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Choosing The Right Online Business! | There are various things an individual should realize when attempting to choose a righteous online business. To be specific, it requires significant investment and exertion to discover a business that will be beneficial and pull in clients. Subsequently, one should take as much time as necessary while choosing one.
Research/Examination
Finding the privilege online business takes research, and hence it should be people’s main concern. When doing explore hope to check whether the business or item has the potential for long haul development and to produce latent.
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Recall that online organizations resemble some other organizations. It requires some investment, and work to have the option to draw in clients and produce benefits.
Photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash
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To have a fruitful online business, particularly one where you need to make easy revenue, you will require steadfast clients. Clients search for organizations that offer them great items, great client care, and consistency. Why consistency? Since it breeds trust in clients. They need to believe that their item will show up on schedule and in the manner they requested.
When searching for an online business ensure you have a product(s) that clients will need.
Photo by rupixen.com on Unsplash
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If you need a fruitful online business that will create automated revenue, pick an item that you put stock in. Likewise, the item can’t of mediocre quality because, in the end, it will cost you cash, possible clients, and time.
While picking the privilege online businesses hope to check whether it has potential. On the off chance that it does ask yourself How much time and exertion will it take from you to make a benefit?. Your answer will decide whether the business is appropriate for you.
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
Hours
When beginning a business on the web it is generally encouraged to not stop your normal employment. This is significant because it will take a little while to create enough pay to live on. Subsequently, an individual should be sure about how long a day or seven days they can commit to their online business.
The privilege online business for you may be one where you don’t need to place that numerous hour first and foremost.
It is ideal to be straightforward with yourself about how long you can place into the business. If you are not genuine about it, at that point you may pick a business that requires more hours than you can give.
Understand what your objectives are, regardless of whether those objectives are financial or individual. On the off chance that you know your objectives, at that point, you can choose the privilege online business for you.
Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash
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Before choosing your online business ensure that it can contend with other businesses of its sort. Is there sufficient space for your business? Is there a specialty that your opposition isn’t seeing that perhaps you do, which will be beneficial for you? These are significant interesting points while choosing an online business.
Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash
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Most proprietors who own an online business need to make some sort of automated revenue. The most ideal approach to do that is to pick the correct business (item) for you and has a possible market. Enrollment locales, programming, shopping, and data items are the most ideal approach when needing to produce easy revenue through online business.
Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash | https://medium.com/@hassanmushtaq003/choosing-the-right-online-business-b54735aa3a83 | ['Hassan Mushtaq'] | 2020-12-25 23:18:56.556000+00:00 | ['Right Business', 'Work From Home', 'Online Business', 'Business Strategy', 'Business'] |
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C# 9.0 İle Gelen Yenilikler | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/cits-tech/c-9-0-i%CC%87le-gelen-yenilikler-350da985f8f0 | ['Mert Şen Findicak'] | 2020-11-27 15:47:37.318000+00:00 | ['Dotnet Core', 'Dotnet', 'Csharp', 'C Sharp Programming', 'Software Development'] |
Fame and Former Successes May Be the Biggest Hindrance to Entrepreneurial Progress | The explosion that broke the camel’s back
The best thing about flying across the country, leaving my old corporate life and colleagues behind, and embarking on my flight of (initially failed) startups from the solitude of my Marina del Rey studio apartment was the isolation. Pursuing entrepreneurship in a vacuum might sound like a horrible idea, but some people — I’d venture to guess many — work best on their own, without the scrutiny of a watchful boss, judgmental colleagues, or a pressure-enhancing audience.
Unfortunately, some startups don’t allow that secrecy, isolation, and anonymity — and for one of my clients, the transition to a public launch became her downfall.
This client wasn’t your average product-hawking entrepreneur; she did have a plan for a line of future products, but initially, she was selling services in the entertainment space. We identified what we thought was her ideal customer audience, strategized a launch plan, and she began building out the service side of her business online. For the first few weeks, her business was doing well, but it was far from exploding. Then, something unexplainable happened, and seemingly overnight her business blew up.
Well, it wasn’t just her business that blew up — it was the services she’d provided, the audience of invested fans, followers, and customers, and her very own name. This person definitely didn’t pursue business for the attention; she merely came up with a unique service to tap into an underserved market that she had unusually direct access to, so she decided to give it a try. If anything, she was building it in spite of the potential attention.
When I say her audience blew up, I’m talking she went from tens to hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of people patronizing her services in a matter of months — with zero advertising and barely any marketing at all. In fact, the services largely sold themselves, spreading through word of mouth or SEO algorithms perhaps, plus a few unsolicited features in relevant publications. Financially speaking, things were going very well for her — and given her lack of marketing expenses, her profit margin was through the roof.
That’s when she experienced something new and equally unexpected: a negative review. Statistically speaking, it would have been nearly impossible for her to grow this fast without accumulating a few less-than-stellar reviews. However, the handful of negative reviews sprinkled among the hundreds of positive ones weren’t the biggest problem. The much graver problem at hand was the size of the audience itself — and the heightened stakes and elevated expectations to which my client felt she had to live up.
She contemplated shutting the entire business down — saying she was “closed for orders” until the frenzy went away. Just a tip — from entrepreneur to entrepreneur — shutting down your entire business in the heat of its explosive growth is typically not a winning move. Especially if you may have been algorithmically blessed and awarded free, zero-cost customers flocking to your offerings. As far as I could see, this was her time to ride this wave all the way to the top.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t proven her concept; she had — many times over. That said, service businesses may suffer from a component that few entrepreneurs talk about: performance anxiety. With the increased pressure of a large audience potentially watching her company’s every move — in terms of services added, customer testimonials, and new product launches — she felt paralyzed in her very own business.
She doubted that she could ever again provide the same high-quality services she’d successfully provided to tens of thousands of people over the past few months. She’d expanded her team a bit — to keep up with the accelerated demand — and the added pressure of supporting her new employees weighed on her further. This client is a perfect example of an entrepreneur traumatized by her very own public success — or “fame” on a small scale.
Thinking back to my earlier failed ventures, it probably isn't a shocker that I’d rather have failed quietly in isolation than on a public stage with an audience to watch, jeer, and “boo” with my every misstep. It wasn’t until years later that I felt confident enough to come clean about my startup failures — which ironically enough, became one of my biggest claims to fame.
Even Harry Potter acknowledges the curse of fame
My two guilty content consumption pleasures range from firsthand prison exposés to interviews with former child stars. Last night, it was child stars with none other than Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe. I watched the interview at double speed (the same way I watch everything to maximize the bang for my limited time’s buck), but I paused and rewatched his answer to one question.
Does Daniel Radcliffe like being famous?
When Daniel Radcliffe was everyone’s favorite little wizard boy, the stakes were fairly low. JK Rowling had already proven the concept, and the success of the movies likely came down to the post-production editing and the marketing circuit. Post-Potter, Daniel started branching out into more mature and artistically complex content. That new, unfamiliar content didn’t sit too well with his former teenage bookworm audience. They captured Daniel in their minds as Harry, and any deviation from that felt like a betrayal, a failure, and a mistake on Dan’s part.
That’s why it’s no surprise Daniel answered “Anonymity is a really cool thing. It allows you to do a lot and make mistakes…and not feel like [they’re] all very, very high stakes all the time.” | https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/fame-and-former-successes-may-be-the-biggest-hindrance-to-entrepreneurial-progress-db3687391526 | ['Rachel Greenberg'] | 2021-09-10 14:06:09.150000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Success', 'Social Media', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup'] |
Tell Me About Yourself | Photo by Anna Shvets
A seemingly simple yet complex question, I fumble for adjectives at times. The American Psychological Association describes personality as the ‘individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving’. Everyone is uniquely different, even twins. Lickerman reckons personality is easier to spot whereas character takes time to find out, often during unspecified uncommon situations. It helps to understand and predict the likely behavior and attitude of others. Finding the ‘fit’, self-reflection or communication are probably reasons why homo sapiens are obsessed with personas. We all seek validation of our own qualities (especially strengths), as compared to how others see us as — so much that this turned into a billion-dollar industry.
What is the impact of applying personality traits in our everyday lives?
THE GOOD
If one is to merely scratch the surface, the possibilities of why we think and act the way we do are endless — blood type, astrology, social background etc. Earthlings are naturally curious and forever in search of answers. What does it take to be a lawyer? Why some fought for toilet paper during Covid19? Attract a ‘dominant-type’ mate? Personality-driven marketing helps several businesses tailor messages to their target audiences. It is an easy way to get into the minds and hearts of target audiences. Remember the romcom “My Boyfriend is Type B’’, Lee Dong-gun fans? Brands have personalities too. The Iphone is viewed as multifaceted — a “seductress’’ in Europe and “dreamer’’ in Japan. To stand out, Samsung prides themselves as being anti-Apple and successfully leads the Android-powered gadget market. Matching the right celebrity to endorse brands is key to a winning brand attitude and purchase intention (think: Manny Pacquiao & Nike). Sackett and Walmsley highlighted out of the big 5 personality traits, conscientiousness and agreeableness are the most prized attributes by employers, something for job applicants to note.
THE BAD
Human beings like to think they are nicer than they actually are. Does temperament change over time and in different situations though? Based on the interaction between genetics and the environment, yes. Self-beliefs and habits are some of the control factors. Perceived as “not always accurate’’, corporations, militaries and universities are actively using identity indicators Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Enneagram to recruit talents. Some questioned if individuals are suffering professionally or “type-shamed” with the unconscious labels. More so when judgement is already flawed and biased. Having infectious laughter helps to brighten someone’s day and too much, is considered as a “disorder”. Given gender misconceptions, should women continue to stay out of technology-related sectors? Olivola et al found prominent cheekbones and high eyebrows to be signs of trustworthiness. Do appearances affect our personality? Or personality in fact, outshine looks? What are the determinants then and who sets them?
THE UGLY
Personality tests are frequently seen as a welcome break from the tedious workday or used to make informed decisions. In stark reality, reports suggested Cambridge Analytica uses those predictive profiles to exploit personal information of the Americans and sway votes in the last US election. Even as companies strive to design the best chatbot personalities to improve user experiences, nothing beats real people. Empathy and compassion prevail. Boomers shared more fake news online, not necessarily because they are not digitally savvy. Instead of “derived” stereotypes, allowing voices of employees across ranks and sexual orientations etc to be heard may help organizations build a positive, inclusive workplace.
FINALLY…
I do not have an answer as to what defines strengths, weaknesses or preferences. What might be perceived as a negative trait by Samantha, James sees it positive. Missing out on forming authentic relationships and experiences to learn from or truly enjoy could occur if we choose to take the assessment results seriously. Actors have the best job in the world in my opinion, as they get to experiment and immerse themselves in various roles. Personality analysis has the ability to manipulate behavior for the better or worst — by looking into the thought process, likes, fears etc. Because mankind is a work-in-progress lot, personality types typically give you an idea and do not guarantee the reality.
p.s: So how do you think I am like? | https://medium.com/bloomrsg/tell-me-about-yourself-7ac3064a0019 | ['Lisa Low'] | 2020-10-13 02:48:09.063000+00:00 | ['Stereotypes', 'Personality', 'Brands', 'Character Development', 'Life'] |
Scopes in Javascript | Photo by Bruno Berger on Unsplash
The scope is a term which decides which variable is accessible from which position. It decides the accessibility of variables. There are many kinds of scope.
Global scope: They are accessible from anywhere of the code
Local scope: It is mainly of two types as Function scope and blocks scope.
Function scope: Anything declared inside a function is inaccessible from the outside of the function.
Block scope: IF you declare something inside if/for/while block, it creates a block scope. Anything inside a curly brace is a block scope. But remember that only let and const can be used to create block scope. Using var will not create a block scope.
Public and private scope:
We can create a public and private scope using namespace.
Let’s create a private scope by wrapping it with braces and call immediately.
In the above code, the sing function is unavailable because it is in a private scope. Let's create a module where we will define both public and private scope and stop polluting the global environment.
Here all the methods inside the return are public and accessible from outside. But private methods are inaccessible.
Private methods aren’t accessible but private methods are accessible inside the private method.
This is another way of writing private and public scope.
Remember that the private method is usually started with an underscore sign.
Another way of writing public and private methods is to declare an object and add a method to it. At last return this object. Here is the example
IF we try “module. eat()”, it will return an error because it is a private function and it isn’t accessible.
Some facts
The scope can be nested. There can be multiple scopes. We can call it a scope chain.
Lexical scope, static scope, and closure is the same thing
By creating two different functions we can create two scopes and use the same name in both two scopes and they will not clash so that we can isolate them.
Thanks for reading. Follow me for more articles | https://medium.com/swlh/scopes-in-javascript-889c0df197c2 | ['Md Shahab Uddin'] | 2020-12-10 16:03:50.707000+00:00 | ['Javascript Tips', 'JavaScript', 'Javascript Development', 'Web Development', 'Web Design'] |
Railgun: A new weapon for mission critical streaming tasks | Practically all distributed streaming engines today implement sliding windows as hopping windows — to a point that they are called the same by systems like Flink or Spark Streaming.
There are many reasons for this design decision and we dived deep into this topic in a previous post.
This raises the question of whether it is even possible to have accurate metrics per event while respecting tight latency Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and have it run in a distributed setting.
In this post we want to talk about Railgun, a novel, elastic, and distributed streaming engine implemented by Feedzai to provide accurate metrics while complying with millisecond-level latencies on high percentiles (≥ 99.9%).
Sounds too good to be true? Let’s look at the several pieces and techniques that enable Railgun’s accuracy and performance.
Event Reservoir
Accurate metrics per event require bookkeeping all the events. Namely, and to support multiple window types (real-time windows, delayed windows, tumbling windows, etc.), for a specific point in time we need to know:
what events have expired for a metric aggregation. what events have arrived for a metric aggregation.
To to this in a few milliseconds, we need a way to store and access events efficiently. The Event Reservoir is our secret sauce to make this possible, by storing raw events in disk and providing iterators to support the two actions above, in lightning speed.
For efficiency, the Event Reservoir works with chunks of events. Whenever a new event arrives, it is added to the current open chunk, which is kept in memory.
Chunks have a target byte size. When chunks achieve this size, they are considered closed and get written asynchronously to persistent storage. As soon as they are closed, chunks become immutable. This immutability allows us to apply aggressive compression and serialization algorithms to minimize I/O storage.
Importantly, the Event Reservoir takes advantage of the time-based, sequential access of events. In fact, and regardless of the type of window, events are always consumed in order.
Event Reservoir
This allows us to define reservoir iterators that efficiently load chunks of events from persistent storage to memory. To know what events have arrived and what have expired, we only need to keep the head and the tail of the window in memory.
With this approach, memory consumption is optimal, and we can support extremely long windows with the same performance and accuracy as small windows.
To make sure events are always available in memory, whenever we start to consume a new chunk we eagerly load the next chunk into cache, before it is needed. This allows us to avoid expensive I/O syscalls and serialization operations in the critical path of processing an event.
How cool is that?
But that’s not all…
Still, if for some reason, chunks are evicted from the application cache right before they are requested, thus resulting in syscall to fetch from disk, the request probably won’t trigger an actual read request to the disk. This is because chunks are organized as a sequence in a single file, up to a maximum configured size, which then rolls to a newly created sequence file.
As such, this approach exploits the I/O subsystem of the operating system to read ahead the chunk contents into the page cache. When a chunk not in cache is requested, the operating system can deliver it directly from page cache, thus paying only the deserialization cost — a fraction of what it would be if an actual I/O request to disk was required.
Optimized Plan DAGs
All metric executions within a Reservoir are optimized to minimize computations.
When a new metric is added, we add it to a DAG of operations. A DAG in Railgun always follows the order: Window → Filter → Group By → Aggregator.
This design restricts Railgun’s metric expressibility to follow a strict order of operations, but allows us to optimize performance, by avoid repeating unnecessary computations, especially the ones related with windows.
Since we often have metrics sharing the same Window, Filter, and Group By, the plan optimizes these by reusing the DAG’s prefix path. For instance, consider these two queries with three metric aggregations:
SELECT SUM(amount), COUNT(*) FROM payments
GROUP BY card [RANGE 5 MINUTES]
SUM(amount), COUNT(*) payments card SELECT AVG(amount) FROM payments
GROUP BY merchant [RANGE 5 MINUTES]
Then, the DAG of these queries is:
Optimized DAG Example
where all metrics share the same window, but metrics in the first query group the events by the card field, while metrics in the second query group the events by the merchant field.
Aggregation State Store: RocksDB
Similarly to Flink and other systems, we store in RocksDB the state of the metric aggregations. We use RocksDB given its proven maturity and low-latency performance for a key-value store.
Messaging Layer: Kafka
We use Kafka as the underlying messaging system, but also as a way to be fault-tolerant and to distribute load between the several Railgun instances.
Since both the state store and the reservoir write their state to persistent storage often, when a fault happens we only need to recover a very small amount of events, which can be efficiently pulled from Kafka topics upon request.
Kafka’s Zookeeper is also responsible for detecting when a Railgun Node (configured also as a Kafka Consumer) crashed and is no longer able to poll messages.
As a messaging system, Kafka stores messages in topics and provides built-in capabilities to split topics into several partitions.
In our case, we configure as many topics per stream as different top-level group bys (e.g. card, merchant, etc.). Then, for each topic, we tune the number of partitions to achieve a good level of parallelism and support a high throughput.
We exploit Kafka’s internal division of topic-partition to determine the number of Railgun Task Processors.
The Task Processor is the main unit of concurrency inside Railgun, and where metrics are computed. We have at least as many Task Processors as different topic-partitions configured in Kafka.
Task Processors live inside a Processor, and a Processor is our main unit of parallelism. Each Processor uses a single dedicated thread to minimize context switching and synchronization.
Technically there is no difference between two Processors in a single physical Railgun Node, or two Processors in two different physical Railgun Nodes. This flexibility allows us to better exploit the machines available for the deployment. | https://medium.com/feedzaitech/railgun-a-new-weapon-for-mission-critical-streaming-tasks-6432dd66a244 | ['Sofia Gomes'] | 2020-11-17 10:43:32.828000+00:00 | ['Distributed Systems', 'Research', 'Fraud Detection', 'Streaming', 'Software Development'] |
The Unusual Perks of Mental Illness | The Unusual Perks of Mental Illness
Sometimes, a major weakness is a major strength.
Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash
Mental illness is a major component of my life. It affects so many aspects of how I live that it’s become an integral part of who I am. Huge life decisions are made taking into account my bipolar.
And, like any illness, there are major downsides that have a huge impact on a given day. Bouts of depression can wreck multiple months of my life. A run of mania can lead to bad decisions. The ever-present anxiety makes simple tasks hard.
These symptoms can cause me great difficulty and pain. Depression sucks, and there’s no varnishing that truth. However, not all aspects of my illness are negative.
That’s not to say that my symptoms are good. Being anxious, depressed, manic, or neurotic are all crappy feelings, and I don’t particularly care for them. However, they all inform the wiring of my brain and are all a part of me in some way. Because these symptoms affect my brain functioning, they naturally inform how I work in unique ways.
I am a neurotic person. I tend to fixate on past mistakes and negative feedback and events, and they tend to ruin my wellbeing when this fixation flares up. I also obsess over every possible outcome of relatively simple conversations, driving myself to madness over a hundred hypothetical scenarios that will never happen.
These same traits assist me at work. My fixation on mistakes and aversion to negative feedback translates to attention to detail in my work, meaning I make fewer critical mistakes in my writing. My obsession with every possible outcome translates to complex processes and mechanisms that guide my work process and help me succeed at my job.
Other traits that negatively affect my life have positive outcomes in other ways. Being late to anything tends to make me panic, and I tend to be hyper-fixated on time. It certainly helps me get to meetings and appointments on time if not early, which reflects well on me as an employee and a professional.
I also operate using strict routines that drive my daily life. For example, I am fully conscious of how much time it takes to get to work and how the traffic signals operate on my whole route. This fixation on routine can ruin my day if I’m running late, but also helps me manage multiple deadlines using standardized practices I’ve developed.
If I’m in the midst of a manic streak, I tend to act recklessly and make poor life choices. I am also incredibly productive with my work and have launched several side projects from manic states.
Not all symptoms of my bipolar can be made unequivocally positive. Depression is depression, and it’s hard to put a shine on it. However, often when coming out of my depression, I feel a sense of renewal that helps me jump-start new ideas or better self-care practices. The deep, dark introspection of the depressive state often leads to major revelations when you pull out of it.
Not everyone is capable of putting a positive spin on their symptoms. I am fortunate that my symptoms are well-controlled by my meds, which allows me to apply their positive effects at work and in life. However, others may not be able to control their symptoms well enough to reach this point, and not all symptoms have positive sides.
Everyone is wired differently, and for some, it’s hard if not impossible to achieve an upside. That’s not a personal failing on their part in the same way that mental illness is not a moral failing. Sometimes, your illness prevents any potential upside, and sometimes, your illness doesn’t have an upside at all. That’s okay.
For me, I do my best to pull value from my illness. It’s a blessing and a curse in that way — my biggest weakness feeds my greatest strengths and enables me to be better.
It’s not always sunshine and roses, though. When I’m hyper-productive during a manic phase, I still have self-destructive tendencies that affect my life negatively. My drive to be timely is fantastic, but not when I’m having a panic attack in my car because I’m running five minutes late.
It’s just a matter of give and take in my mind. I was born with my bipolar and am forced to live with it, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t give me something in return.
I’ve always been a bit more self-aware than normal, and years of therapy and forced introspection have helped build on that skill. I’m also an analytical person, preferring logic and processes and systems. That may or may not be a product of my neurotic side, but it’s part of me either way.
So, being self-aware, introspective, and analytical, I’ve dedicated a lot of time in my life to finding ways to exploit the complex system that is my brain. How can I make my negative qualities work for me as well as against me? How can I channel my problems into solutions for other things?
This may seem like trying to draw blood from a stone. I’m cursed with a mental illness, after all. How can that be good? As I’ve described above, there’s a lot of good to be had from my more self-destructive tendencies. It’s just a matter of finding it.
Turns out there’s plenty of blood in this stone. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/the-unusual-perks-of-mental-illness-18d250c614e2 | ['Matthew Maniaci'] | 2020-01-24 16:34:39.869000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Bipolar Disorder', 'Depression', 'Anxiety', 'Mental Health'] |
I Tried the Minimalist Lifestyle for 30 Days | I Tried the Minimalist Lifestyle for 30 Days
I’m a hoarder. Oh wait, I was a hoarder. My coping mechanism for the most part of my life has simply been to add things to my cart and proceed to checkout. Anytime, I’m low, upset, or even in a slightly bad mood, shopping lifts my spirits up.
So when I decided to clean my closets at the end of 2020, I was surprised to find things that I didn’t even remember getting. It was terrifying. Not only to clean my closet but to look at all that money that I’d wasted on shoes and clothes that I’d obviously not worn in the last 1 year! That was it, the last nail in the coffin. I had to bid adieu to the whole swiping spree.
I spoke to my best friend, complaining how I had no space to accommodate all of my stuff, after having ample amount of closet space. And he simply said, “Maybe you don’t need to own all this stuff?”
That simple statement made me question all my items.
And that’s it. A minimalist was born.
The realization dawned upon me pretty quickly, because the gazillion clothes, bags, shoes, accessories, etc did not bring me any joy. In fact, if anything they were distracting me from all the happiness I had in my life. They were meaningless and purposeless purchases that were made in the spur of the moment, and did not serve any purpose in my life.
This journey towards this simple lifestyle has been far more life-changing and life-giving than I expected. The possessions in our lives define who we are on a far deeper level than we realize. And as a result, the process of removing them teaches us valuable truths about ourselves and the lives we live.
“The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.” — C.S. Lewis
I started by adopting the 30-day minimalism challenge.
So here’s how the 30-day minimalism challenge works: on day 1 of the challenge you pick one item to declutter by donating it, recycling it, or throwing it away — (whatever makes the most sense for the item you picked) — and on day 2 you declutter 2 items, and on day 3, three items, and so on up until day 30 where you’ll declutter 30 items!
Now, doing this can be a little overwhelming. Because you may think, how do I give away 25 or 30 items, in one day, but trust me, the process becomes easier as you embark on the journey. It’s a liberating feeling, to know that you’re not defined by the things you own. In fact, they no longer own you.
Alternatively, you could also consider trying the Marie Kondo method.
The KonMari Method™ encourages tidying by category — not by location — beginning with clothes, then moving on to books, papers, komono (miscellaneous items), and, finally, sentimental items. Keep only those things that speak to the heart, and discard items that no longer spark joy.
By the end of 30 days, I had two empty shelves in my closet and significant space in my shoe closet. It was simple. If I hadn’t used the item in the last 1.5 years, it had to go.
While I achieved my goal of having more space in my closet, there are certain other things too that I learned in the process. Minimalism truly comes with its own perks. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/i-tried-the-minimalist-lifestyle-for-30-days-5cde47888695 | ['Ananya Dube'] | 2021-01-31 20:02:41.992000+00:00 | ['The Ascent', 'Minimalism', 'Inner Peace', 'This Happened To Me', 'Mindset Shift'] |
How to Start with Machine Learning for Free | How to Start with Machine Learning for Free
The field offers competitive salaries, it’s challenging and fun. The best thing about it is that you can learn it for FREE. Roman Orac Mar 30·6 min read
Photo by Roméo A. on Unsplash
There is an increasing interest in the field of Machine Learning. This doesn’t surprise me with all the hype around Deep Learning and Neural Networks. Besides that, the field offers competitive salaries, it’s challenging and fun.
I’m assuming you’re new to the field and don’t know where to start.
The question I get asked the most often is: How to start with Machine Learning? My answer is always the same, hence I wrote this article to guide you in your journey.
My suggestion is: start with free content as there are many great resources available online. Even Ivy League Universities offer their courses online for free.
By studying these resources you’re going to learn if Machine Learning is right for you
Don’t start spending money on expensive courses right away. Think of paid courses as a specialization. Luckily, you can learn strong Machine Learning foundations for free.
By reading this article, you’ll learn, which are great eBooks and courses to learn:
Programming with Python
Data analysis with pandas
Start with Data Science and Machine Learning
I also share a few tips on how to efficiently learn Machine Learning.
Intro
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
I would like to give you a few tips before we start.
Don’t go too deep into any book or course. When starting with a new field, it is important that you learn the breadth of the field.
Learn from multiple books and courses at the same time. This way you’ll hear explanations of complex concepts from different sides.
Practice is also important. Don’t go too deep into the theory without any practical experience. Titanic — Machine Learning from Disaster is a great place to start. Take a look at the code and discussion sections.
What’s the point of learning if you don’t memorize the concepts? One great way to memorize is to use Anki — an app that uses spaced repetition.
Programming eBooks
Python Notes for Professionals
Authors: People at Stack Overflow
Reading Python Notes for Professionals (image made by author)
This Python book is one of the most complete guides for Python I’ve ever seen. It is compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation and the content is written by people at Stack Overflow.
The book extensively covers every area of Python that you will (most probably) ever need. I suggest you don’t read it from start to finish, but use it as a go-to reference for a certain topic you would like to learn more about.
If you aren’t well versed in Python, I recommend diving deep into this book. With 816 pages this book offers more than enough information to make you proficient in Python.
Why do I recommend this book? Because you can always revisit it. It can serve as your reference on your journey.
Learn Pandas
Author: Hernan Rojas
Photo by Stan Y on Unsplash
Pandas became the defacto standard for Data Science in Python. Learn Pandas book is written in Jupyter Notebooks with accompanying text.
It starts with basic lessons on how to create a DataFrame and it ends with creating Excel reports. It is aimed at Junior Data Scientists that are still getting familiar with pandas.
To learn more advanced pandas tricks, I would recommend you to check my pandas series for Data Analysis:
Machine Learning eBooks
Python Data Science Handbook
Author: Jake VanderPlas
Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash
Python Data Science Handbook is aimed at junior Data Scientists. It shows how to use the most important tools, including IPython, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, and many others. This book is perfect for tackling day-to-day issues such as cleaning, manipulating, and transforming data — or building machine learning models.
Interpretable Machine Learning
Subtitle: A Guide for Making Black Box Models Explainable
Author: Christoph Molnar
Photo by Lucas Benjamin on Unsplash
This book uses a “Pay what you want pricing strategy” so it is technically not free.
Interpretable Machine Learning focuses on ML models for tabular data (also called relational or structured data) and less on computer vision and natural language processing tasks.
Reading the book is recommended for machine learning practitioners, data scientists, statisticians, and anyone else interested in making machine learning models interpretable. It details how to select and apply the best interpretation methods for a machine learning project.
Free Online Courses
Machine Learning Course
University: Columbia
Instructor: John W. Paisley, Ph.D.
Photo by h heyerlein on Unsplash
Machine Learning is the basis for the most exciting careers in Data Analysis today. You’ll learn the models and methods and apply them to real-world situations ranging from identifying trending news topics to building recommendation engines, ranking sports teams and plotting the path of movie zombies.
Major perspectives covered include:
probabilistic versus non-probabilistic modeling
supervised versus unsupervised learning
Topics include classification and regression, clustering methods, sequential models, matrix factorization, topic modeling and model selection.
Methods include linear and logistic regression, support vector machines, tree classifiers, boosting, maximum likelihood and MAP inference, EM algorithm, hidden Markov models, Kalman filters, k-means, Gaussian mixture models, among others.
Artificial Intelligence Course
University: ColumbiaX
Instructor: Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi, Ph.D.
Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash
What do self-driving cars, face recognition, web search, industrial robots, missile guidance, and tumor detection have in common?
They are all complex real-world problems being solved with applications of intelligence (AI).
This course will provide a broad understanding of the basic techniques for building intelligent computer systems and an understanding of how AI is applied to problems.
You will learn about the history of AI, intelligent agents, state-space problem representations, uninformed and heuristic search, game playing, logical agents, and constraint satisfaction problems.
You will gain hands-on experience by building a basic search agent. Adversarial search will be explored through the creation of a game and an introduction to Machine Learning includes work on linear regression.
Before you go
Some of the links above are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I’ll earn a commission. Keep in mind that I link courses because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases.
Follow me on Twitter, where I regularly tweet about Data Science and Machine Learning. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-start-with-machine-learning-for-free-483c1974c4b6 | ['Roman Orac'] | 2021-05-15 09:35:40.671000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Learning', 'Machine Learning', 'Course'] |
What new features to expect ? | Image Credit: YouTube
What new features to expect ?
▹ replaceAll()
JavaScript has already a method named replace() . This method is used to replace a string with another value of type string. The replace() method will only replace the the first occurrence. We can use RegExr in order to replace everything or now we can use the replaceAll() function.
const p = 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. If the dog reacted, was it really lazy?'; const regex = /dog/gi; console.log(p.replaceAll(regex, 'ferret'));
// expected output: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy ferret. If the ferret reacted, was it really lazy?" console.log(p.replaceAll('dog', 'monkey'));
// expected output: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy monkey. If the monkey reacted, was it really lazy?"
▹ Private Accessors
By appending # to the function name now we have private accessor functions.
// Private accessor
get #age() { return 42 }
set #age(value) {}
▹ Private Methods
Private method names starts with # . These methods are only available inside the class where it is defined.
class Car { // Private #setType() { console.log("set car type method"); } // Public show() { this.#setType(); } } const car = new Car(); car.show(); // "I am Private"; car.setType(); // TypeError: personObj.setType is not a function
▹ WeakRef
A WeakRef object contains a weak reference to an object, which is called its target or referent. A weak reference to an object is a reference that does not prevent the object from being reclaimed by the garbage collector. In contrast, a normal (or strong) reference keeps an object in memory.
When an object no longer has any strong references to it, the JavaScript engine's garbage collector may destroy the object and reclaim its memory. If that happens, you can't get the object from a weak reference anymore.
const callback = () => {
const aBigObj = new WeakRef({ name: "Test" }); console.log(aBigObj.deref().name);}
(async function(){
await new Promise((resolve) => {
setTimeout(() => {
callback(); // Guaranteed to print "Test"
resolve();
}, 2000);
});
await new Promise((resolve) => {
setTimeout(() => {
callback(); // No Gaurantee that "Test" is printed
resolve();
}, 5000);
});
})();
▹ Finalizers
A FinalizationRegistry object lets you request a callback when an object is garbage-collected. FinalizationRegistry provides a way to request that a cleanup callback get called at some point when an object registered with the registry has been reclaimed.
You create the registry passing in the callback:
const registry = new FinalizationRegistry(heldValue => {
// ....
});
Then you register any objects you want a cleanup callback for by calling the register method, passing in the object and a *held value* for it:
registry.register(theObject, "some value");
▹ Promise.any()
Promise.any() resolves if any of the provided promises is resolved. If no promises fulfill, then the returned promises is rejected with an AggregatorError .
const promise1 = Promise.reject(0);
const promise2 = new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 100, 'quick'));
const promise3 = new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 500, 'slow')); const promises = [promise1, promise2, promise3]; Promise.any(promises).then((value) => console.log(value)); // expected output: "quick"
▹ AggregateError
An AggregateError exception is thrown by Promise.any() when none of the promises are resolved.
Promise.any([
Promise.reject(new Error("some error")),
]).catch(e => {
console.log(e instanceof AggregateError); // true
console.log(e.message); // "All Promises rejected"
console.log(e.name); // "AggregateError"
console.log(e.errors); // [ Error: "some error" ]
});
▹ Logical Assignment Operator
Some of the logical operations are && , || and ?? .Here we combine these operators with assignment.
const a;
const b = a ?? 5;
console.log(b); // 5 const x = 1;
const y = 2;
x ||= y;
console.log(x); // 1 const x = 1;
const y = 2;
x &&= y;
console.log(x); // 2
▹ Numeric separators
This feature allows us to make numeric literals more readable by adding visual separation between digits. Here is a link with more examples.
console.log(1000000); // 1000000 console.log(1_000_000); // 1_000_000 console.log(1_019_436_871.42); // 1019436871.42
Promise.allSettled()
Promise.allSettled() runs all promises regardless of rejection of any promises. Now we can create a new Promise that contains all the promises and the data of each.
const promise1 = Promise.resolve(3);
const promise2 = new Promise((resolve, reject) => setTimeout(reject, 100, 'foo'));
const promises = [promise1, promise2]; Promise.allSettled(promises).
then((results) => results.forEach((result) => console.log(result.status))); // expected output:
// "fulfilled"
// "rejected"
String.prototype.matchAll()
This one is very similar to replace() and replaceAll() . We already have match() available in JavaScript. With matchAll() we can access an iterator that contains all the results matching our string value.
const regexp = /t(e)(st(\d?))/g; const str = 'test1test2';
const array = [...str.matchAll(regexp)]; console.log(array[0]);
// expected output: Array ["test1", "e", "st1", "1"] console.log(array[1]);
// expected output: Array ["test2", "e", "st2", "2"]
Optional Chaining Operator
The optional chaining operator allow us to read the value of a property without having to directly validate the each reference in the chain. The expression short circuits with a return value of undefined .
This way is very easy to write and read the code and you don’t have to do extra work when there is no guarantee as to which properties are required.
const adventurer = {
name: 'Alice',
cat: {
name: 'Dinah'
}
}; const dogName = adventurer.dog?.name;
console.log(dogName);
// expected output: undefined console.log(adventurer.someNonExistentMethod?.());
// expected output: undefined
Dynamic Import 🔥
Dynamic import() introduces a new function-like form of import that caters to those use cases. import(moduleSpecifier) returns a promise for the module namespace object of the requested module, which is created after fetching, instantiating, and evaluating all of the module’s dependencies, as well as the module itself.
We can use async/await instead of the then based callback style because import returns a promise. We can use it with lazy loading.
⚠️ Although import() looks like a function call, it is specified as syntax that just happens to use parentheses (similar to super() ). That means that import doesn’t inherit from Function.prototype so you cannot call or apply it.
Consider the following module, located at ./utils.mjs :
// Default export
export default () => {
console.log('Hi from the default export!');
};
// Named export `doStuff`
export const doStuff = () => {
console.log('Doing stuff…');
};
Here’s how to dynamically import and use the ./utils.mjs module:
<script type="module">
(async () => {
const moduleSpecifier = './utils.mjs';
const module = await import(moduleSpecifier)
module.default();
// → logs 'Hi from the default export!'
module.doStuff();
// → logs 'Doing stuff…'
})();
</script>
BigInt
BigInt is a special numeric type that provides support for integers of arbitrary length. The BigInt can be used by adding n to the end of an integer or by calling the function BigInt that creates bigints from strings, numbers etc. We can’t mix bigints and regular numbers, if needed we should explicitly convert them. BigInt represents a number that is larger than 2^(53) –1 .
const bigInt = 123456789123456789n;
console.log(bigInt +1n);
//9007199254740992n console.log(bigInt +10n);
//9007199254741001n console.log(bigInt +100n);
//9007199254741001n console.log(bigInt +10);
//Error: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot mix BigInt and other types, use explicit conversions
Conclusion
JavaScript is always providing new ways and features to make the code and developers more productive and efficient. It’s very important as a developer to stay up to date with the new features that are released by your favorite programming language. I hope you liked the article and learned something interesting. | https://medium.com/swlh/javascript-es2021-es12-d2798e98bd82 | ['Mihai Dita'] | 2020-12-13 20:57:26.978000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Javascript Tips', 'Programming', 'Javascript Development', 'Web Development'] |
Recognizing Handwritten Digits with scikit-learn under Data Analytics using Python | Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also focus on applying data patterns towards effective decision making. It can be valuable in areas rich with recorded information; analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics,computer programming and operational research to quantify performance.Data analysis is not limited to numbers and strings, because images and sounds can also be analyzed and classified.
Scikit-learn (formerly scikits.learn and also known as sklearn) is a free software machine learning library for the Python programming language. It features various classification ,regression and clustering algorithms including support vector machine,random forest, gradient boosting, k-means and DBSCAN, and is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy. Here we are going to analyze the digits data-set of the Sci-Kit learn library. We are going to train a Support Vector Machine and then we will be predicting the values of a unknown Handwritten digits.
Here we jupyter notebook for the the performing operations. So lets start first with importing required libraries.
There are 1797 total images are there in the dataset.
Our whole data-set is stored in digits. Following is an example of a digit in our dataset. It consists of 64 pixels (8X8).The data set contains images of hand-written digits: 10 classes where each class refers to a digit from 0 to 9.Each image stored as 8x8 matrices as following (for digit 0):
Matrix value for Digit
This dataset consists of 1,797 images that are 8x8 pixels in size. Each image is a handwritten digit in grayscale, as shown in Figure
Pixel image in dataset
Let us train our SVM with the first 1790 images in out data-set. After that we will use the remaining Data-set as our test data and check the accuracy of our training machine.
It consists of 6 images of 64 pixels each(8X8) of six different numbers.The output of the above test data will be produced as below:
Lets fit our model using SVM classifier.Here we use 1st 1790 images for training the model and remaining are for validation.
Pridiction by the model
As we see,both predicted and target values are same for this data.Lets check the model peidiction for some datasets.
As we can see we have achieved 100% accuracy. Let us now define a function that will find the accuracy of our SVM and train our model with varying data-set. We will start with 3 elements in our training data and work our way up to 1790 data and store the accuracy of our models in a dictionary.
Accuracy function
The values dictionary holds all the accuracies values for the given model.
Let us plot our dictionary result to visualize the accuracy result.
Accuracy of the model
Conclusion:As we can clearly see for well above 95% of our models the achieved accuracy is 100% . Hence we can easily conclude that our model works accurate for more than 95% of the time.Hence by using Scikit-Learn library in python,data analysis becomes easy ,effective and take less time.
“I am thankful to mentors at https://internship.suvenconsultants.com for providing awesome problem statements and giving many of us a Coding Internship Exprience. Thank you www.suvenconsultants.com" | https://medium.com/@kuldipawachar25299/recognizing-handwritten-digits-with-scikit-learn-under-data-analytics-using-python-9d2572006f2d | ['Kuldip Awachar'] | 2020-10-08 08:11:21.012000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Scikit Learn', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Analytics'] |
A SINGLE SCREEN REPLACED BOOKS, PENS FROM YOUR HAND! | What a tragic reality we’ve got reached today! One screen isn’t solely restricted to the whole subjects on this planet however conjointly its corresponding books, and even lecturers. we could appreciate the dynamical technology and find ourselves familiar with that or we could simply conserve our authentic Gurukul System?
This journal throws light-weight on the rising and reworking learning ways in our day to day lives.
EARLY LEARNING METHODS
GURUKUL SYSTEM
Let’s begin with Gurukul System.
The students of Gurukul are more disciplined and organized. They are taught to follow a well- planned schedule in school. The students are more focused and possess more concentration power than normal students. This is because they are trained through techniques such as meditation which enhances their focusing power.
However, the old learning method was all about recitation, for example, students would sit in silence, while one student after another would take it in turns to recite the lesson until each one had been called upon.
But the best part about the traditional learning method is “DISCIPLINE” and “GRATITUDE TOWARDS TEACHERS.”
EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION AND LEARNING WAYS
In India, the education system has numerous aspects and it’s evolved since precedent days and color. As the Republic of India progressed and got its independence from the British Colonies, the modern education system step by step evolved. Presently within the Indian establishment has four levels pre-primary, primary, secondary, and better secondary.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
This was the theoretical explanation of the evolution of Learning Methods but the practical evolution of learning methods changed the educational perspective of the world.
Traveling from the “forced to attend” corporate training programs, we have now reached the time to learn with flexibility. While revamping, the accelerated learning techniques along with the apt technology bring refreshing aura in the learning segment.
Is this the bandwagon? Oh no, this is the basic nature of the environment — change.
It’s time to buckle up for the new-age corporate learning!
1.INDIVIDUAL TO COLLABORATIVE LEARNING: In collective learning, two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. Courses serve the best when it involves incorporated problem-based discussions, reflection, and other ways to make the participants an active part of the learning process. Collaboration is no longer considered as a nice add-on; it has become a necessary feature. People are learning, not simply with others, but from the shared experiences and ideas of others.
2.PASSIVE TO ACTIVE LEARNING: The learners scruple to be solely content-receptors, just taking down notes or paying attention to trainers speak for hours without pause. However, Active Learning aka Brain-Based Learning could be a participant cantered learning method that’s contrary to trainer cantered passive learning.
3.COMPULSORY TO CONDUCIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT: Favourable learning environment should be available not by chance but through well designing and planning. Several interventions like ‘ICE BREAKERS’, interactions, and psychological stimulations may be part of each training program. These interventions not only create a favorable learning environment but also make a participant understand the benefit of the training program. Participants must find a purpose of learning.
4.SINGLE MODE TO BLENDED LEARNING TECHNIQUES:
Studies have shown that using different types of learning techniques improves an individual’s engagement with the topic, retention of information, and overall satisfaction. Offering a variety of content, delivery methods, and further resources make the learning experience richer and ensure the best possible outcome.
Some of the basic examples are face-to-face training programs with e-learning modules, action learning sets, or discussion forums. Emerging new modes like e-learning, mobile learning, and gaming are adding flavors to blended learning techniques.
Fun in Learning
5.PROLONGED DURATION TRAINING TO BIT SIZE LEARNING :
Bearing in mind the short span of human attention, the bit-size learning approach is reshaping the learning behavior pattern. The chunking method helps to grasp information in short periods and accordingly learning is applied successfully in the workplace. Such crisp and apt learning motivate me to focus on the key concepts and techniques.
6.STANDARDISED COURSE TO BESPOKE PROGRAMMES: There is an earnest need to design each in-organization course suitable to the workforce, keeping one’s learning objective in view. On the contrary, the standardized courses have their limitations — many times the participants do not find relevance to the course content and their learning objectives.
7. MONOLOGUE TO INTERACTIVE LEARNING RESOURCES: Gone are the days when the print out of the slides was used as participant reference material. Each slide had a lot of information and was enough to create fear psychosis to the participant. In addition to the core face-to-face delivery, providing other resources like Participant Manuals, FAQ Guides, hints, tips, and fact sheets to support the learning may prove beneficial. Interactive Learning is a pedagogical approach that incorporates social networking and urban computing into course design and delivery. Interactive Learning has evolved out of the hyper-growth in the use of digital technology and virtual communication, particularly by students.
8.PROLONGED DURATION TRAINING TO BIT SIZE LEARNING: Bearing in mind the short span of human attention, the bit-size learning approach is reshaping the learning behavior pattern. The chunking method helps to grasp information in short periods and accordingly learning is applied successfully in the workplace. Such crisp and apt learning motivate me to focus on the key concepts and techniques.
LEARNING IS CHANGING!
The manner during which ancient strategies were tutored ensured that students were rewarded for his or her efforts, used category periods with efficiency, and exercised clear rules to manage students’ behavior. They were based on established customs that had been used successfully in schools over many years. The teachers communicated the knowledge and enforced standards of behavior. Whereas Progressive educational practices focus more on the individual student’s needs rather than assuming all students are at the same level of understanding. The modern way of teaching is more activity-based, using questioning, explaining, demonstration, and collaboration techniques.
Photo by NASA on Unsplash
“The traditional “chalk and talk” method of teaching that’s persisted for hundreds of years is now acquiring inferior results when compared with the more modern and revolutionary teaching methods that are available for use in schools today. Greater student interaction is encouraged, the boundaries of authority are being broken down, and a focus on enjoyment over grades is emphasised.”
says Sania Jackson.
Applying what you’ve got learned is wherever 80 percent of the education takes place. This involves victimization of the talents and information at intervals your work atmosphere that produces the educational stick, inflicting a behavior amendment that produces desired results. … Since learning is dynamical behavior, you may encounter resistance.
Increased and video game trends in education technology create learning compelling expertise. Whereas increased reality provides associate degree increased read of a true image, video game provides a false perception of reality around them. Each of these techniques has taken digital learning to new dimensions. One of the largest blessings of technology is the ability for college kids to be told at their own pace. Some students can go with new ideas whereas others would like longer to assimilate knowledge. Brighter students will go to the ensuing stage whereas others will use different learning strategies.
Technology may be accustomed to improve teaching and learning and facilitate our students to achieve success. However, technology may be a “force multiplier” for the teacher. Rather than the teacher being the sole supply of facilities in a very room, students will access internet sites, online tutorials, and a lot more to help them.
Education technology will create learning more interactive and collaborative and this could facilitate students’ interaction with course material. Instead of memorizing facts, they learn by doing. For a few students, interactivity provides a stronger learning expertise
EVEN COVID-19 IS REVOLUTIONALIZING THE NEW AGE LEARNING INDUSTRY.
Photo by Bruno Barreto on Unsplash
The coronavirus pandemic has caused Asian nations and alternative nations around the world to rush into remote learning. This abrupt shift can have a large impact on teaching and learning long when the COVID-19 crisis ends. Picker, a leading legal scholar at the University of Chicago school of law says that the technology and infrastructure for remote learning are building within us and alternative nations over the last decade, creating the large push on-line doable. This huge shift is leading to experimenting on a world scale whereas underscoring a digital divide supported financial gain and site that has long existed, says Picker. Remote learning may be a powerful tool from grade school to skilled education categories, and whereas Picker says it doesn’t replace the room, it shrinks distances and supports teaching in new and fascinating ways in which for instance, invitatory a guest speaker from Europe maybe a few clicks away instead of requiring travel.
Why the World is Betting on Online Education During the Pandemic
There are several advantages of turning to online education — even beyond the fact that the model is synonymous with social distancing. These include:
Flexibility: It’s much more convenient for college students and academics to embrace online learning. A stable web association and a pc square measure all that’s needed to show your home into a room, and with today’s high-speed web connections at cheap costs, this setup is simpler than ever.
Accessibility: Before the internment, thousands of migrant students came back to their hometowns to keep|to remain} home and stay safe with their families. In such a state of affairs, on-line learning becomes a lifesaver. With E-Learning, students will access instructional opportunities that may not be out there to them otherwise.
E-Learning amidst the Pandemic
Range of specializations: For college students wanting to reinforce their skilled skills through on-line learning, the web may be a treasure of relevant courses, with thousands of hours of helpful content that may bolster their data and ability base. there’s no dearth of choices out there, and students will take hold of their career flight by selecting the one that suits them the simplest.
Cost-effectiveness: Online learning is way a lot of economical than ancient learning ways. Online degrees value virtually a tenth of their offline counterparts. This can be an important side in today’s economy, wherever job losses and pay cuts square measure rampant. Students will rest assured that the economic blows dealt by the pandemic won’t affect their education and, in turn, the longer term of their careers.
The traditional learning method rote learning followed by a degree is currently virtually rendered. Today’s students perceive that active learning and relevant sensible business coaching square measures are much more valuable in building a triple-crown career. As a result, the will to find out from business professionals is booming. Students believe that such experiences can facilitate them employment a lot of effectively than in an exceeding room with archaic lessons.
Now that online education is the sole viable possibility, a revolution is on the horizon. Several students United Nations agency embrace e-learning throughout these tough circumstances could stick with it even once the pandemic has passed. Online learning is an Associate in Nursing intrinsic a part of the new tradition. It’s a unique methodology of learning that has been steadily gaining momentum for a short time, and by the appearance of it, is here to remain.
