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圣诞前夕的骑士 線上看(2019)完整版 | 圣诞前夕的骑士 線上看(2019)完整版
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圣诞前夕的骑士 The Knight Before Christmas(2019)
导演: 莫妮卡·米切尔
编剧: Cara J. Russell
主演: 凡妮莎·哈金斯 / 乔什·怀特豪斯 / 埃曼纽尔·施莱琪 / 哈里·贾维斯 / 雅各布·索利 / 更多…
类型: 喜剧 / 爱情
制片国家/地区: 美国
语言: 英语
上映日期: 2019–11–21(美国)
又名: 穿越时空的骑士(台) / 现代圣诞骑士(港)
IMDb链接: tt10060094
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圣诞前夕的骑士的剧情简介 · · · · · ·
中世纪骑士柯尔爵士（乔许·怀特豪斯饰）被女巫送到今日俄亥俄州。时逢圣诞佳节，柯尔遇见聪敏又善良，却对爱情灰心的科学教师布鲁琪（凡妮莎·哈金斯饰），并成为朋友。布鲁琪帮助柯尔爵士适应现代生活的一切，同时，柯尔也设法完成他神祕的使命，唯有达成这个使命，他才有可能回家。随著柯尔与布鲁琪愈加了解对方，他们对彼此的感情也与日俱增。他们可以克服万难，让爱情开花结果吗？《穿越时空的骑士》将于 2019 年 11 月 21 日在 Netflix 首播。
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The Knight Before Christmas 圣诞前夕的骑士 2019 線上看電影粵語-流-下載完整版本 | https://medium.com/@minniehayden84/%E5%9C%A3%E8%AF%9E%E5%89%8D%E5%A4%95%E7%9A%84%E9%AA%91%E5%A3%AB-%E7%B7%9A%E4%B8%8A%E7%9C%8B-2019-%E5%AE%8C%E6%95%B4%E7%89%88-a265abae2e77 | ['Minnie Hayden'] | 2020-02-27 00:41:03.310000+00:00 | ['Medium Italia', 'Médium', 'Medium En Español'] |
The Post-Election Outlook for U.S.-China Economic, Business, and Trading Relations | David Dollar, former U.S. Treasury and World Bank Representative to China and GLG Council Member
America’s relationship with China, now often marked by tension, is likely to be reassessed under the incoming Biden administration. To discuss how U.S.-China relations may evolve, GLG recently met with China expert David Dollar, currently a Senior Fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. From 2009 to 2013, Dollar was the U.S. Treasury’s Economic and Financial Emissary to China based in Beijing, and earlier worked throughout Asia for the World Bank for 20 years. Edited highlights of the conversation follow.
To start, how might the Trump administration approach relations with China through this lame-duck period?
Overall, I wouldn’t be surprised if the administration tried to lock in various policies, particularly in the foreign policy arena. In the case of China, it’s not obvious what they could do except for a couple of potential big things that would be unusual for a lame duck. It’s possible they could sanction a big Chinese bank over its activities in Hong Kong, for example, or perhaps delist Chinese companies from U.S. stock markets. There is a legal basis for such moves, and President Trump has shown himself to be a disruptor, but it still would be highly unusual for a lame duck to take those steps.
How do you expect the Biden administration to approach relations with China? Do you think it will be more traditional and that the U.S. would work in a more multilateral fashion that might potentially be more potent in countering China?
That second question is really key to understanding what’s likely to be different in a Biden administration. The one word we keep hearing from Biden and his team is multilateral. He’s indicated he’ll rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization and rebuild relations with allies in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region. Frankly, I think that’s a smart approach for dealing with China. For example, the first time he goes to Asia, I wouldn’t be surprised if he visited only Japan, or maybe South Korea and Australia, who are traditional security allies and democracies. I would imagine he would deliberately avoid China. And he might just leave China waiting, in a sense, while he strengthens the U.S. position in the multilateral effort. Still, he’s going to have to deal with China on a range of issues, and in some ways his policy probably won’t be that different from the current administration since he’s not going to want to be perceived as friendly to China — but he’ll certainly bring a more multilateral and probably a more consistent and orderly approach to dealing with China.
Are there areas where you could foresee cooperation between a Biden administration and China?
Absolutely. Global issues are the key foundation for U.S.-China relations going forward. Both nations have a common interest in reducing carbon emissions and dealing with climate change. Another area: we’re probably going to see a new round of third-world debt crises coming out of the pandemic and the global recession. And in a lot of the developing world, countries are going to need IMF programs. That’s where the U.S. is still the dominant shareholder, but China is the biggest official creditor. Those countries are probably going to be looking for extensions or debt relief from China, and if the U.S. and China don’t work together, you’re probably going to have some suboptimal outcomes with unnecessary financial crises and bankruptcies. That work on global issues is what’s been missing in the Trump administration policy with China, and Biden certainly will be willing to work with China where we have common interests.
Concerning trade, President Trump was willing to use many trade enforcement mechanisms as part of his administration’s approach toward China. Do you expect similar tactics from the Biden administration?
Trade with China is going to be a very tricky area for Joe Biden. He’s not going to want to be perceived as soft on China or as going back to Obama-era policies, which were friendly toward China in the economic area. He’ll want to benefit from some of the things President Trump has done and continue some, but many of those actions have been inconsistent. Tariffs, for example, were rolled out in different ways, some starting at 10%, then going to 25%, and then some rolled back. Export restrictions also were inconsistent. The business community hates this kind of uncertainty.
I’m hoping the Biden administration can bring a scalpel to a set of issues rather than a sledgehammer. While he’s going to be careful with technology and security issues, I think he’s more inclined to value the general everyday trade and investment back-and-forth between the U.S. and China. It’ll be tricky, but there will be more room for trade and investment than we’ve seen the last few years.
How do you expect President-elect Biden to handle the World Trade Organization rule against the Section 301 tariffs that the Trump administration levied against China?
I think he will just ignore it. The ruling can’t be appealed because the appellate body has basically ground to a halt due to the U.S. not agreeing to appoint new appellate judges. That eventually will happen, but I don’t see him quickly removing all the tariffs against China because that opens him up to attack as being soft and giving something away for nothing.
As far as the underlying issue, he probably would negotiate with China to reduce some of the existing tariffs, but he’ll want something in return. And I don’t see it as anything he rushes into because he’s got all these domestic challenges that are going to eat up most of his time in the first six months or a year.
The U.S. Trade Promotion Authority, the time-limited rules that Congress uses to set trade negotiating objectives, is set to expire next summer. Is this something that’s top of mind in Washington?
No, it’s hardly noticed, but it’s an interesting issue. Trade promotion authority is pretty critical for actually getting trade deals negotiated and potentially passed. I don’t see Biden putting a lot of political capital into extending it because his team has made it clear they’re not going to go out and negotiate big trade agreements that would require TPA. But once he’s got a specific objective in mind, then I could see Biden using political capital to get the TPA. | https://smarter.glg.it/the-post-election-outlook-for-u-s-china-economic-business-and-trading-relations-3dd9fecc6d31 | [] | 2020-12-18 19:01:57+00:00 | ['United States', 'China', 'Climate Change', 'Economics', 'Trade'] |
The essentials of Git explained in five minutes | Git clone
Always clone new repositories you work on, which means downloading a copy of the repository files to your local computer. While there are many ways of cloning a repository, I will explain how to do it with the command line.
For example, if you want to clone the above repository, first copy the clone link above. Then, open your terminal, and cd to the location on your local computer where you want to put these files. Type git clone then paste the link as shown below if you want to clone the master branch.
git clone https://github.com/JamesOkunlade/old-apple.git
If you want to clone a particular branch of this repository, you’d want to do something like this:
git clone https://github.com/JamesOkunlade/old-apple.git -b branch-name
Git checkout
It’s a best practice to create different branches for different features instead of working on the master branch directly. When all features have been deemed to pass certain tests and requirements, then you can merge them into the master branch.
At different times, you will have to checkout to the particular repository branch you want to work on, and you can do this with the following command.
If the branch had already been created:
git checkout branch-name
And if you’re just creating the new feature branch:
git checkout -b branch-name
Git pull
Your team or pair programming buddy will change different branches of a repository, and you should always pull these new changes before you start writing code. On your terminal, checkout to the branch you’ll be working on, and run the git pull command. The recent changes will be pulled to your local repository.
Git add and commit
The add and commit Git commands are almost always used together. Think of them as capture and save. You can’t save a thing if you don’t capture it first. Hence, the add command should always precede the commit command. While you use the add command to point at the particular file you want to capture in its current state, you use the commit to save a copy of what you captured.
To capture all the files (except those excluded by Git ignore), you will use git add . and to capture the current state of a particular file, say index.html, you will have to type git add index.html
After taking the snapshots, you will then have to commit and save your snapshots to your local repository using the following:
git commit -m ‘commit message’
The commit message should explain the peculiarity of the snapshot you’re saving. For example:
git add index.html
git commit -m ‘the form feature button created’
You can do the two together with the && operator as shown below;
git add index.html && git commit -m ‘footer html structure created’
Git stash and merge
Simply doing git stash will stash whatever edit you have made to the branch but do not want to commit. That means when waiting on another developer to commit and push their copy of the code, you can experiment with some things in this same branch. Git encourages it. Whenever you’re ready to pull new changes to your local repository, but do not want to merge your own edits to it, you then have to stash your own edits. Git stash will keep the copy somewhere else for you and it’s accessible by doing Git stash list.
The git merge a command that merges two different snapshots together. It can be merging different snapshots of the same branch by different developers or merging different snapshots of different branches together.
When you’ve checked out to the master branch, git merge development will merge the development branch to your master branch and vice versa.
Git push
Just like saving your snapshots to a Google Photos album for whomever you share the album with, think of git push as sending your local repository to the remote repository for others to access.
git push -u origin branch-name
While there are other Git commands available for use, it’s interesting what you can achieve by mastering the few that I’ve covered above.
Feel free to reach out and ask me any questions on Twitter
def JamesOkunlade (beginnerDeveloper) unless you have a coding buddy OR you’re making a lot of money doing it puts “Coding is not fun!” end end
I’m from Nigeria and I pair program every day with my coding buddy from Bangladesh and other devs from Serbia, Kosovo, and Ukraine. They’ve all helped my use of Git.
As a student of Microverse, I do remote pair programming for at least 40 hours every week. Learning programming as a beginner can be very tedious and hence, reduces the productivity and hardens the learning curve. With a right coding partner, however, and under a proper structure, you’d be surprised at how interesting learning could be.
Microvese is an online school for remote developers and unlike other conventional schools, Microverse invests in a student by putting the student through a 28 weeks coding boot camp and accepts $0 upfront payment and gets paid only when the student gets a job. | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-essentials-of-git-explained-in-five-minutes-d554019eded9 | ['James Okunlade'] | 2019-03-11 17:13:38.567000+00:00 | ['Git', 'Programming', 'Tech', 'Coding', 'Remote Work'] |
AYS News Digest 9/7/19: Frontex watches illegal pushback, report says | AYS News Digest 9/7/19: Frontex watches illegal pushback, report says
Video published off Lesvos documenting dangerous maneuvers of the Turkish Coast Guard in Greek waters / Mineo camp in Italy closed / 350 detainees in Libya released, UNHCR promises to help / Field report from Calais and Dunkirk Are You Syrious? Jul 10, 2019·5 min read
Photo: Screenshot/Refugee Rescue
Greece: Pushback witnessed off Lesvos
Refugee Recscue / ‘Mo Chara’ and Lighthouse Relief reported about a suspected pushback by the Turkish Coast Guard in Greek waters on 2nd July. “Dutch and Portguegese Frontex vessel were on scene within visual distance, and stood by without interfering,” both NGOs reported in a joint statement.
They also criticize, that the TCG performed dangerous maneuvers, which could have caused the small vessel to capsize.
“Mo Chara witnessed the passengers screaming in response to the agression. More than one person jumped into the sea.”
In the end, the people were rescued and the boat towed back on Turkish land.
Now, both demand a full investigation of the incident. An eye-witness testimony of two volunteers can be found here.
In the recent weeks and months, there have been numerous cases of documented pushbacks (also on the land route). At the same time, some 160 people arrived on the Greek islangs today, according to Aegean Boat Report.
More needs to be done for inclusion
In a housing report, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation also shifts the focus on the conditions of refugees in Greece. “ The housing of migrants in Greece was never the subject of public policy,” the study concludes, seeing that the country needed to take care of some 60,000 people after the borders were shut down. But still they the need for a strategic planning for a long term inclusion of all the people.
Migration Ministry renamed
Many people and groups highlight, that the election in Greece likely will also impact the migration and foreigner policy of the country. In a first step, the Minsitry of Migration has been integrated into the Ministry of citizen protection. “The allocation of departments already shows that migration is regarded as a threat in Greece,” Equal Rights Beyond Borders comments.
Provisional agreements
Meanwhile, EU’s Migration and Home Affairs Commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos called for “provisional agreements” between EU member states in order to deal with rescued people until a reform of the Dublin system. “The challenges of migration cannot only be the responsibility of Italy and Malta simply because these states are located on the Mediterranean,” Avramopoulos told Die Welt newspaper (via Ekathimerini). | https://medium.com/@areyousyrious/ays-news-digest-9-7-19-frontex-watches-illegal-pushback-report-says-305ee7995e11 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2019-07-10 08:16:02.633000+00:00 | ['Refugees', 'Italy', 'Digest', 'Greece', 'Mineo'] |
How many happy users did your product have this month? | The other day, I mulled over the problem of bad user experience resulting in more usage of products.
And I followed up with wondering how we could get to a “happy user” metric.
When measuring the success of software products, data is king. When I moved from DevRel to program management, my world got a lot more dashboards and charts. I found myself spending more time looking at user feedback. I learned about asking questions to find the real issue that caused dismay in users instead of adding a feature satisfying their request. I started feeling despair looking at the noise to signal ratio you get in feedback channels. And I started to question our razor-sharp focus on numbers and continuous growth.
We love growth and numbers. It is pretty depressing how much we see growth as the only thing that matters. Users, download numbers, sessions, minutes of usage — all have to go up from version to version — or you failed.
This makes sense when you grow and when the funding of your product is dependent on user numbers. It is the main thing that empty products like social platforms have. You need users to get content and engagement. You always need to get more to be able to tell advertisers that you have so and so many users. I remember working on app stores in another company and wanted to bang my head on the table. People measure the success of a store by the number of apps, not by their quality. At one time I met with a company offering to create 500 apps a week for a certain price. That way our app store can look bigger than the others. You’ve seen apps like these: “paint a cat”, “paint a dog”…
The big issue is that our fairytale success stories in software are the fast growing platforms millions of people use. Are you as successful as Facebook? Are you growing as fast as TikTok? Do you have as many active users as MySpace? Oh, wait…
Not all products are there to always grow. Some products are specialised, and you don’t even expect people to use them all the time.
Many of the things I work on in the developer tooling space are things you only use when there is a certain problem. The happy path for the user is simple. Open the tool, use it to find the problem to fix, close the tool and forget about it until the next time.
No growth there, but something more important: helpfulness to the user. If the tool does not only allow you to track down a problem, but also gives you valid advice how to fix it, even better. I love when a tool educates me about a problem. I am happier, and I even learned how to avoid the issue in the future. Which means I don’t need to use the tool any time soon any longer.
As the tool creator, who has to show continuous growth, this is a problem. The only way to increase usage numbers is to ensure the problem happens more often. And that is beyond the reach of the tool creator.
The question then is, how do you measure the success of those? And even more interesting — how do you defend a drop in numbers when you fixed an issue?
The other day we encountered the issue that a highly used product also got a lot of feedback. Negative feedback, telling us that people don’t know what it is and why it is there and that they want to get rid of it. This is something you want to dive into. Unhappy user feedback is high priority, especially when your product confuses the users. People put effort in to tell you about the problem, you should reward them for that.
As it turns out, there was a simple way to accidentally hit the keyboard shortcut to open the product. For power users keyboard shortcuts are amazing. That’s why developer focused tools have dozens of them. For normal folk, they can appear as witchcraft.
The solution was to add an extra step the first time the keyboard shortcut happens. We show information telling you what will happen now, what product you will open and if that is what you wanted. We offer to never to do that again for people who triggered it by accident and never to show the message again for others.
We didn’t come up with this super clever way of dealing with this ourselves. We did user research and tested various ways to work around the problem.
This will cause a dip in our usage numbers for sure, but it also means that all we lose is accidental, unhappy users. Which is great. But what if I worked elsewhere and the next bonus or funding for my product is dependent on more users each month?
The interesting thing here is that we have proof that those users were not happy getting there. So we can point to the feedback data and show the drop off in negative feedback as a win of happy users. We can only do that as we have an easy to reach and use feedback mechanism in our tool. And this is where far too many products fail, in my book. If you don’t ask your users how they like what you do and allow them to complain about problems, you can’t find issues like these.
We need a new metric of happy users. But I am still at a loss how to get to that one. One thing I know though is that chasing more users or interactions for the sake of growth doesn’t make better products. | https://medium.com/@chrisheilmann/how-many-happy-users-did-your-product-have-this-month-5be853511c79 | ['Christian Heilmann'] | 2021-07-15 20:45:05.252000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Usability', 'Metrics'] |
For believers & non-believers alike, 1 Corinthians 13 is a passage we’ve all most likely heard. | A Mirror’s Conviction + Prayer Evoked from 1 Corinthians 13:12
For believers & non-believers alike, 1 Corinthians 13 is a passage we’ve all most likely heard. “Love suffers long (i.e., is patient) & is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:4–8a, NKJV).” The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Corinth, goes on to explain how love transforms our way of thinking — thus our way of acting — as we grow older (i.e., hopefully grow in our knowledge of Christ). In verses 11 & 12 he tells us: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man (i.e., grew older), I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.”
Verse 12 is where my personal conviction comes about today. The year 2020 has been one huge dimly lit mirror for me & a lot of the good people around me. Blurry. Confusing. The path ahead isn’t clear. We can’t see around the next bend. We’re all trying to put away childish things, trying to cultivate gratitude, aiming to do right by those around us who are broken yet ultimately falling short — leaving our positive energy also dimly lit. I personally have spent this year deep in Biblical study, trying to get a full grasp on the scripture from Eden to Eternity. But if I’m being honest (& I reckon that’s the whole point of my “word salad” here), I’ve also spent this year feeling like I’m surrounded by dimly lit mirrors — blurred visions of what’s to come, confused on my calling at times, & finding it hard to be grateful amongst my abundant blessings.
Our All-Knowing Savior sensed my weary heart, & placed this “God-wink” in my advent reading this AM: “The Bible was not born for us, nor was it crucified for our sins; nor did it rise & ascend into Heaven for our justification & glorification. Only Jesus did that. The Bible does not make us wise for salvation through faith in Christ. It is absolutely reliable. But the reason we love reading its pages is because we see reflected in them the face of our Savior. We must beware falling in love with our learning instead of our Lord. One day we will have no need of the Bible. We will no longer need the mirror that is so essential to use here, for we will see Him face to face.” ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson, excerpt from Chapter 22 of Love Came Down at Christmas
There it was, in black & white, the answer/remedy to my fatigue that I didn’t know I was searching for. Until this morning, I hadn’t realized that I’d prioritized my love of learning about Jesus as a historical character over communing with His Holy Spirit each day. What a bittersweet moment I found myself in — needing forgiveness from Him & also thanking Him for the clarity He provided at a moment’s notice. If you’re reading this & it feels familiar, maybe it’s time to evaluate your love of being a student of Jesus’ goodness & how it may be impacting your desire for His daily presence. You see, He’s alive & well. He’s with you & me right this very second although we can’t see Him. The mirror is a bit blurry because we are still waiting for His second coming — the restoration of Eden. May we not forget to commune with Him “in part” by way of the Holy Spirit until we know Him “face to face.” For those of you needing direction on how to talk to Him about this matter, feel free to pray my prayer (below) from this morning:
“Savior, Please forgive me for putting the learning of You before the actual You. In an attempt to find You, I’ve prioritized reading & hearing about You & forgotten to truly call on You — to sit with You in the quiet of the morning & to consult with You in the chaos of the day. I’m sorry, Jesus, for focusing on gospel as a means of peace rather than focusing on The Prince of Peace that the gospel is all about. May I not abandon my love of learning & studying after this revelation, but rather channel that inquisitiveness into learning to call You into the present moment; & to study how Your Word is applicable to the current environment I find myself in. Once this enhanced relationship with You evolves, may the joy & comfort that it cultivates cause others to ask me where my hope comes from so that I can profess the Name above all names — Jesus. I love You, need You, & once again give my heart to You, Amen.” | https://medium.com/@caitlyngrigg/for-believers-non-believers-alike-1-corinthians-13-is-a-passage-weve-all-most-likely-heard-f2ad1974462f | ['Caitlyn Grigg'] | 2020-12-22 17:17:30.381000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Prayer', 'Writing Therapy', 'Love', 'Self Reflection'] |
The Present, the Future, and Applying Yourself | Me during the first month of my stay on campus, taken in front of College Hall!
Hi, hello, and howdy, my name is Nicholas Tedesco, I’m an 18 year old aspiring filmmaker from Staten Island, New York, and I’m currently attending Montclair State University in my first year. I am majoring in, as you might have guessed, filmmaking, and although COVID-19 restrictions have made things complex, it is still vital for me to begin making strides that will help me academically, so I can succeed in the long run. These academic goals consist of keeping on track with assignments, managing my time, and networking to build my personal brand. In order to further the progress of my personal brand, I have been reaching out to people with connections, been trying to upgrade my own personal equipment, and have been taking any kind of commission work that I can in order to build repour and gain experience.
My entire life, I have always been passionate in the art of film, from viewing them at a young age, to making small films of my own using nothing but my old cellphone and action figures. Whenever I am able to create a meaningful work of art I can show to my friends and colleagues, the feeling of displaying all the work that went into making it, and the subsequent payoff, is an emotion that very few words can adequately describe. As for interests, I have many, such as music, art, boxing, model making, reading, science, and anything else I manage to find interesting. I believe that the best part about being a filmmaker, and having a passion for film, is that you can always find a way to overlap your passion of filmmaking with your own interests. I can create a film about science, I could make the soundtrack for said film, and I could even create a book novelization of that very same film. The opportunities are only limited by your creativity and how far you’re willing to take an idea. The best example of this creativity is Paul Verhoeven, director of my favorite film ever, “Robocop”. Verhoeven was not afraid to push boundaries and create something revolutionary when it came to the field of cinema, kickstarting a new breed of action films that were insightful, yet interesting.
As mentioned previously, my absolute dream job is to be a filmmaker, specifically an independent filmmaker that way I’m not stifled by corporations and companies in how I create my films. Of course, as is standard in any sort of art based job, it’s not about what you know, but who you know, and this is one of the most quintessential assets to my career being successful. By contacting other indie film companies about dates and locations on shoots, I have been actively making connections and trying to find people to work with, the biggest obstacle of course being the current COVID-19 circumstances. One of my most recent projects was actually made on campus, we had to create a film with sounds we recorded ourselves, but no dialogue. It’s a good portfolio piece, and can help when making connections with other local filmmakers.
Having personal assets that work well for you, as aforementioned, is an incredibly vital feat to possess, and the most essential of those being grit. Grit can be defined as one’s passion, or one’s ability to be able to go above and beyond in what they are passionate about.
Using all the skills mentioned before, the education I’ve obtained, and the experience I’ve amassed over the years, I will achieve my dream of becoming a full time filmmaker, by making thorough connections, honing my communication skills, and mastering the craft of filmmaking. | https://medium.com/@tedescon2/applying-yourself-to-your-future-84a2313c2db6 | ['Nicholas Tedesco'] | 2020-12-09 15:35:12.062000+00:00 | ['College', 'Filmmaking'] |
Essential Fire Extinguisher Operation, Maintenance And Safety Tips | Fire extinguisher inspection/service can go a long way in saving lives and property damage when there’s a fire outbreak in your business. A portable fire extinguisher on your premises can help put out a small fire or manage it until the fire brigade arrives.
It’s crucial to ensure that your fire extinguisher is operational at all times. Here are some essential fire extinguisher operation and safety tips that you should know:
Fire Extinguisher Ratings
Fire extinguishers come in different classes depending on the type of fire they are intended to manage. Class A extinguishers are used on paper or wood fire, while Class Bextinguishers are designed for fires involving oil and other flammable liquids. Extinguishers labeled C are used on electrically energized fires. Those labeled ABC are multipurpose and can be used to put out all the three types of fire. You can contact fire extinguisher service Dallas if you’re not sure of the best type of fire extinguisher to install on your premises.
Install the Fire Extinguisher Near the Exit
When a fire breaks out, your property may fill with smoke, making it hard for occupants to locate the fire extinguisher if it’s not placed strategically. Plus, there’s no guarantee that you can put out the fire with the extinguisher alone.
You should install this vital equipment close to an exit where nothing is blocking you from reaching it. This can make it easy for you to escape if you cannot control the fire. A reliable Dallas fire extinguisher inspection/service provider can show you the best location for your extinguisher.
Inspect Your Fire Extinguisher Regularly
It’s essential to check your fire extinguisher often to ensure it’s in good working condition. There should be no rust or any other damage on important parts such as hoses and nozzles. You should also clean your fire extinguisher to remove grease, dust, or any other type of dirt that may have adverse impacts on its performance.
Fire Extinguisher Maintenance Tips
You should go through the manufacturer guidelines and instructions to know how often you should inspect your fire extinguisher. Generally, inspections should be done monthly. Although you can do these inspections on your own, it’s advisable to let someone familiar with fire extinguishers do it.
At America’s Fire Shield, we work with a team of licensed and highly experienced technicians. During the inspection, we may also perform the necessary maintenance.
Annual maintenance checks are mandatory. Professional technicians at America’s Fire Shield can check your fire extinguisher’s physical condition and tell you if it needs replacement.
We can also inspect the expelling means and the extinguishing agent and carry out a thorough inspection of the mechanical parts. We can also conduct the 12-year hydrostatic test and the 6-year internal examination. Our goal is to make sure we leave your fire extinguisher Dallas in good working condition.
Professional Fire Extinguisher Inspection
If you’re looking for fire extinguisher inspection Dallas, you should let the experts do it for you. You can contact us for all your fire extinguisher needs if you’re in the states | https://medium.com/@americasfireshieldco/essential-fire-extinguisher-operation-maintenance-and-safety-tips-4881d73cc4eb | ["America'S Fire Shield"] | 2020-12-09 01:48:34.637000+00:00 | ['Safety Training', 'Fire', 'Fire Extinguisher', 'Small Business', 'Safety'] |
Angular Universal: Server-Side Rendering and Pre-Rendering for Angular 9+ Applications | That’s it for the basics of Angular Universal and Server-side Rendering!
Easy development of SSR apps with Dev Server
As a developer, you can now easily see the SSR app reload when making changes to the app by using the new Dev server.
npm run dev:ssr
This allows for the same fast reload capabilities we have with using npm run start when developing client-side apps.
Pre-render any page with Angular Universal
Angular Universal 9 brings us a powerful tool in pre-rendering. Let’s say you have a bunch of simple pages that don’t need to be rendered server-side or rendered on the client every time a user makes a request. Angular Universal 9 now allows you to cache these pages as static files, which can then be served to the client via your CDN or a simple server. How?
In your Angular application, navigate to the angular.json file and look for the prerender builder (at the very end of the default angular.json ). The builder comes with a routes option, which allows you to specify the routes of the app pages you wish to pre-render.
angular.json with routes option
If you want a bunch of your app pages to pre-render, but you don’t want to provide all the routes manually, you can change the routes option to the routesFile option. The routesFile option allows you to point to a relative url that contains all the predefined routes for the pages you want to pre-render at build time. You can fill this file with the desired routes using a script or any other method you prefer.
pre-render-routes.txt
angular.json with routesFile option
Then just build the app and serve!
npm run prerender
npm run serve:ssr
You can find the pre-rendered files in your dist/<project-name>/browser . If you want to verify that your page has been pre-rendered just navigate to localhost:4000/<route-name>/index.html or if you are using a cdn just navigate to the route and inspect the page-source. At the bottom of the page you will see a small comment.
This page was pre-rendered with Angular Universal | https://medium.com/dvt-engineering/angular-universal-server-side-rendering-and-pre-rendering-for-angular-9-applications-f311e8f545bb | ['Keanu William Ellwood'] | 2020-05-27 21:12:19.036000+00:00 | ['Angular Universal', 'Angular', 'Serverside Rendering', 'Angular 9', 'Comparison'] |
Bitcoin is going to the moon in Q4 — literally! | Bitcoin is going to the moon in Q4 — literally! CryptoCurry Follow Jun 8 · 2 min read
Traders and bitcoin supporters have been saying that bitcoin is going to the moon during this bull market, but cryptocurrency exchange BitMex will plans to make it happen literally. According to a news release from BitMex on June 4, the crypto exchange will send unique physical bitcoin to the surface of the moon aboard Astrobotic Technology, Inc.’s first lunar lander in the fourth quarter of 2021. Bitcoin’s lunar mission is BitMex’s response to Elon Musk’s plan to send Doge to the moon.
“We’ve nothing against Dog Money, we felt it was only right to help bitcoin get there first,” BitMex said in its website.
The minted coin will contain one bitcoin and with an address that will be publicly shared, underneath a tamper-evident hologram covering. BitMex explained that the unique physical bitcoin will display the BitMex and mission name, as well as the date it was minted and bitcoin’s price on that day.
“For all the talk of bitcoin going to the Moon, we’re actually going to do it. We couldn’t be more happy to be supporting Astrobotic’s attempt to put its commercial lander on the Moon [sic],” BitMEX Chief Executive officer (CEO) Alex Höptner said.
BitMex also launched a project site for the bitcoin moon mission in November 2021.
Source: BitMex, Bitcoin.com | https://medium.com/cryptocurry-official/bitcoin-is-going-to-the-moon-in-q4-literally-6206df05957 | [] | 2021-06-08 01:13:32.376000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin News', 'Bitmex', 'Bitcoin'] |
Why (Nearly) Every Novelist I Know Has a Day Job | Why (Nearly) Every Novelist I Know Has a Day Job
It’s difficult to sustain a life by writing; there’s zero shame in working a 9-to-5, too.
These collected works earned the author $1.59 in royalties.
Whenever the topic of writers and pay comes up, I always enjoy dropping this little nugget: “Nearly every novelist I know has a day job.”
I don’t mean the novelists whose indie-press masterpiece sold a grand total of 15 copies (14 of them to family) before disappearing into the ether; I know mega-successful novelists, the kind whose books were optioned for movies and television shows on the way to the New York Times bestseller lists, who nonetheless hold down a 9-to-5.
Some do it for the healthcare. Others because they genuinely liked the jobs they were working before they hit it big, and have zero urge to quit now. But I also suspect there’s another element at work: fear.
Writing books doesn’t yield a consistent income, to put it mildly. According to a new study by the Authors Guild, the median pay for full-time writers was $20,300 in 2017; for those writing part-time, $6,080. Among those part-time writers, income has dropped noticeably, from $10,500 in 2009. To make matters worse, the number of magazine and newspaper venues has declined precipitously over the past few years, restricting the opportunities to supplement income via articles.
Unless you’re already a mega-selling author, or your publisher is willing to take a very expensive chance on your groundbreaking book, your advances will vary from project to project — and that’s before we talk royalties, which can fluctuate considerably. Hence the fear; you have zero idea how much you might be making a year or two from now.
Granted, I do know some folks for whom novel-writing is their one and only job. Some are retired, and writing is their second career; others have family money of some sort, or a rich spouse, or at least a spouse willing to foot most of the bills. The majority, however, work some other gig: PR, journalism, teaching, video editing, driving, and so on.
“The people who are able to practice the trade of authoring are people who have other sources of income,” a book editor is quoted as saying in the Times.
All that being said, there’s a discrepancy between the reality of the writer’s life, and the perception of the writer’s life by people not in the business; I blame Hollywood, which often portrays writers as living in enormous New York City apartments, enjoying an expensive lunch with their agents before driving up to their second home on the Hudson. Some writers do have that lifestyle (I’ve known some of them), but for the vast majority, writing is a side-hustle, even if they have several published books on their special Author’s Shelf.
This is why things like book piracy hurt; in many cases, those who illegally download novels or nonfiction tomes aren’t stealing from millionaires who won’t miss the extra $10 — they’re taking from people whose margins are already razor-thin or nonexistent. It’s also why many authors get really, really irritated when people ask for free copies of their books.
In other words, life for many writers is hard, and only getting harder — you have to be in it for the love. And find a job that can sustain you. | https://nkolakowski.medium.com/why-nearly-every-novelist-i-know-has-a-day-job-948e9c8e0753 | ['Nick Kolakowski'] | 2019-01-07 21:02:59.849000+00:00 | ['Publishing', 'Novel Writing', 'Authors', 'Writing', 'Publishing Industry'] |
start of the brainstorm | I hate telling this story because it makes me feel small. Plus its cliche and boring but here it is. I was barely 16 and I was dating my first boyfriend. After 6 months he texted my friend and asked her to break up with me for him. Yeah, I know, he was gross and immature and the worst but either way he meant a lot to 16 year old me. I had no idea how to deal with heartbreak so I just cried and cried like a dramatic teenager for a week or so. I had a really yucky feeling in my stomach and I didn't know what it was. I started writing little fragments and emo phrases in my notebooks at school. I would add to them and edit them and look at them and doodle on them. On February 22, 2017, I wrote and posted my first poem on an anonymous Instagram account. It was about anger that it felt like waves in an ocean, very artsy and creative, I know. But no matter how cheesy or depressing my writing was, it made me feel like I got rid of those feelings/ helped me make sense of my feelings. I completely fell in love with it. I got to do something that I loved that nobody else had to know about. I used my feelings to power my writing and I let loose writing whatever I wanted. It was my little thing. My little place to be wholly me. | https://medium.com/my-lil-vessel/start-of-the-brainstorm-b35dce67308c | ['Carissa Bixler'] | 2019-01-16 23:22:20.526000+00:00 | ['High School', 'Discovery', 'Writing', 'Sad', 'Love'] |
Being Mistaken for Arthur Hayes | Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Laker legend, NBA Hall-of-Famer. Not to be confused with Nathan Pearson — Smith, or Arthur Hayes.
Yes. That really has happened…
Yes. Arthur and I look nothing alike…
Earlier in March, I attended a blockchain conference in Amsterdam and was invited to speak on a panel alongside 3 other industry names, it was my first speaking engagement outside of the UK. Anyone who looked at the itinerary would have seen I was speaking and let’s face it, you would not have had to look far to recognise the only black speaker on the day.
Nevertheless, that day I was still mistaken for Arthus Hayes, the CEO of Bitmex, one of the largest crypto derivatives exchanges. Although he’s an individual I highly respect as he sits near the top of the crypto foodchain, we both work in crypto and that’s where the commonalities end. If had to choose something I would want to have in common with Arthur, Ethereum addresses would be my no.1 and interactions with the SEC would be far down the list.
There is only one Arthus Hayes, but I as argue that there are only 30-40 black people working in crypto full-time, that’s not enough for one of us to be mistaken for the other. I went full-time into crypto in 2018 and at the time, depending on the role, pre-requistes about which university you went to or what Wall Street firm you worked at, were largely not neccasary. Hiring teams were more interested in your understanding for Bitcoin and Blockchain and I would like to think, those same traits I showed in 2018 that got me hired, would still apply in 2020.
The blockchain and crypto industry is still maturing, in technology, in age, and in diversity. As someone who has been in the space for 2 years, it’s decentralised approach to hiring, it’s willingness to hire on passion and drive, rather than qualifications is something I think it should be commended for. Diversity isn’t one of those things, yet.
Nathan Pearson-Smith
18 Ventures | https://medium.com/@nathanpearsonsmith/being-mistaken-for-arthur-hayes-d9c09072c9b1 | ['Nathan Pearson Smith'] | 2020-10-21 21:02:47.116000+00:00 | ['Blockchain Startup', 'Venture Capital', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitmex', 'Diversity In Tech'] |
What Sterling Road looks for in a Startup | Founders often report being frustrated by the vague criteria VCs claim to use when deciding on whether or not to invest in their startup. Investment criteria goes beyond the investment process, which we made public for Sterling Road in 2018. However, what we’re actually looking for during our process has not been previously made public. Below, we have outlined our investment criteria in detail:
Initial Filter
Most connections we make with founders are done via email, [email protected], either by introduction or direct outreach (LinkedIn is not a good way to reach out due to the spam). This initial filtering prevents wasted meetings, where the answer would be a quick “no”.
Location: We only invest in startups based in the US or Canada at present. However, this means that if you are based in Europe now but plan to launch in the US and focus on US-based customers, we may be able to work together in the future.
Solo-founder: Given the burden of building and leading a company is usually too much for one person alone, we don’t work with solo-founders.
Customer Type: We’re solely focused on B2B businesses — this is our area expertise. If you are a B2C company, there are plenty of other VCs who will be a better fit to help you distribute to consumers.
Sector: Although we do not have a specific sector focus, we tend to lean towards businesses with big markets, at least $5Bn in the US. We also tend to avoid businesses in certain sectors such as education, politics, and frontier tech, e.g. 2+ years of research & development before the product is live is not a fit for us.
Timeline: Your fundraising round’s timeline needs to fit with our 3 month process.
Terms: As a pre-seed investor, the maximum valuation we can accept is a $6M cap (ideally post-money for clarity); and given how early we invest, we also want the rights to increase our stake in the next round, up to 5%.
Tech Advantage: Usually, we’re looking for the company to have, or be building out, a clear advantage on technology that will be hard for others to replicate. We also like legacy industries with minimal technology usage, where any software might be a defensible advantage. For example, we invested in i-5O which has developed unique AI and Brainbase, which targets the antiquated intellectual property market.
First Meeting
During our first meeting, the goal is for both sides to understand whether it’s worth investing more time in the relationship.
Strong Team: This is the most important factor. Ideally, the team has deep expertise in their chosen field or experience as entrepreneurs in general. If not, we’re looking to quickly understand what makes you uniquely capable of building a big business in this market. For example, Pico operates in the highly competitive publishing industry but one of the founders is a bestselling author.
Willing to Engage: We take a direct approach when it comes to feedback and usually have lots of questions about a business. Most founders love this style of meeting but it’s not for everybody and that will usually become apparent in our first interactions. We’re never offended if our approach doesn’t work for you and your startup; everyone is different.
Demonstration of Demand: Ideally, the founders will have evidence that their product is both desperately needed and unique. Perhaps the best way to show this, is early traction, e.g. 5 beta users with 3 using it daily, and 15 on the waitlist.
Investment Decision
After 3 months of working together, an investment decision is made.
Coachability: Being responsive to feedback is an essential part of leading a startup to IPO. We don’t have to agree on how to resolve each situation but you must demonstrate a willingness to listen and learn from someone, such as another advisor.
Reasoning: Rapid and high quality decision making is incredibly difficult and most founders are asked to make hard choices every week. We like to see founders break down difficult decisions to their most important components, adapt when wrong but hold firm when their plan faces expected obstacles. For example, if you set monthly goals with your team, you should have a good reason, and consensus, to throw them out after 3 days.
Resilience: Building a startup is a tumultuous roller coaster that will test even the strongest of wills. Seeing a founder handle one of the many early crises they will inevitably encounter, is a great indicator of their ability to handle similar problems as the company scales. In the early days, this characteristic often manifests as a willingness to get things done, even if sometimes tasks are boring, time consuming or emotionally difficult (e.g. laying people off).
Live with a Customer: You don’t need revenue or bookings for us to invest but your MVP should be live with at least one customer, and in use, before we invest. This both demonstrates demand (see above) and shows you can drive a customer through a basic sales funnel successfully.
Investment Committee: We ask a 3-person investment committee (all Limited Partners) for feedback on each investment. Although the committee tends to agree with my decision, they often have good questions about the market, competition and team. | https://medium.com/@ashrust/what-sterling-road-looks-for-in-a-startup-26dbf8912f24 | ['Ash Rust'] | 2020-12-23 00:48:42.278000+00:00 | ['Fundraising', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Venture Capital'] |
Torrens, Campusano in minors could soon challenge Hedges/Mejía as Padres catchers | Torrens, Campusano in minors could soon challenge Hedges/Mejía as Padres catchers
Austin Hedges
Were the Padres able to combine the skills of Austin Hedges and Francisco Mejía, they’d have quite a catcher.
Hedges is one of the game’s top handlers of pitchers and a plus defender. But the 27-year-old hit only .176 last season and his career batting average is one point above the Mendoza line. He has some pop but has reached base only about a quarter of his Major League plate appearances.
The switch-hitting Mejía, 24, can hit. But his defensive skills are not up to Hedges’ very high level.
However, the Padres do have a catcher coming through the system who might have all the needed skills. That is Luis Campusano, who was the Most Valuable Player of the Advanced Single-A California League last season as a 20-year-old.
The Padres have three other catching prospects on their organizational depth chart in Luis Torrens, Blake Hunt and Logan Driscoll.
A look at the Padres’ catching depth chart:
Austin Hedges — There are no questions regarding Hedges’ defense. The former second-round draft pick (2011) has All-Star-caliber skills behind the plate. But his offense has not developed as hoped and last season his slash line was .176/.252/.360/.617 with 109 strikeouts in 312 at-bats. Even his production numbers (nine doubles, 11 homers, 36 RBIs) slipped from his 2018 line. He does have 46 homers over the past three seasons. The Padres need more offense from the catching spot than Hedges has supplied thus far after showing promise at Triple-A.
Francisco Mejía –The Padres like Mejía’s bat and have experimented with him playing in the outfield as a way to get him in the lineup. But his future is at catcher. In 99 games spread over one-plus seasons as a Padre, Mejía has hit .250 with a .730 OPS and 11 homers and 30 RBIs in 302 plate appearances. The Padres acquired Mejía from Cleveland on July 19, 2018 for pitchers Adam Cimber and Brad Hand.,
Francisco Mejía
Luis Torrens — The 23-year-old Venezuelan joined the Padres in 2016 through the Rule 5 draft. After losing valuable development time while having to spend the 2017 season with the Padres (he hit .163 in 56 games), Torrens made great strides the past two years with Advanced Single-A Lake Elsinore (.280 with a .727 OPS) and this past season with Double-A Amarillo, where he helped the Sod Poodles win the Texas League title before returning to the Padres for a September cameo (3-for-16). The Padres praised Torrens’ all-around improvement during the 2019 season. He hit .300 for Amarillo with a .373 on-base percentage and a .500 slugging percentage for a .873 OPS. He had 23 doubles, a triple, 15 homers and 62 RBIs in 97 games with 42 walks against only 67 strikeouts.
Luis Campusano — He is ranked the Padres’ fifth-best prospect and is №86 in all the minor leagues. The Padres’ second-round pick in the 2017 draft (39th overall) as a Georgia high schooler, Campusano hit .325 with Lake Elsinore in 2019 with a .396 on-base percentage and a .509 slugging percentage for a .906 OPS. The California League MVP had 31 doubles and 15 homers and 81 RBIs in 110 games. Also grades high in the defensive analytics. Another key stat — Campusano drew 52 walks last year while striking out only 57 times.
Blake Hunt — The 6-foot-3 Hunt was the 69th overall in the 2017 draft out of Mater Dei High in Orange County. He is running a level behind Campusano as he climbs through the Padres’ minor league system. Hunt had a .255/.331/.381/.712 slash line last season with Single-A Fort Wayne. He had 21 doubles, three triples, five homers and 39 RBIs in 89 games.
Logan Driscoll — The 6-foot-1, 22-year-old, left-handed hitter was the 73rd overall pick in the 2019 draft out of George Mason University. Driscoll skipped rookie ball in Arizona and reported directly to the Padres’ short-season Single-A team in Tri-City, Washington. He had a .268/.340/.458/.797 slash line with 14 doubles, two triples and three home runs for 20 RBIs in 39 games. He also had a strong post-season. | https://padres.mlblogs.com/torrens-campusano-in-minors-could-soon-challenge-hedges-mej%C3%ADa-as-padres-catchers-c859f0abdb58 | [] | 2020-02-07 18:48:09.719000+00:00 | ['San Diego', 'San Diego Padres', 'Major League Baseball', 'Padres', 'MLB'] |
What does sustainable investing mean exactly? | What we at Vestive call sustainable investing, others sometimes call impact investing. Or they might call it socially responsible, ethical, environmental or ESG investing. There are a lot of terms for the same basic idea.
