 2010. Many IPPs were constructed to support onsite consumption. These IPPs consisted of CHP (combined heat and power plants or cogeneration) and rooftop solar plants. Investments in CHP projects averaged to about 150–200 MW per year since the beginning of the mid 2000s. The projects were mainly focused on the generation of electricity and heat of factories. Rooftop solar investments were supporting the industrial facilities inner consumption and shrinking the grid usage. All these systems decreased production costs over the years creating a promising future for the investors.
In 2020 many investments were still managed in its typical form despite the pandemic. Turkey’s upcoming year forecasts shine a bright path on the investments towards renewable and CHP systems. These energy generation systems will bring competition to Turkey’s future electricity markets and contribute to 100% domestic electricity generation. | https://medium.com/@emirhanbild/renewable-energy-and-industrial-electricity-demand-production-in-turkey-2f87035efad4 | ['Emirhan Bildiricioğlu'] | 2020-12-22 21:04:47.193000+00:00 | ['Energy', 'Cogeneration', 'Efficiency', 'Renewable Energy', 'Turkey'] |
The Music That Moved Me in 2018 | Jason Isbell — Southeastern
I’ve written before about how talented Jason Isbell is, and his album that came out in 2017 — The Nashville Sound — was my favorite of last year. Out of all of his music, though, I still think this release is his best. It’s musically diverse, skillfully written, and contains some of the best lyrics that I’ve ever heard.
The way that Isbell sums up both the American South and life in general is what sets him apart from nearly every other songwriter in the country. There’s no pretension in his lyrics, and he skillfully explores topics like loss, love, and hope in ways that are truly unique. I’ve attempted to write about some of his best songs before, so I’ll refrain from repeating myself here, but his music continues to move me in ways that no other artist can.
On a song-by-song basis, Southeastern contains some of his best musical moments “Cover me Up” was probably his best-known song before “If We Were Vampires,” and “Flying Over Water” (my personal favorite of his), “Elephant,” and “Relatively Easy” are all classics as well. Whenever I don’t know what to listen to, I often turn to this album. The music here fits almost any situation or mood.
Manchester Orchestra — Black Mile to the Surface
This album came out last year and it has rarely fallen out of my usual rotation of music. Andy Hull a lyrical mastermind, and the band’s decades of experience build to what is their best album to date. It’s dark, brooding, and sad, and every moment is compelling in some way.
The songs here range across a variety of different topics and musical themes. There are loud, angry songs, quiet, contemplative ones, and motifs of despair and hope that interweave themselves together. This is certainly not an easy album to listen to, but the musical and lyrical expertise make it one of my favorites ever.
I kept coming back to this album because of its maturity. 2018 has been a difficult year for me personally, and many of the feelings I’ve grappled with I find on this album. That doesn’t mean the actual circumstances that crop up in Hull’s lyrics match my own life at all, but rather that there’s an emotional overlap that I find soothing.
Foxing — Nearer My God
I wrote earlier about how much I love the title track off this album, but the entire project is pretty great as well. This is an album that I had to listen through a few times before it sunk in, mostly due to some of the musical choices. The songs often ramble and meander along, and consequently I think this album as a whole could stand to be a few minutes shorter.
Nearer My God makes this list because of the moments when it shines brightest. The title track is magnificent, and other songs — like “Bastardizer” or “Gameshark” — are also compelling. I still need to listen to Foxing’s discography a little more before I will feel that I truly understand their music, and the same goes for this album. At its best moments, though, it’s fantastic in every way.
The National — High Violet
The National as a band is regarded as one of the most talented and consistent indie rock groups in existence. Their last five albums have all been magnificent, and it’s not surprising to see their fans expound on the merits of any single one. Matt Berninger’s distinctive vocals and melancholy lyrics are a staple in their genre, as are Bryan Devendorf’s drumlines.
For some reason, though, High Violet has always been my favorite album from The National’s library. This year, I came back to it again and again. The opening notes of “Terrible Love,” the drumbeats and melodies of “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” and the inescapable sadness of “Sorrow” all register somewhere in my psyche and emotions, and they all remind me both of events this year and the first time I played this album.
As 2018 ends, I’ve been playing through The National’s catalogue again and again. I think I’ve started to take their greatness for granted, and somehow became less impressed with each consistent and beautiful album they released. If nothing else, writing a few lines about High Violet is a reminder of how great this band really is. Even if The National stopped recording today, their library would be one of the best I’ve ever heard. | https://medium.com/the-coastline-is-quiet/the-music-that-moved-me-in-2018-3fd8797404bb | ['Thomas Jenkins'] | 2018-12-31 17:29:58.307000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Music', 'Culture', '2018', 'Design'] |
A Practical Generative Deep Image Inpainting Approach | A Practical Generative Deep Image Inpainting Approach
Figure 1. Some free-form inpainting results by using DeepFill v2. Note that optional user sketch input is allowed for interactive editing. Image by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Hello guys! Welcome back! Today, we are going to dive into a very practical generative deep image inpainting approach named DeepFill v2. As mentioned in my previous post, this paper can be regarded as an enhanced version of DeepFill v1, Partial Convolution, and EdgeConnect. Simply speaking, the Contextual Attention (CA) layer proposed in DeepFill v1 and the concept of user guidance (optional user sketch input) introduced in EdgeConnect are embedded in DeepFill v2. Also, Partial Convolution (PConv) is modified to Gated Convolution (GConv) in which rule-based mask update is formulated to a learnable gating to the next convolution layer. With these ideas, DeepFill v2 achieves high-quality free-form inpainting than previous state-of-the-art methods. Figure 1 shows some free-form inpainting results by using DeepFill v2, please zoom in for a better view. Let’s see how they combine all the techniques to achieve the state-of-the-art.