CONCLUSION
Technology is an ever-changing platform. We can’t deny it cause we all are benefitted with it and more or less it has turned our necessity too. Traditional techniques used repetition and memorization of information to educate students, it meant that they were not developing their critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. Modern learning encourages students to collaborate and therefore be more productive. Saying that traditional and modern teaching methods are both effective and useful in today’s education. Sarah Wright, who blogs for TES, explains:
“As with most things, it’s all about balance. We need to understand when a traditional method works best and when it’s right to try new and innovative approaches.”
Digital Learning
The best thanks to concluding this discussion is that at the side of adapting and evolving ourselves with the newer learning strategies we’ll keep practicing the principles and disciplines of the standard learning strategies which will be beneficial.
WE ARE HERE BRIDGE ROUTE BETWEEN THE LEARNING METHODS!
We, at Ootsuk, ignite the sleeping curiosity of children from grade 1 to grade 12 and help them to learn the art of questioning. Universe has all the answers you need but what you need to do is to ask the right questions. And these right questions will get you your dream job. To know more, download the Ootsuk android app — Ootsuk on Play Store or Visit the website www.ootsuk.com | https://medium.com/bemoreootsuk/have-you-ever-wondered-a-single-screen-would-replace-books-pens-from-your-hand-and-even-teachers-52204e59a324 | ['Satabdi Mohanty'] | 2020-07-24 17:09:04.267000+00:00 | ['Edtech', 'India', 'Education', 'Technology', 'K12 Education'] |
Impact App | Hi friends! In previous articles, we talked about the direction in which Betegy (and myself), our goals and positioning as a whole, are moving. Now let’s talk about the tools by which this is done. At the moment we have 2 products: Impact and Excite. The impact is a web application for content generation, Excite-system of information screens in real time. Today we will consider the first. It sounds somewhat complicated, but in fact, everything is much simpler.
As already mentioned, Impact is an application in the browser (later it will be possible to have a separate version of it), thanks to which content is created for the selected game event (cards, videos, banners, and widgets). Then it all spreads through the social network and carries 2 goals: informing the audience about an event in the world of sports or details about it and demonstrating the current rates (coefficients) for this event. This is how the first version of the application looked like (now it’s better and then I will show).
As you can see, the application has a block structure for flexible upgrading and simple adaptation to mobile versions. For convenience and simplicity, the actions are divided into steps: Choice of Event->Content setting->Output of the result obtained.
Oh yes. First of all, the application meets with such a nice window for choosing sports (there will be many more options in the future).
But the updated version. Here, for convenience, we have allocated the main control buttons in a separate block, as well as part of the management of posting in the social network. The posting window was also changed from standard to stylized and the block of card type selection was more logical.
First of all, we select the desired event from the carousel of the top games (or we can switch to tab all games and find another game of interest to us).
The next step is to choose the type content for a given event. It can be a static image, a web banner, a widget or (in fact, it is very cool) even an automatically generated video.
Next comes the selection of the type of event (goal, substitution, list of teams, etc). The appearance of future content depends mainly on this, since you choose from pre-made templates that we create by analyzing a lot of data, choosing the most important and interesting of them, and then convert them into cards (without exaggeration) which is nice to even watch, not to mention their informativeness.
After all this, we can configure the internal structure of the selected card, specify the social network for publishing and additionally change the look that you like more and even specify whether to embed coefficients for rates or not (social networks like Facebook block content in this form, so this option will be useful).
The last is to set a list of hashtags for publication, save the created template to the cart / send affiliates (people who are something like content managers and promote your business on their own behalf), and of course the publication.
When you set up the cards for all the necessary events and matches, go to the basket where we can download the generated content, and also share the link on it (for all the same affiliates).
A variant of this page for those Who followed your link will look like this. Enter your unique ID number and choose the one you need from what you have already generated.
That’s how works our Impact application. I hope I have described everything clearly, but if you have questions, feel free to ask them. At this point, the article comes to an end.
The next one will be even brighter in terms of examples since we are (oh, finally) consider in more detail the cards and how they are created.
Thank you for your attention and have a productive day :)
My personal blog where you can find all the articles | https://medium.com/@goga100995/impact-app-db7afd981ae7 | ['Igor Tlusty'] | 2019-02-06 07:02:55.811000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Sports Design', 'Impact', 'Sports', 'Apps'] |
El origen de cannabis, la planta de los mil usos | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/educanna/el-origen-de-cannabis-la-planta-de-los-mil-usos-4d4563d58cdd | [] | 2020-12-22 12:44:15.426000+00:00 | ['Cannabis', 'Cannabaceae', 'Educanna', 'Evolución'] |
Writing Requires Intrinsic Motivation | Writing Requires Intrinsic Motivation
Photo by Steven Houston on Unsplash
I loved writing papers in university. Absolutely loved it. I was thrilled. Joyous, even.
It wasn’t the actually writing of it, but more so the research. Majoring in Sociology gave me a free pass to read up on as many cool and interesting social topics as I wanted, and then cherry pick my favourite bits of information and cobble them together into a paper.
The grades were never my main priority, and my transcript is proof of that. I was in it for the knowledge. The reading. The understanding. I wasn’t encouraged by the possibility of an A, but rather the journey the writing would take me on.
I take this same approach with Medium.
Don’t write for the end result. Write for yourself.
Many of us imagine that each article we write will the one. The one that goes viral, that gets us noticed, that changes everything. With that in mind, we write either one of two ways.
Each word is scrutinized, and then viciously slashed. We imagine the eyes of thousands, not dozens, on these words, and imagine how they’d be read. We write for the masses, not what comes from the heart; praying that our writing is the right amount of insightful and vague so it will get picked up by the big publication and splayed across the front pages of Google. Articles are pumped out rhythmically, thanks to a rage-fueled Excel chart that allows us to churn out three articles a day because so-and-so does that and they seem to do alright. Following formulaic layouts and the ideas of previously successful Medium writers, you’re left with a pile of half-hearted 500-word copies of others, each one you dreamt would be the one due to the buzz words, the number in the title, or the formatting you copped from someone else.
Pssst. Don’t do that.
I see you. I was you, for a little bit. And then I stopped.
This kind of writing is not only unsatisfactory, but it’s unsustainable. You can only go so far pretending to be someone else, or tailoring your words to fit the niche of another author. On the other hand, our own voice will never let you down.
Many people are scared to write this way, to write as they actually think, how their inner monologue really works, because it’s not as popular, or it’s harder to gain a following, it’s harder to gain money.
Admittedly, that is why a lot of writers piggyback off the articles of others, copying and trying to nap inspirations because they too want to be successful, be known for their work (and honestly, you can’t blame them). But it’s not always that easy.
The fame and recognition, the readers and the views, all of that comes with time. The overnight successes are few and far between. It may happen to you, it may not. But if you want to stick with it long enough to reap the rewards, then you need to find a motivation that doesn’t involve the potential success you could achieve.
Loving the Process
On weekends I like to wake early and move down to the kitchen, making rich, black coffee and writing for hours before the sun rises. Most of it never sees the light of day, most of it is trashed on a re-read, but it’s my way to get it all out, it’s my creative outlet, it’s my everything.
I can explain myself better when writing, I can work through all my problems with words, it’s more than any website, or comments; above all else I write for me. I love every aspect of it, and it’s worth it every day.
It’s not perfect or easy every day, but honestly, what is?
The only way you’ll stick with something is if you love it. And the only way to guarantee success (or whatever it is you want to achieve from your writing) is to stay consistent with it. Simple math.
Reaping the rewards
The rewards I promised in the headlines may not come in the form of cold, hard cash. Sorry.
But if that’s all you’re writing for, then maybe Medium isn’t for you. This place of passion and community and expression is so much more than some half-assed words and a Stripe account.
The rewards might be a few followers. Some eyes on your writing, which may have never had eyes on it before. It could be some genuine advice from a reader or author, something you get for free in a comment alongside a few claps, or getting accepting into a publication.
All that comes from the drive to keep going, from the love that pushes you to write even when you don’t want to, from the calm and rage that it brings you.
Writing is something you need to feel — you can’t just pump out words like they’re nothing.
Intrinsic motivation is your drive.
Would you write without the acceptance of the world? If you could never show anyone what you were doing? Then it’s right for you.
If you feel as if you need validation for it, or you only do it to catch the eyes of others, then it will never truly be yours.
Having that intrinsic motivation, writing simply for the joy of letting words flow from your fingertips, without any regard for the external rewards, is how you know you’ve found it. Your thing. What drives you, your passion.
And nothing is better than that. | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/writing-requires-intrinsic-motivation-a6f5fb06acf2 | ['Kae Smith'] | 2020-12-23 09:40:33.844000+00:00 | ['Passion', 'Intrinsic Motivation', 'Writing', 'Motivation'] |
ArtRock Air News! 2/12/2020 | Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash
Hello people and salut! Lots has been happening including not one but two entries to the prompt ‘Fangs like Dracula’; Amanda Dalmas and moi, Mimi Bordeaux, your editor and writer for this lovely super publication, ArtRock!
So how has everyone been? All well and thriving I hope. J.D. Harms continues to astonish with his incredible output daily all written with his passionate plea of love-filled angst witnessed in various publications here on Medium.com. Good job sweetpea! Stephen Ray Brown is hanging in with his humility; spilling sweet pourings of insecurity in this writing thing we do. Young, fiery Amanda Dalmas thrives with Her concerns on religion, lust and forgiveness. Good going Mandy! (sorry!) So what other news have we? Medium.com continues to develop its formatting confusing folk more than enlightening. I’m not sure exactly what but hoping an explanation soon!
Some of my favorite writers currently are: Gurpreet Dhariwal, Ms. Part Time Wino, Dennett and more! Please please me! Yeah.. (sing in background)..
So I will say au revoir and ciao for now. Good work everyone and stay healthy. Cheers, Mimi Bordeaux Editor, Writer of ArtRock, a publication. | https://medium.com/artrock-sexual-manifestations-queer-madness/artrock-air-news-2-12-2020-f191abe1bb55 | ['Mimi Bordeaux'] | 2020-12-02 16:05:38.846000+00:00 | ['Artrock', 'News', 'Love Letters', 'Writers On Writing'] |
Exploring the Tokyo Neighbourhoods: Data-Science in Real Life | As a part of the final IBM Capstone Project, we get a tang of what data scientists go through in real life. Objectives of the final assignments were to define a business problem, look for data in the web and, use Foursquare location data to compare different districts within wards (municipalities) of Tokyo (choice of city depends on the students) to figure out which neighborhood is suitable for starting a restaurant business(‘idea’ also depends on individual students). As prepared for the assignment, I go through the problem designing, data preparation and final analysis section step by step. Detailed codes and images are given in Github and link can be found at the end of the post.
1. Discussion and Background of the Business Problem:
Problem Statement: Prospects of a Lunch Restaurant, Close to Office Areas in Tokyo, Japan.
Tokyo, where I am currently staying, is the most populous metropolitan area in the world. Currently ranked 3rd in the global economic power index, Tokyo is definitely one of the best places to start up a new business.
During the daytime, specially in the morning and lunch hours, office areas provide huge opportunities for restaurants. Reasonably priced (one lunch meal 8$) shops are usually always full during the lunch hours (11 am — 2 pm) and, given this scenario, we will go through the benefits and pitfalls of opening a breakfast cum lunch restaurant in highly densed office places. Usually the profit margin for a decent restaurant lie within 15−20% range but, it can even go high enough to 35%, as discussed here. The core of Tokyo is made of 23 wards (municipalities) but, I will later concentrate on 5 most busiest business wards of Tokyo — Chiyoda (千代田区), Chuo (中央区), Shinjuku (新宿区), Shibuya (渋谷区) and Shinagawa (品川区), to target daily office workers.
We will go through each step of this project and address them separately. I first outline the initial data preparation and describe future steps to start the battle of neighborhoods in Tokyo.
Target Audience
What type of clients or a group of people would be interested in this project? | https://towardsdatascience.com/exploring-the-tokyo-neighborhoods-data-science-in-real-life-8b6c2454ca16 | ['Saptashwa Bhattacharyya'] | 2020-09-04 15:48:03.540000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Towards Data Science', 'Python'] |
Random Reflections on One Year of Farmers for Forests | I have to confess to having a deep curiosity about the daily lives of others. By “others” I mean writers and sometimes scientists, and now more recently, start-up founders. There’s something delightfully personal about getting the deets on when your favorite writer (or start-up founder) wakes up, when she goes for a walk or how she generally gets through her day. I mean has one really lived, if one hasn’t obsessed over how many cups of coffee Balzac drank in a day or what Murakami eats for lunch?
Unfortunately (or fortunately) there’s no similar litany of the daily routines of start-up founders. That’s a good thing though. Because a) who cares? b) there’s definitely too many of us c) we all have infinitely less interesting lives than the writers (and probably the scientists too) and d) all our daily routines would probably look like this:
7:00 — Wake up
7:01 — Panic about self and then the start-up
7:02 — Panic about finances and then paychecks
Rest of the day — some full and half hearted attempts at work
23:00 — ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
So when scavenging for the literature on the daily routines of start-up founders, I mostly came up zilch. Unless, ofcourse, you’re interested in the daily routine of Elon Musk (then there’s a ton). But for the mere mortals that sleep 8+ hours at night and don’t wake up at or stay up till 4 am, there’s really not that much “real stuff” out there (random cascade of generic productivity and motivational advice not counted).
What I did find, however, in my practically pointless search for the uber personal side of the start-up world were some great pieces on what some of these other start-ups had learned over the years. In a similar vein of transparency and (almost) full disclosure, here’s a list of all of the things we did well and all the mistakes we made in the first year of existence for anyone who wants to read them (so basically just our Moms *hug emoji*):
Mistakes
Not being careful enough in our dealings with vendors: As a small start-up hungry to prove itself, we often prioritized immediate action over calm consideration and ironclad contracts. As a result, we often found ourself in prickly situations — we had an irascible IT vendor hold our own website hostage while mocking our “foreign” education and lack of IT knowledge; we also had a barbed wire vendor threaten to throw out two of our co-founders if they ever showed up at his shop again (while refusing to deliver 300 kg of barbed wire that we had paid for). If we had paused a few minutes longer to just think through the long-term ramifications of getting into contracts and dealing with certain ‘type’ of vendors (hint: unethical, mixed with some misogyny), we would have saved ourselves a ton of headache.
MSRTC bus and tree saplings (Location: Dhavalgaon, Maharashtra)
2. Not loosening our purse strings enough: As a new not-for-profit with a small budget, we desperately looked for ways to cut corners — from hiring an inconvenient but majestic looking MSRTC bus for transporting our saplings to scaring our staff into spending less money on field expenses (so much so that one of them spent the night in his car instead of getting a hotel). The most frequent result of choosing the cheaper option over the sensibly priced practical one was that we often ended up spending more money to reverse the damage than if we had simply chosen the latter.
3. Not taking ourselves seriously enough: Honest confession- none of us are the swiss clocks of human beings we’d like to be. We procrastinate, obsess over somewhat irrelevant fonts and formatting details and often turn work conversations into long rambling rants on politics, pilates and police brutality. We’ve also not done a great job of holding each other accountable for missed deadlines and delays. But we’re learning and improving — holding team meetings in co-working conference rooms rather than co-founder homes has helped tremendously, as have weekly check-in calls and Trello task lists.
Afforestation on 3.5 acres of unused farmer land (Location: Dhavalgaon, Maharashtra)
4. Not thinking big enough: We surprised ourselves by not just meeting, but surpassing the Year 1 targets we had set. But when we shared the first draft of our five year scale-up plan and financial projections with friends and advisors, the recurrent piece of feedback we got from everyone was to THINK BIG! Set more ambitious targets! We initially dithered — the scale at which they were forcing us to think scared us a bit. But one thing we’ve solidly realized over the past year is that ‘being practical’ shouldn’t wade into the ‘undervaluing yourself’ territory.
What We’ve Done Well | https://medium.com/@farmersforforests/random-reflections-on-year-1-farmers-for-forests-58fab857bd | ['Farmers For Forests'] | 2020-12-14 11:24:23.736000+00:00 | ['Sdgs', 'Climate Change', 'Conservation', 'India', 'Nature'] |
Design systems: the perfect opportunity for the integration of accessibility | Design systems: the perfect opportunity for the integration of accessibility
Creating an application that meets the accessibility standards is tough, but we don’t have a choice anymore. It is our responsibility to make sure our products can be used by all users, not just morally, but often legally as well. Considering accessibility as part of your design system is a good starting point. How? Read on! Tim Scheffer Follow Nov 19, 2020 · 7 min read
15% of the world’s population experience some form of disability, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). This number grows every day as the global population ages. A lot of these people need to use assistive technology to navigate websites and other digital products and experience a clear mismatch between how they use their tools and how interfaces are designed. Recent studies found that less than 2% of homepages meet standard level AA WCAG 2.1 accessibility requirements, which is the general standard of web accessibility.
Assistive technology comes in many shapes and forms: screen readers that read an interface out aloud, zoom software that enlarges elements, or simply using only a keyboard to navigate instead of a mouse. The reasons for using them also vary wildly, ranging from efficiency or personal preference to mobility disabilities.
Design systems are the perfect opportunity to build accessibility and inclusion into your component libraries, both from a code repository perspective as well as from a UI/UX design perspective. Seeing accessibility as an integrated part of the process, rather than ‘something that we need to check’ when the project is at its end, is something that we’re seeing more and more of nowadays.
Example of an assistive tool to use the computer
Incorporating accessibility starts at the component level
When you want to incorporate accessibility into design systems there are two major considerations: usability and compatibility. We need to be able to provide for both in a design system.
Usability is not only the experience you have when you operate an interface to get a task done, but it’s also the flow of the application, and how you navigate and understand it as a user. Compatibility has to do with how the assistive tools interact with the interfaces and systems. This is outside the control of the users and can be limited by the operating system and/or the type of assistive tools they use. Usability and compatibility play out at several levels of the design system, but it all starts at the individual component level.
Example of components from a design system
However, it’s crucial to keep in mind that if individual components may have built-in accessibility, it doesn’t necessarily mean the user flows at the page level will be accessible. Designers and developers need to consider how components fit into layouts. Having a clear navigation structure and using semantic code helps, but it’s also important for designers and developers to have more context for when they use components. For example, if you have a set of forms, you need to have instructions about the descriptive header for each form. You need to have criteria related to the context you’re using the component in.
Testing and tools ensure success
To ensure that components and page-level flows are accessible, you’ll need to test them. There are three main ways of testing your work. First, you should do manual testing while you’re in the process of creating or developing components. Second, use automated testing, and third, which arguably is the most important, is testing with users.
There are several tools that designers and developers can use during their work for quick testing. Here are a few ways that enable designers to test while designing: | https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/design-systems-the-perfect-opportunity-for-the-integration-of-accessibility-cf1927c24840 | ['Tim Scheffer'] | 2020-11-24 05:12:48.728000+00:00 | ['Resources', 'UX', 'Accessibility', 'WCAG', 'Design Systems'] |
Node.js is Good; Go is Better | SafetyCulture has a microservice architecture deployed on Kubernetes (AWS EKS). When we started this architecture all our services were written, predominantly, in Node.js.
In the early days of our product, Node.js was great; it allowed teams to build services quickly and share a lot of common libraries. Data structures were stored as JSON, and Frontend/Backend development could all be done in a common language: JavaScript.
As time passed, our codebase grew, as well as our Engineering team. Cracks started to appear under the fast-paced growth of the company, product and our microservices. Schema-less JSON in a document store, once our friend, became hard to reason with; and flavours of JavaScript (CoffeeScript, ES5, ES6/7, TypeScript) added a lot of technical debt.
By no means a silver bullet, we decided to try Go, along with other technologies (Postgres, Protocol Buffers and gRPC). You can read more about this decision on: Why Go is a good language for microservices.
Refactor
Comparing a Node.js service to a Go service can be subjective, as no two distinct services have the same API, SLAs, network traffic, workload etc… unless it’s exactly the same service.
To improve the maintainability of one of our services; we decided to refactor the service from Node.js to Go. The API would have a new gRPC endpoint (for newer clients) but would still expose the existing HTTP/JSON API for backward compatibility. | https://medium.com/safetycultureengineering/node-js-is-good-go-is-better-e6a743ba2012 | ['Roger Chapman'] | 2020-01-15 22:17:51.477000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Microservices', 'Golang', 'Performance'] |
The Worn Path of Love | The Worn Path of Love
With the onset of winter, sea fog no longer hangs about the hills above Sausalito, or clings to the atmosphere above the Golden Gate Bridge. The morning is clear, and having spent the night in San Francisco, it was 9 a.m. as I drove over the Bridge.
The yacht has not been cleaned since summer, but I don’t feel ambitious enough for such an undertaking this late into the pandemic season. I feel exposed, open to everything without the comfort of the fog. Even the Bridge looks ordinary without the atmospheric wool hiding my access to the Robin Williams’ Tunnel and the sunshine through the other side. I have felt weary, idle, and am looking forward to the doctor’s couch above Sausalito.
“A cigar?” He asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Whisky?”
“For medicinal purposes, only.” I said.
I lit the cigar, inhaling deeply its fragrance — then exhaling, sighed with contentment; the cigar was excellent.
“You’ll join me in a whisky?” I prompted.
I reclined against the head of the couch, stretched out my feet, conscious of a luxurious sensation — and sent my thoughts across the Bay, where they remained with Jenny.
The doctor was in low spirits. He talked about the state of the country, divided about the way forward, the vaccines, and the health of the nation outside Sausalito. I didn’t care about the rest of the nation; I came wanting him to tell me how it will feel to die.
I felt extremely comfortable on the couch. I felt soothed to hear the doctor tell how death feels. There is always something pleasantly exciting about the prospective — when it is far away from you. It seemed so beautifully distant from the perfume of the cigar smoke, the flavor of whisky, and the restfulness of the couch. My mind wandered to Jenny — as wander it would — despite my studied attention to the doctor’s words.
My favorite pastime is to listen to others speaking. I never seem able to think of any topics worthy of conversation myself, but am inclined to say that my ability to listen amounts to being an art. I can remain silent with an air of absorbing interest, and occasionally offer brief comment, not setting forth an opinion or displaying any knowledge — for I have none to spare — but merely to suggest variety.
After an hour of luxury, I paid him an excessive amount for the whisky and cigar. I was, however, well equipped to deal with the possibility of dying.
Treading the boardwalk, heading to Roma…coffee…still caught up in the drowsiness of the psychiatrist’s couch, and worn-out ideas of a life ever after. I come to wait for Jenny. Sausalito is a cruel place for one waiting for romance, poetry, and the safety of a well-loved face. I once enjoyed being alone, aloof, even mad, better than to be with just anybody.
She will come and penetrate the shadows, like sunlight, and hold me. Holding my coral fears inside her arms.
The worn path of love is an assured safe passage home. | https://medium.com/illumination/the-worn-path-of-love-51ff9ef197e5 | ['Harry Hogg'] | 2020-12-07 15:44:26.841000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'San Francisco', 'Sausalito', 'Love', 'Psychology'] |
Get ready for your CPQ Specialist Cert | The Salesforce CPQ Specialist credential is designed for individuals who have experience implementing Salesforce CPQ. This credential is a great way to demonstrate skills and knowledge in designing, building, and implementing quoting flows with Salesforce CPQ.
Hello Trailblazer,
Congrats! If you’re reading this, the CPQ Specialist certification is in your sight. If you are feeling nervous or anxious, I totally get you. After getting 6 previous Salesforce certifications (Admin, Advanced Admin, App Builder, Einstein Analytics and Discovery and Discovery, Nonprofit Cloud, and Sales Cloud), I consider this the most challenging I have ever faced.
Although there are great resources to study, I highly recommend creating a developer org and have hands-on experience practicing creating different products and pricing scenarios. Create products and bundles with things you have at your reach (fast food combinations, tiered pricing on streaming services, etc.).
Primary resources:
CPQ Specialist Exam Guide
It sounds like this goes by default, but we only focus on the exam outline part. Read the whole guide and learn in-depth the audience description for this test. | https://medium.com/@grodriguezroca/pump-up-for-your-cpq-specialist-cert-47e30aa49932 | ['Gustavo Rodriguez Roca'] | 2021-06-23 15:44:52.025000+00:00 | ['Cpq', 'Salesforce', 'Cpq Certification'] |
Data Mesh Simplified: A Reflection Of My Thoughts On Data Mesh | This is the republished article from https://www.dataengineeringweekly.com/. Subscribe to Data Engineering Weekly for your weekly data engineering news in the industry.
The Rise of Data Mesh
Data Mesh is a set of data engineering principles coined by Zhamak Dehghani from ThoughtWorks. I highly recommend reading How to Move Beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a Distributed Data Mesh and Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture.
Data Mesh influenced by domain-driven design, emphasizing the importance of data ownership and shared tooling to generate, curate, and democratize data. Data Mesh principles getting good adaption in some of the leading organizations. Yelp talked about its data mesh journey, So does Netflix and Zalando.
Though the literacy around data mesh maturing, I see a few confusions around Data Mesh in a few blogs. I’m not an authoritative person to describe data mesh, but an attempt to convey what I learned about data mesh. I’m eager to hear the alternate viewpoints on this.
The sad state of data engineering
Now the fundamental question you may ask. Why Data Mesh and Why now? To understand Data Mesh, we need to understand the current state of the data engineering world. It may not directly apply to your organization, but most of the data infrastructure remains in this sad state.
Imagine you are writing a dictionary with only the words with no meaning for it. On top of it, you shuffle the words randomly and publish the dictionary without any index for it, and hire high-paid data engineers and analysts to decode the dictionary.
It is the current state of the data infrastructure. The modern data infrastructure has sophisticated systems like Kafka, Spark, and the ability to emit and process events at a petabyte-scale. Yet, the data generation process we follow is equivalent to writing a dictionary without meaning.
Wait, Don’t Data Lake solved It?
A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. You can store your data as-is without having to structure the data.
As the definition suggests, Data Lake focuses on centralized data storage to break the organization’s data silo. The central repository removes entry barriers to integrate and analyze from various data sources in an organization.
However, as the data lake grows, the complexity of the data management grows.
The producer of the data generates data and sends it to the data lake. The consumers down the line have no domain understanding of the producer and struggle to understand the data lake data. The consumers then connect with the data producer to understand the data. At that point, the producer side’s domain expertise depends on human knowledge that may or may not available.
As Data Lake grows, it becomes a technical debt rather than a strategic advantage.
How Data Mesh Solve It?
Data Mesh is an enterprise data platform principle that converges the principles from Distributed Domain Driven Architecture, Self-serve Platform Design, and Thinking Data as a Product.
Data Mesh focuses on treating data as a product. The feature team that works on the product feature has the domain understanding of the data, not the data’s consumer. Data Mesh pushes the data ownership responsibility to the feature team to create, attach metadata, catalog the data, and store it for easier consumption.
The data curation and the cataloging of the data at the data creation phase bring more visibility to the data and make it easier for consumption. The process also eliminates human knowledge silo and truly democratize the data. It helps the data consumers not worry about the data discovery and focuses on producing value from the data.
How Data Lake Different From Data Mesh?
Data Lake is like a reporter writing an article for the New York Times. The reporter goes and interviews related people to write a story, fact checks it, and delivers a reporter narration to the readers. Data Mesh is like writing a book for O’Reilly or similar publications. The publication provides a foundational infrastructure for all the authors. The authors write their views, add index, and glossary for the book and deliver their narration to the readers.
But, There Is Always A Catch
Data Mesh sounds very cool, but there is always a catch. This is a great Twitter thread summarizing the challenges in adoption.
Ananth Packkildurai @ananthdurai
@gwenshap @KishoreBytes @byte_array The data mesh approach of services owns the data is a great idea. However, there is a catch. If you don’t have data discovery and links between those domains, we will be back to square 1 of good old org data silo world. A process without proper tooling is dangerous to adopt.
December 4th 2020
5 Likes
As I mentioned, If we blindly adopt Data Mesh principles without the proper tooling, it can easily lead us to the good old org data silo problem. As mentioned in the below Tweet, no tool can fix the problem.
Kishore Gopalakrishna @KishoreBytes
@ananthdurai @gwenshap @byte_array @ananthdurai You nailed it… putting in a process without tooling is not only dangerous but will create new set of problems that no amount of tooling can fix
December 4th 2020
2 Likes
The following threads narrate the observation from the industry and how to adapt the Data Mesh principles.
Gwen (Chen) Shapira @gwenshap
@KishoreBytes @byte_array We want to allow each team that owns services to also own the data store. Maybe even use S3 or Dynamo or something else.
December 4th 2020
Vinoth Chandar @byte_array
@ananthdurai @gwenshap @KishoreBytes But the thing is, this is how most #data organizations grow organically within a company. Then they try to build out something centralized and few are able to succeed there today. So this is not as radical a shift.
December 4th 2020
1 Retweet5 Likes
Kishore Gopalakrishna @KishoreBytes
@byte_array @ananthdurai @gwenshap This is definitely not new — saw this at Yahoo. I remember we had close to 8 databases at Yahoo and tons of libraries and tools doing the same thing. It has its pros — each team moves fast but highly inefficient at a company level.
December 4th 2020
1 Like
Sriram Subramanian @sriramsubram
@KishoreBytes @byte_array @ananthdurai @gwenshap I have seen both. Individual teams incentivized to moving fast and building lots of microservices/DBs with 0 leverage and early teams building monoliths with tightly coupled architecture that makes it hard to scale. It is always hard to move from one to the harder
December 5th 2020
2 Likes
Conclusion
Data Mesh is not a technology or a storage solution instead of a set of principles to streamline its data management. As Gwen, Sriram, Kishore, and Vinoth pointed out, it is an invisible structure in most organizations and requires proper tooling to enable the Data Mesh principles.
The analogy of evolving monolithic architecture to microservices architecture fits well with the Data Mesh principles. If you are starting up, a monolithic architecture may work well for you. As you grow, focus on building tools to label, catalog, organize, and search your data, leading to the adoption of the Data Mesh principles.
Links are provided for informational purposes and do not imply endorsement. All views expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent current, former, or future employers’ opinions. | https://ananthdurai.medium.com/data-mesh-simplified-a-reflection-of-my-thoughts-on-data-mesh-4d4f01c37185 | ['Ananth Packkildurai'] | 2020-12-10 13:57:48.638000+00:00 | ['Data Mesh', 'Data Lake', 'Data Engineering', 'Data Catalog'] |
You seem to be getting it. You started off saying | You seem to be getting it. You started off saying
it is illegal to consider race, sex, national origin, age, disability, parental status or Veteran status when making these decisions.
Now you understand that, under Affirmative Action programs, race may be and has been considered.
I think that basically negates the point you were trying to make in your original essay.
In your original discussion and subsequent reply, you seemed at pains to deny, for example, that an Asian American with 1500 SATs is being denied admission to Harvard, while a Black American with 1200 SATs is getting acceptance letters and scholarship offers. Somehow this is negated by your observation that a White applicant got a job a half century ago from having what you assert was functionally equivalent to Affirmative Action without the fancy wrapper.
There may be good reasons for Affirmative Action today and you may want to bring them up in subsequent essays. But your argument drifts away from reality when you start arguing disparate treatment is not occurring or that it is illegal despite the Bakke or Harvard case rulings which say it is legal to consider race as long as you don’t have actual quotas.
In any event, you now seem to understand your original statements about Affirmative Action were way overstated: race is considered and it’s not true to say it isn’t. | https://medium.com/@caleb-mars/you-seem-to-be-getting-it-dfa3745651e7 | ['Caleb Mars'] | 2020-12-03 23:14:27.753000+00:00 | ['Affirmative Action', 'Civil Rights', 'Asian American'] |
#NormaliseBreastFeeding | #NormaliseBreastFeeding is a hashtag that I’ve used and potentially you’ve seen other people use it too. But what does it actually mean? Originally I thought it was to help normalise breastfeeding in a public space, as this is something we don’t see a lot of, even on TV. But now due to me reading everything and anything about breastfeeding and being active on various breastfeeding groups on Facebook. I have come to the conclusion that #normalisebreastfeeding is about so much more.
When is the last time you saw someone breastfeeding in public? The answer to this, potentially if you live close to me, is probably.. “recently”.
This is because I have the attitude of ‘if my daughter needs feeding and/or asks for “boobies”, then “boobies” she will get.’
Some women don’t have this mentality and to be honest, it is understandable. When you’ve read or seen stories about women being asked to cover up, or “do it elsewhere/in private”.
The funny thing is, I doubt another pig/dog/cat/mammal would say this to a mother pig/dog/cat/mammal who is nursing/feeding her young in the animal world. So why do we say it to our own species mothers?
To simply put it, breasts have been over-sexualised and bottle/formula feeding has become the norm. Even though there are laws in place to protect breastfeeding mothers from having to stop feeding their young, this doesn’t mean the women feel safe.
If they see someone make a face while looking at them or hear someone tutting or even actually confront you, it is really damaging to a mother. If the mother is a first time mum, first time breastfeeding, first time breastfeeding in public, young mum that was struggling with if she was doing the right thing, has had about 4hours of broken sleep, this tiny bit of interaction could really off-road a woman’s breastfeeding journey. Especially if the woman believes that she can only go out in between feeds due to the fear of someone saying something negative if she was to feed in public.
We should be part of society that if a woman is breastfeeding in public, you shouldn’t even notice it. Just like you probably don’t even notice if Joe Bloggs you just walked passed was drinking a can of Pepsi or not.
Whoever coined the term ‘sleeping like a baby’ obviously did not have a baby! Babies by design wake frequently through the night. It helps the mother’s milk supply as mother’s produce more prolactin during the stupid o’clock hours of the night and prolactin is one of the major hormones when it comes to milk production. Frequent night waking also helps to prevent SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) and it is biologically what human babies are meant to do. Also, a newborn has no circadian rhythm, so they don’t know the difference between night and day.
Sleeping has nothing to do with how the baby is fed or how they get to sleep. Sleep is developmental. Some babies are sleepers, some are talkers, some are walkers, some are climbers, just like some adults are active, some are great speakers, some are creative etc. Therefore where has the idea come from that breastmilk make these baby wake up more? A common answer given to a breastfeeding mother is that her milk is not filling the baby up anymore and that she needs to start solids and/or swap to formula.
How is a substance that is tailored made to the needs of the baby, not enough for the said baby?!? And also at night includes a hormone that helps to promote sleep. There are also studies out there that prove it doesn’t matter how a baby is fed, the majority of babies wake frequently through the night and then on average breastfeeding mothers actually get more sleep, which might be only a couple of minutes more though.
Come to think it when is the last time you slept all night through? Most people don’t sleep through every night, they might get up to go to the toilet, have a drink, rearrange the covers, snuggle up to their partner, check their partner is still there. Babies can wake for the same reasons, the difference is they cant sort these things themselves they need help from a parent and most of the time that does mean giving milk. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are hungry, just that we know that is the quickest way to get them back to sleep.
Speaking of babies feeding frequently, mother’s are always getting told ‘oh your baby can’t be feeding again’ or ‘surely baby can’t be hungry again’ but human babies need to be fed frequently. This is because compared to other mammals our milk is quite different. Our milk is high in carbohydrates (lactose) but low in fat and protein. Therefore our milk is digested quicker than other milk.
Studies have shown that the more vulnerable a baby mammal is the more frequently it has to feed. It is like a survival mechanism. Human babies compared to other mammal babies can’t do anything apart from cry, sleep, eat, dirty their nappy, whereas baby horses, can walk from birth. This is due to the fact we walk upright and therefore having smaller pelvises making us have our babies before they are actually ready, but I digress.
If a baby as helpless as a human baby, it makes sense that it would want to keep its mother close because it can’t run away to defend itself and one way to do this is by needing to feed regularly. Regularly feeding or feeding on demand also has long term benefits as well, as it teaches the baby to control their food intake and that food will always be available meaning it is less likely for them to overeat and to become obese.
Continuing from vulnerable human babies, another thing that breastfeeding gets blamed for is this supposable ‘rod for your own back’ eg. ‘you shouldn’t pick the baby up every time it cries else it will learn that you always come running’. What is wrong with our children learning that if they ever have a problem that we will be there to help fix it?
When say a gorilla gives birth, the baby is always with the mother, if not then the zookeepers worry that the mother has for whatever reason rejected the baby, but yet in our culture, we are basically telling mothers to put down their baby’s. Why are we telling the mother’s to not trust their instincts and pick up their baby?
Breastfeeding gets a lot of stick and I think it is due to a society that doesn’t know much about it. Therefore it’s scary so when something goes wrong because the Grandma or mother in law has no advice they resort to what they know and that is potentially formula or out of date breastfeeding knowledge.
Unfortunately, breastfeeding is a dying ‘artform’. In the UK our breastfeeding rates are terrible. Even though the WHO and NHS recommend that children should be breastfed until at least the age of 2, only 1% of babies are still being breastfed at the 12months of age. So PJ is in a very small percentage of toddlers still being breastfed past 12months of age.
Most information that is passed on to mothers from family and friends may be based on what was done in their day, or what they did but that doesn’t mean its correct or what is advised by the professionals. Even some health care professionals have incorrect and out of date knowledge of breastfeeding.
When PJ was 4days old (our first full day at home) a midwife came to see us as they do the first day home after having a baby and in our case being discharged from hospital. She asked me how long PJ was at the breast per feed, I replied about 5–10minutes, her response to that was that this wasn’t long enough and PJ wasn’t getting enough of the hind (fatty) milk (just as for your information the whole fore/hindmilk things has basically been debunked). So that evening I sat on the sofa PJ had her feed of about 10minutes and then I basically force-fed her until she reached the magical 20minutes as stated by the midwife to make sure PJ was getting all the hindmilk.
It took me about 90minutes to do this. A couple of friends came round just as I finished feeding PJ, poor Ben I gave PJ to him to have a cuddle and she projectile vomited all over him, he ended up going home in one of Aaron’s t-shirts. The reason why she was sick because I had overfed her. PJ knew what she was doing she only needed 10minutes to get what she needed.
The other night as a bit of research for this post I did a poll on a breastfeeding group to see what breastfeeding gets blamed for, such as not sleeping through the night (even though mentioned above this isn’t because of breastfeeding) to sort of highlight how little some people know about breastfeeding.
Here are the responses I got:
574 people who voted for breastfeeding got the blame for children not sleeping through (already said sleep is developmental)
456 voted for a child only wanting mum when sad, tired or for comfort (most of us call our mums, or look for our mums when needing comfort)
394 voted for being a needy baby (I’ve forgotten where I read it, but I read something that basically said some babies are like weeds can grow anywhere but some are like orchids where they need the conditions just right)
373 voted for mum being exhausted (I think all new mothers are exhausted)
365 voted for baby not being able to self soothe (again this is a skill that is learned)
317 voted for frequently feeding (How many of you have a morning/ afternoon/ evening snack? or have a drink regularly?)
248 voted for not wanting to eat
217 voted for ‘everything under the sun’
198 voted for dad not being able to bond with the baby (Aaron has a wonderful relationship bond with PJ, they are like best mates, I’m just a vending machine)
174 voted for going to make them shy and too dependant (they clearly haven’t met PJ)
90 voted for child being underweight (now I don’t know if this means being smaller than average but I’m going to answer like it is. All humans come in different shapes and sizes and this includes babies)
82 voted for decaying teeth (it doesn’t make biological sense that breastmilk would decay teeth, with a deep latch the nipple is drawn all the way into where the hard bit of pallet meets the soft bit. And there probably wouldn’t be humans today if all our ancestors lost all their teeth when young)
44 voted for child being overweight (we can’t win)
29 voted for “ that my son will be ‘handsy’ because he likes his hand down my top” (well PJ is going to like groping boobs too then)
…and a handful of other ones, but the thing is these things are just a breastfeeding thing/problem. I bet/ know that even formula-fed children don’t sleep at night and don’t know how to self soothe or hate to put down and always want to be near mum. What do people say to them? Oh well, its because you’ve formula fed?
How about we stop dictating to parents how they should parent, let them trust their instincts without them worrying about this stupid rod we keep hearing about. We should be supporting these mothers if we don’t know the answer to a problem doesn’t just go ‘here’s a bottle of formula this will solve everything’ why not change it to ‘I don’t know but let me put you in touch with someone who might’.
Women’s bodies do amazing things, we grow a baby sort of without having to lift a finger and then we push (majority) the baby out of somewhere that doesn’t look big enough and then we can feed our babies with milk that is made just for them. So women should trust themselves more, trust their breasts more and also trust their baby, those little things know what they are doing.
Join me on Instagram @pjs.mummy x | https://medium.com/@ksale92/normalisebreastfeeding-dfd211483f5 | ['Katie Sale'] | 2021-03-04 12:36:01.454000+00:00 | ['Parenthood', 'Breastfeeding', 'Parents'] |
What did Santa bring for us? | Hello to all the ones reading this post hope you are in a good spirit of health.
Some of us have already lost a lot this year. But always remember if there is dark, a ray of light always makes its way into our lives.
The dark year of 2020 is now getting over after making millions infected physically, financially and billion infected mentally.
What is the Situation in India
We are the second most affected country as per the world meter, yet the active cases are less than 3 lakh.
With daily falls in new cases and a rise in recovery, the gap is increasing every moment.
We are now on a path to recovery, both with pandemic as well as economic.
A lot of people lost jobs this year, but they able to create successful startups. People from the hospitality industry (I am a part of it as well) are worst affected, but this did result in a lot of professionals becoming serious entrepreneurs,
Most of them are now praising 2020 as it has given them a different way to lead life.
Innovation is the invitation to success.
People who were able to innovate are now leading to success. If you can innovate and execute, then the sky is just the limit.
What was 2020 A Year?
A Year full of innovations, implementations, executions, prioritizing mental and physical well being,
A year that gave a strong message to invite savings culture.
A year that told us real happiness lies with the family.
A year of hopes, combined with failures and success.
A year that encouraged people to become self-reliant.
and lastly,
A year that has encouraged us to grow despite the uncertainties.
What did Santa bring for us?
Finally, we stepping in 2021, and with the last few concluding days, we are looking forward to having a peaceful, healthy, and economically stable 2021.
Santa has brought us the good news, in the concluding days of 2020, that is the starting of vaccination on the globe against the pandemic.
What is your take?
You might be thinking that there is no relation between the title with the post but, if you can get to the deep sense, there is indeed a thin silver line attached.
The source of your happiness is “You” and Santa is the faith that helps many people to keep the positivity running in mind.
It is your happiness that describes how you take the positivity of life. Some people are ready to accept happiness but, some, on the other hand, are always towards the smarter side thinking the pros and cons always,
You deserve a positive and refreshing life, so live it accordingly.
I was gifted with wisdom by Santa, what about you?
Love from Smileytraveller | https://medium.com/@smileytraveller/what-did-santa-bring-for-us-4d4aa2d93f9 | ['Sachin Mishra'] | 2020-12-27 17:37:14.960000+00:00 | ['Motivation', '2021', 'Covid 19', 'New Year', 'Life'] |
Reparations in the 21st Century | Getty Images
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a reflection for my Intro to African American Studies course taught by Dr. Mindy Tan at Purdue University. This was a broad assignment, with the only requirement being the paper had to focus on something we discussed over the duration of the semester. With my studies relating to economics and politics, I decided on a topic where the three intersect: reparations.
In the past year, race has come to the forefront in the United States in the wake of multiple murders of black men and women by police. This has sent a wave of racial awareness and reexamination throughout every facet of our society. According to a recent poll from Reuters, seventy-two percent of respondents said they understood “why Black Americans do not trust the police,” up 17 points from a similar poll in May 2015. It is clear that many Americans are becoming more aware of the two different systems we have in this country: one for the white man and one for the man of color. Because of this, the topic of reparations has become more present, especially inside the Democratic Party. However, despite the increased awareness of racial discrepancies in the United States, only 20% of Americans are in favor of reparations. In this article, I will be discussing the history of slavery and economic inequality in the United States, Reconstruction and the immediate attempts to put reparations in place, the lack of economic growth within the black community in the 20th and 21st century, failed attempts of achieving reparations, and what reparations would look like today, the implementation of them, and how to sway public opinion in favor of them.
Before going further, it is appropriate to define the topic of this article. Reparations, according to Oxford, are the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. According to a paper I analyzed by William Darity, an economics professor at Duke University, a program of reparations is intended to achieve three objectives: acknowledgment of a grievous injustice, redress for the injustice, and closure of the grievances held by the group subjected to the injustice. In the United States, three types of injustices have motivated a program for reparations: slavery, the nearly century-long Jim Crow regime following Reconstruction, and the ongoing discrimination that followed.
For the first 89 years of the United States’ history, humans were allowed to be owned because of the color of their skin. During these 89 years, many people, specifically white men, prospered, accumulating wealth through wages, real estate, and other investments. While these men were gaining wealth, many Black Americans were enslaved, gaining zero wealth, working to make the white man rich. In 1865, Congress ratified the 13th amendment, outlawing slavery (explicitly, at least), and freeing the 4 million enslaved Black Americans. With the ratification of the thirteenth amendment, black people were finally free from explicit slavery, except there was one issue: they didn’t have any money, education, or homes. Because of this, there were initial attempts of putting reparations in place. On January 16, 1865, after completing his march to the Georgia coast, General Sherman issued Special Field Orders No.15 that established the provision “of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground” designated “for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.” The territory to be settled under Sherman’s orders included “ [the] islands from Charleston, south of the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River” More expansively, the Freedman's Bureau Act of March 3, 1865, pursuant to the Southern land confiscation acts of 1861, 1862, 1863, and 1864, had an explicit racial land redistribution provision. Again, "not more than 40 acres" of land was to be provided to refugee or freedman male citizens at three years' annual rent not exceeding 6 percent of the value of the land-based on the appraisal of the state tax authorities in 1860. These reparations were ultimately not carried out because of the assassination of President Lincoln. Andrew Johnson strongly opposed reparations, disbanding the Freedman’s Bureau, and shutting down any glimpse of promise for Black Americans. Had these proposals been carried out, we would live in a radically different United States than the one we live in today.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the wealth gap mentioned earlier only grew wider. The Housing Act of 1934 has been one of the most consequential acts of legislation in American history. It furthered segregation efforts in the ears 20th century by refusing to insure mortgages and near neighborhoods in which Black Americans resided. This policy is known as redlining. Because of the astronomical interest rates (up to 16%), black people were forced to rent homes, which meant they were just throwing away their money, not gaining it. At the same time, the Federal Housing Administration was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for White Americans — with the requirement that none of the homes were purchased by Black Americans. It segregated our neighborhoods almost permanently; the low-income neighborhoods you see today in American cities were likely drawn up in the 1930s to exclusively benefit the white man. Today, homeowner percentage among White Americans is 72% compared to the Black American’s 43%. The median value of assets by White Americans is $144,200 compared to the Black American’s $11,200. The unemployment rate for White Americans is 4.5% compared to the Black American’s 10.3% (Pew Research Center). In six states, more than half of the black children are below the poverty line, with all six of those states imposing Jim Crow laws at some point in their history. The most tragic among all of these statistics is that the leading cause of death among black children 1-19 is gun violence. This is all intersectional. The lack of access to means of gaining wealth has left most of the black community exactly where it was in 1934. Because of this, there is not as much tax revenue to fund schools, causing many students to drop out, leading to unemployment and violence as a means of survival. White and Black America are two different places, and to bridge this gap to actually become united, reparations must be put in place.
The pursuit of reparations for Black Americans in the United States primarily has been followed through the judicial route. Charles Ogletree, N'COBRA, Daedria Farmer-Paellmann, and Jerry Leaphart all have developed court cases seeking reparations. Farmer-Paellmann, in particular, has brought suit against corporations that profited from slavery. Her efforts have further galvanized media attention and interest in reparations, but the legal obstacles she has faced are substantial. No reparations case brought to the U.S. judiciary on behalf of Black Americans has been litigated successfully. The same result can be seen in Congress, with no bill ever escaping committees. The most present form of reparations seen today is affirmative action, in which schools are attempting to reverse previous discrimination by weighing black students heavier in admissions. This program has been highly controversial in recent years, with the Supreme Court handling cases annually.
In conversations I’ve had with some of my peers, specifically white right-leaning ones, they don’t think reparations are fair to them. Ultimately, they are correct. If you put a veil of ignorance on, schools should not be discriminating admissions by the color of skin. Reparations are not fair until you historically contextualize them. I believe this is the greatest challenge reparations face. Without the knowledge of how racial disparities have become what they are, reparations seem unfair and unjust. Why should someone get admitted to a school, receive lower interest rates, or even get a check from the government because of their skin? The answer is because that’s exactly what happened in the past, and no one has come up with a better way to solve the disparities we see today between races in the United States. In order for reparations to ever be put in place, the US faces a steep learning curve. I personally did not believe in reparations, specifically affirmative action until I learned about racist policies in the United States’ past in my ethnic studies class taught by one of my favorite teachers ever, Matthew Bockenfeld. That class formed who I am and what I believe in today. This seems like a longshot, especially because of President Trump’s and other GOP members’ criticization of racial and ethnic sensitivity training, but I believe ethnic studies should be required in every high school across the country. This would be monumental to the opinions on reparations in my view. However, this is sadly a hypothetical and will likely never happen in today’s political climate. Realistically, public opinion will have to change slowly over time. This can be done by having open conversations with those who don’t understand the case for reparations. I can say personally that I have changed over 10 people’s minds on why reparations should be put in place. These conversations need to be friendly, understanding, and vulnerable in order to change minds. But if we finally sway public opinion in reparations’ favor, what would they look like?