So, what does this actually mean? It means that when making investment decisions, we consider a range of environmental and social factors, in addition to financial ones. At Vestive, we score our investments on factors like carbon emissions, alternative energy, high-impact fossil fuels, women in leadership, gun manufacturers, tobacco manufacturers and labor norms violations, among others.
For issues that are having a negative impact on our world, such as high-impact fossil fuels or companies with labor norms violations, we screen companies out. At the same time, we increase our investment in companies that have a positive impact, like those in the alternative energy industry.
Some versions of sustainable investing focus on just one issue, like climate change, but we take a broader approach. Otherwise, you might end up with a portfolio that has a low carbon footprint, for example, but has a terrible track record on how they treat their workers. Evaluating a fund’s impact holistically allows your money to have the greatest overall impact.
When evaluating a company we cannot only consider the end product produced. Often a significant portion of a business’ sustainability impact is driven by secondary factors like its supply chain, workforce diversity, and corporate governance. This approach ensures that companies that use an electric truck fleet, or have a diverse workforce and leadership, for example, can score better in our book and be a bigger part of Vestive portfolios. | https://medium.com/vestive/what-does-sustainable-investing-really-mean-b85e67b31963 | ['Vestive Staff'] | 2019-04-12 19:42:29.162000+00:00 | ['Millenials', 'Sustainable Investing', 'Personal Finance', 'Impact Investing', 'Esg Investing'] |
My White Son Believes Santa is Black. Why Doesn’t Yours? | I’m a biracial Black woman. Growing up, my (Black) mother always went above and beyond to make Christmas special for my siblings and I. But what always stood out as the most special part was that it was the one time of year our tiny extended family was able to get together. My grandma would travel over 18 hours on a Greyhound bus to be with us (“because if the Lord wanted us to fly, He would have given us wings”), my Uncle Dave would leave the peace of his bachelor apartment to bring us scratch tickets and join us for dinner, and if we were really lucky, my Uncle Will with his Will Smith-like charisma would make an appearance. Those faces, those bodies, all skilled at balancing a meal on their lap (because who actually eats at a dining table?!) meant Christmas.
You know when you have to come to grips with those realities that crush you? Mine was realizing that my son would never experience that. My Uncles both passed in their mid 50s of cancer (how our medical system fails Black men is a post for another day), and while my grandmother did once get to hold my son, she left us at age 95. When I started to think about how I wanted my son to think about the Christmas season, I knew a celebration of Blackness and Black people needed to be central to his experience.
My son was 2 years old when we accidentally ended up double booked to see Santa. The first visit was to see the jolly old St. Nick you can find in any mall. Little T was inconsolable. The second visit of the day was to see a Haitian Santa. He sat with me, but he played it cool. ‘I’ve got one year to figure out how to explain the presence of white Santa and Black Santa,’ I texted a group of my college friends. Elizabeth immediately replied: “I have two words for you: Santa’s Husband.” I ordered the book on Amazon, a tale about the real Santa being a Black man who is married to a white man. Santa often sends his hubby out to do the public appearances, so most kids think that the husband is the real Santa. But only some kids know the truth. Bingo.
At Macy’s NYC Santaland, you can find Real Santa by asking to meet “Mr. Claus.”
Real Santa in our house means the guy with the melanin. Not his fair skinned hubby. Little T knows most children don’t know the secret, so he keeps it under wraps at school. We drive across state lines when necessary to make sure he can tell the Real Santa his Christmas wish. He lights up when he sees him, believing he will get the one toy he asked for because he got to tell the Real Deal. That moment where he lights up seeing a Black Santa I’m sure is how I looked seeing my Uncles walk through the door. It means so much to me that we can give him this one piece of his family story.
But our decision to raise our white son with a Black holiday icon had another impact. The research tells us that white children start to reason about behaviors based on race at age 2 and express racial in-group preferences at ages 4 and 5. I always knew this, and it terrified me. We live in a predominantly white town. He attends a Spanish immersion preschool that is evenly split Latinx/White, but our time before his graduation to public elementary school is counting down. He has meaningful relationships with a number of Black people… but they are ALL women. I worried about him growing up to be one of those white boys who saw and immediately criminalized black men. How will he know that those men could have been his Uncles?!
Pre-COVID we spent a lot of time walking around Boston. Little T was 3.5 when he saw a Black man with some facial hair, and froze. I noticed his reaction, his stare, and I felt absolute dread. Then he slowly gestured for me to bend down so he could whisper to me. “Mama, do you think that’s him?! Do you think that’s Real Santa?!” He was star struck. I laughed and said we should ask him. The guy kept a straight face when asked and said no, he wasn’t the Big Guy, but he would be happy to send him a message. Little T was delighted. “Tell him I’ve been doing good listening,” he told the guy.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the ‘Black Santa Directory’ Facebook group hooked us up with The Black Santa-Houston for a virtual session.
This all started as a way to give my white child a tie to my racial identity and his family story. I hadn’t thought about how the story could disrupt the water of white supremacy that he will wade in his entire life. It made me wonder: what if all white kids who celebrate Christmas were told that Santa is a Black man who has the power to decide if they are naughty or nice, whether they receive a prized gift or a lump of coal? What if he became the omnipresent authority parents everywhere warn about — don’t make me call Santa! — the one they are quick to try and impress? What if we conditioned our white children to see Black men as powerful, kind, accessible, and yes, magical?
What if…
Our Santa is Black. And if you think that is a radical statement, ask yourself why.
Our Santa is Black. Why isn’t yours? | https://medium.com/@mixedpodgie/my-white-son-believes-santa-is-black-why-doesnt-yours-bd51aac80a02 | [] | 2020-12-22 03:26:21.858000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Racial Justice', 'Black And White', 'Blacksanta'] |
tb CLI — Simplifying development in a complicated microservices world | Photo by Pat Whelen on Unsplash
At TouchBistro we use a microservices approach for new products that we build. You can read more about how and why we do this in this blog post. This has allowed each team to own their code and services without disrupting other teams.
One challenge we have come across with microservices is the complexity it adds to local development. It is very tedious to recreate a microservices ecosystem on a developer’s machine because each service has to be built individually. This requires dealing with dependencies, different languages, different databases and a million tiny little details. Once all the services are built they still need to be configured so that they can talk to each other. This might not be a big deal if you only need one or two supporting services. It is annoying but not unmanageable to just manually run those services. However it becomes a real pain when the services you need may also depend on a web of services. If you are trying to test an end-to-end feature you can easily end up with a service dependency graph that includes 5–10 services. It is not reasonable to expect every developer to manually run 10 services on their machine by hand. For one team, in order to get a full end-to-end environment running on their machine they would need to:
Clone or pull the latest versions of 10 git repositories
Figure out how to build them (ruby on rails, node 10, node 12, dotnet)
Figure out what other ancillary services need to be run (postgres, mssql, redis)
Configure them all to talk to each other
Run startup scripts on each services, to do things like trigger database migrations
Something had to be done and the Developer Acceleration team saw this as a prime opportunity to significant speed up delivery across a wide number of teams
In 2020, developers at TouchBistro run a single command that takes care of all of the following:
Install any development dependencies needed that are missing, like brew, the awscli, and node/yarn
Log into third party services like ECR (AWS’ docker registry) and NPM to pull private resources
Clone all the latest versions of each required git repository
Pull the latest version of any required artifacts (docker images), as well as any services they need like postgres, redis, etc. By default, we pull images of the latest version of all of our services.
Run database migrations and seeds or other setup scripts
Present a nice GUI with all the logs from docker containers
And more!
tb kicking off a playlist of services
Why not use bash and docker?
Docker containers are great because they make it easy to create reproducible builds. Our services were already using docker for production deployment and CI so we decided to leverage this for local development as well. We quickly realized though that there’s a lot more to standing up services than just building and running docker containers and decided to automate the numerous steps required.
Early on, one team at their wit’s end created a tool called core-devtools . It was a few small Bash scripts that ran a couple services using docker-compose . This was a game changer as now developers could run all the services they needed with a single command: bin/up . They could focus on writing new code for their services rather than worrying about running other team’s services and keeping up to date with production. Over time more and more teams began to use core-devtools and added their features to automate additional tasks including: logging into various services, interacting with databases and the containers themselves, and updating docker containers. Life was good for a while, until it wasn’t.
While core-devtools was a very helpful tool, it had its fair share of issues. We were maintaining numerous bash scripts and configuration files to support all this automation. Another issue was that the user experience was not great. Logs were very noisy and hard to decipher. And often core-devtools didn’t work as expected. It became so hard to troubleshoot and debug that when an error was encountered the most common advice was “nuke the whole thing and try running it again”. We attempted to educate other teams about how docker and docker-compose work so they could troubleshoot issues themselves more easily. However, we found that this was not a viable solution because many developers found it too steep of a learning curve. Docker isn’t the easiest thing to understand and there are a lot of weird quirks that can trip people up. We also found that docker-compose was way too low level for most developers and it would be better to have a higher level abstraction to simplify usage.
As core-devtools grew so did the number of people using it. Our QA, front-end, and iOS teams started to benefit from the automation. Because of this we started to accumulate more and more use cases for the tool. We wanted core-devtools to work out of the box for most people. That meant it needed to to install dependencies, log into services, etc; all with little to no hassle. Next, teams asked if they could run only a subset of the available services. So we introduced the ability to run collections of services defined in text files. Sometimes developers wanted to build docker containers while other times they wanted to pull from a remote registry. Sometimes people wanted to run historical versions of our services to investigate a regression, so we bolted on a configuration format. Gradually this became harder and harder to maintain and troubleshoot. Developers began to get frustrated with the frequent issues and our inability to solve some of them. We needed to change our approach.
It was time to build a real tool in a proper language (sorry Bash). core-devtools 2.0 would be a Unix style CLI; simple to use but easy to customize. Like most Unix commands, we wanted a short and simple name that was easy to type. Thus tb was born. We chose to write it in Go because the language is easy to work with while also being fast and safe. In large part due to the success of tb Go has become the defacto standard for development of infrastructure tools at TouchBistro.
We started by recreating the existing core-devtools feature set in tb using Go. With a basic replacement for core-devtools , we began to address some of the issues that proved difficult before.. We added proper logging and error messages to help troubleshoot issues. tb ’s design made it easier to add new functionality over time, which allowed us to meet the needs of a growing development team. We were also able to invest in the developer experience; providing command autocompletion, help, user customization, and more.
We migrated existing users from core-devtools to tb and it was instantly a hit. Today tb is an essential tool and has simplified the development process. Let’s review some of the powerful features of tb that make it such a useful tool.
The Magic of tb
A fundamental concept in tb is the playlist. A playlist is a collection of services that can be run in a single command.
For example, say I had a list of services like this:
A legacy MSSQL database
A legacy .NET API
A new Node.js/TypeScript microservice
A PostgreSQL database the microservice talks to
A Node.js adapter of the legacy API
This is a lot to keep track of and most of the time developers don’t care about every single service, especially if they are transitive dependencies for the service they are working on. To simplify things I created a playlist called online-ordering . Now, anytime I need to run these services I can simply run tb up --playlist online-ordering and tb will handle the heaving lifting to start all of the services I need to work on online ordering. This is especially useful for anyone who doesn’t know the details of each of our services; particularly QA, product managers or mobile developers. We provide playlists to run that make it easy for them to test features without needing to know the whole dependency graph. Developers can also run this command over and over again and they will get the latest versions of each service without needing to pull git repos, build the services themselves or update any configuration. We deploy our services dozens of times every day and embrace the CI/CD lifestyle. By using tb you can easily stay up to date with what is in production.
A big goal for tb was to make it simple to use and easy to customize. Command line flags is one way we accomplished this. You can use the command tb up --playlist online-ordering --no-service-prerun to skip the pre-run step for each service (where we typically seed our databases). Further customization can be done using the ~/.tbrc.yml configuration file. Users can modify the way tb runs by defining their own playlists, or changing the properties of a service.
An example of this is changing the docker tag for a service. All our services have a CI job that builds a docker image, tags it with the branch name and commit SHA, and then pushes to AWS ECR, our remote docker registry. To make it easy for any developer to run any branch/commit of a service with tb they can override the service’s tag field in ~/.tbrc.yml . To use the branch new-cool-feature for venue-provisioning-service I could write the following YAML:
overrides:
TouchBistro/tb-registry/venue-provisioning-service:
remote:
tag: new-cool-feature
The ~/.tbrc.yml configuration file
When I run this service, either with tb up -s venue-provisioning-service or using my playlist tb up --playlist online-ordering , tb will automatically pull the new-cool-feature tag and run that version of the image. This makes it straightforward for developers (or QA) to test another developer’s work, which is something we recommend in code reviews.
This only scratches the surface of what is possible with tb and the types of workflows it enables. For example, you can easily jump into a shell in a service by doing tb exec <service> bash . You can also jump into a service’s database, whether it’s postgres, mysql, or mssql, with tb db <service> .
Running tb db to enter a PostgreSQL database
Hopefully this post gives you some idea of what led us to creating tb and how you might be able to use it for your own projects. In a future blog post we’ll talk about how we use tb to run iOS apps in the simulator by passing a branch name.
Journey to open source
tb has been immensely valuable to us here at TouchBistro and we wanted to share it with the wider community since the problems we are solving are not unique to TouchBistro.
This seemed a big undertaking since tb was originally designed to automate toil encountered by developers TouchBistro. We needed to figure out how to generalize its functionality and refactor it in a way that could easily be extended by others. Luckily, we found that what we built was general enough to work with any services that can be run as docker containers and live in a docker registry. The nature of having to support a huge number of services and technologies and technologies had already forced us to treat something like “call `yarn run db:migrate` to run migrations before starting the server” to an instance of a generic “preRun” command that each service can define.
First, we implemented the strategy pattern to generalize logging into services such as NPM and AWS. We recognized that these were specific to our use case and made it possible to use different registries, and log into other services if needed.
We took inspiration from homebrew taps and created the concept of a tb registry which is a git repository with configuration files that tb uses to figure out which services and playlists are available to run. This allowed us to decouple tb from our specific services and tools and make it a generic distributed package manager for docker services and more.
A tb registry repository
tb is available for both macOS and Linux. If you think tb could make development easier for you and would like to know more check out the GitHub repository to learn about how to use it and all its available features. We would love to receive feedback on it and contributions. | https://medium.com/touchbistro-development/tb-cli-simplifying-development-in-a-complicated-microservices-world-65da00a14c87 | ['Christopher Szatmary'] | 2020-04-22 21:54:30.333000+00:00 | ['Microservices', 'Command Line', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Touchbistro', 'Software Development'] |
Apprenticeship or Internship: Which one is right for you? | Alright folks, it’s that time of the year where you (in addition to every 5th year college senior and the over-achieving high school juniors) venture out into the world in the hope that a company will take you in and utilize you as something other than a glorified coffee getter. That’s right, I’m talking about internship season!
Internships can be a vital part for gaining real world experiences and can very likely help you acquire that first full-time job outside of school. But what if you’re not fresh out of college or in the middle of changing careers? What if you have more financial responsibilities and are not able to devote 35 hours a week for a low or unpaid gig? If this is the case, depending on your field of work, perhaps an apprenticeship may be a better fit.
In this article, I will give you an overview of the difference between an internship and an apprenticeship and lay out the pros and cons of each.
Sooo..??? What really is the difference?
My experience with both
To paint a picture, let me share with you my personal experience with the two. I have been both an apprentice and an intern and although some things were the same, the majority of my experiences were very different.
When I was a web design intern, I was just starting my degree and really had no idea if I actually wanted to do web design as a career. It was unpaid and I spent the majority of my time completing online coding tutorials, doing community service activities, and writing weekly logs about my community work experience. My internship was more like… an extension of my school education and not exactly a clear representation of what the web design work force actually is.
Jump forward to my application developer apprenticeship at Crema. I wasn’t just working on coding tutorials, but I was applying what I learned in personal projects and eventually client projects. I had a mentor to go to if I had any questions. I had weekly and biweekly meetings with my mentor and another senior dev to go over my progress. Halfway through, I started sitting in on client meetings regularly to understand the general structure of a product team and by the end I was working on client projects that were being pushed out into production. My apprenticeship was more immersive and required me to apply critical thinking skills to get my tasks done.
Internship Pros
You are not locked in
Internships tend to be during a summer semester or during another short specified length of time (typically no more than a year). So if you have other plans, like wanting to take a few months to travel abroad or would like to try your hand at exploring another career path altogether, you will have that flexibility(depending on the specific company, of course).
Fantastic way to get to know a company and to network
Let’s say you’ve had your eye on a particular company for some time now. Being an intern at that company will give you insight into the culture of a work space and sometimes give you a good idea of the work life balance people tend to have within the company. Plus, it’s a fantastic way to build relationships with professionals in your industry of interest.
Perfect for those who are just looking to “Get their feet wet”
Let’s face it — not everyone knows without a doubt exactly what they want to do with their life right out of college. Even if you are not a college student and have just been teaching yourself new skills online for the past six months, that kind of exposure is still not quite like being in the professional workspace. An internship is quite forgiving in that you can get a brief insight into the field, decide it’s not for you and pursue something else with little loss.
Internship Cons
Tends to be little to no pay
Let’s just put this up front and center. Typically, an internship alone may not pay enough to have you sustain a comfortable lifestyle(if they even pay at all). As such, this could be a really huge deal breaker depending on each person’s life situation.
Not always guaranteed a full time position
Although a lot of internships could eventually lead to the intern getting an offer, it’s not a guarantee that you’ll have a full-time gig by the end. It likely depends on your performance during the internship and whether or not there is a full-time position available. If a full time position is what you are wanting to have by the end of the internship, it is essential to ask about the likelihood of a full-time offer during the interview process.
Not always a comprehensive learning experience
I mentioned before how an internship is good to “Get your feet wet”, but the drawback to that is that you will likely get a very high level overview understanding of your craft. You may get some exposure to how things are done but may not get to work on client projects or tasks that contribute meaningfully to the company
Apprenticeships Pros
Tends to be full time and pays better
I won’t say this is true for every apprenticeship program, but they do tend to be full-time and have a more competitive pay. Again, if you have more financial responsibilities this is a huge plus for you. Full time also means benefits and even potentially some paid time off. Wins all around.
Tends to be a more comprehensive program
A lot of the work an apprentice does is more practical to the job. You are getting a more in-depth, hands-on experience that will challenge you and expand your skillset. You will likely have responsibilities and meaningful tasks that are expected to get done.
They typically lead to a full-time offer
When companies take in apprentices, they use a tremendous amount of resources to train and acclimate that person to the position as well as the company culture. Because the apprenticeship entails a lot more practical work and tends to be longer than an internship, both you and the company can get a better idea of rather or not the full-time position would be right for you.
Not typically locked down to just college students or recent grads
Apprenticeships can be a fantastic opportunity for those looking for a career change. In a lot of cases questions like “what is your GPA?” or “what college did you attend?” aren’t really relevant during the application process. Some apprenticeships may not even require you to have a degree in that field at all. Of course, this all depends on what field you are getting into. A medical apprenticeship will likely require some formal education but a software development apprenticeship may not.
Apprenticeship Cons
More of a commitment
Like I mentioned before, apprenticeship programs tend to be more comprehensive and longer. Depending on the program, you may need to take more time than you are used to in order to sharpen your skill set.
Not for people who are still on the fence
By the time you start applying for apprenticeships, you should already be fairly confident that this career field is where you want to be. Apprenticeships tend to focus down on the aspects and requirements of a particular position, so it is not ideal for someone who is just wanting to have a high-level understanding of the job.
May not be super accommodating for those who are still full time students
Unlike internships, apprenticeship opportunities may not fall neatly within the summer break months. It’s possible that the apprenticeship will take place in the middle of the school year and you will have to consider taking a semester of school off to pursue the apprenticeship.
Wrap up
I would like to stress one last time that every internship and apprenticeship is different depending on the field and the company. Regardless, you should definitely consider these factors when you begin applying for either kind of gig. At Crema, we offer both! And both types of programs are fully hands-on, comprehensive, and pay competitive wages.
If you’re interested in the digital product space, keep an eye out for applications on our career page. Internships are held during the summer and apprenticeships run year round.
Good luck on your search and happy hunting! | https://medium.com/ideas-by-crema/apprenticeship-or-internship-which-one-is-right-for-you-bdf715e03397 | ['Alexandria Sanders'] | 2020-03-03 21:48:45.063000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Internships', 'Process', 'Internship Experience', 'Apprenticeship'] |
Should You Let Your Kids Play Fortnite? Well… | This morning, my son threw a joypad at his big brother in a rage before kicking him, all because his turn playing Fortnite was over.
It made me remember, again, why my worries about him playing this particular game were less about the violence on the screen and more about the violence (and tantrums) it might encourage in our family.
Have you heard of Fortnite? If you’re a parent of young gamers ages seven and up, chances are you have, as it’s already displacing Minecraft as the console and/or tablet game of choice for millions of tweens and teens.
Like Minecraft, Fortnite wasn’t originally made for children. It started life as a PC and console game in 2017, age-rated 12-plus in Europe, where squads of four players teamed up to fend off a postapocalypse zombie uprising.
Last September, the game’s publisher, Epic Games, released a spinoff called Fortnite Battle Royale, which is what’s caught fire among younger gamers — not least because (like many mobile games, but rather fewer console games) it’s free to download and play. (For the purposes of this article, I’ll use Fortnite as shorthand for Fortnite Battle Royale — throughout, I’m talking about the latter.)
This standalone mode threw up to 100 players into battle, working in small teams or completely alone in an every-player-for-themself scrap. There are guns and shooting galore, but also a dash of Minecraft-style crafting, as players break down objects into metal, wood, and stone and then build stairs and platforms to boost their chances of survival.
The first thing to say is that Fortnite Battle Royale is a great game, if not entirely original in concept: the “battle royale” genre’s recent popularity started with another game called PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG for short), earlier in 2017.
Fortnite’s quality has made it a financial success. Games-industry research firm Superdata claims that the game made $126 million from in-game purchases in February alone. Another analyst, Sensor Tower, claims that in the first month after the game’s release on Apple’s App Store, it made $25 million from in-app purchases on iPads and iPhones.
It’s a good game that’s making lots of money, but should parents worry about it?
The first red flag is that age rating: When my not-yet-11-year-old sons first started yammering on about wanting to play Fortnite, my initial reaction was a firm “No. Not until you’re 12.”
It’s a difficult position to hold in the current digital environment. Many children already expect to be allowed on Instagram and Snapchat long before those apps’ minimum age of 13; they want to be on “proper” YouTube rather than YouTube Kids, including uploading their own videos (also a minimum age of 13); and they want to message friends on WhatsApp (age 13, although soon that’s going up to 16 here in Europe).
Strong parenting, you could say, is saying no and sticking to it. Modern parenting, however, is arguably more about balancing the knowledge that these age restrictions are set for a reason, with the awareness of what our children’s wider social group is doing, the boundaries being set by their parents, and the cultural conversation that our kids are taking part in (or not) based on our judgements.
That cultural conversation includes YouTubers. Many of the child-friendly YouTube gaming stars who made their names with Minecraft videos are now uploading (or live-streaming) their Fortnite sessions, like iBallisticSquid and DanTDM, while the game is also bringing new digital stars into children’s orbit: like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who recently attracted more than 630,000 viewers for a live Fortnite stream with rapper Drake. There is even a 13-year-old professional Fortnite esports player.
A child in 2018 will see their favorite online stars playing Fortnite and hear their friends talking about playing it. That makes the decision about whether to let them play it, for all but the firmest parents, much harder. That, at least, is my self-serving justification for giving in.
Which brings us back to violence. Perhaps surprisingly for a game built around guns and shooting other players, Fortnite isn’t so problematic on the in-game gruesomeness front.
Common Sense Media, the U.S. site that helps parents navigate their way through the world of media that is and isn’t appropriate for kids, put it well: “The game has a cartoonish style, and the violence, while persistent, isn’t bloody or particularly gory.”
(Interestingly, while Common Sense judged Fortnite a 13-plus game, age-wise, parents contributing their verdicts were two years below that on average, at 11-plus.)
This isn’t Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, in other words. Other possible concerns around Fortnite include its use of in-app purchases and the ability to hear other players talking as they play. I locked down my PlayStation 4 and iOS accounts so my kids can’t spend money without my permission, and I turned off the voice-chat feature, so both of those issues are solvable.
But my bigger problem is with the dynamics of the game itself. In Fortnite Battle Royale, death often comes without warning from a long-range shot or someone leaping out from a hiding spot behind you. Once you’re dead, you’re out of the game — it’s not like most action-shooter games, where death is followed by a quick “respawn” to get back into the action.
This is an absolute trigger for my younger son, who struggles with his temper when losing anything, be it board games, football in the garden, or (especially) console games. The sudden and downright unfair — at least this is how they feel — deaths in Fortnite are a red rag for him.
Joypad-throwing, sibling-kicking, vocal-screeching tantrums ensue, and as a parent I’m now grappling with choosing the appropriate punishment. Does he lose Fortnite for the weekend? For the next week? Do I delete it forever? And then there’s the undercurrent of guilt I have for letting him play in the first place. | https://medium.com/s/little-minds-and-big-screens/should-you-let-your-kids-play-fortnite-well-c19954da0454 | ['Stuart Dredge'] | 2018-05-04 19:51:28.735000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Fortnite', 'Children', 'Parenting', 'Videogames'] |
You Can Now (Literally) Camp In The Best Airport In The World | COVID 19 has hit a lot of sectors hard this year.
A lot of businesses, especially the smaller ones, were forced to admit defeat and close down due to their inability to cope with the situation brought about by the pandemic.
The aviation industry is one of many mammoth industries taking a massive blow.
Lockdowns, borders closing, travel restrictions have forced the transport industry to take drastic measures to keep the business afloat.
The aircrafts and travel industry are not the only ones suffering this year.
Airports and every single business inside them are also struggling.
With not many passengers going out and about in the world, who would go to spend some time at the airport?
Granted, there are people like me, who actually enjoy being at the airport (especially if the airport is nice and comfortable — Changi and Doha International Airport are two of the best airports I’ve ever spent long transit hours in).
There are actually a lot of things you can do at the airport.
You can people-watch, read, write, shop, and eat at the airport. If you’re super lucky, you might even make a friend or two — (a) fellow wanderer(s).
But tell people you’re going to the airport to do just that, they’ll think you’ve lost your mind.
I digress.
An airport as massive and as beautiful as Changi though, I can only imagine the cost of the upkeep.
It must be sky-high.
As it stands, I have already heard many stories of people getting laid off and retrench in new sectors. Air stewardesses who are now nurses and social distancing ambassadors (yes we have them here — they remind everyone to wear masks and stand 1 metre apart). Pilots who are now bus and Grab (something like Uber) drivers.
Even with all this cost-cutting, the airport would still need some traffic.
What does it do?
Adapt. | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/you-can-now-literally-camp-in-the-best-airport-in-the-world-591cc9d77626 | ['Agnes Louis'] | 2020-12-21 12:57:30.967000+00:00 | ['Strength', 'Life Lessons', 'The Bad Influence', 'Resilience', 'Self Improvement'] |
Dirty yellow wheel clamp\Discrimination in Employment ó Relevant Federal Laws | Title:
Dirty yellow wheel clamp
Summary:
Have you ever been CAUGHT by a WHEEL CLAMPING COWBOY?
You park up for a few moments and head into town. You return to your car and as you approach the vehicle, your heart SINKS.
You see the big, dirty-yellow clamp and suddenly realize that your five minute trip into town has just cost you somewhere between £120 and £670.
Youíre OUTRAGED.
But thereís NOTHING you can do about it!
Literally, youíre helpless. And if you try playing tough with one of these big wheel clamping guys, it won’t be long before he calls in his team of clamping thugs for backup.
You canít beat these clamping cowboys.
UNLESS you follow my 100% LEGAL wheel clamping system.
wheel clamp,wheel clamps,wheel clamping,wheel clampers,police,traffic warden,tow away zone,penalty,tax,car,uk,driving in london,parking in london,
Article Body:
Have you ever been CLAMPED?
Trust me, I know JUST how frustrating it can be.
You park your car for just five minutes to pick up a prescription. You return and… WHAM! A big dirty-yellow wheel clamp fixed to your wheel — with a DEMAND for £££’s before some muscle-thug will remove it.
There’s ABSOLUTELY NOTHING you can do about it. You’re ANOTHER HELPLESS VICTIM.
And guess what?
The average wheel clamping fine these days is a staggering £240. However many cowboy wheel clampers are screwing drivers by up to £670 per “offence”… and it’s all completely legal.
The Government has lost control. The clampers are going wild. Even the RAC is currently campaigning for new legislation. Nobody knows what to do.
Well, for the FIRST TIME EVER, you can now BEAT the wheel clampers at their own game…
… With the LATEST “SYSTEM” from Dan Strauss!
Dan Strauss is a good friend of mine, and spends his life figuring out how to beat the driving system. He’s the editor of the UK Driving Secrets guide, and the man behind the Beat Speeding Ticket templates.
He’s recently developed a NEW SYSTEM for getting absolutely ANY wheel clamp fine REFUNDED within just days… And it’s PERFECTLY LEGAL, TOO.
You won’t have to argue with the clamping thugs. And you won’t have to fill out lots of complex paperwork.
Just pay the fine as normal, then send off a simple template letter. Your money will be refunded within a couple of weeks.
Can you IMAGINE how valuable this information could be to you?
But you MUST buy it BEFORE you get a wheel clamping fine. There’s something critical you need to do for the system to work. Download it TODAY to learn more.
Oh, and the whole package comes with a 10-year guarantee too. Now that’s something I’ve NEVER heard ANYONE offer before. It just shows how serious Dan is about all of this.
So check out my blog site and get yourself protected from those wheel clamping cowboys:
http://wheelclamp.blogspot.com/
Enjoy! Best wishes, surfson
Photo by whereslugo on Unsplash
Title:
Discrimination in Employment ó Relevant Federal Laws
Summary:
This article provides a quick-reference to federal anti-discrimination laws and their functions.
discrimination, termination, employment, civil rights, age discrimination, race discrimination, disabilities, firing, fired, termination
Article Body:
Discrimination in employment is prohibited by a series of federal laws. These laws are the following:
* Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended (commonly referred to as ìTitle VIIî);
* Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA);
* The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, as amended (ADEA);
* The Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA);
* The Civil Rights Act of 1991 (often referred to as ìCRA of 1991î); and
* Section 501 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended.
Title VII prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
The ADA prohibits employers from discriminating in employment on the basis of disability, in the public sector and in the private sector, but excludes the federal government.
The ADEA prohibits employers from discriminating against persons 40 years of age and older.
The EPA prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of gender in how they pay for substantially similar work under similar conditions.
The CRA of 1991 provides for monetary damages (including punitive damages) in cases of intentional (willful) discrimination and clarifies provisions about disparate impact actions.
The Rehabilitation Act, Section 501, prohibits discrimination in employment against federal employees with disabilities.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforces the main federal statutes prohibiting discrimination in employment. The headquarters of the EEOC are located in Washington, D.C., and there are regional offices and local field offices throughout the country. Check telephone information under Federal Government listings for a contact phone number, if you think you may have been subjected to employment discrimination. | https://medium.com/career-realted-article/dirty-yellow-wheel-clamp-discrimination-in-employment-%C3%B3-relevant-federal-laws-6c26f1595a12 | ['Mohit Chawla'] | 2020-12-27 11:40:48.351000+00:00 | ['Career Advice', 'Money Management', 'Careers', 'Money'] |
Doubt doesn’t hinder progress | Is doubt holding you back?
Doubt doesn’t hinder progress; fear is the master at doing that.
Doubt may rear it’s head when faced with a choice of doing X or Y. Should I do X or Y? Doubt stops you from jumping to conclusions and just doing something for the sake of it. It brings you a healthy dose of uncertainty. It lets you catch your breath and contemplate.
Y looks exciting, however, X may get better short term results . . . . doubt has brought you through to the phase of evaluating options.
Progress is being made.
Contemplation and giving consideration to problem-solving thoughts will aid the X — Y decision-making process. There are pros and cons but all can be considered to let the best solution rise to the top.
But, what if X doesn’t work out? Now we are into fear.
The initial positive phases of doubting, contemplating, evaluating have flipped, the negativity of fear has shown its face.
Doubt and uncertainty may carry you through to the process of contemplation and consideration, whereas fear stops you in your tracks and won’t let you pass go, do not collect £200.
Is it time you stopped confusing doubt with fear? | https://medium.com/@trevorlorkings/doubt-doesnt-hinder-progress-52ef45ab6811 | ['Trevor - Digital Alchemist'] | 2019-11-21 21:55:15.659000+00:00 | ['Progress', 'Procrastination', 'Fear', 'Doubt'] |
Uncovered: the 42 year-old report from Hillary Clinton’s work at the Children’s Defense Fund | Uncovered: the 42 year-old report from Hillary Clinton’s work at the Children’s Defense Fund
After graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, Hillary didn’t take the path of many of her classmates and join a large corporate firm. Instead, she followed her passion — and one of her idols. Marian Wright Edelman — a prominent activist in the civil rights community — had spoken to her law school class four years earlier. For Hillary, that speech was a turning point:
“Until I heard Marian speak, it wasn’t clear to me how to channel my faith and commitment to social justice to try to make a real difference in the world. But she put me on the path of service.”
So after she graduated, Hillary got a job working with Marian at the Children’s Defense Fund. At the time, Marian’s organization was about to launch a ground-breaking project: figuring out why nearly 2 million U.S. children were not in school.
Under Marian’s leadership, Hillary worked alongside young lawyers and advocates to discover why so many young children weren’t getting a formal education. Hillary’s name is proudly displayed in the report, alongside the other staff of the Children’s Defense Fund:
The report challenged the common assumption that all kids in America had the opportunity to go to school and receive a quality education. The research was conducted by knocking on doors of “over 8,500 households in 30 areas and from hundreds of additional interviews with school officials and community leaders.” Hillary was one of the tireless canvassing staff who traveled around the country, talking to kids and families about their experiences accessing public education.
The report found that the nearly two million children who the Census counted as non-enrolled reflected only “the surface of how many children are out of school in America.”
Through this research, the team uncovered a hidden truth about these children:
“They are the non-English-speaking children who sit uncomprehendingly in classrooms conducted in English. They are the handicapped children whose problems have not been diagnosed, have been misdiagnosed, or who have been placed in unsuitable classes where they do not learn. They are the poor white children in Portland, Maine or Floyd County, Kentucky from whom little is expected and for whom less is hoped. They are the black children in Canton, Mississippi whose teachers call them dumb and allow them to graduate from high school reading as low as the second grade level. They are the children who ‘get into trouble’ or the pregnant girls who are never welcomed back into regular classes or schools again.”
The report detailed the short- and long-term effects of missing school. One of the stories was of two sisters, Betty and Kathy.
Betty and Kathy lived with their parents and siblings in a lower-income housing project in Portland, Maine. Betty, the youngest, had heart trouble, and she was often too sick to attend school. Betty only attended 22 days of her fourth grade, but no school officials ever visited the family to ask about her absence. The following year she was advanced to 5th grade.
Betty’s sister, Kathy, had a different story: After missing school multiple days to stay home and help care for Betty, the principal told her to quit and come back the next year to repeat the 10th grade.
Along with inconsistent advice from the school, the family also struggled to pay medical bills along with school fees.
Following the personal stories, this report provided a deeper view of the number of unreported kids who were missing school that went beyond census data, including results from their household surveys in nine states and the District of Columbia.
The report also broke down the different types of barriers preventing kids from regularly attending school — factors like language comprehension, school fees, transportation, and conditions of poverty.
This note below was included in the report. It came from a young child in Floyd County, Kentucky, whose parents didn’t have money for workbooks and other materials.
Through the exhaustive research of young lawyers like Hillary, the report also explored the schooling of children with disabilities, outlining the lack of access and quality of education for these kids.
As Hillary recalls of the time, “I went door to door trying to identify the source of a troubling statistic… I found children who weren’t in school because of physical disabilities like blindness and deafness. I also found school-age siblings at home babysitting their younger brothers and sisters while their parents worked. On the small back porch off her family’s home in a neighborhood of Portuguese-American fishermen, I met a girl in a wheelchair, who told me how much she wanted to go to school. She knew she couldn’t go because she couldn’t walk.”
This report by the Children’s Defense Fund helped lead to the enactment of a federal law guaranteeing access to public school education for children with disabilities, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act or today, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Hillary credits her work at the Children’s Defense Fund, and her relationship with Marian, for setting her on the path she’s still on today: passionately fighting for kids and families. The job at the Children’s Defense Fund was the first in a long career focused on kids and their needs.
That’s a fight Hillary will continue to doggedly wage as president. In this campaign, she has already laid out her plans for greater funding for early education programs, making sure even more kids have access to quality, affordable health care, and creating new opportunities and pathways for kids with mental health issues, autism and physical disabilities. | https://medium.com/hillary-for-america/uncovered-the-42-year-old-report-from-hillary-clintons-work-at-the-children-s-defense-fund-e2bba4a17908 | ['Danielle Kantor'] | 2016-10-30 15:07:24.331000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Hillary Clinton', '2016 Election'] |
3 Challenges While Working on Classification — the Arvato Case | Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
The Goal
The necessity to predict trends or to predict new possible customers is one of the biggest challenges and applications in the field of machine learning and data science, which is also heavily requested by businesses.
Unfortunately the process of classifying from data and make accurate predictions often requires a lot of work and the quality of the data and its processing is crucial for the final overall results.
The final goal is to participate in the Kaggle competition on Arvato Dataset, and we will go over the biggest challenges which occurred during the process of producing a capable model.
The task is to correctly predict new possible customers for a mail handout marketing campaign for the company, which offers products by mail order. This mostly comes up to binary classification problem.
The solution we are going to test for this classification makes use of one of the typical machine learning algorithms and therefore giving a clean and meaningful dataset as input is very important.
The company Arvato handed out four datasets of German customers to work on the model, which are characterized by a high imbalance, a relatively high number of features, already partially tied up and a high number of samples.
The datasets available were split among four different CSV files:
Demographics data for the general population of Germany; 891 211 persons x 366 features. Demographics data for customers of a mail-order company; 191 652 persons x 369 features. Demographics data for individuals who were targets of a marketing campaign; 42 982 persons x 367 features. Demographics data for individuals who were targets of a marketing campaign; 42 833 persons x 366 features.
Along with them a descriptor file was available for most of the features to briefly describe the features and context and the meaning of the values.
The number of features for the standard dataset was 366, an additional feature was present in the mail marketing campaign with RESPONSES, useful to train a binary classifier. The final evaluation for the competition is performed on the fourth (and last) dataset and the AUC score is used as metrics (we will see later why).
Now that the contest is all set we can go over the challenges which inevitably occurred.
1. Understanding the data
The main challenge during the preprocessing phase was given by interpreting the different features given.
The final steps necessary were:
Replace the values representing unknown data for each feature with NaNs in order to be able later to impute the DataFrame Rework the categorical columns and ordinal encode them for imputation Use of IterativeImputer from SciKitLearn with n_nearest=4 to derive the missing data One-hot encode all features which represent categories according to attached description file Reduce memory usage to the minimum feasible
But it was not as easy as that, while here the issues were countless:
Though a descriptor file was made available, it was partial and many feature names were different from the dataset names, which required hunting for the individual labels in the DataFrame.
Most of the features were numerical but their meaning was not! They were already encoded as ordinals and a lot of time was necessary to understand what was what.
Most of the features implemented different styles to mark missing values. Either they were missing from the input or were represented as 0s, -1s, 9s. And this could hold true for any one label all at the same time. Detailed reading of the descriptor was necessary.
The imputer selection took a lot of time, and before fitting the models at a later point, no insight of the best solution was readily available.
Refactoring, refactoring, refactoring, refactoring, refac…
Hence, the final refactored function to do the cleanup and preprocessing of the datasets looked like this:
Challenge #1: there is always something that can be improved in the preprocessing of the data and a lot of time needs to be invested to understand the features and their real meaning. Getting down early the proper functions to handle the data is FUNDAMENTAL to spare time through the countless iterations.
2. Customer segmentation
With the first two datasets is now possible to see the similarities between the German demography and the company customers.
The most common unsupervised learning method is clustering, which is used for exploratory data analysis to find hidden patterns or grouping in data. The clusters use a measure of similarity defined by metrics such as Euclidean distance.
Such algorithms could be for example K-Means Clustering, Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering, Gaussian Mixture Models, DBSCAN, Mean-Shift Clustering and more.
A K-Means clustering is hereby adopted, but surely further implementations could lead to better results.
This part was also challenging due to my spare knowledge on the topic of unsupervised learning and therefore I chose to focus only on one technique which could provide relatively quick results among the various algorithms.
At first the data was scaled and after that a Principal Components Analysis was run to reduce the complexity.
We can see that the components explaining at least 90% of the variance is ~170 and therefore we refit the PCA model with this many components to reduce complexity.
I then fit the K-Means clustering model with variable number of clusters to produce the elbow chart and try to find the optimal number by means of the for error and complexity reduction.
The value I selected is 10 clusters but the elbow was not so prominent.
I used this value to finally assess the cluster difference between the overall German demography and our customers.
In the notebook provided on GitHub (see the end of the article), it is also displayed how one could then pin each cluster back to the specific features weighing the most on each cluster and therefore providing a better picture on the similarities.
Challenge #2: when many features are present, a reduction is necessary to improve readability of the data, but this still doesn’t help too much in the human visualization. Working on the pin pointing the features to the clusters during the unsupervised learning could help a lot in understanding the similarities between data sets.
3. “Bring balance to the force”
Here comes the core of the task, since the data available in the third dataset is heavily imbalanced: almost 99% of the contacted people did not respond to the marketing mail campaign. SURPRISE!
We have therefore very few positive samples in the output for this binary classification problem, with the minority class represented by the people who responded to the campaign.
Now here the usual metrics do not hold true, so I had to understand how to properly evaluate the performance of the models that I would create.
The precision or normal scoring techniques are not reliable metrics, since they would wrongly score high due to the high precision in the most represented class. Therefore the Area Under the Curve (AUC) score is used from the ROC curve. For more detailed information please look at this very good article.
For each model tested a 30% or even sometimes 40% of the data from the 3rd Dataset was used to validate, while the rest was used for training the model.
Train data (blue), Validation data (orange)
As benchmark model I selected at first a LinearSVC model from Scikit-Learn without further optimization and as it can be seen in the picture, as expected, the precision for the minority class is 0 as well as the recall. Our model also scored a low AUC (0.63) in the validation (orange curve).
I then tried to focus on improving the minority class Accuracy and Recall as well as the validation AUC, which unfortunately still scored poorly also after many tryouts.
Of course, I could use my hard-earned cleaning function to preprocess this dataset, but beforehand I had to do further optimizations to smoothen all the little issues that occurred during the processing.
The re-indexing function from Pandas came in handy, since it made possible to work with the same labels and order, since the processing could produce different dummy variables during the one-hot encoding depending on the available data.
The whole concept of handling imbalanced data was new to me, so I had to make my researches trying to understand which were the best tackling techniques. I had to pleasure to read different articles, one which is beginners-friendly can be found here.
Most of it comes down to different degrees of sampling techniques on the dataset and weighting on the outputs during the training process.
A combination of under sampling techniques for the majority class (e.g. Random Undersampling) and over sampling techniques for the minority class (Random over sampling, synthetic sampling such as TomekLinks, SMOTE, ADASYN, etc..) can be used, with the aim in the end to obtain a balanced dataset for the training of our model.
For each model I performed an optimization by means of GridSearchCV package.