Source code is available at [here].
Motivation
Recall that Partial Convolution (PConv) has been proposed to separate valid and invalid pixels such that convolution results only depend on the valid pixels and Edge generator has been proposed to estimate the skeleton inside the missing region(s) as user guidance to further improve inpainting performance, the authors of this paper would like to merge these techniques with their Contextual Attention (CA) layer to further enhance the inpainting results.
First, PConv employs rule-based mask update for separating valid and invalid pixels. The rule-based mask update is hand-made and un-learnable. Readers can refer to my previous post for a short review of PConv. As PConv is un-learnable, hence the most straightforward way to improve it is to make it learnable.
Second, previous methods usually input the masked image and the mask image to the generator network for completion. What if we also allow user sketch input as additional conditions to the task? Does the generator know how to distinguish user sketch input from the mask image input? A simple answer, Gated Convolution (a learnable version of PConv) will do!
Introduction
Again, I assume that readers have a basic understanding of deep image inpainting from my previous posts. Actually, the network architecture and loss functions used by DeepFill v2 have been covered previously. If you need or want, please feel free to skim through my previous posts. In this introduction, I will briefly cover those I think are less important and interested readers can refer to the paper for more details by themselves. So, we can leave much more time to introduce the most important idea, Gated Convolution, in the following sections.
Network architecture. This paper (DeepFill v2) is an improved version of their previous work (DeepFill v1). So, the network architecture is very similar except for the replacement of standard convolutions by the proposed gated convolutions. We have introduced DeepFill v1 previously, I highly recommend you to take a look at it [here]. Note that the most important idea of DeepFill v1 is the Contextual Attention (CA) layer which allows the generator to use the information given by distant spatial locations for the reconstruction of local missing pixels. So, DeepFill v2 also follows a two-stage coarse-to-fine network structure. The first generator network is responsible for a coarse reconstruction while the second generator network is responsible for a refinement of the coarse filled image.
Loss functions. Interestingly, only the two most standard loss terms are used to train the network, namely the L1 loss and the GAN loss. This is one of the claims of this paper as other state-of-the-art inpainting papers employ up to 5–6 loss terms to train their networks. I will talk about the GAN loss used in this paper very soon.
Solution (in short)
To further improve the Partial Convolution for handling irregular masks, the authors of this paper propose Gated Convolution which can be regarded as a learnable version of the Partial Convolution. Apart from Gated convolution, optional user sketch input is allowed to enhance the ability of interactive editing of the proposed model. Lastly, similar to the EdgeConnect we have introduced in my last post, Spectral Normalization (SN) [2] is applied to the discriminator to stabilize the training process.
Approach
Figure 2. Overview of the network architecture of the proposed model for free-form image inpainting. Image by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Figure 2 shows the network architecture of the proposed DeepFill v2. As you can see, this is a two-stage coarse-to-fine network with Gated convolutions. The coarse generator takes the masked image, mask image, and an optional user sketch image as input for a coarse reconstruction of the missing regions. Then, the coarse filled image will be passed to the second refinement generator network for refinement. Note that the Contextual Attention (CA) layer proposed in DeepFill v1 is used in this refinement network.
For the discriminator, the authors of this paper employ the famous PatchGAN structure proposed by [3]. We have also covered the idea of PatchGAN previously. You may skim through it again for a review [here]. Besides the employment of PatchGAN, the authors also apply Spectral Normalization (SN) [2] to each standard convolutional layer of the discriminator for the sake of training stability.
Gated Convolution
Figure 3. Graphical illustration of Partial Convolution (left) and Gated Convolution (right). Image by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Figure 3 shows the difference between the Partial convolution and the proposed Gated convolution. Simply speaking, a standard convolutional layer followed by a sigmoid activation function is used for updating the mask instead of a rule-based mask update in PConv. Note that after a sigmoid activation function, all the values would fall into [0, 1] which can indicate the importance (or validness) of each local area. For readers who want to know about the rule-based mask update, please visit my previous post [here] for details. The output of a gated convolution is computed as,
where the output is the element-wise multiplication of the outputs of two standard convolutional layers, one followed by any activation functions and another one followed by a sigmoid activation function.
Very straightforward! a standard convolutional layer followed by a sigmoid function acts as the soft gating to weight the output of the current convolution layer before feeding to the next convolutional layer. Note that for hard gating, we have only 0 or 1 to do the weighting, but for soft gating, we have 0 to 1 to de the weighting which is more flexible and this operation is learnable.
So, you can see the idea of Gated convolution is very simple and easy to implement.