As Darity explains in his paper, he envisions a “portfolio” of reparations, rather than the fund for reparations being utilized in a single way. A total of $1–6 trillion could partly take the form of a direct payout to eligible recipients. The payout need not take place in one lump sum but could be allocated over time. For example, German government payments to victims of the Nazi holocaust often have taken the form of $100 monthly checks. Reparations also could take the form of “establishment of a trust fund to which eligible blacks could apply for grants for various asset-building projects, including homeownership, additional education, or start-up funds for self-employment,” or even vouchers for the purchase. I agree with these proposals completely. It would have a tremendous impact on the wealth gap we see in the United States today, and may even be a model for other countries as well. Of course, this has never been done before on this scale, and imperfections would arise, however, the imperfections are well worth anything that radically decreases racial disparities.
Reparations are long overdue for Black Americans. With the increasing polarization in the US, it may seem like a difficult prospect to achieve, but I feel as if it is possible, even if it has to be in a United States that is divided as much as it was leading up to the civil war. Hopefully, there will be another fight for equality in which we finally find liberty and justice for all, just not as violent. | https://medium.com/@jakobrmiller/reparations-in-the-21st-century-ee22babe0920 | ['Jakob Miller'] | 2020-12-04 08:03:19.163000+00:00 | ['Reparations', 'Race', 'Inequality', 'Education Reform', 'Economics'] |
Server-Side Analytics with Jamstack Sites | Jamstack sites don’t have a backend. That makes their ability to gather analytics particularly vulnerable to blockers. Let’s fix that problem.
This example includes a Netlify Function that will send our events off to Google Analytics, and a Netlify Redirect rule.
The Problem
Trackers and tracking pixels are HTML code designed to capture user behaviour or visits when they visit a website or open an email. It is useful for tracking usage of your website, and sometimes conversions.
The problem is, that some trackers are slow and often invasive. Ad-blockers were first dreamt up to stop ads and tracking pixels slowing down webpage performance, or to improve a user’s experience, but have subsequently been expanded to improve privacy for users.
A side-effect was, that a lot of site owners lost visibility of what worked and didn’t work on their sites. Physical tracking characteristics can still be used to track certain metrics, e.g. adding an article’s identifier on a sign-up link to see where the sign-up originated.
This still doesn’t help us accurately determine if our content is being viewed, a key requirement to determine conversion.
The Solution
Server-side analytics has become a popular way to track user activity. It doesn’t have the scope of traditional analytics (it can’t easily track on-page interactions), but it can capture important details, like unique page views.
Hosting platforms such as Netlify, or Edge providers like Cloudflare and Fastly, offer Server-side analytics as part of their solutions. But, when using a provider for analytics, you’re often restricted in how you can warehouse that information, limiting internal reporting.
For that reason, some like to roll their own server-side analytics. For this, Google has some quick starts for some languages, and for others there are packages like universal-analytics .
Here, we’ll roll our own using universal-analytics and a Netlify Function.
Netlify Function
Netlify Functions are basically AWS Lambda functions, without the AWS. The AWS developer experience leaves A LOT to be desired, and Netlify have turned user experience into a business model. Netlify Functions are no exception, allowing folks to write JavaScript or Go to a configured directory, and publish it in a few steps. The endpoint is derived by the file or folder name, and it can use the dependencies from the parent application, or be responsible for its own.
A super simple function might look like this:
Once deployed, you would be able to access it at a URL like this one: https://your-app.netlify.app/.netlify/functions/hello-world
But you can also continue to do things after you send a response back, like this:
Now, we could use this functionality to send off our analytics to Google.
Note: If you’re adding dependencies to a function, you’ll need to add the @netlify/plugin-functions-install-core plugin to your netlify.toml configuration. This plugin will ensure all the function's dependencies are installed when the function is deployed.
We need to install universal-analytics first, so make sure you're in your function's directory before you run the following command.
Ensure that you have a Google Analytics ID, and add that to your Netlify Environment Variables.
Now, we can use it in our function.
Now, from your browser, you can send off data from the URL straight to Google: https://your-app.netlify.app/.netlify/functions/hello-world?dp=/my-custom-page
Data you can send off includes-but isn’t limited to-these parameters:
Here is a full list of acceptable parameters.
Add the “Image”
Calling this script alone, with something like a router middleware or AJAX request, might be enough in a lot of instances for decent reporting, but it could still be recognised as an XHR request by a browser or browser ad-blocker, and blocked.
A (typically over-engineered) solution that I decided to use was similar to a tracking pixel method. But, because we return a visible structural image, ad-blockers have completely ignored it so-far.
We’re going to return an SVG image from the Netlify Function and place it on a page using an image tag.
Let’s use this image.
The source for this image can be found here:
Now, to return the image from our function:
Add it to your site using the URL we used before:
With any luck, it’ll look like this:
Redirect Rule
So, the most devious inventive part of my evil plan idea might be this next bit. I was slightly paranoid that an ad-blocker might sense a non-image URL with query string parameters as little suspect as an image source, and block it anyway.
Enter Netlify Redirects.
Using the netlify.toml in the root of your project, you can proxy one path with another.
Now, you can use an image path to include your smiley face.
You can encode the query string however you like, just remember to decode it inside the function.
Conclusion
Analytics is a superpower for marketing and content creators. It allows us to better serve the community, by tuning our goals based on the data we can collect.
There are often privacy and speed concerns around trackers. But as long as you’re acting in good faith, as I believe we are, analytics benefits viewers as much as anyone else.
This is a nice little way to achieve server-side analytics (which blockers can’t block), when you don’t have a server-side at your disposal. | https://vonagedev.medium.com/server-side-analytics-with-jamstack-sites-1a254c0c20bd | ['Vonage Dev'] | 2020-12-17 10:22:43.113000+00:00 | ['Nuxtjs', 'Analytics', 'Netlify', 'Jamstack'] |
Map visualization in D3.js with GeoJSON/TopoJSON cartography | With the fluent syntactic sugar, it can be combined in one liner. Now D3.js can draw SVG paths for all US counties using the GeoJSON features collection.
D3.js teams up rather well with TopoJSON to simplify Map visualizations. All the data magic happens by calling topojson.feature(us, us.objects.counties).features() function which returns US counties as GoeJSON FeatureCollection . With one change you can draw US states instead, the only required change is topojson.feature(us, us.objects.states).features() because the TopoJSON file has both US counties and states defined as geometry collection.
What’s GeoJSON and TopoJSON?
GeoJSON is an open standards format to store and interchange geographic data in JSON format, along with non-spatial attributes. The format gained traction with advent of GIS (Geographic Information System) systems and devices. Due to its high precision a GeoJSON format is not streamlined for web or bandwidth friendly.
Working as an extension on top of GeoJSON, TopoJSON format compensates these cons by using several algorithms to eliminate redundant and duplicate data. Concisely, simplifying paths as arcs and combining boundaries between topologies that might produce two-folds.
TopoJSON comes bundled with a set of useful CLI tools to make it easier. You can install them using NPM package manager. Some notable CLI tools:
They come in very handy for advanced CLI cartography, which is the aim. If it felt like cakewalk by now, the same cannot be said when manipulating maps, like choropleth maps, 3D maps, map interactions, or, combining/merging topologies.
Anatomy of GeoJSON/TopoJSON
Addressing the theme around this article, let’s understand how GeoJSON/TopoJSON store geographic topologies. GeoJSON uses FeatureCollection and Feature objects, to test it let’s take a Feature object for Delaware (notice no arcs):
Look closely at co-ordinates object, they’re longitudes and latitudes (reverse them in Google Maps) defining the boundary of Delaware. Now let’s see the same map object in TopoJSON format (click view raw):
Pay attention to bbox or bounding box and arcs object, also there are no geometry objects. That’s how TopoJSON overcomes the exhausting payload size of GeoJSON, by encoding GeoJSON feature collection into arcs , optionally quantize and simplify geometry, resulting in much simpler and smaller format with somewhat precision trade-off.
Advanced cartography with CLI
Merging US states into regions — starting with northwest, midwest, southwest, southeast and northeast. Several ideas pumped in from Observable HQ out of which two of them really stood out. Explore more on Observable HQ, there’s abundant information on D3.js with matching examples.
There are two methods to do it, one is using topomerge CLI, and the other is using topojson.merge() in Browser. I went with the Browser approach first, quick and dirty, but proves effective! | https://medium.com/geekculture/advanced-map-visualization-and-cartography-with-d3-js-geojson-topojson-2de786ece0c3 | ['Anirudh K Mahant'] | 2021-08-26 07:59:17.034000+00:00 | ['Cartography', 'Geojson', 'Datamap', 'D3js', 'Topojson'] |
Why does almost every company need a website? | Your website is your main marketing asset as we live in the digital age. Right now, consumers expect businesses to have an online presence and will view a business that does NOT have one as less professional. If you are a business owner you need a website. A professionally designed website that attracts leads, increases sales and differentiates the brand.
Consumer behavior is changing over time to adapt to modern technology. In the 1930s, advertising in the Yellow Pages was standard operating procedure for most businesses. The majority of American households used the directory on a daily basis.
Then came the World Wide Web and a new disruption to the business status quo: digital transformation. As more and more consumers realized that they could find what they needed online faster and more efficiently than a phone book, the behavior shifted away from using the printed phone book. In 2011, 70% of all Americans rarely or never used printed phone books. Also in 2011, more than 59% of consumers were already going online to find local businesses. In 2019, and the number of consumers going online to find a local business has grown to 97%. If you want them to choose your business, you have to be found online, which means you need a website.
There’s a reason so many businesses invest in a search engine optimization (SEO) website: 97% of people go online to find local businesses, and 93% of online experiences start with search engines. Believe it or not, there are 3.5 billion searches on Google per day, and right now someone in your area is online looking for your exact service.
According to the April 2017 LSA (Local Search Association) report, “Digital Consumer Studies,” 63% of consumers primarily use the company’s website to find and connect with businesses. It is a very large segment of consumers. | https://medium.com/@itechscripts/why-does-almost-every-company-need-a-website-b339d1215fc6 | [] | 2020-12-26 15:17:33.217000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Web Design'] |
Happy holy-days (or holidays)! | The practice of tending to the fire in dark times: A solstice invocation.
Whatever is the religious denomination or spiritual practice that you do or do not uphold, this time of year in the Northern hemisphere is one where there is more darkness than light. And every day from winter solstice onwards, we are invited to behold and welcome in light increasing.
I see the work of this time of year akin to making fire in the traditional way of rubbing sticks together. After a lot of friction, (and sometimes sweat depending on your degree of agility in the endeavour), the wood miraculously and magically births a tiny hot little ember, requiring all the care and attention of a newborn, to be carried and nested in the tinder readily awaiting to receive it.
It is the power of your breath,
blown on the ember,
which then ignites a small flame.
This is how to make fire.
Making fire requires a quietness of spirit, someone who is adept at listening and attending to the signs, responding with the right combination of preparation, waiting, and a kind of tenderness mixed in with action.
We need to be delicate with small, fragile things.
While many have forgotten these ways, opting instead for the efficiency of using a lighter or match, to some the making of fire still remains holy. Because when there is little heat or light, and it is cold and dark all around, fire becomes precious. And yet, fire is precious, because it is not always easy to come by. Just like young Vasalisa venturing into the depths of the forest in search of fire after it was put out by her cruel stepmother, we meet the Baba Yaga, as we do whenever we go after anything that is sacred. When we choose to make holy amidst the darkness, the road can be uneven. It is often dark outside, and we are continually tested for our capacity to stay on course.
Remembering and caring for the small ember of our budding flames during this time of darkness is the work.
This solstice make your days Holy by: | https://medium.com/@estherkalaba/happy-holy-days-or-holidays-475fe7f3c434 | ['Esther Kalaba'] | 2020-12-27 14:24:25.603000+00:00 | ['Solstice', 'Fire', 'Holy', 'Love Yourself', 'New Year'] |
The Happiness Equation | It all started in late 2019 with a bullet journal to keep me busy over the summer holidays.
I’d long been fascinated by my life represented in data (to varying degrees of healthiness…), so I found it easy to start meticulously tracking everything. From every dollar spent to every unit of alcohol consumed. After a few months of methodical tallying, I started to think of this brightly-coloured tome as something like an equation for happiness.
Get x amount of exercise, spend y hours on business development, invest z dollars and, over time, x + y + z = a happy life.
And then a global pandemic sent the lift barrelling towards the ground.
A life in numbers
Now, I’ll preface this with an acknowledgement that I live in one of the most humane and fortunate countries on earth. New Zealand’s management of COVID-19 has, thus far, been a masterclass. I have felt nothing but gratitude to be here while I’ve watched in impotent horror as my previous homes, friends and family in the UK and US have been devastated by both a deadly virus and their deeply flawed so-called leadership. But, despite our relative safety, we’ve faced many of the same challenges here as everyone else.
We’ve thought too hard and we’ve drunk too much and we’ve slept too little. We’ve repressed and denied and looked for something, someone to blame. Our most cherished relationships have faltered from miscommunications and lack of contact. We’ve grieved the loss of experiences and lives we finally admitted we could no longer have.
For me, lockdown marked the beginning of a sometimes painful period of profound growth, the depth of which I don’t think I’ve experienced in my adult life. | https://medium.com/@authenticstorytelling/the-happiness-equation-5240e3e8c656 | ['Bex De Prospo'] | 2021-01-27 22:07:17.182000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Mental Health', 'Habit Building', 'Happiness', 'PTSD'] |
Recapping This Year’s Harvest | By mid-November, nearly all of the Napa Valley grapes have been harvested. These have made their way to the wineries for crushing to be converted into world-class wines that will end up on tables throughout the world. At this point, the growers are heaving a collective sigh of relief as the new crop has left the vineyards, and the ongoing stress over the uncertainties of Mother Nature are subsiding.
Circumstances in the northern reaches of Napa Valley and many areas of Sonoma County were complicated this year by the widely reported Kincade wildfires. While Napa Valley was not directly impacted as neighboring Sonoma County, the sense of urgency and unexpected power outages hastened the final stages of harvest in many vineyards.
Responding to the Kincade Fire
From October 23 until November 6, the Kincade fire burned nearly 80,000 acres in Sonoma County, and according to a Newsweek article, destroyed 374 Sonoma County homes and other structures, and damaged many more. During this time, Napa Valley residents and businesses pitched in to provide humanitarian assistance to their Sonoma neighbors by assisting with their harvest and crush, lending equipment and labor, and opening their homes to displaced residents.
2019 Napa Valley Harvest
Despite the trials and challenges of power outages and the threatening fire and smoke, the latter stages of the 2019 Napa Valley harvest are complete. Thankfully, the wineries and vineyards of Napa Valley were spared the destructive forces that their Sonoma neighbors endured.
The jubilation that generally accompanies the end of another successful harvest was tempered by the destructive events in Sonoma County.
Post-Harvest Activities
In Napa Valley, at least, the 2019 crop appears to be excellent. The cool, sunny days of October were perfect for encouraging the reds to further ripen to their fullest extent.
Many visitors enjoy coming to Napa Valley during the post-harvest season. The pleasant fall weather and smaller crowds allow for a more personal experience and easier access to many venues. Whether scheduling your wine tasting tour, visiting one of the many popular nightclubs, making restaurant reservations, planning a spa visit, or floating gently among the clouds on your famous Napa Valley balloon ride, everything is a bit more relaxed.
During this time, by the way, some vineyards are presenting new vintages from prior seasons.
Biking and Hiking
Enjoy Napa Valley’s beautiful scenery and spectacular autumn weather as you and your group hike or bile the miles and miles of trails and pathways. In the morning, you’ll notice the always popular and beautiful Napa Valley balloon rides floating gently above.
Reserve Your Napa Valley Balloon Ride
A Napa Valley balloon ride for your family or group can be a delightful, never-to-be-forgotten experience. Nicely complementing a slower-paced, relaxing visit to the region, a Napa Valley balloon ride with Balloons Above the Valley is a great option. Greet the morning as you drift lazily above the Valley floor while enjoying the incredible landscape and the mountainous backdrop.
For information and reservations for a safe and enjoyable Napa balloon ride, contact Balloons Above the Valley at +1–800–464–6824. | https://medium.com/@web.balloonrides/recapping-this-years-harvest-ff263c7f072a | ['Balloon Rides'] | 2019-11-21 09:35:26.039000+00:00 | ['Napa Valley Balloons', 'Balloon Rides Near Me', 'Balloon Rides', 'Wine'] |
Symfony REST API (without FosRestBundle) using JWT authentication: PART 1 | In this first article we are going to explore the simplest way to implement a REST API in symfony project without FosRestBundle. I will add the second article containing JWT authentication. Before we create this implementation, we need firstly understand what REST actually means.
1- What is Rest?
Rest as Representational State transfer is an architectural style for developing web services. It is something that can not be ignored because there is a big need for creating Restful applications in today’s ecosystem. This might be due to the continued climb of JavaScript and these frameworks.
Rest API should use HTTP protocol. This mean that when the client makes any request to this web service, it can specify any of the normal HTTP verbs of GET, POST, DELETE and PUT. Below is what would happen If the respective verbs were sent by the client.
- GET: This would be used to get the list of resources or the details of one.
- POST: this would be used to create a new resource.
- PUT: This would be used to update an existing resource.
- DELETE: This would be used to delete an existing resource.
Rest is stateless and this mean that the server side doesn’t hold any request state. The state should be kept on the client side (example of using JWT for authentication, we are going to secure our RestApi using this). So, when using authentication in our Rest Api, we need to send the authentication header in order to get a correct response in a stateless way.
2- Create a symfony project:
Firstly, we suppose you have installed php and the composer package manager to create a new symfony project. After that, create a new project using the following command in the terminal:
composer create-project symfony/skeleton demo_rest_api
create symfony project
We are using a basic symphony skeleton that is recommended for microservices and APIs. Here is what directory structure looks like:
project structure
Config: contains all bundle configuration and a list of bundle in the bundle.php.
Public: provides access to the application via index.php
Src: contains all controller, models and services.
Var: contains system logs and cache files.
Vendor: contains all external packages
Now, let’s install some necessary bundles with composer:
composer require symfony/orm-pack
composer require sensio/framework-extra-bundle
we installed the sensio/framework-extra-bundle that will help us to make code easier by using annotations for defining our routes.
We need also to install symphony/orm-pack for integration with Doctrine ORM in order to connect with a database. Bellow is the configuration of database I created which may be set in the .env file.
.env configuration file
Now, let’s create our first entity. Create a new file called Post.php inside the src/Entity folder.
<?php
namespace App\Entity;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;
/**
* @ORM\Entity
* @ORM\Table(name="post")
* @ORM\HasLifecycleCallbacks()
*/
class Post implements \JsonSerializable {
/**
* @ORM\Column(type="integer")
* @ORM\Id
* @ORM\GeneratedValue(strategy="AUTO")
*/
private $id; /**
* @ORM\Column(type="string", length=100
*
*/
private $name;
/**
* @ORM\Column(type="text")
*/
private $description; /**
* @ORM\Column(type="datetime")
*/
private $create_date; /**
* @return mixed
*/
public function getId()
{
return $this->id;
}
/**
* @param mixed $id
*/
public function setId($id)
{
$this->id = $id;
}
/**
* @return mixed
*/
public function getName()
{
return $this->name;
}
/**
* @param mixed $name
*/
public function setName($name)
{
$this->name = $name;
}
/**
* @return mixed
*/
public function getDescription()
{
return $this->description;
}
/**
* @param mixed $description
*/
public function setDescription($description)
{
$this->description = $description;
} /**
* @return mixed
*/
public function getCreateDate(): ?\DateTime
{
return $this->create_date;
} /**
* @param \DateTime $create_date
* @return Post
*/
public function setCreateDate(\DateTime $create_date): self
{
$this->create_date = $create_date;
return $this;
} /**
* @throws \Exception
* @ORM\PrePersist()
*/
public function beforeSave(){ $this->create_date = new \DateTime('now', new \DateTimeZone('Africa/Casablanca'));
}
* Specify data which should be serialized to JSON
* @link https://php.net/manual/en/jsonserializable.jsonserialize.php
* @return mixed data which can be serialized by <b>json_encode</b>,
* which is a value of any type other than a resource.
* @since 5.4.0
*/
public function jsonSerialize()
{
return [
"name" => $this->getName(),
"description" => $this->getDescription()
];
}
} /*** Specify data which should be serialized to JSONmixed data which can be serialized by json_encode,* which is a value of any type other than a resource.5.4.0*/jsonSerialize()"name" => $this->getName(),"description" => $this->getDescription()];
And after run the command: php bin/console doctrine:schema:create to create a database table according to our Post entity.
Now, let’s create a PostController.php where we will add all methods interacting with api. It should be placed inside the folder src/Controller.
<?php
/**
* Created by PhpStorm.
* User: hicham benkachoud
* Date: 02/01/2020
* Time: 22:44
*/ namespace App\Controller;
use App\Entity\Post;
use App\Repository\PostRepository;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManagerInterface;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\JsonResponse;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route; /**
* Class PostController
* @package App\Controller
* @Route("/api", name="post_api")
*/
class PostController extends AbstractController
{
/**
* @param PostRepository $postRepository
* @return JsonResponse
* @Route("/posts", name="posts", methods={"GET"})
*/
public function getPosts(PostRepository $postRepository){
$data = $postRepository->findAll();
return $this->response($data);
} /**
* @param Request $request
* @param EntityManagerInterface $entityManager
* @param PostRepository $postRepository
* @return JsonResponse
* @throws \Exception
* @Route("/posts", name="posts_add", methods={"POST"})
*/
public function addPost(Request $request, EntityManagerInterface $entityManager, PostRepository $postRepository){ try{
$request = $this->transformJsonBody($request); if (!$request || !$request->get('name') || !$request->request->get('description')){
throw new \Exception();
} $post = new Post();
$post->setName($request->get('name'));
$post->setDescription($request->get('description'));
$entityManager->persist($post);
$entityManager->flush(); $data = [
'status' => 200,
'success' => "Post added successfully",
];
return $this->response($data); }catch (\Exception $e){
$data = [
'status' => 422,
'errors' => "Data no valid",
];
return $this->response($data, 422);
} }
/**
* @param PostRepository $postRepository
* @param $id
* @return JsonResponse
* @Route("/posts/{id}", name="posts_get", methods={"GET"})
*/
public function getPost(PostRepository $postRepository, $id){
$post = $postRepository->find($id); if (!$post){
$data = [
'status' => 404,
'errors' => "Post not found",
];
return $this->response($data, 404);
}
return $this->response($post);
} /**
* @param Request $request
* @param EntityManagerInterface $entityManager
* @param PostRepository $postRepository
* @param $id
* @return JsonResponse
* @Route("/posts/{id}", name="posts_put", methods={"PUT"})
*/
public function updatePost(Request $request, EntityManagerInterface $entityManager, PostRepository $postRepository, $id){ try{
$post = $postRepository->find($id); if (!$post){
$data = [
'status' => 404,
'errors' => "Post not found",
];
return $this->response($data, 404);
} $request = $this->transformJsonBody($request); if (!$request || !$request->get('name') || !$request->request->get('description')){
throw new \Exception();
} $post->setName($request->get('name'));
$post->setDescription($request->get('description'));
$entityManager->flush(); $data = [
'status' => 200,
'errors' => "Post updated successfully",
];
return $this->response($data); }catch (\Exception $e){
$data = [
'status' => 422,
'errors' => "Data no valid",
];
return $this->response($data, 422);
} }
/**
* @param PostRepository $postRepository
* @param $id
* @return JsonResponse
* @Route("/posts/{id}", name="posts_delete", methods={"DELETE"})
*/
public function deletePost(EntityManagerInterface $entityManager, PostRepository $postRepository, $id){
$post = $postRepository->find($id); if (!$post){
$data = [
'status' => 404,
'errors' => "Post not found",
];
return $this->response($data, 404);
} $entityManager->remove($post);
$entityManager->flush();
$data = [
'status' => 200,
'errors' => "Post deleted successfully",
];
return $this->response($data);
} /**
* Returns a JSON response
*
* @param array $data
* @param $status
* @param array $headers
* @return JsonResponse
*/
public function response($data, $status = 200, $headers = [])
{
return new JsonResponse($data, $status, $headers);
} protected function transformJsonBody(\Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request $request)
{
$data = json_decode($request->getContent(), true); if ($data === null) {
return $request;
} $request->request->replace($data); return $request;
} }
Here we defined the five routes:
GET /api/posts: will return a list of the Posts.
get all posts api
POST /api/posts: will create a new Post.
add new post api
GET /api/posts/id: will return a Post matching the specific identifer
get single post
PUT /api/posts/id : will update the Post.
update post
This is the result after update:
post after updated
DELETE /api/posts/id: will delete the Post.
delete post
This is the result of get all posts after delete the post with the ID 3:
all posts after delete
The code source can be found: Here
Conclusion:
So now we understand what REST and Restful is. A restful API should be stateless. We know how to create a Restful application using HTTP verbs. All in all we now have a good understanding of REST and are ready to create Restful applications in a professional way.
Next Article we will take a look at how to secure the restful API using JWT authentication. | https://medium.com/@hicham-benkachoud/symfony-rest-api-without-fosrestbundle-using-jwt-authentication-part-1-f5cb186ba9ed | ['Hicham Ben Kachoud'] | 2020-11-25 19:37:06.974000+00:00 | ['Web Services', 'Jwt', 'Rest Api', 'Symfony', 'PHP'] |
Two Inspirational Tales Win Tito’s Handmade Vodka Best Dog Story Awards | Two Inspirational Tales Win Tito’s Handmade Vodka Best Dog Story Awards
Patricia Horan, 78, a forty-year veteran of New York and magazine publishing, and Derek Larthey, 38, an actor and substitute teacher in the Pennsylvania public school system, win the top writing scholarships provided by Tito’s Handmade Vodka.
Joining other writers in the Caribbean in February, 2020, Horan and Larthey will take advantage of a writing week focused on art, commerce, craft, and community at the Winter Story Summit.
Each season, Story Summit gathers award-winning professionals from across the globe to provide intimate, meaningful and productive relationships with screenwriters and authors in an inspiring, immersive and naturally beautiful environment.
The vision of Tito’s Vodka for Dog People program is to better the lives of pets and their families far and wide. Tito’s Handmade Vodka sponsored both a male and female scholarship to the Winter Story Summit.
“We could not be more delighted with Patricia Horan and Derek Larthey for their wins” says Beth Bellanti Pander, Program Manager, Vodka For Dog People. “We congratulate them and all the applicants who participated.”
Jeff Arch, a mentor at the summit, and the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of Sleepless in Seattle says, “I am so excited to work with these two gifted and committed writers.” Arch will be mentoring Horan as well as Larthey. “ Both entries are distinguished by their love for America, and the things that are best about us — and yet they come at it from completely different angles,” says Arch. “ Derek’s story, Rescue Me, is about a returning soldier who brings a dog back from Iraq and how they both find salvation through each other. It’s sincere and touching, and, unfortunately, all too real.
“On the other hand, Patricia’s animated story, Bring Me Your Paws, about a flying dachshund who befriends the Statue of Liberty, is a loving tribute to our strength as a melting pot, and how the pure heart and soul of one little dog can remind us, especially in these conflicted times, who we are as a nation of immigrants and refugees.”
Winner, Patricia Horan, for Bring Me Your Paws/ that’s Patricia’s guinea pig, Muttonchops
A forty-year veteran of New York book and magazine publishing, Patricia Horan is the founding editor of a longstanding Crown/Random House division. There. Horan developed, revised and reissued books and series, creating many perennial bestsellers. Among them are Gray’s Anatomy, the Blooper humor series, the Avenel classics and the Arthur Rackham series of distinguished children’s books.
Patricia was a founding member of the pioneering and widely reviewed Westbeth Feminist Playwrights Collective, where Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman first worked together on the New York stage. The plays and lyrics she wrote for Westbeth have been invited to the archives of the New-York Historical Society.
“I have been editing the work of others through mainstream publishing all these years,” says Horan, “and would like to feature my own original work now.
Patricia Horan is the daughter of the late historian, novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman, James D. Horan.
Winner, Derek Larthey, for Rescue Me
Derek Larthey, a public school teacher and an actor who has appeared in House of Cards as well as other series, is looking forward to the opportunity that the story summit provides for him. “I can learn from some of the best in the business,” Larthey says. “I have a mentor in Jeff Arch who will not be shy about pointing out my mistakes, guiding me to expand my knowledge and hone my craft.”
The Story Summit is conducted once every season and attended by an international group of aspiring writers of all ages. The Summit elevates and engages diverse talent in inspiring locations around the world.
The Winter Story Summit will take place in the Caribbean in February, 2020. The Summer Story Summit will take place on a glacier tour in Alaska. Tito’s Handmade Vodka will also be sponsoring two writing scholarships for the summer event as well. Details for the application process will be announced after the holidays. | https://medium.com/@thegoodage/two-inspirational-tales-win-titos-handmade-vodka-best-dog-story-awards-7dc02e94139e | ['David Paul Kirkpatrick'] | 2020-01-02 21:23:32.438000+00:00 | ['Creative Writing', 'Scholarship', 'Dogs', 'Writers Life', 'Inspiration'] |
Honestly, No | Honestly, No
Photo by Peter Olexa on Unsplash
I like how you’ve taken a little time to dribble some insight down the inside of your neck, how you swirl it around in your mouth as if each one has a flavor; or you confess your surreal intentions by garnering such a massive pile of books on helping
a recovery of the lost art of being at home in yourself; and, honestly, no one is going to tell you otherwise, but to get over that heap you’ve got to jump, to sling yourself through golden lines distended from the ceiling, lights you never put there, and didn’t imagine would fail you just when you needed to climb
and talk about all the things troubling you; I can reach you, I can, and I drape the cold phone fingers over your discomfort, pulling out the threads you can do without; I didn’t come to challenge you, but to burn the noise that is causing your grief
if that’s the name you’ll put to it; I can figure these things out, but I am not you, and I don’t see quite the same way, as we pale against each other, and look into the fitness and fitting of things; and, truly, I am always distracted by your mouth; it happened again | https://medium.com/the-rebel-poets-society/honestly-no-80378f831043 | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-12-15 00:48:01.021000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Musing', 'Rant', 'Prose Poem', 'Image'] |
How to Minimize Booking Cancellations | We all hate cancellation fees, but hotels, airlines, salons, and more have good reasons for charging them.
Last-minute cancellations leave hotels with unsold rooms and airlines with empty seats. Without cancellation fees, tons of revenue is lost.
It’s in the best interest of consumers and providers to attack the root of the problem, and minimize cancellations. I analyzed a hotel booking demand dataset¹ and a hair salon no-show dataset² using the predictive analytics tool Apteo to find insights into customer cancellations.
I. Hotel Cancellations
Sooner Bookings Are Better ⏰
If you’re booking a hotel for a few days from now, say for a weekend getaway, it’d probably take some serious extenuating circumstances for you to cancel.
Now imagine that you’re booking a hotel for a few months from now, say for a festival that you think you might attend. Over those months, a lot can happen, and there’s a much greater chance you’ll cancel. Maybe you’re invited to a wedding you need to attend, or you get sick, or you decide to visit another event, or your flight gets canceled, or, well, any of a million other things.
This is reflected in the hotel booking dataset, which shows that bookings with longer “lead times” are more likely to get canceled. The average non-canceled booking was made 45 days in advance, while the average canceled booking was made 113 days in advance. | https://medium.com/dataseries/how-to-minimize-booking-cancellations-dd1614f83d1c | ['Frederik Bussler'] | 2020-09-28 08:57:12.694000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Data', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Data Analysis'] |
When transitioning doesn’t cure internalized transphobia | Thinking Queerly: A Series
The other day, someone misgendered me. Not to my face, but to my boyfriend. He said: “I hear you’re dating Adrian. Isn’t she trans? — or he — or whatever.”
My face was on fire as my boyfriend, a cis gay man, nervously relayed the story to me over the phone. Midway through, my thoughts started to spiral. How was I misgendered? I have a full beard, a flat chest, a deep voice, a masculine build. Does my boyfriend see me differently now? As less of a man? As more “trans” than “man?” As not a man at all?
“How did he even know I’m trans?” I finally responded. I was testing him. I knew I would be able to tell from his answer if his perception of me had changed. He passed the test. “I have no idea babe. Someone must have told him. Or he found your Thinking Queerly column. Or went through your status updates.” I relaxed a little. That the guy had simply clocked me — or figured out I was trans just by looking at me — wasn’t on the list of plausible theories. My boyfriend still saw me as cis-passing, a man who read as cis to the rest of the world.
But after I hung up the phone I was still troubled. Why did I care whether this random acquaintance had clocked me? And why was I so certain that my boyfriend would think less of me if he had?
Sometimes I think I’m comfortable and confident in my identity as a trans man, and then something happens, I “read the comments,” and my internalized transphobia rears its ugly head.
Most self-destructive behaviors serve some purpose. Internalized transphobia has helped me perform my gender according to cis standards, and thus win the approval of cis people. Society rewards trans people who pass as cis, and it punishes trans people who can’t, or don’t care to. This sends a clear message to trans people that cis is good, trans is bad.
On the one hand, I believe it’s my responsibility to eradicate my internalized transphobia — for one, because I’m responsible for taking care of myself, but also because my biases toward myself are also biases toward other trans people. On the other hand, I have to be careful, because to blame myself for my internalized transphobia is a form of victim-blaming. I need to be gentle with myself when I struggle, or when I’m triggered because some transphobe came out of the woodwork to remind me of all of the times I’ve been hurt, rejected, and made to feel inferior by cis people.
So I felt what I felt. And I forgave myself. And then I saw my reaction for what it was: a trauma response, and myself for what I am: a man. | https://medium.com/queer-kentucky/when-transitioning-doesnt-cure-internalized-transphobia-51fa10c7c871 | ['Queer Kentucky'] | 2020-03-14 23:57:40.899000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'LGBTQ', 'Queer', 'Love', 'Transgender'] |
9 important questions to ask yourself to thrive in 2021 | 1. What do you love to do? Do you do it often? If the answer is no, why not?
A friend of mine just quit her job in the middle of a pandemic. She loves designing clothes and she has always talked about opening a designing shop. When I ask her, “Why the hell are you not doing what you love to do?” her answer was always, “What about my job? What about my responsibilities?”
I guess she got tired of turning her back on what she loves to do.
Since mid-2018, I’m doing what I love to do: teaching and writing. This is my life. The only life I’m going to have.
What about you?
What do you love to do? If you’re not putting energy and time into it, why not? We think we have all the time in the world. That’s a huge problem. We think we will do what we love to do in our 30s, or 40s, or 50s. Or we put an imaginary “someday” in our calendar and we tell ourselves we will do what we love doing when that day comes.
That day never comes.
What you love to do matters. Why would you put it in the bottom of your shelf? Enjoying something is enough of a reason to go and get it. You don’t have to quit your job to start doing what you love to do. You can start having an affair with what you love to do. Surely, you can take 30 minutes or an hour every day to make love with something you enjoy doing. Like lovers who sneak out to a stairwell to make love like crazy, sneak out from your job and responsibilities to give what you love to do a chance to flourish.
2. Where do you see yourself in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?
Picture in your mind your future self.
Where do you see yourself, your relationship, job, career, and business in 1 year? 5 years? If you really want to see what you imagine, write whatever your mind is picturing. The more vivid your picture is, the more you can see where you want your life to go.
For example, I say no when friends ask me to go to parties. I refuse because I see my future self starting a family with my boyfriend. Going to parties every night is not on my map.
This question is important because you can use your answer like a compass to guide how you spend your days. You can then take small steps every day that inch you closer to your future self.
3. What would you regret not doing?
A friend’s loss this year has taught me life is fickle. You and I are racing toward our graves. Behind every human heart, a feeble, insecure, vulnerable, and beautiful life lives, clinging onto fluttering hopes. Desperately. To live.
We have less time than we think.
Thinking about regret might make you uncomfortable. But that’s exactly why you need to think about.
. Telling someone you like how you feel
. Forgiving your friend for the stupid mistake he made in high school
. Spending quality time with your spouse
. Starting a business
. Quitting a job you hate
. Moving to another country
When you ask yourself honestly what you would regret not doing, you start doing them. You move towards what you have been avoiding for so long.
Asking about what you would regret not doing is a powerful motivator.
4. What do you want to be remembered by?
Thriving does not have to mean only on external things.
When we die, no one is going to remember the money in our bank account, the brand or number of cars we drove, or the mansion we lived in.
No one will remember us for these external things.
Working on internal things is a beautiful way to thrive. We can start working on things that will make us eternally live in the hearts of those we love. Who are you in your depth? Who are you beyond your resume? Are you loving? Dependable? Are you considerate of others? Do you spend time with your loved ones? What is the nature of your relationships? Do you love enough? Or do you calculate every action you take — whether it gives you something in return or not?
You can start living life the way you want people to remember you. Think of your eulogy. What would your eulogy say when it is read at your funeral?
5. If a doctor gave you one year to live, what would you try to accomplish?
Before almost dying, I treated life as if I would get another chance to live life the way I want one day.
Every day, I dragged my unwilling self out of bed at an ungodly hour. I got stuck inside an office all day, slaving away my life for a measly paycheck. I did this for a boss who did nothing but loaf around, snapped at his employees, and spent his weekends luxuriating. I was bone-tired from being ordered like a slave.
And yet.
I did nothing to change my situation until an ectopic pregnancy landed my unconscious body in the emergency room.
The first statement my doctor told me when I woke up after many hours of surgery was, “You would be dead right now if you had arrived at our hospital by 30 minutes late.”
My near-to-death experience has changed my life.
I’m thankful for the horrible experience that almost killed me. I take every day as a gift now, because it is. A second chance in life gracing me had snapped me out of my comfort zone. I’m now a sought-after trainer and public speaker in Ethiopia. I’ve started writing professionally. I love what I do now. No more tolerating a job. No more waiting for “someday” when I will find a job I will love.
This is the best question to start walking in the direction of what you want to do in life.
Stop treating your life as if you’ll live forever.
6. When you look at the picture of your life, what do you see?
I have an artist friend who paints on a canvas like crazy. If she feels like something can be done about the art she tossed aside, she would do so. If she feels like it is time to create something new from scratch, she would do so. She is always brushing on something old that needs a new brush. Or else she is laying her first brush on a new canvas.
You can I can take a lesson from this.
The picture of our life is not fixed. If we don’t like the picture we see, we can always change it.
Take your life as a canvas you get to paint. Take an objective look at your life. Do you like it? Are you a hero in it? Are you driving your life the way you want it? Is your life happy? If you don’t like the picture you see so far, the brush is in your hands. Don’t just stand there looking at the picture wondering what has happened. You can do something about what you don’t like.
You can change the picture.
7. What did you want to be when you were younger?
At 15, I wanted to be a writer. But then, I stopped writing until I was 29. The sense of freedom and unselfconscious rigor I had at 15 had vanished into thin air.
As we age, we have more responsibilities and less time. But it’s not just responsibilities and lack of time as an adult that scare us to bury our dreams. Every time we hesitantly approach our dreams, an insidious voice interrupts us,
“What’s the point? What does it matter? Why spend Saturday afternoons practicing my painting, writing, running, that turns out to be just okay?”
It’s time to wake your younger self up.
Take out a piece of paper and make two columns. In the left column, write your dreams. In the right column, next to each dream, write one thing you can do today to achieve that dream. Then start dribbling like a football player dribbles a ball. You need to take one step at a time because you cannot achieve your dreams in one day just like you can’t kick a ball directly into an opposing goal. You have to dribble the ball to reach the goal.
Do the same for your dreams. One dribble at a time.
8. What are you most terrified of?
. I’ll start my business when I’m no longer terrified of failing.
. I’ll start publishing my articles when I’m no longer terrified of telling my story.
. I’ll work on my relationship when I’m not terrified of confronting my issues.
If you wait for fear to go away and leave you alone, you’re going to wait for a long, long time. Whatever you’re trying to achieve (your dreams, startup, side business, creativity, and relationships) are paying the price.
You need to do what you’re terrified of. The “doing it” comes before you feel better about your fear. Terrified to be a writer? Write something and send a draft to a publisher. Terrified of social interactions? Say hello to your neighbor.
Make a list of things you’re terrified of. By terrified of I don’t mean “likely to cause you bodily harm”. I mean things that make you uncomfortable that you know you need to do. Like walking up and talking to a stranger. Like asking someone out. Like speaking up. Like developing opinions. Go do what makes you feel uncomfortable for your next-level life is lurking behind your fears. Check off every single item on your list.
You don’t have to take a giant leap, my friends. You can start small.
9. How many people do you love? What are you doing for them now?
I don’t know why thriving is only related to the work we do or the business we run. I don’t know about you, but I want to thrive at loving my loved ones.
We need to make time for what matters — our loved ones. Yet we so often lose sight of this.
We get busy. We need to work to pay the bills. To buy the house. To get the promotion. And we just forget. It’s not until we lose our loved ones regret breaks our heart.
Like it or not, the clock is ticking.
It’s time for all of us to slow down, look around, and spend time with the people who matter to us. I’m not talking about five minutes snatched here and there while staring at a screen. I’m talking about a quality time when you are fully present with those around you and your surroundings.
It’s not always easy to love the people you care about. You won’t always love them. Sometimes they’ll annoy you, or you’ll disagree. And that’s okay.
No one and no relationship is perfect. We’re all doing the best we can.
The important thing is you love your loved ones today. Make time for them, even if your relationship has ups and downs, and let them know you care while you have the chance. | https://medium.com/be-unique/9-most-important-questions-to-ask-yourself-to-thrive-in-2021-2f47472640bc | ['Banchiwosen Woldeyesus', 'Blogger Ethiopia'] | 2020-12-08 09:08:54.512000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Inspiration', 'Life Lessons', 'Questions', 'New Year'] |
BETTER CALL SAUL, 5.10 — ‘Something Unforgivable’ | BETTER CALL SAUL, 5.10 — ‘Something Unforgivable’
Saul and Kim make a sideways move that takes a serious turn; while Nacho gets closer to the cartel than he’d like. Dan Owen Follow Apr 22, 2020 · 7 min read
One trend in modern television (that True Blood started and Game of Thrones popularised) is having finales that aren’t especially climactic, but mostly deal with the fallout of the preceding episode and set the stage for what’s to come. Better Call Saul’s “Something Unforgivable” was an example of that, although it did deliver a big action set-piece that was a more traditional way to end season 5 with a bang. Or multiple bangs. But even that moment was mostly interesting for what it sets up for the final season…
Saul (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) spent the finale in a numbed and reactive state of mind, grappling with their frightening late-night visit from Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) in “Bad Choice Road” and trying to work out their next move. Understandably scared, they head for a nearby hotel to hide low for a while, after Saul finally reveals what happened to him in the desert with Lalo’s bail money. The scene’s set for Kim to leave Saul given the extreme danger he’s put them both in, and Saul’s clearly prepared to let their new marriage end if it means keeping his wife safe, but the end result of their time together was unexpected and even seemed to blow Saul’s mind.
Kim isn’t one to sit around being scared and feeling powerless, so she threw herself back into her work as a public defender, accepting numerous difficult felony cases as pro bono. While at the courthouse she bumps into Howard (Patrick Fabian), letting slip she’s parted ways with Schweikart and Cokely, which makes her old boss assume it’s a result of Saul’s influence. So he feels obliged to reveal all of Saul’s stupid “pranks” he’s been a victim of recently. But while the matter of expensive car damage and public humiliation with prostitutes is beyond the pale for a straight-arrow guy like Howard, it sounds like childish games for Kim now she’s had a taste of real danger with Lalo Salamanca, so she can’t help laughing in his face.
In general, Kim’s outlook crystallises over this hour. We’ve always assumed she would be the sensible one trying in vain to pull Saul away from wrongdoing, and perhaps pay the ultimate price for her attempts to keep him on the straight-and-narrow, but her encounter with Howard instead inspires a desire to wreck his life too. Under the bedsheets that night, Kim and Saul fantasize about how they could sabotage Howard’s legal career and force a resolution of HHM’s big Sandpiper case, meaning Saul would get his seven-figure share of the settlement sooner. Saul takes their discussion with a grain of salt because he knows Howard doesn’t deserve to have his career left in tatters — but is surprised and alarmed when Kim’s still keen to go through with their plan the next morning. She even throws ‘finger guns’ at him, as he did her in season 4’s finale, symbolising how she’s joining him on his reckless path. So rather than Kim being the voice of reason desperately trying to stop Slippin’ Jimmy McGill transform into Saul Goodman, it now looks like she’s been persuaded the “rogue lawyer” ways of her husband are something she enjoys too — perhaps more than he does!
Perhaps a little disappointing, this was the sum total of Kim and Saul’s impact on the finale. It was just setting up a big change in their dynamic as a couple and teasing what they’ll get up to in season 6, although I’ve always felt uncomfortable about how much of a punching bag Howard has become on the show… so getting more of that seems a little excessive to me. But it’s certainly surprising to see Kim’s reaction to recent events go in this direction.
The more entertaining aspect of “Something Unforgivable” was found in the half of the story focused on Lalo and Nacho (Michael Mando) as they cross over into Mexico and go to stay at Lalo’s fortified hacienda in Chihuahua. Mike (Jonathan Banks) reports back to Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) about Lalo’s hideout, and wheels are set in motion for a team of armed assassins to eliminate Lalo while he sleeps that night — information Mike reluctantly passes on to Saul when he comes calling, looking for assurances Kim’s going to be safe in the future.
A lot of the finale took place in Lalo’s large home, filled with his family and friends, who treat Nacho hospitably before he goes to meet Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) at his luxury ranch the next morning. Nacho’s being elevated in status on Lalo’s word for his good work in Alburquerque, and Nacho manages to impress Don Eladio with his bold plans for expansion in “the north” while Lalo stays behind in Mexico and the other Salamanca’s aren’t able to keep the business afloat. In other times, this would be everything Nacho’s been working towards his whole adult life, but now he’s just looking for a way out because his father’s life is under threat from Gus. And thanks to Mike, Nacho gets an anonymous tip-off from the hitmen to open the homestead’s locked gate at 3 a.m, letting them in so they can take Lalo out of the picture once and for all.
The big set-piece of “Something Unforgivable” was the nighttime raid on the hacienda, with Nacho’s plans running into trouble because Lalo himself is late-night drinking near to the locked gate he needs to open before 3 a.m. Better Call Saul always offers a high benchmark when it comes to wringing tension out of scenes, so seeing Nacho set a delayed diversion with a kitchen fire to force Lalo away from the gate was edge-of-your-seat stuff… even before the suspense and mounting horror of seeing Nacho escape and let the armed men swarm into the homestead.
Unfortunately for Nacho, Lalo manages to survive the surprise attack because he has home turf advantage — with an escape hatch (evoking Pablo Escobar’s secret methods of evading capture) allowed him to circle back on his attackers and take them out. It was perhaps a little unlikely these highly trained men would be so easily tricked, without having a man keeping an eye on the bigger picture from a distance, but it still made for an entertaining action sequence.
And so we end season 5 with Lalo forcing a surviving assassin to confirm the job has been done (meaning Gus, Mike, Saul and Kim are going to think a threat has vanished that’s actually alive and itching for vengeance), and it’s clear that Lalo’s instinctually knows Nacho was involved in the incursion because he’s suddenly nowhere to be seen. My prediction that Nacho won’t survive season 5 will have to be delayed for yet another year, but surely he doesn’t have long to live if he’s presumably out in the middle of nowhere with an enraged Lalo on his tail? The sixth season will be the last, of course.
For a season finale, “Something Unforgivable” was entertaining and contained bursts of memorable moments and some intriguing suggestions about where the story’s headed. I would’ve liked for bigger things to happen between Saul and Kim, perhaps, but the show has a tendency to keep those characters on a slightly more subdued area of the overall story and leave the seat-gripping drama and action to the machinations between Fring and the Salamanca family. But whichever ingredient of Better Call Saul grips you most (the character study side, or the drug cartel action side), “Something Unforgivable” offered a little of both, to cap a season that finally managed to balance the Saul and Mike halves of the storytelling.
Click for more BETTER CALL SAUL recaps
Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on April 22, 2020. | https://medium.com/framerated/better-call-saul-5-10-something-unforgivable-4d713c73cd9b | ['Dan Owen'] | 2020-05-05 17:44:02.872000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Review', 'TV', 'Television', 'Better Call Saul'] |
After COVID-19: Prevent Homelessness Among Survivors of Domestic Abuse | With the implementation of stay-at-home orders, victims found themselves trapped in a home with an abuser, leading to more frequent abuse. Now, victims who can leave abusers confront a new crisis: housing.
Los Angeles County is in a particularly vulnerable position battling two issues that could still get worse: a heightened level of homelessness, as the current homeless population jumped by almost 13 percent even before the economic impacts of the health crisis; and coronavirus contagions.
An American Life Panel survey, conducted by RAND, showed that 9 percent of respondents living with a partner reported an increase in physical or verbal abuse since the outbreak of COVID-19. Simultaneously, several major cities reported a drop in domestic violence reports to police during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing evidence that people may have been trapped with an abuser without privacy to call hotlines or create safety plans with advocates.