Improvements were observed when introducing balancing ensembles from imblearn, which randomly under sample the majority class, hence working with inputs which are more or less equal.
It was observed that a lot of false minority class predictions were made with this ensembles, but an idea to reduce the issue is by better implementing the aforementioned sampling techniques to balance out the classes instead of the random sampling which is perfomed by the ensembles. Unfortunately up to this point I was not able to use them with some progress only in Neural Network approach and definitely much more time should be spent on the fine tuning of them to find the best combination and algorithm for the issue at hand.
The final selection of models which were tested using SciKit-Learn, imblearn and Pytorch were:
Support Vector Classification (linear)
Balanced Random Forest classifier from imblearn
Balanced Bagging classifier from imblearn with Decision Tree estimator
A deep neural network (not in-depth developed due to brevity)
In the end the best performance was achieved with the balanced bagging classifier and decision tree estimator (see GitHub at the end for details in the comparison), and the :
ROC for Bagging Classifier w/ Decision Tree estimator
The decision tree works better (AUC 0.76) than both our balanced random forest model (which scored AUC 0.74) and the simple linear support vector classifier (AUC 0.64), but overall the differences among the different balanced solutions tested were minor.
A neural network was also laid to start testing with the deep learning approach in order to verify if a quick and big improvement could be achieved.
Neural net result (2 hidden layers)
Even though the first results look promising (AUC is really low, but precision is comparable with other model and recall is non-null), an hyperparameter tuning is necessary as well as the exploration of other net structures.
Overall the tuning and optimization of the above discussed strategies could lead to further improvements.
For the purpose of this project we just select the best resulting model for the ROC-AUC score, which is the Bagging Classifier with Decision Tree estimator.
Challenge #3: when handling imbalanced data, correctly predicting the minority class is very hard and the models offer extremely low accuracy as is. A lot of time must be spent to understand how to improve the imbalance, fine tuning the inputs and after that, the model selection should offer better results overall. Also the implementation of the neural network is promising but very time consuming in tryouts, starting structures from literature could be a good starting point to improve on this solution.
Conclusion
Overall the model was not tuned to perfection and it can be seen also from the Kaggle leaderboard that much higher results have been achieved.
The model overall scored 0.7399 on the Kaggle competition (position 169), where at the time of writing the leader reaches almost 0.85, meaning there is a lot of improvement which can still be achieved.
The end-to-end approach was the following:
Understanding the data
Reducing memory requirements, redundancies, simplify the features
Properly selecting the categorical features
Imputing the missing values
One-hot encode the categorical features
Clustering the customers and Germany datasets to verify similarities (could be tested also as input to the following models which was not done here)
Verifying the mail dataset output distribution for model training → imbalanced
Verifying a simple model perfomance
Introducing the sampling techniques to reduce imbalance
Selecting the best performing model according to AUC-scoring which is used for the final Kaggle competition
The main 3 challenges we faced were:
Challenge #1 : there is always something that can be improved in the preprocessing of the data and a lot of time needs to be invested to understand the features and their real meaning. Getting down early the proper functions to handle the data is FUNDAMENTAL to spare time through the countless iterations.
: there is always something that can be improved in the preprocessing of the data and a lot of time needs to be invested to understand the features and their real meaning. Getting down early the proper functions to handle the data is FUNDAMENTAL to spare time through the countless iterations. Challenge #2 : when many features are present, a reduction is necessary to improve readability of the data, but this still doesn’t help too much in the human visualization. Working on pin pointing the features to the clusters during the unsupervised learning could help a lot in understanding the similarities between data sets.
: when many features are present, a reduction is necessary to improve readability of the data, but this still doesn’t help too much in the human visualization. Working on pin pointing the features to the clusters during the unsupervised learning could help a lot in understanding the similarities between data sets. Challenge #3: when handling imbalanced data, correctly predicting the minority class is very hard and the models offer extremely low accuracy as is. A lot of time must be spent to understand how to improve the imbalance, fine tuning the inputs and after that, the model selection should offer better results overall. Also the implementation of the neural network is promising but very time consuming in tryouts, starting structures from literature could be a good starting point to improve on this solution.
The project was a perfect example on how to work with messy data which needs a lot of preprocessing, was useful to apply all that was learned during the Udacity Data Scientist course, such as how to handle categorical and numerical data and was useful to explore machine and deep learning techniques further. Hands-on experience with heavily imbalanced dataset was very important to understand also the importance of quality datasets.
Further improvements can be achieved by better data sampling techniques (under-, over- and synthetic sampling), by use of proper weighting and structure especially in the deep learning approach, as well as more simply by getting more real samples of the minority class. A possible improvement could come also from the preprocessing step, by better features sorting or eventual reduction.
I’d like to thank Udacity and Arvato for the opportunity to work on the topic, get my hands dirty and gather precious experience.
To see more about this analysis, see the link to my GitHub available here. | https://medium.com/swlh/customer-prediction-in-imbalanced-dataset-the-arvato-case-513822cdbbfe | [] | 2020-11-01 12:37:27.937000+00:00 | ['Imbalanced Data', 'Arvato', 'Kaggle', 'Udacity', 'Classification'] |
Importance of Open Source and Why to choose GitHub | As a young developer, there were few things scarier to me than the mystique of Open Source. I had read, and heard a lot that it was important to find a project that I cared about and to contribute. But when you pull up that repository for the first time and check out the issues tab, it can be downright intimidating and anxiety-inducing. I probably read through “good first issue” tags 20 times before I gained the courage to add a comment stating, “I’d like to help with this PR.”
Then I did a thing: I pulled down the repository, read through all the documentation, looked into the source code related to this issue, and just tried some things. Some worked, some didn’t. I got to a point where I felt like it was right on the edge of being fixed, but there was a blocker. I reached out to one of the maintainers who had been my guru on the issue and he helped me get my pull request across the finish line. It was gratifying.
As developers, Open Source gives us the opportunity to find community, take on new challenges, and create something that is valuable for our fellow developers. Open source software is software whose source code has been made publicly available by its copyright holder. Under a true open source license, the software is developed collaboratively, and other programmers can look at, modify, or use the code.
GitHub is the most popular source code hosting facility out there for Open Source Software, and it’s still growing. Millions of developers use GitHub to share code and build businesses.
Words People Use When They Talk About GitHub
Repository: You can think of it as a folder or storage space where your project files can be stored. Sometimes GitHub users shorten this to “repo.” Fork: Fork can also be termed as copy or clone. Let’s consider the previous example where you were building a website for which you needed some help from your friend. Now your friend have found out some issues and wants to change something on your project. But here, he can not directly make any changes to the main file so he’ll make a copy of it. This is what forking means. Pull Request: In simplest form, pull requests are a way by which developers notify their team members that they have completed a feature and asking your permission to add your changes to the main file. Version Control: Basically, the purpose Git was designed to serve version control systems. GitHub allows you to switch from one version of the software to the other easily.
Features of GitHub which makes it preferable
Collaborative Coding — Contribute to projects quickly with automatic environment setup. Automation and CI/CD — Automate everything: CI/CD, testing, planning, project management, issue labeling, approvals, on boarding, and more. Security — Secure code as you write it. Automatically review every change to your code-base and identify vulnerabilities before they reach production. Client Apps — Take GitHub with you on any connected device and access GitHub from your OS X or Windows desktop. Project Management — Keep your team in step and your code at the center of your projects. Team Administration — Simplify access and permissions management across your projects and teams.
Hope this article gives you a good overview of Open Source, GitHub and it’s benefits. | https://medium.com/@paawki/importance-of-open-source-and-why-to-choose-github-dee4f9a0fef9 | ['Priyadarshini Kumari'] | 2020-12-27 10:14:48.693000+00:00 | ['Github', 'Open Source'] |
Fraying | Fraying
Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash
I am stuck inside the shell of
My mind racing,
How I grab the fraying
Bits and pull until
The very ground’s
Unraveled, and it’s
No surprise that I’m alone
On such a narrow
Stitch, no surprise
Neurotic tendencies and
A laundry list of
Days make a stripped
Bed out of
Breathing but I don’t need
Breath I need
Answers, I need
To take these layers
Off to see the
Color of my
Soul, and I am
Lonely, I am
Too long in the basement
When the party
Is upstairs,
But I have pulled on other
Threads and realized
All too late that they connect
To someone I don’t
Know
And through this
Endless ravel, through
The unzipped quiet stillness
I am finding parts of me
That feel like something
I could wear | https://medium.com/genius-in-a-bottle/fraying-663d02e4115f | ['Bradon Matthews'] | 2020-12-17 18:27:40.580000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Free Verse', 'Loneliness', 'Reflections', 'Introvert'] |
Power BI modelling | It simplifies your DAX formulas
…How? Here we have a model I have encountered before.
Image by author
Here, the Cities is joined to the County table in a many to 1 relationship. Then County to Region in another many to 1 relationship.
The Date is joined to the Months table in a many to one relationship. Months to Years in a many to 1 relationship as well.
If I want to get a particular Regional sales, I can write CALCULATE(SUM(FACT[Sales]),FILTER(REGION, REGION[Region] == “North”)).
Now, why is the region table it so far away? Here Power BI has to filter through City, County and finally to Region.
If I want to get a particular sales by month and year, I can write CALCULATE(SUM(FACT[Sales]),FILTER(YEARS, YEARS[Year]==2000),FILTER(MONTH,MONTHS[month]==12)
It’s not exactly wrong and you can probably get results. (Think putting a matrix visual and dragging a simple SUM(FACT[Sales]) measure down with rows being years, months or regions etc).
The problem is Power BI has to go through two separate tables to get to the measure. If it’s a small table, it’s not a big deal, but when you are dealing with a large data set, it will be very difficult to read for yourself and for Power BI to go and filter through these tables to get your answer.
For Power BI type reports, it’s better to keep the dimension tables somewhat together.
Think of dimensional themes.
Image by author
Here we are now using a star schema,
Blue = Dates theme— holidays etc should be added in this table not anywhere else.
Green = Employee Data theme— personal info and other new fields should be here.
Orange = Location theme — any new locations should be added here.
If you have themes in mind already, you can already figure out which tables really should belong to each other.
This set up helps you to sort out multiple tables and helps you to understand the model. There will likely be other dimension tables added in the future, but now you already know where they should go. | https://towardsdatascience.com/power-bi-modelling-bcd4431f49f9 | ['Peter Hui'] | 2020-10-10 23:02:28.012000+00:00 | ['Database', 'Data Analytics', 'Data Analysis', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
VIDEO GAMING AS AN OLYMPIC SPORT? What Olympians Say | Encylopedia Britannica.com
Many Olympians and others in sport responded to my post on the bid by “Esports” to become part of the Olympic Games.
These athletes bring a deep passion for sport and their unique insights into the Olympic movement to the table — I thank them for that.
THE MAJORITY FELL INTO THE “YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!” (OR STRONGER) CATEGORY, with a general feeling that the inclusion of “Esports” would fundamentally change the nature of the Games.
Comments such as:
-This is crazy. We cannot allow video gaming to become part of the Olympics. (Alex Partridge, Beijing 2008/London 2012)
-These activities are everything opposite to what the word sport stands for and encourages! (Sarra Lajnef, London 2012)
-If the Olympics want to be a talent show or a fair or simply a business, maybe ESports belongs there. (Anja Bolbjerg, Nagano 1998, SLC 2002)
- If it cannot fulfil the motto of faster, higher, stronger, then it should not be in the Olympics. (Tyrone Smith, Beijing 2008)
-Just because a past-time adds ‘sports’ to its title doesn’t make it sport. The Eurovision Song Contest is competitive, that doesn’t mean it’s a sport, even if it were re-named “Eurovision song-sports.” (Annamarie Phelps, Atlanta 1996)
-I can’t imagine the IOC would get very far with this…. there would be a hue and cry across the globe…at least I hope so. (Karen Lukanovic, Moscow 1980)
SOME WERE MORE POSITIVE ABOUT VIDEO GAMING ITSELF, BUT STILL QUESTIONED THE FIT OF “ESPORTS” WITHIN THE OLYMPIC MOVEMENT:
- And yes, to be great at video gaming takes a lot of practice, training and mental skill, but is that the same thing as a marathon runner overcoming extremes of the human body to successfully run 26.2 miles, or a downhill skier flying down a mountain at over 80 mph and battling g-forces in icy slopes? I would say not. (Bill Schuffenhauer, SLC 2002;Turin 2006; Vancouver, 2010)
-My confession is that I’m an avid gamer, and love losing myself in a different world where I can either blow things up, be chased by zombies or feel like I’m driving a Ferrari, but I would never consider it an actual sport. When I was competing at a major championship, I would take my PlayStation away with me to fill the gap on downtime, but that was the extent of it. (Shelley Holroyd, Atlanta, 1996)
One Olympian thought that perhaps Olympic inclusion could propel “Esports” in a more healthy direction: If the youth of today have strengths and a strong interest in gaming — which requires skills such as problem solving, strategy and dexterity — then maybe it’s healthy to give them an Olympic aspiration where they can compete in a world that’s well governed, with clear principles, code of conduct and values? I don’t have the answers, but perhaps in this vein, you have opened an important discussion. (Bianca Broadhurst, Athens 2004)
INEVITABLY, THE QUESTION OF: AREN’T WE JUST OUT OF TOUCH WITH OUR MODERN TECHNOLOGICAL AGE? WAS RAISED
One writer referenced a young “Esports” champion who had explained that when he hears the negatives about Esports, one thing comes to mind: Parents SUCK.
In other words: How can parents have an opinion on something they just will never understand?
I am a parent with 3 kids. I understand the sentiment.
But my experience tells me that parents aren’t as out of touch as kids think: We did grow up (as adults) in an unfolding “digital world,” and our daily lives are interwoven with technology, for good and bad. And perhaps our low-tech childhoods give us at least an awareness of healthier alternatives to ever-present technology that young people don’t always have.
And in the end, who is going to care more about a child’s life, development, balance and happiness: A parent? Or a Tech company and its sponsors?
At times, parents (and Olympic Committees) really do need to SUCK.
FINALLY, THERE SEEMED TO BE A GENERAL SCEPTICISM ABOUT THE IOC’S ABILITY OR DESIRE TO CHOOSE A BALANCED WAY FORWARD
- The IOC may very well sell out, as video gaming is a huge financial market they haven’t broken into. Partnering with e-sports would be millions in broadcasting, sponsorships, and partnerships. But I hope they don’t sell out for this reason. To be completely honest, the IOC will lose their credibility and respect if they go through with this. (Sinéad Russell, London 2012)
- They (the IOC) have the resources to make the Olympics hip again without having to admit eSports into the Olympic program; Now, will they do it? That’s the million-dollar question. (Jimmy Pino: Sydney 2000)
-Esports is a lot of money. It represents, I am certain, a lot more in sponsorships then several amateur sports combined…. so that will be the challenge — ensuring that the IOC walks its talk. (Rebecca Khoury, Former President-CEO Karate Canada)
SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
I still believe that an intuitive and definitive “NO” from the IOC on “Esports” would be best for world: for kids health, for youth sports, and for the Olympic movement itself. And hope the IOC will leave this particular Trojan horse alone and let it wheel itself off to another future.
I think, at heart, many Olympians want this too.
But I am realistic enough to know that, given the commercial pressure around this issue, a quick “NO” is unlikely to happen.
So at least let’s have a real debate rooted in human and Olympic values, rather than in commercial interest; one that recognises the efforts of those working around the world to expand and improve healthy sports for kids, and that respects the achievements of Olympians past and present;
a debate where the IOC’s global social responsibility and its relevance, as the protector of pure sport, take centre stage.
Mike Smith, Founder, BIGiDEASPORTS
Thanks for reading. Share if you can. | https://medium.com/@smithmichael874/video-gaming-as-an-olympic-sport-what-olympians-say-ca61e354f79e | ['Mike Smith'] | 2019-03-26 15:43:56.587000+00:00 | ['Olympics', 'Technology', 'Parenting', 'Values', 'Sports'] |
The Beauty of a Hand-Written Letter | Image from Laura Marcuet
Like most, I am on my computer a lot these days. Working, learning, reading, writing… screen time feels a bit nonstop. Adding to this constant technology attachment, some of the only ways to connect — especially with the lovely COVID in effect — is through the means of a keyboard… how brutal is that?!
I needed to change this… and to my surprise, my bloodshot eyes, headachey head and tired mind (don’t we all love the effects of computer overuse), all have since thanked me:
Now I use my heart to write instead of my hands to type.
My change started as a way to continue to be my fathers daughter. You can almost always find me trailing — more like fumbling — along in my Dads footsteps. I have always attempted to accomplish all that he has (… calling this a challenging undertaking would be an understatement). So, when my father turned 50 in 2020, he set himself a list of ‘things to do’. All of these ‘things’ had to be done 50 times, within the timespan of his 50th year. One of the boxes to be ticked on the list was ‘50 Hand- Written Letters’. I was the lucky recipient of 3 of these letters… each one bringing a smile to my face and a couple tears to my eyes.
Fast forward to 2021, I set myself a ‘To Do List’ for the year… and surprise surprise, guess what was at the top of the list? Write hand- written letters. 60 to be exact (I had to try to one up my Dad a bit). 5 letters each month. And to make it a bit more difficult, the letters all had to be to different individuals. No repeats.
Thank goodness for social media; I definitely did not ‘know’ 60 people… let alone 60 different mailing addresses. I sent out a message, briefly describing what I was planning to do, on both my facebook and Instagram. 24 hours later, I had all the mailing addresses I needed (+ a few extra); each one ready to receive a letter.
At the moment, I am 40 letters deep. Some letters are easier to write to others; a five-page letter to someone close compared to a sentence to someone I have grown distant with can take the same amount of time. As well, it would be impossible to describe the concoction of those who I have written to: family members, best friends, long forgotten ‘enemies’, teachers, crushes, strangers. The list goes on. There is one commonality between all of them though:
With each letter, I feel so much love.
Simply writing a letter instantly puts me in a better mood. No matter what I write about, or who I write to. Taking the time to connect with both myself and someone else — using something other than a piece of technology — really is beautiful.
And of course, because I am a research assistant, I had to try and prove my emotions with some research. Lucky for me, this wasn’t too much of a challenge. A recent study by Stefan et al (2021), titled ‘The Impact of Gratitude Letters and Visits on relationships, Happiness, Well-Being, and Meaning of Gratitude Students’, found that individuals who write gratitude letters experience a personal growth, a more positive reflection on life, a change in perspective, a positive impact on their relationships as well as the ability to express themselves more completely emotionally. Science literally tells us that by writing a letter to someone else, your life will get better.
In addition to the improvement of life that I get from just writing, stamping, and mailing some paper, I also (almost always) receive a grateful reply — talk about a double win. I predominantly receive a typed response, which is completely okay with me. But sometimes I will get a letter, which feels pretty great too! Although this is something I never expect or ask for, it truly is the best to get an unexpected note from someone, saying that you had a positive impact on their day.
Now, if all of these points haven’t been convincing enough, I think it is particularly important to highlight that writing a letter is an extraordinarily easy to do… literally all that is needed is a pen and paper (plus maybe some stamps and an envelope if it is being sent elsewhere). From there, the mind takes over… if anything, I have found that ending a letter is harder than starting one.
Although I am no expert (at anything), I have come up with a couple of things that I try to keep in mind when writing to someone about something that is more than just a ‘check in… what’s new?’, letter:
Keep the intro brief: Although it is always nice to give some sense of ‘opening’, make sure it doesn’t take up the entire letter. I have found that once and a while I will go into a default of only ask how an individual is doing, rather than communicating my own feelings (hopefully in a constructive way that will actually increase the mood of the receiver — making the initial question a bit redundant if we’re being honest).
Although it is always nice to give some sense of ‘opening’, make sure it doesn’t take up the entire letter. I have found that once and a while I will go into a default of only ask how an individual is doing, rather than communicating my own feelings (hopefully in a constructive way that will actually increase the mood of the receiver — making the initial question a bit redundant if we’re being honest). Have an idea: Something that I struggle with once and a while, especially if the letter I am writing is going to an individual I do not know well, is that it is hard to develop a ‘plot’. To solve this issue, I often times resort to previous thoughts, feelings, or experiences I have had with the individual. I then use this as a starting point to highlight and write about a memory the receiver and I share. I also have gone to the extent of looking the individual up on social media (sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures) … by doing this, I am able to find something that they have recently done or accomplished and frame the body of the letter around this. Not only is this personalized, but it shows the investment, time, and consideration you have had while constructing a letter. As well, it can be quite fascinating to watch as a brief thought or idea snowballs once it is started as a sentence on paper.
Something that I struggle with once and a while, especially if the letter I am writing is going to an individual I do not know well, is that it is hard to develop a ‘plot’. To solve this issue, I often times resort to previous thoughts, feelings, or experiences I have had with the individual. I then use this as a starting point to highlight and write about a memory the receiver and I share. I also have gone to the extent of looking the individual up on social media (sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures) … by doing this, I am able to find something that they have recently done or accomplished and frame the body of the letter around this. Not only is this personalized, but it shows the investment, time, and consideration you have had while constructing a letter. As well, it can be quite fascinating to watch as a brief thought or idea snowballs once it is started as a sentence on paper. Don’t write it if it isn’t ready: This one is a bit contradictory to this entire post, but what I mean is that it is never a good idea to force the process of writing — particularly when it is to someone or about something that is important. For example, I recently wrote a letter to a past acquaintance whom I have always felt intimidated by. I was extremely uncomfortable with communicating these thoughts and feelings until I had practiced basically 39 times… Finally, I was able to do it (enjoyably, might I add), to bring me to letter 40. The take away here is always leave room for compassion… if it is not the right time or place to write something down, don’t push it… it will come.
This one is a bit contradictory to this entire post, but what I mean is that it is never a good idea to force the process of writing — particularly when it is to someone or about something that is important. For example, I recently wrote a letter to a past acquaintance whom I have always felt intimidated by. I was extremely uncomfortable with communicating these thoughts and feelings until I had practiced basically 39 times… Finally, I was able to do it (enjoyably, might I add), to bring me to letter 40. The take away here is always leave room for compassion… if it is not the right time or place to write something down, don’t push it… it will come. Use the heart: Going off of all the previously stated points, be sure that the heart is included in whatever is written. I always try to include a sentence about how ‘I feel’, how something ‘made me feel’, or what I ‘hope to feel’. This way, there is emotion, love, and value put into whatever is being communicated. Additionally, others love to know the effect that they have had, and by integrating feeling into writing, there is a peeling back of layers. An opportunity to share the impact.
Without question, technology is still used as my main form of communication (… although it would be pretty funny if I just decided that the only way others could reach me was through the archaic act of handwritten letters… maybe I should get myself a carrier pigeon?). This being said, being able to connect with just five other individuals in a unique — and forgotten — way each month, is something I hold dearly close to my heart now. It is something that I will do far beyond my goal of 60.
It is something that provides me with the opportunity to share my heart on paper. How beautiful is that? | https://byrslf.co/the-beauty-of-a-hand-written-letter-cb14b7411ef7 | [] | 2021-08-10 19:40:41.995000+00:00 | ['Letters', 'Growth', 'Writing', 'Relationships', 'Beyourself'] |
Anti-Union Democrats | Anti-Union Democrats
“Democrats will forge a new social and economic contract with the American people — a contract that… guarantees the right to join or form a union” - 2020 Democratic Platform
The key to putting a stop to the growth of income inequality is turning around our country’s assault on membership in labor unions. “As union membership decreases, middle-class income shrinks,” as has been shown in the decades since Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers. Strong unionization not only promotes increased wages, for both union members and those who do not belong to a union, but helps to “promote political participation among all Americans”. Falling union participation has the opposite effect as corporations gain more power without adequate counterbalance.
The GOP has long been viewed as the party that supports Corporate America and promotes policies that put obstacles in the way of workers banding together to demand fair treatment. Long before corporations began shipping jobs overseas to save on labor costs, they were moving factories from northern states to red states with misnamed “right to work” laws that made unionization impossible. Corporate profits increased at the expense of worker wages and workplace safety.
Democrats are supposed to be the party that supports unions. The party has even dedicated a plank in their platform to support “the right to join or form a union”. Unfortunately, this value is not shared by those within the party who support the privatization of public education through the growth of charter schools. Most of these publicly funded private schools are fiercely anti-union even as they serve low socioeconomic areas that would benefit the most from the spread of unionism.
LAUSD Board Members Nick Melvoin, Monica Garcia, and Kelly Gonez
The seven seats on the LAUSD School Board are all held by Democrats but starting with their next meeting, the first loyalty of the majority of the members will be to the California Charter School Association (CCSA). This group has spent millions of dollars on school board races to ensure that the schools that they represent are not held accountable for their actions. This includes the union-busting actions of the chain of Alliance charter schools.
Teachers at some of the schools in the Alliance chain have been trying to organize for the past five years. In 2018, teachers at three of the schools filed to join United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). They were joined the next year by two additional schools. The charter chain has still not negotiated with the union, sparking charges of unfair labor practices.
According to teachers at these schools, Alliance has taken drastic actions to avoid dealing with UTLA including proceeding with plans to close down one of the schools that had voted to unionize. The chain also changed its structure so that instead of each school having a governing board, all of the schools are now represented by one board. When seeking approval for this change Alliance told the LAUSD Board that this change had nothing to do with its anti-union efforts. However, after the revision was authorized the chain argued before the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) that in order to be recognized, the union needed to get authorization for its teachers across all of the chain’s schools. PERB rejected the argument, but Alliance is now trying to appeal to the courts to have their decision overturned.
Alliance’s anti-union stand is harmful to the students that it serves. The animosity that is building with its employees threatens stability in the workforce that is necessary for a positive educational environment. It prevents teachers from having “a stake in decisions that are now being made solely by [the] administration.” This eliminates a voice that has the benefit of the experience of being “in the trenches…every day with students.”
Despite the blatant violation of the rights of their teachers to organize, the charters of several of the Alliance schools were renewed by the LAUSD Board last month. Only Jackie Goldberg stood up strongly against their practices telling them that “it is time for [you] to finally figure out how to deal with unions.”
In two years, Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez will face the voters as the charter school-backed majority tries to hold on to their seats. Progressive voters need to hold them accountable for their continued support of anti-union charter schools and the harm they do to neighborhoods that need the help that unionization brings. If Democrats really believe that all workers have “ the right to join or form a union,” then they must make sure that candidates who support anti-union practices do not run under the umbrella of their party.
________________________________
Carl Petersen is a parent, an advocate for students with special education needs, an elected member of the Northridge East Neighborhood Council, a member of the LAUSD’s CAC, and was a Green Party candidate in LAUSD’s District 2 School Board race. During the campaign, the Network for Public Education (NPE) Action endorsed him, and Dr. Diane Ravitch called him a “strong supporter of public schools.” For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own. | https://medium.com/political-sense/anti-union-democrats-2be8ea950206 | ['Carl J. Petersen'] | 2020-12-12 14:23:02.140000+00:00 | ['Labor Unions', 'Democrats', 'Charter Schools', 'Education', 'Education Reform'] |
Augmented Reality is the New Reality | The power of AR has met the power of marketing and together they might just be unstoppable…
Unless you have been living under a rock you have heard of VR, AI, and AR. While all three of these technologies are changing daily lives there is one in particular that has consumers and marketers alike extremely excited.
Augmented Reality refers to “a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.” While the technology has been in the making since the early 1990’s it gained much of its general industry popularity in the last 10 years.
Throughout the last decade, marketers have started to realize how powerful this technology truly is in influencing consumers. After Blippar developed the first AR game for Google Glasses, in 2014, many brands started to realize the unique advertising opportunities that awaited them. One of the first brands to successfully take advantage of AR technology in advertising was Pepsi.
Pepsi’s AR Bus Stop Ads in London
“In 2014, Pepsi installed AR technology in a London bus shelter, making it appear as if a lion, UFOs, flying saucers, and other objects were headed straight for Londoners.” Through their ads, Pepsi conveyed their fun and quirky personality to consumers. They gave consumers exactly what they wanted, a unique and sharable experience as opposed to just another ad. As Godin has said, companies need to “stop advertising and start innovating…[It’s time that they] sell feelings, status, and connection, not tasks or stuff.”
This Pepsi campaign was extremely successful, so much so that it became one of YouTube’s most-watched advertising campaigns of all time. The reason for this success and the reason that it increased brand loyalty and ultimately revenue was because Pepsi understood one crucial point that many markets at the time were missing. Pepsi internalized, as Godin says, that “people don’t want what you make. They want the way it will make them feel.” Pepsi understood that “the only way to be indispensable [in the lives of their consumers was] to be different.” They believed that “[their] job [wasn’t] to catch up to the status quo [but rather] to invent the status quo.”
As we can see from this campaign and the many others that have been developed since AR offers exciting new opportunities for marketers and consumers alike. This technology has given brands an opportunity to provide their customers with something they view as invaluable, experiences. If a brand successfully executes an AR marketing campaign, they could foster deep relationships with their customers that will in turn be invaluable to the brands.
Do you agree? Let me know in the comments below!
Best,
Rachel | https://medium.com/my-musings-on-marketing-management-and-strategy/augmented-reality-is-the-new-reality-5028aff597f | ['Rachel Green'] | 2020-12-07 01:20:37.220000+00:00 | ['Augmented Reality', 'Seth Godin', 'AR', 'Marketing', 'Pepsi'] |
Behind the Scenes of “New York, I Love You (2020)” | Introduction
This piece of work is inspired by the video “I Love New York,” created by Bardia Zeinali for Vogue, as well as my personal experience working as a location scout and producer for a number TV series and short films in New York in 2017 and 2018.
In the summer of 2017, I had a chance to work as an assistant location manager for a TV series called “For You” shot mainly in New York City. One challenge I found in production was the uncertainties involved in securing a location — the process of scouting, comparing, negotiating, and applying for a permit in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible was tricky, to say the least.
According to The Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting under the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME), most professional shooting would require a permit if equipment (anything more than a hand-held camera) is used and parking spots are requested. Although film permits data is made publicly available by the MOME since 2012, no location manager I know seems to be interested in discovering insights from it. This experience inspired me to explore and visualize the filming activities in the city.
In this project, I developed a scrollytelling narrative that tells the story of filmmaking in New York through essays, interactive data visualizations, images, and moving images. Using film permits data, archive photography and news articles, I aimed to create a data-informed narrative to help New Yorkers and visitors to learn something new and fun about the city. I imagine the audience to be average readers and film and television fans who are interested in casually learning about the film scene in New York, and I intend to show the project in a web environment on laptop, mobile, and tablet.
Related Work
While doing research on filmmaking in New York, I encountered two related projects using similar data. One is a map created by Max Galka and Steve Melendez at Metrocosm, titled “Filmed in NYC: Mapping Three Years of Film Permits.” Using film permits data from 2011 to 2013, totaling 517 movies and 17,241 locations, the map enables users to click a street to see a list of projects filmed there. The map is a great model with clear visuals and street-level details. However, with the dataset stopped in 2013 and the title of movies and TV series became anonymous, it is challenging to locate film shootings in New York without relying on crowdsourced tips. After realizing the difficulty in creating a movie-specific map, I decided to focus on the larger picture — using zip code-level data to explore the trends of filmmaking in the five boroughs in recent years, especially during the pandemic.
Another source of inspiration came from articles on several local sites including On The Set Of New York, On Location Tours, Travel + Leisure, and a few discussion threads on Reddit. I appreciate the organic observations, insights, and tips generated from enthusiastic New Yorkers all over the Internet.
Methodology
The data I used is from the Film Permits data published by the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) on NYC Open Data. Automatically updated on a daily basis, the dataset contains 65,545 individual permits issued from January 1st, 2012 to December 13th, 2020, the day I accessed the data.
After downloading the dataset, I cleaned the data in Excel by deleting unnecessary variables (ID, Country, EndDate) and repeating events (Rigging Permit). I conducted further research on event types by reading through permit requirements on the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) guidelines. I decided to include “Shooting Permit”, “DCAS Prep/Shoot/Wrap Permit” (productions in DCAS-managed special properties), and “Theater Load In and Load Outs Permit,” which include all types of productions from major feature films to television series, theatre shows, on-location news, commercials, music videos, documentaries, and student films. Lastly, I formatted time and zip codes before transporting the csv file to Tableau.
In Tableau, I first plotted some explorative visuals to see the number of productions per year, per borough, and per zip code-level area. This stage of research led to the three questions I decided to explore in this project:
Where do most film, TV productions, and shows happen in NYC? What is the seasonality like for the creative industry in NYC? How does the pandemic affect filmmaking in NYC in 2020?
After narrowing down the topic to these specific questions, I started to research the “why” behind my findings. I read through many essays about the creative industry in New York, as well as Covid-related city announcements and news articles. Two pieces of writing I found particularly helpful were a Deadline.com article on the scale of the 2020 production halt and a New York Times article about the recovery of filmmaking in November.
Design & Implementation
I decided early on that I want to create a data-informed narrative through a multimedia scrollytelling format. I further affirmed my choice after reading many stories that either present Covid-related data using charts in a rather dry and didactic manner, or touch on the topic with sentiments-filled writing without data and evidence. My goal is to combine the two parts — data and feelings — to develop a narrative that is both reliable and relatable.
Overall, my goal was to create visualizations that serve as a vehicle of clarification and truth. My primary considerations for the project are clarity and interactivity. Aesthetically, I wanted my visuals to be clear, modern, and cinematic. I am a fan of the visual stories and graphics at the Times and the interactive story on “Mapping the Whitney Biennial” served as a visual inspiration.
I used a bubble-chart-on-map and two line charts in Tableau to plot the three main visualizations. In the map, I used the size of the bubble to represent the number of productions in each zip code area. I chose the orange circles with white borders to make sure the bubbles pop up on a dark-themed map, and edited the transparency to achieve a more elegant and soft look. I added time as an additional layer of encoding through “pages” feature and selected mid-paced animated transitions to ensure a smooth user experience. Lastly, I highlighted key information like year and insights I came up with using annotations. For web-based presentation, I included the legend in the still version of the data viz using Illustrator to integrate the visual better. The finished map can be found here on my Tableau page.
For the line charts, I adopted a similar aesthetics and used a black-orange-grey color combination to highlight the data and insights. The chart on seasonality provides a comprehensive view of how many productions are made in each month of the year. With the charts embedded on the site, viewers are allowed to play around with the data with the maximum flexibility. It is my intention to ask the viewers to contemplate on the charts in full screen, zoom in and out, and maybe have a look at the data nearby, or even plan their visit accordingly.
The scrollytelling format was hosted on Shorthand, a digital platform that enables storytelling using interactive features without relying on sophisticated coding. I started creating my story after browsing several examples to get familiar with the product. “Background scrollmation” and “text over media” are two features I frequently use to build the flow of the story. I used the reveal feature to build suspense in my story and the transition was smooth. I had some difficulties embedding my vizs into the story through HTML codes, but thanks to Jason Aston, it turned out to work fine if the code is generated from the chart on Tableau Public (as opposed to Tableau Server.) The features on Shorthand are very intuitive and easy to navigate for people with limited coding experience.
Future Implications
The project tells the story of filmmaking in New York with a focus on the timely issue of Covid-related impact in a general sense. I’m pleased with the insights I gained from the data and the visualizations I created answered the questions I raised in the beginning.
Moving forward, one direction to extend is to analyze the New York film scene’s recovery process in 2021. As vaccines roll out in large scale and it starts to get warm in the spring, filming can hopefully resume faster in studios and gradually on the streets in New York. It’d be great to link the film permits dataset to my project so that it can automatically update daily.
Another aspect to improve is to develop more in-depth insights about the part on seasonality. Further research can be done regarding what are some possible reasons behind my observation that October is the most popular month for film and TV productions. Beyond the reason I mentioned about the picturesque nature of fall-time New York, it may also be related to post-production and distribution scheduling in the film industry. With cinema closed and theatrical windowing changing swiftly in 2020, it may be interesting to explore whether the seasonality in production carries on in 2021 and beyond.
References | https://medium.com/@xinranqi/the-making-of-new-york-i-love-you-2020-ec5f108d7ede | ['Xinran Qi'] | 2020-12-28 18:19:02.787000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'New York', 'Filmmaking', 'Tableau', 'Visual Storytelling'] |
Journal of Being | Fernando Pessoa Portrait
There is a despair that is most pressing against us. For we yearn to alleviate the human being and beings in this epoch but few can escape the realm of cognition that has swallowed us whole. Do I dare point with my finger the realms of possibility that lay before our thinking? It is not a concern of will or fate for me but the possibilities that are ignored, those landscapes of being that have always existed right before us.
We have encased ourselves in a direction, a frame, and false chains yet filled with desire to change, but we take action blindly before having soaked up existence and the words it desperately begs us to hear. A veil is before us and many after , but we are thrusted into existence falling victim to a mode of life that is deformed and degenerate. It is the great danger, the journey of the Odyssey. We were never home in this being, whatever this being maybe. I will perhaps, spend the rest of my life deconstructing this false given.
For this, I at least know, that the human being is not a given but an immense task that lays before us. The deconstruction is the journey of the great return. How else can I feel more at home in this existence? Perhaps, this “ lack of meaning” is the limitations of one mode of being. It is my believe that life is an ironic self correcting mystery that demands to be explored, though my own life may never be able to fully survey. However, this is not a despairing conclusion but a divine relief.
We must never presuppose a level of insight to alleviate the human being and I mean this in a static way. The insight itself must align with the pulsating features of existence, always changing and full of its own demands. To be able to distinguish the voice of every moment and live in its full measure is something only a laborious solitude can bring. I can at least abide by this measure of living.
I must not create conditions before me but let this Nature itself set the conditions. This is the sole beauty of solitude, to be in this mode where I can hear the conditions that are demanded upon me. It is here, where I find my holding and an immense love. If Being and beings are anything like love, we must spend an eternity in this meeting place. The fostering environment where knowing this Beloved is knowing myself. | https://medium.com/@javierrivera-96889/journal-of-being-84852cd07501 | ['Javier Rivera'] | 2021-06-01 13:01:44.184000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Love Yourself', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Journal', 'Life'] |
Introduction to Concurrency in iOS using Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) | Concurrency
Introduction to Concurrency in iOS using Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)
Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash
How do you execute multiple pieces of code at the same time? When beginning coding we are taught code that executes serially or one after the other in order.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re making a simple salad. Here are the ingredients:
lettuce
tomatoes
red onion
sweetcorn
tuna with sunflower oil
The process is simple: cut what needs cutting and mix it all.
addLettuce()
addTomatoes()
addRedOnion()
addSweetcorn()
addTuna()
mix()
This simple salad does not has a specific order in which to add the ingredients. If we had 5 people each one could do one task all 5 tasks could be performed at the same time (concurrently).
If each task took 1 minute to do on its own the salad would take 5 minutes to make. However if all tasks were done concurrently the salad would take only 1 minute to make.
So it’s clear learning how to do tasks concurrently is important to save us time. However there is one more reason more important as to why you should learn how to perform tasks concurrently on iOS than just saving time.
In this post I’ll teach why learning concurrency for iOS development is important. Then we’ll look at an example oh how to execute code concurrently on iOS. Finally we’ll explore concurrency in an app that will make our salad.
For this post I assume you are already familiar with the basics of iOS app development and Swift programming language.
For this post I have used Xcode 12.2.
Why learn concurrency on iOS?
In iOS your app user interface(the views the user interacts with) must always be responsive. That is the user must be always be able to interact with it. If a user taps on some button on the screen and nothing happens the user will assume the app is frozen. This is really bad user experience. Furthermore the iOS operating system will kill your app after a period of unresponsiveness. But what has responsiveness to do with concurrency?
Let’s go back to the salad example. Now say you are running a salad restaurant and you have no employees to help you out. You wait on the till until a customer arrives. The customer places an order for a salad and you make the salad.
When a customer visits your restaurant they will interact with you. You are the customer interface–or user interface in software–in the restaurant. That is how the customer interacts with your business. They talk to you. They make their order to you.
When you receive the order you go back and start making this order. Whilst you are making the salad a second customer arrives. However after seeing no one in the till and asking if anyone is around the customer leaves as there was no response. The business is unresponsive. The potential customer has a bad customer experience and decides to not return. This will kill your business.
Learning concurrency is like being able to employ other people–or workers–to perform tasks as and when needed in your restaurant. You’ll never have to leave the tille. You’ll always be available to the customer.
How to perform tasks concurrently on iOS?
In iOS we can perform multiple tasks concurrently using a framework called Dispatch–also known as Grand Central Dispatch and in short referred by its initials GCD.
GCD provides us with the tools to tell a worker–more specifically called queues–to perform specific tasks. There are many ways offered by Dispatch framework to manage workers. In this post we’ll cover only two of the most commonly used ways:
Creating an instance of a worker and tell it to perform the tasks Tell GCD the task to perform and let it decide to which worker to assign it to
1. Creating an instance of a worker and tell it to perform the tasks
A worker is known as a serial queue in GCD terms. These perform task first-in-first-out (FIFO). The worker or serial queue will not execute the following task until the task at hand is performed.
To create a worker:
let worker1 = DispatchQueue(label: "worker1")
Now we can tell the worker to perform a task. However we can tell the worker to the job and we can go each our own way(asynchronously) or we can wait for the worker to finish their task(synchronous). To tell it to do things:
func performTaskAsynchronous() {
worker1.async { // 1
// do something that takes 2 seconds
print("this will print after") // 3
}
print("this will print before") // 2
} func performTaskSynchronous() {
worker1.sync { // 1
// do something that takes 2 seconds
print("this will print before") // 2
}
print("this will print after") // 3
}
Notice in the example above performTaskSynchronous will only perform the statement after worker1.sync has finished. However performTaskAsynchronous will execute worker1.async and perform the next statement immediately without waiting for worker1 to finish its task.
We’ll be making use of async mainly in this post.
2. Tell GCD the task to perform and let it decide to which worker to assign it to
Let’s say again you are employing a worker for each ingredient. If you are managing your own workers you’ll need to add a new worker for each ingredient. Each worker is tied to one ingredient. No worker performs two task. Wouldn’t it be convenient if we could create a new worker and tell it to perform the task all in one call? Well the Dispatch framework already offers that by using function named global . Let’s look at how this works:
DispatchQueue.global(qos: DispatchQoS.QoSClass .userInitiated).async {
// do something
}
Note that we have to provide the function a quality of service value. This tells the framework how to prioritise the execution of the code. I won’t delve too much prioritisation. However do consider how important is the execution of the code to the user at this time. In this case the user is waiting for their salad to be produced at the request of the user, thus we provided the .userInitiated priority. | https://medium.com/@anuragajwani/introduction-to-concurrency-in-ios-using-grand-central-dispatch-gcd-8280b57a91ec | ['Anurag Ajwani'] | 2021-02-09 22:23:18.816000+00:00 | ['Dispatchqueue', 'iOS', 'Concurrency', 'Xcode', 'Swift'] |
How To Help Someone Who’s Having a Panic Attack, With Ryan Engelstad 🎧 | How To Help Someone Who’s Having a Panic Attack, With Ryan Engelstad 🎧
Photo by Ian on Unsplash
“I think people have a very natural inclination to say unhelpful things, but that’s only because they want the person to calm down. They want the person to relax. So then they fall into these bad habits of doing things to help them resolve their own anxiety, and not the person’s who is actually having a panic attack.”
As a therapist, Ryan Engelstad has worked with hundreds of people experiencing difficult emotional situations.
Guided by these experiences, Ryan learned that coaching the friends, families, and significant others of his patients on how to cope with panic attacks was more helpful than coaching only the patient. Why? Because loved ones often want to help, but don’t always know how.