Loss Function
The loss function to train the model consists of two loss terms, one is pixel-wise L1 reconstruction loss (L1 loss) and another is SN-PatchGAN loss. Note that the hyper-parameters to balance these two loss terms are 1:1.
As you can see, the SN-PatchGAN loss for the generator is very simple. It is the negative mean of the output of the SN-PatchGAN discriminator. Actually, this is a hinge loss which is also commonly used in many GAN frameworks.
Experiments
Free-Form Mask Generation and Edge Map as User Sketch Input
The authors propose a method to generate free-form masks on-the-fly during training. I think the simplest way is to directly use their code at [here]. Interested readers can refer to their paper for details.
For the optional user sketch input, the authors make use of the HED edge detector [4] to generate the edge map as the sketch input. Note that the sketch input is optional. For readers who are interested in the user sketch input for interactive editing, I highly recommend you to read their paper.
Similar to previous inpainting papers, the authors evaluated their model on Places2 and CelebA-HQ datasets. These two datasets are commonly used in the task of deep image inpainting.
Quantitative Comparison
Table 1. Quantitative Comparison of various approaches on Places2 dataset with both rectangular mask and free-form mask. Data by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Table 1 lists two objective evaluation metric numbers for readers’ information. As I mentioned in my previous posts, there is no good quantitative evaluation metric for the task of deep image inpainting. Hence, these numbers are only for reference and you should focus on the visual quality of the filled images. As you can see, the proposed model offers the lowest l1 and l2 errors. Note that Global&Local, ContextAttention, and PartialConv have been introduced in my previous posts and readers may refer to them for recall.
Qualitative Comparison
Figure 4. Qualitative comparison of various methods on Places2 and CelebA-HQ datasets. Image by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Figure 4 shows the qualitative comparison of different deep image inpainting approaches. Please zoom in for a better view of the quality of the filled images. It is obvious that the proposed model (GatedConv) outperforms all the other methods in terms of visual quality. You can see that the proposed method offers inpainting results without obvious color inconsistency.
Figure 5. An example of showing the advantage of using the user sketch input. Image by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Figure 5 shows that the proposed model can understand and make use of the user sketch input to further improve the inpainting result compared to the previous method which does not allow user sketch input. Again, you can see that the proposed method gives better inpainting result without color inconsistency.
Figure 6. An example of object removal by using different existing approaches. Image by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Figure 6 shows an object removal example and you can see that the proposed method can completely remove the objects with better visual quality.
Figure 7. Examples of inpainting results with user guidance. Image by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Figure 7 shows some examples of image inpainting with user sketch input as guidance. You can see how interactive editing can be achieved by the proposed method.
Similar to previous inpainting papers, the authors also did a user study to evaluate which method provides results with better visual quality. Interested readers can refer to the paper for the details.
Ablation Study of SN-PatchGAN
Figure 8. Ablation study of SN-PatchGAN. From left to right: Original image, Masked image, Results with one global GAN, Results with SN-PatchGAN. Image by Jiahui Yu et al. from their paper [1]
Figure 8 shows the ablation study of SN-PatchGAN. Compared to a standard single global GAN, the employment of the SN-PatchGAN brings better inpainting results. The authors claim that a simple combination of simple L1 loss and SN-PatchGAN loss can produce realistic inpainting results.
Conclusion
The main idea of this paper is Gated Convolution. The Gated Convolution is a learnable version of the Partial Convolution. We can implement the Gated Convolution by using an extra standard convolutional layer followed by a sigmoid function as shown in Figure 3. The employment of the Gated Convolution and the SN-PatchGAN significantly improves the inpainting results compared to existing inpainting methods. The authors also show how interactive editing can be achieved by allowing optional user sketch input. With the user sketch input, better and meaningful inpainting results can be achieved. Hence, this is a very practical deep image inpainting approach in the literature.
Takeaways
I hope that you can understand what is Gated Convolution - the most important idea of this paper.
To all readers, we have gone through nearly all the common techniques for deep image inpainting, such as coarse-to-fine network, contextual attention, gated convolution, partial convolution, PatchGAN, perceptual loss, style loss, etc. We have also covered both regular and irregular masks. As you can see, image inpainting has many possible applications. However, until now, it is still very difficult to fill images with complicated scene structures and large missing areas. Hence, Extreme Image Inpainting will be a promising direction. Let’s learn and read more together:)
What’s Next?
I think it’s time to recall what we have covered previously. Perhaps, I will write a short summary of the papers we have read before for a revision! Thanks a lot.
References
[1] Jiahui Yu, Zhe Lin, Jimei Yang, Xiaohui Shen, Xin Lu, and Thomas Huang, “Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution,” Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019.
[2] Takeru Miyato, Toshiki Kataoka, Masanori Koyama, and Yuichi Yoshida, “Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks,” Proc. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2018.
[3] Phillip Isola, Jun-Yan Zhu, Tinghui Zhou, and Alexei A. Efros, “Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks,” Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 21–26 Jul. 2017.
[4] Saining Xie, and Zhuowen Tu, “Holistically-nested edge detection,” Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015.