As states’ stay-at-home guidance begins to lift, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is experiencing a spike in calls, which may suggest a stifled demand for protection created by stay-at-home orders.
Continued social distancing restrictions have led to a 50 percent reduction in the capacity of domestic violence shelters. Some shelters have placed survivors temporarily in hotel rooms, but this practice is unsustainable for most shelters that operate with minimal budgets.
Even before COVID-19, housing resources available to victims of domestic violence were insufficient. According to a report by the National Network to End Domestic Violence, on just one day last September, there were 11,336 requests for help that went unmet. Nearly 70 percent of all requests were for a safe place to stay. Without assistance, these survivors — typically women and children — are more likely to be forced into homelessness. Research in New York found that 80 percent of mothers and children experiencing homelessness had previously experienced domestic violence. Other studies found that between 22 percent and 57 percent of homeless women report that domestic violence directly led to their homelessness.
Between 22 percent and 57 percent of homeless women report that domestic violence directly led to their homelessness.
Cases of COVID-19 in LA County are currently the highest in the nation, and there is no information suggesting steep declines are anywhere in sight.
As city and county officials grapple with the decision to slow down the reopening of the economy and re-implement stay-at-home orders, current victims of domestic violence may face two less than ideal options: remain at home in abusive conditions or try to find refuge in shelters that may not have room. As reopening continues, it may be more necessary than ever to find support for programs like California’s Housing First (PDF). Unlike other assistance programs for survivors of abuse, California’s Housing First program provides flexible funds for survivors to use for a range of financial needs including rent, car payments, food, and childcare. Such programs adapt to the needs of survivors in a way that promotes long term housing and financial stability.
If cases of COVID-19 continue to increase, and officials resurrect stay-at-home orders across the state, California officials could consider becoming proactive and creating opportunities for victims of abuse to escape dangerous housing environments. California and other states could learn from tactics used by European countries to identify those at risk of domestic abuse. Several countries implemented “silent and save services” where victims of domestic abuse can go to essential businesses, like pharmacies and supermarkets, and use a code word (“MASK 19”) to signal an urgent request for protection from domestic abusers. Such strategies could provide help to victims systematically and ensure survivors find open and safe housing and mitigate another surge in homelessness.
With the current spike of COVID-19 cases, the pandemic is not a thing of the past. Risk factors of household violence, like economic recessions and joblessness, are still present and so too are the risks of intimate partner violence. Now could be the best time to invest in programs that can help victims get out of unsafe living arrangements and into safe and stable housing before a second wave of COVID-19 cases pushes more families into unsafe environments.
Sierra Smucker is an associate policy researcher, Alicia Locker is an associate physical scientist and Aisha Najera Chesler is a mathematician at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. | https://medium.com/rand-corporation/after-covid-19-prevent-homelessness-among-survivors-of-domestic-abuse-8acd7d14e5d7 | ['Rand Corporation'] | 2020-07-07 15:47:47.059000+00:00 | ['Domestic Violence', 'Homelessness', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19', 'Los Angeles'] |
How to Monitor Machine Learning and Deep Learning Experiments | Training machine learning/deep learning models can take a really long time, and understanding what is happening as your model is training is absolutely crucial.
Typically you can monitor:
Metrics and losses
Hardware resource consumption
Errors, Warnings, and other logs kept (stderr and stdout)
Depending on the library or framework, this can be easier or more difficult, but pretty much always it is doable.
Most libraries allow you to monitor your model training in one of the following ways:
You can add a monitoring function at the end of the training loop
You can add a monitoring callback either on iteration (batch) or epoch end.
Some monitoring tools can hook to the training loop magically by parsing logs or monkey patching.
Let me show how to monitor machine learning models in each case.
How to add monitor function in the training loop
Some frameworks, especially lower-level ones, don’t have an elaborate callback system in place, and you have direct access to the training loop.
One such framework example is PyTorch.
A typical training loop looks like this:
for inputs, labels in trainloader:
optimizer.zero_grad()
outputs = net(inputs)
loss = criterion(outputs, labels)
loss.backward()
optimizer.step()
And you can add monitoring in the following way:
for inputs, labels in trainloader:
optimizer.zero_grad()
outputs = net(inputs)
loss = criterion(outputs, labels)
loss.backward()
optimizer.step()
neptune.log_metric('loss', loss)
Of course, you can monitor more things than just the loss.
In that case, you should create a function that takes outputs and labels and creates all the metrics you care about, like accuracy, confusion matrix, and others.
def monitoring_function(outputs, labels):
acc = accuracy_score(outputs, labels)
loss = criterion(outputs, labels) fig = plt.figure()
confusion_matrix = contusion_matrix(outputs, labels) neptune.log_metric('accuracy', acc)
neptune.log_metric('loss', loss)
neptune.log_image('performance_charts', fig)
And place it after optimizer.step()
Inserting your monitoring function directly inside the training loop is not the most convenient option, but it gives you a lot of flexibility, and sometimes, there is just no other way.
How to add monitoring callback to the machine/deep learning framework
Most machine learning frameworks have a callback system that lets you hook in your monitoring functions in different places of the training loop without actually changing the training loop.
Let me show you how it works.
The typical training loop looks like this:
for epoch in epochs:
for batch in dataloader:
handle(batch)
And you can create places in that loop where the callback object will be called:
for epoch in epochs:
callback.on_epoch_start()
for batch in dataloader:
callback.on_batch_start()
handle(batch)
callback.on_batch_end()
callback.on_epoch_end()
Then when you create your monitoring callback, you need to overwrite callback methods.
For example, in Keras, you can create a custom monitoring callback by inheriting from the keras.callbacks.Callback class and overriding .on_epoch_end() or .on_batch_end methods.
class MonitoringCallback(Callback): def on_epoch_end(self, epoch, logs=None):
for metric_name, metric_value in logs.items():
neptune.log_metric(metric_name, metric_value)
And pass it to the appropriate fit method.
model.fit(..., callbacks=[MonitoringCallback()])
Note:
Neptune has callback implementations for most major machine learning frameworks, so you don’t have to implement those callbacks and can use the ones we created.
For example, in the popular Catalyst deep learning framework, you need to import the logger:
from catalyst.contrib.dl.callbacks.neptune import NeptuneLogger neptune_logger = NeptuneLogger(...)
And pass it to the runner:
from catalyst.dl import SupervisedRunner runner = SupervisedRunner()
runner.train(..., callbacks=[neptune_logger])
For a full list of supported integrations, go to the documentation.
How to track your machine/deep learning models “magically”
In some frameworks, you can “magically” hook into the framework training loop by monkey-patching default loggers.
For example, you could take the keras callback we implemented before and make it a default.
We just need to overwrite (monkey-patch) what keras thinks is the default BaseLogger .
def use_monitoring_magic():
from keras.callbacks import BaseLogger, Callback class MonitoringCallback(Callback):
def on_epoch_end(self, logs={}):
for metric_name, metric_value in logs.items():
neptune.log_metric(metric_name, metric_value) keras.callbacks.BaseLogger = MonitoringCallback use_monitoring_magic()
...
model.fit(...)
Note:
This is exactly how we implemented neptune integration with keras.
import neptune_tensorboard as neptune_tb neptune_tb.integrate_with_keras()
# your training logic
model.fit(x_train, y_train)
You can check out the full code example in the docs.
Final thoughts
In this article, you’ve learned:
How to add monitoring callbacks to deep learning frameworks
How to add a monitor function to the model training loop
How for some frameworks you can add model monitoring “magically”
I hope that with all that knowledge, you will be able to monitor your machine learning model however you train them! | https://medium.com/neptune-ai/how-to-monitor-machine-learning-and-deep-learning-experiments-955fb46c6e2c | ['Patrycja Jenkner'] | 2020-10-27 09:34:13.126000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Keras', 'Data Science', 'Pytorch', 'Deep Learning'] |
Are we Turning the Internet Against Ourselves? | Are we Turning the Internet Against Ourselves?
We’re creating a digital culture of alienation
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
The social contract is dead and it’s going to take a messiah to resurrect it. More than likely, they will strive for results over marketing, causing vast cognitive dissonance among many. Personal enrichment as a consequence of striving for the common good isn’t a new concept for most of the world but America struggles to grasp it.
Look, here’s a socialist secret: it’s a shortcut.
When we all join forces, change happens faster so everyone enjoys greater ease at the same time. When we share the work, it only takes a fraction of the time to complete the task, see. And because what feels good for us tends to feel good for others why wouldn’t we support social mobility for all if there’s a way to conjure it up?
Yes, but we’re Americans and we like to have a choice, we reply.
Fair enough. Equal opportunities doesn’t mean we have to take them, it means they’re available to anyone who wants them whenever they do so we can ditch the scarcity mindset once and for all. | https://asingularstory.medium.com/are-we-turning-the-internet-against-ourselves-b52b6dde20ef | ['A Singular Story'] | 2020-02-19 16:51:16.569000+00:00 | ['Future', 'Society', 'Philosophy', 'Politics', 'Internet'] |
APPLE: An AI-based pricing system at LOGIVAN | Pricing
Lots of things come with fixed prices. For example, Burger King’s large French fries cost $2.39 everywhere in America. Or EyesPhone. For details, you can see the table below.
Seems legit. Or not.
Evaluation, simply pricing, is difficult. It involves a lot of skills, actions, and experience to get the right price. Therefore, people are always curious about the price, i.e. the upcoming phone, food at restaurants, or even people themselves.
Who doesn’t love eyesPhone?
Pricing in logistics
At LOGIVAN, we get dozens of thousands of booking requests per month. The first thing to do is to give each of them a price. We tried the simplest taxi-based formula as following
Final price = goods_weight * price_per_km * distance
It didn’t work. There are more than 9999 factors that may affect the price. For example, truck type, time, cargo types, fuel price, toll fee, etc. Therefore, getting a reasonable price is the most difficult task in logistics, and is the top reason for failing the deal.
APPLE: Auto Pricing Project for LOGIVAN: code E
One of the top priorities at LOGIVAN is to build an automated pricing system.
First, to make sure that we are not going to find a needle in a haystack, we built a POC model (which then became APPLE v1) to be sure that the price in logistics is model-able. The result seems promising: MAPE (mean absolute percentage error) is less than 11%. MAE (mean absolute error) is less than 300 (the mean value of all orders is 4000). We are confident that building an automated pricing system for truck delivery services is indeed possible.
We would also like to share some interesting facts:
· The price is calculated from several dozens of original features and then transformed into 200+ features to feed into the model.
· When we compared our model with AutoML, the rising star of Google, the result indicated that APPLE outperformed it clearly.
Features used to build the pricing model.
The APPLE v2
We deployed the model on product for two weeks and monitored its performance. Not bad, we can say. But there were several aspects we needed to consider:
· Flexibility. How the model can quickly adapt to changes in the market, business, etc.
· Feedback mechanism. Most of AI systems retrain the model by a fixed-period. But if we found a wrong case (wrong price), how can we quickly fix it?. How can operators feedback to APPLE more actively?
To satisfy the aforementioned requirements, APPLE-v2 has incorporated the following changes:
· Flexibility. APPLE can quickly adapt to the change in fuel, market status, or LOGIVAN business by using a multi-stage architecture.
Design of APPLE to make it quickly adapt to market and business changes
· The model is based on an incremental learning algorithm, so we don’t have to re-train it. We designed a feedback-oriented and continuous training process for APPLE to utilize this feature: directly feedback mechanism and training data pool.
· We also re-coded APPLE using pyTorch, leading to a huge improvement in speed.
· We invented a custom loss function, which performed extremely well with the pricing problem. We are ready for patenting this function.
Continuous learning mechanism for APPLE
Early results from APPLE v2 are very promising. APPLE v2 clearly outperformed the previous one in many aspects:
- Accuracy: the MAPE was reduced to 8%, the mean error of negative cases is less than 1%. This can guarantee the profit for drivers.
- Productivity: User now can directly feedback to the model. APPLE can keep live-training without re-deploying the component models.
- Performance: APPLE can handle thousands of requests per minute. The APPLE is hosted on an AWS t2.large machine together with other LOGIVAN AI services.
Future work: an AI bot that works as a negotiator
In the near future, we will also take into consideration drivers’ and customers’ profiles. More specifically, we would expect that the model can understand truck owners’ driving habits, years of experience, permanent address, and other personal details to propose an appropriate price. Similarly, customers’ information such as shipping habits will also be used as training data. By knowing more about the shipment itself, as well as understanding the preferences of the truck’s owner and the customer, our model will offer a price that would make everybody happy. The data science team at LOGIVAN is currently focusing on this part of the project and would expect to integrate it into our product by 2020.
Conclusion
Shipment valuation is indeed a very interesting problem that requires resources and intense research. LOGIVAN is proud to be one of the pioneers in Vietnam to apply statistical analysis and artificial intelligence to provide the best available solution in the market. Being fast, accurate, flexible, and scalable, APPLE is a very promising start in tackling one of the toughest problems in the logistics industry.
This blog was written by Hiep NX, a data scientist at LGV, and edited by me, Vu Anh, the lead of LGV data science team. I hope you guys will be in love with our AI-based services, i.e., REEL, APPLE. See you guys in next posts. | https://medium.com/logivan/apple-an-ai-based-pricing-system-at-logivan-cf69eb989fca | [] | 2019-10-02 03:29:14.939000+00:00 | ['Logivan', 'Pricing', 'Logistics', 'AI', 'Incremental'] |
Case Study: Mobile Indexing App | TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN A WOOD
After sketching out some ideas we had two flows for two different approaches we wanted to test. So we quickly built an invision prototype with the two flows and headed to a local college to test them.
Initially we thought we wanted to get the kinks out first on local English speakers because we didn’t want to “waste” our limited local Brazilians on a first test that we weren’t sure how it would pan out.
Flow 1: The user chooses something to highlight something and then highlights it. So for example they click “people” then they highlight the name, then if they want to highlight a city they select “Cities” then highlight it.
Flow 2: The user is prompted to highlight names dates and places and then after highlighting something, they are prompted to identify what they highlighted. When they make the initial highlight it is yellow then once they identify what it was it turns it’s respective color.
MISTAKE
We had a limited amount of local Brazilians available for testing so we ended up testing in English to “save” our resources. You will see later on how this choice led us down the wrong road. This prototype was intended for Portuguese speakers from Brazil and we should have stuck to that in every phase of testing.
FLOW #1 WON
Testing showed that 4 out of the 5 people liked flow 1 better. They said with flow 2 they didn’t know what to do initially, there wasn’t a strong enough call to action. Other insights we learned were:
Even for flow #1 it wasn’t clear for everyone what to do at first, that they needed to tap on a category then start highlighting.
People were confused about the wording of the tasks (like highlighting and transcribing) initially till they tried it.
Once they tried it they liked it more compared to traditional “it’s good that it’s on your phone so you don’t even have to pull out your computer.”
It was more work for people to highlight First name / last name not needed, just say “full name.”
MAKING DESIGN DECISIONS
After getting valuable feedback from user testing, we met again to collaborate on the design decisions we needed to make to keep this project progressing. Here are some of those decisions:
01 CONTINUE WITH FLOW #1: Each user test revealed that the mental model that local American/English speakers related most with was to choose a data type (name, date, or place) and then to highlight it, rather than highlighting something and identifying what it was. We decided to flesh out this flow more in the next round.
02 HIGHLIGHT ALL THE NAMES OR 1 AT A TIME? One idea we had was what if a person just stayed in “name” mode and highlighted all the names on the image? We realized that this could be the fastest approach to highlighting because you stay in one frame of mind. The negative to this approach is we wouldn’t know what name matched with what city or date on the image which was a key business need.
So we decided we would do another test with this new flow. We wanted to see if highlighting just all the names, or all the dates, or all the cities would be a lot faster and be a game changer for this app. If that was the case then we would need to build another micro-task in the app later to connect all the data or see if the business could work around this given the potential speed of this approach.
03 COMBINE FIRST AND LAST NAMES: One thing that was clear from testing was separating out first and last names proved to be more clunky and confusing. We changed it from “highlight first names” then “highlight last names” to just “highlight a full name”.
04 ON-BOARDING WAS PARAMOUNT: We also realized from testing how confused people were on just what to do because this prototype was so different than traditional indexing. We needed some on-boarding to help people get context for what to do.
05 CLICK AND DRAG TO HIGHLIGHT AND USE 2 FINGERS TO PAN: Another problem we had to solve is how would a user move or pan around the image and also highlight the image since they were both similar movements. In our competitive analysis we saw a lot of sights (desktop apps) that would click and drag to create a highlight. We decided to move forward with this approach. Then we decided since that required 1 finger then, if users wanted to move around the image they would use 2 fingers.
06 INVISION RAN ITS COURSE: From our tests with Invision we realized that we did great at testing the concept with Ivision and people liked it but it was almost impossible to test the true interactions. This app is all about moving, panning, zooming and image and creating highlights on it, and Invision just didn’t cut it.
Our testing helped us get approval for 1 dev to work very part time on this project to bring this to life. Me and Andrew then collaborated on those design changes by white boarding those concepts out and then updating our digital mocks and by talking with the developer to explain the ideas and interactions. We also invited him to come with us to test it. | https://medium.com/kevindewey/case-study-mobile-indexing-app-70af9a653d82 | ['Kevin Dewey'] | 2019-11-10 06:44:32.513000+00:00 | ['Human Centered Design', 'Mobile Apps', 'Case Study', 'UX', 'Interaction Design'] |
Unlocking Startups Using These 3 Rules With Sal Braico | Skot Waldron:
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So I just met a guy named Sal, and yes, he’s from New Jersey. Now he lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Take that for what it’s worth. Sal is an entrepreneur at heart. This dude has started four/five companies, depending on who you ask. And it’s all in the healthcare space. Healthcare is hard and Sal knows that, but he takes on the challenge and he has a few rules for how to make your startup more successful.
He lists three of those rules and number one is awesome. And I’m going to just tell you that it is, nevermind. I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to let Sal tell you what his three rules are. And number one has a lot to do with what we talk about on this show. So I want you to listen up. Sal brings a lot to the table. Number one, he’s going to talk about his new healthcare company that he is starting called Pivotal Health, and he is going to enlighten you about what that takes to start up a company. It’s on the pains, the frustrations, and also the rewards that go along with that. Stay tuned. It’s going to be awesome. Let’s do this thing.
Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now and where you come from.
Sal Braico:
Yeah. I am not new to the entrepreneurial world. This is my, I guess third startup, I guess maybe fourth startup. So for the last, close to 20 years, I’ve been starting and/or running startup companies. Everything in the last 18 to 20 years has all been in healthcare. I was the first employee of a biotech company back in 2002. And I ran that for about four or five years. And then I started a medical device company, ran that for another four years or so. And then I went to a more established business. It was a pharmacy company, but it was really like about to grow really fast. So I got there to kind of help grow that. And then I went to run a healthcare IT company, and I’m just leaving that. And now I’m in the process of starting up Pivotal Health.
So what pivotal is really doing is trying to bring consumer friendly healthcare. The health systems of today are filled with fantastic people, really passionate, smart people who want to help people, but they’re not great for those everyday problems that you have. For the sore throats, for the ear infections, for those kinds of things. The big health systems are really not good for that. They’re fantastic if you have cancer, if you need a heart surgery, if you have something big. Then there are fantastic health systems across this country.
But for those everyday things, healthcare is not easy. Who do you call? When do you call? Is this covered? Is this not covered? Do you go to the ER? Do you go to the urgent care? All of these things, people face these issues every day. And if you have kids, then you’re dealing with those issues with your kids. Is this an ear infection? Oh my God, do I have to pack up all the kids and bring them to the ER? What do you do?
And so some business partners and I have decided to kind of create this platform where we can deliver high quality, convenient healthcare, and we’re going to combine house calls and telehealth. So if we need to send a clinician to your home, then we will do that. If it can be solved with a telehealth call, then we could do that as well. But it’d all be done at a time that works for you.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. So there’s a lot of questions with that, right?
SAL BRAICO:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
First of all, we’re just going to start on, ask the question. So why have you been in healthcare for so long? I mean like two decades of healthcare. Healthcare is hard. You just like to take on hard things? What’s the whole thing there?
SAL BRAICO:
It kind of started by accident. Actually, I went to business school at the University of Wisconsin and I went into business school with the intention of probably starting an IT company or something. I had an engineering background and I had worked in IT. And so that was my plan. But during the second year of business school, I actually got connected with two University of Wisconsin professors who had an idea for a biotech company.
And so I worked with them to create the first business plan. I convinced them to bring me on as employee number one. And I just I’ve been in healthcare ever since. It’s a very specific industry. It’s very different than the financial industry. It’s very different from like tech companies. It’s got its own specific things for better or for worse.
So I’ve just been kind of doing it. I did the biotech and then I did the medical device and then I did the pharmacy home healthcare business, and then the healthcare IT company, and then now this. So all of those things have kind of led. I’m like taking things that I’ve learned from each of those and using that knowledge, using all of the pain that I felt going through all those things, all of the really hard things that you learn and taking all those to work on this thing.
SKOT WALDRON:
On your journey, you’ve encountered a lot of things, things that didn’t go so well, things that went awesome. And like you said, you’ve learned your lessons throughout all these different ventures to launch now this. I’m assuming this is not going to be your last, right? Seeing the trend of what’s happened over the past 20 years that this is something … What does it take to build this? So this is, you say your fourth or your fifth?
SAL BRAICO:
Fourth or fifth, depending on how you count them. Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. Fourth or fifth depending on how you count. What’s one of the secrets? Like inform us, what does it take to launch a startup, because there’s a lot of people that want to launch startups in this country and a lot of them fail and you’ve had successes. You probably had failures in the past as well. Or we won’t call them failures. Let’s call them learning experiences, in the past. What’s the secret? What do you use as a backbone to help keep you moving?
SAL BRAICO:
So I think number one, tenacity, it takes a lot of tenacity. You have to talk to a lot of people. You have to get told no many, many times, and you just have to keep on doing it. You’ve got to keep on knocking on the doors. You’ve got to keep on making those phone calls. You’ve got to keep on recruiting people. You just need to keep on doing it. And that’s tough. It’s not easy to be told no over and over again, or to have people say, why you can’t do this. Oh no, that’s too hard. There’s too many hospitals and people are going to their primary care physician.
No, no, I look at what does it take to make this thing work? Let’s really focus on that. Let’s focus on what does it take to make a project work. Now there’s always risk. Always. Are those risks, things that I can work on, mitigate? So for example, with the biotech company, one of the major risks that was out there was the FDA. We were working on a very novel product. And the FDA at that time did not have a lot of experience looking at products like that. So that’s a tremendous risk, regulatory risk. Looking back on it, I would probably not do that company again because that’s a risk that’s out of my control.
With the medical device company, there was a risk of if this product would actually work. Again, that was out of my control. I could raise all the money in the world. I could have a great team of people, but if the product doesn’t actually work, if it doesn’t help the animals that it was being tested in, or if you don’t get those results, there’s really not much that you can do.
In a company like this, there’s no technical risk. There’s no intellectual property risk. There’s no any other kinds of like technical science risk. This is all operations. Can you raise the capital that you need? That’s going to be a sales process. I need to convince people to invest in this. Can we create a scalable platform? We’re not going to really build anything new technically. It’s going to be all off the shelf software. Can we hire the right people? I’ve hired and fired many, many people before. Can we create the scalable platform?
So this is all like human operational risk and having done and seen all the things that I’ve done so far, I’m very comfortable with that. I believe that I can figure this out. I believe I can hire the right people to help me figure this out. That’s also something that I’ve learned too, is really focused on hiring people that have done this before.
For example, one of the key things about what we’re going to be doing is billing. We need to process claims and send claims into insurance companies. I know from the past, if I have a billing person who has never done that before, that is going to create problems. So this time I’m going to focus on finding people that have done this before. People that have done this type of billing before. I may have to pay a little bit more for that, but that’s okay. I don’t have a problem with that because I know the problems that can happen if you don’t have that right person. Can people learn? Of course they can, but they can only learn if they’re learning from someone that has done it before.
SKOT WALDRON:
So hard skills. What about the soft skills? So you’ve got hard skills, the things that you want to hire for. You know you need somebody in this role to fulfill this position and this job to get this thing done. And yes, we want competent people that have experience, and we’re even willing to pay more for them. What about the type of people that you want working for you?
SAL BRAICO:
So I have a couple of rules. Number one, no jerks. None.
SKOT WALDRON:
No jerks. Oh man. But what if they’re good at their job? No?
SAL BRAICO:
Nope.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. No jerks
SAL BRAICO:
Life is too short. I’ve worked with many jerks before and it just drains you. It makes you feel sick at the end of the day that you have to deal with this person. You’re like, well, why can’t they just understand? Absolutely no jerks. So the person has to be someone that … You don’t have to be best friends with them, but they have to get along with everybody. Okay, number one.
Number two. Are they smart? Do they have horsepower? If you don’t have the horsepower, then you’re not going to be able to figure things out. And then number three, have they done it before? Those are the three things that I always look for. Is it a nice person? Is it someone that I want to spend time with? Do I want to figure out problems with this person?
Number two, are they smart? Can they bring some creativity to the position? Can they figure out problems? There’s always problems. Nothing ever goes right. There’s always something that breaks. Always. Almost every day something doesn’t go according to plan. So you need to have people on your team that can figure those problems out. Because if everything has to go up to the CEO or to the COO, it’s just not going to work.
I like to give people freedom to figure out things and then to please come to me if they need help. But my first question when people who work for me when they bring me problems, my first question is, what would you do? What do you think? Because they probably know a lot more about that specific area than me.
SKOT WALDRON:
So hire people smarter than you in that thing?
SAL BRAICO:
Yep.
SKOT WALDRON:
So, no jerks, make sure they can think and figure things out and do they have the experience. Solid three rules. Love it. I love that your first one is no jerks. Like really good. Let’s revisit that for a second. What does the jerk do? What does the jerk encapsulate? And what’s the result of that on the culture?
SAL BRAICO:
So a jerk may dismiss the ideas of their teammates without really listening to them. A jerk may just be rude with kind of how they talk to people, how they treat people. A jerk would be arrogant to the point. And you know, confidence is not arrogance. There’s a difference there, but who may be arrogant and think that they know better and that they don’t want to learn.
I think everyone needs to always be learning. If you think that you don’t have to learn, if you think like, well, I’ve done this before. If you have that attitude, then you’re a jerk. You need to be open. You need to be willing to listen. And then also you need to be friendly. Just the everyday kind of conversational skills of asking people, hey, how was your day? What did you do this weekend and things like that. I mean, that’s important. You may not really care what the person did over the weekend, but it makes them feel good if you at least ask them. And so if you can’t at least fake it, then there’s a problem there.
SKOT WALDRON:
Really good. The results of that type of individual, we treat it like a greenhouse. Our businesses are greenhouses and we’re trying to grow plants. And everybody in there represents a plant, everybody in our business and we have these plants and we’re nurturing them and we’re growing them. Some of them need different things to grow. And then we bring toxicity into that greenhouse and it just starts killing the life in everything. And it just spreads and it’s done. And then people can’t be productive. Have you seen that happen?
SAL BRAICO:
Yeah, I’ve seen it multiple times. I saw it even back before when I was working in IT. There was a guy that was on our team. We were working on this project. I mean, he was a total jerk and you couldn’t approach him. All of the younger guys, and I was one of the younger guys at that time, you were afraid to ask him anything, because he just didn’t want to be bothered.
And so that caused problems. That caused technical problems and things, things that he could have easily solved. But we were so afraid of talking to him because he was such a jerk. Things ended up not working the way that they should. And so I saw it there and I’ve just seen it afterwards. People that they don’t care about anybody else. They only care about themselves. People feel that. Most people feel that pretty quickly. You can tell within a day if someone’s a jerk or not. Like during the interview process, people try to put up that good face and all that kind of stuff. But soon after that, you can see very, very quickly if they’re a jerk or not.
SKOT WALDRON:
It kills collaboration, is what I just heard you say, right? There’s this, when there’s a problem, there’s a culture of fear and domination where I’m tiptoeing. I don’t want to speak up because I know I’m just going to get bulldozed and crushed and I don’t want to do that. Self-preservation kicks in. It’s like, nope, life’s too short for that. It’s like that dude’s going to crash and burn. He’ll crash and burn a little bit. And that hurts productivity overall. Nobody wants to operate that way.
So now you, launching a new company, have a very defined number one rule of no jerks because of the understanding and the experience of what that does to cultures and how that impacts things. You have an interesting thought about how you want to invest in people and create engagement within your new company. Explain that a little bit.
SAL BRAICO:
Yeah. I strongly believe that all employees should have some piece of the equity. They should get some stock options. They should get that in the company, because there, they will be taking a chance. So it’s important that as the company’s value goes up, that they also are able to participate in that. So one day if the company goes public, or if it gets sold or something. Maybe someone walks away with $50,000 or they walk away with like $100,000 or $200,000, or maybe even more. That’s awesome.
If you can help pay for their kid’s college, if you can help them buy a car, if you can help them pay off student loans or a house. That’s all incredible things. And by giving them that ownership, I want them to feel like this is their company. It’s not just mine. I can’t do this. Me and my business partners, we can’t make this work without everybody. We’re going to be out taking care of people. So every time one of our clinicians goes out to someone’s house, they are representing Pivotal Health. And so they need to bring that attitude of, yeah, I want to help you, let’s solve this problem. And so I want them to feel like that, hey, this is important. Not just for the company, it’s important for me as well. I feel strongly that companies like this, all employees should definitely participate in that equity.
SKOT WALDRON:
I get so frustrated when I see companies not investing in their people and not helping them feel part of the growth and the opportunities there, because what happens is that the excitement may fizzle from that first initial, I’m getting hired at this new company and I have a job, but what happens when they have a bad day or a bad week or a bad month, or there is a little bit of bad harmony inside the office, or maybe some hard conversation happens. They have no skin in the game. There’ll be just like, I’m out. Peace.
Or it’s, I still need a paycheck, but I’m not giving you anymore. They go out as your brand representatives, they represent your brand, who you are as a company, and they’re visiting those patients. And that reputation is going to spread and it’s going to help, or it’s going to hurt your business. Investing in them, helps them invest in the patient, which in turn comes right back around to you.
SAL BRAICO:
Exactly. Right. We don’t want to just take care of people once. I want them to come back to us over and over again. I mean you don’t just have one medical problem a year. Most people have two or three, especially when you have kids and things like that. People get sick.
I’m going to stress to everybody, always do what is best for the patient. It may mean that we lose money on this one interaction. So what? Who cares? If they know that we took care of them, if they know that we help them out, they’re going to keep on coming back to us. And when their friend calls them and says, hey, my son has this, or, hey, my husband’s not feeling well. They’re going to be like, hey, call up these guys. Call up Pivotal. They will help you out.
SKOT WALDRON:
Love it. Invest in your people, they’ll invest in the patient. That patient feels loved, taken care of, feels like you’re serving them, turn right back around and serve you. So many ways.
SAL BRAICO:
Exactly.
SKOT WALDRON:
How can people get in touch with you? When is this launching? Tell us about Pivotal and the future and how do we engage with you? What’s the thing you’re doing right now and what do you need help with?
SAL BRAICO:
So we’re in the process of raising capital. So we’re out talking to potential investors now. We only want to talk to people that have the means to invest. This is an early stage company. People that are angels, maybe some venture capital firms. So we’re out talking to those people. The best way people to reach me is probably email. It’s [email protected]. And we would be glad to go through the business plan with them and walk them through it. But that’s what we’re in the process of doing right now. We’ve been kind of refining the business plan, kind of getting all of the pieces together so that we can get this money in the door and just kind of get the operation going.
SKOT WALDRON:
Sounds awesome. Sounds exciting. You’ve been down this road before. You look cool, calm, collected. I don’t know if you’re just faking it, but you know, good job at doing whatever you’re doing. Awesome conversation. Thanks. I really appreciate you being on, Sal, and sharing some insights with us about building companies from the ground up and what that takes and just really appreciate the value you brought.
SAL BRAICO:
Great. Skot, thank you very much.
SKOT WALDRON:
Rule number one, no jerks. I love it. Jerks destroy companies because they destroy culture, which destroys people, which means collaboration is dead, which means the company, the atmosphere, the productivity, nobody wants to belong to a culture that grows jerks. We all want to belong to something that we feel invested in and that we feel part of and that we can grow with. And that is what’s important when starting your company. That was his rule number one.
And then finally, also we need to find people that can think. Use your brains. Yes, there’s processes and systems. Use your brains. You need to be able to think. And then the experience, the hard skills, make sure you’re developing yourself in a way that makes you valuable to other people around you. Thank you, Sal. Good information and good luck with the startup.
You can find all of my interviews at skotwaldron.com. On my blog, you can find a lot of free resources there for building teams, helping unlock the potential of people and your teams and your organizations. There’s a bunch of free resources there. You can also find these interviews on my YouTube channel. Again, it’s been fun being with you. See you.
Want to make your culture and team invincible? You can create a culture of empowerment and liberation through better communication and alignment. We call these invincible teams. Make your team invincible through a data-driven approach that is used by Google, the CDC, the Air Force, Pfizer, and Chick-fil-A. Click here or the image below to learn more.
The post Unlocking Startups Using These 3 Rules With Sal Braico appeared first on Build a brand worth following. . | https://medium.com/thoughts-of-a-brand-strategist/unlocking-startups-using-these-3-rules-with-sal-braico-95a64700efed | ['Skot Waldron'] | 2020-12-16 18:47:50.163000+00:00 | ['Company Culture'] |
Dealing With Paper Waste As an Eco-Friendly B Corp | The first step companies can take is to reduce the use of packaging materials or opt for sustainable alternatives like corn-based packing peanuts, air packs, or tree-free paper. These materials can be used repeatedly, and consumers can recycle them at home. Use leftover boxes for storage in your warehouse instead of throwing them out.
Another way to reduce the use of paper packaging is by modifying your boxes. Make the shipping containers smaller or form fit them to items so customers get their product securely but without as much waste. Changing box sizes may seem like a big change at first, but you can save on shipping and fuel costs while also helping the planet.
You May Be Recycling Wrong
As a B Corp, it’s likely that your business encourages employees to recycle paper, but you may not be doing it as effectively as possible. The first step is shredding your paper, but there is a right and a wrong way to shred. If you simply shred your paper and throw it in the recycling bin, it could still end up in the landfill. As a side note, before you even think about sending away that shredded paper, consider reusing it as packaging material for your boxes.
If you shred your paperwork and dispose of it with the rest of the recycling, those shreds go on an adventure that may or may not end at the recycling plant. One of the reasons is that not all recycling facilities will accept paper shreds. Even if they do, when these small scraps of paper are thrown on the conveyor belt, they can fall into other non-recyclable bins. Other recycling facilities use large screens to filter what they receive, and shredded paper can fall through and simply be thrown away. To ensure that your paper is properly cared for, you’ll want to consult a professional shredding service.
No matter how big or small your business may be, a shredding company can assist in your paper conservation needs. Many of these businesses have mobile shredding vehicles that can come to your location and take the paper off your hands. The largest corporations might consider investing in an industrial shredder, which can shred paper and other materials including plastic and metal. It will package processed items correctly so the recycling center can handle them properly.
Turn to Technology
One of the easiest ways to reduce paper waste is not to use paper in the first place! Instead of faxing paper documents and cramming filing cabinets full of records, store everything in the cloud and go paperless. For those new to the idea, the cloud is any one of many online storage solutions where you can keep all important business information without keeping it on your hard drive.
Not only can you use the cloud for storage, but cloud-friendly apps could make physical files and paper faxing a thing of the past; instead, all you’ll have to do is use your phone. Applications such as Files Anywhere and CamScanner allow you to fax and scan documents no matter where you are in the office. Once they are in the system, you can access them at will. These applications are inexpensive and help reduce your carbon footprint.
Going paperless will not happen overnight, but there are other ways that you can get there faster, including adjusting the settings on your printer to double-sided printing or creating automatic electronic PDFs. If you deal with a lot of signatures, you could transition to accept digital signatures, which avoids waste and is still legally binding. You also can go paperless for your meetings by avoiding the paper handouts and using a slideshow on a large TV in the middle of the room or emailing the presentation so attendees can view it on their laptop or smartphone.
Your B Corp certification shows that you are dedicated to sustainability. However, there are always more ways to prevent waste. Try some of these paper-saving techniques and continue to do right by the world. | https://bthechange.com/dealing-with-paper-waste-as-an-ecofriendly-b-corp-60a02ee8ab97 | ['Noah Rue'] | 2019-09-24 11:41:01.363000+00:00 | ['B Corp', 'Recycling', 'Reduce Waste', 'Business', 'Eco Friendly'] |
The real meaning and process of data democratization. | The real meaning and process of data democratization.
How to do it and why to do it right now…
The scene: a small village in rural India. The whole of the village has gathered to listen as public records are being read out. A villager is listed in the public record as having rented out his plough to the government-sponsored irrigation project. “No,” he says, “I did not do that. I was away in Delhi at my cousin’s wedding at that time.” There is laughter, as well as outrage, as people immediately discover how they have been tricked and how public money has been siphoned away from them and their village. More false information is revealed: Examples such as items for bills for transport of materials for 6km when, in fact, the real distance is just 1km. A worker, employed according to government records on the construction of a new canal, stands up and asks: “What canal?” Workers involved in the building of houses confirm that fifty bags of cement, not one hundred, were supplied and used. At the end of the public hearing the chant goes up: “What do we want? Information. What do we want? Information: a story told by Dr. Richard Calland
Over the last fifty years, many states and their governments have formally acknowledged a right of access to information responding to these claims. More and more nations, for example, South Africa, have entrenched a right of access in their constitutions. Formal recognition of access rights is a no-brainer if institutions strive to maintain popular legitimacy. The road to more democracy is the road of data democratization. A very rigid correlation exists between access to information and the existence of democracy. Simply said: to make the right decision and to tick the right box on the voting ballot, the citizen must be informed. Access to information is essential for persons to realize their basic right to participate in the governing of their country and live under a system built on informed consent of the citizenry. In any state, and particularly in states where the policy analysis capabilities of civil society are poorly developed, political participation rights cannot be exercised effectively without access to government information. Sounds obvious? Great: let’s move on since apart from talking about that “ambitious ambition” of mine, I would like to cover a little bit of theory on data democratization in general, answering two main questions: why now? and how? in the opposite order.
How to democratize data?
Well the solution I found, is building a search engine. It is obviously not the only way to do it — far from it. But it is one that is flexible and at the same time powerful thanks to the emergence of data science.
I see three main steps in this process I chose, that I’ll cover one by one:
1. Making data easy to find
Most of the data that could be democratized is available somewhere. But the problem is that “somewhere” is more or less the same as “nowhere” when it comes to data usefulness. If only political campaign managers see the data you cannot call this democratization. The problem lies in the wrong KPIs (key performance indicators) of the people that publish data. Most of them focus on how to push as much data as possible to the internet instead o focusing on how many people will see this data.
If we finally agree on changing this focus, how will we reach the performance? This needs a good search engine with good search engine optimization. A good search engine is an intelligent one. In opposition to a simple search engine which only looks for keyword matches, intelligent search engines interpret the query by identifying or deducing the nature of the result wanted by the user, identify important parameters such as time and location mentioned in the query and finally take into account the context of the search. Once it is usable it also needs to be used. Reaching users can be done in numerous ways. Statistics show that data is mostly searched through search engines like Google. Thus, decent SEO is a crucial step towards the goal to facilitate data search.
2. Easy, understandable and high-quality data representation
Once the search engine is working and accessible, the next step is to display the results. This part seems simple, and at its core it is simple. But try to design and build something that looks & feels user-friendly but is complex enough to understand the whole picture and you’ll see that the task isn’t easier done than said. In fact, most of the wannabe solutions for data democratization are far from matching these criteria. Here are the main problems that solutions face in displaying data in the best possible manner:
The lack of directness is caused by the way the solutions treat their data: many solutions group data in tables and thus fail to display individual values and lose directness;
Factual imprecisions kill the whole deal. Can be tough to guarantee full precision, but a fall into this trap is definite;
Not answering the question is also among the very frustrating experiences a user can get;
Sources are necessary;
Data context is a must;
Representative visuals are a big plus (like infographics) for comprehension
An example of poor quality data representation
An article with a more in-depth overlook of data representation experience is coming soon…
3. Repeating the two first steps while augmenting the quantity of data
The third step is the one that gets ignored all the time in two ways.
Either a solution rushes in, adds all the possible data, and can’t handle it, or in the opposite case — adds too little data and the users don’t get enough value from the product to use it.
Illustration by Katerina Limpitsouni
The first option is the most common one. We see Statista.com that have lots and lots of data pilled up, mismanaged, and thus with poor search functionality and UX. They have data ranging from GDPs per capita, to Fortnite frag counts by esports professionals. And as it is common with almost everything (with a few exceptions): choosing quantity hurts quality.
The opposite problem is self-explanatory.
Data democratization needs to find it’s speed equilibrium: the intersection between the quality of search & data curve and the quantity necessary to have users.
Why democratize data now?
This sounds like an absurd question knowing that in the introduction I advocated for data democratization. And, let me assure you, I did not change my mind. I just believe that right now is the best time to accelerate the process of making information spread faster and reaching more eyes.
First of all, we have an immense amount of data coming out every day, progressively readier to be used. Governments are collecting more data than ever, opening it up to the public, and the quality of this data is increasing, although the speed and extent of this positive trend depends fiercely by country and region. Old-fashioned, corrupt mayors and government officials may create a short-term blockade, but on the long term and on a large scale this does not cause problems.
Data interpretation is also on the rise thanks to the progress in data science. I will publish an article (in collaboration with a few great data science and open data experts) on how AI can be used to get interesting insights from data.
Photo by Elena Koycheva on Unsplash
Second, we have the resources to make people’s eyes follow this data. The progress in user experience (in its vast definition) makes me believe that it is possible for “boring”, but important for decision-making data to reach large audiences. In the last 10 years, the collaboration of designers and engineers has resulted in the creation of new types and new designs of interfaces that are more convenient, better looking and in general — they deliver better user experiences. Although attention spans decrease, we learn how to get this attention more frequently. Almost no one spends 2 straight hours on Instagram, yet if you sum up the daily time spent on it — you might discover a different story. Tell me if I’m naive, but I think that Instagram isn’t privileged by its wonderful user experience and other products, like ones representing statistical information, can deliver equal competitors for attention.
Last, but probably most importantly, now is the time to do it. Not tomorrow. We have upcoming elections, we have numerous crises and enormous amounts of decisions to be taken. If we follow our gut and not our data, we are going to lose in most of these situations.
Here’s a question for you. If two candidates are running for reelection. Would the more rational decision be based on new campaign promises or the track record of their participation in sessions during the last mandate and their voting history?
I would choose the second option. And I believe that if more people chose this second option, the society would be better represented. | https://towardsdatascience.com/the-real-meaning-and-process-of-data-democratization-abd7d7608a1 | ['Simonas Žilinskas'] | 2019-01-14 19:11:39.201000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Democracy', 'Open Data'] |
Silicon Valley Style: Normcore at an extra expense | Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg, your data’s landlord, wears custom-ordered, $300 Brunello Cucinelli t-shirts? Yes, those plain (technically melange) grey tees that he wears when yapping about the latest way he’s going to invade your privacy, are three hundred small ones (well, regular ones). And The Zuck is not the only person with unreasonable amounts of your personal info to hop onto this trend of extremely expensive, regular clothing. In fact, pretty much every FAANGMULA executive has bought into Brunello Cucinelli’s, “business casual for people who never have to work again” aesthetic. Characterized by $400 dollar jersey knit tees, thousand dollar gilets, and reverse weave hoodies, this fad at least does it’s best to act humble.
Brunello Cucinelli Navy Cotton Jersey T-Shirt | MR. PORTER | $445
But it has horrifyingly and hopefully accidentally progressed. It’s no longer just the Silicon Valley big shots and it’s not just Mr. Cucinelli. This isn’t too recent either and it just seems to be a version of the smart, casual, modern-man style you see on shitty male fashion blogs, but adapted for bay area tech salaries and somehow slightly better.
Normcore has already been everywhere but this it’s own sect. A quick look at the fashion retailer Garmentory showcases the concept very well. It’s stealth wealth woven into every fabric, not Dickies and vintage Lee jackets, but the ability to look normal for an extreme expense. There is no irony to it, it is completely intentional and specifically chosen. Perhaps it is better comprehended as a well constructed “PR” move to appear inoffensive while holding a “this shirt actually costs $500, ya know” grenade in their back pocket — an obviously much needed defense for when being called unfashionable.
But it is still weirdly respectable. It is knowing your lane and being able to enjoy the comforts of life. Having a ridiculous amount of money, you would probably find it very easy to over indulge in yourself like this. And of all the worst menswear trends to ascend over the past, at least this “trend” isn’t trying too hard.
Speaking of trying too hard, Amazon employees have been overworked since before the COVID pandemic — maybe they should get a couple spins of that Brunello yarn. | https://medium.com/@gialexander/silicon-valley-style-normcore-at-an-extra-expense-2a6c7b402d5a | ['Gitte Alexander'] | 2021-01-17 01:45:46.099000+00:00 | ['Silicon Valley', 'Style', 'Fashion'] |
Spark Getting started-From source code to new SparkContext | This post speaks about how to run Apache Spark on Mac(nix based systems) from Spark’s source code.
Though there are many “Spark Getting started” guides, there is none that get someone started from source code to writing a Spark application.
The Building Spark section of Open-source documentation is elaborate and talks about compiling and creating jars from Spark code. This post will help you run Spark using those jars, in Spark local mode.
Why do I need a local setup?
Few reasons that come to my mind
Quick iteration of your code changes — When you make a change to code, you want to see it in action. In a distributed system like Spark, unless you have a local setup, you will have to deploy your changes(scp!!!) to the cluster and verify. Why do you have to pay the cloud vendors just to verify a change that could as well be done locally? Increasing the debuggability of your application — 1. It is almost impossible to remotely debug a JVM running on a cloud VM.(Losing connection to you VM, round trip delays(~10s for a line of code!!!)). 2. Why not add log lines? Ok. Add a few log lines, build, deploy to the cluster. Now, you found that the log line is not at the right place. Re-iterate by adding new log lines(This implicitly translates to item 1). Had there been a local VM running the code, you could have attached a debugger to the JVM and gained insights into your Spark code.
Where is this setup useful?
If you want to get your hands dirty with Spark without an actual cluster. Such as
1. Getting started with Spark
2. Contributing code to Spark codebase.
Note: There are no actual executors(workers) in Spark local mode. Java threads act as executors. When you want to verify a piece of code change/operation that needs to run in a distributed manner, Spark local mode is not helpful as there is a single JVM which acts as both driver and executor.
Building Spark
Your Spark build will depend on answers to the following questions
Hadoop version(default — 3.2.0)? Hive support required? If yes, Hive version to use(default- 2.3.6)? Resource-manager(Standalone, YARN, mesos, K8S) — In the context of this post, Resource-manager is not relevant, since we will run Spark on Local mode.
Your build command will look like
./build/mvn -Phive -DskipTests clean package
(Note: this link has details on setting up maven. Also, a basic primer on maven will be helpful to connect pieces of the build process)
The command uses Hadoop version as 3.2.0 and Hive version as 2.3.6 which are the defaults.
Note: Add the following options to the build command, if required(In an ideal scenario, these options should never be required) 1. -Denforcer.skip - If you get an error message like "Some Enforcer rules have failed"
2. -Drat.skip - failures in license check
3. -Dscala.skip - To skip style checks
Effects of the firing the command
Let us assume that code has been downloaded at SPARK_HOME directory
$SPARK_HOME/assembly/target/scala-2.12/jars directory should have all the jars — Spark + Hadoop(default 3.2.0) + Hive(2.3.6) required for you to start an Spark application.
Launching spark-shell
$SPARK_HOME/bin/spark-shell --conf spark.master=local
Let us dissect the above command
$SPARK_HOME/bin/spark-shell- Shell script which fires up a scala shell with a pre-created SparkContext(bound to variable sc) and SparkSession(bound to variable spark) objects. — conf- allows you to pass configs to spark application. It should be followed by <key>=<value>. spark.master=local- Indicates that Spark application should start in local mode, where the driver and executors(Java threads, in this case) run in single JVM.
If the command runs successfully, you should see
This should generally work out of the box. Why? Since all the Hadoop jars , Hive jars required for Spark is made available in assembly/target. | https://medium.com/@DaRkMa_N/spark-getting-started-from-source-code-to-new-sparkcontext-1b0c878e6501 | [] | 2020-02-08 13:26:08.303000+00:00 | ['Build', 'Apache Spark', 'Maven', 'Getting Started', 'Source Code'] |
Why I admire Jean-Jacques Rousseau Despite his Many Major Faults | Rousseau wearing an Armenian costume (1766), painted by Allan Ramsay
Many intellectuals I have run into have had a rather pessimistic view of the famous Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). From a history professor who saw him as a hypocrite to Jordan Peterson’s damning dismissals, Rousseau seems to be a philosopher to love to hate. There are certainly reasons for this. He abandoned his illegitimate children at foundling hospitals despite being the author of a popular child-rearing book. He wrote personal reflections which were way too personal (and held public readings of these, often embarrassing episodes). He had trouble maintaining friendships and saw conspiracies where they did not exist. His Social Contract has influenced some of the worst dictators of the past two centuries. Despite all of this, Rousseau was one of the most genuinely human philosophers of the Enlightenment. He understood its shortcomings better than most. He appeared to hold in contempt middle class materialism while praising the simplicity of his native Geneva.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau seemed to intuit the problems associated with the excessive materialism of the coming centuries. While he may have gone a little too far in the other direction (the Industrial Revolution made life infinitely better for the average person), the problems associated with excess caused problems all their own. As psychologist Jordan Peterson noted in one of his lectures, leisure is the precondition for existential angst.