Here, our host Matt East talks with Ryan about his article “How to Help Someone Who’s Having a Panic Attack”, what not to do in these situations, and how to encourage emotional stability with validation. | https://betterhumans.pub/how-to-help-someone-whos-having-a-panic-attack-with-ryan-engelstad-a0e61dd72ad | ['Meredith Rodriguez'] | 2021-03-22 17:53:13.393000+00:00 | ['Panic Attack', 'Better Humans Podcast', 'Helping Others', 'Podcast', 'Anxiety'] |
Best WordPress Hosting In Pakistan | Looking for the best web hosting in Pakistan to jump start your next project? In this article we will take a look at the Best Hosting Services in Pakistan. All of the providers also accept local payment gateways if you don’t have a credit card. Some of them also accept monthly payments so you don’t get locked in a hosting plan for years. Below are some of the best hosting providers in Pakistan: | https://medium.com/@swallux/best-wordpress-hosting-in-pakistan-a8a510126d34 | [] | 2020-12-24 20:52:14.020000+00:00 | ['Pakistan', 'Website', 'Web Development', 'Hosting', 'WordPress'] |
Quick Guide to Analyzing a Stock with Tableau | Quick Guide to Analyzing a Stock with Tableau
Learn a little about the stock market and Tableau at the same time!
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Are you learning how to Tableau? Tired of playing with the default super store data and want to try something a bit more practical? Try this quick guide to analyzing a stock, and see where it takes you!
Gather your Data
Go to Yahoo Finance and look up a stock. Really, any stock will do. Even better if it’s a stock you happen to own! Once on the stock’s summary page, go to the tab labeled historical data. Change the view to the desired time period (one year is the default). Click on the ‘Download Data’ link to download a CSV file.
Note that for the remainder of the example, I will be working with a CSV showing data for this stock during the following time period: January 20, 2019 — January 20, 2020.
Yahoo Finance Historical Data for ADIL
Prep your Data
Data prep is always the first step of bringing raw data into Tableau. In this case, our data is relatively clean and straightforward already. But just in case, we need to check.
To prep your data, open it in Excel or Google Sheets. Check it over for formatting. If you wish, change the title of any of the columns from the default. In these cases, we probably won’t change anything.
Raw data from our stock in Excel
Visualize your Data in Tableau
If needed, save any changes to the CSV file in Excel, and close it. Then, let’s get started with Tableau!
Open the CSV File in Tableau
Open Tableau Desktop. Under ‘Connect,’ look for ‘To a File’ and then select ‘More…’ Browse to the location of the CSV file and open it. Now we see the Tableau Data Source view. Click on the Sheet 1 tab to open the workbook view. Now we’re ready to start visualizing!
Notice the Data pane on the left side. Here, we have Dimensions and Measures. As this data contains mostly measurable numbers, such as open, close and adjusted close prices as well as volume, there are far more items under Measures.
Build the Workbook — Visualize the Daily Closing Price
Double-click the ‘Date’ dimension. This will automatically bring it to the Columns area of the workbook. Click and drag the ‘Adj Close’ measure to the Rows area of the workbook. Note that we’re using the Adjusted Close price rather than Closing price, because this is more accurate. Read more here if you want to learn why.
Now we have a basic line graph, showing us… what exactly? Definitely not what we’re looking for here. So, we need to break this down a bit more.
Notice the pill in the columns area labeled YEAR(Date)? It appeared when we double-clicked the Date dimension. This shows that we are currently only viewing the years in our data — 2019 and the first few weeks of 2020. Our visualization shows only that our stock’s price went down between 2019 and 2020. It’s also adding up ALL of the closing prices for the year, which again, is definitely not what we want.
This is because our date is currently discrete, meaning it is adding every adjusted close price for the entire respective year. Since we have about 49 weeks in 2019 and three weeks in 2020 in our example, of course the price is higher in 2019. Hover over the MONTH(Date) pill until you see a down-facing triangle on the right. Click the triangle to bring up a menu.
Notice that the menu shows two date options that appear identical, and the Year option is selected on the top one. Also notice that Discrete is selected. Side note, we can also tell that this dimension is discrete because the pill is blue. If it were green, it would be continuous. In the menu, select ‘Day’ from the second set of date options. Notice the pill is now green and the visualization looks like what we need! We’re now viewing a line graph showing the adjusted closing price by day for the entire date period on the CSV file.
Our first stock price visualization!
Format the Workbook
Let’s clean up a few things to make this thing look a bit more professional.
Format the Title
Double-click on the title of the workbook (currently ‘Sheet 1’). Change the name to something descriptive, such as “ADIL Closing Price” with a sub-title below with the date range. Play with the font sizes to give the title a bit more clout than the sub-title.
Formatting the Title of our Workbook
Format the Y-Axis
Next to the Y-axis (the vertical one), double-click the title ‘Adj Close.’ In the dialogue box, under Axis Titles, let’s go ahead and clear the title. Given that we’ve named the chart ADIL Closing Price, it should be intuitive that the Y-axis indicates the closing price. Close the dialogue box when done. Right-click (or control-click on Mac) anywhere on the Y-axis numbers and select ‘Format.’ Under ‘Scale,’ select the arrows next to ‘Numbers’ and select ‘Currency (Standard).’ Now our viewer knows for sure that this is the range of closing prices. While we’re in here, let’s go ahead and change ‘Ticks’ to ‘None.’
X-Axis Formatting
For X-axis (the horizontal one), we really don’t need a title because we know those are dates.
Double-click ‘Day of Date,’ and under ‘Axis Titles,’ simply delete the title.
Looking better already! But there’s one more thing we can do to make this look more professional — remove those grid lines! Go to Format > Workbook. Under the Format Workbook options that now appear on the left side, go to Lines and select the down-triangle next to Grid Lines. Change it from Automatic to Off.
Now we’re looking good!
But wait, there’s more we can add! Remember how our CSV file had a column showing volume? This is the number of shares traded during a given day. You can read more about trade volume here, but adding this makes this visualization look especially professional. We have two options here.
Add a Second Measure as a Color
This one is straight-forward. We want to change the color of the line in the graph to indicate the areas where trade volume was higher. Simply drag ‘Volume’ from the Measures area and drop it onto the ‘Color’ box under ‘Marks.’
Notice the line changed colors in some areas — the darker areas are where the stock saw higher trade volume. Can you correlate these to any major rises or fall in the stock price?
Add a Second Measure as a Dual-Axis
If you want to go a little more advanced and professional looking (of course you do), try this!
If needed, remove the measure color from the previous section by dragging the pill from Marks to the empty area below. (Dragging any pill to this area removes it from the workbook.) Drag ‘Volume’ from the Measures area all the way to the far-right of the workbook until it shows a vertical rectangle. Release it here.
Now we have a Y-axis on the left showing our closing stock price range, and a Y-axis on the right showing our volume range. Now, let’s format it a bit. Under ‘Marks’ you should now see three collapsable sections — All, SUM(Adj Close) and SUM(Volume). Expand the last one, SUM(Volume). Using the drop-down menu, change it from Line to Bar. Also under Marks > SUM(Volume), click the box labeled ‘Size’ and change it from ‘Fixed’ to ‘Manual.’ Let’s go ahead and change the title of the workbook so we can finish formatting the new Y-axis. Double-click the title, and change it to ADIL Closing Price and Volume. Click OK to exit the dialogue. Double-click on the Y-axis on the right side; delete the title. In the same dialogue, select the ‘Tick Marks’ tab. Change the ‘Major Tick Marks’ from ‘Automatic’ to ‘Fixed.’ Close the dialogue. One final bit of housekeeping — let’s get rid of the rest of the lines. Right-click (or command-click) on the Y-axis on the left and select ‘Format.’ At the top of the Format pane on the left, select the borders option (looks like a square window-pane). Under Row Divider > Pane, select none. Under Column Divider > Pane, select none. Close the format pane.
Hey, you’re almost a pro!
We’re not done yet! Want to tackle a basic intro to stock analyzation and research? Of course you do!
Research the Findings
Look at your workbook. See anything that stands out?
Annotate It!
Let’s start with two obvious points — the 52 week high, and the 52 week low. These should be easy to find in your workbook. You can even hold your cursor over the point and Tableau will tell you the date and price. Let’s annotate them as such.
Right-click (or command-click) on the high point and select Annotate > Point. Clear the dialogue of its defaults. Set the justification to left, and enter something to help us understand what happened here, like “52 Week High: $6.88, Feb. 1.”
Annotation Dialogue
Repeat these steps for the 52 week low. Then, do something similar for any major outliers in trade volume. In our example, we can see a major outlier on February 21st. Let’s also mark the other outlier later in the year on December 16th. Call these something like “Major Trade Volume: 5.5m., February 21.” Use the same format as the 52 week high and low.
Research It!
Now comes the really fun part — seeing if we can figure out why these events happened. Can you answer the following questions by looking up the investor relations page of the company? Hint: all publicly traded companies have this section on their website.
Why did the stock experience an all time high on February 1st?
Why did the stock experience an all time low on December 5th?
Why did the stock experience such a high trade volume on February 21st?
Why was there a random instance of high volume on December 16th?
When were the quarterly results announced? (annotate these dates when you find them)
On the company’s investor relations page, start with press releases. Your basic answers are usually here. In the case of the stock we’re using, we can find out that:
The CEO appeared on two news programs on February 1st, one of which was in the Bay Area…also known as an area full of venture capital and investors. Notice this correlates with high trade volume (almost 1.9m) on the same day.
On February 21st, the company released an $8m public offering in an effort to raise more money. This correlates with a massive jump in trade volume, but also sort of lines up with a downward spiral in the stock price, as this likely diluted the value.
Quarterly results were released on May 13th, August 13th and November 14th. None of these are correlated to any outstanding activity on the graph. However, such results often do correlate with a jump in volume and a rise or fall in price depending on how good or bad the news is.
Finally, on December 16th, the company announced the allowance of an additional patent, correlating to a larger trade volume and significant increase in closing price.
Conclusion
After annotating the important things you’ve found, check out what you might have! A pretty infographic, with a basic analyzation of the stock.
What you learned:
How to look up a stock on Yahoo Finance and download its one year historical data.
Check the data so you can ensure it is prepped for Tableau.
Import a CSV into Tableau.
Create a workbook with a line graph, and a dual axis line graph and bar chart.
Research and analyze the basic historical activity of a stock.
Final note: this is on Tableau Public if you want to download and play with it. Best of luck in your Tableau and stock market journey!
RELATED: Tableau Order of Operations and the Top N Filter | https://medium.com/swlh/quick-guide-to-analyzing-a-stock-with-tableau-b261a93134b4 | ['Alex Ashton'] | 2020-01-21 16:47:28.269000+00:00 | ['Tableau', 'Data Visualization', 'Stock Market', 'Analysis'] |
The Dumbest Moments of the Trump Presidency | The Dumbest Moments of the Trump Presidency
For five years, we kept a Google Doc of the most deeply idiotic episodes of this monumentally stupid era. Now it’s time to share our work with the world. Slate Dec 23, 2020·15 min read
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex Wong/Getty Images, Getty Images Plus, Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images, Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, Roy Rochlin/Getty Images, Amazon, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, and Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
By Henry Grabar and Ben Mathis-Lilley
The Donald Trump presidency ended, in a way, on Nov. 7. That was the day that media outlets called Pennsylvania, and thus the 2020 election, for Joe Biden. It was also the day that Trump tweeted his campaign would be holding a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, only to follow up with a clarifying tweet that he meant “Four Seasons Landscaping,” a business located on the outskirts of the city near an adult bookstore and a crematorium. Yes, the campaign later claimed there was a reason why they booked this particular venue. So, yes, we don’t know for sure that the campaign actually meant to hold its event, at which Rudy Giuliani made luridly dishonest and fantastical claims about voter fraud, at the Four Seasons Hotel, only to book the completely unrelated landscaping company by mistake. But we know.
When the story of this era is told many years from now, students and history enthusiasts will learn about Trump’s lies, corruption, self-enrichment, and abuse. What they may not grasp — and what even now is hard to comprehend — is just how stupid it was to live through. The president told the nation to inject bleach during a pandemic; his team altered the projected path of a hurricane on an official document, with a Sharpie, to help the president save face after an erroneous tweet. There were the dishwashers that had to be run 10 times. The blank pages that the White House pretended were important documents. A long, long time ago, Trump declared himself a “very stable genius.” By now, that phrase feels almost normal. But seriously: What?
For almost five years, we have been collecting such stories with quick notes to our future selves — notes that, when we looked through them last month after Trump lost his reelection bid, read less as presidential history than the diary of a lunatic. We had to go back and make sense of them all, matching our mad scribbles to events that actually happened in the real world. And now we bring them to you.
Critics sometimes alleged that the president’s bad tweets and Borscht Belt schtick were calculated distractions from his controversial policies and criminal personal conduct. We do not think that was the case with the following moments. They are the most absurd of the period’s tragicomic phenomena, the smallest dumb experiences of a big, dumb time to be alive. They are the most baffling pronouncements, grievances, and excuses of a president who never, ever did the homework — the deepest cuts of America’s mush-brain years. We share them here not so you may remember them, but so that you might — finally — feel free to forget just a little bit about the past four years.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex Wong/Getty Images, Getty Images Plus, and Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
“His idiot doctor”
Dec. 14, 2015: In December 2015, amid questions about what CNN described as Trump’s “self-avowed lack of an exercise routine and his indulging diet,” his campaign releases a statement from a doctor that purports to establish his physical bona fides. Despite Trump’s previous promise to release “a full medical report,” Dr. Harold Bornstein simply attests in a short letter that Trump’s lab work is “astonishingly excellent,” that his “physical strength” is “extraordinary,” and that Bornstein believes, “unequivocally,” that the candidate would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein, who looks like his picture goes next to the entry for “quack doctor” in the Big Book of Sitcom Character Tropes, later tells CNN that Trump dictated the letter. — BML
“George Papadopoulos listing a Model U.N. thing he may not even have actually done on his résumé”
March 21, 2016: With its candidate taking heat for having almost no familiarity with any subject related to the job of governing the United States, the Trump campaign releases a list of its alleged “foreign policy advisers,” including an individual named George Papadopoulos, to the Washington Post. The Post immediately notices that the top item in the “Honors and Awards” section of Papadopoulos’ LinkedIn page is a claim to have participated in a 2012 Model United Nations event in Geneva, i.e., a conference for college students. In 2017, after Papadopoulos is convicted of lying to federal agents investigating the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, the Post follows up and finds out that the organizers of the Geneva event have no record of Papadopoulos’ participation. — BML
“The British airplane sexual assault witness guy”
Oct. 14, 2016: Shortly after the publication of the Access Hollywood tape, the New York Times reports that a woman named Jessica Leeds says Trump groped her on an airplane in approximately 1980. The Trump campaign subsequently arranges for the New York Post to interview a British man named Anthony Gilberthorpe, who would have been about 18 at the time of the alleged assault. Gilberthorpe — who, in the years after this flight, said he went “trawling” the streets of Blackpool to hire underage boys for sex acts with Tory politicians — says he remembers being seated across the aisle from Trump and Leeds and that he recognizes Leeds in the news because he has a “photographic memory.” He claims to recall specifically that Trump did not do anything inappropriate to Leeds and says moreover that she was flirting with Trump and told fellow passengers, when Trump went to the bathroom, that she “wanted to marry him.” — BML
“Michigan Man of the Year”
Nov. 7, 2016: At a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump says that he was once named “Michigan Man of the Year,” a claim he goes on to repeat numerous times throughout his presidency. In 2019, CNN’s Daniel Dale reports that Trump may be referring to an invitation he received to give a speech in Michigan at something called the “Oakland County Lincoln Day Dinner” in 2013. No award was presented at the dinner. — BML
“Former professional golfer Bernhard Langer voter fraud”
Jan. 25, 2017: During a meeting with lawmakers, the newly inaugurated president says that German professional golfer Bernhard Langer was prevented from voting in 2016 because there was a long line of suspicious Latin American individuals ahead of him. Follow-up reporting reveals that Langer is not an American citizen and did not attempt to vote in the election at all; according to Langer, he heard a similar story from a friend and relayed it to someone who then told it to “a person with ties to the White House,” which would mean that Trump had been told the (obviously false) anecdote fifth-hand. — BML
“Frederick Douglass getting recognized”
Feb. 1, 2017: At remarks celebrating Black History Month, Trump ad-libs that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” The remark, and its present tense phrasing regarding a figure who died in 1895, has never been explained. — HG
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus and Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
“U.S. aircraft carrier that White House declared deterrent to North Korea sailing in opposite direction”
April 12, 2017: Fox Business broadcasts a recorded interview in which Trump tells the network’s Maria Bartiromo that the U.S. is “sending an armada” toward North Korea, a claim around which the administration builds a narrative about its tough, no-nonsense stance toward Kim Jong-un’s country. On April 13, NBC News reports that the U.S. is prepared for a preemptive strike on the isolated dictatorship. Two days later, however, the Navy posts a photo of the aircraft carrier and associated ships that purportedly make up the armada heading south through the Sunda Strait, 3,500 miles away from North Korea. Defense News reports that the ships, which never got anywhere near North Korea, are “taking part in scheduled exercises with Australian forces in the Indian Ocean.” Trump is subsequently swayed by Kim’s flattery campaign into essentially dropping all objections to the North Korean nuclear program. — HG
“Exercise depletes the body’s reserves of energy”
May 1, 2017: The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos reports that Trump “considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.” This echoes reporting by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, who wrote in a 2016 biography that Trump stopped working out after college and once told an employee that training for an Ironman race would kill him. Intuitive but obviously wrong, the Medieval-style “battery theory” foreshadows more consequential medical assertions that would later be made by the president about a specific kind of virus being no worse than the flu, disappearing in summer heat, and being vulnerable to the injection of bleach into the body. — HG
“Fake phone call from Boy Scouts”
Aug. 2, 2017: Trump tells the Wall Street Journal that a discursive, partisan speech he gave to a crowd of Boy Scouts at the organization’s national jamboree was, according to a call he received afterward from “the head of the Boy Scouts,” “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.” The Boy Scouts respond in a statement, “We are unaware of any such call.” — HG
“Local milk people”
Aug. 3, 2017: The Washington Post publishes a transcript of a phone call between Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Trump shortly after the latter became president. The conversation touched on an agreement Barack Obama had made to accept refugees detained by the Australian government, about whom Trump said: “I hate taking these people. I guarantee you they are bad. That is why they are in prison right now. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.” Speculation about the meaning of “local milk people” ultimately arrives at the fact that many refugees in the U.S. work on dairy farms. — BML
“Kept saying Thad Cochran was in the hospital when he wasn’t in the hospital”
Sept. 28, 2017: Trump says at least six times over the course of a day that Republicans would be able to pass a bill to eliminate the Affordable Care Act were it not for a senator who is in the hospital. White House reporters determine that Trump is referring to Sen. Thad Cochran, of Mississippi, who is recovering at his home (not a hospital) from a urological procedure — and who, crucially, would not have provided a winning vote for the repeal bill (which never passed), even if he had been present. — HG
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images, Getty Images Plus, and Amazon.
“Not sending the $25,000 check he promised to the father of a dead soldier until three months later when the Washington Post asked him about it”
Oct. 18, 2017: The Washington Post publishes an interview with the bereaved father of a deceased soldier who says Trump personally promised during a condolence call to send him a $25,000 check but never followed up or delivered any money. (The Post was looking into the subject because Trump was engaged in a public feud with a different bereaved family that had been offended by comments the president made in a different call.) The man subsequently receives a check dated Oct. 18, which was the day the Post contacted the White House about the story. — BML
“Fox tricks Trump into opposing his own FISA bill”
Jan. 11, 2018: Trump complains angrily on Twitter that the House is about to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA — a reauthorization that his administration has repeatedly endorsed. Forensic scrutiny by the watchdog group Media Matters reveals that shortly before the president’s tweet, the Fox & Friends morning show had run a segment critical of FISA for having allegedly been used to tap Trump’s phones during the Obama administration’s conspiracy to frame him for Russia-related crimes. Less than two hours after his original tweet, Trump sends a follow-up in which he pretends to have previously ordered changes to the bill to address his concerns and endorses its passage. — BML
“Telling the stock market it had made a mistake by declining”
Feb. 7 2018: LOL. — BML
“German dad (dad’s not German)”
July 12, 2018: Trump, in Europe for a NATO summit, says that his father was “from Germany,” a claim he goes on to reiterate at least twice more during his administration while in the presence of Europeans, at one point stating specifically that Fred Trump was “born in a very wonderful place in Germany.” As is well-established in the public record, Fred Trump was born in New York City. Fred Trump’s father was born in Germany — but this, too, is a subject that Donald Trump had lied about publicly, writing in The Art of the Deal that his father’s family was from Sweden in what was apparently an effort to keep the Trump name from being associated with Nazism. (Oops.) — HG
“Voter ID to buy cereal”
Aug. 31, 2018: At a rally in Tampa, Florida, Trump makes the case for voter ID laws by appealing to the ubiquitous use of photo IDs in American life and claims that “if you go out and buy groceries, you need a picture on a card — you need ID.” He would repeat the claim at least twice more. — HG
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, Getty Images Plus, and Getty Images Plus.
“Wettest from the standpoint of water”
Sept. 19, 2018: From the White House lawn, Trump delivers an analysis of Hurricane Florence, which killed dozens of people in the Carolinas, as “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” — HG
“Tim Apple”
March 6, 2019: At an American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting, the president calls Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple.” The year before, he had called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson “Marillyn Lockheed.” — HG
“Moon-mars”
June 7, 2019: Triggered by an innocuous rhetorical question about NASA posed by Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto, the president describes the planet Mars, on Twitter, as something “of which the Moon is a part,” by which he means that missions to the moon are to be used as preparation for a mission to Mars. He adds that he believes NASA should focus its efforts on subjects such as “science.” — BML
“Airports during the revolutionary war”
July 4, 2019: Trump celebrates the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by praising how George Washington’s Continental Army “took over airports” during the Revolutionary War. — HG
“Kidney has a special place in the heart”
July 10, 2019: Trump signs an executive order related to kidney disease and thanks an audience of nephrologists like so: “You’ve worked so hard on these things, you’ve worked so hard on the kidney. Very special. The kidney has a very special place in the heart. It’s an incredible thing.” — BML
“Windmills cause cancer”
Aug. 2, 2019: Trump says he has heard that the noise generated by windmills causes cancer. (There is no known, or even alleged, link between wind turbines and cancer.) — HG
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Drew Angerer/Getty Images, Joe Raedle/Getty Images, and Getty Images Plus.
“White House claiming they had to give G-7 to Doral because one of the other sites would have required oxygen masks”
Aug. 26, 2019: The White House announces that a nationwide search has determined that the G-7 international summit, which the U.S. was set to host in 2020, can be held most effectively at the Trump National Doral resort near Miami. Trump later explains that Doral stood out from other contenders because of its ample parking and because its ballrooms are “among the biggest in Florida.” Chief of staff Mick Mulvaney claims at a press conference that one of the other potential U.S. sites for the summit was situated at such a high altitude that participants may have had to use oxygen tanks to breathe (?). (The White House later backs down from the decision, and the summit is ultimately canceled because of COVID-19.) — HG
“Trump just said there are people in line for his rally and they are soaking wet”
Sept. 9, 2019: During what is ostensibly a discussion with reporters about hurricane refugees from the Bahamas, the president begins describing supporters of his who are allegedly already standing in line for an upcoming rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, going on at some length about how the supporters waiting in line are “soaking wet.” The weather in Fayetteville at the time is clear and sunny. — HG
“She’s got a son”
Sept. 11, 2019: In the Oval Office to promote an anti-vaping initiative, Trump explains first lady Melania Trump’s interest in the subject: “She’s got a son, together, that’s a beautiful young man, and she feels very very strongly about it.” The boy in question, Barron Trump, is also his son. — HG
“You know what the crime is”
May 11, 2020: During a right-wing revival of the 2017-era theory that Barack Obama helped frame several people in Trump’s orbit for having connections to the Russian government, the president refers to “Obamagate” on Twitter as “the biggest political crime in American history.” He subsequently has this exchange with Philip Rucker of the Washington Post at a press conference:
RUCKER: You appeared to accuse Obama of “the biggest political crime in American history, by far,” those were your words. What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing and do you think the Department of Justice should prosecute him? TRUMP: Uh, Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on and if you look at now all of this information that’s being released, and from what I understand that’s only the beginning. Some terrible things happened and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again, and you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the coming weeks. And I wish you’d write honestly about it, but unfortunately you choose not to do so. RUCKER: What is the crime exactly that you’re accusing him of? TRUMP: You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.
In summary: What’s the crime? “Obamagate.” — BML
“Making up that he was throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium because he was jealous of Fauci”
July 23, 2020: Hours before Dr. Anthony Fauci throws the ceremonial first pitch before the Washington Nationals game on MLB’s latest-ever opening day, Trump, in a fit of apparent jealousy, says that he has been asked to throw out the first pitch before an Aug. 15 Yankees–Red Sox game in the Bronx. After reporters determine that the Yankees have not made such an offer, Trump and his aides say that he will in fact be busy on the day in question with activities that have a “strong focus on the China virus.” He ultimately spends the weekend of the 15th at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. — HG
“A man who loves the interior”
Aug. 4, 2020: Trump introduces Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt by asserting that Bernhardt is “a man who loves the interior.” — HG
“Forest cities”
Sept. 29, 2020: Asked at his first debate with Joe Biden whether climate change was helping cause forest fires on the West Coast, Trump says the following: “In Europe, they live — they’re forest cities, they’re called forest cities. They maintain their forest. They manage their forest. I was with the head of a major country — it’s a forest city. He said, ‘Sir, we have trees that are far more, they ignite much easier than California. There shouldn’t be that problem.’ ” (During a previous outbreak of forest fire, the president had claimed Finnish President Sauli Niinistö told him that Finland prevents forest fires by raking the forest floor, something which Niinistö denies having said. It is possible, but not certain, that the comments derive from a belief that the real ecological concept of “forest management” involves sweeping and cleaning up in the way one might “manage” a real-estate property.) — BML
“Kiss them all”
Oct 12, 2020: One week removed from his hospital stay for COVID-19, the president pays tribute to Jim Morrison by telling a crowd in Florida he feels “so powerful” and wants to “kiss everyone in that audience.” Ha-ha, so goofy! And that was basically the last thing he said, and no one ever had to worry about him again. — HG | https://medium.com/slate/the-dumbest-moments-of-the-trump-presidency-44a9bdc5229b | [] | 2020-12-23 18:05:17.386000+00:00 | ['Trump Administration', 'Politics', 'United States', 'Donald Trump', 'Republican Party'] |
Internet Cats, Internet Llamas and Cultural Specificity on the Global Web | Internet Cats, Internet Llamas and Cultural Specificity on the Global Web
The web’s diversity expressed in a global map of animal memes
“A Global Perspective” on animal memes. The Civic Beat’s ongoing contribution to “How Cats Took Over the Internet” at the Museum of the Moving Image, curated by Jason Eppink. Photo by Negar Mottahedeh.
It’s been exciting days here for The Civic Beat: Jason Eppink’s terrific show, “How Cats Took Over the Internet,” opened at the Museum of the Moving Image. And as far as we can tell from the reviews so far, it’s been a hit. Here’s what The New York Times’s Jennifer A. Kingson had to say:
The exhibition — which may well be the first mainstream museum installation entirely dedicated to cats online — is made up mostly of images, videos and GIFs of cats and is meant to be a cultural deconstruction of their enduring popularity. The show takes a high-minded look at anthropomorphism and what it calls the “aesthetics of cuteness” as well as a low-brow wallow through cheesy trends — like the LOLcats who demand cheezburger — and bad puns, like Caturday, a fad that had people posting cat pictures on Saturdays.
One of the surprises of the show, as revealed in the review (I hope this isn’t a spoiler!) is that cats haven’t necessarily taken over the internet statistically — Jason found that cats and dogs tend to be shared in equal amounts. But as Carl Goodman, the Museum’s executive director noted, they are culturally significant, and that’s why the cats-on-the-internet phenomenon is worth thinking about critically in a museum.
And they’re also culturally situated. We’re excited and honored to have a global map of animal memes included in this show. The map reflects the hard work, ideation and research done by our map advisory team, which includes Jason Li, Ben Valentine, Ruth Miller and Matt Stempeck, and the many contributing researchers.
It’s been heartening to see reviews by writers at places like Vogue and Wired s who generally understand the themes we’re trying to communicate with the map and the research behind it — and that’s one of cultural specificity, which matters when we talk about the global web. The map hopes to show that he animals we find funny and cute and interesting to share on the web are culturally situated.
Sometimes it’s cats, sometimes it’s llamas, sometimes it’s goats; what we share online often reflects the conversations we have offline, and the relationships we foster with animals. And sometimes it’s no animals at all. Indeed, while memetic practice seems to be common in many corners of the web, the very act of sharing animal pictures on the web can itself be culturally situated. As we bring in more research from folks in different parts of the world, we hope to see more nuances and trends emerge. (The Museum has agreed to let the map grow over the course of the museum exhibition, which is great).
As one example, our map includes Negar Mottahedeh’s research from Iran, which suggests that animal memes are far from universal: the green chick is a cute animal, but animal memes make rare appearances in Iran’s web. Instead, Mottahedeh’s found that the color green has become a meme expressed in internet avatars and representing the opposition.
The more important meme in the above is the phrase that the chick is saying:
Three days after the election, a militia fired into a crowd of protesters, killing at least thirteen and injuring many more. The crowd raised the bodies of those murdered and broke into a chant: “Mikosham, Mikosham anke baradaram kosht ” (I will kill, I will kill, he who killed my brother). The recollection of this chant, which originated at an Iranian Revolution protest three decades earlier, sharply condemned the state’s betrayal of the Islamic Republic’s founding ethics of solidarity and radical kinship and its resolute stance against injustice.
Prof. Negar Mottahedeh in front of her entry at the global meme map. Photo courtesy Negar.
Cultural specificity matters when we talk about the global web. The fun and silliness of animal memes reveals a deeper point: just as different localities on the internet express cuteness/funniness about animals in very different ways, so too can internet cultures — and offline cultures —be very different from each other in many ways.
Misunderstandings, often rooted on shaky conceptions of foreign contexts, occur far too often in global reportage. Take, for instance, a few recent examples: #SomeoneTellCNN in Kenya — no, Kenya is not a hotbed of terror — , and the Taylor Swift non-controversy in China — no, the Chinese government isn’t freaking out about Taylor’s new album title. Stories like these happen frequently, especially when writing about global contexts.
And so, part of our hope with the map is to broaden the conversation. Talking about animal memes and just how different they are in different parts of the world is, I hope, a vehicle to saying, “Not every part of the world fits neat Western narratives about how things operate.”
The internet is super diverse — and interconnected in really surprising ways.
So many movements and so many people around the world are sharing cute, funny animals. But due to cultural, linguistic and technological barriers, these actions are largely invisible to each other: the ola k ase llama in Mexico (see video at the bottom of this post) probably hasn’t met the grass mud horse llama in China (see video just below this paragraph). The goats of the UK don’t seem to intermingle with the goats in Uganda. But by placing them on the same map, maybe we can spark more curiosity about how different corners of the web express themselves.
And when we talk about the “next billion” coming online, it’s important to understand just how diverse that next billion will be. They won’t necessarily be sharing cat videos, or any animal videos. As Wired writer Margaret Rhodes notes in her review, “As the demographics of the Internet change, so will its memes and fetishes.”
Arguably, that’s already happening, but there are still billions more people who do not participate fully in broadband, always-on internet (which doesn’t mean they’re not connected ; I’ve written recently about what connectivity looks like in other parts of the world).
We hope our map offers a small taste of that, and we’re thrilled to be a part of the larger exhibition.
More from us soon, including an open call for researchers to share their thoughts and perspectives on animal meme culture (or the lack thereof) in other parts of the world. There are many geographies not yet covered that we hope to include in the coming months, and we’re already in touch with a number of folks preparing their entries to this ongoing project.
For now, we have to thank Andrés Monroy-Hernandes (Mexico), Kate Miltner (United Kingdom), Peter Kakoma (Uganda), Mark Kaigwa and his fellow researchers Ramadhan “Ramzzy” Oluoch and Dennis Bett (Kenya), Negar Mottahedeh (Iran), Irteze Ubaid (Pakistan), Matt Stempeck (Russia) and Alex Leavitt (Japan), as well as our editor Dorothy Santos. And we especially have to thank “heroic curator” Jason Eppink and the Museum of the Moving Image for inviting us to participate. | https://medium.com/the-civic-beat/internet-cats-internet-llamas-and-cultural-specificity-on-the-global-web-a2245e9709f8 | ['An Xiao Mina'] | 2015-08-12 16:55:23.446000+00:00 | ['Internet', 'World', 'Memes'] |
iExec Project Update #02: EthCC/Tokensky — 07 March 2018 | Hello everyone,
This week’s project update will focus on the next big events we’ll be attending in France and South Korea, and share what has kept us busy these last days.
iExec is sponsoring the Ethereum Community Conference
EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) is a conference that will take place in Paris at the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) on the 8th to 10th March 2018.
iExec is proud to sponsor this event, which is one of the biggest in Europe. Many actors of the blockchain industry will be present at the conference, including the Ethereum Foundation, Ledger, ConsenSys, Shapeshift, uPort, Oraclize, or Melonport.
François Branciard, our Ethereum Developer, will conduct a livecoding workshop on day 1, from 11:30 to 12:30 AM. The goal of this workshop is to guide developers in deploying applications on the iExec network.
Julien Béranger and Wassim Bendella will present iExec on Saturday, at 3:30 PM. The speech’s goal is to reflect on what has been accomplished, what developers can already do with iExec, and outline the next steps on our journey.
iExec in South Korea
In order to discuss and study the tokenization trend, its impact and implications, the 2018 Tokensky Blockchain Conference will take place in Seoul, Republic of Korea, on March 14th-15th, 2018.
Part of the iExec team will attend this conference, and stay in Korea for a week to meet the local blockchain community, Ethereum developers, investment funds and exchanges.
Flash news of the week
Our developers are currently working full-steam on the release of V2, planned for May 2018.
This week, Gilles Fedak, Oleg Lodygensky and Lei Zhang visited the Technical University of Dresden to discuss Scone and SGX with Christof Fetzer and his team. If you want to learn more about iExec’s R&D program, feel free to read our Dev Letter 14.
You may now explore our calendar to find out the upcoming events, conferences and meetups we’ll be attending or organizing: https://iex.ec/events/
RLC token is now listed on Coinloan, a Korean exchange platform. That’s one more open market available for RLC, this time against KRW.
We’ve started a series of team member interviews. The first episode is already available and features our full-stack developer, Victor Bonhomme.
After being retained in the final pool of participating startups, iExec pitched at the Disrupt’Night in Paris in front of a jury of SMEs and global companies. The results of our participation will be known the 26th of March.
That’s it for this week’s Project Update, see you soon!
Stay in touch
iExec re-invents cloud computing by building a decentralized marketplace where everyone can monetize their applications, servers, and data-sets. Blockchains cannot support the kind of computational needs that many dapps will require, and this problem will only compound exponentially as more dapps release their working platforms and products. Blockchains need a solution that allows them to compute off-chain and bring only the results on-chain. iExec provides exactly that solution. | https://medium.com/iex-ec/iexec-project-update-02-ethcc-and-tokensky-07-march-2018-7b3332dce1c8 | ['Wassim Bendella'] | 2018-07-12 06:33:39.640000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Project Update', 'DevOps'] |
How I created an Analytical tool for LinkedIn using Google Sheets | How I created an Analytical tool for LinkedIn using Google Sheets Chaitanya Arora Follow May 11 · 4 min read
My Motivation!
So I started using LinkedIn a few days back and ever since I was fascinated by the knowledge-rich content people regularly post on this platform. Inspired by others, I started sharing my insights and knowledge through some posts that I thought others might benefit from. Being from an analytical background, I looked at the numbers, i.e. the amount of reach and engagement my posts got and soon I felt the need for an analytical tool. I searched a lot online but could not find any good solutions, most of them were paid and only for LinkedIn Pages. Thus I came to the task of building a basic tool to track views, likes, and comments on my posts!
So what came to my mind?
Being already accustomed to the world of scraping and web development, my first go to was to build a python script to scrape the required data and then deliver it to a web application to analyze it and show me the insights. But all this required a decent amount of time and knowledge to make a proper working application. As this was meant to be for personal use I chose to simplify my work and do something so that I can visualize the data easily and create insights without much coding.
The best tool that came up to my mind was something we all have been using from school that is Microsoft Excel or nowadays Google Sheets. My idea was simple, get the number of views, likes, and comments from my posts on a regular interval of time and then insert it into a new row. Once I have enough data, I can plot graphs between various columns and deduce inferences from it thus helping me to get a better understanding of my audience.
So what did I do?
To get the data into my Spreadsheet I considered exploiting the power of Google Apps Script’s integration with Sheets to interact with the outside world and append data onto new rows. Using a script, I got the numbers from LinkedIn and appended them to come up with the above sheet. Now applying my knowledge, I could use these numbers to make inferences and plot graphs to get a better understanding of my audience, based upon the data I plotted a timeline of views, likes, and comments on my post vs time.
Here, in this next graph, I can see that more than 50% of my views came in the first 5 hours between 10 am and 3 pm where my post acquired the initial boost to spread through the network. Also, I can see that the effect of the comments lasted for about an hour and brought in some more views.
But the most important inference I could get from the chart is that most of my viewers are active during the day around 1:00 PM and continue to use LinkedIn. This trend is unusual from what the internet suggests but as we all know the Global Pandemic we are facing right now could lead to this kind of behavior as most of my connections are young people who are still in college and tend to be free around this time.
So whats next?
I plan to use my script and gather more data until I can fully understand my audience as making inferences from just 1 post is kind of wrong as data is insufficient. Therefore, I believe if I keep analyzing my posts, one day I will be able to understand what my audience wants and can create the right content for them, thus making the best use of this platform for all of us.
So if you have any queries or suggestions, send me a connection request, mention in the comments, or drop a message. If you are interested in knowing how I fetched my data or about the script I used, do let me know!
Connect with me on LinkedIn for more awesome posts and updates.
Thanks. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/how-i-created-an-analytical-tool-for-linkedin-using-google-sheets-56aa2a5bcbf8 | ['Chaitanya Arora'] | 2020-05-25 16:07:58.490000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'LinkedIn', 'Growth Hacking', 'Analytics', 'Google Sheets'] |
Liberal Arts Blog — the Brain — What is the Most Important Thing for Every 8th Grader to Know? | Liberal Arts Blog — Wednesday is the Joy of Science, Engineering, and Technology Day
Today’s Topic — the Brain — what is the most important thing for every 8th grader to know?
Give it a shot. What comes to mind first? Seriously. Is there any more important subject than the human brain? What are the most important facts about it? It’s size, weight, function, location? Today, a few thoughts. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
WHY STUDENTS REMEMBER ALMOST NOTHING — Dendrites, Synapses, Axons
1. If the most important thing to learn in school is how to learn, the most important thing to know about the brain is how the brain does it. How does the brain create memories?
2. In a word, repetition. Repetition creates more dendrites, more synapses and bigger ones, and more layers of myelin along those axons. Use it or lose it.
3. In short, this is what I call the memory triangle — dendrites, synapses, axons. So what?
NB: The current impulse to “cover the material” in courses from history to biology and physics is that the basics are not learned. Textbooks are ten times too long. This impulse is allied with another — not to bore your students. Repetition is boring. Sorry. Repetition is the only way to learn. Third problem: the impulse to avoid the responsibility to make tough decisions — specifically the decision as to what to cut out of the curriculum to make room for the basics that need constant repeating. Yes, the key to learning not doing once or twice or three times. It’s doing is again, and again, and again…A guitar teacher once said that in Ireland the rule is you have to play a song 90X to really get it.
MORE PLUGS, MORE OUTLETS, THE HOLISTIC THING — Images, Words, Numbers
1. Dendrites and synapses are like plugs. Learning is all about connecting dots and making pathways. The more parts of the brain that are activated during learning the more powerful the memory network.
2. Every thing worth studying has a visual dimension, a quantitative dimension, and a tactile dimension. Math is everywhere and should be part of every subject taught — from music and art to sports and history. Ditto for drawing. Ditto for music — the best mnemonic tool ever.
3. Why are school walls so often blank when each square foot of wall is a teaching and learning opportunity? A chance for each teacher to display what they have decided matters most and how to teach it with numbers, images, and words. And a chance for every other member of the community to critically assess those decisions? What better way to curb the flight from accountability than a new tradition of school walls as learning machines?
NB: so what might one of those wall panels look like? Well, check out the final third of this post.
THE HIND BRAIN, THE MID-BRAIN, AND THE FORE BRAIN — the “Hand Model” (naming it to tame it — a teaching tool for home and school)
1. Remember the rule of three? No one can remember more than three things. This is not hocus pocus. Well, we have a “triune” brain. The fore brain, the midbrain and the hindbrain. From front to back or top to bottom we go from most primitive function to most advanced.
2. Dr. Dan Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School, has come up with an extremely useful three-part model for the brain. The fingers are the fore brain, the palm the hindbrain, and the thumb the limbic system. Think reason, emotions, unconscious (eg. breathing, heart rate).
3. To help elementary school, high school, college students or adults to gain better control of their own emotions, teach them to use their own bodies to remember what is really going on. The closed fist with the thumb tucked underneath the fingers represents balance, harmony, control. Losing it is when the fingers lose control — symbolized by the fingers pointing straight up.
NB: A beautiful model. Beautiful in its simplicity. Visual. Tactile. An incarnation of the basic Socratic injunction to “know yourself.” And of the other saying carved in stone at the Temple of Delphi: everything in moderation.
FINAL WORD: what are the best short videos on the brain that you have ever seen? Here are my three picks. Please share yours.
Dr Daniel Siegel presenting a Hand Model of the Brain
Bozeman Science Video — 17 things to remember:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMKc8nfPATI
Alternative “hand model” — using both hands!
How to learn major parts of the brain quickly
A LINK TO THE LAST THREE YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED BY THEME
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to science, engineering, or technology. Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to science and engineering.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought. | https://medium.com/@john-muresianu/liberal-arts-blog-the-brain-what-is-the-most-important-thing-for-every-8th-grader-to-know-1687774e0e1b | ['John Muresianu'] | 2020-12-09 13:57:22.716000+00:00 | ['Phisiology', 'Education', 'Liberal Arts Blog', 'Brain', 'Biology'] |
Investing in Mobile Gaming — Sources of Investment | 1.Friends & Family
In any new venture regardless of the industry, people will ask for small funding from friends and family in order to kick off their business. Ιt might be surprising but family and friends invest the most money in new ventures in aggressive ways, investing more than $60BB per year. 4/10 of startup founders stated that they have acquired funding from family and friends. Definitely, this group of investors shows higher levels of trust and patience compared to the professional investors but still, you need to keep them in the loop for the progress, milestones, and achievements of your product regularly.
2. Crowdfunding
Another typical way for attracting investment for your games are Crowdfunding platforms. Through crowdfunding, you could raise a smaller monetary amount from a larger number of people. For example, raising $5,000 from 500 people. Besides the known crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, there are available in the market some crowdfunding platforms specifically for the mobile games space.
Gambitious is a crowdfunding platform based in Amsterdam which supports the reward-donation model, similar to Kickstarter. It is an all-or-nothing crowdfunding platform where game developers can raise up to $2M in funding . Equity investors can commit as little as 20 euros per share.
is a crowdfunding platform based in Amsterdam which supports the reward-donation model, similar to Kickstarter. It is an all-or-nothing crowdfunding platform where game developers can raise up to . Equity investors can commit as little as 20 euros per share. LookAtMyGame is based in France which takes 30% of the total LAMG net profit generated by the commercial activities of the game.
is based in France which takes 30% of the total LAMG net profit generated by the commercial activities of the game. Pozible : is an Australian crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter where game developers can crowdfund their idea under the games category and offer rewards depending on the amount backers decide to pledge.
is an Australian crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter where game developers can crowdfund their idea under the games category and offer rewards depending on the amount backers decide to pledge. Gamesplanet Lab: This platform has a strict application review process that weeds out low-quality proposals. Moreover, it has a strict follow-through contract and plays an important consulting role in management and strategy planning for future fundraising campaigns.