Thanks for reading:) If you have any questions, please feel free to leave comments here or even send me an email. I am happy to hear from you and any suggestions are welcome. Hope to see you again next time! | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-practical-generative-deep-image-inpainting-approach-1c99fef68bd7 | ['Chu-Tak Li'] | 2020-11-26 14:57:59.956000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Convolutional Network', 'Image Inpainting', 'Image Processing', 'Generative Adversarial'] |
ParallelChain, a Blockchain Wallet Solution Provider, Joins the WorldBook™ | ParallelChain, an award-winning blockchain wallet solution provider, is the latest participant to join the inter-exchange liquidity network known as the WorldBook™.
The NEXUS WorldBook is an initiative by Broctagon Fintech Group, under the licensed entity Broctagon Prime Markets Limited to create a universal liquidity standard for digital assets.
Ian Huang, Founder and CEO of ParallelChain
Ian Huang, Founder and CEO of ParallelChain, said: “The DeFi and crypto space is reshaping the financial system. Due to these distinctive characteristics, DeFi community and traditional enterprises are facing big challenges as they become more intertwined. We need to create an environment that enables seamless access between the two, one that understands their respective needs and values — this is at the heart of what we do at ParallelChain. In support of the WorldBook initiative, ParallelChain will bring the much-needed stability, accountability and privacy protection for the institutional adoption of crypto.”
Cecilia Chan, Head of Liquidity (Asia) and ED of Broctagon
Cecilia Chan, Head of Liquidity (Asia) and Executive Director of Broctagon Fintech Group, commented on ParallelChain’s participation on the WorldBook network, saying: “More than just a wallet solution, ParallelChain’s cross-functional utility can even cover KYC, data security, and supply chain solutions. Through their understanding of scalability, latency and security — all important issues surrounding blockchain technology, the WorldBook will gain a greater perspective of how blockchain can be employed in various use cases.”
About ParallelChain
ParallelChain is a layer-1 project that brings accountability to the public blockchain and crypto sector. Comprised of public and private networks, ParallelChain creates an ecosystem where enterprises and the crypto community can enjoy seamless access to each other’s markets and value-adding interaction. It provides the necessary backbone infrastructure as this new fusion economy takes shape.
About NEXUS WorldBook
The NEXUS WorldBook™ is the world’s first crypto liquidity ecosystem, committed to building a cohesive network for both makers and takers. The WorldBook leverages on the NEXUS 2.0 aggregator technology to offer its members global price discovery and direct STP capabilities on a universal liquidity standard.
To find out more about ParallelChain, visit:
Website: https://www.parallelchain.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/parallelchainofficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DTL_blockchain
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/digital-transaction-limited
Medium: https://medium.com/digital-transaction-limited
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DigitalTransaction
To find out more about or to join the NEXUS WorldBook, visit:
Website: https://nexusworldbook.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NEXUSWorldBook
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/74741847/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NEXUSWorldBook
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nexusworldbook/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT5_f3W2SEBDsWrJc8YGAEw | https://medium.com/worldbook/parallelchain-a-blockchain-wallet-solution-provider-joins-the-worldbook-9914ae622eb | ['Broctagon Fintech Group'] | 2021-09-13 04:06:51.174000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Wallet', 'Liquidity', 'Partnerships', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
10.11 Presidential Social Intelligence Battleground Tracker — Aggregate Support Gained/Lost | 10.11 Presidential Social Intelligence Battleground Tracker — Aggregate Support Gained/Lost
A pulse of how potential voters in battleground states are discussing the Presidential candidates
Please read the background post on this project if it is your first time reading.
Past posts:
— Our initial dataset from the week of 7.3 was detailed here.
— Data from the week of 7.11 was detailed here
— Data from the week of 7.19 was detailed here.
— Aggregate data to date through 8.14 was detailed here
— Language data from the weeks of 8.07 & 8.14 was detailed here
— Aggregate data through 8.25 was detailed here.
— Language data from 8.21–8.28 was detailed here
— Language data from 8.28–9.04 was detailed here
— Aggregate data through 9.5 was detailed here
— Language data from 9.04–9.11 was detailed here
— Aggregate daily support gained/lost data through 9.17 was detailed here
— A first look at Supreme Court Data was detailed here
— A deeper dive into Supreme Court Data was detailed here
— A language comparison between voters in NC and FL was detailed here
— An overview of the pre-debate top issues was detailed here
— Aggregate daily support gained/lost data through 9.30 was detailed here
— Post debate issues and sentiment were detailed here
— Trump’s COVID diagnosis and recent campaign issues flow was detailed here
— A language analysis of data from 9.25–10.2 was detailed here
Battleground States in our Analysis: AZ, CO, FL, IA, ME, MI, MN, NV, NH, NC, PA, TX, WI
Date Source: All data is publicly available and anonymized for our analysis from Twitter, Facebook, Online Blogs, & Message Boards.