“Richness of apparel may proclaim the man of fortune,and elegance the man of taste; but true health and manliness are known by different signs. It is under the homespun of the labourer, and not beneath the gilt and tinsel of the courtier, that we should look for strength and vigour of body.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’ (1750)
One can see a great divide in society — between blue collar values, grounded in practicality, and the superficiality of bourgeois values, grounded in the opinions of others. The most absurd of the latter can be seen in the popular dress of the eighteenth century, known as the ‘macaroni.’
‘The Macaroni’ (1773)
The macaroni has much in common with the Hollywood celebrities and fashion gurus of today — concern with outward appearance and keeping up with trends. The individual pictured in the above satire would not be out of place in the world of Instagram and Facebook.
Generally speaking, as far as the arts go, they tend to become quite effete in later stages of culture. One can see this in the statues from ancient Greece — going from the muscular heroes of old to the fragile androgyny consistent with decadence.
“Thus it is that luxury, profligacy and slavery, have been, in all ages, the scourge of the efforts of our pride to emerge from that happy state of ignorance, in which the wisdom of providence had placed us. That thick veil with which it has covered all its operations seems to be a sufficient proof that it never designed us for such fruitless researches. But is there, indeed, one lesson it has taught us, by which we have rightly profited, or which we have neglected with impunity? Let men learn for once that nature would have preserved them from science, as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child. Let them know that all the secrets she hides are so many evils from which she protects them, and that the very difficulty they find in acquiring knowledge is not the least of her bounty towards them. Men are perverse; but they would have been far worse, if they had had the misfortune to be born learned.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’ (1750)
Rousseau seemed to have gotten the problem more or less right, though his solutions are often a different matter. His advocacy of simple living is probably the best solution one can find in his writings.
Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences for an essay contest (which he won) in 1750, arguing that the arts and sciences corrupt human morality rather than improve it. This is a quite problematic claim, as the arts are a reflection of society (and influence it) while the sciences are tools developed by human beings to understand the world around them. Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning (1999) expands on this, situating the role of the sciences in a larger human-centered perspective.
“The world can be validly construed as a forum of action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however — myth, literature and drama — portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the object world-what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is the world of value-what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action.” — Jordan Peterson, ‘Maps of Meaning’
Rousseau gets quite a bit wrong by asserting that the sciences corrupt humanity because the sciences are tools. One needs morality because morality is that which offers a path forward (through elimination of non-useful information and use of values to determine motion). The abuse of ‘science’ by nineteenth-century intellectuals has more to do with the need for justification of certain prejudices (in many cases) than with the pursuit of knowledge. Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not construe the world in the same manner as Peterson. Indeed, Rousseau often flirts too much with what today would be called social constructivism. He fails to see societies as expressions of human nature across time, instead focusing on creating theoretical impositions on society through his works to counter the excesses of humankind. In short, Rousseau would have done far better as a writer of self-improvement than of politics.
Rousseau’s critique in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences is a valid critique of the superficiality of middle class values. This is something the nineteenth century thinker Benjamin Disraeli would expand upon in his literary works. Indeed, Disraeli’s ‘One-Nation Conservatism’ was conceived of as a union between the working classes and the elites against the decadent bourgeois values.
Rousseau was also spot on in his rejection of excessive study of virtues rather than simply practicing them:
“Before that time the Romans were satisfied with the practice of virtue; they were undone when they began to study it.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’ (1750)
This seems to be an important antecedent to the Genetic Epistemology of Jean Piaget. By studying children playing tag, Piaget observed that children understood the game before they were able to clearly (or uniformly) articulate the rules of the game when asked. This informed his views on the development of human morality and suggested the necessity of the abstract being grounded in the concrete. The problem with so much modern philosophy (particularly of the postmodern variety) is that it does not do this. The emphasis is on increasingly obscure abstractions with no real grounding — essentially a symptom of decadence. Rousseau’s insights were way ahead of his time.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is that critic of Enlightenment sorely needed but also terribly misguided in several of his key writings. His life and works exemplify that ‘crooked timber of humanity’ that Immanuel Kant spoke of, stating that out of such a crooked timber nothing straight could be made. Such is the human condition. Among critics of society, Rousseau ranks at or near the top. He was a genius. But, like many geniuses, not a man who one might like to know and not a man who was right about all or even most of his assertion. Rather, his works contain key insights necessary to keep the excesses of modernity in check. | https://medium.com/digital-republic-of-letters/why-i-admire-jean-jacques-rousseau-despite-his-many-major-faults-d0bf9fc87818 | ['Kevin Shau'] | 2019-09-24 16:54:01.734000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Society', 'Philosophy', 'Enlightenment', 'Criticism'] |
768K Day — Internet Doomsday: is it real? | There is an ominous rumbling in the internet about 768K day, some even termed it internet doomsday others called it “Y2K” of internet. The fear is justified given the experience of wide spread internet outage during 512K day when internet BGP table size exceeded 512,000 routes. The 512K day caused havoc and many routers simply exhausted of TCAM (Ternary content-addressable memory) size and were unable to process certain routes leaving parts of internet unreachable. The same issue seems possible this year again when internet routes exceeds 768K routes. Some predicts August 12 is 768K day following 512k Day which happened in August 12, 2014[1].
Some Internet Outages are predicted
While majority of teir1 ISPs were caught off guard during 512K day, this should not be the case this time around. There are mechanisms within BGP route configuration to protect routers from exhausting TCAM and presumably ISPs upgraded their legacy routers with patches. However, this is temporary fix and may come with string attached on reachability etc. A more permanent fix requires routers to accept upto full internet routes in its forwarding table. This requires a special memory known as “TCAM”. Older routers are built with limited TCAM size and hence, unable to provide faster response and may exhaust its resources and eventually fail or unable to process certain prefixes.
A typical outage could be something similar to the following diagram.
Figure 1. [Courtesy ThousandEyes] This diagram is presented in the blog page of “Thousand Eyes” at https://blog.thousandeyes.com/what-is-768k-day/ to depict recent outage in SF-Bayarea.
A blog post in “Thousand Eyes”[2] claimed that the writer has observed packet lost on several interfaces in the Cogent (AS 174) network in San Francisco Bayarea. As a result, many peer ISPs like comcast, quest, amazon, 8x8 etc were affected. Recently, several media reported outage in Australia in which media outlet like CSO[2] and Computerworld[3] claimed the outage directly related to BGP prefixes reaching 768K. There seems to be an increase phenomena of internet outage reported in twitter[5] message. Proper analyses could ascertain how many of reported outages are due to BGP prefix issues. Nonetheless, BGP route sizes are increasing and this will definitely cause network reachability issues in routers that lacks bigger forwarding table.
According to CIDR report (a website that keeps track of global BGP routes), the BGP route size already exceeded 768K and current table size shown as 783K as of June 11th, 2019[6]. However, this report is not official and may include duplicates.
Irrespective of the numbers presented in CIDR report, I can ascertain that majority of the customers I talked to, are looking to replace or add edge routers with 750k+ table size for IPV4 and around 65K for IPv6. Henceforth, it should go without saying that one should be cognizant of the issue and take precaution before 768K day arrives.
Under the hood
Internet routers generally process route request in two tables in conjunction with routing protocols: RIB and FIB. While RIB is part of control plane and generally processed by NOS, much of the table look and processing are done at FIB level which part of Routing hardware or reside within the pipeline of Marchant Silicon or ASIC.
Figure 2. Routing functions including RIB and FIB processing.
If the lookup engine (TCAM) within ASIC pipeline lacks capability of processing certain number of tables for IPv4 packets, RIB may flood the table causing overflow problem. With patches, routers may able to control processing and lookups at ASIC pipeline. However, such patches are temporary fix and protects routers from failing. A more permanent fix is to somehow connect ASIC packet processing pipeline to external TCAMs using high speed bus. Older ASICs lacks such capabilities resulting routers more software dependable and may be limited in table size capabilities.
Solution: Can whitebox Switch help?
Disaggregation or whitebox is the best solutions for this problem. Buy the choice of hardware herein router/switch from your preferred vendor and select software or Network Operating System (NOS). The benefit of whitebox or disaggregation nfor that matter allows you to select best of the breed merchant silicon and buy those in your terms with a price point you can afford. Result you get the best of both world: hardware and software. For the bigger IPv4 table size, Broadcom® Qumran-MX™ silicon with BCM52311™ Knowledge-Based Processor (KBP) [TCAM] provides you optimal choice for upto 1 million IPv4 routes. There are cases where upto 1.2 million routes are possible in such system.
Figure 3. Edge Router Whitebox based on Broadcom® Qumran-MX.
A number of hardware vendors are currently offering Qumran-MX based platform with industry proven NOS from companies such as IP Infusion. As depicted in the figure above, Merchant Silicon herein Broadcom® Qumran-MX™ is connected through an internal bus (known as ELK bus) to external TCAM which provides further capabilities for lookups.
However, it is also important to select appropriate software vendor that has optimize such boxes and provides optimal route capabilities of more than 768K to facilitate your upgrade or help in your preparation for 768K day.
IPInfusion’s OcNOS™ is tested with a number of Hardware vendors providing you a wide slections, please ensure you select appropriate Qumran-MX based hardware with External TCAM to achieve upto 1 Million route. If you are interested about OcNOS and how it can solve your 768K day, you may visit their website at https://www.ipinfusion.com .
However, please make sure you ask each vendor to provide you with test report or ateleast enough data to make educated decision.
Reference
[1] Some internet outages predicted for the coming month as ‘768k Day’ approaches. Available at https://www.zdnet.com/article/some-internet-outages-predicted-for-the-coming-month-as-768k-day-approaches/.
[2] Australian Internet Users Face Looming ‘768k Day’. Available at https://www.cso.com.au/mediareleases/34669/australian-internet-users-face-looming-768k-day/
[3] Australian Internet Users Face Looming ‘768k Day’. https://www.computerworld.com.au/mediareleases/34669/australian-internet-users-face-looming-768k-day/.
[4] Thousand Eyes. What is 768K Day, and Will It Cause Internet Outages? Available at https://blog.thousandeyes.com/what-is-768k-day/.
[5] Internet outage tag at twitter. Available at https://twitter.com/search?q=internet%20outage&src=tyah
[6] CIDR, 2019. CIDR report for June 11, 2019. Available at https://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/ | https://medium.com/@dhiman.chowdhury/768k-day-internet-doomsday-is-it-real-68dbb6a6e518 | ['Dhiman Chowdhury'] | 2019-07-10 00:53:05.562000+00:00 | ['Technology Trends', 'Technology', 'Technology News', 'Service Provider', 'Tech'] |
Value, Labor, and Capital | The problem of capitalist society is the problem of alienation. It is the process of social collapse and the cause of increased turmoil, a thing most professional academics do not study, and certainly don’t bring to others. Alienation derives from the term Entfremdung in Marx, which means literally “the making foreign of.” It is literally a division between things that should not be divided. In the case of Marx, the primary form of alienation was the separation of the worker from the products of their labor. This was only one form of separation, though. Capitalist development has made the nature of work on products so fragmentary that this form of alienation is now total.
Instead of working on parts of a car in the same factory in which the cars were made, for instance, when automotive manufacturers made their own engines, then the laborer could still claim to have been a part of the whole process of production. Now this is no longer the case. Parts and cars are now produced less and less in colonialist nations and more in the imperialized. The mundane suffering brought about by the production line has been exported to the countries suffering under colonial oppression. Labor fragmentation leads to social fragmentation. Separations between people in different aspects of production become separations of people in different aspects of social practice outside of production. It is in this way that the primarily petty bourgeois white settlers have successfully isolated themselves from the suffering of the (lumpen)proletarian colonized people.
To destroy this system of isolation and separation requires an action beyond reform; the segmentation of the labor process is endemic to any form of capitalism, regardless of how “woke” or “egalitarian” it is. Because workers on the labor market have only one thing to sell (their labor), they have become isolated into individual commodity-forms. In other words, they are no longer a class, but a collection of raw materials, in Marx’s parlance. They are products of labor used in order to produce something, which itself might be used to produce something or to ensure the process of exchange flows efficiently. They are no longer human beings, and as Marx noted in “Wages of Labor,” they are governed by the same laws of supply and demand that seem to govern all other commodities. It would be very convenient if we could merely dismiss this as a delusion, as an oversimplification. We would also be denying the whole logic of capitalism.
When we look at the development of social institutions, there are a variety of different ways to examine their disintegration. For instance, record low church membership and attendance, collapsing union membership, decreases in sexual activity, increased rates of ADHD and ADD, increased prevalence of mental illnesses such as Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, and high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, etc. I don’t judge people, obviously. However, these are all aspects of support systems that are not being replaced. When liberals wonder why there are so many mass shootings, murders, assaults, etc. their first response is always to treat the symptom, not the cause. There is one way to reverse social collapse: a radical restructuring of the society as it stands presently.
It is for this reason that communists should work to establish networks of support for people suffering from abuse, homelessness, poverty, mental illness, chronic health issues, and other serious conditions. These people are vulnerable, and capitalism preys upon the vulnerable. It is at the same time a struggle for humanity as well as for survival. With the failure of the support structures prominent under previous capitalist relations, new support structures must be formed. The primary question is not whether this will happen, but who will engage in it and how it will be done. Capitalists and liberals will play into the same tired old tropes of individualism and responsibility, all the while oblivious to their prior failures. Willingly or unwillingly, they will reproduce the very necessary conditions for exploitation that have caused the social collapse. The opposition to this is the formation of a counter-hegemony. That is, the creation of structures of solidarity external to capitalist economic relations, or rather, in direct opposition to them.
These are mostly just observations. I will admit that my practices have rarely reflected the radicalism I truly wish to put in practice. I make no apologies, for actions are far more important than words. The difficulty of my economic situation at the moment is part of the reason for this. Another reason is that I myself have become alienated — I have succumbed to the very sensations I have attempted to describe here. It is my opinion that alienation under capitalism is the root cause of the recent social disturbances and the hints toward complete collapse. If not reversed, society approaches a crisis like that which faced the world in the 1920’s and 30’s: the rise of fascism and imperialism to even greater heights. | https://medium.com/@just-a-trans-maoist/value-labor-and-capital-6ae709b21280 | ['The Trans Maoist'] | 2021-07-25 13:34:12.443000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Marxism', 'Communism', 'Culture', 'Alienation'] |
All the President’s Goon. The president has announced he’s going… | The president has announced he’s going to go into American cities with high crime rates and fill them up with militarized agents who will fix all that. How, exactly? Well, no one is sure, because violent criminals don’t wear signs that say, “Me! I’m the bad guy! Come get me!” Our esteemed crime-busters from DHS will presumably do what they’ve done in Portland: pretty much take anyone around and grab them into unmarked vans, in one of those “proactive arrests” meant to make people aware that they should not and will not do anything criminal…such as …standing around in public after 10pm.
The situation would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. My biggest fear — I’m sure everyone’s biggest fear if they think about it — is that someone’s going to get killed in all this. And then, my fellow Americans, expect all hell to break loose. The giant of the American spirit has been slow to awaken to the deeper problems in our midst, but it’s awakened now. And she’s pissed.
Just as Bette Davis took to the stairs at her party and said, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to a bumpy night,” all of us are aware there’s a lot of tension in the air now. Yet unfortunately this isn’t a Hollywood movie. It’s as real as real can be, more like the scene that started the Bolshevik Revolution when women and children approached the Winter Palace begging for food and the Czar’s soldiers started shooting them.
That wasn’t a good idea.
I don’t think the president’s goons from the Department of Homeland Security (I always thought that name was creepy), untrained though they apparently are, are being told to shoot lethal weapons at protestors. But that’s not the point. Situations like this are volatile and they shouldn’t even be happening. Only in a dictatorship do squads of secret police invade cities, presumably to establish “law and order” but doing nothing but spreading chaos and fury.
When running for president, at my CNN Town Hall I said we needed to be aware of the risk of encroaching fascism. No wonder the political status quo didn’t think those the words of a serious candidate, huh? But what an insane system calls crazy might not be, and what it calls sane might be what is bound to drive all of us crazy. Such is the state of America today.
Am I hopeful? Yes, because hope is a moral imperative. Am I cynical? No, because to me that’s an excuse for not helping. In truth, I think that in the long run we’re going to be more than okay; I think we’re going to be magnificent. I think we’re going to have Lincoln’s proverbial “new birth of freedom.” But not immediately, not easily, and not without pain. Not in the short term, and perhaps not even in the middle term. There’s no reason to expect things will not get ugly very, very soon. The president is sending his troops to cities whose citizens simply will not have it.
Nor should they. This has gone too far. There are times when you have to draw a line, and now is such a time. A dangerous man is trying to destroy our democracy and we must not let him. America does not belong to him; it belongs to us. And millions of us are buckling up. | https://mariannewilliamson.medium.com/all-the-presidents-goons-176c33945191 | ['Marianne Williamson'] | 2020-07-23 17:46:48.225000+00:00 | ['Fascisminamerica', 'Trumps America'] |
What is true growth?: Creator’s edition | Being a creator, it’s very easy to constantly think about the numbers and analytics to get a sense of growth. Though in recent times it was less for me when it came to Youtube but the sense of growth was something I couldn’t feel. There was an increase of 2–3 subscribers per video, But my video making wasn’t getting any better.
Last week I had a long call with a friend/mentor where I asked her how should I grow? And she gave importance to this one point:
If you want to have goals think of something which is all under your control.
Having the goal of getting a certain number of followers is very vague and in that scenario, you are still dependent on an entity that is the audience. The result is under your control only when you control the minds of the audience. And unless you are a hypnotist you can’t do that.
So what can you do?
You can have goals that only you have full control over. And in the creator’s life that only thing is his/her content. You have full control over it. Then why not have a goal that says “I won’t miss a day of upload!” or “ I would create a creator’s lifestyle where I’ll write down one idea every day!”. The possibilities and goals are endless.
I personally had failed to understand the true meaning of growth. Subscribers and followers are also the signs of growth, no doubt, But that is not true progress. True progress is the skill that you display in front of the audience. Gaining credibility to your name through your work is anytime better than having more followers because we all know how easy it is to gain followers if that’s all we want.
I always had this sense of being true to my skill and that’s why never used the wrong ways to get followers. It’s just that humans are never satisfied with what they have and Hi! I am human! when I crossed certain goals I always made the next ones. I was not aware that after some time it’s not about the number. What’s the point of the followers if you don’t grow your skills?
So the new goal!
Be the best at what I do and be consistent with it! Keep on Challenging my skills!
As a creator, this is by far the most important mindset change that I have faced. And all thanks to the people around me that made me realize it! | https://medium.com/@ameykarhade/what-is-true-growth-creators-edition-a6be72d85585 | ['Amey Karhade'] | 2020-11-26 07:06:31.170000+00:00 | ['Creator To Creator', 'Creators', 'Growth', 'Skills', 'Skills Development'] |
V-shaped recovery in 2021 | How a swift mobilization of union machinery is paving the way for economic revival from the pandemic
Amidst a once in a century crisis ‘The COVID-19’ brought an eye-opener impact on the Indian economy. The GDP was growing at 4.2 percent in the FY2019, the onslaught of the actions taken in the view of giving importance to lives of citizens vis-a-vis trade-off to the growth of the economy has led to GDP fall at 23.9 percent in Q1 to 7.5 percent in Q2.
The IMF projected an impressive 11.5% growth rate for India in 2021, making India the only major economy of the world to register double-digit growth this year. Moreover, the economic survey of 2020 states India’s real GDP is projected to record a growth of 11.0 percent in 2021–22 which is the highest since independence. This will be symbolic of India’s testimony of resilience, economic strength, and mature policymaking.
The cushion of this is the prudence of government actions in correspondence to nuanced details. This initiates with the early stringent lockdown implemented keeping in view India is the second-largest population country and the transmission effect is much higher in a country with a high population density. Hence, saving the human resource to the maximum possible extent. Further, the calibrated demand policies like a public investment program centered around the National Infrastructure Pipeline are likely to accelerate the demand push and further the recovery. The scheme of Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana for ensuring food security through the public distribution system, direct benefit transfers to widows, pensioners, and women, additional funds for MGNREGS, and debt moratoria and liquidity support for businesses. This action led to an increase in the economy’s demand as the beneficiaries have a high marginal propensity to consume. Timely proposing and rolling out of forbearance and under the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Package Government of India also launched Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS 1.0) to provide much-needed relief to stressed sectors helping entities sustain employment and meet liabilities for MSMEs. A boost for Project Exports with the assistance of EXIM Bank A second version of the Scheme (ECLGS 2.0) was also launched to offer necessary credit guarantees for loans by banks and NBFCs to identified stressed sectors. The Atmanirbhar 2.0 and 3.0 timely increased the capital expenditure. On the other hand, supply-side policies included changes in the monetary policy Lowering of Repo and reverse repo rate by 115 and 155 bps respectively. Injection of durable liquidity through Open Market Operation (OMO), Reduction in the CRR requirement of banks, increasing bank’s borrowing limit. Privatization of PSUs in non-strategic sectors, Production Linked Incentives (PLI), ease of doing business, etc The Government has undertaken several structural reforms with a focus on land, labor, liquidity, and law that will globally position India as an attractive investment destination. Since the onset of the pandemic, it has injected over Rs. 20 lakh crores stimulus for the economy. The sectors covered include power, manufacturing, defense, land, education, mining, and minerals. India now ranks 63rd out of 190 countries in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing business 2020 report.
The approval of two indigenously manufactured vaccines for emergency use adds an extra feather to achieving the expected target. With the economy’s returning to normalcy brought closer by the initiation of a mega vaccination drive, hopes of a robust recovery in the services sector, consumption, and investment have been rekindled. Thus, giving way too many opportunities which were surpassed by the pandemic. All the fiscal, monetary, and structural reforms are paving the way for achievement.
-Tanu Goyal, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics | https://medium.com/@equilibria-52795/v-shaped-recovery-in-2021-1e35fcda663 | ['Equilibria Gipe'] | 2021-06-17 10:04:46.852000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'India', 'Covid 19', 'Vaccines', 'Gdpr'] |
Manual Labor: The Holy Grail for Creativity | Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
CREATIVITY
Manual Labor: The Holy Grail for Creativity
The potential ideas that manual work offers is endless.
“Where do you see yourself in fifty years?”
That question is a hyperbole of the prevalent platitude that is almost all the time asked in a job interview. Generally, the interviewer asks you where you see yourself in five or ten years. But have you ever been asked where you see yourself in fifty years?
It might be a difficult question to answer. You may not even be present after fifty years. To predict where you would be, fifty years into the future, you will first have to understand how the world will be fifty years from now.
So many science fiction movies, novels, and mind-numbing daily programs have provided us with a stereotypical, technologically sophisticated vision for the future. That vision of the future involves robots and a technologically advanced society.
But by looking at the way the past centuries have progressed into the 21st century it wouldn’t be audacious by me to state that the world will have more robots fifty years from now.
When I envision the future, I see two types of robots. The robots that don’t breathe and the robots that do. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/manual-labor-the-holy-grail-for-creativity-219785dd96a4 | [] | 2020-08-21 08:39:00.484000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Startup', 'Creativity', 'Future', 'Technology'] |
AN UNFAIR WORLD | Dirty hands homeless poor man with a piece of bread in modern capitalist society. Economic recession, unemployment, poverty, hunger, retirement, global crisis, inequality problem concept.
One day, a man while walking towards his office saw a beggar coming toward him. The beggar was in very bad condition. He was barefoot and his clothes were torn
A tired old beggar woman with a cane and a water bottle, sits on a street corner in Rome, Italy, waiting for someone to put money in her alms basket.
When the beggar asked for money, the man said, ‘‘Why don't you work? Don't you feel ashamed asking people for money?’’ at this beggar replied, ‘‘I do feel ashamed asking for money. But once when I took money without asking, the police took me to jail.’’
Close-up of a beggar
The man had n answer to this. He went on his way to the office.
The End.. | https://medium.com/@muhammadshahzaib0165/an-unfair-world-a1ab3f90037b | ['Muhammad Shahzaib'] | 2020-12-26 15:48:23.103000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Covid 19', 'World', 'Freedom', 'Police'] |
Tell Me About Yourself | Tell Me About Yourself
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash
When Muse career coach Theresa Merrill does mock interviews with her clients, she always leads with, “Tell me about yourself.” It’s good practice because that’s often the very first thing an interviewer will ask you to do — whether you’re having a preliminary phone screen, speaking to your prospective boss, or sitting down with the CEO during a final round.
Even though it’s one of the most common interview questions, “it almost always stumps them,” Merrill says. It might seem like an easy win — after all, you know all about yourself! — but responding to this invitation to talk about you in the context of a job interview can feel stressful and complicated. “It’s challenging because it is broad, open-ended,” Merrill points out. You might be thinking: Um, what do you want to know? How am I supposed to pick what to share out of my entire life story right now?
Luckily, you can prepare in advance and use this common opening prompt to your advantage, setting the stage for a successful interview.
Why Interviewers Ask It
As with any interview question, the key to crafting an impressive answer is understanding why people are asking in the first place.
“It lets them ease into the actual interviewing,” says Alina Campos, Muse career coach and founder of The Coaching Creative. “Often when the conversation starts it’s a lot of small talk and it’s a way to transition into it,” especially for less seasoned recruiters or hiring managers. “The interviewee’s nervous but the interviewer’s trying to get their bearings [too].”
It’s also a great starting point that can help inform the direction of the interview, says Muse career coach and CareerSchooled founder Al Dea: “Depending on what you say it’s going to help them figure out the next question,” which might help start a chain effect of follow-up questions and lend an easy flow to the conversation.
Beyond serving as an icebreaker and transition, Dea says, this introductory question also helps recruiters and hiring managers accomplish what’s often one of their major goals in the hiring process: getting to know you.
If you answer it well, the interviewers will begin to find out why you’re the best candidate for this job, in terms of hard skills and experience as well as soft skills. It’s a great opportunity to demonstrate that you can communicate clearly and effectively, connect with and react to other humans, and present yourself professionally.
There are plenty of times when you’ll hear these exact words: “Tell me about yourself.” But interviewers might have their own versions of the prompt that are asking pretty much the same thing, including:
I have your resume in front of me but tell me more about yourself.
Walk me through your experiences.
I’d love to hear more about your journey.
Tell me a little bit more about your background.
A Simple Formula for Answering “Tell Me About Yourself”
Lily Zhang, Manager of Graduate Student Professional Development at the MIT Media Lab and a writer for The Muse, recommends a simple and effective formula for structuring your response: present, past, future.
Present: Talk a little bit about what your current role is, the scope of it, and perhaps a big recent accomplishment.
Talk a little bit about what your current role is, the scope of it, and perhaps a big recent accomplishment. Past: Tell the interviewer how you got there and/or mention previous experience that’s relevant to the job and company you’re applying for.
Tell the interviewer how you got there and/or mention previous experience that’s relevant to the job and company you’re applying for. Future: Segue into what you’re looking to do next and why you’re interested in this gig (and a great fit for it, too).
This isn’t the only way to build your response, of course, and you can tweak it as you see fit. If there’s a particularly potent story about what brought you into this field, for example, you might decide to start with that “past” story and then get into what you’re doing in the present.
Whatever order you pick, make sure you ultimately tie it to the job and company. “A good place to end it is to give a transition of this is why I’m here,” Dea says. You want to be absolutely certain your interviewer is left with the impression that it “makes sense that [you’re] sitting here talking to me about this role.”
8 More Tips for Answering “Tell Me About Yourself”
Okay, so you’ve got an interview coming up and you know it’s probably going to start with some form of “tell me about yourself.” Here’s what else you need to do to nail your answer.
1. Tailor Your Answer to the Role and Company
“When an interviewer asks that, they really mean tell me about yourself as it’s relevant to the position you’re applying for and this company. I think they’re giving you an opportunity to articulate succinctly why you have the right qualifications,” says Muse career coach Tina Wascovich.
Take advantage of the opportunity! In order to do that, you’ll want to spend some time combing through the job description, researching the company, and figuring out how you can tell your story in a way that makes it crystal clear why you’re interested and what you bring to the table that aligns with the role and company.
“This is the best chance to be very direct and share your objective. But your objective needs to fulfil their goals,” says Muse career coach and recruiter Steven Davis.
For example, a client he worked with was leaving a job where she’d worked on a team developing a new antibacterial cream and getting it ready for clinical trials. The new job she wanted entailed working on an entirely unrelated product, so the important thing for her to mention in this case was that prior to her current role, she’d never had experience working on antibacterial creams and was able to come in and figure out how to move the process forward, just as she could do in this new role.
So when you’re in the midst of a job search looking for a particular type of role, you might have a basic template you use for every interview, but make sure to tweak it to fit the company. “It’s an opportunity to show them right away that you get it,” Campos says. “If they talk a lot about culture, weave that into your answer,” she adds, and if the company or even the particular team emphasizes something else, see if you can incorporate that. In some cases individual keywords could help give the cue that you’ve done your research and are a good fit, according to Campos. For example, does the company refer to itself a tech company or a start-up, a consumer brand or an online retailer, a publication or zine?
“Generally the [answers] that always resonate with me show that they really get the role,” she says, as well as why they applied. “I get more engaged because I can see that it’s going to go somewhere.”
2. Keep It Professional
In keeping with the notion that this question carries an invisible addendum — “as it’s relevant to this role and company” — you’re best off keeping your answer professional. Wascovich explains that whereas the norm in some countries might be to share personal details at this point, in the U.S. you should avoid doing so. In other words, this isn’t the time to talk about your family and hobbies, unless you know something very specific about the company that would lead you to believe otherwise.
3. But Inject Some Passion Into Your Answer (if You Feel Comfortable)
Keeping your answer professional, however, shouldn’t stop you from shedding light on why you’re passionate about your work or about this company, even if that broaches slightly more personal territory.
“If people feel comfortable telling their story from a passionate perspective, it helps engage the interviewer and set them apart,” says Wascovich. For example, Wascovich recently worked with a special education administrator who’d actually been a special education student in elementary school. Her teachers inspired her to pursue the career she did. “So in telling your story about how you got your start, that could be a unique hook.”
You don’t have to go into a huge amount of detail, but if your goal in an interview is to stand out among the applicant pool and be memorable, then infusing this answer with some passion can help you do that.
“People don’t want to talk to robots — they want to talk to humans,” Dea says. “I love it when someone tells me, I knew I wanted to work in marketing when I was a kid. I’ve always really loved writing.”
Campos agrees. “If a person really is connected to their mission and what they want to go after in their next role and this company really aligns, this is a great place to bring that in,” she says. You might incorporate a sentence like, “I’m really passionate about x and y and so I was really attracted to your company…”
4. Be Succinct (and Definitely Don’t Recite Your Resume)
Whatever you do, don’t waste this time regurgitating every single detail of your career. “Most people answer it like they’re giving a dissertation on their resume,” says Davis, but that’s only going to bore the interviewer to tears.
It’s not just about entertaining or engaging your interviewer, Campos explains. You’re also giving a hint as to how you’ll speak in meetings with co-workers, bosses, and clients. Are you going to ramble for 10 minutes every time someone asks you a somewhat open-ended question?
There’s no scientifically proven optimal length for answering this or any interview question. Some coaches and recruiters will tell you to keep it to 30 seconds or less, while others will say you should aim for a minute, or talk for no more than two minutes.
“Everyone has a different approach,” says Dea, who’s had candidates speak for one minute or go on for five. But in his experience, people tend to start losing steam after 1.5 to 2.5 minutes of uninterrupted talking. You’ll have to decide what feels right for you in any given context, but if you’re speaking for longer than a couple of minutes, there’s a good chance you’re getting into too much detail too soon.
Make sure you’re also reading the room as you’re talking. If the other person looks bored or distracted, it might be time to wrap it up. If they perk up at one part of your answer, it might be worth expanding on that topic a bit more.
In general, however, remember that you don’t have to relay your entire life story here, Dea says. Think of it as a teaser that should pique the interviewer’s interest and give them a chance to ask follow-up questions about whatever intrigues them most.
5. Practice (But Don’t Memorize)
You don’t want to wait until you get this question in a live interview to try out your answer for the first time. Think through what you want to convey about yourself ahead of each interview and practice saying it out loud.
Davis recommends leaving yourself a voicemail or recording your answer and then waiting an hour or more before you listen to it to give yourself some distance and perspective. When you finally play it back, see if the answer sounds solid and credible to you.
If you can, go beyond practicing solo. “It always helps to practice with other people to hear yourself say it and hear feedback from how other people are interpreting what you’re saying,” Dea says. Asking a trusted colleague, friend, or family member to listen and react to your answer will help you hone it. If your practice buddy is game, you can even ask them what they would say if they were being asked, and try to put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes to think about what you’d look for on the other side.
Practice will surely make your answer stronger and help you become more confident giving it. Dea warns, however, against memorizing and reciting your spiel word-for-word. “There’s a fine balance between practicing and memorizing. It needs to come off as very authentic,” he says.
Wascovich explains that recruiters might be more understanding of new grads in their first couple of years in the workforce who sound like they’ve memorized their answer, but that it’s likely to be a red flag for anyone with a little bit more experience. “You don’t want to sound overly rehearsed,” she says. “You should be able to have a conversation,” she adds. “Imagine yourself telling a story to a good friend.”
6. Know Your Audience
As with any interview question — or conversation for that matter — you’ll want to make sure you understand who you’re talking to. You might get some form of “tell me about yourself” at every single stage of the interview process for a job, from the phone screen through final rounds, but that doesn’t mean you have to give the same exact answer every time.
If you’re speaking to a recruiter who’s not immersed in the hard skills of the team you’d be joining, you might keep your answer more focused on the bigger picture, whereas when you speak to your prospective boss, you might get a little bit more technical. If you’re talking to a C-level executive as part of your final round, it’s probably smart to touch on why you’re drawn to the overall mission of the company they run.
You can also enhance your answer and make it more specific to the role and company based on what you learn as you progress through the interview process, Campos says, such as, “When I talked to so-and-so it really resonated with me that your mission or value is…”
7. Keep It Positive
If you were fired or laid off from your last job, this probably isn’t the best moment to mention it. “There’s a time and place for everything — you don’t have to cram it all into this answer,” Campos says. “If you view this as your first impression professionally, give them a window into that but don’t give them everything. The conversation’s not ready for that.”
As you move further into an interview, things get more comfortable. So wait until you get a specific question about why you’re looking to change jobs or why you have a gap on your resume to address those topics.
And that advice you’ve probably heard a million times about not badmouthing your previous employer? That applies here, too. Especially here. If the first thing you tell an interviewer is how awful your boss is and you’re trying to escape the misery of their micromanaging clutches, that’s a big turnoff.
8. Remember This Is Often Your First Impression, and It Matters
“We really only have one chance to make a first impression,” Davis says. “My opinion is that most hiring decisions are made in the first minute,” which includes your greeting, handshake, eye contact, and the first thing you say, which may very well be your response to “tell me about yourself.”
Even if the powers that be aren’t making an irreversible determination shortly after the conversation begins, a first impression can colour the rest of the interview. If you have to spend the rest of the time making up for a bad opening, you’re in a very different position than if you gave a succinct, confident, and relevant answer right off the bat.
“Be prepared for this question and show interviewers you prepared for it,”
Campos says. “The confidence that comes across in this is a really good place to start from.”
“Tell Me About Yourself” Sample Answers
That’s all great in theory, but what would a solid answer actually sound like? Check out these examples from Zhang, Dea, and Campos.
Well, I’m currently an account executive at Smith, where I handle our top performing client. Before that, I worked at an agency where I was on three different major national healthcare brands. And while I really enjoyed the work that I did, I’d love the chance to dig in much deeper with one specific healthcare company, which is why I’m so excited about this opportunity with Metro Health Centre.
Sure! So I’ve always enjoyed writing and public speaking, even going back to high school. This led me to pursue writing-related passions, for example in college, where I was an editor for our school newspaper. In addition to writing, I got to learn how to manage a team and the writing process. After college, I took a job at Acme as a social media manager, writing copy and social content for the company blog, but I raised my hand to work on the communications plan for a product launch which is where I discovered my interest in product marketing. After switching to a product marketing role and managing the two most successful new product launches last year, I realized I’m excited to take on a new role. I’ve learned I work best on products that I love and use, and given that I’m a big user of your company’s products I jumped at the chance to apply when I saw the open posting.
I’ve been in the marketing industry for over five years, primarily working in account and project management roles. I most recently worked as a senior PM for a large tech company managing large marketing campaigns and overseeing other project managers. And now I’m looking to expand my experience across different industries, particularly fintech, which is why I’m so interested in joining an agency like yours.
If you liked this piece why not check out some of my other pieces here. | https://medium.com/@everythingcj/tell-me-about-yourself-fdef50c72f9b | ['Everything Cj'] | 2021-02-07 18:11:49.729000+00:00 | ['Knowledge', 'Interview', 'Interview Questions', 'Storytelling', 'Work'] |
Partially Woke Older White Men, Part II | Partially Woke Older White Men, Part II
“What is bullying you ask? Oh, that’s an easy one…”
Photo by: Jeena Paradies
A comment was posted today on my Facebook page by an older white man. (His post has some typos so I have made some edits.)
He said, “I’m beginning to look at my fellow left-leaning friends, in real life here in ID, where tension (has) been high over a couple who sell their produce in the local farmers market.”
“This couple has been accused of (being) white supremacists. It’s possibly true. What concerns me is the vilification of people that don’t automatically want to drive this couple from the market. A lot of talk about you must be Nazi sympathizer if you don’t want to drive them out.”
“It looks like bullying to me. It’s got me thinking about looking through the lens of (what) is bullying in other situation (s). But I don’t really have a good working definition of what bullying is. Have you thought about it?”
Yes, I have thought about bullying.
I want to approach my response by stating my own priority here; my hope that I can exhibit compassion for older white men. There are challenging assumptions in this man’s questions, but please know I am not berating anyone. How can I not understand how he feels? He grew up in the same world I did.
My response: What is bullying you ask? Oh, that’s an easy one. Bullying is a polite term for what white supremacists would do to you if your skin was not white.
Bullying is the result of those who believe in dominance as the right and proper expression of their advantages be it class, race, religion or gender. It’s not done to counter aggression, it’s done to glorify aggression, typically against the weak or defenseless. It is domination for its own sake.
My work speaks extensively about how we bully boys out of emotional expression using violence to slot them into hierarchical masculinity of dominance. The alpha males of masculinity bully any who are different, any who are outliers. Bullies seek to punish difference and force conformity in a culture of domination. They express their own brokenness by hurting others.
But you are after a very different definition of bullying, I think. At times, you have seemingly implied that anyone who calls out male privilege, demanding that millions of silent men take action to end violence against women, feels to you like bullying them. And even more surprising, you seem to be hinting here that we shouldn’t bully white nationalists, even though they are most certainly ready to bully all of us.
Rest assured, the only thing constraining white nationalists is that white nationalism is not yet openly the law of the land. But they would happy have it so. And THEN, I assure you they would happily kick in all our doors. THEN you would see some bullying. But of course, it will be too late to do anything about it because we didn’t want to, as you seem to be calling it, “bully” them at this earlier stage.
Also, your language, “fellow left-leaning friends.” I can find you plenty of conservatives who would happily run white nationalists out of town. This is not a left/right thing. This is a fundamental moral issue. Racism is evil. Period. Full Stop. When you frame opposition to white nationalists as “left-leaning” you do white nationalists’ work for them, reinforcing a false political binary that serves their purposes. Be careful about how you use language. It is dangerous to chip away at moral clarity by inserting doubts.
White nationalists are not burdened by your need to question in these ways. They have no doubts as to their goals. They have children in cages at the border. Right now. While we partially woke white men have a nice debate about bullying. Honestly, I wish you could spend six months as a woman or as a black man. It would clear up all these doubts you have about who is actually doing the bullying very quickly.
Ultimately, what I see here is white male discomfort. Millions of white men of our generation find all this upheaval deeply uncomfortable. We didn’t grow up in the great depression. We didn’t bare-knuckle battle to build unions. We didn’t fight in the great wars. Men like you and I grew up in the easy times. When America was fast cars and dependable jobs. When white men like us just had to pick a good college. Today’s constant calls to take action on behalf of others represent an intrusive discomfort in our otherwise comfortable lives.
It may seem easier to ask everyone to just calm down instead of confronting the ugly truth of white supremacy or the epidemic of abuse against women. But THIS is the work of white men like us. We must learn to lean into our discomfort.
The good old days are gone and they aren’t coming back because the women, LGBTQ people, and people of color who made our easy lives possible aren’t having it anymore. We don’t ask black men to lean into their discomfort because they live discomfort every day of their lives and much worse. We don’t ask women to lean into discomfort because they live discomfort daily and much worse. Women, LGBTQ people, POC can NEVER EVER step out of inequality/ oppression. White men like us can take a nice break whenever we like. No one is coming after us daily. We are not the targets.
My ask of you is to look at your own discomfort when others loudly oppose what you yourself suspect are white nationalists participating in your local farmers market. Is your discomfort about bullying? Or is your discomfort about your wish for life to not be uncomfortable for you?
The world is in upheaval not because people oppose injustice. It’s because we have white nationalists in the White House seeking to subjugate us all. The right to openly oppose them exists for now. So, let’s be real clear about what’s at stake before we lose this fight.
You want a comfortable world? Then older white men like you and I, we have to help make a comfortable world happen, not just for ourselves (we already have that) but for everyone else who does not. You want a comfortable world? Then wake up. Stand up. And fucking fight for it.
The thread this post is based on is up on Twitter here: | https://remakingmanhood.medium.com/partially-woke-older-white-men-part-ii-1e14032c734d | ['Mark Greene'] | 2020-03-26 16:15:02.641000+00:00 | ['Bullying', 'White Supremacy', 'Masculinity', 'White Privilege', 'Politics'] |
‘This is the Waycast’ Episode 8: Chapter 16 “The Rescue” | ‘This is the Waycast’ Episode 8: Chapter 16 “The Rescue”
Join Zach Perilstein, Sara Edwards, Giovanni Delgadillo, and Elizabeth Pfeiffer as they break down and analyze this week’s episode of ‘The Mandalorian’ named “The Rescue.” Where The Mandalorian and his crew go on a rescue mission for Grogu on Moff Gideon’s ship. Zach Perilstein Follow Dec 18, 2020 · 1 min read
SPOILER WARNING FOR The Mandalorian
This is it! The season finale of season two of The Mandalorian and the first season of this podcast This is the Waycast. Thank you to all of our listeners for joining us every week. Today the hosts talk about “The Rescue” and dive deep into Zach’s amazing theory for the rest of The Mandalorian, the Skywalker Saga, and the Star Wars Universe.
Zach, Sara, Giovanni, and Elizabeth break down and discuss arguably the biggest episode of The Mandalorian yet. You won’t want to miss this pod!
This is the Waycast will return for season two in December 2021.
Anchor:
Apple Podcasts:
Spotify:
All episodes of This is the Waycast are available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Boardwalk Times — The Destination for True Disney Parks Fans Plus Everything Else. | https://boardwalktimes.net/this-is-the-waycast-episode-8-chapter-16-the-rescue-1098f2e27462 | ['Zach Perilstein'] | 2020-12-18 21:15:39.065000+00:00 | ['Disney Plus', 'Star Wars', 'The Mandalorian', 'This Is The Waycast', 'Podcast'] |
Rose water is a treasure of beauty and health | The face is said to be the best reflection of our emotions, feelings and thoughts, so the clearer the face, the more beautiful the colors of life will appear on the face. The face is the part of our body that is directly affected by external factors. Affected. It is a sign of facial skin sensitivity that it is the first to accept the effects of illness and health and suffering. This is why facial skin is considered more demanding than body skin.
Experts believe that the use of natural products to protect the skin has magical effects. An important advantage of these products is that they are useful for all skin types and do not have harmful effects. One of these natural ingredients is rose liqueur. Rose liqueur is considered to be a rare gem for the skin. In the current advanced age, dermatologists recommend using it not only for the beauty of the skin, but also for the treatment of skin diseases. Rose liqueur It also helps maintain the amount of water in the lower layers of the skin. If you wash your face with rose water, your skin will be soft, radiant and beautiful. Research has also shown that rose water prevents abnormal discharge of water from the skin.
Usually in summer when excessive sweating occurs. Yes, rose water prevents excessive sweating. If some amount of rose water is added to the bath water, the skin remains fragrant. There is hardly any natural product better than rose liqueur for skin rejuvenation. Rose liqueur is the best medicine to eliminate skin diseases. Expensive chemical products are used to remove freckles, dryness and blemishes on the face. However, dermatologists prefer rose liqueur in this regard. They suggest that if rose liqueur is used daily to protect the skin of the face from wrinkles and brighten the complexion, the desired results can be achieved. Housewives’ hands usually become stiff and hard when they wash dishes and clothes. The skin of the hands starts peeling and becomes sore. If glycerin, lemon and rose water are mixed together and massaged on the hands, the skin of the hands becomes soft. And the softness returns. Rose liqueur removes dust and protects the skin from drying out. Rose liqueur helps in solving not only physical but also mental problems. Drinking this liqueur strengthens the heart and mind less, but in this regard it is important that the rose liqueur is absolutely free from admixture. Sedatives are taken to relieve nervous tension. If a few drops of olive oil and honey are mixed in rose water, it has miraculous effects, relieves stress and calms the nerves. Adding rose water to the water gives immunity against diseases and removes the sluggishness of the body.
Due to the invaluable benefits of this liquor, doctors consider it to be an effective and useful natural medicine. Clear, cool and pure rose water is a blessing to protect the eyes from all diseases. It keeps the eyes clean. It provides protection against conjunctivitis. Drinking rose water reduces the severity of physical ailments. If taken daily in gastrointestinal diseases, it produces the best in gastrointestinal functions. It is very useful for eliminating toxins in the blood. It cleanses the blood. Which does not cause skin problems. Modern research has shown that the ingredients in natural products have magical effects and this natural blessing is popular all over the world due to the amazing benefits of rose water. Applying rose water on the forehead to relieve headaches in hot weather gives relief. It is also useful in hemorrhoids. Drinking rose water relieves constipation. Children and pregnant women can be fed in any disease. It is useful to feed in the wound of the urinary tract. It is a nourishing and pleasing organ. It protects against heart failure. | https://medium.com/@nosher-atif/rose-water-is-a-treasure-of-beauty-and-health-60066c5f594a | ['Atif Nosher'] | 2020-12-24 17:45:12.408000+00:00 | ['Beauty Skin Care Products', 'Skin Care Tips', 'Beauty', 'Skin Care Products'] |
Strategies for Dealing With Extra Sensory Perceptions While Struggling With a Sensory Processing… | Boy Having Fun in a Sensory Tunnel — Photo Courtesy of Pixabay
Strategies for Dealing With Extra Sensory Perceptions While Struggling With a Sensory Processing Disorder
We were all introduced to our five senses — touch, taste, hearing, smell and sight — possibly as far back as preschool. However, did you know we do NOT have FIVE senses…we actually have EIGHT!
“What?! My preschool teacher was wrong?”. Well, the short answer is “Yes”; however, do not be too hard on him or her because the other three ways in which we process stimuli from our environment are not commonly known. In fact, the only ones I have ever met, outside of the health professions, who know about the extra sensory perceptions of proprioception, vestibular and interoception are parents facing the daily challenges of training a child with a sensory processing disorder.
The MediLexicon defines proprioception as “a sense or perception, usually at a subconscious level, of the movements and position of the body (especially its limbs), independent of vision”. Proprioception is gained primarily by sensory nerve input from muscles, tendons and the fibrous capsules of the joints. Proprioception is controlled by the cerebellum, the center of balance in the brain. Put simply, the sense of proprioception allows us to know the position of our arms, legs, hands and feet without looking at them. For example, when a person puts their hands on their head, they generally do not have to look in order to realize that their hands are above their head. Children who suffer from a proprioceptive processing disorder have had this sense disrupted. Some common challenges these children face are frequent falling, lack of focus and the general tendency to become over-stimulated when his/her environment is filled with too many different kinds of stimuli at one time — i.e. sights, sounds, smells, etc. Children with proprioceptive challenges can even have an adverse response to the daily clutter that shows up with the normal activities of a household. While most of us do not like clutter, a person with a proprioceptive disorder will respond in an irrational, almost obsessive compulsive, manner. For example, our son Andy thrives on order so when our house becomes cluttered with toys after a day of learning and play with his brother and sister, he attempts to bring order by creating stacks, sorting things and/or lining things up. These days, now that he is older, he will even put things away where they are supposed to go. This does not happen as consistently as we would like; but, at least it happens more often than it did. However, when he was less than four-years-old, the story was quite a bit different. Andy’s answer to clutter back then was to dump all the toy bins in the house then line up the toys from one end of our apartment to another, which actually contributed to creating more mess instead of to bringing order — not to mention the additional frustration it caused for Mom and Dad. Some strategies for coping with a proprioceptive processing disorder are deep massage, big squeezes (around our house those look like big bear hugs while turning it into a game called “1 2 3 Squeeeeze!!”), and weighted blankets or vests.