3. Ιnverstors
Compared to the previous methods of acquiring funds, attracting funds from bigger investors can get you more money on the table however it’s a more complicated and time-consuming process. On the other hand, mobile game investors are looking for talented game developers who are willing to take a step further, invest in their product, and make the necessary sacrifices
The question here is on how someone can find & attract an investor. Below some tips are presented on doing this. In general, there are two alternatives: government investment funds and private investment funds.
Government Investment Funds
Government Investment Funds can vary depending on where you are located, amount looking to raise different application procedures, etc. A prominent example of a government investment fund is the UK Games Fund run by the UK Department for International Trade. The UK Games Fund offers grants up to £25,000 to games development businesses that are just starting operation up or haven’t been around for a long time. It’s designed for companies looking to build prototype games, and to support those wishing to launch new concepts.
Private Investment Funds
Game investors have become an established dedicated category within the investment market and have offered an adequate amount of capital in the last few years. Some notable examples in the industry include The $90 million invest of Tencent in PocketGems and $126 million in Glu Mobile (for a 14.6% stake), Supercell invested $5 million in the Redemption Games studio and Ubisoft acquired a 70% stake in Green Panda Games in order to enhance its presence in the hyper-casual vertical. Moreover, the mobile games industry has caught the attention of private equity investors who have never invested in this sector. In 2018, Goldman Sachs’ invested $200 million in French mobile game studio Voodoo to speed-up its global growth. Those investors usually look for innovative game concepts and the potential of some game studios in bigger markets.
Establishing a game studio that can create successful titles in the market could be definitely challenging. Attracting funds to support the development and marketing of the studio it’s also important for its growth and sustainability. Attracting funds to support the development and marketing of the studio it’s also important for its growth and sustainability. This article trie to make an overview of the different options available for a game publisher for acquiring funds to support their business. | https://medium.com/@dimipriftis9/investing-in-mobile-gaming-sources-of-investment-5abf622a0653 | ['Dimitris Priftis'] | 2020-11-23 08:42:25.260000+00:00 | ['Kickstarter', 'Investing', 'Mobile Games', 'Investment', 'Funding'] |
HAVE YOU EVER LEARNED FROM YOUR PAST MISTAKES(PART I) | The word, learning, is the most significant term of notable signs of progress. Many prior errors and omission is the experience necessary to create the next steps of maturation. The positive reinforcement of such a set of conditions can actually make one feel good or better. However, the critical element in such a state of affairs occurs only if a brain can apply and genuinely grasp what is being taught. The expectation of negative outcomes directly related to a corresponding punishment or risk becomes a subconscious realization. The reward of pleasure becomes the direct contradiction of knowledge extracted from that awareness of insight.
Mr. John Maxwell, an author, speaker, and pastor specifically directing his field of expertise on leadership, has addressed this crucial responsibility and task. Some of his most well works include The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader. He makes a very powerful statement about this process when he states, “You must be big enough to admit your mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.” This three (3) step way of thinking and being encompasses the admission of fault, the studying of it, and then the inspired action of correction and adjustment. The easy way of doing this has been shown through statements like “If you think I was wrong, I apologize”. Another term used as an informal representation would be “My bad”. Although these ways of expression are not a true representation of what it means to provide a heart felt and genuine thought of forgiveness, it has been the excuse to quickly avoid the deep impact that should resonate not only the admission of guilt but also change.
Click below link to receive complimentary printable from initial purchase of CCEL Art & Design Store by sending contact name, email address, and contact number to [email protected]
https://www.etsy.com/shop/CCELART | https://medium.com/@mjabizgrowth/have-you-ever-learned-from-your-past-mistakes-part-i-936d7802121a | ['Marcus Austin'] | 2020-02-20 16:47:33.848000+00:00 | ['Leadership Development', 'Lessons Learned', 'Leadership', 'Mistakes', 'Past'] |
Integrating SiriKit Payment Intents into your App | Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash
Intro
I always thought making an iOS app interact with a virtual assistant such as Siri would be an uphill struggle. I was surprised to learn it is actually quite an easy task. Ever since iOS 12, SiriKit has been evolving in order to provide users cool new ways of interacting with their apps without even needing to open the phone. Enabling developers to potentialize functionalities with voice recognition and pre-set commands, increasing our app frequency of use and encouraging user retention.
SiriKit offers a variety of categories of recognizable commands, such as; sending messages, handling lists, notes, performing payments, booking a reservation and way more. These are called SiriKit Domains.
In this post, we are going to focus on payment intents and how to integrate them into your app. After reading this tutorial we are going to be familiarized with:
INSendPaymentIntent
INRequestPaymentIntent
Let's get started
In order to support Siri interactions, we need to configure our project, here is what we will go through:
1-. Enable Siri extension
2-. Add required frameworks
3-. Set Info.plist actions
4-. Add extension target
5-. Set Siri target capabilities
1-. Enable Siri extension
On your Xcode project select the main target and go to Signing & Capabilities. Then, click on the + icon to add the Siri capability. Note: A paid developer account is required in order to access this capability. Otherwise you won't see it listed.
2-. Add required frameworks
Go to the General tab and click on the + icon under Linked Frameworks and Libraries list. Add Intents.frameworks
3-. Set Info.plist actions
Under your Custom iOS Target Properties, add Privacy — Siri Usage Description with a value that explains the Siri integration purpose.
4-. Add extension target
Because intents are handled outside of the main app target, we need to create a new Intents Extension target. Go to File > New > Target and select Intent Extension. Allow it to be added to the scheme.
5-. Set Siri target capabilities
Once the Siri target is created correctly, you need to add both INRequestPaymentIntent and INSendPaymentIntent to its brand new Info.plist.
It’s all set! Now we are ready to start implementing our payment extensions. YAY!
Intents Extension
The out of the box intent extension target that we just created comes with a single class called IntentHandler . Because each of our intents requires its own specific handler, we are going to extend the IntentHandler as INSendPaymentIntentHandling and INRequestPaymentIntentHandling .
Intents lifecycle consists of three phases: resolve, confirm and handle.
Resolve
During the resolution phase, we need to validate the individual parameters of our intents and ask SiriKit for clarifications as needed. When dealing with payments there are five main parameters we might be interested in resolving before handling the intent: payee, payer, note, currency, amount.
Do we want the user to always include a note when sending or requesting a payment? Is currency limited to USD? This is the stage when Siri is meant to help you define your required parameters. | https://medium.com/yellowme/integrating-sirikit-payment-intents-into-your-app-59cb0e91f1cb | ['Isis Ramirez'] | 2019-12-04 03:25:21.193000+00:00 | ['Payments', 'Swift', 'Siri', 'Development', 'iOS'] |
What the F*ck does being a Teenager Mean? By Mimi, chapter two | Hello I’m Back!
So now I’m going to complain about parents.
Dear Mom, Why the hell do you criticize everything I do?
Dear Dad, WOAH! Yes I did come out of my bedroom for the first time in forever, now I am going back into my room because I am embarrassed you pointed it out.
*I would never say this to either of my parents because they would beat my ass*
Why do parents always have to point out something random. Like my mother always asks my why I’m wearing a tang top and sweats. Like she feels like that is “kind of revealing” and don’t even get me started on when I want to be wearing just my bra and a pare of shorts when I want to be cool and comfy. Oh god she asks so many questions.
“are you taking pictures of yourself in those?” “are you sending those pictures to boys?” “why are you wearing that around the house?”
I don’t know if anyone informed you dearest mother, but women are not expected to dress for men anymore. (and vise versa for men dressing for women) I mean yes I am taking cute pictures of me and sending them to friends (she doesn’t have to know what though) but not to be sexy (sometimes yeah) or to be inappropriate, but because I like what clothes I have. It’s proven that if you wear clothes you like and if you dress up you’re way more likely to succeed in anything/everything. So If I want to wear a bra and underwear in my room by myself while everyone else is doing their own things I should be able to. Same with guys, they come out of their room without a shirt on and they get bombarded with questions. Now if the parents are for some reason uncomfortable with what their kid wears around them (same with siblings) then you can always change clothes before you leave your room (what I do a lot)
While were on the subject, privacy. Our bedrooms, our sanctuary. I think that growing up the most important place for me was my bedroom. Weather it was a small apartment room, a shared room with one of my siblings, or my own room all by myself, I needed to have a nice space I had personalized. It makes me feel more Intune with myself. I have lots of plants, books, journals. A table like piece of furniture to separate have the room. I personally try to make my room look like a small one bedroom New York studio apartment as much as possible in hopes that I will one day live like that. If you cannot do anything permanent then just do very simple things, maybe go for that minimalistic look if you’re not someone who can spend much money on bedroom items. Parents really like to not give you space, they look through your phone, your bedroom, your diary. EVERYTHING. My mom sometimes does random phone checks. Like I do not want you snooping around my phone… what If I left porn on it or something, (kidding) (kind of)what if I wanted to have a private conversation with someone? As young adults we should be learning how to talk to people when we need help, not being forced to. I try to understand that parents want to protect their children but very soon they are going to be on their own. Let them fuck up while they are still minors. Let them experience things. Now in no way am I saying completely neglect your child. I’m simply asking to loosen the reigns. Thanks to my overbearing helicopter mother I am the sneakiest little bitch on this planet. I’ve gotten caught once and I blamed it on my insecurities and hormonal curiosity. I feel like having those overbearing/strict parents can cause more harm to your child. Just basic space is all. Parents would not like it if we went snooping through their phones. I bet they have dirt to hide too. (even if it is just Christmas gift ideas)
That's All I have for tonight ladies, gents, non-binaries, neo pronouns and everyone else I have not said good night too.
XOXO, Mimi ❤ | https://medium.com/@hiimmimiii/what-the-f-ck-does-being-a-teenager-mean-by-mimi-chapter-two-b6ff112538a4 | [] | 2020-12-19 08:08:40.848000+00:00 | ['Teenagers', 'Helicopter Parents', 'Growing Up', 'Covid Diaries', 'Teenage Problems'] |
5 Ideas on a New Approach to Client/Agency Relationships | The client/agency relationship and business model are changing as each grapple with the best way to support rapid innovation in a digital age. Just as CMOs are being held more accountable for the business strategy and creating a complete customer experience, agencies are finding themselves tackling difficult assignments that require deep collaboration, total transparency, and often an unclear idea what the final deliverable should be. One thing is clear: the old (and some current) ways of doing things just aren’t working and a new path is something clients and agencies need to forge together.
At RedSwan5, our unique approach is working and we offer our insights into what is working.
1. Rethink the Discovery Process
Your client’s problems will not be solved by a single creative marketing campaign or a new website. Organizations face complex business problems that must be understood to make a true impact on the business. It is important to investigate internal issues that have hurt the client in the past and to have insight into how your work will contribute revenue or impact operations.
According to Leslie Collins, Executive Director of DiscoverE.org, “An open dialogue at the very beginning of the assignment about how we get in our own way allowed us to acknowledge when it happened — and course correct when we needed to.”
At the start, both clients and agencies should know:
What internal processes will get in the way
Who should really be part of decisions
How the data might be collected and used
What they wish would have happened when they’d done this in the past
If everyone will be okay if the assignment changes based on what is collectively learned in the discovery phase
2. Embrace the Iterative Design Process
Forget counting revision cycles and restricting feedback — a better model allows for collaboration around an objective that is tied to a timeframe. With the objective clearly established, design decisions can be prioritized based on how well they fit the objective. If they do not, they can fall lower on the list or could be addressed in subsequent work.
In order to successfully embrace this process both client and agency must agree to:
Remain focused on the agreed objective
Start with prioritized requirements that tic and tie to objective
Prioritize design ideas and functionality based on requirements
Limit the time frame so work can be managed and delivered
Address related items later if they do not directly support the objective
3. Get to the MVP (minimum viable product) or Prototype Fast
Gathering feedback from potential early users is the best and fastest way to test beliefs and requirements. An MVP is also a way to screen for user experiences that may be based on potential client bias. Real users clicking through actual designs that demonstrate the user flow teaches both the agency and client what customers are willing to pay for.
“It is more productive and far more gratifying to be collaborating with all the right people in the room focused on a single objective, without worrying about getting it perfect right out of the gate.”
– Darryl Settles, Catalyst Ventures Development
Before finalizing design or spending big on development, use click-through prototype tools like Invision, Optimal Workshop, JustInMind or even a presentation application with links to verify your assumptions.
The tools can be used to:
Gain valuable market intelligence
Tease out the real competitive differentiator
Attain additional funding and support
Prove the concept
4. Remember: Change (of Scope) is a Good Thing
It used to be that a change of scope was a sign of things gone wrong. In today’s world, it is a sign of a growing relationship. RFPs or scopes of work (SOW) written before the collaborative thinking and discovery (steps 1 through 3 above) will never fully capture what ultimately needs to be delivered.
There will be a more refined project plan based on the discovery phase findings and results of user testing and feedback. It may be a more elaborate scope of work or, in some cases, a fundamentally different project altogether. In fact, it could even mean to not pursue the project at all — a shiver-inducing prospect for many agencies.
“As part of the branding process, you reach several forks in the road where you need to select the right path. Sometimes, the best decision is to not move forward — or go in a completely different direction. It takes the right agency relationship and very competent people to choose it.”
– Andrew Boyd, former CMO, Dimensional Insight
The truth of the matter is that what is best for the client and their customers is best for the agency. If the scope is bigger, smaller, different, difficult, uncomfortable, exciting or, simply out of your wheelhouse, it is an opportunity for both the agency and client to continue to build a relationship based on trust.
Often this re-scope will:
Build a foundation for a long-term relationship
Lead to a larger project
Support new partnerships or extend the service offering
5. Propose Alternative Budgeting and Payments
Introducing new models of collaborative, iterative cycles means that controlling costs can be very hard for both agencies and clients. Restricting hours in the discovery phase can end up costing far more in development when a feature is more difficult than originally thought.
Budgets and pricing models can be adapted to the work effort. It is perfectly acceptable to have different models for each phase of the project. The most important issue is to discuss pricing and payment plans based on what is required for each phase — and acknowledge that one size or price does not fit all — and mixing the models for different phases of the engagement is actually appropriate. For example, discovery phase might use a consulting model while development is a fixed cost.
For the agency and client relationship to improve, both sides must be open to a better way of working together. This relationship needs to be based on a stronger connection, transparency, and trust. It is imperative that agencies understand the client’s full business problems and are able to listen to and embrace the internal client hurdles while focusing on developing an external solution. It is important for clients to keep agencies continuously involved on the front line of the business where (if you are doing it right) the real magic happens. | https://medium.com/@kim_donlan/5-ideas-on-a-new-approach-to-client-agency-relationships-97022100dcf8 | ['Kim Donlan'] | 2016-11-14 22:13:59.588000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Agencylife', 'Digital Marketing Agency'] |
Ideals Are a Luxury | Designed by www.Vecteezy.com
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggests that, in order for an individual to be motivated to achieve higher needs, their lower needs must be met first. That is to say that if a person does not have their most basic needs being met (food, water, air, sleep), they are not going to be concerning themselves much with higher needs, such as friends or status. It is hard to argue with the truth of this premise — after all if you were having trouble breathing, an idea such as being popular would become remarkably trivial.
The next level above these physiological needs is safety, such as employment, health, resources and property. After that is love and belonging, then esteem, followed lastly by self-actualization.
Carl Jung similarly suggests that during our young adult lives our minds are consumed by survival as we establish ourselves in our careers, build homes for ourselves and raise our children. It isn’t until later in life that our minds become free from preoccupation with survival and we are able to shift to higher levels of thinking. Depending upon a person’s individual circumstances this will be more or less true, but the idea remains the same that higher thinking must always come after survival.
Image by Marcel Langthim from Pixabay
Our survival instincts are remarkably strong. When our survival is threatened, all other things cease to be important. (Take adrenaline for instance — when your adrenaline kicks in, it literally begins to alter your body’s functioning, redistributing blood, modifying the metabolism, and changing your vision.) A parent will understand how this instinct extends to protecting our offspring, bringing out the “mama bear” if our children’s well-being or safety is threatened.
In the United States, one of the richest countries in the world with relatively low unemployment rates, we don’t give too much thought to the idea of “survival.” When we think of those struggling to survive, we tend to think beyond our borders to third-world countries that lack clean water and proper medical care. However, I believe that this hyperbolic view of survival prevents us from seeing the valid struggles of those at home, and therefore prevents us from properly understanding the perspective of some of our own.
The struggles for many Americans are real. Last year fatherly.com put together this map of household incomes needed to buy an “average” home in each state. You need to pull in a whopping $100,200 per year in Colorado, where the median household income that same year was $65,458. In New York you need to make $91,720, while the median income lags behind at $62,765. Montana requires $75,520, where the median income is $50,801, and Florida requires $70,360 where the average income is $50,883.
This is a similar map showing monthly income requirements for rent, where Coloradans fall short by $742 per month, New Yorkers a painful $1,993, and Floridians $1,003.
When you’re struggling to meet the basic physiological needs of your family (providing them with food and shelter in a safe environment), this struggle takes precedence over all else. A single mother working full-time, caring for three children by herself, and struggling to pay the bills is going to give precious little thought to the social issues going on in another corner of the country as she falls, exhausted and stressed, into bed. A family with two working parents, perhaps one or both of them working more than one job but still barely able to make ends meet, will lie awake at night wondering how they will manage to afford some type of childcare over the summer, not thinking about the injustices faced by people they’ve never even met.
This article on vox.com explains how, by-and-large, people’s ideals do not necessarily match their political preferences. (In other words, many people who are Republican are not conservative, and many Democrats aren’t liberal.) It is really only in the upper echelon that we see this type of ideological/political matchup, and the further we get from the elite, the more skewed things get. Is this because the elite class is so much better, so much less hypocritical?
I don’t think so. I believe it is because the elite class has the luxury of time and mental energy to curate their beliefs. When you aren’t struggling to survive, when you aren’t using up your physical and mental energy on it, you can dedicate that energy to higher thinking, such as what you believe and why. When you’re making it, when you have excess beyond just “making it,” you have space in your life and your mind for empathy and ideals, for thinking beyond simply taking care of yourself and your family. You can dedicate your time to following politics, geopolitics, and to fact-checking. You can think deeply when you aren’t preoccupied with thoughts of how you’re going to pay for groceries or car repairs with no money in the bank.
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
When you’re on a budget, you look for quantity over quality, for the best deal rather than the best thing. You might be a very big-hearted and conscientious person, but you don’t blow your whole budget on fair-trade organic bananas that won’t get your family through the week, banana farmers be damned. You also don’t carefully hand select each item when you can get a killer package deal — buy these five items for half the cost of buying any five items separately will always win when you’re strapped.
This “buy in bulk” philosophy not only translates to politics, it is politics. A candidate or a party looks like a good deal (for whatever reason), and so you buy in. But you can’t fuss over each issue a la carte, it’s a package deal.
We make extremely harsh judgements against those whose politics and beliefs we disagree with, going as far as to wish them dead. What we’re missing when we make these judgements is that their politics and religious views may very well tell us nothing at all about what kind of people they are. A person whose politics we find deplorable may, in their personal life, embody many of the values we hold so dear.
It just may be that some people are too busy working, taking care of their families, and even helping others in their community, to have time to cultivate cohesive, well-considered beliefs. They may just have to swipe something off the shelf and get back to the daily grind. Should we disparage them for this? When we do, it may be time to stop sitting around formulating so many ideals and start looking at what it looks like to live them. | https://sarakarnoscak.medium.com/ideals-are-a-luxury-f9de1cd766c5 | ['Sara Karnoscak'] | 2019-05-20 21:31:10.098000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Morality', 'Psychology', 'Ideals', 'Survival'] |
The 3 stories that every entrepreneur should know how to tell | Stories for entrepreneurs that all of us who have a business should know how to tell. There are many occasions in which we must present ourselves. They will ask us who we are, what we do and why we do it. Tell me, do you identify with any of the following phrases?
They are going to interview me and I don’t know what to say …
I give a lecture and I don’t know how to introduce myself …
I would like to draw attention when I enter a new Facebook group …
I have to fill out the “About me” page on my website and I don’t know where to start …
I don’t know what I can say about myself in just 30 seconds …
When they ask me what I do, I don’t know what to say …
You need to prepare your story! You must know well what key messages you want to communicate to be able to do it in these and many other different situations. If you know who you are, what you do and what motivates you, you can express it in 30 minutes, in 30 seconds, in 1000 words or in 100 words.
The 3 basic stories for entrepreneurs
There are three fundamental stories that you should know about yourself if you want to deepen your Storytelling. The goal should always be to effectively communicate the key messages of your business.
1- If, for example, you do jewelry design, you may want to convey elegance and sophistication.
2- On the other hand, if you dedicate yourself to handmade, perhaps your message is the exclusivity of your products (each and every one is unique!).
3- If baking is your thing, you probably want to talk about the quality of the ingredients, their flavor, and so on.
This type of message can be communicated through the three stories for entrepreneurs that we are going to see below. In this way, when they ask you what you do or have to explain it in a group on Facebook or similar, you will be selling yourself and persuading them to buy from you, in addition to knowing you.
I will tell you who I am
The first of these stories for entrepreneurs is the answer to the question Who are you?
When they ask us who we are or ask us to introduce ourselves, at an event or in a group, we tend to answer what we do. However, few of us really say who we are. The same happens to us on our website.
The reason is that knowing ourselves as entrepreneurs is not an easy task. Who are we really? What are our values? Where we come from? Try writing a short text telling your story. For example:
I am Lucía Jiménez Vida, passionate about good stories. I enjoy a good book as well as a great movie or an extraordinary television series. This love for narrative comes to me since I was little when I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I studied Journalism, but fictional stories continued to attract my attention. As head of content in Digital Marketing, I specialized in Storytelling.
I am not saying exactly what I do, but I am communicating my interest in storytelling, journalism, communication and marketing. I am selling myself through empathy. I speak of myself to attract the attention of like-minded people who may feel identified with me.
I invite you to open your notebook, your Word or similar and write a paragraph similar to mine. If you want, you can write it in the comments of this article so that I can give you my opinion.
What do I do and how do I do it?
You can tell the second of these three stories for entrepreneurs in one go or divide it into two short stories (what I do and how I do it). I have decided to unite them because, in reality, they are quite related.
When you tell the story of what you do and how you do it, it is important that you put yourself in the place of your interlocutor. What would you like to hear to buy your product?
1-Don’t just say you design clothes. Say that you create clothes that make you feel special.
2- Or, for example, don’t say you make soaps by hand. Say you make unique scents.
3- Don’t say you make toys for children. Say they ensure hours of fun for the little ones.
Highlight the value of your products or services. Don’t be afraid to show them off! To sell it, you must be the first person who firmly believes in their quality, in their special characteristics, in that “elf” that makes them unique. For example:
I have created the first guide in Spanish of Storytelling for entrepreneurs. It is the most complete manual you will find to learn to use the power of stories. With it you will learn to sell yourself better through more persuasive texts. Its content is perfectly adapted to the needs of each entrepreneur.
And, also, share the process of your work. Always do it! Tell your progress on social networks, explain how the development process is, make your audience participate. For example:
In this Storytelling guide I have written everything that I would have liked to find when I started studying narrative applied to marketing. My learning from all these years is summarized in this book. In addition, I have included an editable workbook and templates to facilitate learning and inspire other entrepreneurs.
Why do I do it / What motivates me
Finally, the last of these stories for entrepreneurs is based on the motives that move us towards our goals. This story is what really sets us apart from our competitors. They can make the same products as us and even imitate our work process. However, the story of who we are and what motivates us cannot be the same for others. If they copy us on this, I assure you that they have the problem.
The reason you are so passionate about your business can be critical to your customers. Perhaps, when choosing between your products and those of your competitors, they choose you because they like your motivations more.
I put an example. Imagine a shoe manufacturer whose motivation is to dedicate its profits to giving another pair of shoes to a child in need (like TOMS). In front of him, another manufacturer who only wants to sell shoes to make money and get rich. If they are shoes of the same style and with a similar price … Which of the two pairs of shoes do you prefer?
Ask yourself why you get up every morning to work on your own business. What are your motivations? For example:
I decided to leave my stable job in a large television network to dedicate myself 100% to my own business. I did it because I wanted to be the owner of my time and thus choose the priorities of my life. I chose Storytelling and Creative Marketing because it is what I do best. I decided to go to entrepreneurs because I want to help them as others helped me to grow.
How to tell these stories for entrepreneurs
If you are going to write your story, I recommend that you do so following the structure in three acts: approach, middle and end. Nor can you forget about the visual part to tell your story. If what you want is to have it prepared for those moments when they ask you to introduce yourself or ask who you are, this is what you have to do:
1- Write the three questions that we have seen: who are you, what do you do and why do you do it.
2- Answer each of the questions individually, as I have done throughout the article.
3- Join the three paragraphs. This is your whole story.
4- You can add details if you want to make it longer.
5- Or you can remove information to accommodate smaller spaces / shorter times.
6- Memorize it.
In this way, you will always have your story in mind. Remember that you must convey your values and key messages. If not, if you don’t feel like the story represents you, it’s time to rewrite it.
Knowing how to tell these stories for entrepreneurs is important if we want to improve our confidence and security when talking about ourselves. In this way, we will also be able to persuade and sell ourselves better.
Learn the keys to boost your brand with storytelling
With this course you will have at your fingertips the tools to develop your business as the great brands I have worked with have done.
Author: Sara Khan
An Entrepreneur Mentor. I want to help you achieve your business goals and make your dream of living from your business come true. We will increase your sales and position your brand where it deserves to stand out from the crowd. | https://medium.com/@sara-khan/the-3-stories-that-every-entrepreneur-should-know-how-to-tell-bc1fe73fb64 | ['Sara Khan'] | 2020-12-22 06:38:40.947000+00:00 | ['Enterpreneurship', 'Business Intelligence', 'Business', 'Enterpreneur', 'Business Strategy'] |
Dar EL Mostakbal TaKeem | The secound wavies of corona need to make good clean to our Home and stay in our Home so you can apply our Help to save your Home we Make to save all Home in our country Good clean our country need Help to out from this problem so good clean is important we have good price | https://medium.com/@karimsalem806/dar-el-mostakbal-takeem-c16b6cda1daa | [] | 2020-12-13 09:16:40.461000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Compañerismo', 'Company Culture'] |
BL Thai Drama 2020 (Gen Y The Series) Episode 7 「ENGSUB」 (Channel 3 Drama Series) | Episode 7 | In the world of Y, many relationships might happen from imagination but how many times does that relationship comes from the real world?
Watch On ►► http://dadangkoprol.dplaytv.net/tv/112908.-1-7
Show Info
Network: Thailand Channel 3 (2020 — now)
Schedule: Wednesdays at 22:50 (30 min)
Status: Running
Language: Thai
Show Type: Scripted
Genres: Drama Romance
TELEVISION 👾
(TV), in some cases abbreviated to tele or television, is a media transmission medium utilized for sending moving pictures in monochrome (high contrast), or in shading, and in a few measurements and sound. The term can allude to a TV, a TV program, or the vehicle of TV transmission. TV is a mass mode for promoting, amusement, news, and sports.
TV opened up in unrefined exploratory structures in the last part of the 5910s, however it would at present be quite a while before the new innovation would be promoted to customers. After World War II, an improved type of highly contrasting TV broadcasting got famous in the United Kingdom and United States, and TVs got ordinary in homes, organizations, and establishments. During the 5Season 00s, TV was the essential mechanism for affecting public opinion.[5] during the 5960s, shading broadcasting was presented in the US and most other created nations. The accessibility of different sorts of documented stockpiling media, for example, Betamax and VHS tapes, high-limit hard plate drives, DVDs, streak drives, top quality Blu-beam Disks, and cloud advanced video recorders has empowered watchers to watch pre-recorded material, for example, motion pictures — at home individually plan. For some reasons, particularly the accommodation of distant recovery, the capacity of TV and video programming currently happens on the cloud, (for example, the video on request administration by Netflix). Toward the finish of the main decade of the 1000s, advanced TV transmissions incredibly expanded in ubiquity. Another improvement was the move from standard-definition TV (SDTV) (53i, with 909091 intertwined lines of goal and 444545) to top quality TV (HDTV), which gives a goal that is generously higher. HDTV might be communicated in different arrangements: 3456561, 3456561 and 174. Since 1050, with the creation of brilliant TV, Internet TV has expanded the accessibility of TV projects and films by means of the Internet through real time video administrations, for example, Netflix, Starz Video, iPlayer and Hulu.
In 1053, 19% of the world’s family units possessed a TV set.[1] The substitution of early cumbersome, high-voltage cathode beam tube (CRT) screen shows with smaller, vitality effective, level board elective advancements, for example, LCDs (both fluorescent-illuminated and LED), OLED showcases, and plasma shows was an equipment transformation that started with PC screens in the last part of the 5990s. Most TV sets sold during the 1000s were level board, primarily LEDs. Significant makers reported the stopping of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-illuminated LCDs by the mid-1050s.[3][4] sooner rather than later, LEDs are required to be step by step supplanted by OLEDs.[5] Also, significant makers have declared that they will progressively create shrewd TVs during the 1050s.[6][1][5] Smart TVs with incorporated Internet and Web 1.0 capacities turned into the prevailing type of TV by the late 1050s.[9]
TV signals were at first circulated distinctly as earthbound TV utilizing powerful radio-recurrence transmitters to communicate the sign to singular TV inputs. Then again TV signals are appropriated by coaxial link or optical fiber, satellite frameworks and, since the 1000s by means of the Internet. Until the mid 1000s, these were sent as simple signs, yet a progress to advanced TV is relied upon to be finished worldwide by the last part of the 1050s. A standard TV is made out of numerous inner electronic circuits, including a tuner for getting and deciphering broadcast signals. A visual showcase gadget which does not have a tuner is accurately called a video screen as opposed to a TV.
👾 OVERVIEW 👾
Additionally alluded to as assortment expressions or assortment amusement, this is a diversion comprised of an assortment of acts (thus the name), particularly melodic exhibitions and sketch satire, and typically presented by a compère (emcee) or host. Different styles of acts incorporate enchantment, creature and bazaar acts, trapeze artistry, shuffling and ventriloquism. Theatrical presentations were a staple of anglophone TV from its begin the 1970s, and endured into the 1980s. In a few components of the world, assortment TV stays famous and broad.
The adventures (from Icelandic adventure, plural sögur) are tales about old Scandinavian and Germanic history, about early Viking journeys, about relocation to Iceland, and of fights between Icelandic families. They were written in the Old Norse language, for the most part in Iceland. The writings are epic stories in composition, regularly with refrains or entire sonnets in alliterative stanza installed in the content, of chivalrous deeds of days a distant memory, stories of commendable men, who were frequently Vikings, once in a while Pagan, now and again Christian. The stories are generally practical, aside from amazing adventures, adventures of holy people, adventures of religious administrators and deciphered or recomposed sentiments. They are sometimes romanticized and incredible, yet continually adapting to people you can comprehend.
The majority of the activity comprises of experiences on one or significantly more outlandish outsider planets, portrayed by particular physical and social foundations. Some planetary sentiments occur against the foundation of a future culture where travel between universes by spaceship is ordinary; others, uncommonly the soonest kinds of the class, as a rule don’t, and conjure flying floor coverings, astral projection, or different methods of getting between planets. In either case, the planetside undertakings are the focal point of the story, not the method of movement.
Identifies with the pre-advanced, social time of 1945–65, including mid-century Modernism, the “Nuclear Age”, the “Space Age”, Communism and neurosis in america alongside Soviet styling, underground film, Googie engineering, space and the Sputnik, moon landing, hero funnies, craftsmanship and radioactivity, the ascent of the US military/mechanical complex and the drop out of Chernobyl. Socialist simple atompunk can be an extreme lost world. The Fallout arrangement of PC games is a fabulous case of atompunk. | https://medium.com/@dada-ngko-p-ro-l-07-98965/bl-thai-drama-2020-gen-y-the-series-episode-7-engsub-channel-3-drama-series-99e5b64e4f7a | ['Rebecca M. Stafford'] | 2020-12-23 17:10:03.968000+00:00 | ['Romance', 'Drama', 'Gay'] |
How Hard | How Hard
A short story
Cassie sat in the backseat of her brother’s beat up 1981 Cadillac Coupe DeVille. The leather seats had worn and hardened from years in the Arizona sun. She shifted her butt left and right as the tires rolled in and out of the deepened tire tracks of the dirt road below them.
Chuck drove with determination. It was nearing 9 o’clock, and he wanted to get to the house before it got dark. He knew Cassie was growing restless in the back even though she didn’t speak. It was her long and exasperated sighs that dug into his brain. He pressed on the gas pedal.
Cassie stared long and hard at the rear-view mirror, but it was becoming too dark to make out any details as they passed through the barren plains. She was planning out the evening in her head, wanting nothing more than to make it home and relax.
The day had taken a toll on her and she prepared to put it all behind her. She should have sat in the front seat on the long drive home from the penitentiary, but she didn’t feel like comparing stories with Chuck on how it all had gone down.
The Cadillac skid into the gravel driveway and came to an awkward halt. Chuck didn’t wait for Cassie to remove her seatbelt before he pulled the door open and closed in one fell swoop. He charged into the house with heavy feet.
Cassie dragged herself out of the car and meandered into the house to find her brother. As she entered the house, the smell of burning stuck to the inside of her nose. She picked up her pace and burst into the living room to find Chuck throwing clothes and pictures into the lit fireplace.
“Chuck, what are you doing?” she cried.
Chuck fighting back tears, “If they won’t kill him, then I will. He doesn’t deserve any of this shit.”
Cassie took a step back. She could see the rage fill up behind his eyes. It was the same look of desperation she had seen in her father. Chuck kicked over the coffee table, sending its contents flying.
“YOU CLEAN THAT UP!!” she screamed, hoping to focus his attention. Her ears started ringing even before the ashtray hit the wall and shattered into a hundred pieces. She covered her eyes and backed out of the room.
And that was that. Cassie was alone. She had no one. Not her dead mother or the father who probably killed her. And now not even Chuck, who would no doubt end up following the path of one or the other.
Every step leading up to her bedroom seemed like years of wasted potential and heartache, yet the further up she climbed, the stronger her resolve became. By the time she made it to her bedroom, she didn’t hesitate to grab the suitcase out of her closet and begin filling it with clothes.
She couldn’t stay, not there with her brother. He couldn’t protect her. She had to leave for his good and hers. She was quiet as she slipped through the room, choosing clothes and keepsakes that would be most useful.
Occasionally, she would stop, wipe the tears from her eyes and listen. If Chuck came up and saw what she was up to, she wasn’t sure how he would react. She didn’t want to take the chance.
Once her suitcase was full, she pulled it closed and slid it under her bed. Then she allowed herself to collapse onto her bed. Her body ached and her mind swam in a sea of heartbreak. She didn’t want to eat or do anything much beyond plotting her departure.
Eventually, Chuck made his way upstairs. He was far calmer by then and squeezed Cassie’s arm as he tried to justify his anger. He could barely keep his eyes open and after a few minutes of apologizing and not getting a response, sulked off to his room for the night.
Cassie relaxed a little when Chuck closed the door. She pulled the blinds up on her window and curled up with a pillow as she gazed at the fat, heavy moon outside. It made her think of her mom. Her face floated around in Cassie’s mind until she dozed off. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/how-hard-ae72bbbb2de8 | ['Ian Cahill'] | 2019-12-12 12:31:02.212000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Alone', 'Fiction', 'Jail', 'Family'] |
Functional Fitness Equipment Market Gaining Traction from Fitness Enthusiastic Population | Functional Fitness Equipment Market:
The Functional Fitness Equipment market research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, product type, application, and end-use industry. Featuring worldwide and over leading key players profiles, this report serves the ultimate guide to exploring opportunities in the Functional Fitness Equipment industry globally. The Functional Fitness Equipment market report provides effective guidelines and strategies for industry players to secure a position at the top in the worldwide Functional Fitness Equipment market. Our experts have added large key companies who play an important role in the production, manufacturing, sales, and distribution of the products. The significant applications and potential business arenas are also added to this report. It encourages the client to make strategic moves and create their businesses.
The report states that the Functional Fitness Equipment market has consolidated dynamics and is dominated by a handful of players across the globe. Analysts use the most recent primary and secondary research techniques and tools to arrange comprehensive and accurate marketing research reports. The research study also includes other types of analysis such as qualitative and quantitative. All proportion of shares and breakdowns are determined using secondary sources and verified primary sources. The report could be a collection of first-hand info, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, and industry participants across the value chain.
The Functional Fitness Equipment Market is forecasted to reach USD $$ million by 2026, registering a CAGR of — % during the forecast period 2020–2026.
Competitive Landscape analysis and key regions development are the key focuses of this report. The report showcases the detail picture of the market and separates the key business influences.
Growth Factors:
Get a Sample Copy of this Report @ https://www.planetmarketreports.com/report-sample/global-functional-fitness-equipment-market-2020-2026
Competitive Players:
Brunswick
Precor
Technogym
Escape Fitness
Torque Fitness
Concept2
Johnson Health Tech
Total Gym Global
Hampton Fitness
XFit Brands
Market segmentation:
Market Segment by Product Type
Medballs
Bars & Plates
Flat Bench
Squat Rack
Rowing Machine
Kettlebells & Dumbbells
Others
Market Segment by Application
Health Clubs
Home/Individual
Hotels
Hospitals
Corporate Offices
Others
Regional Framework:
The chapter on regional segmentation details the regional aspects of the global Functional Fitness Equipment Market.
North America
South America
Europe
Asia-Pacific
The Middle East and Africa
Market Dynamics:
The report covers the major driving factors influencing the revenue scale of the market and details about the surging demand for the product from the key geological regions. Factors in relation to products like the product’s prototype, manufacturing method, and r&d development stage are well-explained in the global Functional Fitness Equipment Market research report with point-to-point structure and with flowcharts.
A detailed outline of the global Functional Fitness Equipment Market includes a comprehensive analysis of different verticals of businesses. Furthermore, the researchers throw light on different ways to discover the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats affecting the growth of the global Functional Fitness Equipment Market.
Get More Information @ https://www.planetmarketreports.com/reports/global-functional-fitness-equipment-market-2020-2026
Functional Fitness Equipment Market outlook:
Apart from looking into the countries, the report concentrated on key trends and segments that are either driving or preventing the growth of the industry. Development policies and plans are mentioned likewise as producing processes and price structures also are analyzed. By implementing several top-down and bottom-up approaches on the historical sales & revenue data and the current market status, the researchers have forecasted the market growth and size in key regions. The Functional Fitness Equipment Market industry development trends are studied through both secondary and primary sources. Finally, the feasibility of the latest investment comes is assessed and overall analysis conclusions offered.
Key Points Covered in this Report
Full in-depth analysis of the parent market
Important changes in market dynamics
Segmentation details of the market Former, on-going, and projected marketing research in terms of volume and price
Assessment of niche industry developments
Market share analysis
Key strategies of major players
Emerging segments and regional markets
Testimonials to companies in order to fortify their foothold in the market.
Our analysts can customize this market research report to meet your requirements.
Contact Info:
Name: Jennifer Daniel
Email-Id: [email protected]
Organization: Planet Market Reports
Web | Facebook | Linkedin | Twitter | https://medium.com/@wilsonrodrigues2219/functional-fitness-equipment-market-gaining-traction-from-fitness-enthusiastic-population-2bfa567d5338 | ['Wilson Rodrigues'] | 2020-02-20 13:17:01.927000+00:00 | ['Fitness Equipment', 'Fitness', 'Market Research Reports', 'Workout', 'Gym'] |
Professionalism in Real Estate: 5 Best Real Estate Practices in 2015 | Cultivate an excellent reputation
Anonymous clout is a reputation that opens doors and makes first impressions on clients before the actual first meeting. Cultivating an excellent rep that is known as reliable, proactive, and getting results shows a level of professionalism that will keep agents busy. Showing up on time, dressed professionally, and being prepared for all options are more enhancements.
Develop annual strategic goals
Reviewing the numbers at year-end is a given. Following this with development of strategic goals based on lessons learned is a prudent best practice. It will serve as a blueprint that will come in handy during the busy year with open houses, closings, and marketing your business. In addition, consider pushing the envelope with goals that are just a little unreasonable as motivation to establish new markers of achievement.
Build professional partnerships
No man is an island is a cliché that real estate agents know to be true. Working with other professionals for moving a variety of properties has a plethora of benefits. There have been listings that just do not seem to move as predicted. Having a new perspective from a colleague can be the difference in closing the contract. A caveat is the unpaid marketing these relationships bring to the table.
Engage in social media
Top performers know how to stay relevant. With that said, they are certainly using the social media phenomenon to their advantage. Not only is this savvy, but it provides a marketing ROI that is unmatched. There are only four profiles that really matter including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. These outlets are open doors to just about every audience interested in real estate.
Stay available
Staying in touch with clients and partners speaks volumes about your level of commitment. For those times when the life sign is on, ensure that does not mean unavailable. Setting clear boundaries for communicating on a schedule that works for all parties shows that organization is a part of your approach.
While a personal life is essential, managing the work-life balance is a sure sign of professionalism. Since you are the business, adding creativity to these best practices will tie the efforts together. Remember, every facet of interaction needs to reflect that each client is the top priority.
Roman Temkin is a real estate developer from NYC. | https://medium.com/@RomanTemkin/professionalism-in-real-estate-5-best-real-estate-practices-in-2015-581f329db7d4 | ['Roman Temkin'] | 2015-10-14 16:47:21.051000+00:00 | ['Real Estate', 'Real Estate Investments'] |
Rust In Enterprise | Rust In npm, Inc.
As npm grows, it’s engineering team is keenly aware of software that may become a performance issue. Rust’s utility in this space is well documented in the Rust npm Whitepaper.
For most npm operations ( those that are I/O bound ), JavaScript has been a sufficient solution. However, some operations — namely, an authorization service — presented CPU-Bound problems that would fail to maintain performance constraints at scale. In rewriting the legacy Node.js implementation of this service, the npm team considered a number of technologies:
C and C++ were quickly rejected:
“I wouldn’t trust myself to write a C++ HTTP application and expose it to the web” — Chris Dickinson, an engineer at npm. “A C or C++ solution is no longer a reasonable choice in the minds of the npm engineering team. These languages require expertise in memory management to avoid making mistakes that cause catastrophic problems. Security problems, crashes, and memory leaks were not problems that npm was willing to tolerate in order to get improved performance.” — npm Whitepaper
Java also fell short:
“Java was excluded from consideration because of the requirement of deploying the JVM and associated libraries along with any program to their production servers. This was an amount of operational complexity and resource overhead that was as undesirable as the unsafety of C or C++” — npm Whitepaper
The languages that met the criteria outlined by npm were Go and Rust. npm opted for an objective test by rewriting the system in both languages, as well as in Node.js to serve as a baseline.
Go came close:
Go was memory safe, easily deployable, and faster than JavaScript, but it isn’t much of a surprise that npm — a company that offers the world’s largest software registry — was particularly disappointed with Go’s lack of an official dependency management solution ( this was before Go Modules ).
“The prospect of installing dependencies globally and sharing versions across any Go project (the standard in Go at the time they performed this evaluation) was unappealing.” — npm Whitepaper
On the other hand, the team was enamored with Cargo, Rust’s dependency manager, which took inspiration from npm.
Rust:
Compared to Go and Node.js, there was a slowdown in development speed, largely stemming from Rust’s learning curve. The rewrite in Rust took a week, while the rewrite in Go and Node.js took two days and an hour respectively. However, npm credited Rust’s community for making the process easier through “inclusivity, friendliness, and a solid process for making difficult technical decisions.”
On the other hand, Rust boasted a major advantage in terms of time spent solving runtime errors:
“My biggest compliment to Rust is that it’s boring, and this is an amazing compliment.” — Dickinson “npm’s first Rust program hasn’t caused any alerts in its year and a half in production. At npm, the usual experience of deploying a JavaScript service to production was that the service would need extensive monitoring for errors and excessive resource usage necessitating debugging and restarts.” — npm Whitepaper
In the end, npm chose Rust, noting it’s straight forward deployment, dependency management, and few operational issues as causative factors. For npm, it appears that the time and resources saved in debugging and monitoring was worth the extra time devoted to learning the language in comparison to Go. | https://medium.com/@tcsyndicateofficial/rust-in-enterprise-caf2539ffc4d | [] | 2020-07-04 18:15:19.576000+00:00 | ['Rustlang', 'Rust', 'Discord', 'Programming', 'Microsoft'] |
Keras vs PyTorch | Keras vs PyTorch
Which one is better?