Technology Partners: Eyesover & Relative Insight | https://medium.com/listening-for-secrets-searching-for-sounds/10-11-presidential-social-intelligence-battleground-tracker-aggregate-support-gained-lost-f33b1288a087 | ['Adam Meldrum'] | 2020-10-11 19:57:54.343000+00:00 | ['Social Listening', 'Joe Biden', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Donald Trump'] |
How Data Visualization Helps Us See the Effects of Climate Change | How Data Visualization Helps Us See the Effects of Climate Change
Mapping techniques highlight how quickly the glacier margins in Glacier National Park are receding
The importance of maps
I’ve always considered maps to be powerful visuals because of how universal they are. They’re a pretty standardized encoding system, as we learn about maps and what the legends mean all the way back in school, and then we keep seeing them throughout our lives, everywhere from the weather channel to planning our commutes.
When using maps for data visualization, we build on all those lessons taught about maps throughout the years. If we choose to visualize a metric by country on a world map, we can introduce characteristics that that can capture the interest for a wider audience. Let’s take life expectancy as an example. This may not be something you’ve considered in the past, but if you were shown a map of average life expectancy, I’m fairly certain you’d look to see how your country compared to others.
(Romania, where I was born, averages 74 years, and I’m pretty confident you also checked your home country.)
Methods for visualizing data on maps have become more advanced to meet the needs of our global landscape. The Tableau-Mapbox integration has made exploring map data increasingly easy, leading to some interesting visuals such as how Africa would look like without forests or what the military presence looks like in Syria.
Maps and climate change
Inspired by the many compelling visuals, I set out to explore the effects of climate change using maps. Climate change is a complex topic that first came under the name of “global warming.” That term caused people to associate climate change with weather, which is the shorter-term manifestation of overall climate trends. This, in turn, led to questions like “How can the Earth be getting warmer if we just had a really cold winter?”
Climate is a longer-term trend than seasons and can be harder to understand intuitively, because singular weather events can skew perception of what the overall climate trend looks like. This is where visualizing data can help us look past our own experience of the weather and instead focus on long-term patterns and trends that exist on a scale we otherwise would have trouble noticing. A good proxy to understand climate change is to look at geographical units that would otherwise be stable and see how they evolved over the years. The most straightforward example for this is glaciers.
Why is the melting of glaciers always mentioned in climate change debates?
The most commonly known consequence of melting glaciers is rising sea levels, but it’s just one of many. According to the WWF, the melting process increases coastal erosion, creates more frequent coastal storms and affects the habitat of wildlife such as walruses and polar bears. Through continual melt, glaciers are a source of water throughout the year for many animals, and help regulate the stream temperatures for animals that need cold water to survive. When a glacier shrinks, that cyclical source of water disappears.
It’s difficult to remember what a glacier looked like 10 years ago compared to now. While pictures of glacier valleys before and after melting can provide an interesting visual, they can be seen as anecdotal, and lack a certain quantitative element to them. We know glaciers are melting, but how fast and by how much? What do the glaciers look like now, and what are the implications? I decided to see if I could use Tableau and map data to visualize how the glaciers are shrinking over time, to see if I could help answer some of those questions.
Choosing Glacier National Park
2.9% of the Earth is covered with glaciers, so representing all the glaciers in the world in one visualization is tricky. Not only that, but there is no universal, consistent dataset of all glacier margins that is detailed enough to derive meaningful visualizations from. As a result, I chose to narrow down my analysis to Glacier National Park, a forest preserve that spans over 1 million acres (4,000 square kilometers) between Canada and the US state of Montana. It’s home to more than 1,000 different species of plants and animals. Currently, it’s home to 37 named glaciers that have been evolving over time.
The USGS (US Geological Survey) has collected a time series spanning 49 years of the 37 named glaciers and their margins based on aerial imagery. The dataset consists of shape files that can be overlayed to produce a comparison of what the park looked like 50 years ago versus now.
Full visualization can be found here.
Looking at some of the glaciers with the most recession (as percentage of their initial span in square meters), we can compare the 1966 margins (dark blue) with the 2015 margins (very light blue).
These comparisons tell a story that is less than ideal. Taking Herbst Glacier and Two Ocean Glacier as examples, we can see that over 80% of the main glacier body area has disappeared. Summing up the losses, we find that over 7.6 million square meters of glacier area has receded. That’s over 1,000 football fields lost just out of this one national park in Montana. Below are sevenof the glaciers visualized:
What can we do next?
There is a wealth of resources that address how to slow down the effects of climate change, so access to information is clearly not the problem. From a data perspective, what we can do is help understand it better by providing the information in an accessible way. One of my favorite Tableau vizzes presents the topic of ocean plastic in a way that made me look at it closely, even after scrolling past multiple articles with the same theme throughout the years. The method in which data in presented has a great impact on whether the information is consumed.
So I invite you to dig into the data, visualize it yourself, find key insights, and share with others. In doing so, we have the ability to make others see the issues more clearly and in turn, work to address those issues. | https://medium.com/nightingale/how-data-visualization-helps-us-see-the-effects-of-climate-change-8b937ab7a71f | ['Maria Ilie'] | 2019-12-27 13:01:01.135000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Climate Change', 'Data Science', 'Mapping', 'Data Visualization'] |
Closing Wikipedia’s Gender Gap | By now, it’s second nature. When you come across an unfamiliar name, you search for it online. Google’s algorithm typically includes the relevant Wikipedia pages near the top of its search results. But what happens when that person doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry? How does that change your perception of their importance?