The vestibular sense is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a complex sense concerned with the perception of bodily position and motion…”. This sense is essentially mediated by the vestibule in the inner ear, the pull of gravity and the motion of the head. Children who suffer from a vestibular processing disorder often have problems self-regulating their body position and movement. They attempt to self-address this issue through something called stimming. Stimming is short for self-stimulation; and, it is basically defined as repetitive body movements. The most common repetitive body movement, often associated with autism, is hand flapping. However, there are several different forms of stimming: visual, vestibular, tactile, verbal and auditory — just to name a few. Andy’s modes of stimming are visual (repeatedly turning toys and other objects in front of his face and lining up toys), auditory (repetition of odd noises and inappropriate giggling) with occasional hand-flapping though not as common as these other forms he does. As with anything else, there are many ways to deal with a vestibular processing disorder; but, the one way that has been most effective around our home is a consistent and rigorous household schedule. It seems that Andy, at least, requires a constant flow of information; and, the busier we can keep him learning and interacting with himself and his environment, the less he stims. Your child could be different. It will just take a bit of experimentation before finding what works.
Interoception is probably the even lesser known and understood of the extra sensory perceptions. The Autism Awareness Center defines interoception as “the little receptors…that gather information from inside our body that enable us to feel things such as hunger, fullness…body temperature, the need for the bathroom, physical exertion, sexual arousal and our emotions”. Andy has struggled with interoceptive processing disorder in different ways depending on his stage of development. As a toddler/preschooler, struggling interoceptively meant that potty training took longer. Now that he has been potty trained for several years and nearly eight-years-old, his interoceptive struggles manifest more in the total unawareness of body temperature (he will take his coat off in sub-freezing weather) and emotional outbursts (for us, this means crying from time-to-time for no apparent reason). The emotional outbursts are admittedly a new development for us, but one strategy that has worked for us is communicating with him, especially the narration of daily activities and reassurance that the people in his life are there for him and where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there. For example, Dad is leaving for work; but, when it is time, he will come back. Or, Sissy is off to the homeschool academy but will come back when the school day is over. Another strategy we have used for his emotional outbursts is distraction. We just get him involved in something else; and, often, he calms down in ten minutes or less.
A great way to address any of these areas is occupational therapy. Work with your health care provider, home health agency and/or school district to obtain these services for your child. As always, I personally recommend in-home services across the board. My husband and I totally believe that Andy has done as well as he has because we have always had in-home occupational, speech and ABA services for him even when he was in public school at the preschool and kindergarten levels. Public schools are restricted by budgetary concerns. This often means that children only receive an hour or less a week in any of these areas. We have found that this is simply not enough!
These senses — vestibular, proprioceptive and interoceptive — are essential to things I have already mentioned, and they are in varying ways important to learning which can affect your child’s future. Please do not let insurance companies dictate your parenting and the opportunities you afford your child. If your child is autistic, you have access to Medicaid; and, for parents of autistic children, there is (currently anyway) an income waiver so no matter what, your child has access to Medicaid which does pay for in-home pediatric therapy and for certain medical equipment. If your child does not have autism but suffers a sensory processing disorder and you make too much to receive Medicaid, you are then forced to deal with private insurance which may or may not cover the amount of therapy services or the equipment your child may need. Please do not give up or settle! Get creative; and, do not tether your child to a system, private or government, that is based on their weakness and unstable at best. Take measures that put your child in a place of strength. This is why I wrote an article here on Medium entitled A Candid Talk to Parents About Money and Raising a Child With Special Needs. I will be writing follow-up articles about money and special needs parenting. Stay tuned! | https://medium.com/life-on-the-spectrum/strategies-for-dealing-with-extra-sensory-perceptions-while-struggling-with-a-sensory-processing-2e263402d919 | ['Tiffany Cook'] | 2018-11-07 11:22:29.135000+00:00 | ['Sensory Processing', 'Special Needs Parenting', 'Autism', 'Parenting', 'Personal Finance'] |
My Journey into CQRS and Event Sourcing | The Application
First we need a problem to solve, one that would benefit from applying these patterns.
Since I work for a health-tech company I decided to tackle a problem which we'll eventually need to address: Consent Management.
Why? With event sourcing we store all events instead of mutating a persistent state so we get auditing "for free". We can also handle consent events to trigger user-facing side effects such as push notifying users when something happens or use event streaming to integrate with other services asynchronously. Also, something not related to the domain, we can evolve our read model according to evolving business requirements — if necessary we can replay all events and reconstruct our read models for new use cases.
Note: The application is implemented using Commanded. Commanded is an awesome Elixir library that helps abstract away some of the plumbing necessary when building an application of this kind. We'll be blazing through some of it's concepts and building blocks but be sure check out the full documentation.
Requirements
We need a service that allows for health care professionals — doctors and nurses for now — and patients to ask a patient for consent i.e. permission to view his/hers health records — exams, consultations, conditions and ER visits for now. The patient should be able to grant consent — give permission — revoke a granted consent — remove permission — and view/list all consents he/she has granted.
There should also be a way to easily know whether or not a health care professional has consent over a patient's health records.
From this we can define some aspects of our service:
Actors : patients and health care professionals
: patients and health care professionals Write Side (Command) API: ask for consent, grant consent, revoke consent
ask for consent, grant consent, revoke consent Read Side (Query) API: list patient's granted consents, check whether or not a professional has consent
list patient's granted consents, check whether or not a professional has consent Business Invariants: * A professional cannot ask for a consent which was already granted; * A patient cannot grant a consent which was already granted; * A patient cannot revoke a consent which has already been revoked or was not granted; * Consents can be asked by other patients; consents can be granted to other patients; * Professionals can only be doctors and nurses; * Permissions can only be given/asked/revoked for health records of type exams, consultations, conditions and ER visits
With the higher level api of our application defined and the requirements we can derive:
Commands: AskConsent, GrantConsent, RevokeConsent — Referencing a patient id, the professional's id, the professional's type (e.g. doctor or nurse), the health record type being targeted.
AskConsent, GrantConsent, RevokeConsent — Referencing a patient id, the professional's id, the professional's type (e.g. doctor or nurse), the health record type being targeted. Events: ConsentAsked, ConsentGranted, ConsentRevoked — Also referencing a patient id, the professional’s id, the professional’s type, the health record type.
ConsentAsked, ConsentGranted, ConsentRevoked — Also referencing a patient id, the professional’s id, the professional’s type, the health record type. Aggregates: Patient — Identified by the patient id; its state should have a data structure capable of rapidly checking for the existence of granted consents.
Patient — Identified by the patient id; its state should have a data structure capable of rapidly checking for the existence of granted consents. Projections: PatientConsent Entity — references the patient's id, the professional’s id, the professional’s type and has a list of health record types to which permission has been granted.
Event Sourcing With Elixir — Main entities in Commanded Library by Bruno Antunes
Now let's dive into some implementation.
Commands
We will define our commands as Elixir structs. We'll also have one module per command:
defmodule Consent.Commands.GrantConsent do
@enforce_keys [:patient_id, :to_id, :to_entity, :target]
defstruct [
:patient_id, # patient's id
:to_id, # id of professional/patient
:to_entity, # patient | doctor | nurse
:target # exams | consultations | conditions | ...
]
end
Events
We'll also define our events as structs and have one module per event — remember to have the event's name in past tense:
defmodule Consent.Events.ConsentGranted do
@enforce_keys [
:patient_id, :to_id, :to_entity, :target
]
@derive Jason.Encoder defstruct [
:patient_id,
:to_id,
:to_entity,
:target,
:timestamp
]
end
Notice how we derive the Jason.Encoder protocol. That way commanded is able to serialize our events as JSON encoded binaries prior to saving them to the Event Store.
Aggregate
Our Patient aggregate is an Elixir Module that:
Defines the aggregate state — a struct
Has two kinds of functions
# command functions: take the current state and a command
# return events @spec execute(state, command) :: {:ok, [event]} | {:error, term()} # state mutators: take the current state and an event
# return new state @spec apply(state, event) :: state
For our case:
the state will be a map: key is a tuple of {actor_type, actor_id}, value is the list of permissions granted. That way it is easy to enforce our business invariants
command functions will pattern match on the struct type of the aggregate and of the command, enforce the invariants and return an event
state mutators will pattern match on the struct type of the aggregate and return the updated state reflecting the event application
defmodule Consent.Patient do alias Consent.Events.{
ConsentAsked, ConsentGranted, ConsentRevoked
}
alias Consent.Commands.{
AskConsent, GrantConsent, RevokeConsent
}
alias __MODULE__ @derive Jason.Encoder # used for snapshotting (not discussed)
defstruct consent: %{} # empty map as initial state # executing GrantConsent command
def execute(%Patient{} = patient, %GrantConsent{} = cmd) do
if has_consent?(
patient,
{cmd.to_entity, cmd.to_id},
cmd.target
)
do # consent already granted -> error
{:error, :consent_already_granted}
else
%ConsentGranted{ # dispatch event
patient_id: cmd.patient_id,
to_entity: cmd.to_entity,
to_id: cmd.to_id,
target: cmd.target
}
|> add_timestamp()
end
end # applies ConsentGranted to aggregate
def apply(
%Patient{consent: consent} = patient,
%ConsentGranted{
to_entity: entity,
to_id: id,
target: target
}) do
consent
|> Map.get({entity, id}, [])
|> (&[target | &1]).()
|> update_consent({entity, id}, consent)
|> update_patient(patient)
end # private helpers defp has_consent?(%{consent: consent}, {entity, id}, target) do
consent
|> Map.get({entity, id}, [])
|> Enum.member?(target)
end defp update_consent(target_list, key, %{} = consent_map) do
Map.put(consent_map, key, target_list)
end defp update_patient(%{} = consent_map, %Patient{} = patient) do
%Patient{patient | consent: consent_map}
end # other commands and state mutators omitted for brevity end
Note: both the state mutator and command functions take the current state as parameters. This stateful behaviour is possible because Commanded spawns a GenServer per aggregate instance.
Command Router
The command router will be an Elixir module that adopts the behaviour of a Commanded.Commands.Router. Here's where we define how to forward the commands to the appropriate aggregates by defining which commands are dispatched to which aggregate — and possibly a command handler — and aggregate identity:
defmodule Consent.CommandRouter do
use Commanded.Commands.Router alias Consent.Commands.{AskConsent, GrantConsent, RevokeConsent} # middlewares won't be discussed
middleware Commanded.Middleware.Logger
middleware Consent.Middlewares.Validation dispatch(
[AskConsent, GrantConsent, RevokeConsent], # commands
to: Consent.Patient, # aggregate module
identity: :patient_id # how to locate or spawn aggregate process
)
end
Now when we dispatch a command through the router it will forward it to the appropriate patient aggregate identified by the patient's id.
Note: It is possible to dispatch the command to a Command Handler — which receives the aggregate and the command in its handle/2 function — to validate, authorize or enrich command data prior to calling the aggregate. In our case we are forwarding the command directly to the aggregate.
Event Store
The specialized data store that stores the events. Commanded ships with adapters for two of them: Commanded author’s own EventStore, open source and based on PostgreSQL — the one we're gonna use — , and Greg Young’s Event Store, also open source and with optional paid support.
To configure the eventstore:
# /config/config.exs config :commanded,
event_store_adapter: Commanded.EventStore.Adapters.EventStore --- # /config/dev.exs config :eventstore,
column_data_type: "jsonb" config :eventstore, EventStore.Storage,
serializer: EventStore.JsonbSerializer,
types: EventStore.PostgresTypes,
username: "write_model_db_user",
password: "write_model_db_password",
database: "write_model_db_database",
hostname: "localhost",
port: 5433,
pool_size: 10
This will configure commanded to use PostgreSQL as the Event Store and also configures the connection to the database.
Api — Write/Command
Now that we have the command side implemented we can start implementing our high level api and it is as simple as having functions that build commands from their parameters and dispatch it using our router:
defmodule Consent do
alias Consent.CommandRouter, as: Router
alias Consent.Commands.{AskConsent, GrantConsent, RevokeConsent} # -- Write --
def ask_consent(patient_id, by_entity, by_id, target) do
%AskConsent{
patient_id: patient_id,
by_entity: by_entity,
by_id: by_id,
target: target
}
|> Router.dispatch()
end def grant_consent(patient_id, to_entity, to_id, target) do
%GrantConsent{
patient_id: patient_id,
to_entity: to_entity,
to_id: to_id,
target: target
}
|> Router.dispatch()
end def revoke_consent(patient_id, from_entity, from_id, target) do
%RevokeConsent{
patient_id: patient_id,
from_entity: from_entity,
from_id: from_id,
target: target
}
|> Router.dispatch()
end # -- TODO: Read -- end
Projector
A projector is a specialized Event Handler, it's a module that listens for events and builds/changes the read model. We're gonna use another commanded library — commanded-ecto-projections — that simplifies projector implementation with Ecto. With this library we're going to build our read model using a SQL database supported by Ecto — Postgres.
Our projector will listen for events and create/update our PatientConsent entity — patient_consent table.
First let's define our Ecto Schema for our read model:
defmodule Consent.Schemas.Patient do
use Ecto.Schema schema "patient_consent" do
field(:patient_id, :string)
field(:entity_name, :string)
field(:entity_id, :string)
field(:permissions, {:array, :string})
end
end
Now we have to configure the Ecto Repo for our read model:
# /lib/consent/repo.ex defmodule Consent.Repo do
use Ecto.Repo,
otp_app: :consent,
adapter: Ecto.Adapters.Postgres # postgres connector
end --- # /config/config.exs config :consent,
ecto_repos: [Consent.Repo] --- # /config/dev.exs config :consent, Consent.Repo, # database connection config
username: "read_model_db_user",
password: "read_model_db_password",
database: "read_model_db_database",
hostname: "localhost",
port: 5433,
pool_size: 10
Note: Ecto is an awesome library but explaining it's details is out of the scope of this article. Please refer to the official documentation.
Now we can configure and implement our projector.
The projector uses the project/3 macro from Commanded.Projections.Ecto. We just have to pattern match to our domain events and create/update our read model using the Ecto.Multi passed to the callback function:
# /config/config.ex config :commanded_ecto_projections,
repo: Consent.Repo # projectors will use our Ecto Repo --- # /lib/consent/projectors/patient.ex defmodule Consent.Projectors.Patient do
use Commanded.Projections.Ecto, name: to_string(__MODULE__) import Ecto.Query alias Consent.Events.{
ConsentAsked, ConsentGranted, ConsentRevoked
}
alias Consent.Schemas
alias Consent.Repo # -- projections -- # projecting ConsentGranted event
project(%ConsentGranted{} = evt, fn multi ->
patient =
query_patient(evt.patient_id, evt.to_entity, evt.to_id)
|> Repo.one() case patient do
nil ->
Ecto.Multi.insert(
multi,
:create_patient_consent,
%Schemas.Patient{
patient_id: evt.patient_id,
entity_name: evt.to_entity,
entity_id: evt.to_id,
permissions: [evt.target]
}) saved ->
changeset =
[evt.target | saved.permissions]
|> update_permissions_changeset(saved) Ecto.Multi.update(multi, :update_patient_consent, changeset)
end
end) # -- helpers -- defp update_permissions_changeset(permissions, patient) do
patient
|> Ecto.Changeset.change()
|> Ecto.Changeset.put_change(
:permissions,
Enum.uniq(permissions)
)
end defp query_patient(patient_id, entity_name, entity_id) do
from(
p in Schemas.Patient,
where:
p.patient_id == ^patient_id and
p.entity_name == ^entity_name and
p.entity_id == ^entity_id
)
end end
Api — Read/Query
Now that we have our read model ready we can implement our queries on our high level api:
defmodule Consent do
# omitted for brevity
# -- Read -- def consents(patient_id) do
from(
p in Patient,
where: p.patient_id == ^patient_id
)
|> Repo.all()
end def has_consent?(
patient_id,
entity_name,
entity_id,
permission \\ :all
) do
permissions =
from(
p in Patient,
where:
p.patient_id == ^patient_id and
p.entity_name == ^to_string(entity_name) and
p.entity_id == ^entity_id,
select: p.permissions
)
|> Repo.one() case permissions do
nil -> false
[] -> false
list -> to_string(permission) in list or "all" in list
end
end
Running the Application
Let's run our application in the terminal with the IEx interactive shell— you'll need to have Elixir and git installed.
git clone [email protected]:rodrigobotti/cqrs_es_consent.git
git checkout part-1
cd cqrs_es_consent # download code # download dependencies
mix deps.get
mix compile # run interactive shell with project modules available
iex -S mix
Now we can interact with our application in the interactive shell. We'll do that by using the high level api — Consent module:
# list consents for patient "patient_id"
iex> Consent.consents("patient_id")
[] # empty list - has no consents granted # granting consent
iex> Consent.grant_consent("patient_id", "doctor", "doctor_id", "exams")
:ok # just returns :ok atom # granting another consent
iex> Consent.grant_consent("patient_id", "doctor", "doctor_id", "consultations")
:ok # attempt to grant already granted consent
iex> Consent.grant_consent("patient_id", "doctor", "doctor_id", "consultations")
{:error, :consent_already_granted} # returns error # list consents
iex> Consent.consents("patient_id")
[
%Consent.Schemas.Patient{
__meta__: #Ecto.Schema.Metadata<:loaded, "patient_consent">,
entity_id: "doctor_id",
entity_name: "doctor",
id: 6,
patient_id: "patient_id",
permissions: ["consultations", "exams"]
}
] # checking consent
iex> Consent.has_consent?("patient_id", "doctor", "doctor_id", "exams")
true # because this consent was granted # revoking consent
iex> Consent.revoke_consent("patient_id", "doctor", "doctor_id", "exams")
:ok # checking consent again
iex> Consent.has_consent?("patient_id", "doctor", "doctor_id", "exams")
false # because we revoked it
As we can see, dispatching the commands enforces the business invariants and returns immediately. When we query the read model we can see the handlers — projectors — managed to modify the read model allowing us to query it.
Conclusion
By building this application I managed to accomplish learning about some of the pattern's concepts in practice and clear some misconceptions I had about some elements of the architecture.
The most important thing for me was that I was able to understand in practice the responsibilities of each component of the architecture and how they all connect together.
Summarizing what we learned so far:
How to combine CQRS and Event Sourcing
Components of the architecture: Command Handlers, Aggregates, Event Handlers, Event Store
How the components connect together to form an application
Using Elixir with Commanded for implementing the architectural patterns
References and Comments | https://medium.com/nexa-digital/my-journey-into-cqrs-and-event-sourcing-4bd7d0c1c670 | ['Rodrigo Botti'] | 2019-11-05 00:36:48.225000+00:00 | ['Event Sourcing', 'Cqrs', 'Software Architecture', 'Elixir'] |
Life Lessons | Life is full of lessons
It can teach us a lot
People will complain
About their given lot
Every lesson
Is like a stepping stone
Even like a ladder
Provided you take
Things in your stride
The education of
The school of hard knocks
Is often more valuable
The school or university
Things they do not teach you
You often learn by doing
Even lessons no parent
Can teach us
Along each step of the way | https://medium.com/@peteraedwards/life-lessons-4d6d6ef0ded1 | ['Peter Andrew Edwards'] | 2020-12-18 21:42:43.951000+00:00 | ['Poetic Prose', 'Poetry', 'Poet', 'Poems On Medium', 'Poetry On Medium'] |
Fake News and how to spot it | If you’re on any social media site, chances are you’ve already seen some fake news today.
Through social media’s complex algorithms, the content we see on our daily scrolls is being targeted at us directly, without us ever knowing much about it. Platforms use age, gender, interests and any other data they have to filter down what reaches our feeds. Often this is done to give you a more enjoyable experience, with content that will be more relevant to you. But as if times weren’t confusing enough, much of the news we see across the internet isn’t even accurate. A lot of it deliberately isn’t. We all have a fake news problem. The importance of fact-checking and critical thinking is at an all-time high where clickbait is concerned.
Two words pop up now more than ever. Disinformation and Misinformation. While they may sound pretty interchangeable, there’s a bit more to it than that.
What’s the difference?
Disinformation: Content that is intentionally false, but is presented as fact. It serves a purpose. The writer was well aware of what they were doing, and subsequently many of its sharers are too. It has the goal of being untruthful. Often the presentation of this content — made to seem official and delivered with conviction — can be enough to make people believe it to be true. ‘Dis-’ is a negative prefix, it might be easiest to remember this one by thinking of ‘dishonest’.
Misinformation: It’s less calculated than the above, with people often unwittingly sharing false information. Although the content isn’t factually correct, it’s redistributed as if it is. It’s a lot more likely to involve your grandma sharing some highly dubious news articles on Facebook. However it’s often shared deliberately by people who agree with the message it’s promoting. ‘Mis-’ as in to misinform or make a misjudgement. Although it’s less malicious than making the content itself, it can still have negative results.
Where does it all come from?
Disinformation — and subsequently misinformation — has a long history that can be traced back many centuries. As long as people have had agendas, and access to means of spreading their views, there’s been scope for exaggeration and outright deception. From the earliest forms of news sharing, right up to the device you’re reading this on, it’s found outlets somewhere. Politics has always been particularly prone to this. Smear campaigns throughout history have shown how one side can end up in murky water when it comes to lying about the other.
Back in the early 20th century, newspaper and radio were about the only ways to get your news. During conflict and times of political unrest, they could be used to push propaganda and sway public opinion. We have access to as many varied sources as we like today when it comes to investigating current events. Sixty seconds on google can uncover a lot. But the same principle remains: the greater your exposure to specific information, the more power it can have to influence you. We have far more choices about where to get our news from today. But we’re also spending more time than ever being bombarded with content.
Accompanied by an explosion in platforms to communicate it from, disinformation has become inescapable. It’s lurking in our news feeds and we aren’t always able to spot it.
But why is it even a thing? What use could distorted facts even have?
Disinformation exists to push ideologies through stealth tactics. Convincing people they’re buying into factual evidence [when they’re not] can be more effective than openly trying to win them over to a cause that they might not fully agree with on face value. It also provides the ‘evidence’ to support claims being made, whether any of it’s true or not. It can give the impression of people having formed organic opinions from their own findings — so long as they haven’t done much work double-checking those findings. It’s easy to end up down the rabbit hole from one fake news article into another. At the furthest end of the spectrum, disinformation can encompass extremist content.
Misinformation is redistributed for many reasons and they’re not all malevolent. People may simply believe it to be true and not feel inclined to fact check. They might feel very strongly about it if it’s emotive content. Or they may believe it to be a kind of ‘alternative’ truth — popular among conspiracy theorists. However there are also malicious reasons for sharing misinformation — for the same reasons that disinformation is created.
Fake News
In comes ‘fake news’. It’s not the most exact phrase; it can be thrown at just about anything. Usually as an insult and without much thought or research behind it. But fake news has become a common term for all things mis- and dis-informative. Popularised by Donald Trump in just about every press conference, its popularity has seen a meteoric rise lately.
Entering ‘fake news’ into Google Trends shows how the term had a sudden surge in popularity online back in late 2016 — notably right around the time of the US election. It’s been with us ever since, often spiking during particular global events and has never dropped back to it’s pre-Trump levels. Facebook has been a breeding ground for fake news. With its quick and easy Share feature and a proliferation of fake accounts dispersing harmful content.
It’s not hard to notice that fake news is most prevalent when there’s a major event of some kind. Think of Brexit, the pandemic and even recent news about medical breakthroughs. When there’s a subject people feel strongly about, especially something divisive, there’s a surge in the amount of misinformation being passed around. Anti-vaccination content exists on the internet all year round, but doesn’t usually get shared too far beyond its own community. However with more and more people looking up news about the Covid vaccine, it’s potential audience has grown exponentially. It only takes a few people to share anti-vax items that aren’t based in scientific fact for the message to be spread across social media as if it were genuine news.
Fake News and Influencers
The problem gets intensified when high profile figures share misleading material. Particularly celebrities with audiences well into the millions across social media. For instance Kim Kardashian has 193 MILLION Instagram followers right now — her posts reach enough people to populate a country. That’s a colossal audience, and as with all influencers, she has an impressionable demographic following her. Many have been called out for irresponsible sharing. From Gwyneth Paltrow’s misleading and sometimes dangerous health content, to Woody Harrelson sharing baseless reports about 5G causing coronavirus. And of course, Donald Trump; walking the line between sharing fake news, and accusing other people of doing the same. Unfortunately, the enormous reach influencers have means that just one drop of disinformation can spread like a tidal wave. More reliable, expert content struggles to rival such popularity.
Social media sites have been slow at combatting what’s shared on their platforms. While freedom of speech is an important right, there’s always the uncomfortable matter of when it’s gone too far. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have recently started adding disclaimers under certain content — anything on your timeline related to Covid is likely to have a little message tacked underneath with further resources.
Spotting fake news
Check it out: It can be as simple as that. Take a look at the author, the publication date and the evidence. All these little things can help you discern the credibility before you go any further. Is it reputable, recent, and supported by other reliable sources? You wouldn’t buy something without shopping around a bit first; make sure you’re getting the best quality news the same way. Track down a few other sources to compare the facts.
Read beyond the headline: Don’t fall for the clickbait-y opening lines. Sensationalist titles aren’t the whole story so make sure you’re not getting your facts from the first sentence on the page. Read thoroughly, especially before sharing.
Common sense: Critical thinking shouldn’t stop just because you’re on your phone. If something seems too good to be true, chances are it probably is. Same goes for anything that’s trying to get a strong reaction from you. Take a second to really think about that article which made you upset/offended/furious. Outrage can be a sign you should check out this info elsewhere before you believe it.
Not 100% sure? Don’t share: It can be tempting to automatically repost content when you agree with a catchy headline. And we’re all guilty of skim-reading things without paying much attention. But perpetuating the cycle of misinformation is the last thing anyone needs. If you’re not certain about something — or haven’t double checked the facts — just give sharing it a miss. | https://medium.com/@braderievintage/fake-news-and-how-to-spot-it-7fabf2bbed98 | [] | 2020-12-15 09:17:35.383000+00:00 | ['News', 'Misinformation', 'Disinformation', 'Social Media', 'Fake News'] |
[NEWS] An Award For TEMCO | So, let’s take a look at our CEO Scott Yoon’s Interview from Hankook Ilbo:
The innovation of supply chain data management platform through Blockchain:
TEMCO (CEO Scott Yoon, TEMCO) is a company that develops blockchain based supply chain data management system and e-commerce platform, planning to lead the revolution in the industry. TEMCO, through the specialized technical skills and business model, secured funding from Korea Investment Partners, and have made partnerships within Korea and globally.
Currently, TEMCO is in the process of developing an open market platform for luxury items called “GUHADA”.
“GUHADA” differentiates itself from other existing platforms by providing an independent method for the consumers so that they can trust the luxury goods’ authenticity that they purchase on the platform. To protect consumers from mishaps and troubles, the GUHADA platform uploads all the data such as product certifications, distribution records, and more information and shares them transparently, as well as provide insurance for in case of purchasing of counterfeit items. Other than performing as a third-party open market platform, “GUHADA” provides community service that sellers and buyers can actively share product information, authenticity evaluation, and sharing information about luxury items in general, and both buyers and sellers can receive rewards.
Through the successful operation of “GUHADA”, TEMCO team is developing and operating integrated system business that applies blockchain technology to the supply chain data management service and provide business intelligence tool for SMEs to continue its innovation.
TEMCO’s CEO Scott Yoon mentioned that
“TEMCO is working on becoming a professional platform developer company through the independent and integrated supply chain data management system and Business Intelligence tool.”
TEMCO is continuously developing GUHADA, and through the successful start of the GUHADA platform, TEMCO will be able to set up a stepping stone for the operation of integrated system business of the supply chain data management service. Also, by providing the Data analysis tool suitable for companies, continuing the innovation. | https://medium.com/temcolabs/temco-received-a-value-management-award-a6d2d408bb17 | [] | 2019-06-14 02:48:54.408000+00:00 | ['Temco', 'News', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Awards'] |
How To Increase Employee Engagement By Focusing on Workplace Culture | “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” ― Seth Godin, Author of ‘Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us’
What Seth Godin writes about tribes also relates to companies, workplaces, and employees — all of which contribute to, influence, and create organizational culture. The advantages of a positive workplace culture cannot be overstated. Employees working for a company with a strong culture are not only happier but are more engaged.
Over the past couple of decades, the subject of employee engagement has been a popular one in HR circles. And it’s not difficult to see why; employees who are engaged in their work are more productive, are more likely to become brand ambassadors, and are more likely to stay with their current employer.
Think of culture like a tribe: a group of people connected an idea, to one another, and to a leader.
Engagement Cannot Be Created in a Vacuum
Enjoying our work, using our skills, and knowing that what we do matters all contribute to engagement. However, employee engagement cannot be created in a vacuum.
The likelihood of us being engaged in our work increases by feelings of being connected to the company’s values, our co-workers, and working together towards a unified cause. In other words, engagement goes hand-in-hand with company culture.
On the contrary, it’s unlikely an individual can experience high levels of engagement if he or she worked in a toxic work environment and was not aligned with the company’s mission and goals. As shared by Thrive Global, people don’t leave toxic jobs, they leave toxic work cultures.
Let’s Do This Together
If you have ever wondered just how important work relationships are, author Michelle Gielan shares in her book “Broadcasting Happiness” that our social connections are, in fact, the number one greatest predictor of our happiness.
As shared in our e-book on Employee Engagement, every employee seeks not only meaningful work but also meaningful connections. The workplace offers a golden opportunity to connect people.
To make employees feel connected to your organization and feel part of your company culture, first, they must feel they have a role to play. And what better way than through communicating and aligning employees with company values, company goals, and company mission? Employees who feel valued and align themselves with the company’s values and mission are more committed to their work and the organization.
In March 2019, Benify was recognized and awarded as one of Sweden’s Best Workplaces by Great Place to Work®. On the importance of workplace culture, Josefine Söderqvist, Director of Human Resources at Benify, says “Great employees create a great culture, and great culture creates a great a place to work”.
Opportunities for development and career progression, feeling a sense of belonging, and finding meaning in one’s work all play a crucial role in engagement and company culture. Make employees and teams aware that what they do matters. Encourage and welcome ideas. The fact is that companies with a culture of openness, trust, learning, and development are ultimately more competitive.
Want to increase employee engagement? Focus on culture. | https://medium.com/@benify/how-to-increase-employee-engagement-by-focusing-on-workplace-culture-100c88d4e291 | [] | 2020-12-07 15:00:53.662000+00:00 | ['Employee Engagement', 'Employees', 'Employee Experience', 'Workplace Culture', 'Leadership'] |
Sad Memories | “remember when we were kids… our teachers would make us write those silly letters to our future selves, oh we would write about our lifelong dreams of becoming princesses and doctors, the perfect fantasy romances where the boy doesn’t cheat on you with your sister and how we just had to make it to collage.” She chuckled then paused, the smile fading away from her face. “we were so innocent… what happened to our dreams, our imagination, our fantasies, our big bright futures …” she yelled out with a saddened voice, sniffling as the tears slowly streamed down her flushed cheeks. “Where did our happiness go? Why didn’t I think to write it down, to remind myself of what it felt like, to remind myself to live and not just survive every day… how come I thought that being a god damn freakin doctor was more important than my happiness.” She screamed out, deluded in pure agony. “I just want to be happy again, like the time I wrote those letters, those silly little insignificant letters…that was probably the last time I truly felt happy. I was too young, too naive to think that happiness would last forever, to think it wouldn’t fade with time, all those memories, the emotions I felt, the colorful world I once saw is now faded to grey…. Where do I go from here?” She screamed out gasping for air though tears rushing down her cheeks.. All of the unspoken words, all of the bottled-up emotions came gushing out like a raging river with a single memory, a memory from a time where happiness wasn’t a luxury.
To be continued- Follow for more | https://medium.com/@botham2003/sad-memories-74752aade4a6 | ['Skinny Love'] | 2020-12-19 00:52:49.578000+00:00 | ['Series', 'Sadness', 'Memories'] |
The Best Qualities to Highlight in Your Cabin Crew Application Resume | An analysis of cabin crew job descriptions from some of the biggest airlines in the world reveals exactly what personal qualities and attributes recruiters truly value and search for in their new recruits.
For this analysis, the publicly available cabin crew job descriptions from Emirates, Etihad and Qatar. As well as Flydubai, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Qantas and Delta Airlines were put into a word cloud generator powered by wordclouds.com.
The result was then manually checked and an assessment of the best cabin crew characteristics was extracted for the final word cloud. This is a summary of the desires and needs of cabin crew recruiters from some of the biggest and most famous airlines in the aviation industry.
Here are our Top Ten qualities that should be included in your cabin crew application:
1. Customer Service
Without a doubt, this is the most highlighted quality out of all 8 job descriptions analysed. Whether you have experience in your normal day-to-day job or you need to be a little more creative make sure that you demonstrate how truly great you are at delivering exceptional customer service to every customer, every day.
2. Team Work
Being a flight attendant isn’t about working on your own. Your colleagues will need to trust you to work effectively in a team — to provide a fantastic experience for passengers and to ensure the safety of the aircraft and everyone onboard.
Explain what you do that makes you such a good team player. Explain specific incidents that prove your credentials.
3. Communication Skills
You’ll need to be able to communicate with a multi-national team and passengers from across the globe. Don’t just say you have “good communication skills”, prove it. Describe how you communicate with customers and team members.
Remember, a key part of communication is the art of listening and finding out what the real needs of your customers are.
4. Creating a Great Customer Experience
What’s the difference between a great customer experience and an average experience? It’s up to you to prove that you can wowcustomers — Think of a time where you turned a bad customer experience into a good one?
Have you ever been thanked by a customer? Or received good feedback from your colleagues or manager about the service you gave a customer?
5. Friendly & Positive
You’ll be working long shifts, often times starting and finishing your working days at unsocial hours. But no matter how you feel you need to remain friendly and positive.
Think of times in your working life where you have remained friendly and in good spirits when other mere mortals would have faded away.
6. Caring & Understanding
Your customers will have a diverse range of needs and issues. You need to demonstrate that you can understand those needs and care for all your customers.
7. Exceeds Expectations
The very best airlines in the world don’t just expect you to meet the expectations of their passengers. An airline like Emirates isn’t voted the Best Airline in the World by simply doing the bare minimum for their passengers.
How have you exceeded customer expectations in the past? What makes you able to exceed expectations as cabin crew?
8. Professional & Responsible
Cabin crew are primarily responsible for the safety of their passengers. You’ll need to show how you’ve taken on responsibility in the past and how you can be trusted to take the health and safety of your customers and colleagues seriously.
9. Dependable & Dedicated
Recruiting and training a new member of cabin crew is a time consuming and expensive process. On top of that, the airline will be putting you in 4 or 5-star hotels around the world.
They need to know that you are a trustworthy ambassador for their brand, who is dedicated to building a career with the airline.
10. Learning and Adapting
The initial 7-week training course is a tough learning curve. But the learning doesn’t just stop there. Demonstrate how you’ve pushed your boundaries in the past and are able to keep up with the constant changes in safety protocols and onboard service improvements.
Other qualities that should definitely be included in your resume include:
Genuine
Confident
Takes care of appearance and presentation
Global / Multinational
Punctual
Anticipating the needs of customers and team members
Some airlines have very specific qualities that they are searching for and these have been highlighted below:
Emirates
Positive attitude
Confidence
Flexibility
Maturity
A friendly disposition
A genuine passion to help others
Uphold the values of Emirates: Professional, Empathetic, Progressive, Visionary, and Cosmopolitan
Etihad
Exceed customer expectations
Deliver a great service 100% of the time
Uphold the Etihad values: Cultured, Considerate, Warm and Generous.
These qualities have been extracted from the publicly available job descriptions across 8 leading airlines. However, recruiters can programme their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for their own specific set of requirements and qualities that are not available for public scrutiny.
CHECK OUT THESE ARTICLES TO CREATE A GREAT CABIN CREW RESUME: | https://medium.com/@pyok/the-best-qualities-to-highlight-in-your-cabin-crew-application-resume-5874e04a5b48 | ['Paddle Your Own Kanoo'] | 2016-12-17 10:09:03.732000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Airlines', 'Cabin Crew', 'Flight Attendant', 'Resume Writing'] |
How schools can clear the path to college | XQ Institute | The road to college can be complicated and filled with U-turns for some high school students, especially those who are already marginalized. But schools can take steps to make that transition smoother, so students have a higher chance of attending the right school, choosing the right field of study, and ultimately succeeding in college and beyond, according to a new report by Summit Public Schools .
“Our purpose was to better understand the experience of students — especially students from low-income families — as they navigate the K-12 college pipeline,” the study authors wrote. “Rather than asking how students can better hack their way to a college degree, we asked: How might we better clear the path for them?”
“Clearing the Path: How schools can improve college access and persistence for every student “ is based on interviews with almost 200 students, teachers, parents, and alumni about the journey to college, vocational school, or work. The goal was to pinpoint the phases students go through, from abstract dreams to final decisions about their future, identify roadblocks along the way, and determine what schools can do to meet students’ needs.
Several of XQ’s Learner Goals and Knowledge Modules also address these issues, especially Youth Experience and Aspirations , Student Agency and Engagement , and Learners for Life . Empowering students to confidently make decisions about their education is a key component of XQ schools.
The study identified six phases that students experience, starting in sixth grade and culminating with students enrolling in college and thriving in their studies:
Imagining: “What type of person do I want to become?”
Thinking: “Which path makes the most sense for me?”
Planning: “What do I need to do to reach my goals?”
Deciding: “Which is my best available option? What are my criteria?”
Transitioning: “I am committing to do this on my own.”
Persisting: “I am managing my own life and keeping myself motivated.”
Students rely on four primary factors when considering their future, according to the report. Those are:
Family and support: Expectations, values, support, role models, involvement
Dreams and identity: Vision, impact, purpose, pride, power, race, class, mindsets
School and belonging: Success, community, connection, agency, preparedness
Cost and benefit: Finances, planning, guidance, interests, exploration
To support students as they go through these phases, schools can help students understand themselves and their goals, include families sooner in the decision-making process, and provide ample opportunities for students to explore careers, visit colleges, intern, and otherwise learn about their options beyond high school.
The authors offered several suggestions for schools to bolster their support systems for students:
Personal advisory boards: small groups of people who can help students make decisions about life in high school and beyond. Boards can include family members, teachers, peers, and role models from the community.
Oral defense: an annual meeting between students and their advisory boards, in which students identify their goal for the upcoming year and board members make recommendations and pledge their support.
Best-fit checklist: A list of questions for students to consider when deciding whether, or where, to attend college. Questions include “Does the student have obligations at home or otherwise that would interfere with persisting at the next step?” and “Does this school have a published average debt load less than $30,000 for a degree?”
Interested in learning more? Check out these posts from the XQ blog:
Envisioning the graduates of the future What do young people need to learn today to be prepared for tomorrow? | https://medium.com/xqamerica/how-schools-can-clear-the-path-to-college-xq-institute-599a3d17c915 | ['The Xq Team'] | 2020-03-02 21:13:24.551000+00:00 | ['Students', 'College', 'High School', 'Education', 'Parents'] |
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) | INTRODUCTION
GANs stands for the Generative Adversarial Networks designed by Ian Good fellow along with his colleagues at University of Montreal, in the year 2014.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are basically architecture based algorithmic that in use by the two neural networks in pitting one against the other in order to generate new synthetic instances of data that we can pass for real data. GANs are widely used for image generation, video generation and voice generation.
The core idea of a GANs is based on the ‘indirect training’ through the discriminator which itself is also being updated dynamically. This means that the generator is not trained to minimize the distance to a specific image, but rather to fool the discriminator. This enables the model to learn in an unsupervised manner.
How Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) Works
One special kind of neural network called the generator, it generates new data instances while the second kind of neural network is discriminator basically it evaluates the authenticity level i.e. the discriminator decides whether each instance of data that it to be review belongs to the actual training dataset or some other. The goal of the discriminator is to shown an instance from the true MNIST dataset, is to recognize those that are authentic.
While the generator creates a new images that will be passes through the discriminator. It does so in the hopes that they, too, will be deemed authentic, even though they are fake. The goal of the generator is to generate passable hand-written digits: to lie without being caught. The goal of the discriminator is to identify images coming from the generator as fake.
The steps GANs takes into play are as follows:
Generator takes the random numbers and returns as a image.
Generated image is fed in to the discriminator side by side a stream of images taken from the actual ground-truth dataset.
Discriminator takes both real as well as fake images and returns the probabilities i.e. a number between 0 and 1, with 1 representing as prediction of authenticity and 0 as representing fake.
Fig1.1 Flow Diagram of GANs
Different Types Of GANs
TF-GAN
TF-GAN stands for the tensor flow GANs. This is a open-source light weight python library developed by the Google research AI for better and easy implementation GANs.
This helps us in provides a well-developed infrastructure to train and evaluate the GANs along with effectively tested along with loss functions and evaluation metrics also provides a simple function that a user can apply on his own data without the code implementation from scratch.
Torch-GAN
This is a Py Torch based framework for better understanding and writing in a short easy way to understand codes for developing GANs. This library consists of various network along with utilities for the implementation. This imitates the design of GANs through simple API and also allows the customizing of components when required.
This is having multiple components or models like generator, discriminator, evaluate metrics and the loss function.
Fig 1.2 Overview of Torch-GANs
Deep Convolutional GANs (DCGANs)
DCGANs generally used for the improvements of GANs , more stable and also generate higher quality images. In this normalization of batch is done in both networks i.e. generator as well as discriminator network and can be used for style transfer.
Lets suppose we have handbags dataset to generate shoes in the same style as the handbags.
Conditional GANs (C-GANs)
They are use to extra label the information and produce the result in better quality and also control how the new generated images will look and make the model learn to produce better images by using the exploiting of information fed into the model.
Fig1.3 Conditional GANs
Stack GANs
The author propose a Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (Stack GANs) to generate the high quality 256x256 realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. He decompose the hard problem into manageable sub-problems through the refinement process. With the help of Stack GANs suggested a solution of problem for synthesizing high quality images from text descriptions.
Fig1.4 Synthesis of Images using Stack GANs
The First stage represent primitive shape and colors of object based on the given text description yielding low-resolution images. While the Second stage takes first stage results, text descriptions as inputs and generates high-resolution images details as output.
Key Points While Training a GANs
Generator and Discriminator plays a very important role in training a GANs. When we use generator in training we have to keep the discriminator as constant and when we use discriminator in training we keep generator as constant. They both play a static adversary against each other.
If the Discriminator is pre training against the particular dataset before start the training part the generator will make a clearer gradient against that. Each part in GANs plays an important role and can over power the other.GANs take very long time to train, on a single GPU it might take hours, and on a single CPU more than a day required for training.
If Discriminator is good it will return values very close to 0 or 1 on the other hand generator face lots of problem to read the gradient. While if the generator is good it will persistently exploit weaknesses in the discriminator that will lead to false negatives.
Code Implementation
Here is an example of GANs code.
Applications of GANs
There are multiple application of GANs are follows:
Text to Image Generation
Using a special type of GANs it can generate different types of images from a text description.
Fig 1.5
Image to Image Translation
We can also feed the sketch images to the GANs to produce the real images as output.
Fig 1.6
Increasing Resolution of an image
It also fed the low resolution images and helps to produce the high resolution images.
Fig 1.7
Semantic Image to Photo Translation
It helps to demonstrate the use of GANs to generate photorealistic images along with given a semantic image/ sketch as input.
Fig 1.8
Photos to Emojis
GANs also play an important role in image translation i.e. from one domain to other domain from street numbers to MNIST handwritten digits, photographs to emojis or small cartoon faces.
Fig 1.9
Advantage of GANs
In GANs there is no code way of implementing the art computer vision technology only a simple JSON file is required to define the particular architecture.
Best about GANs is there is no need to write the training code from scratch as the framework will take care of it.
GANs also provide the multi library support such as PyTorch, Tenserflow, and Keras etc.
Summary
In this article we have gone through about the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in details we discuss almost every thing for good understanding about GANs. Hope You Like It… | https://medium.com/@jgcse11/generative-adversarial-networks-gans-4b0e5fe35b78 | ['Jatin Gupta'] | 2020-11-15 07:00:32.267000+00:00 | ['Neural Networks', 'Gans', 'Keras', 'Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning'] |
Nice article, I like way you are creating a naming scheme. | Nice article, I like way you are creating a naming scheme. For the boolean stuff most of the time I stuck to ‘is’ and I was feeling bad using some other ‘prefix’ like ‘has’. I also did the ‘bad’ thing with ‘exists’ and was never totally satisfied with the naming. Thanks for the tipp with ‘has’ which reads much better.
For me the ‘boolean’ prefixes should always read like a question and the boolean is the answer..like an inner dialog.
I am not totally happy with the term ‘prefix’ as it only states the position of this part, but not the content or type of word that is used.
Do you think that there exists a more meaningful term for words like ‘is’, ‘has’ or ‘should’? | https://medium.com/@surelyplus/nice-article-i-like-way-you-are-creating-a-naming-scheme-94d12b715d0a | ['Helge Fahlbusch'] | 2020-12-23 13:31:36.918000+00:00 | ['Clean Code', 'Naming Conventions'] |
Chick-Fil-A Is Thriving Despite the Pandemic | It’s been a hard year for many businesses, but some places have withstood the challenges of 2020. Restaurants have been hit particularly hard with capacity limitations, but fast food restaurants are built on a model that can adapt to these changes. Among the fast food market, Chick-Fil-A stands out as a glowing success.
The Atlanta-based chicken restaurant began 2020 on a strong note. It now holds the title of third most profitable restaurant in the United States, passing chains like Burger King, Subway, and Taco Bell. This shouldn't be surprising. Prior to 2020 the restaurant was experiencing a great amount of growth and was poised to continue to grow. Consider this fact alongside the fact that Chick-Fil-A earns more per restaurant than any other chain. When they open more doors, this means they’re going to outperform the competition.
With the restaurant industry slowing, Chick-Fil-A has relied upon its core values to continue thriving. Their success if no fluke, and they’re built upon a model that allowed them to serve customers throughout 2020 without needing to compromise their identity.
Go Where the People Are
In recent years, Chick-Fil-A has been opening free-standing restaurants. Many people first encountered the chain is shopping areas such as malls. The first restaurant opened in 1964 as a mall location. There wouldn’t be a free-standing store for another 22 years until one opened in Atlanta in 1986.
Malls experienced significant growth in the 80’s, becoming a popular stop for young adults to spend money and time. Early malls were a different experience. There weren’t a lot of restaurants in malls during the 60’s. Those places were reserved for stores and the occasional eatery in department stores. Chick-Fil-A’s gamble paid off, allowing the chain to please customers in a convenient setting.
In recent years, you’ll see Chick-Fil-A adapting to changes. It’s probably not a coincidence we’re seeing more free-standing stores open because malls are closing rapidly. Chick-Fil-A has already been embracing app-based purchases, and picking up your order can be a breeze if you order on mobile. Perhaps this isn’t hugely innovative, other stores have allowed mobile ordering for years, but Chick-Fil-A isn’t always trying to innovate. They’re simply trying to remove inconveniences when it come to obtaining their food. Adapting to this change allowed the brand to follow customer trends before it became a necessity.
Perfect Your Product Before Expanding
As far as fast food restaurants go, Chick-Fil-A has a fairly small menu. It’s not as small as In-N-Out Burger, but it’s not as large as a McDonald’s. When it comes to meat, you can get grilled or fried chicken. That’s it. It might be a sandwich, nugget, or strip, but their batter and seasoning is consistent. By doing this, customers can expect a certain level of quality and staff can prepare orders more easily.
Chick-Fil-A has even tested a smaller menu so they can streamline their service and provide a faster customer experience. While removing items may be unpopular, the chain recognizes the importance of keeping fast food fast. With a focus on speed, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the company doesn’t tamper with their signature sandwich. You can get it spicy if you want, but beyond that there’s very few ways to complicate your order.
Treat Your Customers With Value
If you’ve ever been to a Chick-Fil-A you’ve likely noticed something about their employees: they’re really nice. They’ve ranked number 1 in customer service, and this has been engrained in their culture. When you go to a restaurant, you can expect employees to smile and get your order right.
Some of their tactics are obvious, such as the smiles and willingness to answer questions. Other things are hidden in plain sight, such as staff only saying “my pleasure” instead of “you’re welcome.” Regular customers aren’t supposed to see every element of the experience, but you’re supposed to feel the impact during their visit.
For the brand, this is their form of marketing. Word of mouth has a powerful impact, and people speak highly of their positive experiences. Chick-Fil-A doesn’t need an advertisement to tell you they’re great, they know you’ll feel it when you enter the stores.