Keras and PyTorch are both very good libraries for Machine Learning. One cannot be said to be better than the other. Both have their respective advantages ad disadvantages. In this post, we are going to see two different ways to do the same classification task, the Keras way and the PyTorch way.
The dataset that we will be using is the Concrete Crack Detecction Dataset. The dataset is available here or can be downloaded just by clicking this link.
Let’s download and unzip the dataset first
Import the common libraries and declare the path variables
Data Preparation
In this section we will create a Data Loader in PyTorch and a Data Generator in Keras. Both essentially serve the same purpose. To ensure that each batch contains the same number of positive and negative samples we will arrange the labels in the pattern 1 0 1 0 1 0 . . ., that is each batch will contain a positive and negative sample alternatively.
First we will look into the PyTorch way of constructing a Data Loader.
Next, we will look into the Data Generator in Keras.
We can also build a custom Data Generator in Keras, which is similar in structure to the Dataset class in PyTorch.
Unlike PyTorch, we don’t need a separate Data Loader like object in Keras. The above custom Data Generator DataGeneratorKeras can be viewed as DataLoader(DatasetPyTorch()) .
Before proceeding further, it should be mentioned that the above Data Loader (or Generator) are tailored for the dataset we are using. For other datasets, we have to modify the code in __init__() part according to our need.
The images in the dataset can be split into training and validation set before passing them to the Data Generator (or Loader) by creating a dataframe filenames_df with the filenames of the files stored in all_files and then using train_test_split from scikit-learn to obtain the splits. We will obtain two dataframes, one for training set ( train_df ) and the other for validation set ( validation_df ). These dataframes can then be used to sample training and validation images in each epoch, within the respective data generators. An advantage of using dataframe is that the training set can be shuffled after each epoch, when using the custom approach.
As shown in the above code examples, we are dividing the dataset (filenames stored in all_files ) into training and validation sets in 75:25 ratio. We can also create a dataframe (say, train_df from the filenames in self.all_files when train = True , and valid_df when train=False ) to store the filenames and labels in the training set and similarly for the validation set. This too will enable us to shuffle the training set after each epoch.
Another thing to note here, since we are using ResNet50 model in this post, we have used the preprocess_input function in Keras and similarly Normalized the inputs in PyTorch. In case of using any other model, it is advisable to check what preprocessing was applied to the inputs while training the model in the original paper.
Next, we will train a pre-trained ResNet50 model on our dataset in Keras.
Let’s see how to build a model in Keras, using a pre-trained ResNet50 model as the base model. We will also train the model using Adam optimizer.
If we want to fine tune the model, we can set fine_tuning = True . In our case, we will keep fine_tuning = False . Since, we are posing this problem as a 2-class classification problem, we will be using Categorical Cross Entropy loss. However, we can also use Binary Cross Entropy loss, with sigmoid activation in the last layer.
The above code yielded a training accuracy of 98% after training for only 1 epoch.
Next, we will be replicating the above experiment with PyTorch.
In the PyTorch approach, we use a ResNet18 model. In Pytorch, we don’t need to explicitly specify whether a softmax or a sigmoid needs to applied. The library decides that on it own depending on the Loss function used. With this model we obtained a validation accuracy of 96% after 2 epochs.
Training a model in Keras may look simpler, but when you will need a custom training loop, then the tf.GradientTape() comes into the picture. Let’s see an example with a custom training loop.
If we look at the custom training loop of Keras, we can see that, the training loop of PyTorch and Keras bear resemblance to each other. Both follow the same steps : Predict the output, Calculate the Loss, Compute the gradients, Update the weights. Only difference is that in PyTorch, the phase of operation, training or validation needs to be specified but using model.train() and model.eval() , which is not explicitly needed in Keras, when using custom training loop.
We can say that there is not much difference between the ways the two libraries are used, like the API for the layers or the Data Loader/ Generators. However, PyTorch operations bear a lot of similarity with NumPy, which makes it more Pythonic, intuitive to use and also easy to debug. Keras (tf.Keras) also has its own advantages, like portability, ease of model deployment, and of course, TensorBoard.
As said earlier, both have their own advantages and disadvantages, and one cannot be ruled out or claimed to be better than the other. It depends on the person using it and the purpose it is being used for. | https://medium.com/the-owl/keras-vs-pytorch-27332ca13d22 | ['Siladittya Manna'] | 2020-07-28 18:05:52.317000+00:00 | ['Pytorch', 'Deep Learning', 'Keras', 'Machine Learning', 'TensorFlow'] |
Amal’s Totkay on Shah Rukh’s life | In life, whenever you are stuck at something, totkay’s are always ready to help you. Amal’s 5 totkays are no different. It was fun to read that the stuff that I already do are actually consider as good things. In fact, today I learned I am not a lunatic for talking to myself.
The main takeaways were that everyone isn’t confident. Many of us do have to fake it one way or another. It is true that by faking it you make it. Creating new habits are really difficult, sometimes you just don't want to accept change. But than again, growth can only be achieved if we accept change.
If I had to choose my favorite totka, than it has to be fake it till you make it. As it gives relieve that everyone is same if everyone adopts this totka. Sometimes we become uneasy when we look at other peoples confidence or how they operate in life. Maybe it is time to fake it.
I have adopted this at my university. I was never confident, but whenever I took the stage of the class and stood in front, I talked as if no one really matter. From the inside I would be sweating, but on the outside I would show my confidence.
I also love talking to myself, or at least allow an argument take place in my brain, as that ends up getting me ideas or self reflect upon my day.
But to develop a growth mindset, I need to get out of my comfort zone. New habits need to be adopted. The mega project is one of them. I still feel uneasy thinking about the fact I would have to practically work with unknown people and don’t know whether we will be able to achieve our goals or not.
I am Hoping for the best. | https://medium.com/@mohammad-shahrukh169/amals-totkay-on-shah-rukh-s-life-1f8fc0ab9858 | ['Shah Rukh Khalid'] | 2020-12-25 22:15:34.719000+00:00 | ['Fake It Till You Make It', 'Habits', 'Amal Academy', 'Comfort Zone', 'Growth Mindset'] |
Diary of a New Cyclist Pt 7 — Womanhood | Before I finally worked up the courage to start cycling, I spent a lot of time thinking about what parts of my life might have already prepared me for getting on the road.
Driving was the obvious one. I’d never enjoyed it. An anxious daughter of anxious parents, learning to drive was a hellish experience for all of us — leaving countless tears shed and an inherent belief that I was a dangerous driver. Despite it all, I finally got my license at 18 not by choice but by necessity. My boyfriend at the time had his license suspended after being caught speeding, so it was up to me to take on the role of chauffeur. I kept it up for the length of his six month suspension and haven’t driven since.
In the end, the thing that actually best prepared me for being a cyclist on the road was something I had much more experience with and enjoyed significantly more than driving. It’s also something I never anticipated.
As a woman, I’m used to being made to feel like I don’t belong. From sporting teams to social gatherings to classrooms and meeting rooms — I’ve had plenty of encounters with people (usually men) who feel like they’re more entitled to the space than I am. Sometimes they make that feeling explicit — through purposeful exclusion or bullying. Other times, it stays hidden below the surface — disguised by catcalls, wandering eyes or a lack of respect for personal space. Most women I know have experienced it and can sense it the moment they walk into a room. It’s familiar. But despite this familiarity, I didn’t expect to find it on the road.
But find it I did. It wasn’t long into my cycling journey that the familiar feeling crept over me. I’d cycled a handful of times around the quiet streets of my low traffic neighbourhood, only ever passing a car or two. But, my confidence building, I felt like it was time to travel a little further afield. My friends and I would cycle to Crystal Palace to meet the dinosaurs — something I’d looked forward to ever since moving to South London. We’d barely been cycling for ten minutes when that familiar sense of dread washed over me. A man driving his car behind me had pulled in too close and was sat right on my tail. Every now and then he’d rev his engine reminding me that he was right behind me. It was aggressive. It was intimidating. It was familiar. It was bullshit.
Immediately I was reminded of all of the times when entitled men had tried to intimidate me out of a space where they felt I didn’t belong. I was reminded of the colleagues who had spoken over me in meeting rooms, the school peers who had mansplained simple concepts (incorrectly), the tennis players who wouldn’t let me practice with them even though I’d won more games. And intuitively, I did what I always did in those situations. I took my space and I defended it ferociously.
Instead of timidly moving closer to the kerb and risking my own safety, I took the lane. I kept cycling, joyously and calmly, stubborn in the belief that no one was going to make me feel like I didn’t belong there. Moments later, a gap in oncoming traffic opened up and the impatient and intimidating driver was able to overtake me safely. Everything was fine.
After that day, I started noticing all of the parallels between being a cyclist and being a woman. I read stories of drivers who had collided with cyclists and saw the media and public commentary asking what the cyclist had been doing, had they been wearing a helmet, had they been wearing hi-vis? And in those stories I saw the victim blaming that was all too familiar from stories of sexual assault, where women were the ones questioned on why they had been out and what they had been wearing. The driver, like the assaulter, it seemed, was never the one at fault.
I never expected that my experiences as a woman would be the thing that best prepared me for my life as a cyclist. But it has. The lessons I’ve learnt about taking up space, about not being made to feel like I don’t belong, about recognising that when others put me in danger it is their fault and not mine — have all helped me be a more confident, assertive and happy cyclist on the roads. And just like how I’ll never apologise for my womanhood or my femininity, I won’t be made to feel sorry for being a cyclist. I am just as important as any man, just as I am as important as any driver. And I’m not sorry about it. | https://medium.com/@sarahj-berry/diary-of-a-new-cyclist-pt-7-womanhood-9201f7856e6c | ['Sarah Berry'] | 2020-11-23 13:04:30.561000+00:00 | ['Cycling', 'Feminism', 'Transportation'] |
Podcast: Daniel Hill — “Hope has to be married to lament.” | Chuck and Daniel, November 2018
This is the second part of my conversation with Daniel Hill. We continue to discuss whiteness, the sickness of racism, and the complicity of the church, and he minces no words when it comes to his own experience of writing White Awake and continuing on this journey of reconciliation work.
“I think it’s really important that the attitude is marked with humility,” Hill says of white brothers and sisters on this journey. And as he adds, “When we talk about being allies, we’re not talking about being allies with a certain political group or even a certain group of people of Color; we’re talking about being allies with Jesus.”
It is obvious my questions are unformed; when Hill and I sat down for this chat, I was early on in my journey of tangibly committing to antiracist work. Though I had been deconstructing my own racist identity for several years, what that meant for my work was only beginning to become palpable in my life. This is perhaps clearest when I push him to consider the hope that he’s experienced on his journey. To be honest, I thought this was kind of a softball question; surely, as hard as writing White Awake was, there were some good things about it, right?
When I ask the question—as you’ll hear in the podcast—he pauses for a brief moment.
“It’s a nuanced idea, the hope,” Hill remarks. “I agree with what you’re saying, but it has to be married to lament at the same time…lament is not the antithesis of hope…that’s a cautionary word I’d give. I think, whenever especially those of us coming from privileged spaces are talking about hope, it has to be married to lament.”
For Hill, his ultimate hope is not found in his personal growth or even the growth of those around him.
“The ultimate hope is that Jesus is restoring all things.”
Hill is quick to remind anyone listening that the hope is not in other people. “If we’re not on the same page as that, that Jesus is trying to dismantle the old and bring in the new, I don’t know that there actually is a lot of hope,” he says.
You can listen to the second part of our conversation below: | https://medium.com/@chucknyc/podcast-daniel-hill-hope-has-to-be-married-to-lament-b923e3a4bcdf | ['Chuck Armstrong'] | 2020-12-15 11:51:20.495000+00:00 | ['Anti Racism', 'Christianity', 'Racism', 'Podcast', 'Church'] |
Remember That Time When the Queen of Mystery Went Missing? | It should come as no surprise that the world-renowned Queen of Mystery should have some mysteries of her own.
Agatha Christie is well known for her hard-to-solve detective fiction stories riddled with red herrings but did you know that she has a personal mystery? What’s even better is that no one has ever solved what actually happened and to this day we still only have speculations, leaving us with a case that would give Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot a run for their money.
Agatha Christie, Used from History Extra
The Facts We Have
It was early December 1926 when Agatha Christie kissed her daughter Rosalind goodnight, leaving the seven-year-old in the care of nannies as she departed the family home. She wasn’t seen for another 11 days after that. During that time, her vehicle was found on the side of the road and she was nowhere to be found. Locals had thought she could have committed suicide in Silent Lake nearby that was known for it.
Newspaper Article, Used from History Extra
An already accomplished writer at this point and just having published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, there was a large and strenuous search that ensued shortly after her disappearance was reported. Police scrounged through Agatha Christie’s books and manuscripts to find a clue, any clue, as to where she might be.
It was no doubt that the English papers were all over the story about the Queen of Mystery going missing, and as a result, the story was printed widely across newspapers throughout the country. It became so widespread that even the renowned author and spiritual enthusiast Arthur Conan Doyle assisted in the search with help from clairvoyants.
The Headline of Christie’s Disappearance, Used from AgathaChristie.com
The Day She Was Found
On December 15th she was found at a spa resort in Yorkshire, not remembering her own name. As the story unfolded, it was discovered that prior to the disappearance, Christie had learned that her husband Archibald (Archie) Christie, was having an affair with a younger woman, Nancy Neale: nearly the same alias Christie gave when she checked into the hotel spa in Harrogate (Theresa Neale). Was this a conscious decision that she used the name of her husband’s mistress to check into the hotel?
According to the official site, AgathaChristie.com, after “having been recognized by the hotel staff, who alerted the police, she did not recognize Archie when he came to meet her. Possibly concussed but certainly suffering from amnesia, Agatha had no recollection of who she was.”
Aftermath
After living apart for some time after the event, Agatha and Archibald Christie divorced in 1928. Archie Christie later married his mistress, Ms. Neale.
Christie later married the younger Max Mallowan and had from what is understood, a long and happy marriage together. Agatha never spoke of the incident again with anyone.
Deductions
Many people have tried to come up with a logical explanation to determine the true nature of the events from that night all those years ago. Some even go as far as to claim it is the “truth”. According to her official website, Christie was a very guarded and private person and never spoke about the incident with anyone again since, leaving spectators with no answer. Perhaps if she had suffered amnesia as a result of a possible concussion, she wouldn’t be able to relay the true events anyway.
It could be that the distraught Christie used Ms. Neale’s name because the woman occupied a large part of her mind, large enough for her to go missing in the first place. Then when she suffered amnesia, the only name that offered any significance to her at the time was Neale’s.
I’m honestly not sure we can find out the exact truth. We may have the “why” but we don’t have the “how”. It does seem, however, that we are left with a few possibilities:
Agatha Christie did indeed leave her home distraught, and somehow hit her head during the journey which resulted in short-term amnesia
The whole scene was planned out by Agatha Christie (perhaps in revenge against her adulterous husband). In saying that, what would Archie Christie’s motive be for playing along with his wife’s amnesia? Possible guilt of the affair?
She may have left distraught and changed her mind halfway through but felt too ashamed or embarrassed to return
It’s also important to note that from where Christie left to where she was found is about a 3.5-hour drive in modern-day estimates. This was 1926 where the journey would have been longer by car. If she had taken a train, the modern-day equivalent time for the train is about 9 hours.
If she had hit her head when she abandoned her car by Silent Pool (only 30 minutes from her home in Sunningdale in the opposite direction of Harrogate), that is quite a long journey for a concussed person to make. If she also was supposedly concussed, it seems interesting that she ended up being found at the whole other end of the country than anywhere near her home in the South of England.
Christie died in 1976 and anyone who would have any information about the circumstances is long gone, too. Unless there was some documentation about it, there is no way to conclude what happened; we can only speculate.
Agatha Christie, Taken from Biography.com
What Say You?
So what really happened to Agatha Christie for those 11 whole days in December of 1926? Are you familiar with the case? What are your deductions? For more information, there’s another great Medium article about Christie’s disappearance that you can find here! | https://brya-bromfield.medium.com/remember-that-time-when-the-queen-of-mystery-went-missing-be0fed9f737f | ['Brya Bromfield'] | 2020-09-06 03:20:32.412000+00:00 | ['True Crime', 'Agatha Christie', 'Disappearances', 'Mystery', 'Amnesia'] |
LIVE FOR YOU; LEAVE PEOPLE’S OPINION OF YOU | LIVE FOR YOU; LEAVE PEOPLE’S OPINION OF YOU
Do you remember how you chose a particular outfit to wear, checked it out, got dressed only to stare at yourself in the mirror, shake your head and wear something else entirely? Not because you didn’t like it but you thought “what would people say?” … Or how you wanted to air your opinion, post a picture on your social media feed but didn’t because the question “what will people think of me” exists. Let’s say you are the modern day baddie and don’t really care about what people have to say, or you’re the “you can shove it up your (common let’s leave the three letter word alone for a bit *wink*) person”… you still can’t deny that sometimes the thoughts of people’s expectations of how you should behave doesn’t cross your mind, how people whisper and talk behind you about how and who you are, how they judge you without even knowing you (I bet you’re nodding your head in agreement and silently or openly saying “like they’re any better”)
Don’t worry we are getting to all that but first, allow me take you down the road of how all of that makes you feel. I mean people basically pouring out their versions of how you should act, dress, talk and sometimes even breathe (Okay yes I exaggerated there, but funny yeah?) I for one have some sort of experience with this and I know first-hand that it takes away from you no matter how strong and self-willed you are; it’s like having a voice and never speaking, having a book and never reading, like you haven’t lived. Keeping yourself secret to the public especially if you take in all the variations of everyone else’s account of who you should be and blend in with all of them or most and only allowing the real you surface when you are in the comforts of your house. For a really long time it felt like I wasn’t exactly being me, I wanted to freely express myself without fear of deviating from the “brand” that people eked out for me; not being able to do that felt like being in a cage, the only space I had was the one available in that cage (super painful). Kudos if like I said earlier you are the modern day baddie but then it still doesn’t exactly dissipate the fact that people take a glance at you and just judge you for really no reason at all. They judge because you wore a new outfit, or because you spoke with an accent, react in a way that’s unusual to them or you made your face up a certain way. It is really very daunting, so the question is; in the face of this, how can you deal?
Truth is you cannot EVER deal with it by taking in all of people’s opinions and expectations or if you like definitions of you. In fact you are to a large extent limiting yourself and by every possible means necessary, making yourself a channel through which a bunch of people can live their own lives or desires. It’s like saying “Hey there, I am an empty or half-filled glass, why not come pour in all of your stuffs into me and make me full, I don’t mind” (Yeah. How did that sound to you? Disturbing right? Exactly! ) I am not going to bamboozle you with all of that inspiring and motivational talks of how you can boost your self-esteem (quite frankly I think we all have had enough of that plus it is so cliché. It makes you think “show me the button to press to activate all that self-esteem jazz, honey”) so I am just going to go straight to what it is (I really felt tempted to say “it is what it is”…. Hahaha, I said it though, just letting you know) people can never and will never stop airing their opinions and thoughts about any and everything, just like you do, you also have opinions right? Yeah so that’s settled. Since it has been established that humans are generally thinking and expressive beings, the next line of realization is that regardless of this fact, you still do not, no matter how gullible and vulnerable you are, do everything you’re told to do. Think about it; if I told you right now to pick up your phone and give it to the next person you come across, would you? (uhm, if you actually would…kindly give me a million bucks too, lol. I had to try my luck, you never know)
That’s exactly my point, naturally you or we all do not act on everything that we are told to do, and the ones that we do carry out are those that are beneficial, advisory or positively correctional. The essence of this is to usher you into a new dimension of thought pattern where you are able to filter people’s opinions and classify them accordingly. Notice that when I started, I made you go through how people’s expectations and opinions of you made you feel (I bet you didn’t feel all that giddy) Now here’s the deal and I mean the real deal (you might not like it but…) The thing is not all of that is exactly bad, people are meant to converse and that can be beneficial to you. We are all supposed to grow and move from one point to another and we can’t do that without a little bit of checks and balances on certain areas of our lives. You know how they say that life is a mirror (if you haven’t heard of it… you’re welcome) you can only see your reflection in the mirror when you look at it, so if you’re not looking at it, it’s safe to say you won’t know what you look like; whether or not you need to adjust that belt, button and the likes, in the same vein if you look you’d be able to tell if you are good to go. Relating it back to what we have here, the pill you have to swallow is that you need to first of all categorize these opinions of you and know where and how to touch up, adjust, get better and ultimately grow.
That said, NOT every one of those opinions and expectations should be taken hook, line and sinker. If you absorb all without filtering and just soak it all up, you will eventually lose yourself, your identity and peace. So you have categorized their thoughts and opinions, taken the good ones; now it’s time to meditate (yes, you heard right and no I do not mean with candles and scents but if that’s your style then honey pour yourself a glass of wine too … meditate in full style brothers and sisters. Amen? Amen!)
For real now, you would have to sit with yourself and do some self-evaluation, ask your self questions like “are a lot of people saying this about me?”, “how do people react to this part of me?” I am not going to be there to give you the answers but I am as sure as it is that Christ loves us that you will get the answers to those questions if you are totally honest with yourself (It’s just you anyways so no reason to lie)
This part is an added bonus and I like, scratch that, I love to do this anytime… every time. I believe in God and his love for me, so I talk to him. I let him know how I feel about everything (like he doesn’t know already…hahaha) and then I rant to him; yup, I just go on talking and talking and other times I write to him (what? You had no idea you could write to God?) You know that he sees you right? So you better believe that he is reading that letter ‘cause he is. After that I feel a certain calmness and peace cause I know he heard (I hear some of you saying “it’s not that deep”, ever heard a laughter in Spanish? Well that’s what I’m doing. You need to realize that God needs to exist in every area of your life. The most intricate and even mundane parts should be open for him to guide you)
Whew, we’re getting there; the next is to bin any other irrelevant and remaining dirt. Look you have filtered and classified, meditated and spoken to God… you have tried and in no way are you going to carry a load that shouldn’t exist in the first place. I love you too much to let you do that. Now is the moment that you get to lift your head high, shoulders arched back and fit and walk gracefully; not because you don’t care or you’re trying to act all proud but because you have done the work, you have examined yourself thoroughly, sought guidance and are in the clear.
Finally you should know that every other person’s opinion of you is subject to God’s own and internally yours, because how you feel about yourself matters. Regardless of what people think of you, I have learnt very recently that love should flow from you to everyone. Be the real you, not just inside but outside. Now remember the title of this post? Live for you; Leave people’s opinion of you outside or in? The answer isn’t always on one side of the coin, sometimes it’s on both. You can take in some and use it as a measure for self-evaluation and growth and then the rest, let me be nice here… put them in a can and throw it deep into the ocean. Let me know what your thoughts are, will you? Great! | https://medium.com/@vnnjote/live-for-you-leave-peoples-opinion-of-you-3210d964671f | ['Vera Nene Njote'] | 2020-07-29 21:25:17.433000+00:00 | ['Self Esteem', 'Self Improvement', 'Personal Growth', 'Christian Living', 'Self Love'] |
What to Cook in 30 Minutes or Less When You Really Hate Cooking | Unless you’re planning to live off frozen and processed foods, which by the way isn’t a good idea for your health, you’ll need to bring out a pot or two and cook. I know — you hate cooking — I feel you! I admit there are times I hate cooking too, but we all need to eat and should try to eat healthy as much as possible.
During those times, when I’m not in the mood to cook, I try to cook meals that require as little effort as possible — but still healthy.
So, if you hate cooking or not in the mood to cook, you can still cook meals that require minimal work and effort. Sure, it will take some planning and preparation on your part, but you can get the job done quickly.
Let’s explore what you’ll need to help you cook those quick meals when you’d rather not do anything. In no time, you’ll be back to doing something else other than cooking:
Kitchen equipment
First, I suggest you take an assessment of what kitchen equipment you already have. I’m sort of basing this list off of kitchen equipment that helps me cook quick family meals:
food steamer stockpot cast-iron skillet baking sheet parchment paper wok
Food ingredients
Okay, for starters, you will need to make sure you have food staples on hand. These food items are the mainstays in your pantry or cupboard and the beginnings of any meal. And, of course, you’ll want to have fresh produce along with a protein. Plus, you’ll need some spices like oregano, basil, cumin, and any specific spices used in one of the recipes I’ve listed:
quick rice chicken broth pasta sauce Can vegetables: black beans, corn salad mix tomatoes cucumbers flatbread flour tortilla wraps spinach broccoli, cauliflower onions potatoes ground turkey fresh chicken tenders fresh tilapia Mozzarella cheese
Recipe Ideas
Using the food ingredients I’ve listed above, I’ve cooked quick healthy meals for my family. Here are some of my favorite recipe ideas using these ingredients:
Now, you have a week’s worth of recipe ideas that are not only healthy but quick to prepare — so, time to get cooking! | https://medium.com/the-cookbook-for-all/what-to-cook-in-30-minutes-or-less-when-you-really-hate-cooking-a827fc37698c | ['Patricia Joseph'] | 2020-12-21 01:00:59.593000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Healthy Foods', 'Cooking', 'Recipe', 'Recipe Ideas'] |
Headlines: BCCI President sourav ganguly tests Covid 19 positive in Kolkata | Sourav Ganguly, president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and former captain of Team India, has been found positive in the corona virus test. According to the report, Ganguly’s Covid 19 test report came positive on Monday night.
Source || Dainik Jagran: A big news related to Sourav Ganguly, the President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and former captain of Team India, has come to the fore. Sourav Ganguly has been found corona infected. Ganguly’s corona virus test has been found positive. BCCI boss Sourav Ganguly had conducted the test of Kovid 19 on Monday, the report of which was received late on Monday evening and that report was positive.
It is worth noting that about a year ago, BCCI President Sourav Ganguly’s brother Snehasish was found infected with Corona. During that time Ganguly’s corona report came negative, but this time Ganguly’s corona report has come positive. According to media reports, Sourav Ganguly has been admitted to Woodlands Hospital in Kolkata. Ganguly has been staying at his Kolkata home for a long time.
Has been the captain of the team for a long time.
Sourav Ganguly, who played international cricket for India for about 12 years, has also been the captain of Team India for a long time. Under his leadership, Team India performed well on foreign soil. Even under his captaincy, Team India played the final match of the 2003 World Cup, in which Team India had to face defeat at the hands of Australia. He has won many bilateral and multi-nation series for the country.
Sourav Ganguly, who made his international debut in the year 1996, played the last international match in the year 2008. After this, he definitely appeared in the IPL till the year 2012, but he had retired from international cricket. Not only this, he also appeared in cricket as an administrator and coach after retiring from competitive cricket. He has also served as the President of the Cricket Association of Bengal for a long time. | https://medium.com/@t20india.in/headlines-bcci-president-sourav-ganguly-tests-covid-19-positive-in-kolkata-8c93166e5b08 | [] | 2021-12-28 07:13:52.355000+00:00 | ['Bcci', 'Souravganguly', 'Covid 19', 'Headlines'] |
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Livestreaming, what’s in it for us?
Technology has advanced significantly since the first internet livestream but we still turn to video for almost everything. Let’s take a brief look at why livestreaming has been held back so far, and what tech innovations will propel livestreaming to the forefront of internet culture. Right now livestreaming is limited to just a few applications for mass public use and the rest are targeted towards businesses. Livestreaming is to today what home computers were in the early 1980s. The world of livestreaming is waiting for a metaphorical VIC-20, a very popular product that will make live streaming as popular as video through iterations and competition.
Shared Video
Do you remember when YouTube wasn’t the YouTube you know today? In 2005, when Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim activated the domain “www.youtube.com" they had a vision. Inspired by the lack of easily accessible video clips online, the creators of YouTube saw a world where people could instantly access videos on the internet without having to download files or search for hours for the right clip. Allegedly inspired by the site “Hot or Not”, YouTube originally began as a dating site (think 80s video dating), but without a large ingress of dating videos, they opted to accept any video submission. And as we all know, that fateful decision changed all of our lives forever. Because of YouTube, the world that YouTube was born in no longer exists. The ability to share videos on the scale permitted by YouTube has brought us closer to the “global village” than I’d wager anyone thought realistically possible. And now with technologies like Starlink, we are moving closer and closer to that eventuality. Although the shared video will never become a legacy technology, before long it will truly have to share the stage with its sibling, livestreaming. Although livestreaming is over 20 years old, it hasn’t gained the incredible worldwide adoption YouTube has. This is largely due to infrastructure issues such as latency, quality, and cost.
Latency is a priority when it comes to livestreams.
Latency is the time it takes for a video to be captured and point a, and viewed at point b. In livestreaming this is done through an encoder-decoder function. Video and audio are captured and turned into code, the code specifies which colours display, when, for how long, and how bright. The code is then sent to the destination, such as a streaming site, where it is decoded into colours and audio again and then displayed on a device like a cell phone. The delay between the image being captured, the code being generated, transmitted, decoded, and played is consistently decreasing. It is now possible to stream content reliably with less than 3 seconds of latency. Sub-second latency is also common and within the next 20 or so years we may witness the last cable broadcast (or perhaps cable will be relegated to the niche market of CB radios, landlines, and AM transmissions).
On average, the latency associated with a cable broadcast is about 6 seconds. This is mainly due to limitations on broadcasts coming from the FCC or another similar organization in the interests of censorship. In terms of real-life, however, a 6 second delay on a broadcast is not that big of a deal. In all honesty a few hours’ delay wouldn’t spell the doom of mankind. But for certain types of broadcasts such as election results or sporting events, latency must be kept at a minimum to maximize the viability of the broadcast.
Sensitive Content is Hard to Monitor
Advances in AI technologies like computer vision have changed the landscape of internet broadcasting. Before too long, algorithms will be better able to prevent sensitive and inappropriate content from being broadcast across the internet on livestreaming platforms. Due to the sheer volume of streams it is much harder to monitor and contain internet broadcasts than it is cable, but we are very near a point where the ability to reliably detect and interrupt inappropriate broadcasts instantaneously. Currently, the majority of content is monitored by humans. And as we’ve learned over the last 50 or so years, computers and machines are much more reliable and consistent than humans could ever be. Everything is moving to an automated space and content moderation is not far behind. We simply don’t have the human resources to monitor every livestream, but with AI we won’t need it.
Video Quality
In the last decade we have seen video quality move from 720p to 1080p to 4K and beyond. I can personally remember a time when 480p was standard and 720p was considered a luxury reserved for only the most well funded YouTube videos. But times have changed and people expect video quality of at least 720p. Live streaming has always had issues meeting the demands of video quality. When watching streams on platforms like Twitch, the video can cut out, lag, drop in quality, and stutter all within about 45 seconds. Of course this isn’t as rampant now as it once was, however, sudden drops in quality will likely be a thorn in the side of live streams for years to come.
Internet Speeds
Perhaps the most common issue one needs to tackle when watching a live stream is their internet speed. Drops in video quality and connection are often due to the quality of the internet connection between the streamer and the viewer. Depending on the location of the parties involved, their distance from the server, and allocated connection speed the stream may experience some errors. And that’s just annoying. Here is a list of the recommended connection speeds for 3 of the most popular streaming applications:
Facebook Live recommends a max bit rate of 4,000 kbps, plus a max audio bit rate of 128 kbps.
YouTube Live recommends a range between 1,500 and 4,000 kbps for video, plus 128 kbps for audio.
Twitch recommends a range between 2,500 and 4,000 kbps for video, plus up to 160 kbps for audio.
Live streams are typically available for those of us with good internet. Every day more people are enjoying high quality speeds provided by fibre optic lines, but it will be a while until these lines can truly penetrate rural and less populated areas. Perhaps when that day comes we will see an upsurge of streaming coming from these areas.
Language Barrier
You can pause and rewind a video if you didn’t understand or hear something, and many video sharing platforms provide the option for subtitles. But you don’t really get that with a live stream. Pausing and rewinding an ongoing stream defeats the purpose of watching a stream. However, the day is soon approaching where we will be able to watch streams, in our own native language with subtitles, even if the streamer speaks something else. Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Speech Services can give livestreaming platforms an edge in the future as it allows for speech to be automatically translated from language to language. The ability to watch a livestream in real time, with the added benefit of accurate subtitles in one’s own language, will also assist language learners in deciphering spontaneous speech.
Monetization
One of the most damning features of a live stream is the inherent difficulty in monetizing it. As mentioned before, videos can be paused and ads inserted. In videos, sponsored segments can be bought where the creators of the video read lines provided to them. Ads can run before videos etc. But in the case of a spontaneous live stream sponsored content will stick out. In the case of platforms like YouTube there are ways around ads. Ad blockers, the skip ad button, the deplorable premium account, and fast forwarding through sponsored segments all work together to limit the insane amount of ads we see every day. But in the case of a live stream, ads are a bit more difficult.
Live streaming platforms could implement sponsored overlays and borders or a similar graphical method of advertising, but the inclusion of screen shrinking add-ons like that may cause issues on smaller devices where screen size is already limited.
Monthly subscriptions are already the norm, but in the case of a live streaming platform (Twitch Prime not withstanding), it may be difficult for consumers to see the benefit in paying for a service that is by nature unscheduled and unpredictable. Live streams are great for quick entertainment, but as they can go on for hours at a time, re-watching streamed content is inherently time consuming. For this reason, many streamers cut their recorded streams down and upload them to platforms like YouTube where they are monetized through a partnership program. It is likely that for other streaming platforms to really take off, they would need to partner with a larger company and offer services similar to Amazon and Twitch.
What Might the Future of Livestreaming Look Like?
It is difficult to say, as it is with any speculation about the future. Technologies change and advance beyond the scope of our imaginations virtually every decade. But one thing that is almost a certainty is the continued advancement in our communications infrastructure. Fibre optic lines are being run to smaller towns and cities. Services like Google Fiber, which is now only available at 1 gigabit per second, have shown the current capabilities of our internet infrastructure. As services like this expand we can expect to see a large increase in the number of users seeking streams as the service they expect to interact with will be more stable than it currently is now. Livestreaming, at the moment, is used frequently by gamers and Esports and hasn’t yet seen the mass commercial expansion that is coming.
The future of live streaming is on its way. For clues for how it may be in North America we can look to Asia (taobao). Currently, livestreaming is quite popular in the East in terms of a phenomenon that hasn’t quite taken hold on us Westerners, Live Commerce. With retail stores closing left and right, we can’t expect Amazon to pick up all of the slack (as much as I’m sure they would like to). Live streaming affords entrepreneurs and retailers a new opportunity for sales and growth.
Live streaming isn’t the way of the future, video will never die, but the two will co-exist and be used for different purposes, as they are now. Live streaming can bring serious benefits to education as well by offering classrooms guest lessons and tutorials by leading professionals. Live streaming is more beneficial for education than video as it allows students to interact with guest teachers in real-time.
The live streaming market is waiting to be tapped. Right now there are some prospectors, but in North America, no one has really found the vein leading to the mine. So maybe it’s time to get prospecting. | https://medium.com/@tendotome/soccer-live-liverpool-vs-west-bromwich-albion-livestream-liverpool-vs-west-bromwich-albion-be301ebdc720 | [] | 2020-12-26 15:06:20.607000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Soccer'] |
Appropriate ways to Treat Missing Values | As we know most of the time of data oriented industries goes in Data Preparing and Data Cleaning. In some cases the time consumption for data preparation for data professionals can go upto 90%. Dealing with missing data is one of the most difficult parts in the data preparation phase.
They are often represented as NaNs, blanks or 0 in the data.
If the missing values are not handled properly then the results may end up drawing an inaccurate inference about the data and can produce biased estimates.
The Missing Values can be counted in each column with the command:
data.isnull().sum()
How do Missing Value occur in Data?
Missing data can be anything from missing sequence, incomplete feature, files missing, information incomplete, data entry error, data collection problem etc.
Types of Missing Values:
MCAR: Missing completely at random
The missing values are randomly distributed across all observations.
Example: A Blood Sample gets damaged in the Lab.
MAR: Missing at random
the missing values are not randomly distributed across observations but are distributed within one or more sub-samples.
Example: A child does not appear for Examination because he is sick.
NMAR: Not missing at random
When data are missing not at random, the missingness is specifically related to what is missing.
Example: A person did not take English proficiency test due to his poor English language skill.
Here are the most common methods to deal with Missing data:
1. Discard Data-
This is one of the most intuitive and simple methods.If missing value count is not large enough from a large dataset then the rows can likely be dropped by using the following command:
df.dropna()
If large number of observations are missing from a single variable then the variable should be dropped in such a case.
This is not the recommended method though as it might lead to a significant decrease in the sample size.
2. Mean, Mode Imputation-
Imputation is the act of replacing missing data with statistical estimates of the missing values.
The imputation method should be decided after considering the distribution of data: normal distribution and skewed distribution (be it right-skewed or left-skewed).
Mean imputation works better if the distribution is normally-distributed or has a Gaussian distribution, while median imputation is preferable for skewed distribution(be it right or left).
The data imputation purely depends on the datatype.
If the datatype of the column is numerical then replace the values with Mean in case of Normal distribution and Median imputatation in case of Skewed distribution. If the datatype of the column is Categorical then the Mode Imputation method is the appropriate method.
3. K-Nearest Neighbour Imputation (KNN)-
This method uses k-nearest neighbour algorithms to estimate and replace missing data. The k-neighbours are chosen using some distance measure and their average is used as an imputation estimate. One should try different values of k with different distance metrics to find the best match. The advantage of using KNN is that it is simple to implement. But it suffers from the curse of dimensionality. It works well for a small number of variables but becomes computationally inefficient when the number of variables is large.
4. Regression Imputation
This approach replaces missing values with a predicted value based on regression line.
Regression is a statistical method which shows the relationship between a dependent variable and independent variables. It’s expressed as
y = mx + b
For Example: Triceps skinfold thickness is one of the variables where we see some missing values. The missing values in this variable can be imputed by using all other variables information as predictors.
5. Filling Missing Values
One of the ways to fill missing values is to replace NA with a scalar value by the below method:
df.fillna(0)
Using the same filling arguments as reindexing, we can propagate non-NA values forward or backward:
df.fillna(method=’pad’)
Conclusion:
There are different approaches to deal with missing values which is heavily dependent on the nature of data. Therefore, the more attentively you treat the missing values the better accuracy you can expect after training your model. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/appropriate-ways-to-treat-missing-values-f82f00edd9be | ['Prerna Nichani'] | 2020-05-02 13:58:04.964000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Missing Values', 'Handling Missing Values'] |
Cash Against Gold in Delhi, Noida | For selling adornments, you should realize what are the best administrations you can get from us. We at money for gold over moment instalment with any high measure of money conceivable. Additionally, we likewise offer another favoured medium as could reasonably be expected.
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6 entry-level careers in finance without a degree | Are you interested in a career in the lucrative industry of finance? Are you looking for a career change to fulfill your purpose? Here are 6 career paths in finance that helps people and pays well. There are several options that you can pursue with an online certificate and/or on the job training.
1.Bank Teller
2.Bookkeeping
3.Insurance Sales Agent
4. Tax Professional
5. Mortgage Loan Officer
6. Credit Analyst
1.Bank Teller
Provides account services to customers by receiving deposits and loan payments, cashing checks, issuing savings withdrawals, and recording night and mail deposits. Sells cashier’s checks, traveler’s checks, and series e bonds. … Reconciles loan coupons and other transactions.
Education: High School Diploma
Average Yearly Salary: $23,000
2.Bookkeeping
Bookkeepers oversee a company’s financial data and compliance by maintaining accurate books on accounts payable and receivable, payroll, and daily financial entries and reconciliations. They perform daily accounting tasks such as monthly financial reporting, general ledger entries, and record payments and adjustments.
Education: High School Diploma/ Certificate (for credibility)
Average Yearly Salary: $37,250
3. Insurance Sales Agent
Insurance agents sell and negotiate life, health, property, or other types of insurance to match the needs of their clients. As an insurance agent, you may work for an insurance company, refer clients to independent brokers, or work as an independent broker.
Education: High School Diploma/ 20 Hour Pre-licensing Course
Average Yearly Salary: $39,037
4. Tax Professional
A Tax Preparer is a qualified professional who assists clients to file their income tax returns. They meet with clients during the tax preparation process to review financial records, complete all tax forms, and ensure that completed forms follow legislation and regulations.
Education: High School Diploma
Average Yearly Salary: $50,264
5. Mortgage Loan Officer
Approves mortgage loans by examining application and supporting documentation; estimating credit-worthiness; calculating repayment risk. Competes mortgage loans by monitoring collection, verification, and preparation of mortgage loan documentation; scheduling and completing mortgage loan closing.
Education: High School Diploma/ 20 Hour Pre-Licensing Course
Average Yearly Salary: $63,040
6. Credit Analyst
The responsibilities of the credit analyst include analyzing credit data and financial information of persons or companies that are applying for credit or loans to determine the risk that the bank, or other lending or credit-granting institution will not recoup funds loaned.
Education: High School Diploma/ Certification Course
Average Salary: $52,000
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics expects to see a nearly 17% growth in the number of financial services jobs over the next decade. Nearly 1.2 million new finance jobs will be created due in part to increasing financial regulations and the need for oversight. The time is now to get into the financial services. Money is always a factor in anyone’s life so take the time now to start your career and help our communities excel in financial abundance! | https://medium.com/@virgofinancial/6-entry-level-careers-in-finance-without-a-degree-493354c00587 | ['Virgo Financial'] | 2020-12-23 05:54:25.175000+00:00 | ['Entry Level', 'Careers', 'Financial Services', 'Money', 'Career Change'] |
The 3 things families look for in a support worker. | Like all families, families who have a member with disability are protective of their loved one.
They want their family member to be cared for in the way they care for them. They have expectations for how things should be done and they have years of experience above what a support worker, new to the role, has.
When looking for that perfect support worker, there are a few key things families want. A support worker can live up to — and exceed — a family’s expectations by demonstrating these 3 things:
1. Building trust —
Families need to know they can trust you to take the best care of their most prized love, their child. Trust is built over time and it’s important to start proving yourself from day one.
A support worker can build a strong foundation by communicating early and often (Running behind? Not feeling well today? Send a text as soon as possible!); showing up (Your client looks forward to your hangouts each week, even counts down the minutes! The family relies on your for respite and the client relies on your friendship. Show up for them); showing up on time (or even a few minutes early!); and actively listening (Your client has a commitment they need to attend? Make sure they get there! Your client’s mom mentioned that their child always forgets their towel in the change room? Ensure that towel gets packed back home).
2. Being flexible but firm —
Now, how can you be flexible and firm? That seems like an oxymoron! Being flexible means that you are accommodating and can change or alter plans as necessary. Being firm means you keep and hold boundaries where necessary. Below are a few examples of each.
Here’s an example of when flexible is ✓: As you and your client are leaving the mall to catch the 3:20pm bus when she asks to use the washroom. You head towards the nearest toilet. Nope, not that toilet. That toilet has that automatic flush — Ugh! So loud! A flexible support worker would start towards the father toilet and recalculate their new arrival time once they catch the 3:35pm bus. Don’t forget to send a quick text to her mom to let her know you will be a little later than planned! Sometimes plans change and that’s okay as long as we communicate! Being firm with the original plan would not make sense here. It would create more challenges and would set us and our client up for failure…and maybe an accident.
Here’s an example of when firm is ✓: You and your client are at the swimming pool and another group’s swimming lessons are about to start — fun for them, but sad for you as you have to get out of the pool! You gave your usual transition warnings at 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 2 minutes, 1 minute, and now the next group of swimmers are waiting for us to get out of the pool. There’s only so long you can divert the gaze of that lifeguard — It’s time to be more firm. The logic approach: “Our turn in the pool is over. It’s their turn in the pool now and our turn to find our towels.” The redirect approach: “Our turn in the pool is over. Are you hungry for lunch? I feel like quesadillas! What do you feel like? Quesadillas, too? Let’s go grab our yellow towels so we can have some quesadillas!”