For Wikipedia editors like Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, this issue of online visibility — or lack thereof — is closely tied to the number of biographical articles about women on Wikipedia. Back in 2014, Stephenson-Goodknight co-founded the Women in Red movement with a mission to improve the encyclopedia’s coverage of women’s biographies, works by women, and women’s issues. For her efforts, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales presented Stephenson-Goodknight with the 2016 award for Co-Wikipedian of the Year.
As we near the end of Women’s History Month, it’s worth reflecting how Stephenson-Goodknight and her colleagues have affected the content and the culture of the fifth most visited website in the world.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Stephenson-Goodknight by phone. This interview has been edited and condensed.
How did you get started editing Wikipedia?
Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight: On June 4, 2007, I was in San Francisco, working out of my son Sean’s apartment. I was telecommuting that day instead of being in my office. In the afternoon, I took a break and was searching for things on Wikipedia. I tried to find an article regarding Book League of America, a publisher whose books I collect. But I couldn’t find it. At first, I thought that maybe I misspelled it or the capitalization was wrong, but none of these seemed to be the problem. I thought to myself, “Wow, there’s no article on this subject. How is that possible?”
Here it was, 2007, and I thought there was an article about everything on Wikipedia. Then I remembered that Sean had edited Wikipedia while he was in the Peace Corps. I thought, “If Sean can figure this out, I bet I can, too.” So, I created a username and started the article on Book League of America, and it still exists today.
Once you started editing Wikipedia as a hobby, how long did it take before you were hooked?
I would say that pretty much I was hooked immediately… like I created seven articles that first month. I made my 500th edit within two and half months, including starting the article Arctic Shrinkage (renamed Climate Change in the Arctic), which is by far the most heavily edited and controversial article I ever created. Now it’s 2019, and I’ve made more than 150,000 edits and contributed to more than 1,300 articles featured in the “Did You Know…” section of Wikipedia’s main page. One of my all-time favorite articles would probably be Deolinda Rodrigues Francisco de Almeida, a writer from Angola who corresponded with Martin Luther King Jr.
What is a “red link,” and what’s the connection with the gender gap on Wikipedia?
On Wikipedia, a red link is a hyperlink to an article that does not currently exist. Back in 2014, I met with a group of experienced Wikipedia editors in Washington, D.C., where they challenged us to take action on ideas we had not yet pursued. One idea I had was a WikiProject dedicated to women writers who were “red links,” who did not yet have articles, and I started that project. We now have more than 33,000 articles within our scope: women writers and their works.
“When women were excluded from a profession, we can’t make up for that today.”
In the following year, I was approached by Roger Bamkin, a professor in Britain. He suggested that we collaborate on a conference presentation regarding the content gender gap — how few of Wikipedia’s biographies are about women. Our presentation in July 2015 in Mexico City evolved into WikiProject Women in Red, named after Wikipedia’s “red links,” which are the missing articles.
To our surprise, the idea really took off, and people began writing more articles about women. We use a bot to collect and post our metrics. Five years ago, only about 15 percent of the English-language Wikipedia biographies were about women. Now the number is closer to 17.74 percent. And the project is now active in 13 different language versions, not just English.
That’s substantial progress, but the gap nevertheless seems to be quite pronounced. What are the historical drivers of the gender gap?
There are multiple different parts to this. First, if women were not able to participate in various professions until a certain period of time, there is no article to write. Five hundred years ago, there were almost no women politicians, so there won’t be articles about women politicians from that period, and the same applies to military officers or positions of leadership in various religions. When women were excluded from a profession, we can’t make up for that today.
But when there were women poets, musicians, educators, scientists, and activists in the historical record, they should be included in Wikipedia. This is knowledge equity. The issue is that once women become involved in various occupations, they often received less coverage in written publications than their male counterparts. For example, in STEM occupations, when women and men worked side by side with each other for years, there can be an issue of who was credited for what was accomplished: “He who writes the history books wins.”
Gender bias on Wikipedia received media attention last year when Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize for Physics and — at the time of her award — did not have a Wikipedia page. Would you say she should have had a Wikipedia entry earlier?
Absolutely. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Someone created a Wikipedia page for Donna Strickland before she won the Nobel Prize, but the volunteers in the Articles for Creation community decided that it did not meet the notability requirements to become an article on Wikipedia, because it lacked a sufficient number of third-party references. So, the article did not get published until after she received her Nobel.
What do you see as the future for Wikipedia?
I would say that we are still in our infancy, and that’s because I take a very long view for the Wikimedia movement. I don’t think in terms of five years, 15 years, 55 years. I think in terms of 155 years, 555 years.
Could you expand on that? What is your 555-year vision for Wikipedia?
A long time ago, I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation science-fiction series, in which the character Hari Seldon is a psychohistorian. Hari crunched large data sets in order to predict far into the future. Using these probabilities, he predicted that humanity was doomed and that there would be tens of thousands of years of chaos. But if he made certain changes, then those dark ages would last only a thousand years.