Care About Your Employees, They’ll Care For Your Business
If a business cares about its development, it will be reflected in their employees. This will allow them to gain more skills, apply them to their work, and move into better roles.
Chick-Fil-A wants their employees to develop. They offer a leadership program so employees can learn how to run a business and prepare for more responsibilities. They also offer scholarships for team members to pursue educational endeavors. This keeps employees committed to the brand and allows them to promote from within.
When businesses have unmotivated workers and high turn over, this trickles down to the customer and quality of the product. As a brand, Chick-Fil-A does what they can for their employees to stay energized and loyal. It helps that they never need to work on Sunday because every store is closed. The bigger motivator is the employee benefits and growth potential.
Innovate Where It Makes Sense
Perhaps one of the most impressive feats at Chick-Fil-A is their drive-thru. For such a popular restaurant, they get food into your hand quickly. This is because they have an organized system and staff who know what they’re doing.
Chick-Fil-A Drive Thru
Team members carry tablets and go up to car windows. They’re usually multiple lanes and windows, but it’s all guided by the staff. The restaurant was already set up to serve food quickly, but this reduces friction when it comes to payments and entering orders.
Originally this system was designed to reduce congestion in busy areas. The staff kept the lanes of traffic moving and orders were filled quickly. It was also designed because the company saw other restaurants embracing technology. Little did they know how important the use of technology would become as we moved into the 2020's.
Chick-Fil-A Continues to Thrive
In 2020, when people aren’t going into restaurants, Chick-Fil-A has built a system that adapted to the changing environment. This can be seen with their drive-thru and app-based systems, but the technology is just the culmination of company values. They want customers to have a fast and reliable experience, but they know consumer trends are changing. Some parts of the customer experience will need to adapt, but others are irreplaceable.
Companies with old-school drive-thrus will see delays in their service as business cannot continue indoors. If a company doesn’t have an app, customers may be afraid to spend their money there. None of this applies to Chick-Fil-A who adapted when they saw industry trends shift. However, customers can still expect a pleasant experience and friendly staff. That’s a staple of Chick-Fil-A and a reason they invest in their employees.
It wouldn't be a shock to see Chick-Fil-A post some type of a loss in the second half of 2020; most restaurants will be heavily hit by the pandemic. While this is a concern, the progress Chick-Fil-A has made will allow them to rebound. Despite all of their challenges and controversies, the brand has focused on its mission and values. They serve chicken, make it tasty, and give it to you fast. All of this will allow the brand to grow while customers and staff keep smiling. | https://medium.com/swlh/why-chick-fil-a-is-thriving-despite-the-pandemic-b6cdd8ccbd1d | ['Michael Beausoleil'] | 2020-12-28 21:49:22.129000+00:00 | ['Company Culture', 'Food', 'Business', 'Growth', 'Innovation'] |
Celebrating Lesbian Visibility Week | Celebrating Lesbian Visibility Week
Taimi — world’s largest LGBTQ+ platform wants all of us to celebrate great lesbian womxn in our lives. Taimi Follow Apr 25 · 2 min read
Lesbian Visibility Week 2021 is April 26 — May 2.
Taimi — the Home of Diversity reminds everyone that Lesbian Visibility Week starts this Monday! The week aims to encourage people to show solidarity with every kind of lesbian womxn in the LGBTQ+ community.
Lesbian Visibility Week celebrates the incredible diversity of women loving women around the world. It is important for all of us who are LGBTQ+ as well as allies to be the voice of unity when it comes to recognizing incredible LGBTQ+ womxn around the globe.
Research shows that gay womxn often hide their sexual orientation and identity at work, in fact they are twice as unlikely to be out as gay man.
Unfortunately in many places around the world lesbians tend to face double discrimination. Identifying as a woman who is LGBTQ+ can often come with awful consequences in societies that are misogynistic and homophobic.
So it is crucial to have visibility weeks and days that celebrate and support LBGTQ+ womxn.
TAIMI, wants to salute all lesbians and remind them to be visible, to speak out against bullying, anger, harassment and discrimination.
So be sure to celebrate all the incredible lesbians in your life this week, but remember being strong, resilient, proud is not limited to a calendar!
About Taimi: Taimi is the world’s largest LGBTQ+ platform that features a social network and dating app. Taimi offers the safest and most secure user experience on the market — with its several verification layers, 24/7 profile moderation, PIN/Fingerprint/Face ID, and live support. The platform’s fundamental policy is zero-tolerance for judgment, discrimination, hate, or aggression.
Taimi is free to download. Taimi XL subscription provides access to features unavailable or limited in the free version of the app.
Follow the latest Taimi news on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. | https://medium.com/taimi/celebrating-lesbian-visibility-week-e474e744f743 | [] | 2021-04-25 13:02:33.559000+00:00 | ['Lesbian', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Taimi', 'LGBTQ'] |
Contemporary meets classical: a digital invite to the Frans Hals Museum | Contemporary meets classical: a digital invite to the Frans Hals Museum
Original publication date: Jun 18, 2018
The Dutch agency Build in Amsterdam was asked to develop a welcoming and slick website that would invite people to visit the Frans Hals Museum. This case by the Dutch Digital Design collective is a brilliant example of a perfect match between functionality, design and great user-experience.
Background
The Frans Hals Museum — a museum exhibiting pieces from the Dutch Golden Age, including paintings by the famous Dutch painter Frans Hals — merged with the contemporary arts museum De Hallen, both situated in Haarlem (centre of the bulb growing district, to the West of Amsterdam). This merger has created an innovative museum experience, making art accessible to everyone.
Dutch communications agency KesselsKramer developed a bold, new brand identity to reflect the marriage of these two museums. Build in Amsterdam brought this new brand experience alive online.
Strategy
They created a surprisingly refreshing museum website where ‘old meets new’, perfectly transitioning the new identity to an online environment, making art and the Frans Hals museum accessible to a wider audience. Giving online visitors a sneak preview of what the museum has to offer. Result: you will want to visit the museum after visiting the website.
Process
To move this new brand online was an exciting challenge, using bold, contrasting colour blocks, large headings, quirky typography and no white space at all, but still displaying all content in a clear, easy-to-read way. All done with the utmost eye for detail. With smooth page transitions, simple yet stylish animations, appealing to a broad, diverse audience, including students, art lovers, tourists, children and art professionals.
The agency also chose to incorporate a side bar consisting of graphics only, making it easy to navigate and finding essential information, like ticket sales and exhibition dates, quickly.
The titles in the main menu along the top of each page are inviting, friendly and clear calls-to-action: visit, discover, immerse (learn), support — inviting people to explore further. With all underlying pages visually strong and light on copy.
All in line with the new brand identity and museum experience: bold, unusual, mixing old & new, but always clear, inviting and easy to understand for any visitor. Giving a great impression of the Frans Hals museum and all it has to offer.
Outcome
The museum and website seamlessly merge into one, creating a consistent, bold brand image. This is a website that stands out from most other museum websites, with just the right balance between design, functionality, user experience and interactivity.
Offering what a museum-goer would want: an (interactive) impression of the collections on offer and all other essential information. Convincing visitors this is a place you will love to visit, again and again.
Launched in April this year, it has already won the Awwwards, CSS Design Award and FWA Site of the Day.
This case was brought to you by the Dutch Digital Design collective. | https://medium.com/@DutchDigital/contemporary-meets-classical-a-digital-invite-to-the-frans-hals-museum-8a497de88118 | ['Dutch Digital Design'] | 2020-12-16 10:24:12.169000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Creative', 'World', 'Agency', 'Museums'] |
Nervos unveils new brand design, launches contest | #NervosSocietee Contest Calls Community to Design and Decide on New Brand Swag Nervos Network Follow Dec 22 · 10 min read
A total of $7,000 USD in CKB is up for grabs, as well as the chance to Be the Nervos Brand while showcasing your designs to the blockchain community!
Since Nervos was founded a few years ago, we’ve been evolving and making significant strides in building a layered blockchain architecture ideal for the next generation of decentralized applications. Now as we close out 2020 and look forward to 2021, we want you to be a part of our latest blueprint.
The new Nervos logo and branding designs were recently announced on Cointelegraph and to celebrate, we’re hosting a community design contest called #NervosSocietee to find the next great designs for the Nervos swag store.
But first, a little about why we’ve updated our branding…
The new Nervos branding and logo
Its been two years of huge growth at Nervos — the community-led launch of Lina and the Nervos CKB mainnet in 2019 were massive milestones. This year, we have been partnering with other projects and exchanges, bringing in developers, establishing incentive programs, and growing teams and projects to further expand our ecosystem.
With the foundations set, we are now ready to enter the broader market with a splash and an eye catching impression thanks to our brilliant new branding — But we want you to have a play with it and design us some stylish swag.
Competition overview
The Ask
We’re rolling out a new look for Nervos, and want our community to be a part of the change. There’s a lot of talent in the Nervos community and we want to showcase that brilliance through our swag.
So what are the rules? Here’s the deal:
Who
Anyone can enter, but if you’ve got a great eye for design, even better :)
What
We want you to design EITHER a hat OR a t-shirt using ONE of the following themes below
Themes
Theme 1: Our Core Values — which are:
INNOVATION. OPENNESS. TRUST. SUSTAINABILITY. PERMISSIONLESS ACTION.
Theme 2:
How do you envision the future of the Nervos community within Crypto Culture.
Submit your work via Twitter/Weibo using the hashtag #NervosSocietee and tag @NervosNetwork. Use the following template for a t-shirt or a hat and be sure to consult the brand guidelines!
Note: You can submit more than one design, but only one will be shortlisted and eligible for a prize.
*Reference Templates and Max Print sizes here
When
We’ll be accepting submissions starting December 21st, until January 18th 0:00 UTC.
The Nervos Foundation will then create a shortlist of 10 designs (for each category; 10 shirts and 10 caps) by the 18th and voting on Twitter/Weibo will begin on January 19th. Once the finalists are announced, simply “like’’ and/or retweet your favorite design to cast your vote.
Voting closes on January 24th and the winners will be announced by January 25th via Twitter/Weibo.
Prizes
We will have two winners per category (T-Shirt and Hat)
The two 1st place winners will win $1750 USD worth of CKB and the 2nd place winners will receive $750 USD worth of CKB. All shortlisted designers will receive $100 USD worth of CKB!
Before you submit your design, see the branding guidelines and “Terms and Conditions” section below.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
—
To stay updated on all things Nervos:
Join our community: Discord — Github — Nervos Talk Forum — Twitter/Weibo
For discussions or questions join the conversation on Discord or check out one of our community Telegram channels: English, Korean, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese
Brand guidelines
https://projects.invisionapp.com/boards/WK3VAZJUYCM
Terms and conditions
Official Rules
Eligibility: #NervosSocietee competition (the “Contest”) is open to everybody who is at least as old as the minimum age of majority in the jurisdiction from which they enter the Contest. Those who are employees of Nervos Research & Development GmbH or its affiliates, subsidiaries, representatives, advertising, promotion and publicity agencies (“Sponsor and its agents”) or who are immediate family members or persons living in the same household of each such employee are not eligible. The Contest is subject to all applicable laws and regulations and void where prohibited. By participating in the Contest, the participant signifies his or her full and unconditional agreement to these Official Rules. Timing: The Contest begins on December 21st, 2020 at ) 0:00 PM UTC and ends on January 18th at 0:00 PM UTC (the “Contest Period”) and consists of the phases set forth in the chart below:
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO ENTRANTS: ENTRANTS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DETERMINING THE APPLICABLE CONTEST ENTRY PERIOD TIMES IN THEIR RESPECTIVE TIME ZONES.
How to Enter: During the Submission phase, submit a t-shirt or hat design for either category of; Crypto Culture Themed Design or Nervos Values Design in the form of a post on Twitter/Weibo using the following hashtags: #NervosSocietee. If for some reason these methods are not accessible please visit (the “Contest Site” or “Site”), follow the directions to submit your T-Shirt Design. By uploading your Entry, you agree that it conforms to the Entry Guidelines and Content Restrictions as defined below (collectively, the “Guidelines and Restrictions”) and that the Sponsor, may disqualify you from the Contest if it believes, in its sole discretion that your Entry fails to conform to the Guidelines and Restrictions. Winner Determination: The winner will be determined according to the following: Submitted entries will be reviewed and categorised by our Nervos Team panel. There will then be a shortlist of 20 entries (10 per category) as identified on Twitter/Weibo, Weibo, (the “Contest Site” or “Site”). The shortlist entries are judged based on Originality and Creativity equally. Judging Phase: The two categories will be judged by a Peoples Choice to select the prize winner. The winners will be selected based on an accumulation of points based on the following value structure:
1 Point per “like” on the submission
2 Points per “Retweet” on the submission
In the event that entrants have the same amount of points, the winner will be determined by time of Entry from earliest to latest.
Winner notification: The potential winners will be notified by inbox messaging via Twitter/Weibo that the Entrant used for submission within seven (7) business days after the end date of Judging Winner Response time: Ten (10) days Prize: There will be ten (10) finalists prizes awarded for each category specified in item 4. Each finalist will receive: Total prize value in CKByte (CKB) equivalent to 100 USD
There will be one (1) people choice prizes awarded for each category specified in item 4.
Each winner will receive:
Total prize value in CKBytes (CKB) equivalent to 1750 USD (one thousand seven hundred and fifty US Dollars) Second Place winners will receive total prize value in CKBytes (CKB) equivalent to 750 USD (seven hundred and fifty US Dollars)
Guidelines and Restrictions:
Technical Requirements
Entries must include any listed hashtags that are specified in Item 3 of the Rules Schedule within the searchable text of the Entry.
Content Requirements
Entries must pertain to the # contest theme, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion. For purposes of this Contest, all Entries will be presumed authored by the person submitting the Entry. You may not incorporate your own facial likeness, or that of another person, within your design. Entries submitted in this Contest must not contain any pornography, or other illicit, illegal, defamatory, morally offensive or obscene content, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion. The Sponsor, in its sole discretion, reserves the right to disqualify any Entry containing racial, religious, or ethnic slurs, explicit language, obscene, pornographic, violent, or sexual content, or libel, hate speech, references to alcohol, drugs or other illicit substances, or otherwise objectionable, offensive, illegal, inappropriate or prohibited material. Any Entry that incorporates prohibited content, including but not limited to, third party creations, trademarks, names, or other third party property(ies), or the work of creative consultants, or any content that is pornographic, illicit, or otherwise in Sponsor’s sole and absolute discretion violates the above Guidelines and/or is not in compliance with these Official Rules, may not be accepted for entry and may not be eligible to win any prize in this Contest.
By entering, entrants warrant that their Entries contain only Sponsor-provided Contest Assets, if any, and/or their own, Original Creations. Entrants further warrant their Entries do not contain any third party copyrighted materials, and otherwise do not violate or infringe the rights, including, without limitation, copyrights, trademark rights or rights of publicity/privacy, of any third party.
Limitations
Each entrant may enter the Contest multiple times during the Contest Period. Entries received from any person or email address in excess of the stated limit will be void. Entries generated by script, macro or other automated means are void.
With the upload of the Entry, the entrant consents that the Sponsor may use, reproduce, modify, publish, create derivative works from, and display such submissions in whole or in part, on a worldwide basis, and to incorporate it into other works, in any form, media or technology now known or later developed, including for promotional or marketing purposes without paying any further compensation to the entrant. If requested, the entrant will sign any documentation required for Sponsor or its designees to make use of the non-exclusive rights entrant is granting to use the Entry. The Sponsor and its agents are not responsible for lost, late, stolen, damaged, incomplete, invalid, un-intelligible, garbled, delayed or misdirected Entries, all of which will be void. Physical copies of Entries become the property of the Sponsor and will not be returned.
In the event of a dispute regarding any Entry, the authorized account holder of the email address or Twitter/Weibo account used to register will be deemed to be the entrant or participant. The “authorized account holder” is the natural person assigned an email address by an Internet access provider, online service provider or other organization responsible for assigning email addresses for the domain associated with the submitted address. Each potential winner may be required to show proof of being an authorized account holder.
Personal Information: Nothing in these Official Rules shall be deemed to exclude or restrict any of the winner’s or the entrant’s statutory rights as a consumer.
By participating in the Contest, entrant consents to Sponsor processing their personal information (name, address, email, birthdate) in accordance with Sponsor’s Privacy and Cookie Policy, available at URL for Privacy Policy for the purposes of: (a) Organizing, running and monitoring the Contest and prize fulfillment, including, if entrant wins a prize, publishing (i) their name on the Winner(s) List and (ii) their name and country of residence online or in any other media in connection with the Contest, as described further in the “Notification” Section below); and (b) Any additional processing activities to which entrants consent. Entrants acknowledge that personal information may be stored and processed for the purposes set out in the Privacy and Cookie Policy in the United States or any other country in which Nervos, its subsidiaries, or third party agents operate. By entering the Promotion, you consent that your personal information may be transferred to recipients in countries that may not offer the same level of privacy protection as the laws in your country of residence or citizenship.
General Terms:
By participating in this Contest, each participant agrees:
1) To the extent allowable under applicable law and, in the United States, subject to and without excluding, restricting or modifying any rights or remedies to which the participant may be entitled as a consumer under the consumer guarantee provisions of the Swiss Consumer Law in relation to the operation of the Contest and any prize won, to release and hold harmless the Sponsor and its agents from any and all liability or any injury, loss, damage, right, claim or action of any kind arising from or in connection with this Contest or any Contest-related activity or the receipt, possession, use or misuse of any prize won.
2) The Contest is governed by and interpreted in accordance with the substantive laws of the United States. The parties agree that any dispute arising under these Contest Rules will be resolved in the appropriate courts of the United States and the parties hereby submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the the United States courts provided that the entrant will not be deprived of his or her statutory rights and legal protection as a consumer granted by the laws of their country of residence. | https://medium.com/nervosnetwork/nervos-unveils-new-brand-design-kicks-off-nervossocietee-contest-d5d131074fe | ['Nervos Network'] | 2020-12-22 00:50:48.289000+00:00 | ['Design Contest', 'Community Contest', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Nervos Community', 'Blockchain'] |
Eğlenceli İnternet Araçları | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/bid%C3%BCnyai%CC%87%C3%A7erik/e%C4%9Flenceli-i%CC%87nternet-ara%C3%A7lar%C4%B1-e7f7735234fc | ['Gökhan Akçay'] | 2020-12-26 17:58:20.719000+00:00 | ['Bi Dünya İçerik', 'Eğitim', 'Web 2 0', 'Online'] |
District Attorney Krasner Announces Acceleration of DAO Reforms in Response to COVID-19 Emergency | CONTACT:
Jane Roh, District Attorney’s Office, 215–686–8711, [email protected]
PHILADELPHIA (March 16, 2020) — District Attorney Larry Krasner on Monday announced a series of measures to protect the public’s health and safety and prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, in the Philadelphia criminal justice system.
Following the First Judicial District (FJD) of Pennsylvania’s decision to close the Justice Juanita Kidd Stout Center for Criminal Justice (CJC) and all FJD facilities effective March 17, 2020, and until April 1, 2020, District Attorney Krasner has issued the following guidance to District Attorney’s Office (DAO) unit supervisors and assistant district attorneys (ADAs) for minimizing exposure and transmission of COVID-19 in the criminal legal system. Absent special circumstances, the DAO will seek the following:
Defendants charged with violent felonies and other truly serious offenses should be held in custody with the equivalent of a ‘held-without-bail’ status;
Defendants charged with non-violent felony and misdemeanor offenses should not be held pre-trial for any amount of cash bail;
Following a request to the Philadelphia Police Department to use their discretion and prioritize dangerous offenses for arrest, ADAs will exercise their discretion on charging and request no-bail detention only for people who present a net safety risk to the public;
ADAs may exercise options to delay prosecution for people who must still be held accountable for their crimes for the benefit of the public but whose immediate arrest is unnecessary (methods may include approving arrest warrants for turn-in or execution at a later time or the use of a summons in cooperation with police and the courts);
Domestic violence matters, among other types of cases involving specialized issues, may be appropriate for consideration in Early Bail Review (EBR) or another available proceeding where judges have more power and resources than exist in bail hearings; and
ADAs will continue to work with the Public Defender to review early parole or release petitions, bail reduction requests, and requests to lift detainers among other relevant motions for people who do not present a public safety threat, people whose underlying medical conditions make them at risk for COVID-19 infection and transmission, and people who are being detained for technical probation violations and not new criminal offenses.
“This pandemic requires us all to think differently and bear in mind the paramount danger to the public we cause by ignoring public health,” District Attorney Krasner said. “Our effort to reform the cash bail system to date is already a success. I am hopeful that our move toward additional bail reforms now, due to the urgent need to prevent a COVID-19 outbreak in Philadelphia, will be similarly successful. As with all policy reforms, we will review and assess outcomes after the public health emergency declaration period, and make adjustments to our planned cashless bail policy as needed.”
District Attorney Krasner added: “I want to be clear: People who do violence and commit truly serious offenses risk being charged and held in custody. You do not want to be in any jail or prison right now, and I suggest that this warning ought to affect people’s decision-making and behaviors beyond this public health emergency.”
The Philadelphia DAO will only ask for high bail or detention for those who cannot be released without posing a serious threat to public safety. ADAs will first evaluate all other options, including whether any conditions can adequately protect community safety. Additionally, any presumptions can be rebutted by unexpected facts and circumstances as individual justice requires.
As of Monday, ADAs reviewed and supported more than 100 people for early parole in order to alleviate unsafe crowding in prisons.
District Attorney Krasner has also communicated with Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw about new arrest priorities during the COVID-19 emergency. Preliminary data show that arrests remained constant last weekend, the first since emergency response measures were announced in Philadelphia. Among the dozens of non-violent misdemeanor arrests made: four people were arrested for unlicensed selling of liquor.
“People charged with non-violent offenses generally should not be added to the jail population at this time. Doing so would only increase risk of infection to police officers, guards, other detainees, and workers,” District Attorney Krasner continued. “We are hopeful that the Philadelphia Police will change arrest patterns in order to ensure only truly dangerous offenders are taken into custody and that the prison system is not stressed beyond what it can bear.”
In Seattle, where testing and reported COVID-19 cases are more advanced than in Philadelphia, District Attorney Dan Satterberg has announced his office is filing charges only for serious violent offenses.
Effective March 17th, most unit supervisors and all non-essential DAO personnel are instructed to work remotely. Notable exceptions to this guidance include ADAs responsible for essential, 24/7 functions, including the Charging Unit.
Unit supervisors will assign duties every day of the work week, which will include case management and review. Units tasked with overseeing prosecutions of homicides, non-fatal shootings, major trials, family violence, sexual assault, and municipal court will be staffed and operational every day.
Given the daily unpredictability of new COVID-19 infections and new directives from local, state, and federal government, the DAO is in the process of finalizing medium- and long-term contingency plans as well. ADAs are instructed to request scheduling of conferences and hearings by email or phone, to conduct conferences by video as often as possible, and to request hearing dates beyond the emergency courts closure period, with the assumption that all scheduled hearings, conferences, and trial dates are subject to change during the health emergency.
The DAO will continue to share updates related to COVID-19 on social media feeds (@philadao on Twitter), and will encourage members of the public to check the city’s information website for important updates: phila.gov/COVID-19.
###
The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is the largest prosecutor’s office in Pennsylvania, and one of the largest in the nation. It serves the more than 1.5 million citizens of the City and County of Philadelphia, employing 600 lawyers, detectives, and support staff. The District Attorney’s Office is responsible for prosecution of approximately 40,000 criminal cases annually. | https://medium.com/philadelphia-justice/district-attorney-krasner-announces-acceleration-of-dao-reforms-in-response-to-covid-19-emergency-e2340f587f25 | ['Philadelphia Dao'] | 2020-03-17 16:30:22.916000+00:00 | ['Criminal Justice', 'Public Health', 'Coronavirus', 'Philadelphia', 'Press Release'] |
February 26th, 2019 | So, technically I’m writing for the 25th. My OCD-self has to have the date precisely exact. Of course. It’s 12:24 am and I’m getting myself ready for bed. I felt like doing a night time recap of my day.
I went back to school today after another weekend. I was fortunate enough to not have to work Saturday or Sunday, but I still fell behind in doing my homework. I procrastinate to the extreme and now that I’m getting into my harder classes this habit isn’t going to fly. I need to actually study and take the time to read my books, watch YouTube explanations, go to the tutoring center, anything. The worst part of the week (and it’s only Monday) is having to be a responsible college student and pass on a chance at a day at Disneyland. Alyssa and I planned on going but there’s too much going on for me on Wednesday that I need Tuesday to really prepare. This is where I start trying to instill better academic habits. No fun.
I can’t help my head from going there, but.. I keep thinking about if or when Justin will text me about removing him from social media. The whole point of me deleting him was for me to FORGET but now I’m internally panicking. My anxiety has been so bad the last few days too. Its uncomfortable. I haven’t been eating much. Smoking makes everything better.
I’m going to head to bed. It’s been 1.5 days since the delete and no response. Maybe it’s for the best. I need to keep my mind occupied with something else. It runs a mile a minute. I hate how much I overthink. | https://medium.com/@beneathwaves/february-26th-2019-4dbbc3dd2cd6 | ['Some Lil'] | 2019-02-26 08:37:08.880000+00:00 | ['Journal', 'Diary', 'Daily Blog'] |
Standing On Lies | I am watching and drawing the Republican Convention. We know Trump lies, it is well documented. But almost every single speaker at this convention thus far — along with him — is lying about something. Twisting facts, and making stuff up out of whole cloth. Add propaganda, and what I am hearing is unlike anything I have heard before, except from despots, dictators and strongmen.
It is frightening.
And it is taking a toll on my psyche. I am an optimistic person, and trust people in a way that some might call naive. With this election, and the last four years, I find it incomprehensible and stressful that there are so many people in our country that exhibit racism, sexism, homophobia and hate.
I hope we can change. This stakes in this election cannot be exagerated. | https://lizadonnelly.medium.com/standing-on-lies-7513097697e0 | ['Liza Donnelly'] | 2020-08-28 00:00:33.203000+00:00 | ['Lies', 'Trump', 'Propaganda', 'Election 2020', 'Politics'] |
Arlo Pro 2 VS Soliom Solar camera | Performance, Specs, and Price
For any house owner, home security would be the top priority for his or concerns. In the market, you would find several kinds of home camera security system that would consist of an integrated CCTV camera system. But in the recent few years, solar cameras are becoming the new favorite of the general masses. Just like the name suggests, these cameras use solar energy to remain operational during the day time. And at night, it uses the power from its highly efficient rechargeable batteries.
Some features are common in every solar camera. It would have a weatherproof casing, night vision, Micro SD storage card, Wi-Fi compatibility, and continuous video surveillance recording capability. Arlo Pro 2 and Soliom solar camera are the two best cameras that would have all these features. Here are some of the differences based on performance, specs, and prices.
Performance
Both the camera pretty much similar performance capabilities. In the case of Arlo Pro 2, it has 25 ft night vision capabilities that would turn on automatically turn on during night time. This camera could be operated with the help of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. For better performance, this camera comes with Arlo Smart service that is unique to Arlo CCTV cameras. This camera also comes with a Look Back Feature.
Another best security camera you would find in the market would be Soliom S60 solar camera. The body of the Soliom camera has IP66 certified rating, which means the camera would operate under extremely harsh weather conditions. For the night vision, this camera uses starlight infrared night vision technology. It would take continuous shots with an interval of 0.7 seconds between each shot. The vision range of this camera is about 15 meter.
Specifications
Under specifications, Arlo Pro 2 has one of the best motion sensor systems. At the day time, visual video surveillance range would reach up to the distance of 300 feet. Either power this camera by using rechargeable batteries, direct AC link, or solar power. The user would need to install a separate solar panel for charging its battery during the daytime.
For Soliom S60, the video format would be H.264, and it has a triggering speed of 15 FPS. During the day time, this camera has 140-degree field vision. Soliom camera has 6 layer lenses that make the quality of footage recorded very high. This camera has PIR technology and Integrated Rader technology for the motion sensor. This camera has the solar panel attached to its body, which gives it a unique shape.
Price difference
There are major differences between the Arlo Pro 2 and Soliom S60 camera when it comes to the cost of each unit. The general cost of Soliom S60 would be around $140, and the cost for Arlo Pro 2 kit would be around $411. This price range makes, Soliom camera the best buy as features of both cameras is pretty much similar.
These are the basic differences between the Arlo Pro 2 and Soliom Solar Camera. Both cameras have their advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, the buyer would have to buy a camera that would meet his or her requirements. | https://medium.com/@samuelbrown7051/arlo-pro-2-vs-soliom-solar-camera-c38ff2ad0958 | ['Samuel Brown'] | 2019-06-03 07:42:48.746000+00:00 | ['Security Services', 'Wireless', 'Solar Camera', 'Surveillance', 'Security Camera'] |
fastai MultiLabel Classification using Kfold Cross Validation | July 18, 2020
# Blog18
I have written this as Kaggle Public Notebook if you have any feedback comment there.
The problem I have considered is Multi Label classification. In addition to having multiple labels in each image, the other challenge in this problem is the existence of rare classes and combinations of different classes. So in this situation normal split or random split doesnt work because you can end up putting rare cases in the validation set and your model will never learn about them. The stratification present in the scikit-learn is also not equipped to deal with multilabel targets.
I have specifically chosen this problem because we may learn some techniques on the way, which we otherwise would not have thought of.
There may be better or easy way of doing kfold cross validation but I have done it keeping in mind how to implement using fastai, so if you know some better way so please mail or tweet the idea, i will try to implement and give you credit.
Install all the necessary libraries
I am using fastai2 so import that.
! pip install -q fastai2
Cross Validation
Cross-validation, how I see it, is the idea of minimizing randomness from one split by makings n folds, each fold containing train and validation splits. You train the model on each fold, so you have n models. Then you take average predictions from all models, which supposedly give us more confidence in results. These we will see in following code. I found iterative-stratification package that provides scikit-learn compatible cross validators with stratification for multilabel data.
My opinion:
In my opinion it’s more important to make one right split, especially because CV takes n times more to train. Then why did I do it??
I wanted to explore classification using cross validation using fastai, which I didn’t find many resources to learn. So if I write this blog it may help people.
fastai has no cross validation split(may be) in their library to work like other functions they provide. It may be because cross validation takes time, so may be it not that useful.
But still in this condition I feel its worth exploring using fastai.
so what is stratification??
The splitting of data into folds may be governed by criteria such as ensuring that each fold has the same proportion of observations with a given categorical value, such as the class outcome value. This is called stratified cross-validation
! pip install -q iterative-stratification from fastai2.vision.all import *
from iterstrat.ml_stratifiers import MultilabelStratifiedKFold
Here dataset is of Zero to GANs — Human Protein Classification inclass jovian.ml hosted competition
path = Path('../input/jovian-pytorch-z2g/Human protein atlas')
train_df = pd.read_csv(path/'train.csv')
train_df['Image'] = train_df['Image'].apply(str) + ".png"
train_df['Image'] = "../input/jovian-pytorch-z2g/Human protein atlas/train/" + train_df['Image']
train_df.head()
The method I use here is if we have column called fold and with fold number it would be helpful to split data using that.
fastai has IndexSplitter in datablock api so this would be helpful.
strat_kfold = MultilabelStratifiedKFold(n_splits=3, random_state=42, shuffle=True)
train_df['fold'] = -1
for i, (_, test_index) in enumerate(strat_kfold.split(train_df.Image.values, train_df.iloc[:,1:].values)):
train_df.iloc[test_index, -1] = i
train_df.head() train_df.fold.value_counts().plot.bar() ;
DataBlock
now that data is in dataframe and also folds are also defined for cross validation, we will build dataloaders, for which we will use datablock.
If you want to learn how fastai datablock see my blog series Make code Simple with DataBlock api
we will create a function get_data to create dataloader.
get_data uses fold to split data to be used for cross validation using IndexSplitter. for multiLabel problem compared to single only extra thing to be done is to add MultiCategoryBlock in blocks, this is how fastai makes it easy to work.
def get_data(fold=0, size=224,bs=32):
return DataBlock(blocks=(ImageBlock,MultiCategoryBlock),
get_x=ColReader(0),
get_y=ColReader(1, label_delim=' '),
splitter=IndexSplitter(train_df[train_df.fold == fold].index),
item_tfms=[FlipItem(p=0.5),Resize(512,method='pad')],
batch_tfms=[*aug_transforms(size=size,do_flip=True, flip_vert=True, max_rotate=180.0, max_lighting=0.6,max_warp=0.1, p_affine=0.75, p_lighting=0.75,xtra_tfms=[RandomErasing(p=0.5,sh=0.1, min_aspect=0.2,max_count=2)]),Normalize],
).dataloaders(train_df, bs=bs)
metrics
Since this is multi label problem normal accuracy function wont work, so we have accuracy_multi. fastai has this which we can directly use in metrics but I wanted to know how that works so took code of it.
def accuracy_multi(inp, targ, thresh=0.5, sigmoid=True):
"Compute accuracy when `inp` and `targ` are the same size."
if sigmoid: inp = inp.sigmoid()
return ((inp>thresh)==targ.bool()).float().mean()
F_score is way of evaluation for this competition so used this.
def F_score(output, label, threshold=0.2, beta=1):
prob = output > threshold
label = label > threshold
TP = (prob & label).sum(1).float()
TN = ((~prob) & (~label)).sum(1).float()
FP = (prob & (~label)).sum(1).float()
FN = ((~prob) & label).sum(1).float()
precision = torch.mean(TP / (TP + FP + 1e-12))
recall = torch.mean(TP / (TP + FN + 1e-12))
F2 = (1 + beta**2) * precision * recall / (beta**2 * precision + recall + 1e-12)
return F2.mean(0)
Gathering test set
test_df = pd.read_csv('../input/jovian-pytorch-z2g/submission.csv')
tstpng = test_df.copy()
tstpng['Image'] = tstpng['Image'].apply(str) + ".png"
tstpng['Image'] = "../input/jovian-pytorch-z2g/Human protein atlas/test/" + tstpng['Image']
tstpng.head()
Training
I have used technique called mixup, its a data augmentation technique.
In fastai Mixup is callback, and this Callback is used to apply MixUp data augmentation to your training. to know more read this
I have tried this first time, but this technique didnot improve my result in this problem. It usually improves accuracy after 80 epochs but I have trained for 20 epoches. so there was no difference in accuracy without it. so you can ignore this.
But to know about how mixup works is good, I will separate blog on this, so follow my twitter for updates.
mixup = MixUp(0.3)
gc is for garbage collection
import gc
I have created 3 folds where I simply get the data from a particular fold, create a model, add metrics, I have used resnet34. And that’s the whole training process. I just trained model on each fold and saved predictions for the test set.
I have used a technique called progressive resizing.
this is very simple: start training using small images, and end training using large images. Spending most of the epochs training with small images, helps training complete much faster. Completing training using large images makes the final accuracy much higher. this approach is called progressive resizing.
we should use the fine_tune method after we resize our images to get our model to learn to do something a little bit different from what it has learned to do before.
I have used cbs=EarlyStoppingCallback(monitor='valid_loss') so that model doesnot overfit.
append all prediction to list so that we use it later.
I have run the model for less epochs to see code works and show result, or stopped model in between(it took so much time)
This method gave me F_score of .77 and accuracy of >91% so you can try.
My Purpose here is to write blog and explain how to approach and how code works.
If GPU is out of memory delete learner and empty cuda cache done in last line of code.
all_preds = []
for i in range(3):
dls = get_data(i,256,64)
learn = cnn_learner(dls, resnet34, metrics=[partial(accuracy_multi, thresh=0.2),partial(F_score, threshold=0.2)],cbs=mixup).to_fp16()
learn.fit_one_cycle(10, cbs=EarlyStoppingCallback(monitor='valid_loss'))
learn.dls = get_data(i,512,32)
learn.fine_tune(10,cbs=EarlyStoppingCallback(monitor='valid_loss'))
tst_dl = learn.dls.test_dl(tstpng)
preds, _ = learn.get_preds(dl=tst_dl)
all_preds.append(preds)
del learn
torch.cuda.empty_cache()
gc.collect()
stack all the prediction stored in list and average the values.
subm = pd.read_csv("../input/jovian-pytorch-z2g/submission.csv")
preds = np.mean(np.stack(all_preds), axis=0)
You should have list of labels which we get using vocab.
k = dls.vocab preds[0]
I found threshold of 0.2 works good for my code.
thresh=0.2
labelled_preds = [' '.join([k[i] for i,p in enumerate(pred) if p > thresh]) for pred in preds]
then all the labels predicted above 0.2 are labels of that image using vocab.
put them in Labels column
test_df['Label']=labelled_preds
this step is to submit result to kaggle.
test_df.to_csv( 'submission.csv' , index = False )
I have written as Kaggle Public Notebook if you like please upvote.
Thank you for reading:) | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/fastai-multilabel-classification-using-kfold-cross-validation-706b5948e138 | ['Kiran U Kamath'] | 2020-07-23 14:50:59.367000+00:00 | ['K Fold', 'Crossvalidation', 'Multilabel Classifier', 'Fastai'] |
Load Balancers — In-depth guide. In this post we will explore : | In this post we will explore :
What is a load balancer?
Infra levels where we can use load balancer
Benefits of load balancers
Types of load balancers
Algorithms used in load balancers
A Load Balancer is used to distribute incoming requests from clients to cluster of servers. Here we can have a lots of clients (thousands/millions) which are trying to use a service which is being served by few(hundreds) servers.
Here all the client requests will first land on load balancer and then then load balancer will distribute those request to different workers(servers) so that they can do the requested task. Load balancer hold the client connection till the worker is working on the task but it not blocked on that only, It also accept other client request and delegate that to other workers based on selected request distribution algorithm. Once the worker has completed the task then it returns to the load balancer and load balancer return back to the client and connection is released.
Load balancers continuously check for the active workers using health/ping API’s. If some host is not returning proper response to these hits then it is marked as unhealthy and thus removed from the active group and no more requests are sent to it. Once this worker is healthy or new worker is added to the pool then load balancer will start sending requests to these workers.
Load balancer delegating request to multiple worker instance
A load balancer is not required for distributing http request only. Below are the scenarios where we will need a load balancer.
User on Internet who want some information from some service like Amazon
One service requesting some resource from other service(Inter service communication). Let’s say Delivery service is requesting user information from User service in a e-commerce setup. In this scenario all the services will be behind a load balancer so that load can be distributed.
Application server asking for data from load balanced database. Let’s say we have a highly available MySQL database with 1 master and 3 slaves. So in this setup instead of making connection to each of the slave database we will be using a load balancer which will distribute read request within these slaves.
Various type of load balancer in single diagram
Don’t be confused by the above diagram. I have included 3 levels of load balancers here.
External load balancer which is between client on internet and Delivery service. Internal load balancer which is between two internal service. So that we can scale both of the services independently. Database load balancer which is between application and database instances to balance reads from MySQL master and various slaves.
Benefits of Load Balancers
There are a ton of benefits of using load balancers. We will try to explain a few of them below.
Load Distribution : Primary function of a load balancer is to distribute the load to different worker nodes. Here we have to choose proper algorithm for load balancing so that our worker nodes are utilised properly. Reduced Downtime : Since our worker nodes are behind the load balancer so we can replace faulty workers and spin up new one and external world didn’t even know about it. The load balancer automatically stop sending traffic to faulty worker. This happens using a ping/health API exposed by the worker. Load balancer frequently hits this API for all worker nodes to know about the current state and stop sending traffic to un-health workers High Availability : If we have a load balancer then if some of the workers are down still then service will up as load balancer will distribute the request to the health workers. This way load balancer provides high availability to the system. Auto Scaling : Since our worker nodes are running behind load balancer, we can increase and decrease the number of workers. This can be configured on basis of some parameter like response time i.e if response time of some service is increase by defined threshold then spin up one more instance to handle requests. SSL Offloading : SSL offloading is a process of decrypting incoming https traffic and encrypt server responses. This process is a bit expensive as need to be done for all requests. Load balancer can be configured to offload ssl at load balancer level and then forward http traffic to worker nodes. User Authentication : Load balancers can be configured to authenticate users by integrating user authentication service. This service is used to authenticate each incoming request and some token in headers is used to authenticate that user. If authentication is successful then that request is allowed to enter in system and a header with userId is added for downstream to identify that user. Security : We are exposing IP address of the load balancer to the world and IP of the worker nodes will be internal. Security of our infrastructure is maintained as we are not exposing any of our internal system info to the world.
Different types of Load balancers
So far we have learned what are load balancers and where can we have these load balancers. In this section we will look into different types of load balancers.
Hardware Load Balancers : A hardware load balancer is a hardware device with a specialised operating system that distributes incoming requests to worker nodes. To ensure optimal performance, the hardware load balancer distributes traffic according to customised rules so that worker nodes are not overwhelmed. Traditionally, hardware load balancers and worker nodes are deployed in on-premises data centre and the number of load balancers depends on the expected amount of peak traffic. Load balancers are usually deployed in pairs in case one fails. Software Load Balancers : A software load balancer is implemented using software layer. This can run in virtual machine/cloud/pod.Software load balancer are cheap as compared to hardware load balancer. These load balancer consume a lot of system resources as they are doing a lot of computations and IO operations, so please reserve proper resources in infra while deploying these. HAProxy is quite popular software load balancer.
Algorithms used for Load Balancer
Load balancing algorithms are formulas to determine which worker will serve the current client request. The algorithms can be very simple, like round robin, or they can be hybrid which take multiple factors into consideration.
Random : Randomly choose the workers from the pool and forward request to process. This algorithm do not take into consideration any of current state of the worker. Round Robin : Here the requests are forwarded in round robin fashion. This do not consider any attributes of the server for forwarding request. IP Hashing : Hash of IP is created and based on that hash worker is chosen for current request. This technique will forward all the requests from same client to same worker each time as it will have same IP. This algorithm might cause skewing and few of the worker can be overloaded. Least Connection : In this algorithm the request is forwarded to the worker having least active connections. This algorithm is used exhaustively in production as it evenly distributes the load to all worker nodes and load balancer is aware about current states of the worker. Least Response : In this algorithm load balancer take note of the response time from each instance and gives priority to forwarding traffic to instance which is taking least time to respond.
What about single point of failure?
Since single instance of load balancer is running, it can be single point of failure and if load balancer is down then whole service is down. So to tackle this problem always provision one passive load balancer which can take place of this active load balancer if it fails.
Hope this article have cleared a lots of doubt regarding load balancer. Please applaud and share this article with others. | https://medium.com/@techwithaman/load-balancers-in-depth-guide-621d6bdffb2f | ['Aman Yadav'] | 2020-11-10 16:44:34.621000+00:00 | ['High Availability', 'Distributed Systems', 'Load Balancer'] |
‘Before & After’ Surgery Accounts Shame Women But We Can’t Look Away | By Ruchira Sharma
PHOTO BY SERENA BROWN.
In 2007, magazines plastered paparazzi pictures of Tyra Banks in a swimsuit, under headlines “Thigh-ra Banks”, “America’s Next Top Waddle” and “Tyra Porkchops”. A year later, The O.C. actor Mischa Barton was shamed in The Daily Mail for her thighs after pictures of her on holiday became a story. Shaming celebrities still takes place in 2020 — but it’s happening on celebrity ‘before and after’ accounts on Instagram.
Accounts like Celeb Face (1.5 million followers), Celeb Before and After (263k) and Exposing Celeb Surgery (145k) dissect the cosmetic surgeries they believe celebrities have had done, usually by comparing ‘before’ and ‘after’ images, pre- and post-procedure(s). The captions read like accusations: #rhinoplasty, #lipfiller, #botox. Sometimes, irresistibly, the before and afters are presented as GIFs, transitioning between the two pictures to maximise the impact of difference.
These kinds of before and after accounts aren’t new but now they’re online, available to everyone and, crucially, generated by user-led content, not by the media. Users say they feel uncomfortable with how the pages shame celebrities but still they can’t quit scrolling. On top of this, experts worry it’s another trigger for body and beauty dissatisfaction among users.
“I started seeing [before and after accounts] roughly a year ago when they began appearing on my Instagram Discover page,” says 26-year-old Sarah. She describes her use as roughly twice a month but refuses to follow any of these accounts because of how “clearly bad” they are. “They are so obviously unfeminist,” she adds.
“People think the online sphere has dramatically changed the media, but the formats of tabloids are replicated online,” says Adrian Bingham, professor of modern British history at Sheffield University and an expert in tabloid media. From true crime to gossip pages — for which there is also a big appetite on Instagram — much of what goes viral online originated from tabloids, he adds.
But owners of the Instagram accounts are reluctant to embrace the comparison and insist there is a moral obligation for them to post.
“I tried really hard for it to not be about shaming,” Dana Omari tells me. She is the owner of one of the biggest before and after Instagram accounts, @igfamousbodies (181k followers). Dana explains that she tries to ensure there is either an educational or complimentary point to her posts.
Her rationale is journalistic. In her eyes, celebrities not telling us the truth about their cosmetic procedures is “actually quite dangerous”. Dana cites Kylie Jenner’s decision to stay silent about getting filler in 2014, aged 15, and creating a company the following year to sell lip products as an example of this.
“They have so much influence and some of them try to sell us things,” she goes on. “When Kylie Jenner wasn’t truthful about her lip injections for the first year, she sold masses of her lip kit, because she said, ‘Oh, I just over-lined my lips’. And so when younger people tried that or bought her kits, they found it didn’t work.”
In terms of feminism, there are absolutely questions to be asked here. There is no escaping the fact that pretty much all of the pictures shared on before and after accounts are of women, even though countless men in the public eye are reported to have undergone work. (I implore you to google ‘Joe Biden + Botox’ right now.) The most popular figures featured are Bella Hadid, Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian; some accounts are even dedicated to ‘uncovering’ work on specific celebrities, like Kendall Jenner. Omari says she knows there’s a lack of equal representation on her account and that she wants to show more men but that it is much harder to showcase as what they’ve had done is often more subtle.
While Omari thinks her posts are necessary and provide a public service, it’s hard not to sympathise with Jenner and other celebrities a little and interrogate why they may conceal any work they’ve had done or even why they get it in the first place. Celebrities are under insurmountable pressure to be thin and beautiful by a Western standard but are considered less worthy if they’ve worked for it.
This context is something many of these accounts aren’t interested in exploring on their pages. Many accounts will say that they’re “exposing celebrities’ lies” about cosmetic surgery or enlightening users to the “reality of celebrity beauty”. Others, in contrast, will proclaim to “love the glow up” or use the caption “beautiful then, beautiful now” to justify posting the image. None engages with the idea that before and after pictures are designed to shame the person in question and stem from magazines doing just that. Some echo the tone of catching celebrities out.
“They straddle this strange line of clearly shaming celebrities who have had plastic surgery or fillers and trying to make women feel less bad about their normal, natural faces while also filling a very similar gap left by ’00s and ’90s body-shaming tabloids,” Sarah says of her own fascination with this part of the internet.
But there’s a flipside. Victoria, also 26, follows two or three before and after accounts and finds they help to assuage the anxiety of being a young woman on social media today, a huge part of which is being bombarded with unattainable levels of beauty at every turn. These accounts, she says, offer her reassurance that even the most beautiful faces had some help from Hollywood’s best surgeons and Photoshop. It’s good to “think that I could be that hot one day when I’m rich,” she tells me.
Helena Lewis-Smith, a senior fellow at the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England, Bristol — the world’s largest research group focusing on body image — has similar thoughts. She believes the format is appealing because people are fascinated by bodily and facial changes.
“The body changes so slowly. I think it’s because we’re not used to recognising those little changes in our bodies and appearance. And so when we see something which kind of indicates a very drastic change, it’s quite shocking,” she explains.
While research on the impact of before and after cosmetic procedures is limited, studies have shown that users dislike a person more if they’re shown to have airbrushed their images, as they perceive it to be disingenuous, she added. Perhaps that explains why we’re so keen to find out whether people have had work done? We feel we are uncovering the truth.
In addition, Helena says that in before and after images designed to show weight loss, young people experienced increased body dissatisfaction if the after image showed a smaller body with a six-pack or athletic physique. “But when people had put on weight but were at peace with their body, people felt better about themselves.”
Our fascination with before and after photos is — as ever — linked to how we feel about ourselves. In a world where we are encouraged to buy into perfection, there’s something reassuring about the fact that, more often than not, we’re being peddled a lie.
While mainstream feminism has grown to critique and condemn the widespread shaming of women in the public eye, it’s apparent that the practice continues in the guise of secret scrolling. It might seem like we’re making ourselves feel better, reassuring ourselves that even beautiful people get surgery, but it’s clear that users aren’t feeling any better for it. And so the cycle of compare and despair continues. | https://medium.com/refinery29/before-after-surgery-accounts-shame-women-but-we-can-t-look-away-21bbf7a7bb90 | [] | 2020-12-10 17:37:25.171000+00:00 | ['Plastic Surgery', 'Before And After', 'Beauty Standards', 'Celebrity', 'Instagram'] |
Are you getting a fair price/service for your utility subscriptions, in Sri Lanka? | Wind Turbines capturing wind energy to be converted to electrical energy.