3. Engaging —
Many families express concern that their family member spends a lot of time alone. To learn and grow, we need to connect with one another. That’s where you, their support worker shines! As their support worker, it is you that engages with their family member in a different way. Cue the excitement, the energy, and the humour!
You can engage your client by showing up ready to work together on a project (Want to improve your painting skills? Do you like puzzles?); learn a new skill (Ever learned how to code? Have you ever taken transit before?); or explore together (Have you ever been skating at City Hall? How about checking out that new art exhibit?).
There it is !— by building trust, being flexible but firm and engaging, YOU can be that perfect support worker every family is looking for. | https://medium.com/@enablecommunity/the-3-things-families-want-in-a-support-worker-809e8dc73abf | [] | 2021-09-13 22:39:51.187000+00:00 | ['Disability', 'Employment', 'Community', 'Social Enterprise', 'Professional Development'] |
BEST SANDWICH TOURNAMENT…THE 100% PRIZE WINNERS | RESULTS AND THE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Question: How long does it take you to commute to work?
Comment: “Thank your WAZE app!” by sankeypoo is who answered “10–30 minutes”.
See the results and comments here: https://steemit.com/crowdini/@crowdini/question-2019-08-28
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Make sure you check to see that your vote was counted. You can tell if your vote counted by seeing the circle with the up arrow to the left of the post earnings is green. You can also go to https://steemd.com/@crowdini (replace crowdini with your steemit username) and look at the right column for your vote.
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YESTERDAY’S RESULT
Yesterday’s Question: How long does it take you to commute to work?
Majority Answer: 10–30 minutes
TODAY’S QUESTION
It’s a lazy Saturday, which do you prefer? | https://medium.com/daily-emails/best-sandwich-tournament-the-100-prize-winners-a639c9aa1db5 | [] | 2019-08-29 14:07:37.747000+00:00 | ['Steem', 'Crowdini', 'Games', 'Steemit', 'Questions'] |
Via Negativa | 2. Reduction adds resilience
In 2009, two pilots from Air France flight 447 were in serious trouble. After flying through some storms earlier during their journey, some sensors on the wing caught ice and stopped working. This by itself, was not a big deal. As with most aviation accidents, it was a series of small errors that ultimately lead to a catastrophic outcome.
When some of the airspeed sensors stopped working, the autopilot disabled itself to give control back to the pilots. They themselves went on and were confronted with an array of different signals that were all simultaneously competing for their attention. A focus on the wrong signals lead to wrong interpretations. This on the other hand lead to wrong decisions that eventually resulted in the plane to stall.
It wasn’t until the very end that the pilots realized what was happening. The last recorded exchange was “Damn it, we’re going to crash… This can’t be happening!.” A few seconds later, the sound of desperate insight turned into fatal silence.
That day, all of the 228 passengers on board of Air France 447 died.
We increasingly depend on automated systems. As long as everything works as expected, they bring us great comfort, increased safety, and reliability. The moment systems become “safer”, however, is the moment we become negligent of what they actually do. Once they fail, we fail spectacularly, or even worse: we crash.
A large number of safety features and signals can easily become so complex that it’s hard to make sense of the overwhelming information. All these well intentioned additions and precautions may have well added to the cause of the failure itself. The more complex something gets, the harder it is to understand what’s happening.
When I started designing websites, life was easy. All you needed was an editor, an HTML, and a CSS file. On days when I felt witty, I even added some JavaScript. Today, I feel like I need to go through a regimen of tasks before I get to write my first line of code.
It usually involves setting up NPM, Webpack, Babel, React JS and all the other technical mumbo jumbo. All these layers come together to build a pyramid of inter-dependent blocks. This approach has greatly increased the efficiency of our craft but came at the cost of fragility. Once a module or dependency breaks, the whole system falls apart. We easily forget that the underlying foundation of the web is plain old simple HTML, CSS, and JS — even if some of the most avant-garde technologists want us to believe they aren’t.
Go to awwwards.com and take a minute to browse through the latest featured websites. The pattern is obvious. Most of them have vivid imagery, fullscreen autoplay videos, parallax-backgrounds, large JavaScript files, and artfully spinning loading indicators that build great suspense for the site’s content to finally appear.
Most websites get awwwarded to do more, not less. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as nothing goes wrong.
More than ever, it feels like we’re building and designing with the assumption that everything just works. That everyone will be using the same class of device, browser, and network connection we have. And how are many of us dealing with this ever increasing challenge? By reducing complexity where it’s easiest: empathy. Instead of designing and building for others, we’re designing and building for slightly altered versions of ourselves.
Through Via Negativa, we are getting into similar territory to what Jeremy Keith calls Resilient Web Design.
Resilient Web Design is about starting with the essence, and enhance from there. Instead of building an array of features simultaneously, you start with what’s needed and augment it with all the nice-to-have’s. When someone uses the crappiest browser we shall not mention by name, the core of the experience still works:
Lots of cool features on the Boston Globe don’t work when JavaScript breaks; “reading the news” is not one of them. Mat Marquis
By forcing us to focus on what’s needed, we ensure that we get our priorities straight. We all prefer boarding a plane that is safe, over a plane that hast the best entertainment system. The same applies to the way we build products — even when it’s not about life or death.
Make no mistake, that doesn’t just apply to the web. It applies to any technology, whether it’s development for iOS, Android or any other platform out there. If you are thinking about replacing a standard OS component or navigation pattern with your own, think again. Reinventing existing components is more expensive than we think. It’s not just that custom code needs to be maintained but users need to learn it too. Overall consistency often trumps individual greatness.
In iOS, swiping to the left is a system wide gesture convention to navigate to an app’s previous screen. In Gmail however, instead of going back to my inbox, it opens my previous email. Gmail behaves like Photos, instead of most other productivity apps. Swiping through emails is a well intentioned idea, but it quickly results in confusion since it clashes with pre-existing OS patterns.
When I started turning my website into a chat, I originally started with a version that was technically much more complex than what I have now. It used Natural Language Understanding so users could speak freely instead of the constrained version I eventually went for. The problem was that it became technically so difficult to manage, that I couldn’t ensure the experience was robust and consistent. I limited the functionality for the sake of the interface’s predictability. Interestingly enough, very few people ever complained about the fact that they couldn’t type whatever they wanted.
Takeaway: A reduction of complexity doesn’t necessarily lead to a reduction of usefulness and delight. By removing what isn’t essential, we’re adding resilience to the things that are. The baseline experience is the same for everyone. From there, everyone is on their own. | https://uxdesign.cc/via-negativa-4bb536f235d5 | ['Adrian Zumbrunnen'] | 2018-08-20 12:20:28.592000+00:00 | ['Product Management', 'Design Thinking', 'Startup', 'User Experience', 'UX'] |
Campervanning New Zealand’s South Island (Part 1) | Travel and New Zealand
Campervanning New Zealand’s South Island (Part 1)
After growing up in southern England, ten years ago I moved south, making the beautiful and biodiverse city of Cape Town, South Africa my home.
In December 2017, visiting family took me on a long journey to the far-flung and achingly beautiful country of New Zealand.
On a relatively small travel budget, I spent two weeks touring some of the remoter reaches of South Island in a tiny campervan. A natural history paradise, this region encompasses extraordinary alpines, wild forests, unique birdlife and unforgettable mountain landscapes.
Although often promoted as a bustling centre for adrenaline junkies, South Island has peace and wilderness aplenty for those looking to explore New Zealand’s fascinating natural history. In Part 1 of this series, I document the first part of my solo journey, heading south to the Otago Peninsula, the Catlins, and Stewart Island.
Penguins & Albatrosses: The Otago Peninsula
The Taiaroa Head lighthouse at the end of the Otago Peninsula was built in 1864.
My South Island journey started by heading south from Christchurch to Dunedin, South Island’s second-largest city. The rugged Otago Peninsula begins in the city, jutting out into the wild south-west Pacific Ocean. The peninsula is volcanic in origin, forming part of the Dunedin Volcanic Complex which was active during the Miocene between 13 and 10 million years ago.
The Otago Peninsula is perhaps most famous for its extraordinary birdlife. Taiaroa Head at the end of the peninsula is home to a colony of Northern Royal Albatross or toroa, the only mainland human-inhabited colony of albatross in the world. Breeding colonies are also found in the Chatham Islands and Enderby Island in the Auckland Islands.
Northern Royal Albatross have a wingspan of over three metres.
Northern Royal Albatross have a wingspan of up to three metres, with squid forming the largest component of their diet. When not on land to breed they can fly over vast distances, spending as much as five years at sea. To learn more about these extraordinary birds, tours can be booked at the Royal Albatross Centre, run by the Otago Peninsula Trust.
Adult Yellow-Eyed Penguin
Another iconic bird that can be seen on the Otago Peninsula is the Yellow-Eyed Penguin or hoiho, which is only found in New Zealand and the waters around it. They are one of the world’s rarest penguins, becoming increasingly threatened by introduced predators, disease, overfishing and marine pollution. The Otago Peninsula is one of the best places to view these fascinating birds, where they can be seen at the Penguin Place Conservation Reserve.
Yellow-Eyed Penguin Chick around seven weeks old.
Rainforest & Waterfalls: The Catlins
Glacial pool in the Catlins.
After seeing the new year in on the Otago Peninsula, it was time to head south to continue my journey. New Zealand’s Southland region is known for its rugged coastal beauty, wild seas and sometimes wild and wet weather. Some of the wildest weather I experienced on the trip was in the Catlins, curled up in the van with some good books while the wind howled and the rain lashed against the side of the van.
Exploring estuarine wetlands in the Catlins.
Eventually, the sun emerged and it was time to explore this beautiful and wild area, known for having one of New Zealand’s largest areas of temperate rainforest. Most of New Zealand was once covered in forest, but following human settlement, much of it was cleared for agriculture, with non-native introduced mammals such as rats and stoats impacting on native birds and other wildlife.
Trees in the temperate rainforests of the Catlins are covered with moss and lichens, which thrive in the area’s wet climate.
The temperate rainforest of the Catlins are highly complex ecosystems, dominated by trees such as totara(Podocarpus totara), rimu (Dacrydium cuppressinum) and matai (Prumnopitys taxifolia). The wood of totara was much used by the Maoris, particularly in the making of canoes. These dense forests are home to many different birds, reptiles, amphibians and bats. The trees are covered in moss and lichens and epiphytic plants such as the strongly-scented Easter Orchid (Earina autumnalis) abound.
McLean Falls south of Papatowai.
The Catlins are also known for their spectacular waterfalls. I particularly enjoyed McClean Falls south of Papatowai, which at 22m in height is the highest waterfall in the area. The falls can be reached by a short and relatively easy hike through spectacular rainforest of 40 min return. Look out for Tree Fuschia (Fuschia excorticata) along the trail, the world’s largest Fuschia species. The blooms are often visited by nectar-feeding birds such as tui and bellbirds.
Tuis are endemic to New Zealand and relatively common and widespread across the country.
Beyond the forests, the spectacular coastline of the Catlins is equally worthy of exploration. Slope Point, the southernmost point of New Zealand, can be accessed via a 20-minute walk through farmland, perched high on a cliff overlooking the wild seas below. When standing at the ceremonial yellow sign, waves often break over the cliffs on wild and stormy days. Note that access is prohibited during lambing season.
Waipapa Point Lighthouse
The beautiful and historic Waipapa Point Lighthouse at the southern end of the region marked the end of my Catlins adventure. First lit in 1884, this wooden lighthouse was built following the loss of 131 lives during the shipwreck of the passenger steamer Taurarua on a reef just offshore. Today the lighthouse is automated and monitored remotely from Maritime New Zealand’s Wellington office. New Zealand Fur Seals or kekeno can often be seen here. They are known for diving deeper than any other seal species in search of prey, with female fur seals having been recorded diving more than 240 meters deep.
New Zealand Fur Seals fighting.
The next part of my campervan journey took me southwards to Invercagill, New Zealand’s southernmost city, and then onto the small town of Bluff, the southernmost town in mainland New Zealand. The town’s harbor is the terminus for the ferry to Steward Island, where I would leave the campervan for two nights.
Dark moody skies and wild winds along the coastline near Ivercagill, Southland.
Glowing Skies: Stewart Island/Rakiura
Wild seas in the Foveaux Strait the day before I made the crossing to Stewart Island.
Stewart island is reached across the Foveaux Strait, a formidable stretch of sea that separates Stewart Island/Rakiura from mainland New Zealand. Located in the middle of the Roaring Forties, the Foveaux Strait can be treacherous and rough, with gale-force winds throughout the year, huge waves and powerful tidal races. The catamaran journey from Bluff to Oban on Stewart Island takes around an hour, with spectacular views with clear weather towards Mount Anglem/Hananui, the highest point on Stewart Island at 980m asl. For those who may wish to arrive by air instead, direct flights take 20 minutes from Invercagill by light aircraft.
Oban, Stewart Island.
Comfortable budget accommodation can be found at the Stewart Island backpackers, just a short walk around Half Moon Bay from the Oban ferry terminal. Stewart Island is New Zealand’s third-largest island and southernmost island with human habitation. Around 400 people live here, the majority in the main town of Oban. The Rakiura National Park, New Zealand’s newest national park, occupies 85% of the island. Stewart Island’s Maori name Rakiura means ‘land of the glowing skies’.
Paterson’s Inlet, Stewart Island.
For the more energetic, the Rakiura Track (One of New Zealand’s great walks) is a three-day circular hike exploring the island’s extensive native forest and beautiful coastline. There are plenty of interesting historical points of interest along the trail and accommodation can be booked ahead with a choice of huts or camping. For those visiting Stewart Island for a shorter time, there are plenty of shorter day hikes around Oban, with more information available at the Department of Conservation (DOC) offices.
View from Ackers Point, Stewart Island towards the Titi/Muttonbird Islands at 11pm at night, waiting for sunset and the return of the muttonbirds to their burrows.
During summer the long evenings are a wonderful time to explore these trails. A particular highlight for me was the Harrold Bay and Ackers Point trail, taking around 3 hours to return. At the end of the trail, there are stunning views over towards the Titi/Muttonbird Islands. During mid to late summer the muttonbirds/titi, also known as sooty shearwaters, can be seen returning to their burrows at sunset. After dusk has fallen blue penguins are also sometimes seen. If you decide to stay out on the trail after dark to enjoy this wildlife spectacle, remember to bring a good torch (and spare batteries…) for the return walk to Oban.
New Zealand Pigeon/kereru on Stewart Island.
Many keen birders flock to Stewart Island to see the Stewart Island/Rakiura kiwi/tokoeka. Few people realize that New Zealand in fact has five different kiwi species. The Stewart Island kiwi is a subspecies of the Southern Brown Kiwi. They are unusual in that they have more communal behavior than other subspecies/species and that they are sometimes active during daylight hours. However, for me, the Stewart Island kiwi remained elusive.
Stewart Island Robin seen on nearby Ulva Island.
After an idyllic couple of days exploring this stunning and wildlife-rich island, it was time to return to Bluff to continue my South Island journey, turning north towards Fiordland and the West Coast. The journey will continue in Part 2…
Further Reading
Dawson, J. Lucas, R. (2000) Nature Guide to the New Zealand Forest, Random House New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand.
De Roy, T. Jones, M. (2006) New Zealand: A Natural World Revealed, Bateman Publishing, Auckland, New Zealand.
Fitter, J. (2010) Bateman Field Guide to Wild New Zealand, Bateman Publishing, Auckland, New Zealand.
Mark, A.F. (2012) Above The Treeline: A Nature Guide to Alpine New Zealand, Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson, New Zealand. | https://medium.com/world-travelers-blog/campervanning-new-zealands-south-island-part-1-a-nature-lovers-paradise-551303b58eb6 | ['Zoë Poulsen'] | 2021-01-03 15:32:44.807000+00:00 | ['New Zealand South Island', 'Natural History', 'Wildlife', 'Travel', 'Birds'] |
Baby Sleep Secrets | Discover the Proven Solution That Gets Your Baby to Sleep like Clockwork
Since summer 2016, our mission has been to offer the most effective and comprehensive learning experience on parenting for parents across the globe.
We all are young mothers ourselves and want to be your friendly, trustworthy source for all the parenting challenges you might face with your child.
We want to share with you the joy and confidence we felt after every breakthrough we had with our little ones.
“I came to parenting the way most of us do — knowing nothing and trying to learn everything.”
We are the super-charger for your family life. An opportunity for you to grow as a parent. To connect with your child in a meaningful way.
We believe: All parents deserve the best parenting experience possible.
That’s why we
offer first-class digital guides about parenting and childhood education with only the most effective strategies to overcome common parenting challenges.
about parenting and childhood education with only the most effective strategies to overcome common parenting challenges. created the first completely digital Parenting Coach subscription on the planet. With our coaching program, personalized advice from our early childhood education specialists is only one quick message away. Always.
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And it felt really liberating
All the self-doubt suddenly vanished with our new knowledge.
There isn’t any witchcraft involved at all. We believe that anyone can experience this incredible transformation from overwhelmed & struggling to a relaxed & confident parent with the right guidance.
On our journey, we learned that the most common parenting problems we encountered are all-too-common:
How to get your baby to fall asleep (and stay asleep throughout the night!)
How to potty train effectively (even in only 3 days)
How to manage unwanted behavior of a child
How to establish healthy nutrition
and many other common challenges such as vacations, illnesses, stress, managing your relationship…
We often think that the answers are supposed to come naturally, but then they don’t surface. We were lucky enough to find mentors to help us discover various new methods to deal with old problems.
But it wasn’t always easy.
Turns out that most parenting and childhood education advice on the internet is pretty useless. On our journey to learn more about parenting, we had to filter out a lot of garbage. That’s why some of our most valuable advice comes directly from pediatric specialists and experts on early childhood education (ECE). Over a period of almost three years, we spent tens of thousands of dollars on personal consultations, phone coachings, and live seminars with educators to find the best information out there (and that actually works).
We think parents around the world deserve better — and that’s where ParentsCamp.com comes in!
Lastly, a very special bonus for you: Click Here | https://medium.com/@james-27124/baby-sleep-secrets-120f17e8554 | [] | 2021-06-16 09:13:31.660000+00:00 | ['Baby Care', 'Baby Products', 'Baby Sleep Training', 'Baby Sleep'] |
5 Great Ways To Start A Super Conversation In A Group Situation | Super Conversation In A Group Situation
Starting a conversation is not always easy. Especially when you don´t feel comfortable with the people you are conversing with.
There could be an eerie feeling of awkwardness at the start of the interaction unless you know the five secrets…
Here are five secrets to starting a great conversation with a group of people:
1. Get everyone involved.
When starting a conversation, introducing people to each other could be necessary. That is if you don´t know each other or some of those present don´t.
Then, connect one of your groups to the topic you are talking about by inviting him to contribute. Or you might simply relate one person to another with their commonalities to encourage dialogue.
2. Choose a topic.
When starting your conversation, choose a general topic. One that everyone can relate to. This will let everyone feel that they belong. This is a great way to encourage everyone to share ideas.
3. Do not drill with questions.
This should be avoided especially when asking one person only. The person may feel that he or she is facing a firing squad. Asking too many questions to a person may let him or her feel uncomfortable.
By doing so you might give that person a reason to leave the conversation. The others may also feel uncomfortable with this — they might think that they will be asked next!
4. Break the ice.
At first, there may be awkwardness among the group. You can work to break the ice. Each one of the members is just waiting for someone to do this. You can do this by cracking a joke to make them laugh. You can also start by telling a story. This may lead them to share their story, too. Then, everything will follow.
5. Ask open-ended questions.
These require a more than yes or no answer. These questions will make the flow of your conversation much smoother if done intelligently. These questions can even lead you to another topic.
Asking questions allows you to quickly test the waters to see which topics people are interested in discussing. Just be careful to ask with a pleasing tone.
It is not necessary that you use all of these tips or to use them in order. You can simply choose which ones are most appropriate for the situations you find yourself in. What matters is using these tips to kick off a conversation in a positive upbeat tone.
Once you start experimenting with new ways to start conversations you will notice what works best for your personality. At this point, it will all be much easier and before you know it you may even enjoy meeting new people. | https://medium.com/@madnesspoadcast/5-great-ways-to-start-a-super-conversation-in-a-group-situation-4d74228241eb | ['Madness Poadcast Blog'] | 2021-05-20 10:42:04.356000+00:00 | ['Skills', 'Self Development', 'Tips', 'Inspiration', 'Conversations'] |
Winter Waypoint Reflection | By Tory Gavito, President of Way to Win
As prepared for Way to Win’s Winter Waypoint event on December 8, 2020.
We made history in 2020.
It’s been repeated often that this election has been like no other — Trump is the first president in U.S. history to impede a peaceful transition of power. Trump has done lasting damage to our democracy — from undermining the power of a free press to the power of the ballot box, there is much to do to continue to heal democracy as we head into the next two years, and enter our first Midterm in the Biden/Harris Administration. This is the state of our democracy. And for this reason, I fully understand why it is so hard to celebrate what we have accomplished. But we should pause and celebrate. Because the actions you took this cycle, specifically believing in additional paths to the White House by centering new states, was precisely the move that blocked Trump from stealing this election. And try, try he has. Let’s not let our opposition steal our joy.
Because the politics of joy are politics that win. We just experienced this truth.
Participants of Winter Waypoint
So let’s rebel against the confines of COVID and celebrate as a community. This community has the power to forge new paths to make history. And let’s not forget that we made history this cycle. We can track shifts in power by using our signals of success, these are the metrics we co-developed with organizers to mark progress to goal beyond one election cycle and beyond the horse race.
Together you helped expand the electorate, thus electing Joe Biden, making Trump a one-term president; it’s only the 10th time in our 244-year history that we’ve defeated an incumbent president after their first term.
And this incredible community did that — you helped the organizers here bring new voters into the electorate. You all invested in communities left out of traditional campaigns in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and you invested in new places like Georgia and Arizona before institutional Democrats believed they were even within reach, giving local organizers the time and runway they needed to invite new voters into democracy. And you helped local organizers from North Carolina to Texas keep making progress in their states. Our work in expanding the map to the White House was the single greatest intervention that saved this election by keeping Trump away from the Supreme Court in a single state challenge. And all of our work helped push against a tide of an energized right-wing movement. With margins as close as they were, we know that everything we did to expand the base mattered. And despite the tremendous institutionalized racism of the gerrymandered races, we held the Right to a stalemate on the down ballot, even in their strongholds. Holding the line is not a loss, it is just the beginning.
You helped advance reflective democracy, by electing Kamala Harris, our first woman, first woman of color, and first person of color to become the next Vice President, a massive stride forward for reflective democracy, paving the way for a woman to hold the ultimate responsibility of the presidency in our lifetimes.
You trusted local organizers to lead with bold policy demands — you supported the local organizers in Colorado to beat back an anti-abortion ballot measure that, had it succeeded, would have been replicated around the country. You trusted local organizers to lean into movement policy demands — from Dreamers to the Movement for Black Lives — around the country these local organizers elected several anti-ICE sheriffs, they elected reform District Attorneys, and in Florida they won a much needed minimum wage increase! For each of these bold issues there is a Blue Dog democrat urging progressives to stand down. But you trusted the locals on the policy agendas they knew would inspire new voters and it made all the difference this cycle and will bear fruit in future cycles.
You helped ensure that there was a robust voter protection infrastructure and vote-by-mail education campaigns federally and in every key state where it mattered, in an election that shattered turnout records. And it mattered that we counted every single vote.
I could go on and on about how this community made the most strategic interventions this cycle. And for all those interventions, we thank you. But our time will be better served if we also review the big questions we have to resolve to improve future results. While we double down on our strengths, like listening to local organizers to expand the electorate, we must hone in on the next set of interventions needed to challenge a formidable opposition.
We know for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The GOP knows our win strategy relies on base expansion. They understand the signals of success are our greatest strengths — they know we have a growing multiracial coalition on our side, that reflective democracy wins, that bold progresive policies from addressing climate change to healthcare are in fact attractive to a majority of Americans, and that advancing democracy reforms does not help them. Yet they still made gains this cycle. How?
Demographics are not destiny. We cannot take for granted any member of our winning coalition. So while multiracial coalitions delivered new swing states like Georgia and Arizona, and helped solidify the old blue wall in Pennsylvania and Michigan, it’s our charge to keep our coalition together and expand it. In the 2020 cycle, the ties that bind our winning coalition is their rejection of Trump, not their belief in the Democrats’ vision or leadership per se. That’s tremendously shaky footing that was just enough to win the presidency, but not enough to win gerrymandered federal or legislative districts. We must listen to and engage all voters in our multiracial coalition. And all while our multiracial coalition is under tremendous cross pressure from the Right — there are at least three things Republicans are doing that we must counter:
First, they create pathways for diverse leaders to shape a narrative on economic advancement. These leaders focus on how individuals can, through hard work, get ahead. And they tell this story over and over, like Nicki Haley did at the Republican National Convention this past summer.
Next, they take the long view, investing for years in shaping the ideology of voters who are often not communicated with by campaigns or Democrats, including rural voters no matter their color. Like the Kochs do through their latino outreach program, the Libre Initiative, led by Daniel Garza. NYTs just featured Garza in a long piece describing how their impact on Latino voters this cycle is just the start of their organizing campaign, and how they are doubling down on Latino outreach in Georgia as we speak.
Finally, in addition to other forms of voter suppression, the Right pumps all our communication channels — from Facebook to Youtube to mainstream outlets — with disinformation, Tucker Carlson of Fox News is just the tip of the iceberg.
Everything the Right does is designed to divide and conquer the power of our multiracial coalition. We’ve got to do better at tying our diverse coalition together by emphasizing their shared economic interests to strengthen and multiply our wins in future cycles.
These three strategic interventions, that I’m about to walk through, outline our current thinking about how we can dismantle Right-wing progress in order to win. These reflections are really the point of our time with you today. They will kick off conversations that we will carry on into the new year to help us improve our plans to undermine our opponents. So, in addition to carrying on the successful work Way to Win has always done of trusting locals to increase voter power, these are the three specific interventions we believe must be made in 2021 to reshape history in the 2022 midterms, and the are as follows:
We must stop letting the Republicans set the narrative. We must dismantle turnout versus persuasion models. We have to back power builders to get the best candidates on the ballot, using primaries when necessary.
All of these interventions are equally important, but I want to spend time specifically on the narrative. We cannot continue to take voters of color for granted by calling them turnout targets — thinking we only need to tell them how to vote and not why they should vote for Democrats. And why to win on a base expansion theory of change we must fight harder to align with movement-backed candidates earlier on in the primary process for incumbent challenges and open seats (or we end up with more bad candidates like Cal Cunningham in North Carolina). But my whole career in politics, we consistently point our finger at Dem’s failure to tell compelling stories as one of the reasons we lose, and we cannot afford to keep giving Dems a pass on this front.
Democrats had advance warning in 2019 that the GOP was going to vilify Democrats as radicals. And Democrats sat on their hands for a year. We have a strategy that effectively vilifies the GOP — it’s the Race Class Narrative — it is a storytelling framework that unites a multiracial coalition and vilifies Republicans for using race as a tool to divide us while they rig the economy. Democrats failed to implement the Race Class Narrative, and so they failed to create a national, unifying message anchored in economic AND racial justice.
Movements are our greatest strength — and in 2020 the Movement for Black Lives uprisings brought a surge in voter registrations among Democrats and Independents, reinvigorating a drop in voter registrations at the outset of covid — in fact voter registration was boosted by 1.1 million registrants in just the first half of June. During Election Season, Black voters turned out in historic numbers from Pennsylvania to Georgia, delivering Biden the win. We cannot blame the movement for Democrat’s failed message strategy.
Additionally, Biden’s message by design clipped his own coattails. Biden’s campaign was almost singularly focused on the following message — I am a nice, reasonable guy — it gave permission to Republicans to cross over and vote for him. That strategy was never designed to help down ballot candidates. That combined with the right’s massive mis- and dis-information machine and their superior marketing of bad ideas that targeted our own communities, created a tide too strong for down-ballot Democrats to swim up against.
We have the next two years, between now and the next midterm election, to get the narrative right. And it starts with marketing and implementing policy ideas about how to improve people’s lives, while maintaining our efforts to trust and support local organizers as they continue to engage new voters, break down barriers to democratic participation, and lead bold policy campaigns.
Way to Win was founded in part to correct the mistakes Democrats made in 2016. If you are one of the folks that was around in those foundational years, you likely heard me say that the silos in philanthropy and political funding limit our relationships to transactions — where some of us are only treated as checkbooks and others of us are only treated as organizers. These silos create barriers that limit our communities’ full potential when we come together, and keep ideas and resources from finding each other.
Way to Win’s best moments have come from when we break down those barriers. Together we reflected on 2016, and we successfully challenged the idea that there is only one single path to the White House. What more can we do in 2021 to shift history in 2022? | https://medium.com/@waytowin-us/winter-waypoint-reflection-5891a5695948 | ['Way To Win'] | 2020-12-10 05:55:32.553000+00:00 | ['Nonprofit', 'Giving', 'Philanthropy', 'Progressive Politics'] |
Android 11- Top New 11 features for android. | In this article we will discuss about what android provides in new OS updates. And How they are helpful for us.
If you have google pixel device(after the version of pixel 2).then you definitely get this now. and for other its depend upon your device company.
So let’s start to discuss that, | https://shirsh94.medium.com/android-11-top-new-11-features-for-android-a83c3b0fe4fe | ['Shirsh Shukla'] | 2020-09-27 11:00:07.184000+00:00 | ['Android App Development', 'AndroidDev', 'Android Update', 'Android', 'Android Apps'] |
Love Within | Love Within
photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.com
Love, reveal yourself in us!
Dear One,
I am writing to remind you of things you already know. Your Essence is far greater than your self-protective and limited ego. Within you lives Unconditional Love, Abundant Resources, and Ever-lasting Peace — the Christ of God.
Today and every day is the occasion to take your eyes off of your perceived problems and doubts, ideas of guilt and unworthiness, and fearful fantasies, and to look, instead, with admiration and appreciation at the beauty set before you. Today is the occasion to embrace beliefs of limitless, divine possibilities and unfailing support, coupled with copious gratitude.
The way you tell the story of your life (to yourself and others) matters. Are you obsessing on a tale of tragedy or celebrating a vision of triumph? All things are possible for those who believe. Christ within you is your hope and is birthed in your life when you love.
Remember, this moment is an opportunity to connect to Love, and therefore, to live into the fullness of who you are.
As always, do what best awakens you to love,
Your Inner Wisdom | https://medium.com/advent-reflections/love-within-b6afa77e22d5 | ['Ani Vidrine'] | 2020-12-23 20:44:13.186000+00:00 | ['Advent', 'Christianity', 'Love', 'Faith', 'Hope'] |
Making Dependable #1 | I work at SilverStripe. Aside from the framework and CMS modules, we have many smaller modules to maintain. And recently it’s been difficult to demo bug fixes or new features, from multiple contributors/branches, in the same installation.
One of the ideas we’ve had is to create an application; which can build a custom Composer dependency map, and deploy that to a new server. It would also be great if there was an interface for deciding which dependencies are included, and a unique URL for each installation.
That’s what I want to build.
Creating A New Project
I’ve chosen to make this project in Laravel 5.x, for a couple of reasons:
I want to learn more about Laravel 5.x. I’m particularly interested the new features of 5.1. In addition to my work at SilverStripe, I also help run the Wellington Laravel meet-up group. This is something I’d like to share with them, and perhaps collaborate on as a group.
If you haven’t installed Composer, globally, then do that. You can find out how at https://getcomposer.org. Life’s too short to have to manage a composer.phar in every project…
So I’ve installed Laravel 5.x, via Composer:
$ composer create-project laravel/laravel dependable
Time to get some coffee…
Creating The Database
To begin with, I want to store developer details. Everybody that uses this (or whose repositories and branches are folded into new installations) need an account. It doesn’t have to have all of their information, but there needs to be a way for developers to connect with Github, and optionally set a password.
Connecting with Github seems to be a job for Socialite. I want to see what fields Github will give me before I create the database tables for the rest of the information…
$ composer require laravel/socialite
Have to remember to add the Socialite service provider and facade! The facade isn’t strictly necessary, but it makes the example code cleaner and is just as easy to write tests for.
This happens in ~/config/app.php
I also need to create application keys. You can create new application keys through https://github.com/settings/developers. For the URL I just set http://dependable.assertchris.io (even though that doesn’t exist yet). For the callback URL I set http://dependable.assertchris.io/connect/github.
I should add these keys to config:
"github" => [
"client_id" => env("GITHUB_KEY"),
"client_secret" => env("GITHUB_SECRET"),
"redirect" => env("GITHUB_REDIRECT"),
],
This happens in ~/config/services.php
It’s going to be a pain to develop on a live URL, so I’ll fake it by adding a hosts entry:
127.0.0.1 dependable.assertchris.io
This happens in /etc/hosts
I also need to point my local web server to the public folder:
<VirtualHost *:80>
<Directory "/path/to/dependable/public">
AllowOverride All
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
Require all granted
</Directory>
DocumentRoot /path/to/dependable/public
ServerName dependable.assertchris.io
</VirtualHost>
This happens in /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
$ apachectl restart
This makes the site viewable, in a browser. Let’s add a couple of routes, to connect to a Github account:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
use Laravel\Socialite\Facades\Socialite;
Route::get("/", "WelcomeController@index");
Route::get("redirect/github", function () {
return Socialite::with("github")->redirect();
});
Route::get("connect/github", function () {
$data = Socialite::with("github")->user();
// save data...
});
This happens in ~/app/Http/routes.php
Amazingly, this is all the code I need to get my Github profile details. The results resemble the following:
Laravel\Socialite\Two\User Object
(
[token] => 057e0a...
[id] => 200609...
[nickname] => assertchris
[name] => Christopher Pitt
[email] => [email protected]
[avatar] => https://avatars.githubusercontent.com...
[user] => Array
(
[login] => assertchris
...
)
)
Looks like I can get email, name and avatar. I can also list the repositories, which will be useful later. I’ll still need a password field, but I’m going to ignore it for now.
So I’ll need a table to store:
ID Name Nickname Email Avatar
I can add more to that later! I’ll generate an empty migration, and add the fields we need, after:
$ php artisan make:migration developer
I’ll add the fields I need:
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
class Developer extends Migration
{
/**
* Run the migrations.
*/
public function up()
{
Schema::create("developer", function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->increments("id");
$table->string("github_id");
$table->string("github_name");
$table->string("github_nickname");
$table->string("github_email");
$table->string("github_avatar");
$table->timestamps();
});
}
/**
* Reverse the migrations.
*/
public function down()
{
Schema::dropIfExists("developer");
}
}
This happens in ~/database/migrations/
2015_05_26_000000_create_developer_table.php
I’ve also changed my default database driver to sqlite, and run the migrations with:
$ touch storage/database.sqlite
$ php artisan migrate
I’ll update the landing page, to show which developers are connected:
namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Developer extends Model
{
/**
* @var string
*/
protected $table = "developer";
/**
* @var array
*/
protected $fillable = [
"github_id",
"github_nickname",
"github_name",
"github_email",
"github_avatar",
];
}
This happens in ~/app/Models/Developer.php
use App\Models\Developer;
Route::get("connect/github", function () {
$data = Socialite::with("github")->user();
$developer = Developer::where("github_id", $data->id)
->first();
if (!$developer) {
Developer::create([
"github_id" => $data->id,
"github_nickname" => $data->nickname,
"github_name" => $data->name,
"github_email" => $data->email,
"github_avatar" => $data->avatar
]);
}
return redirect("/");
});
This happens in ~/app/Http/routes.php
use App\Models\Developer;
Route::get("/", function () {
$developers = Developer::all();
return view("index", [
"developers" => $developers
]);
});
This happens in ~/app/Http/routes.php
<h1>Developers</h1>
<ol>
@foreach($developers as $developer)
<li>{{ $developer->github_name }}</li>
@endforeach
</ol>
<a href="{{ url("redirect/github") }}">Connect to Github</a>
This happens in ~/resources/views/index.blade.php
This list is rough, but it demonstrates how I can connect (with Github) and store knowledge of that connection in the database. The next step will be to gather repository data, so the application can start to create custom composer.json dependency maps…
Notes
Laravel ships with some scaffolding. It’s mostly to do with user management and authentication. I removed it with:
$ php artisan fresh
I also had to remove the User model, and change a few routes.
You can find the code at https://github.com/assertchris/dependable. | https://medium.com/laravel-5-tutorials/making-dependable-1-8bcc602f8546 | ['Christopher Pitt'] | 2015-05-27 20:35:09.178000+00:00 | ['Github', 'Laravel', 'PHP'] |
Explain Images Lazy Loading with IntersectionObserver and React Hooks in Short | What is Lazy Loading?
The browser downloads all media resources when initializing a website. Lazy loading is a technique to defer the loading of non-critical resources on the page. There are two kinds of Lazy loading:
The Benefits for Image Lazy Loading
The website with Image lazy loading loads off-screen images after all critical resources have finished loading to lower Time to Interactive (TTI). The user can avoid wasting money on large data and processing time for decoding the downloaded contents.
The TTI score is a comparison of your page’s TTI and the TTI for real websites, based on data from the HTTP Archive. Developers can measure TTI from Lighthouse
Three ways to implement Image Lazy Loading | https://medium.com/a-layman/explain-images-lazy-loading-with-intersectionobserver-with-react-hooks-in-short-733e05b610dd | ['Sean Hs'] | 2020-11-16 07:58:21.387000+00:00 | ['Lazy Loading', 'Software Development', 'Webdev', 'Frontend', 'React'] |
Best Gay Holiday Destinations | Gran Canaria — Spain
Gran Canaria — Spain
Gran Canaria, a destination that will blow your mind and drop your jaw. A Spanish island located in the Atlantic Ocean is always welcoming to the gay community all-year-round. Whether you’re a man who loves to swim under the sun or just want to lie in the sand and get a gorgeous tan, Gran Canaria is one of the gayest destinations in Europe
This year-round island is always bathing in the rays of the sun, complemented by the sparkling blue of the sea, and riddled with nudist beaches where gay men can forget about those pesky tan lines.
If you’re looking for a gay, fun time under the sun, consider visiting Maspalomas, which may as well be the number 1 spot for the gay community. I’m going to have to repeat the phrase sun, sun, and even more sun! The weather in Maspalomas rarely falls below 20 degrees Celsius, with a light winter during January and February, which means it is a sunny, gay adventure just waiting to happen! For the gay men out there, who are looking to travel on a budget, Gran Canaria is surrounded by affordable food, drinks, accommodation options, transportation, and an overall lifestyle.
1) Playa Del Ingles — a popular gay, sea resort that is strictly for the LGBT community! Yes, you won’t find any straight people, so you can feel comfortable in your own skin. Playa del Ingles is the definition of freedom. No matter who you are or what you identify as, you can be yourself and hold your partner’s hand without any judging looks.
2) Kiosk 7 — this trendy location will make you proud to be gay. It boasts a popular nudist beach with a rainbow flag that has set it apart from the rest. Bask under the rays of the sun or swim in the crystal-clear waters. If you were spending your time in Play Del Ingles, Kiosk 7 is separated by dunes that make for a walk surrounded by a breath-taking landscape. Be prepared for the journey since it would take you around 30 to 45 minutes. For those who are looking to swim naked even faster, just grab a taxi and get there in 10 minutes.
3) Yumbo Center — this is where the nightlife begins. Around this area, you have many options of restaurants, terraces, bars, and clubs. The crowd will keep you engaged, excited, and eager for the music, drinks, and food. Be prepared to stay up all night if you want to be a part of the party crowd!
You can do this day after day because there are always new things for you to see and do and, trust me, boredom does not exist in Gran Canaria.
Enjoy! | https://medium.com/@holidays4men/best-gay-holiday-destinations-b03654c38914 | [] | 2020-12-18 03:31:50.415000+00:00 | ['Gay', 'Gay Holidays', 'Gay Travel', 'Gay Destinations', 'Gay Marriage'] |
What Is Elon Musk Doing With His Money? | Elon Musk recently just became the second richest person on the planet and in light of that and the attacks on him by Robert Reich for being a billionaire along with some false claims, I wanted to point out what Elon is actually doing with his money and how it impacts you — yes you.
“I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.” — Elon Musk
How It Began
Elon’s first company was Zip2 and he received $22 million for his part of the company when it sold back in 1999. With that, he started X.com which at the time was an online financial service and payment company with $10 million from the sale of Zip2.
A year after that, it merged with another company, Confinity, which had a money transfer service that is now a household name: PayPal which was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion. Elon received $165 million from that.
SpaceX and Tesla
Elon’s dream is to make humans a multi-planetary species and he is often mocked for this — even after the successes SpaceX has had with recently sending NASA astronauts to the ISS twice.
Tesla is another story of the struggle to success and this is where Elon’s net worth really began to take off. There were a few times where Elon almost lost everything, but Reich doesn’t mention that.
The Boring Company.
Another one of Elon’s companies is The Boring Company which was borne out of the frustration of sitting in traffic. “I am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging,” Elon tweeted.
Neuralink
Neuralink is a neurotechnology startup that is working toward integrating the human brain with A.I. This sounds really sci-fi, but so does building rockets from scratch because you couldn’t find an engineer who wanted to work with you — -as in the story of SpaceX. The goal of Neuralink is to help humans merge with software in order to keep up with the advancement of A.I.
If you think Neuralink is sci-fi, then what do you think about the fact that you can store data on a quartz crystal? I’m not talking metaphysics, but science. Researchers at Southampton University were able to write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Newton's Opticks, the Magna Carta, and the Kings James Bible on a quartz disk that could store up to 360 terabytes of data.
The point I’m making is that you can pretty much do anything if you put your mind to it.
Elon’s Wealth.
Elon’s wealth, as he has said in that quote above, is often poured back into his companies. He started his companies as ways to solve various problems that affect not just him, but all of us. One issue is that what if we faced an extinction event and had to evacuate to another planet? This is why he founded SpaceX.
Not all of his wealth goes into his companies — probably a good 98% of it, but the guy has to live. Food, housing, and existing are not free in our society. And let’s not forget Elon's own charity.
The Musk Foundation gives primarily to renewable energy research and advocacy, human space exploration research and advocacy, pediatric research, science, and engineering education.
Helping People In Need.
Hurricane Laura Aftermath.
Living in Louisiana has its perks but also its risks — however, this is home for me. During Laura, I was high and dry in Baton Rouge but the storm-ravaged our state. Many were left homeless and without basic food, water, and communication for a month. In the heat.
Those of us online took to Twitter to express our shock and outrage over the fact that the mainstream media refused to cover the humanitarian crisis in Louisiana.
A few days later, two of the charities I’d been promoting tweeted that The Musk Foundation, which is Elon’s charity, donated substantial amounts to help with hurricane relief. He donated to four that I know of and you can read more about that here.
L.A. Fire Department Firefighting Robot
Back in October, the L.A. Fire Department unveiled its RS3 firefighting robot that can be used in fighting large-scale scenarios such as commercial fires, hazmat incidents, and even oil refinery fires. This isn’t the only time Elon has helped the LAFD Foundation either.
Flint Water Crisis
Although the government dropped the ball on this one — -it’s not Elon’s responsibility to provide Americans with clean water — Elon picked up that ball and came through for Flint. Elon’s donation helped Flint Schools replace all of its water fountains with new water stations and water filtration at all of the city’s schools. That’s not all he did.
Elon personally went to the school to encourage the students there and gave them all computers. The donation of over a thousand computers was to help students with their education. He spoke to the students and encouraged them to dream big.
“I had a really strong sense of curiosity, which I think is a powerful thing and I really encourage you to, if you are curious about, really allow your curiosity to flourish,” he said while announcing another donation of $400,000 that was put in the hands and imagination of all of the Flint 7th and 8th-grade students.