One of the things Hari did to reduce the period of chaos was develop a planet in a distant galaxy that was populated by scientists and their families to work on the Encyclopedia Galactica, which would be the sum of all human knowledge.
I see this as a sort of parallel universe, so much so that I used to say at conferences that I’m wearing an invisible bracelet that said “WWHSD?,” which stood for “What Would Hari Seldon Do?” Eventually, my co-Wikipedian of the year, Emily Temple-Wood, gave me an actual bracelet with those letters, so my bracelet is no longer invisible.
How does this type of long-term thinking apply to the issue of gender equity specifically?
It connects to both our vision and our strategy. Once Wikidata became part of our lives, I could see a parallel — large data sets can be a source for good for mankind. When we think about gender equity, I believe it’s a matter of when we will see a more equitable encyclopedia. And I’m not just talking about English-language Wikipedia… there are 300 other language versions. I am pretty sure that we will not be there in 15 years, but maybe in 55 years, and certainly 555 years from now I project that there will be gender equity — not necessarily in the sense that 50 percent of the biographies will be about women, but we will feel we will have met a standard of equity. That presents a question: If we will be there in 555 years for sure, what can we do now to shorten the time span? What can we do now versus postponing change for another point in time?
I suppose the future-state incarnation of Wikipedia might even be called ‘Encyclopedia Galactica.’ Could you describe a day in the life of Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight?
I edit Wikipedia in the morning, or I edit it at night. It’s like anytime you have a passion for something—you just make the time. I’ve been a visiting scholar for Northeastern University’s Women Writers Project since March 2017, so mostly I concentrate on creating articles within that scope, pre-20th-century women writers and their works. I do a lot of coordination tasks for Women in Red, and there are endless tasks and meetings associated with my membership in various organizations or committee work.
I have a great family and eclectic friends, and I enjoy spending time with them. I love traveling, and I do a lot of that. I live a half-mile down a gravel road in the Sierra Nevada foothills, so nature is right outside my door. There’s a group of Canadian geese who live in my neighborhood six months each year, and I am so happy when I see them on my walks. What else? Every September, my husband and I participate in the Marching Presidents and First Ladies procession in our town’s Constitution Day Parade. I portray Helen Taft.
You spend a lot of time doing volunteer work for Wikipedia. Are there any perks?
First of all, it doesn’t have to be a lot of work. We are all volunteers, so you do as much or as little as you want. No deadlines. No clocking in. No pressure. I’m retired from my career in the health care industry. Now that I’m in my sixties, with grown sons and some grandkids, I think I’m setting a good example that you can still do cool things — meaningful things — later in life, and sometimes you even get recognition for it. But truly, I don’t do it for that reason. I edit Wikipedia because it makes me happy to do so. Go figure.
In 2016, Women in Red and I were shortlisted for the GEM-TECH award by the ITU/United Nations Women. There were more than 300 entries for that award, so being in the top five really made me proud. In May 2018, I was knighted by the Republic of Serbia, in part because of my work on Wikipedia, and partly because I’ve promoted the memory of my grandfather, a Serbian patriot of bygone times. I suspected there would be a sword involved when I was knighted, but instead someone read a paragraph about accomplishments, and then the press took a lot of photos of us with the foreign minister. It was an awesome experience and such an honor. But no sword!
And that’s why you’re now Dame Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. I expect some readers would be interested in hearing how they might become more involved with Wikipedia or Women in Red.
Start anywhere. Many articles on Wikipedia, especially the shorter ones, could use a bit of improvement. Add a sentence, fix the punctuation, upload a photo. Within the scope of Women in Red — women’s biographies, women’s works, women’s issues—we’ve created more than 300 lists of missing articles. You could do some research on one of these women and try writing an article! There are many in-person edit-a-thon events where you can actually meet other editors, and you might like that instead of editing Wikipedia from your home computer.
Once you start, I hope you stick with it. If you have a negative experience, please don’t give up! There are communities on Wikipedia that can show you the ropes and help you out. We were all new once. I would say it’s worth it if you persevere. | https://onezero.medium.com/meet-the-woman-pushing-for-more-gender-diversity-on-wikipedia-3aea131484f6 | ['Stephen Harrison'] | 2019-03-27 13:54:11.803000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Wikimedia', 'Industry', 'Wikipedia', 'Gender Gap'] |
How to get Rank #1 Site on Google Search | How to get Rank #1 Site on Google Search
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And the best way to increase the visitors on our website is using SE Ranking
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Join now to get promo: SE Rangking | https://medium.com/@yosiamanullang/how-to-get-rank-1-site-on-google-search-e79dc3cedde1 | [] | 2020-12-25 14:13:21.749000+00:00 | ['Affiliate Marketing', 'Website', 'Trafic', 'SEO', 'Site'] |
From Joe’s Desk: Bitcoin in Price Uptrend, Finally | Bitcoin (BTC) survived a double-bottom and may be in a price uptrend. Double-tops and double-bottoms typically signal a change in price trends. Double-tops may signal a turn from a price uptrend to a price downtrend. Conversely, double-bottoms may signal a change from a price downtrend to a price uptrend.