Background
Let us take electricity generation for example today the CEB is crying aloud about an electricity shortage, but is there a shortage of electricity in the country? We are a tropical island that is lucky to be blessed with not only one form of renewable energy, but many forms of it; from Hydro Power to Solar, Geothermal, Wind, Wave Power etc. and by using these technologies effectively (such as solar loans and incentives), we can contribute a significant percentage of our power consumption from renewable energy. But what is the catch? Successive governments have shown a pathetic lack of interest in the realization of such a dream. But here is the thing, this is not the only problem that we are facing with our electricity board: even when it comes to non-renewable energy sources, the board is not making the most cost-effective decisions, when it comes to sourcing their energy. The reason behind this is that the board is more concerned about making a profit for diesel power plant owners, which they source their electricity from, rather than making cost-effective decisions for their customers. If we let this culture continue, we could be paying much more than what the actual cost of electricity is. Do a comparison of the cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity in our Sri Lanka versus other developed and developing countries and see for yourself.
It is in such a backdrop that we have a commission called the PUCSL (Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka) and their sole responsibility is to monitor utility companies and see if they are giving a fair service at a fair price point to their customers. Similar organizations in the United Kingdom are OFSTED and OFCOM, for education and communications regulation, respectively.
If experience is anything to go by, professionals in Sri Lanka, be it in Engineering, Medical Sciences are known to propagate a lot of fake news and phantom challenges (challenges, that, in reality do not exist). And for people like you and me, we do not have unlimited time to keep on chasing these utility companies for a fair price/service. So, the solution for that is the PUCSL; they fight for our rights (consumer’s rights).
Current Context
Under the current government, they do not seem to believe in consumer rights and think we should be satisfied with any rubbish they give us, even if it is us that is paying the salaries of the government and various boards in Sri Lanka.
If the electricity costs (for the consumer) rise exponentially, millions of families will be in the dark, not being able to meet their bills, thereby not being able to have access to quality education or even a basic dignified living. For centuries, we have known what this can lead into, so why do we still keep on spinning the same hamster wheel?
Public Utilities Commission Sri Lanka (PUCSL) Logo
Call to Action
Therefore, I feel every self-respecting patriotic citizen must protest against the abolishing of the PUCSL. | https://medium.com/@faizancassim-45295/are-you-getting-a-fair-price-service-for-your-utility-subscriptions-in-sri-lanka-f3bf88d13d5d | ['Mohamed Faizan Cassim'] | 2020-12-27 04:08:04.224000+00:00 | ['Sri Lanka', 'Power', 'Electricity', 'Government', 'Utilities'] |
Building High Performing Data Science Teams | What has changed, is that as a discipline, data science has matured. Many companies have gone from proof-of-concept mode to running multiple productionised machine learning models in a short span of time, with varying degrees of success.
A lot of the reason behind this success or failure is not having the most highly qualified data science talent, or having the most expensive, state-of-the-art tools and technology, but by organisational structure and team culture.
In this article, I outline some changes I’ve seen in this industry and how data science teams or even departments can best be structured for success.
Data Science is a Team Sport
Many companies have realised that hiring one, or a bunch, of data scientists and expecting instant results hasn’t worked. In order for data science teams to be most effective, a multidisciplinary team is essential. Data science is a team sport.
A team of data scientists alone is not a data science team. If a team only consists of data scientists, often these data scientists will cover the gaps of missing roles in the team, such as Project Manager, Data Engineer, Business Analyst, Tester or DevOps Engineer, all of which are roles in their own right.
The most effective teams have the right balance of skills and personalities to work together and develop great data products or deliver impactful insights to the business.
Hub & Spoke Model
Once an organisation has grown beyond having one data science team to many, the question arises around how the teams should be structured and interact.
There are many different operating models for data science and analytics departments, each with their own pros and cons.
These include:
Centralised — A large central data science team that serves all parts of the business, usually within an IT, technology or data department.
A large central data science team that serves all parts of the business, usually within an IT, technology or data department. Federated — Smaller data science teams embedded within business units.
The advantages of a centralised department, are shared data and technology within the department, more specialised roles and improved knowledge sharing and internal capability development. However, this comes at the cost of lacking a deep understanding of the businesses needs and domain knowledge.
Federated teams are closer to the business units, and hence have a better understanding of their needs and more domain-specific knowledge.
However, the operating model which strikes the best balance between capability and proximity to the business is the “Hub & Spoke Model”.
The Hub
The hub is a central team that cover areas including:
Industrialised Services & Capabilities
Training & Onboarding
The hub can also be known as the:
Lab
Capability Centre
Centre of Excellence
The Spokes
The spokes are teams embedded in the business that cover areas including:
Analytical Briefs
Domain-Specific Services
The spokes can also be known as the:
Squads
Pods
Business Engagement Teams
Image by Author
Team Structure
As the work Hub and Spoke teams carry out differs, so do the roles within these teams.
Hub Team
Since Hub teams are developing robust, industrialised services (e.g. deploying machine learning pipelines). The possible roles in this team reflect this:
Product Owners define the vision for data products, manage the product roadmap, prioritise and anticipate customer needs. 🧑🏻💼
define the vision for data products, manage the product roadmap, prioritise and anticipate customer needs. 🧑🏻💼 Scrum Masters run agile ceremonies, ensuring that goals and scope are understood by everyone on the team, aid in the estimation of tasks and removing impediments to the team’s progress. ⏱
run agile ceremonies, ensuring that goals and scope are understood by everyone on the team, aid in the estimation of tasks and removing impediments to the team’s progress. ⏱ Machine Learning Engineers train and deploy, scalable, productionised machine learning models to serve the business via APIs or applications. 💻
train and deploy, scalable, productionised machine learning models to serve the business via APIs or applications. 💻 DevOps/MLOps Engineers support the deployment and monitoring of machine learning models into the company infrastructure and set-up CI/CD pipelines.⚙️
support the deployment and monitoring of machine learning models into the company infrastructure and set-up CI/CD pipelines.⚙️ Business Analysts gather requirements from the customer, support in understanding business processes, rules and complex data mapping. 📋
gather requirements from the customer, support in understanding business processes, rules and complex data mapping. 📋 Testers develop integration and system tests to ensure the robustness and quality of the data products. ✅
Spoke Team
Since Spoke teams are rapidly responding to strategic briefs from their business units, different role profiles are needed:
Team Managers engage with the business to understand their needs, help write and define analytical briefs and act as the interface between the business and the team.👩🏽💼
engage with the business to understand their needs, help write and define analytical briefs and act as the interface between the business and the team.👩🏽💼 Data Scientists frame the business questions as machine learning problems and develop machine learning models make predictions and help drive decisions. They also carry out statistical analysis of available data to derive insights valuable to the business.🔬
frame the business questions as machine learning problems and develop machine learning models make predictions and help drive decisions. They also carry out statistical analysis of available data to derive insights valuable to the business.🔬 Data Storytellers/Visualisation Experts create analytical reports, presentations and dashboards and present insights back to the business in a way they can understand to drive impact.📊
What is a High Performing Team?
Once data science teams and departments are set up, how can they be made to perform?
The concept of a “High Performing Team” (HPT) is not unique to data science, a lot has been written about them in management literature, however many of the learnings can be applied to data science specific problems.
High performing data science teams do the following:
Forge a powerful sense of purpose and identity. They create a common performance challenge.
In practice — this can be achieved by creating a clear Product Roadmap & Team Charter.
2. Build an atmosphere of Trust and Cohesion — Develop relationships and ensure they can rely on each other.
In practice — this can be supported by organising one-to-one meetings, keeping the team size small and holding regular team building sessions.
3. Create a team where everyone is a leader — Everyone should be able to make decisions (and trust them)!
In practice — this can be supported by organising design forums, where team members can brainstorm ideas and decide on product designs.
4. Development — the desire to constantly get better — Challenge and provide constructive feedback to each other.
In practice — this can be achieved by having regular knowledge sharing sessions, pair programming or mentoring/buddy schemes.
5. Standards and Processes — Focus on the processes that will lead to the outcome rather than the outcome itself.
In practice — this can be achieved by agreeing and documenting standards and processes within the team, such as peer review processes, code quality standards and testing strategies.
6. People are made to feel welcome — In order for people to perform; they have to be made to feel part of the team and welcomed.
In practice — this can be achieved by having onboarding sessions for new joiners; setting up a buddying system between senior and junior data scientists and ensuring a positive and inclusive working culture.
Companies are investing an ever-growing amount of time and money into data science and artificial intelligence. In order to make the most of this investment, it is worth structuring the organisation and establishing the ways of working to make sure data science teams are acting as High Performing Teams. | https://medium.com/swlh/building-high-performing-data-science-teams-6e9f160c5c94 | ['Jon Howells'] | 2020-12-24 15:03:15.397000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Teamwork', 'Team Building'] |
Finding Color | Finding Color
For the 5th time now I’m joining the daily photo challenge created by Dennett.
It’s mid-November and personally, I feel like this tends to be the darkest month of the year. Spring is still far away, Halloween has passed and it’s not yet time to bring out the Christmas decor. The beautifully colored leaves start turning into brown mush on the side of the road and every day it gets just a little bit colder. In early November Germany went into a second lockdown, which doesn’t make things any easier. While I don’t mind the cold, I do miss the light, the sun, and well the color that comes with it.
Which is why this week I tried to use this challenge not just to express myself, but also to brighten my mood. I focused not just on finding the beauty, but also the color in the days that otherwise don’t feel quite as fun and bright.
It wasn’t always easy to find something. Some days I had to go ahead and create the colors myself, others nature did it all by itself and I just happened to run right into it.
Either way, I truly enjoyed joining the challenge again.
It made my week at least a little less dark and a whole lot more fun! | https://medium.com/snap-shots/finding-color-d24b0d948321 | ['Sasha Meyer'] | 2020-11-20 01:40:31.187000+00:00 | ['Photography', 'Dailyphoto', 'November', 'Challenge', 'Colors'] |
Crypto Weekly | After a pump comes a dump or simply a short market retrace? Well, the next few days will be a telling point on the crypto market as a whole.
Hi guys and welcome to another lovely Monday, it’s a new week and also new opportunities await us as we dive into it.
Crypto Weekly is a weekly writeup that talks about the crypto market and how it fair the previous week with reference to BTC, ETH, and EOS.
BTC
Starting from a weekly low of $13k, BTC has outperformed itself the past few weeks as we experienced it cross the $15k mark and it seems like it is not going back or retracing anytime soon.
The past few weeks have been a trying time in the different financial sectors with regards to the US election and result, all financial markets felt a little hit every now and then, so also BTC was not spared.
For a time we thought BTC was heading back to $14k but it seems the support held perfectly and we soon found BTC at the $15k once again.
Do you know/understand what it means to have the feeling of De Ja Vu, everything kind of pause and it feels like the present event took place already. This is the feeling I get after staring at BTC price for a while.
The thoughts of 2017 come flooding and all I can do is hope for something far better to happen.
ETH
ETH definitely did not fail to meet expectations this past few days as we saw/experienced its price movement rally from $375 go $440 where it currently trades.
If there is anything the entire crypto space can agree on is a good price movement and ETH exhibited this once again claiming the entire crypto space love.
While the launch date of ETH 2.0 continues to stay pending, the list of users who believe in this project continues to increase on daily basis, from what seems to provide 32ETH as a minimum requirement to safeguard the system turned to mere words hours later and we now have contributors donating every seconds or minute.
ETH 2.0 claims to have features that are far better than its existing one and with the hype going on each passing day, getting a higher market price for ETH might be coming anytime soon.
EOS
This past few weeks favored all or most altcoins.
Moving from a low of $2.28, EOS and many altcoins saw an upward movement as EOS clocked a high of $2.61 before its final retrace as it moved to $2.49 where it currently trades.
EOS continues to rank no.13 on Coinmarketcapp rating and just another form of assurance to keep users at ease while development continues to take place.
If just like I said about 2020 been a de ja vu of 2017 then the best is yet to come and the hype is just getting started.
As usual, individuals are advised to do their own research before investing in any digital or offline platform.
Until some other time stay bless. | https://medium.com/@otemzi/crypto-weekly-fe11e5098655 | ['Oteme Eghele'] | 2020-11-10 05:41:43.334000+00:00 | ['Eos', 'Cryptoweekly', 'Eth', 'Tokenpocket', 'Btc'] |
The Hidden Tribes of America and Political Polarization | The Hidden Tribes of America and Political Polarization
There is a well-known parable about six blind men and an elephant. In an effort to understand what the elephant looks like, the blind men all go up to touch the elephant. One touches the side of the elephant and draws the conclusion that the elephant is huge and strong. Another touches the trunk and says that the elephant is like a giant snake. Yet another, touching the tusk, says that the elephant is pointy and deadly as a spear. The men continue to argue until one man walking by suggests that they put their knowledge together. Finally, the blind men understand what the elephant looks like.
This parable parallels American politics today. Each group of people has a certain view of what America looks like: economically, socially, and politically. Although this article will not discuss how those viewpoints come to fruition, it is still important to know what the most common viewpoints of America are.
An organization called “More in Common” recently did a year-long survey about the “Hidden Tribes” of America. This study investigated 8000 people who were statistically representative of the United States in order to determine their most important political beliefs and ideals. The main results from that study are below.
Whether or not you agree with how these groups were organized and labeled, this study shows how these hidden tribes are shaping American politics today. Most people fall into “The Exhausted Majority” or people who are generally disengaged in politics. The vocal minorities or “Wings” as they are referred to in the study seem to be controlling today’s political dialogue on both sides of the aisle.
So what does America actually look like? The answer lies in the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s quite simple, but it’s only by working together that we understand the economic, political and social forces that shape our society. These forces are complex. Therefore, in order to have a clearer, fuller picture of the whole, we must communicate with one another. Only then will we be able to learn how to handle our political climate.
At the moment, both parties are simply speaking to their base and while they tend to comprehensively cover the issues of their constituents, they don’t always address problems that the other side considers relevant. For example, in his first 100 days, Biden has promised to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, create a coronavirus task force, and roll back some of Trump’s major immigration policies. However much this agenda may please a more progressive audience, major conservative issues such as terrorism and bringing back jobs are sidelined. Many Democrats argue that Biden’s agenda will help all of America, including conservatives. However, if conservatives do not perceive that their most urgent issues take priority alongside progressive issues, they will feel ignored by the establishment. This is harmful because the very basis of democracy is compromise. We have to learn to listen to each other, even though it has become increasingly difficult due to media efforts to portray the opposite political party as radical or unreasonable. It’s hard to cross party lines in order to understand these more complex Hidden Tribes, but it is necessary to have a functioning political system.
However, looking into the future, the Hidden Tribes of America are changing quickly. One of the biggest causes of this rapid change is the phenomenon of a Browning America; by 2050, there will be a larger proportion of minority Americans including Hispanic, Asian and Black Americans than White Americans. The fact that we do not have an accurate picture of the American population and truly understand different peoples’ political views is a fundamental cause of political polarization today. More importantly, this population is quickly changing beneath our feet so we need to make honest efforts to reduce polarization now. If we don’t, our quickly changing demographics coupled with our current lack of communication across the aisle will result in a fundamentally flawed picture of America on which we will base equally flawed policy.
This is why it’s so important to learn how to communicate and get each group of the Hidden Tribes to understand and become familiar with the views of one another. This is the only way that our policies and our institutions can reflect what our current society genuinely wants and needs. | https://medium.com/the-triple-helix-cmu/the-hidden-tribes-of-america-and-political-polarization-10a064d35e96 | ['The Triple Helix'] | 2021-03-01 22:59:49.754000+00:00 | ['Hidden Tribes', 'Democrats', 'Republicans', 'American', 'Politics'] |
Regenerative Cities in their Bioregional Context | Regenerative Cities in their Bioregional Context
A conversation between Herbert Girardet and Daniel Wahl
On July 13th, I had a fascinating conversation with Herbert Girardet. His is a long-term member of the Club of Rome and the World Future Council, who has worked as a documentary film-maker for decades, is the author of many books spanning 4 decades, and one of the world’s leading thinker-practitioners on regenerative cities. His book ‘Creating Regenerative Cities’ came out in 2014.
We start by remembering when we last met at the NOW Assembly in Delphi where we were joined my Kenny Young who recently passed away and was a long term friend of Herbie’s. They co-founded ‘Artists Project Earth’ together to help fund environmental projects around the world through the music industry.
Here is Herbie’s obituary of his friend Kenny Young, who I had the pleasure to meet and spend three days with last October:
I invited Herbie to reflect on his 45 year journey from being a student at the London School of Economics in the 70s to becoming an environmentalist, meeting Satish Kumar and contributing to Resurgence, working on a TV series with the ‘self-sufficiency guru’ John Seymour on the human impact on the planet called ‘Far from Paradise’ that documented the increasing degradation of the Earth through human intervention.
We talk about the shift from hunter and gatherer societies to agricultural societies, cities and empires. We also address how many indigenous people around the world actively engaged in a subtle form of ecosystems management or being abundance generating key stone species in the bioregions they inhabited.
Summary of what we talked about (listen to recording below):
Herbie reflects on his work with the Kayapo in the Amazon. We talk about Terra Preta and biochar.
(min 14) We start talking about Herbie’s work in London and on the ecological footprint of London which he published in 2002 as a ‘Schumacher Briefing’.
(min 19) Herbie speaks about the impact of the city of Rome on the ecosystems around the Mediterranean basin and how Rome denuded North Africa.
(min 26) We speak about Herbie’s work as ‘Thinker in Residence’ at the city of Adelaide and his recommendations leading to the cities becoming among one of the best examples of city redesign. See:
(min 33) I asked Herbie about the balance between re-regionalisation and maintaining global collaboration in bioregional transitions everywhere. …
Herbie describes how his work on the ecological footprint in London made him realise that relocalising food production has to distinguish between the production of horticultural vegetables and grain production — the latter impacting on vast areas beyond a city’s boundaries.
(min 39) We talk about the relationship between cities and their bioregions. Herbert’s book ‘Creating Regenerative Cities’ offers 20 case studies of cities to learn from. “By an large the understanding that there is a conceptual systemic problem between an urbanising world and the every grater impacts on the global environment by the resource demand patterns of cities [needs to grow].”
(min 45) we briefly talk about the work of Sir Patrick Geddes … and my work on regenerative cultures … “Just looking at the physical metabolism of cities is only one aspect of the story we are talking about, which needs to be internalised deeply within the cultural context in which we live”
(00:47) Herbert starts talking about the new initiatives within the Club of Rome focussed on cultural change — reconciliation between humanity and “the environment”.
(min 53) … the dual path of ecosystems restoration as a way to build resilience to climate change and to contribute to mitigating (and possibly) reversing it …
(min 57) … local resilience and a return to local food as a widespread response to the pandemic …
(min 1:09) … is capitalism structurally dysfunctional or can it be redesigned to incentivise regenerative resource use?
(min 1:22) we talk about re-localisation again and have a brief chat of maybe getting Herbie involved in advising the city of Palma in the context of the island of Mallorca based on his experience in Adelaide … and I briefly mention some of the more recent developments on Mallorca aiming at creating a large scale integrated marine and terrestrial ecosystems restoration project within the context of re-inventing the bioregional economy in a way that makes it less dependent on tourism and a potential example of bioregional regeneration.
More about Herbert Girardet:
Here is the recording of our conversation:
(Warning: unfortunately the recording has some kind of interference every time Herbie speaks — a slight hissing in the background — but he can be understood well.)
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If you like the post, please clap AND remember that you can clap up to 50 times if you like it a lot ;-)!
Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
Please consider supporting my ongoing work by becoming a patron: | https://medium.com/activate-the-future/regenerative-cities-in-their-bioregional-context-8259d8d65d8e | ['Daniel Christian Wahl'] | 2020-08-09 13:01:26.882000+00:00 | ['Cities', 'Sustainability', 'Urban Planning', 'Culture', 'Bioregionalism'] |
Knowing the Intelligent Cosmic Space | image: paul mulliner 27_6_19
Knowing the Intelligent Cosmic Space
You’re not a separate person. Neither am I. Although we have separate human bodies, the conscious awareness we all share with each other is a single field of cosmic intelligence, a spatial consciousness everywhere, inside us and throughout the Universe.
Each one of us is this cosmic spatial-intelligence continuously coming into existence as a human being.
Cosmic intelligence is transforming itself into living beings by spin-patterning cosmic energy into the quantum scale field-resonances we observe as the streaming flows of cell biochemistry characteristic of all life.
A cosmic field-intelligence organism in all space is transforming itself into living beings across the Universe, making itself visible to itself and experiencing life as every living being.
There’s never a time in our everyday life when this field-consciousness, the core-stuff of the Universe, isn’t looking through all of us into the world, conscious of every moment of our experience, aware of every thought, realizing and knowing every moment.
As we tune in to this spatial conscious-intelligence and bring it into our awareness, we can begin to feel more at home in the Universe and on this planet.
We can find a larger sense of ourselves as cosmic beings, as we intuitively realize the whole visible Universe and all life everywhere to be a continuously generated expression of cosmic intelligence.
Today, here and now in our everyday life in the world, wherever we are and whatever we’re doing at this moment, we’re connected into a cosmic-scale consciousness field-organism which is bringing us all into being within itself.
The space around, within and between us is an aware and conscious cosmic intelligence and as we intuitively realize this conscious awareness within ourselves by inwardly paying attention to it, we can know it as the self inside all of us.
When we do this, we realize that there’s no actual ‘other’. There’s only the appearance of others, within one seamless field of conscious awareness inside all of us and in all space everywhere.
Our thoughts about ourself can reinforce the sense of separation we may feel from existing in separate human bodies and our busy life in the world can result in us paying more attention to what’s happening around us than inside us.
Tuning in to the presence of this cosmic field inside ourselves helps us lessen our attachment to thoughts of separation and we can more easily dissolve the thought boundaries that separate us from each other.
A field-experiencing cosmic consciousness is generating all life across the Universe, experiencing every moment within all of us and becoming more aware of itself by doing so.
~We can bring this intuitive realization into our daily life by taking a focus of attention inward.
~The focus of our attention, like the rays of light focussed into a high intensity point by a lens, has an actual location in the space that surrounds us.
~If we pause from reading for a moment, we can take the location of this point-focussed attention away from the words on our screen and move it into the inner core of ourself.
~We can gently hold this focus of attention in the inner core of ourself and allow our thinking to subside.
~Our attention is now focussed within a conscious, self-aware space which seems to be not only inside us, but everywhere throughout the Universe.
What we are, at the core of our innermost self and in all space everywhere, is what is looking through all of us into the world.
27_6_19
Read more at : https://medium.com/@paul_mulliner
View more of my CGI art at https://www.behance.net/paulmullin26e8
and CGI animation at https://vimeo.com/user73314390 | https://medium.com/daily-connect/knowing-the-intelligent-cosmic-space-864f42307aef | ['Paul Mulliner'] | 2020-01-14 07:49:36.368000+00:00 | ['Enlightenment', 'Meditation', 'Personal Development', 'Consciousness', 'Spirituality'] |
10 Simple & Essential Tips To Keep Your Body Fresh & Hydrated During Summer | 10 Simple & Essential Tips To Keep Your Body Fresh & Hydrated During Summer Fuzia Jul 8, 2020·5 min read
Summer is a season of joy and laughter. Spark out the energy in you and follow these 10 tips to make your summer healthy and full of enjoyment.
Without a doubt, Summer is the best season of all. Ice-creams, barbeques, short dresses, long days, pools, warm climate, vacation and what not! Summer is filled with everything you ever need to have a fun time. It’s a perfect time to dig out your favourite swimwear and have some well-deserved chill time on a beautiful beach.
But summer has its downsides too. Summer brings excessive sun exposure, hay fever, dehydration, sweat, and other health woes. So, it is very important to take care of ourselves in that hot-warm weather. Here are 10 simple and essential tips for you to have a happy and healthy summer.
1. Protect your skin
This is a vital part and an important issue to be addressed. Protect your skin from excessive sun exposure.
Use a sun lotion to protect your skin from harmful UV rays. It is recommended to use at least SPF 30 as it blocks 97% of UVB rays, whereas SPF 50 blocks 98%. A mineral-based sunscreen is suited best for sensitive skin.
Avoid sitting in the sun during peak hours (between 10 am to 4 pm) in order to reduce UV radiation.
Use accessories such as a hat that shades your face, ears and neck. Also a pair of sunglasses with lenses that have 99% to 100% UV absorption, which will provide optimal protection for the eyes and the surrounding skin.
2. Drink water — A lot of it!
Drinking lots of water is the best way to stay hydrated during summer. Heat and sweat in hot summer months can leave your body dehydrated. Lack of water in your body is very harmful and can lead to many health conditions that could impact the body functions.
Health professions recommend women to drink at least 11 cups of water a day and 15 cups for men. You can also drink fruit juices or use a slice of lemon in water to add a fresh flavour.
3. Have healthy smoothies
We all know that fruit smoothies are a great way to keep refreshed throughout the summer. But smoothies made with frozen yoghurts, ice cream, or too much fruit contains a lot of hidden calories. Beware of smoothies and it’s better to avoid them completely. Have green smoothies, which are great for your health as they are made of fruits and veggies.
4. Exfoliate your skin
Exfoliation is a process of removing dead skin cells from the surface of your skin. Summer increases dead skin cells and hence it is important to exfoliate your skin to improve blood circulation and to brighten and improve your skin’s appearance. Face scrubs and brushes are physical exfoliation methods, whereas exfoliators include acids and skin peels.
5. Tackle hay fever
Hay fever, also called allergic rhinitis, causes signs and symptoms that are similar to cold, such as a runny nose, itchy eyes, congestion and sneezing. Hay fever is caused by an allergic response. It is caused by allergens such as pollen, dust mites, fur or feathers of cats, dogs, and other animals and birds.
This can be avoided by cleaning your home regularly and getting rid of the allergens. Take a shower and change your clothes after you’ve been outside. For worse symptoms, you may need prescribed medications.
6. Keep up the exercise regime
Don’t rush around to hide your running shoes and gym wear. It’s a vacation from a mundane routine but not from the exercise regime. Yes, call it harsh if you want to, but this is it. Workout really well, or take up some ‘moving your body’ classes.
Don’t work out in the scorching heat. Try doing it at 5 am and evening. Drink loads of water, go on biking and remember to wear your SPF!
7. Get swimming!
Who doesn’t love a cool dip in hot surroundings now? Yay, we all love it now. Don’t we? Let’s be the water baby and go hit the pool with alluring costumes. Have a pool party but wait, workout ten minutes before you dive in.
Try various kinds of strokes and float. Floating on water is considered the best therapy to heal our body and relax our mind. Did you know that a 30minute session in the pool burns out 400 calories! I know right. So exciting news. So hit the pool, burn calories and splash some fun.
8. It’s time for Hair Care
Frizzy hair, dull hair and all blew up in the air. Is your hair ruining your photograph? Or is the sun ruining your hair? Well, the sun causes a lot of damage to our hair during summers. Splits, roughness, dryness and sweat collection make you go mad zoo! And don’t even get started about chlorine damages.
The solution: Well, use an amazing shampoo to clear and clean your scalp. Use a generous amount of conditioner and always carry serum with you. Try avoiding heat styling as your hair is already dealing with enough heat.
9. Gulp down the goodies
Summer is so much similar to snacks. Isn’t it? Temptations hit you hard and ice creams are a part of it. In order to treat your tongue don’t burden your health people. A healthy diet a day keeps you fit for years. Grab a sandwich with enough proteins and nutrients. Make it yummy for your tummy and tongue. Grind the smoothies and enjoy the season of blessing. Always carry a bottle of water with you. Keep yourself super hydrated.
10. Building new skills
Rainy isn’t your season to learn new things. Winter is all about being on the bed curled up. But summer, summer is exciting and building. It’s time to learn new skills and develop a new hobby. Go and cook something new. Plant trees and gardens often. Want a stroke-like Picasso? Get going already. Try out those new yoga moves or sign up the meditation class you’ve been longing for. Do anything you love or what makes your soul happy.
This is it. Here’s your list of perfect summers. Follow these tips and tag us on your summer trips. Have truckloads of fun with perfect health and safety. Keep yourself mindful and not mind-full! It’s time to enjoy summers being carefree. SPF, hydrating, healthy food, exercise and you are good to go. Oh, wait, you forgot one thing, sign up on Fuzia and share your summer stories. We are waiting for it.
Happy healthy summer to you. :) | https://medium.com/@pr-26909/10-simple-essential-tips-to-keep-your-body-fresh-hydrated-during-summer-e242e833e6eb | [] | 2020-07-08 09:38:23.623000+00:00 | ['Tips', 'Body', 'Summer', 'Self Care', 'Hydrate'] |
Mapping Classical Antiquity: Exploring the Ancient World through the maps created by ancient peoples | Mapping Classical Antiquity: Exploring the Ancient World through the maps created by ancient peoples Lewis D'Ambra Follow Jul 11 · 6 min read
Possible Invasions and Migrations during the Bronze Age Collapse
The aim of this publication is to explore, through maps, texts and historical accounts of expeditions, what the people of what we can loosely call Classical Antiquity knew of the world and how their knowledge of the world’s geography evolved, changed and grew over time. Through this we will see how antique civilisations interpreted this knowledge and how this knowledge in turn influenced their world view. The series of articles following this one will trace the story of knowledge of the world from the dawning of the classical age in ancient Mesopotamia, through the Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans, to the end of the classical world where so much of that accumulated knowledge was lost and forgotten. However, before we can dive into the detail of the evidence, we need to set the context and parameters of our period of exploration.
Dating Classical Antiquity is a difficult business, the period roughly covers the millennium from the re-emergence of civilisation after the Bronze Age collapse to the collapse of antique civilisation itself about 1500 years ago. However, the exact definition of the boundaries of this period is open to dispute.
Some historians place the start of Classical Antiquity at end of the Greek Dark ages[1], using the date of the first Olympic Games[2] in 776 BCE as a starting point. Other historians use the founding of Rome in 753 BCE[3] as its start, and others still will pick out different events to place its beginning. The only consensus being of a start point in roughly the 8th Century BCE.
Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf
The end of the period is even more disputed, some historians use the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE[4] to mark the end of Classical Antiquity. Others place the end with the death of the Emperor Justinian in 565 CE[5] and yet more still with the coming of Islam in the 7th Century CE.
For the sake of clarity, for this series we are going to use the first Olympic games in 776 BCE as the start point for our period and the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE as the end of Classical Antiquity. This allows a broad scope but with definitive boundaries not tied to the lives of individuals but geopolitical events with a clear start and end point.
In between these epoch marking dates, the world would see the rise and fall of Assyria[6], Babylon[7] and Persia[8], the conquests of Alexander[9] and the domination of Rome[10].
Alexander the Great
Throughout the period, ideas, knowledge, and religions would shift and change, fundamentally altering the face of civilisation. However, there would be a consistent and continuous streak running throughout as knowledge of the world was passed down and developed, linking Babylon to Greece and Persia to Rome.
Through the maps these civilisations drew and the explorations of important characters, events, texts, and cultures we can track this development and see the impact it had throughout this thousand-year period and beyond. Each of the following articles will focus on a map, a character or an important event or account aimed at following the story of knowledge of the world and its geography through Classical Antiquity. However, to begin to understand Classical Antiquity, we must go back to its beginning.
From about 1200 BCE the world of the Bronze age entered a period that was violent, sudden and culturally disruptive, the great civilisations of the western world all but collapsed[11]. The empire of the Hittites vanished[12], the fractious Mycenaeans disappeared, taking their palace-based culture with them[13], Babylon was sacked[14], the Assyrians retreated[15], and a diminished Egypt[16] became isolated and wary of the outside world. Almost every city between Pylos and Gaza was violently destroyed and many were abandoned.
The Lion gate of Mycenae
What followed has been termed a dark age[17]. For several centuries, the world had to piece itself back together and adapt to the new realities that the Bronze age collapse brought with it. By the 8th Century BCE civilisation was on the rise once more, rediscovering and building on top of the half-forgotten knowledge of a glorious past, defining what they knew of the wider world and what they discovered in their own terms. Through the next thousand years this process would see civilisation grow to new heights and change beyond recognition, forging ideas and knowledge which still influence our own.
This publication is going to explore how Classical Antique civilisations understood their world, what they knew of far off lands and people, and what the way they depicted this knowledge can tell us about these societies. The first stop is ancient Mesopotamia, the heart of Classical Antiquity at the beginning of the period and the city of Babylon, a name which still resonates 2500 years later.
The ruins of Babylon
[1] Violatti, Cristian. “Greek Dark Age.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 30 Jan 2015. Web. 05 Jul 2020.
[2] Cartwright, Mark. “Ancient Olympic Games.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 13 Mar 2018. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[3] Mark, Joshua J. “Ancient Rome.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 02 Sep 2009. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[4] Wasson, Donald L. “Fall of the Western Roman Empire.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 12 Apr 2018. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[5] Wyeth, Will. “Justinian I.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 28 Sep 2012. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[6] Crabben, Jan V. D. “History of Assyria.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 18 Jan 2012. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[7] Mark, Joshua J. “Babylon.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 28 Apr 2011. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[8] Davidson, Peter. “Achaemenid Empire.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 11 Feb 2011. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[9] Mark, Joshua J. “Alexander the Great.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 14 Nov 2013. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[10] Mark, Joshua J. “Roman Empire.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 22 Mar 2018. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[11] Podcasts, BBC. “The Bronze Age Collapse (In Our Time) — BBC.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 25 May 2019. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
Studies, Luwian. “The End of the Bronze Age.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 01 Jun 2016. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[12] Mark, Joshua J. “The Hittites.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 01 May 2018. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[13] Cartwright, Mark. “Mycenaean Civilization.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 24 May 2013. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[14] Mark, Joshua J. “Babylon.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 28 Apr 2011. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[15] Crabben, Jan V. D. “History of Assyria.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 18 Jan 2012. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[16] Mark, Joshua J. “New Kingdom of Egypt.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 07 Oct 2016. Web. 12 Jun 2019.
[17] Violatti, Cristian. “Greek Dark Age.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 30 Jan 2015. Web. 12 Jun 2019. | https://medium.com/mapping-civilisation/mapping-classical-antiquity-29031058069f | ["Lewis D'Ambra"] | 2020-07-14 16:07:06.540000+00:00 | ['Maps', 'Mapping', 'History', 'Ancient History'] |
The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver | The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver
Myfather died of alcoholic liver cirrhosis four years ago. It came as a surprise to all of us, even though it was clear he had a severe drinking problem for decades. It was especially surprising to me, as a former nurse and a recovering alcoholic. You would think I’d know more about liver problems and alcohol use than the average person. But the truth is, in the months before his death, I had no idea my father’s liver was struggling at all. Most people know about cirrhosis, but few people know how a liver goes from early damage to end-stage liver cirrhosis.
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The combination of my father’s death and my personal background lit a fire in me to know more. He was admitted to the hospital on June 24, 2016, and he died on July 18. Only 24 days passed between the first sign there was a problem and his subsequent death.
Now, hearing that he was in end-stage cirrhosis didn’t surprise me, given his heavy drinking. What did surprise me was that he’d visited several doctors and specialists in the months before his death, and no one knew his liver was struggling either.
So what happened? Does end-stage liver cirrhosis really sneak up that fast? Were there other signs that would have alerted someone to his failing liver?
As for why the doctors and specialists didn’t know what was happening, that mystery resolved reasonably quickly. The plain truth is that alcoholics rarely divulge the amount and frequency of their drinking to their doctors. This was the case for my dad. He had many health issues that he was trying to solve, but he protected his drinking habit fiercely. So he refused to spill the beans, even when it mattered.
The problem is that liver damage has numerous multifaceted symptoms that are confusing and associated with many other illnesses. Unless a doctor knows that the patient is an alcoholic, they may not know how to interpret what’s happening until it’s too late.
As he was dying, my father told me that he didn’t think to tell the doctors how much he was drinking. He said it was as if he blanked out and “forgot” to mention it. As crazy as that sounds, this strange “forgetting” is a common part of the alcoholic mindset. It may also be due to the metabolic and physical changes of cirrhosis itself.
There are many signs of liver problems, but oddly, none seem to point to the liver at first. And in fact, many of the first signs of liver damage occur in other parts of the body. Knowing these signs may help educate alcoholics and their families if they want to understand their risk of developing liver cirrhosis.
Liver damage has numerous multifaceted symptoms that are confusing and associated with many other illnesses. Unless a doctor knows that the patient is an alcoholic, they may not know how to interpret what’s happening until it’s too late.
Digestive signs
The liver plays a huge part in our digestive process. It filters out all toxins from food as well as helping to break down fats and glucose.
When a liver starts to slow down due to significant damage, it will reduce its digestive work. Instead, it will divert its energy toward vital functions like metabolizing medications and filtering toxins.
This means that symptoms like bloating, nausea, vomiting, gas, and diarrhea will start to increase. Over time, eating becomes more challenging. In the later stages of liver cirrhosis, toxins that can’t be filtered out begin to build in the bloodstream, which causes more nausea.
Cognitive signs
Although confusion and brain fog happen in end-stage liver cirrhosis, they can also be early signs.
The liver is responsible for filtering dangerous substances in the blood. It also helps regulate hormones, blood glucose, and vitamin absorption. In the early stages of liver damage, these processes can be interrupted. Inevitably, this affects our brain and nervous system.
This means that early liver problems can make you feel tired, confused, slow, and foggy. You may have some memory issues as well.
Neuromuscular signs
The liver stores vitamins required for the functioning of many organs and systems in the body — one of them is vitamin B1 or thiamine. A deficiency in this particular vitamin has been documented in many alcoholics with or without liver damage.
Unfortunately, alcohol inhibits the absorption of thiamine in the intestine. Over time, as the liver becomes damaged, it can no longer store thiamine in enough quantities. Thiamine deficiency is responsible for many neurological issues in people with alcoholism.
Symptoms of thiamine deficiency range from mild to severe and include things like: confusion, mental fog, lack of balance, pain and numbness in hands and feet, muscle weakness, rapid heart rate, digestive problems, flushing, and involuntary eye movements.
Thiamine deficiency happens in almost every alcoholic who consumes frequent and large amounts of alcohol. And if thiamine deficiency due to alcoholism is discovered, you can be sure the liver is suffering damage at the same time.
Many of the first signs of liver damage occur in other parts of the body.
Vascular signs
All alcohol consumption can lead to blood vessel dilation, causing flushing in the face and hands. Over time, this can cause damage leading to permanent redness in the face. Although many alcoholics have rosacea or spider-like veins on their faces, this is often benign.
However, spider angiomas are different from rosacea or spiderlike veins. They’re circular and have a central point called a spider nevus that is darker than the rest of the lesion. Spider angiomas are a sign of liver disease and can be present in the early stages. They often progress to more extensive and more numerous lesions.
Spider angiomas are caused by increased estrogen levels in the blood. When the liver becomes damaged, it can’t properly metabolize estrogens, which causes them to build up in the body.
Many women who are pregnant or taking birth control pills may have a few spider angiomas. However, in alcoholic liver disease, these lesions are often more frequent and accompanied by red palms and varicose veins in the esophagus.
These are a few of the main signs of alcoholic liver damage that happen outside of the liver. It’s important to know this because most of us have no idea how the liver functions and how it communicates distress.
The liver itself doesn’t show signs like pain or swelling in the early stages of liver damage. This contrasts with other organs like the heart or stomach, where any damage will emit pain or symptoms directly from these organs.
What happens with liver damage is that its many diverse functions become interrupted, causing symptoms in other parts of the body. This may explain why most people never think they have a problem with their liver.
Unfortunately, patients with alcoholism are rarely educated about these issues. This is because they often don’t reveal their drinking, to begin with. And even if they do, the symptoms are widespread and complex, which makes patient education challenging.
My goal in writing articles like this is to help educate regular people about alcoholic liver disease to understand their health and make better decisions.
It’s hard to say if my father would have changed his drinking habits if he knew more about his vague and complicated symptoms. But I think having proper education would have certainly helped him understand his risks and health problems better. | https://medium.com/@karinakapur58975/the-first-signs-of-alcoholic-liver-damage-are-not-in-the-liver-b2d2d7ef737 | ['Karina Kapur'] | 2020-12-14 22:23:14.204000+00:00 | ['Addiction', 'Body', 'Alcohol', 'Mental Health', 'Health'] |
Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher | 50 Word Microfiction
Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher
Thrifty Words Theme #8: Youth
Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash
Music was my salvation. I grew up with ten siblings. There was opera, the 40’s, R&B, Motown artists, & rock ‘n roll.
A collection that spirited my life into a place where I was free.
It was a safe haven where my surroundings became a sea of notes and comfort. | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/50-word-microfiction-415d6487d565 | ['Giulietta Passarelli'] | 2020-10-22 17:02:33.001000+00:00 | ['50 Words', 'Youth', 'The Bad Influence', 'Music', 'Growing Up'] |
The Art of Engineering: How Designing a Self-Driving Car Prepared Me for a Career at Ford | The Art of Engineering: How Designing a Self-Driving Car Prepared Me for a Career at Ford
Design sketches for the Deep Orange 10 self-driving vehicle prototype.
I was only six years old when my family left South Korea and moved to Canada. Many things changed as a result of this big move — my father was a mechanical engineer and my mother was a school teacher, but both gave up their careers and made significant sacrifices for a new life. While the world and everything around me seemed to be changing, one thing that never did was my love for cars.
Whether I was comparing completely different vehicles or trying to spot differences between a new Mustang and the previous year’s pony, I was fascinated by the way cars looked and felt. Luckily, I was able to pursue that passion at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, where I studied transportation design and got to play an important role as an intern in Clemson University’s Deep Orange program — which truly helped prepare me for my current role at Ford.
Deep Orange is a two-year master’s program that provides students with the opportunity to design and build a fully functional vehicle from the ground up, and the 10th year of the program threw a curveball — help develop a self-driving car. While some engineering elements were already being refined by Clemson students before I came on board, there was still an important question to answer: What would this car look like?
That’s when the College for Creative Studies was enlisted to help bring the self-driving vehicle’s design to life. Along with my classmates Chris Kim and Hyunhong Jo, I was given the opportunity to work on the program through an internship. At school, we had often talked about the emergence of new mobility solutions and now, I was officially tasked with bringing one to life.
A full-scale mock-up of the Deep Orange 10 self-driving vehicle prototype based on overall wheelbase and dimensions.
Understanding the challenge: As a student at the College for Creative Studies, designing a self-driving car presented a very different challenge than designing a traditional vehicle. Autonomous vehicles have sensors like LiDAR and radar that need to be integrated into their exterior design, among other things. Since there is no driver, designers can experiment further with their interior and exterior. The biggest challenge was creating a cohesive design that incorporated all the various sensing systems, while ensuring they were not obtrusive to the overall look.
Armed with dimensions for the wheelbase and the locations for occupants’ hip points, my team and I went to work on a design that would meet all of Clemson’s technical requirements while delivering the right experience for a potential customer.
Real-world experience: As a student, you might sometimes create only a scale model for a project, but typically we were left to our imaginations when it came to how our designs would look in the real world. In this case, I was working side by side with engineers on something that would become a real, functioning vehicle. There was a lot more at stake than in a typical student project, and every detail counted.
Steven Lee measures interior spaces at a Ford dealer as he researches how to design a self-driving vehicle prototype.
For example, mobility vehicles tend to have different proportions than traditional ones, so we began looking at how we could best serve customers. That meant measuring how much headspace we could provide when designing for 99th percentile occupants, identifying an optimal seating position and height — especially important since the interior had passengers facing each other to enable visiting and interaction. We even went to Ford dealerships to measure different types of seats to determine what would work best for our vehicle.
Eventually, we were able to design a spacious interior that would meet the needs of customers, deliver a fresh experience through the living room-style seating arrangement, and fulfill all the technical requirements specified by the engineering team.
Prepared for life at Ford: I was only a junior when this collaboration between the College for Creative Studies and Clemson began, but one of the most impressive things about working on Deep Orange was how well it prepared me for the job I eventually landed at Ford. Even as students, we approached working with each other every day with a sense of professionalism, conducting weekly meetings with Ford and Clemson engineers, presenting work in front of large groups of people, and making sure everyone was aligned with our overall objective.
This is all day-to-day stuff at Ford. Collaborating with working professionals — including modelers at Revolution Design Studios — inspired me to pursue a career as a modeler as well. I’ve wanted to work on cars my whole life, and it’s clear to me that the College for Creative Studies and projects like Deep Orange not only give students the chance to experience what it’s like to work at a real automotive company, but also provide them with the skills needed to thrive when they land their first opportunity. | https://medium.com/self-driven/the-art-of-engineering-how-designing-a-self-driving-car-prepared-me-for-a-career-at-ford-2f0c4add745a | ['Ford Motor Company'] | 2020-12-30 15:37:27.345000+00:00 | ['Self Driving Cars', 'Engineering', 'Education', 'Autonomous Cars', 'Technology'] |
On the 4th Day of Christmas… | On the 4th Day of Christmas my true love sent to me….4 Sweet Pups!
What better present to receive under the tree than a cute puppy that of course you’ll fall in love with instantly? And what happens when you love someone? You want to protect and provide for it.
In the estate planning realm, we’d call this a good situation for a Pet Trust. A Pet Trust is simply a place where you’ve written down what you want to happen with your pup if something happened to you, and it’s a place to set aside some funds for the continued care of your dog (or horse or cats, or any other animals).
People are usually shocked to hear this is an option that can be talked about and dealt with in their estate plan. But we say — why? Your estate planning can be customized to fit your exact needs and desires!
And just so happens, the Elder Law Ladies, Stephanie and Chantelle, have 4 wonderful pups! You’ve already seen 2 of them above, so here are the other 2:
To talk more, call (405) 252–0472! | https://medium.com/elder-law-ladies/on-the-4th-day-of-christmas-4d7b77131849 | ['Stephanie Alleman'] | 2020-12-21 14:38:51.958000+00:00 | ['Asset Protection', 'Christmas', 'Estate Planning', 'Pet Trust', 'Winter'] |
Gym-going in Japan | Gym-going in Japan
So you’re taking a trip to Japan? Congrats!! You are in for an incredible adventure to a place where literally anything that can be opposite of your experience in the western world will be.
Nearly every physical task you take on is likely to make you feel momentarily confused or stumped (feel like you should turn that faucet to the right? Nope, it’s left. Trying to pull that door open and find yourself struggling? Try pushing it instead, or sliding it sideways. Looking for the handle to flush the toilet? Good luck — you have an extensive menu of options from which to choose).
Even more than physical tasks, though, many cultural and behavioral norms are distinct enough in Japan to leave you feeling slightly off-balance, awkward, or even, sometimes, uncomfortable (feel like you should make eye contact with the person sitting across from you on the train? Maybe don’t. Does it seem like smiling would be a good idea generally? It might not be, unless you want to appear to be simple-minded, etc).
If you, like me, are pretty into fitness and love to exercise, you might find it a challenge to keep your usual routine going in Japan. There are a few ways you could approach this:
Just take a break. If you’re anything like me, you might actually have a tendency to over-exercise and your body could use a rest anyway. If, however, you are traveling for an extended period or moving to a new place, it’s worth doing some research to plan in advance what you’ll do to stay active while traveling. We are here for 3 weeks now, and moving back in August for me to participate in the JET program and teach English, so, this trip is serving as a good opportunity to think through some of the challenges I may face when we move here more permanently in a few months. If you want to keep exercising you could change up your routine somehow. For example, I’ve been weight lifting, but, in the past I’ve run a lot. So, training for the Tokyo marathon is an idea I’ve entertained and may still pursue if my knees will allow it. Having an event or goal to work towards might be good for motivation, too, particularly if you are struggling with the sense that you’re “downgrading” your exercise routine from your ideal (for me, weight lifting) to whatever will be most convenient (running = no equipment needed, can do it anywhere). You could also play around with body weight resistance training, which, counterintuitively, often feels more challenging that lifting heavy weights to me, because without all the weight, the only thing to focus on is reps to fatigue, mind-muscle connection, and intensity — all of which can add up to a really hard workout, while also tending to serve almost like physical therapy to ameliorate the aches and pains that we often incidentally accumulate from heavy compound lifts like squats and deadlifts. You could try to continue your routine in a new country by finding a gym that suits your needs, paying for a day, week/month pass or annual membership, and learning the procedures and norms that are in place at your new facility. This is probably only really a realistic option for those traveling to a single destination, or for those moving somewhere, like we will be in August, but, it might be worth looking into if you really love your routine. After all, studying or working abroad in another country can be stressful. Taking the time to figure out a way to keep one element of your weekly routine going might be a great way to add consistency to an otherwise big life change and could help manage stress levels.
The first option of taking a break above is self-explanatory, although I should also mention that it’s very likely that even if you “take a break” from intentional exercise you will likely continue to be plenty active during your travels in Japan. Extensive use of public transportation via train and metro always means a lot of walking to and from stations and between stations and points of interest; even on a low day of walking in Japan, I rarely have trouble hitting 10,000 steps and often get up to 20,000 or more! This amount of walking, paired with thoughtful, local eating of fresh, healthy Japanese food is probably enough to maintain your weight, if not your body composition, so don’t be too afraid of the scale. | https://medium.com/better-better/gym-going-in-japan-dc97364c6838 | ['Becky Searls'] | 2019-06-03 17:38:38.756000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Workout', 'Cultural Exchange', 'Travel', 'Fitness'] |
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