In the ninety-day price chart of BTC, there was a price uptrend in late April (1) with double topping of price (2) on 25-April at about $9,670 and on 6-May at about $9,800. BTC could not break past this price resistance and it appears there is a psychological ceiling at around $10,000. This double topping marked a trend reversal with a price slide of BTC in a clear downtrend (3) over the ensuing seven weeks.
Ninety-day BTC chart ending 4-July-2018 from CoinGecko
There was price support at $6,400 around 14–16 June (4) but that failed and BTC crossed the psychological floor of $6,000 but not by much and not if the crypto community could help it. BTC had a price bottom at about $5,860 on 25-June and another price bottom at similar pricing of about $5,860 four days later on 29-June-2018 with clear marks of a double-bottom (5) of BTC. BTC may have made the turn, finally, and may now be in a price uptrend (6). The current BTC price of about $6,400 puts us back to the price floor from mid-June with good, but not strong, support. The stochastic indicator for trading volume shows an uptick of 8% (7) as the market experiences an influx of BTC buyers and elevated liquidity.
There is a 22% likelihood BTC may return to $6,000 with an 11% likelihood of BTC breaking that price floor. If BTC falls below $6,000, it will be in freefall. However, in the event that BTC returns to $6,000 and pops back up, the price uptrend of BTC will be much stronger with the price support from a triple-bottom. The path of the BTC price uptrend will be rough with profit-taking on price spikes. This price uptrend may be a good opportunity to buy BTC on dips for re-calibrating and dollar-cost averaging your portfolio comprising the major cryptos such as BTC and Ethereum (ETH), and alt-coins such as Chynge tokens (CLPX).
Forecast: BTC in the $12–15,000 price range in the next ninety days (mid-October) and $35,000 by end of 2018.
Disclaimer: Joe Tusin is CEO and Founder of Chynge which is currently in an Initial Coin Offering. Hence, Joe has a naturally-biased and bullish market outlook for cryptocurrencies. This is a purely technical analysis and ignores fundamentals such as fiat currencies, financial markets, economic indicators, geopolitics, natural disasters, and other factors. There are forward-looking statements in this article and it is highly unlikely these statements will come true. Do not make buying and selling decisions based on this article. Joe was an FX Trader in San Francisco and was deep in the market when the British Pound (GBP) was attacked and devalued on Black Wednesday 1992. Connect with Joe at Linkedin. | https://medium.com/chynge/from-joes-desk-bitcoin-in-price-uptrend-finally-5648c0d1723 | [] | 2018-08-14 07:52:20.464000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'ICO', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Altcoins'] |
Everyday Quick Learnings to develop great skills | Mark Twain said — ”The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one”
Product leaders need to keep up with the latest techniques and trends for managing the very best product in their respective markets. This is no different from programmers learning a new framework or doctors learning about new methods for treating illnesses. There are many great resources for product managers to stay updated. This includes online courses, blogs, seminars etc. How about getting all these in small bites everyday through just one place?
Yes, you got it right! I am emphasizing the need of microlearning in Product management. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things to do in a day. Whether you are a mid-level or C-level professional, there are just too many things competing for your time and attention.
So, how do you break your learning? Studies suggest that “Learning in small steps of 3–7 minutes matches the human attention span”. We have been doodling about the possibilities of the learning techniques for product managers that are cost-effective, time bound and also offer powerful mobile performance support solutions. Microlearning or bite-sized learning is the ultimate solution for product managers to keep up with the latest trends and knowledge , with their large set of responsibilities in the organization.
Micro-learning deals with relatively small learning units and short-term learning activities. Basics of micro-learning includes :
Time-bound (5–10 mins,30–60 mins) Module based (Audio/Video) Engaging , gamified learning with rich media formats add to this. Focus on key concepts and better retention of learning.
If you are a product manager struggling to make time for learning,
Micro-learning is the new age learning strategy for you! | https://medium.com/@shipra-chaturvedi/everyday-quick-learnings-to-develop-great-skills-9e164329d0c0 | ['Shipra Chaturvedi'] | 2021-04-25 08:54:45.730000+00:00 | ['Microlearning', 'Skills Development', 'Benefits Of Microlearning', 'Product Management'] |
[Paper] MobileNetV3: Searching for MobileNetV3 (Image Classification) | [Paper] MobileNetV3: Searching for MobileNetV3 (Image Classification)
In this story, Searching for MobileNetV3, by Google AI, and Google Brain, is presented. In this paper:
MobileNetV3 is tuned to mobile phone CPUs through a combination of hardware-aware network architecture search (NAS), i.e. MnasNet , complemented by the NetAdapt algorithm .
complemented by the . Then it is subsequently improved through novel architecture advances.
This is a paper in 2019 ICCV with over 400 citations. (Sik-Ho Tsang @ Medium) | https://medium.com/@sh-tsang/paper-mobilenetv3-searching-for-mobilenetv3-image-classification-5072d4d8703c | ['Sik-Ho Tsang'] | 2020-11-15 06:31:39.253000+00:00 | ['Mobilenet', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Image Classification', 'Deep Learning', 'Neuralarchitecturesearch'] |
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