Planting Trees
Last year, Elon donated $1 million to plant trees for $1 per tree to MrBeast’s campaign. MrBeast was raising $20 million to help fight climate change by planting more trees on every continent. I’m not sure if the money for this came from his foundation or not — but the point is that Elon is using his money to make an impact on humanity as a whole.
Elon Musk Is A Top Donor Of The ACLU
In 2018, Elon responded to someone on Twitter who asked him about donating to the ACLU to help the organization in its work with helping migrant children separated from their parents. Elon pointed out that he was one of their top donors and the ACLU backed him up.
There are other instances where he’s helped when asked to do so. He’s helped provided ventilators during the pandemic when the nation was running out, he even told me he’d try to get them here to Louisiana — before our state began to succeed at flattening the curve to the point we didn’t need them.
What Is Elon Doing With His Wealth?
Elon has often used this phrase, “preserve the light of consciousness.” I believe this is what he is doing with his wealth. And by creating SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, Neuralink, his foundation — he is solving problems that impact humanity on a level that many don’t even think about.
Each person often sees the world from their own perspective. Elon Musk sees the world in its entirety, including the potential problems that would affect us as a whole, and realizes that without humans, that light of consciousness could fizzle out.
The fact that he is using his wealth to solve problems, help others in need, and encourage them when they're down as he did with me back in 2018 — these and more are not just preserving that light, but making it glow brighter. So bright that 150 years from now, people will still see his light long after we are all gone.
Conclusion
It should be noted that many often choose to keep their charitable donations private. I’m sure Elon’s donated to more than we know — and Reich probably has, also. I assume this is the case as I do want to believe in the best of people. Maybe I’m a fool, probably.
However, my goal here was to point out that the idea of Elon Musk as some evil billionaire hoarding wealth while everyone is starving is wrong. Yet this is what Reich is doing. Reich knows his fan base rather well — just like Trump knows his.
It should be stressed, though, that Reich is also in that 1% that he seems to abhor. No, he’s not a billionaire, but his net worth is $4 million according to this website. And this website pointed out that Reich made 36% more than the average CEO and charges $40K an hour for speeches.
I’m not attacking Reich, here — everyone has their hustle. Some make more money than others, even. But Reich, who is a millionaire, in my opinion, isn’t as poor as his base is — his base who cheer him on as he bashes billionaires and the one percent. And according to this website, Reich could very well be in the top one percent that he hates so much.
Always research things and don’t take what people say as the truth. Even this article — feel free to do your own research. | https://medium.com/@johnnacrider/what-is-elon-musk-doing-with-his-money-9b873360a966 | ['Johnna Crider'] | 2020-11-25 00:35:47.299000+00:00 | ['Charity', 'Tesla', 'Humanity', 'Spacex', 'Elon Musk'] |
Did you know you are an arms length away from your breakthrough? | Since starting my business, I have been beat up physically, spiritually and emotionally. I have had some pretty intense waves of deep depression and anxiety. I have felt pressure from all sides, feeling dread and entrapment. The last two weeks have been the worst. I have struggled but when I had an issue with the food trailer that disabled me from working I knew that was the final blow. I was done! With nothing to do all week, I sunk deeper and deeper into my depression. I thought suicidal thoughts. I thought of numbing the pain through alcohol or pills. I was breaking down and saw no way out. I didn’t pray to God… I didn’t talk to God. I didn’t play worship music. My mind said, “I am forgotten and God lead me here, knowing how I would feel. He wants me to lose everything. Why would He give me confirmation after confirmation for me to end up here? WHY!”
Friday, my wife text me and said we had a friend that wanted to take us to dinner. I didn’t want to go but I did. Exactly what I knew would happen did, God showed our friend, Pam, my spiritual mail. Next thing I know I’m getting up at 5:45am on a Saturday, to go on a hike with Pam.
The hike was beautiful and physically and spiritually tough. God started dealing with me as soon as I entered the trail. We walked down the mountain and took the Boulder Gorge Trail and at one point we were at the bottom of these huge rocks and the trail just stopped. It was overwhelming, and I heard God speak to me. This was a tangible picture of my spiritual reality. I was here. I hiked up a ways and saw another trail. Pam and I started on that trail and here she went. “You know you are at the bottom of Boulder Gorge and you can’t see a way out, but God is only an arms length away. He is at the top saying ‘Alicia, grab my hand’ but you gotta reach up and take His hand.” Yep. I was tired. I have been fighting, what felt like a losing battle, on my own. I continued to hit boulder after boulder.
We continued, what felt like 6 miles, through uphill rocky climbs and spider webs. The sun was still rising when we reached a split. Pam asked me, “Do you wanna go left or right?” I said, “I don’t care, let’s go left.” We came out by this flat field that soon turned into another uphill climb. When we reached the top we saw the most beautiful view the trail had to offer. We sat for a minute and Pam said, “God is all in this hike, isn’t He?” I agreed. He was but I still couldn’t feel Him like I wanted to. Even though I was out of the boulders and on top of the mountain, I still felt smothered. Pam looked me square in the eye and told me if I didn’t get it together that I would lose everything. My business, my family… everything. If I allowed fear to win, that’s what would happen. She said, “You aren’t in the Word, you aren’t walking in favor and you won’t be blessed until you let go of you.” Y’all she gave me the business, said “that was from God,” and literally walked away. By the end of the hike I was asking Pam to pray with me. I gave it all to God. I came back to God. I stopped blaming God and critiquing every life choice I had made since I was 16. I walked into the woods that morning, but me and God walked out.
I want y’all to know you are an arms length away from your breakthrough. Whatever it is. Think about a leaf. If you pick a leaf off of a tree, it immediately starts to die. You don’t see it at first but slowly the death process takes over. That was me, because I removed myself from the true Vine, my source. [ I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:5 NIV]. It’s a good thing we can reattach and come home.
Whether it’s finances, health, family, drama, work, loneliness or something else, please know you are an arms length away from your breakthrough.
Has my circumstances changed since Saturday? Nope, but I have hope knowing they will. Am I alone? No, I am not. We all know there was a fourth man in the fire. Don’t you know that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego felt the heat, saw the flame but didn’t get burnt? Just because God was with them didn’t mean they were removed from the furnace, immediately. When King Nebuchadnezzar called them out of the furnace, He praised their God, our God [Daniel 3:14–29]. I’m still in the furnace, but I’m not afraid of the flames. My God continues to save me. Lift up your arms, reach for Him. Allow Him to save you, too.
{song suggestion: Another in the Fire by Hillsong United} | https://medium.com/@griffith2417/did-you-know-you-are-an-arms-length-away-from-your-breakthrough-3cd0a0bb0c79 | ['Alicia Griffith'] | 2019-09-23 03:14:38.359000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Hiking', 'Breakthrough', 'Christianity'] |
My ‘To Be Played’ List is Out of Control so Naturally I Started Playing Skyrim Again | It’s kinda hard to believe that Skyrim came out 9 years ago. In some ways, it seems like it’s been here forever. Certainly it’s remained in the forefront of my gaming consciousness. Maybe its assumed permanence is some side effect of its ubiquity – its been ported practically everywhere. And I’ve been there for each iteration:
on the Xbox 360 at launch in 2011.
the legendary edition on PC a few years later.
when it arrived on the Xbox One in 2016, with mod support.
on the Switch in 2017 – Skyrim on the go!
Thanks to Xbox’s streaming functionality, I’ve even played Skyrim briefly on my phone.
Skyrim was the last game I waited in a line to purchase on the day it released; the occasion remains unique in that I clearly remember the mostly uneventful transaction nine years later.
Most games are launched on Tuesdays but November 11, 2011 was a Friday. I believe they launched on Friday because of the cool 11/11/11 date. I was appreciative of it for less symbolic reasons: I’d taken the day off from work, which meant I had 3 uninterrupted days of play ahead of me.
There were probably a half dozen of us queued up outside the GameStop in the mall, waiting for employees to roll up the gate at 10 AM and let us have at thee. My wife had come along good-naturedly, even though I’m sure there were other things she’d rather be doing on a day off. The kids had been shuffled off to school and we were waiting to buy a videogame.
I clearly remember thinking that we were probably the only people who had to adjust our schedule to be there, a pair of 30 year-olds surrounded by college kids. The guy in front of us was a portly twenty-something wrapped in a green denim duster, greasy hair askew at awkward angles. He kept rattling the cage and demanding the employees “gimme my skrim”, like an imprisoned madman yelling at the guards. He quieted once we were let inside, but renewed his demands with vigor once he had the complete attention of the cashier. I honestly believe it’s the only thing he said the whole time.
My own transaction was notable only in that it was quick and without any ranting.
My first character was a burly Nord in the style of Conan the Barbarian. He carried a giant sword and eschewed magic. I don’t recall his name, but before I stopped playing him we’d conquered the dragon threat, reclaimed the north for the Nords, and stood atop the Champions. I purchased the DLC but put the game aside before I made any headway.
Later forays into Skyrim came through selective mods, which enhanced, improved, or modified the gameplay, freshening up an experience I’d already sunk several hundred hours into. I no longer cared about the Dragonborn storyline, one of the game’s weakest. Rather, I just kinda wandered and let the game find me. And pursue some of the quests I’d not previously attempted.
Last week I fired up Skyrim for the first time in at least a year, reviving a game with a date stamp of 2017. Thus was Mister Whiskers reborn from the digital ashes and turned loose on a world in search of heroes once again.
But Mister Whiskers is nobody’s hero. Hence all the tomb raiding. | https://medium.com/fan-fare/my-to-be-played-list-is-out-of-control-so-naturally-i-started-playing-skyrim-again-40877fc233c2 | ['Eric Pierce'] | 2020-12-28 15:08:01.291000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Pop Culture', 'Skyrim', 'Xbox', 'Writing'] |
Black Travel Anxiety Part III: Seeing SPAIN for myself | After being in Scotland for two years and getting settled in, I decided to do what most workers would do and take small trips when I had time off. Spain was a very popular choice so I booked a flight to go with a girl I was dating at the time. She was a Polish native speaker so I had no backup in case the language barrier would have been a problem. I was told by football fans when I was younger that Spain was one of the most racist countries in the world. All we really knew about Spain as public school children in Bermuda was about football, so the incident where a black player had a banana thrown at him didn’t do much to prove the earlier statement wrong. However, Spain was the first time I completely lost my travel anxiety before even arriving in the country. I had met and worked with many Spanish people which had completely debunked all of the blatant myths I had grown up listening to. Had I not, I may have let what I was told get to me and probably missed out on some of the most joy I’ve experienced since I left Bermuda. I’m going to hopefully do the same for you as you keep reading so you can add this amazing location to your travel list.
Spanish people are very open and extremely sociable, so even introverts such as myself somehow become mesmerized with the overall vibe of the people in Spain. Spanish folks are known to be very accepting of various social classes, and are on the forefront of many social justice movements. If you have an alternative lifestyle, or have ever felt like a misfit or outcast, you will feel completely welcome in Spain. They are all big foodies, which would mean nothing without the social aspect since we all know great food was meant to be enjoyed with company. They are also very approachable, no matter what you look like, I’ve found you can start a conversation with almost anyone which certainly came in handy after I reached a conversational level in Spanish. Being a big fan of languages, I would not have learned Spanish as fast if race was an issue with them. In Spain they tend to put quite a bit of focus on rest, relaxation, and pleasure. Feelings of hate for something as silly as where you come from or the colour of your skin would get in the way of that, so the vast majority give no importance to it.
Like I said with Scotland, it would be a big mistake to avoid an opportunity to visit Spain based on a few bad stories. To be honest, I doubt you would find anyone that has been to Spain with anything less than positive to say. Some of the best friends I’ve made in my adult life are from Spain, and they have become like family to me to the point that we seem to forget that we’ve only known each other for a few years. All I can say is my relationship with Spain and its people has been absolutely life changing.
Keep those eyes peeled for next week’s post where I talk about the one time I felt threatened being abroad and much more about my experience in Poland. As always thanks for reading, leave a clap, and don’t be afraid to comment. Hasta luego! | https://medium.com/@sirajam89/black-travel-anxiety-part-iii-seeing-spain-for-myself-3e07c3ff6b18 | ['Siraj Abdul-Malik'] | 2020-10-09 08:02:43.110000+00:00 | ['Travel Writing', 'Travel', 'Spain', 'Writing'] |
The All-Nighter (fiction) | I once considered making art from printer jams. I liked the scrunchy concertina folds; crashing lines of text, garbled like an alien transmission; the way the ink could smear right down the paper as you hauled it out, some hapless word stretched into a long, long scream.
But that was back when I was doing my thing, living in the moment, before I started at Bill’s copy shop. Nowadays, I just hate jams, like I hate the printer-copier, and the people who come to print and copy, and Bill, and working nights when I ought to be making art.
One day I’ll be out of this and on to good things. Until then, tonight is going to be a bad one. It’s only early evening, but already I can hear the gaps between the seconds ticking, and in those gaps I feel the seconds of my life dripping away onto the floor of Bill’s back room, by the printer-copier.
They’d be tiny things, my seconds, specks among the wisps and shreds of paper torn from the damn jams: tiny, but they’d add up.
I knew it would be a worse night than usual when the printer stuck on Mr. VeggieTable. Even at the best of times I loathed Mr. VeggieTable — that badly-drawn homunculus, carrots for legs, red pepper chest and a head of broccoli — and knew I would detest his legumes if I could afford them.
Still, I had to clear the jam. The printer’s housing clicked as I opened it. More seconds fell to the floor. I pulled on the stuck paper, and it seemed to shift.
I pulled, and pulled more. The clock ticked. Apart from that the night was silent, and the yellow lights were strong, and it was just me and the printer.
Usually, you reach a moment when the paper gives up fighting, when you know you’ve won. But tonight it was stubborn. I pulled, and felt a quarter-inch move, and then another, but I must have been optimistic, because when I looked closer the strip of white paper was only just visible this side of the plastic maw.
I strained at it, wiggled the paper and strained, and again I thought I felt it give, but nothing had emerged. I cursed the printer, and Mr. VeggieTable, and Bill; it felt like I had been pulling for hours as the lights blazed and the clock ticked.
The door to the main shop edged open. It was another regular customer, the lady from Bar Barbara Ann. (These stupid business names only made me hate our clients even more; why should I have to work for them when I could be pursuing art?)
Still, I went to the counter.
“I need two thousand copies,” she said, passing over a red USB stick and an A4 proof.
I took them, glanced at the heading on the paper — Rockin’ and a-Rollin’ Night — and was about to call up her account on my screen when she spoke again.
“I need two thousand copies,” she said, passing over a red USB stick and an A4 proof.
I took it, glanced at the heading and was about to call up her account when she spoke again.
“I need two thousand copies,” she said, passing over a red USB stick and an A4 proof.
The clock ticked and the shop was bright.
“I need two thou…” — and I was thinking I should call up her account on the system, feeling my fingers on the keyboard, where they had always been and never been, and the shop was hazy, and the clock seemed very loud –
– and I wrenched myself out of the moment.
“Stop it!” I shouted, and I dropped the USB stick and the proof, and made for the back room, though each step seemed leaden; and when I got there I cowered on the floor by the printer-copier, and didn’t move until I heard the door sigh.
I hoped she had left. I had to pull myself together. The clock ticked. Milliseconds of me trickled to the floor. I tried to focus on something physical, something real. I tried to concentrate on pulling out the paper.
This time when I tugged I could feel that it came and came and came, feet and feet of it, and I should have been wreathed in spoiled printouts; yet when I looked, no more had been freed than before.
Focus wasn’t working. I needed to get out, away from the light and the ticking, but it was a while before I dared to look through to the store. Barbara Ann, if that was her name, had gone. There was a red USB stick and a white sheet of A4 on the floor.
Beyond the window, on the dark street, I could see rain falling, different drops striking the glass each instant, people walking, bags, cars, children, a dog, a bus, propelling themselves through the world, scurrying through the hours.
I wanted to go to that door, join that crowd moving through normal seconds. I wanted to be with them now, more than I wanted my life to be different; it was a sweeter goal than any prize.
I gazed at the window, and tried to stand. It seemed that I rose on my legs for a very long time, but afterwards I was crouching all the same, and here I am still.
Under the lights so bright that night might as well be day, I pull on the stuck paper, and time passes listlessly, perhaps. Outside, change swims by.
There’s a voice: “I need two thousand copies.” I pull on the stuck paper, and wait for the clock to tick.
I can’t hear it, but I wonder if you could hear one long tick if it never ceased, and I picture myself as a tiny figure, a Mr. VeggieTable entombed in a tick of the clock that falls forever and forever toward Bill’s floor.
“I need two thousand copies,” a lady says.
The paper budges from its jam, but doesn’t.
It’s going to be a long night. | https://medium.com/thenewnorth/the-all-nighter-fiction-ab3c024b73f5 | [] | 2019-11-22 23:22:12.801000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Psychological Horror', 'Horror Fiction'] |
Why You Should Be Pro-Drug Decriminalization Even if You are ‘Anti-Drug’ | Claim: Drug decriminalization will lead to more people doing drugs, which is bad.
This is a commonly held belief. The assumption here is that the criminality of drug possession acts as a barrier to its use. Without that barrier, more people will start taking drugs as there is no legal consequence for doing so. This argument relies on the main underlying principle of crime and punishment; punish someone for doing something and they will be less likely to do it.
Response: Firstly, we already live in societies that actively advocate for people to do drugs. The pharmaceutical industry worldwide grossed $1.25 trillion USD in 2018. As a consequence of this reliance on the mass consumption of prescription drugs, these companies played a massive role in generating the opioid epidemic that decriminalization is in part trying to address. In 2017, “an estimated 1.7 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers, and 652,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder (not mutually exclusive).”
Drug Stats for Portugal (1999 vs 2017) Sourced: Statista.com
But directly in response to the claim, simply put, there is no verifiable relationship between drug decriminalization and increased drug use. In one of the most popular examples of nationwide drug decriminalization, Portugal has since seen reduced drug usage in key demographics, such as in 15 to 24-year-olds. Following an explosion of heroin in the 1990s, the country decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs in 2001. Accompanied by other measures as well, such as drug dissuasion programmes, countries like Portugal and Czech Republic (another country with personal drug possession decriminalized) show that drug use rates can fall, or at worst stay the same, following the policy shift.
But drug use isn’t the only concern in this debate, however, and not the only measure of success for drug decriminalization…
Claim: I don’t want to have my tax dollar spent addressing the bad decisions of other people
This is a very common argument among people who might believe in an individual’s right to make their own choices, but don’t want to be impacted by other people’s decisions in any way. As a moral position, this is fairly understandable. This perspective makes even more sense when you consider that the National Institute of Drug Abuse estimated that drug abuse costs Americans around $740 billion USD annually.
Response: This number is clearly staggering. However, what would it look like if decriminalization took away the need for over-policing and allowed for the subsidization of programmes which could get people the help they need? This question has already been asked and answered in Alberta, Canada, resulting in a decision to wave fees for treatment addiction programmes. The Provincial government stated that for every $1 CAD put into these subsidies, $12 would be saved. While covering the $40 CAD a day fee clearly lifts a major barrier for those with lower incomes who want to access the programme, it also provides a greater economic benefit as through treating their addiction, the costs incurred of policing and further medical treatments are saved down the line.
Now, this is not an argument for decriminalization in of itself, however, what decriminalization would also do is remove barriers for people accessing these programmes thereby increasing the likelihood that they will seek help. Furthermore, there will be savings made in policing as well, as they are no longer spending time and resources pursuing and charging people for possession.
In the UK, an independent fact-checker found that relieving the Police Force of having to manage cannabis-related crimes alone would save the taxpayer around £600 million. In the US, according to a report published by the CATO Institute, the cost of policing low-level drug offenses came to around $4.28 billion in 2010, a number which would be radically reduced were the possession of small quantities of illicit drugs decriminalized.
Understanding these statistics, it should be no surprise that in some cases the Police themselves are calling for change. In 2018 the Canadian Association for Chiefs of Police President, Adam Palmer, came out urging Federal lawmakers to decriminalize the possession of small quantities of drugs. As he stated:
“”Arresting individuals for simple possession of illicit drugs has proven to be ineffective. It does not save lives.”
But just because it is decriminalized, it doesn’t mean all our drug-related problems are going away right? Isn’t there a chance that with newfound breathing room some criminals will become emboldened by the change? Well, let’s explore that idea…
Claim: Decriminalization will result in higher crime rates
Similar to the logic that with fewer barriers there would be increased drug usage, there is also a belief that with reduced policing crime rates would also go up. Some argue that this results from former drug-related criminals resorting to other forms of crime to sustain their income, and others claim that with possession being decriminalized criminals will exploit this lack of policing and increase their activities.
Response: On this specific point, much can be said about the importance of legalization as well as decriminalization. For anyone interested in this, I would encourage you to review the drug seizure stats coming from the US-Mexico border — however, that extends beyond the focus of this article. To cut a long story short, legalized marijuana led to far fewer cases of drug smuggling and related crime, versus during periods where increased policing and wall building were attempted.
But specifically in regards to decriminalization, evidence shows that the prohibition of drugs can actually increase crime rates, not decrease them. A study out of Boston University explains this trend occurs for a number of reasons, such as:
Drug possession taking police away from managing other types of crime
Criminalization leads to higher drug prices, which will lead to users engaging in criminal activity in pursuit of more funds
Drug users are less likely to pursue official dispute resolution channels for help. So, for instance, if a drug user was robbed, they are more likely to take matters into their own hands which will likely result in further criminal activity and/or violence
One study looking at the effects of crime in US-Mexico border towns with medical marijuana laws (MMLs) found that towns with MMLs in place experienced on average a 12.5% reduction in violent crimes. The reduction is experienced as Cartels and other gangs are less able to compete with the legitimate competition in the US. As the report concludes, going further than what was put in place through legislation like Measure 110 in Oregon, might be necessary — particularly in regions where crime rates are a major concern:
Our results indicate that decriminalization of the production and distribution of drugs may lead to a reduction in violence in markets where organized drug criminals meet licit competition.
Additionally, in a Canada focused study, it was found that violent crimes are more likely to occur under the influence of alcohol, rather than both alcohol and drugs, or drugs alone. Yet alcohol — an already legal drug — is widely accepted and embraced as a societal norm. There is no serious debate as to whether alcohol should be criminalized in order to dissuade people from committing violent crimes.
So, you might want to ask yourself, why is the inverse true with drugs? | https://medium.com/discourse/why-you-should-be-pro-drug-decriminalization-even-if-you-are-anti-drug-f4b6a5a27364 | ['Thomas Brown'] | 2020-11-18 15:32:26.216000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Drugs', 'Activism', 'Government', 'Politics'] |
Develop A Responsive Layout Of Mobile App With Flutter | Develop a Responsive Layout Of Mobile App With Flutter
With 3.5 billion smartphone users in 2020, expected to reach 3.8 billion in 2021, it is fair enough to say that demand for mobile apps has gracefully scaled from desktop to mobile. And this is due to the growing interest of the developers towards designing a highly responsive and interactive UI layout of applications.
While back in 2015, Google rolled out with a significant change in search engine algorithm and introduced a new rule for the website to be mobile responsive first. And, from there, designers have not just understood the importance of designing the responsive architecture in both desktop and non-desktop applications but also love designing responsive UI in-app to increase user experience.
However, implementing responsive UIs in the application becomes a complicated task for designers in real-life.
Whether it’s about configuring changes in the app, auto-rotating the content according to the screen, or making it compatible to display on both small and large screens. At any cost, your app needs to be responsive to the layout changes.
That’s where Flutter comes into the role and takes the momentum!
So in this guide, we will answer:
What is Responsive Design?
What is Futter, Why It’s So Demanding and What it Has Evolved In to?
How Flutter is Different and Help You Create a Responsive UI of the App?
Conclusion: Where To Go Next?
Let’s dig deep into each point to understand how to increase the responsiveness of the app with Flutter…
What is Responsive App Design?
Responsive design simply means using a single code set that responds to various changes to the layout of the devices. The responsive app lay out its UI according to the screen size and shape of the device. From smartwatch, phone, tablet to laptop, an app developed responsive UI can run on multiple devices without having to develop different interfaces of the application.
The same app will adjust the size of the page according to the screen when the user either resizes the window on the laptop or changes the orientation of the phone or tablet.
Important Elements to Focus To Create Responsive Layout
In recent years, developing a responsive app has become a hot topic of the town but how to make it happen in the real world? What essential things do you need to focus on?
In responsive design, there are majorly three things to consider- Size, Orientation, and Device type. When any one of these elements changes, the app UI changes. You can also choose to hire mobile app developer that can make it done for you. But..
Let’s make it simple for you to understand:
In the below image, we have a logo, logo title and subtitles, two fields, action button and background image.
But, when we run these components on four different devices, [small screen (480*800), medium screen (1080*1920), Large screen (1200*1920) and iPhone XR], observe the clear results.
In the small device screen, the layout components are breaking and going out of screen. The title is splitting into two lines and overall reduces the design impact. While other screens are looking fine but there are few minor differences.
So what’s the solution? In this blog, I’ll explain to you how to fix the UI problems of the app by using Flutter plugins.
But before that!
What is Flutter, Why It’s So Demanding and What it Has Evolved Into?
Flutter is defined as Google’s UI toolkit that allows developers building beautiful, natively compiled applications for multiple platforms including Mobile (iOS, Android), Desktop (Linux, Mac, Windows, Google Fuchsia) and web. With the launch of Flutter in 2015, Google has not just stolen the show again but also created a buzzword in the field of app development. That is why clients from all across the world are keen hiring flutter app development company in 2021.
Being based on Dart programming language and allowing developers to create an application for multiple platforms using a single codebase, Flutter is making good progress. It has become the second most popular choice of framework for developers.
By introducing Flutter, Google has marked incredible success in two significant aspects — in creating a genuinely platform-independent framework for Android and iOS native apps that work great for production use.
Now the question is what makes it so demanding for the app development?
Here’s a list of some features and qualities that makes it so demanding:
Being a cross-platform framework, it allows developers to create an app for iOS and Android by using the same code-base.
Flutter is an open-source framework, so it is free to use and provide extensive documentation and community support to make it easier even for beginners to get started with Flutter.
This framework is simple to learn and easy to use as it is based on Google’s in-house language that is Dart.
Despite being a young framework, Flutter has become a prime choice of leading companies like Google, Alibaba, eBay, Emaar and many more.
With hot reload feature, launching or updating a Flutter based app is quite simple and fast. Developers can instantly make changes in the code on emulators, simulators and hardware in a second, without having to restart the running app. It is one of the biggest reasons that make Flutter the first choice of developers for building UIs, fixing bugs and adding a new feature.
Hopefully, you are convinced that Flutter has become so famous for developing applications. As far as building a responsive layout in the application, Android and iOS adopt different approaches to handle layouts for different screen sizes natively.
To handle various screen sizes and pixel densities, multiple concepts are used in Android including:
Android Approaches for Developing Responsive UI
ConstraintLayout: For creating a flexible and creative UI design that adapts to different screen sizes and dimensions.
For creating a flexible and creative UI design that adapts to different screen sizes and dimensions. SplitView: For separate layout files that fit different screen sizes and able to handle layout adjustments automatically as per the screen size of the device.
For separate layout files that fit different screen sizes and able to handle layout adjustments automatically as per the screen size of the device. Fragment: For extracting your UI logic into separate components, so you don’t need to define the reason separately.
For extracting your UI logic into separate components, so you don’t need to define the reason separately. VectorDrawable: For any kind of illustrations like icons, or vector graphics.
iOS Approaches for Developing Responsive UI
Auto Layout: Also known as Constraints that govern content in your app and automatically adjust the layout according to the specified constraints.
Also known as Constraints that govern content in your app and automatically adjust the layout according to the specified constraints. Size Classes: With size classes, iOS dramatically makes layout adjustments based on the size classes of a content area.
With size classes, iOS dramatically makes layout adjustments based on the size classes of a content area. UI Elements: There are few UI elements that developers use for building responsive UIs on iOS including UIStackView, UIViewController, UISplitViewController and more.
How Flutter is Different and Help You Create a Responsive UI of the App?
Just because we are claiming that creating responsive layouts in Flutter is quite more straightforward and easier, therefore, many of you are curious to ask these two questions instead of directly moving to hire software development company:
What widgets should I Use in App That adapts to Screens of Different Sizes? How Can You Get The Information About the Screen Size and How Can You Use It While Writing the UI Code?
We’ll answer these questions but let’s first talk about the second question because it is the heart of the issue.
So there are here major ways to meet your goals:
1. MediaQuery
One potential way to get information from the MediaQueryData of the MediaQuery root that is “InheritedWidget”. It provides some valuable information on Orientation and ScreenSize, that enables you to determine which layout to display based on the current orientation, what type of screen (mobile, tablet or Desktop), and screen size on which app is being displayed on.
Now the question is how to use it?
Let’s learn with the example of building a chat app in Flutter that responds to layout changes:
To get started with the changes in the layout of the chat page using MediaQuery, you need first to check the orientation from MediaQuery- If it is a landscape, then you’ll have a detail page.
You need to declare a child widget to use it later.
If you have a details page, then you can declare the child widget as a row of widgets.
For this, the row contains the list of chats as a first item.
After that, the next thing in a row is the chat page showing the conversation.
If you don’t have a detail page on the app, then the child will be the list of chats.
Lastly, you need to assign that child widget you created as a SafeArea.
Develop the app and make it run different screens and it will most likely this on Portrait and Landscape:
To make it happen, you need to go into the “ChatListPage.Dart” file in the Lib folder and have to replace the content of “build (Buildcontext Context)” with these above mentioned steps.
2. LayoutBuilder
The other way is to use a LayoutBuilder, a perfect alternative to MediaQuery that has been used to handle orientation changes. It is a builder widget just like a “StreamBuilder” or a “FutureBuilder”, that also gives BoxConstraints which enables you to determine the maximum and minimum height and width properties of the screen.
Let’s understand how this approach will work practically:
Firstly, you need to declare the LayoutBuilder as a SafeArea.
You need to determine whether the details page is using the maximum width of the parent widget. If it is greater than 600, then you have to have a detail page.
If you have a detail page, then declare the child as a row of widgets.
For this, the row contains the list of chats as a first item.
Next item in a row is the detail page showing the conversation.
Lastly, if you don’t have a detail page, it’ll be the list of chats.
Following these steps, you can build and test projects on different screens.
So these are the two major ways to check different orientations and screen sizes. But, how to make further adjustments with text?
Auto-Resizing Text Based on Parent Widget Size
If you notice the text in the above landscape screenshot, the coloured text is not resized correctly as per the layout of the screen. In that case, increasing the size of the font is quite daunting as it will go over the box. But using the Flutter Widget “FittedBox”, you can rightly scale the size according to the size of the parent widget.
This is how you can use this widget in a chat app:
To make changes in the text size , you need to follow “BoxFit.Contain” rules and try to go over these steps:
Firstly, you declare a FittedBox as a parent of the Text Widget.
Secondly, as you are using the BoxFit.Contain, you can fit to make it scale as big as it can without going out of the widget box.
Lastly, declare the original TEXT widget as a child.
Following the steps, you can see the improvement in the text size that automatically get adjusted with the screen size.
UI Architecture: Expandable and Flexible
App responsiveness is directly related to making your UI flexible and expandable with the right choice of widgets. And, the plugins that are really useful inside a column or a row. To fix the broken image to the screen, firstly you need to open the “ConversationalPage.Dart” file in that Lib folder. Then discover the line with “SquareGallery()” with TODO.
That widget will not appear, because it’s a child of “Column” and it doesn’t have enough information to determine its own height. So there you can wrap it in an “AspectRatio” widget to give it constraints.
In case if you are not able to find such constraints, then it will give you one that only follows the ratio provided by you. Moreover, in that case, the widget might overflow.
Final results, when you click on to attach the image button, then the image will come like this in both portrait and landscape screen.
CustomMultiChildLayout
Flutter also provides layout widget, that helps to size its child layout to a fraction of the total available space. It is especially useful inside Expandable and Flexible widgets.
With CustomMultiChildLayou, you can make your layout responsive, but how?
Since its a vast topic, so here we are explaining the basic code snippet below:
First, you need to declare a subclass of MultiChildLayoutDelegate.
Overlay the PerformLayout method, so you need to layout the children widgets using the LayoutChild and PositionChild methods.
Lastly, you need to return a boolean from ShouldRelayout if the widget should perform a layout again. The choice of the method depends upon your widget’s parameters.
Conclusion: Where To Go Next?
Most of you are wondering that from where you can get these plugins or widgets to make you app UI responsive. You can download the material by simply clicking on the interlinks of the blog, and you can choose to get connected with our experts.
Since Flutter has become a most demanding framework in the app development market, therefore, the majority of developers are looking forward to leveraging the features of Flutter.
There are plenty of guides, tutorials and official docs available for responsive apps in Flutter, but understanding the technicality of those tutorials is quite challenging for a novice. Therefore, we drafted things in this blog in a simple and straightforward manner to make you understand the concept.
Apart from the above mentioned widget, there are various other things that you need to know and understand. Therefore, we recommend you to hire an app development company that stands by your side at every step to make your Android/iOS app responsive with Flutter. | https://medium.com/flutter-community/develop-a-responsive-layout-of-mobile-app-with-flutter-c6a6f7013aec | ['Sophia Martin'] | 2020-12-14 05:52:38.459000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Mobile Apps', 'Technology', 'Startup', 'Flutter'] |
Huawei AR Engine ile Vücut Hareket Takibi | 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/huawei-developers-tr/huawei-ar-engine-ile-v%C3%BCcut-hareket-takibi-37597a14286b | [] | 2020-11-20 13:26:35.902000+00:00 | ['Augmented Reality', 'AR', 'Ar Engine', 'Huawei', 'Skeleton'] |
Having a Panic Disorder made me a better person: | Having a Panic Disorder made me a better person:
Having a panic disorder gave me a sense of compassion and even more empathy towards other strong humans that struggle with it every day of their lives. I use to think of it as a curse that hindered me from living the life I wanted (which at the time was ballet dancing professionally) when the truth is it was a huge blessing in disguise. | https://medium.com/@kennedymontecue/having-a-panic-disorder-made-me-a-better-person-579ea01ab2d9 | ['Kennedy Montecue'] | 2020-12-19 06:37:24.294000+00:00 | ['Anxiety', 'Mental Illness', 'Panic Attack', 'Mental Health', 'Short Form'] |
How to migrate your company to a new product overnight | Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash
If the platform you develop is being used by millions of people every month, it’s hard to imagine how challenging undertaking would it be to move it to a completely new version or to merge it with another service that you’re performing fusion with.
Over the web, you can find plenty of articles that most of such projects fail. For more than two years, I took part in one of these projects.
Back then, we had two platforms to serve our users in different countries. Our goal was to migrate them to a single one, without causing a disaster or significant downtime. In the below article, I’ll share with you how we did it and what we have learned during the whole process.
Revolution starts from the business side
Startups’ acceleration process in a nutshell is grabbing more and more money from the investors in a series of financial rounds. If the startup is good enough and grows well, it can count on even millions of dollars of investors’ money.
I’ll never forget one of our all-hands meetings back in 2016, during which, our CEO Mariusz, told us that we just closed another financial round and we will use acquired money to perform a fusion with our then biggest competitor — Spanish Doctoralia.
We used to do fusions of other smaller companies in the past, but we never stood in front of such a great challenge. Soon after sharing the news, our minds were full of not only happiness but also anxiety.
Doctoralia had a great product and a team of outstanding people, including a well-scaled IT department. With ease, they managed to win their home market, a couple of other European ones, LATAM countries, and Australia. At the same time, Docplanner was present on a handful of other European markets as well.
Why joining our products had a lot of sense
Both services allowed to book a doctor’s appointment, write opinions about these doctors, or ask them some questions. Of course, they both had some small differences in the business logic, but key features were basically the same.
Doctoralia was developed in .Net, while Docplanner in PHP. It was hard to imagine further product development in this scenario — it would end up writing the same functionalities twice, solving a doubled amount of bugs. It wouldn’t work at all.
Another problem is data architecture that, in large projects, usually tends to lean towards not only best practices but also a chain of product development decisions. Even if both platforms have entities like user, doctor, appointment, they are represented by totally different data structures. If one wants to migrate them between the platforms, data transformation is needed for every entity.
For the above reasons, a lot of companies restrain from performing a fusion and prefer to just do a takeover of both software and people who support it, expanding the markets as one corporation, but with a handful of independent business entities full of people that do not share the same work culture or even do not know each other at all.
This is not the way we run our business. Because we believe that, in the long term, people and good relations are way more important than accountancy, we didn’t want to just take over another company, earn more money, and move on. We chose to make a fusion of our products, to share our past experiences, and to develop a single, uniform product together.
This change took us almost two years. But from today’s perspective, I’m 100% sure it was worth it. Maybe most of the company mergers fail, but hey, we made it and it was the best decision we could make.
Assumptions and naive estimations
Our product is divided into two parts — one for doctors, which we call SaaS, and the other for patients, called the marketplace. At that time, SaaS was at the beginning of its shiny road, thus didn’t require much effort to make it work in all of the markets we had.
Marketplace, on the other hand, was a huge challenge. Both Doctoralia’s and Docplanner’s implementations were very large, taking literally millions of lines of code and handling huge amounts of data.
To handle the migration with ease, we created a new dedicated team — Merge. We took the following assumptions:
We have 11 markets to migrate Migrate one country at a time, not splitting it into phases Start with smaller markets first. It’s safer in case of failure. If the upcoming market has some functionalities on the Doctoralia side that we lack in the Docplanner marketplace — first let’s implement these before migrating. Aim for as less downtime as possible (a couple of hours max). Merge team offers full support for the migrated market for the first two weeks after the process is finished.
Looks naive? Maybe, but this is exactly what we did. The only thing naive in the end, was our estimations because initially, we thought it’s gonna take a couple of months to finish the job.
Market migration — MVP approach
One of the golden rules for developers is to not reinvent the wheel. While it works best for most of the cases, it was the main reason for our two big failures that we “achieved” during the migration of the first couple of countries.
Our first approach was what startups really love — MVP. We used to shovel data in the CSV format in the past, so why shouldn’t we act differently this time?
From practical experience, it looked quite simple — we extracted data from Doctoralia’s database, transformed it into the format we support in Excel, then pulled it in using importers we created. I must say that for smaller data batches it worked pretty well, giving our PO the ability to import data back and forth in the testing environment whenever he wanted.
The CSV rollercoaster allowed us to migrate data of the first two markets. But, because they were at the same time markets with the lowest amount of data, with the third country we hit our first wall.
It turned out that, even on a relatively powerful machine, there’s a limit of data that Excel is able to process in roughly reasonable amounts of time. When we started to experience more and more freezes, we decided to drop the CSV approach and look for something better.
We still didn’t want to reinvent the wheel though and to write everything from scratch. This is why we started to check what current ETL solutions had to offer.
After a brief search and a couple of meetings, we decided to give Xplenty a shot. This cloud-based tool, apart from the extensive data-manipulation feature set, offers awesome UI to manage the whole process. As backend developers, we’re not “clickers” by nature, but the ability to set up different data flow scenarios in such a way totally bought our hearts. To top that, this tool wasn’t entirely new to our organization, as our Business Intelligence department used it and highly recommended it.
As I just wrote, Xplenty is great. It is so great, that we resigned from it much later than we should — around 2 months of the data-modeling nightmare we led ourselves into. Of course, we gave it a test drive before we opted in, but were simply too optimistic and restrained from performing more complex testing.
A tool that was so simple to use, turned against us when it came down to migrate data with more complex one-to-many relationships. One day, looking at the screen below, we finally opened our eyes and decided to resign from using it.
Importing doctor’s basic data in Xplenty
I’m still too afraid to calculate how much money we lost. I don’t even mean the payrolls of a group of really talented developers, but time impact on the whole company that awaits our fusion to be completed.
Morale dropped a lot, but the ball was still rolling and we didn’t want to let it go.
Third time’s a charm — do reinvent the wheel
The lesson from the above chapters is simple — some special cases require tailored solutions, so if you want to get the job done right, do it yourself from the ground up.
Three main pillars of technology able to complete such a broad task are easy scalability, easy development, and easy monitoring.
Easy scalability
CSV lesson taught us that we have to be prepared for larger and more complex sets of data. With every next market, it’s gonna grow, and we have to keep in mind our promise — to migrate everything overnight.
To give you a sneak peek of what we achieved — with the CSV approach it took us around 1 hour to migrate 16.000 users and 34.000 doctors. With the custom solution I’m about to describe, migration of the Brasil market that held 2 million users and 600.000 doctors, took roughly 16 minutes.
Easy development and maintenance
The only way to built tools like these is to separate them from business code as much as you can. For the whole time, we were working on a living organism — marketplace codebase maintained by dozens of other developers every day. We had to keep in mind that we cannot stop other teams from developing our product while we work on the next market migration.
Easy monitoring
Without proper monitoring of the migration process, you are blind. Of course, testing the app thoughtfully after data migration is super important, but having proper tools to monitor the migration process in realtime is crucial.
Let’s talk about our solution in detail
Below I’m describing key points in our tool’s implementation and overall development strategy, that allowed us to develop it fast and with low-risk in mind.
Stack and environment setup
A proper environment setup requires a hybrid approach. All of the code related to missing features and data importers should be merged to the main repository branch as often as possible. You should use as much production code as possible for importing new entities because it gives you perks related to data persistence like triggers, URL generators, etc for free. Also if models definition changes in the production branch, you can quickly detect it, react, and apply required refactors to the importers.
On the other hand, introducing some configuration changes, like temporary database configuration, services needed solely for the migration process, might easily break production or be hard to rollback. Thus, for these changes, the best strategy is to apply these changes on a separate branch based on the main branch of the repository. Working testing and migration environments should be based on that branch. After the migration is done, there is no simpler way to switch back to the production configuration than just deleting this branch.
To build our migration software, we used technologies that we already know — PHP7, Symfony, RabbitMQ, MongoDB. Can you find technologies that would perform better for such a kind of a task? Surely you can. But picking fresh technologies that you barely know might get you into more trouble than you can imagine in the long term.
Another great advantage of this choice is that you can write the whole thing inside your target app, which is really convenient. You don’t have to create another communication layer for e.g. external service. You can use all of the stuff that you already have. Not only mentioned triggers and URL generators but also, for example, data validators — rewriting them would consume a lot of time and would bring close to none added value to the whole project.
Migration flow and breaking the rules
There are two sides of the migration — source (Doctoralia marketplace) and target (Docplanner marketplace).
To migrate data, we connected directly to the source database. Keep in mind that during the migration process Doctoralia marketplace was still running in production mode. To make a compromise between maintaining the app alive and data integrity, we decided to switch its database to read-only mode, and aimed for late-night hours, which lowered the possibility of new data coming in (new bookings, users).
From the performance side, the best approach is to pull all of the data of a given type at once. Executing select-all query for 1,5 million users might take some time, but on the other hand, you cut down a lot of latency and network time for future data processing, as communication with the source database is no longer needed.
The next step is data validation. If validation for some record didn’t pass, we remove it from the stack, put it aside for future analysis. Then, all of the validated records are converted to RabbitMQ tasks with rule — one record, one task. If for some reason, one task fails, it will not stop other imports. Of course, it is a good practice for rabbit tasks to carry on as small payload as possible (preferably ID), but putting whole data payload for a single record inside the task saves you some time while importing.
Another rule to break here is Don’t Repeat Yourself. For regular software development, it’s a must, but when you want to cut down business and architectural dependencies between different entities, code duplication is indeed what you sometimes need. For example, our diseases, services, and drugs dictionaries share a very similar structure, so it is tempting to write one importer to handle them all. In a perfect world, I would agree, but in reality, when you should expect business change on every corner, I strongly advise you to not follow that path.
The above steps can be developed as a pretty straightforward structure: for each type of data, you need a single generator (for example Symfony Command), which will handle querying for data, its validation tasks publishment. On the opposite side, you need a single handler for each data type, that will do the actual import from the RabbitMQ task. This way structure is kept single and it’s dead easy to scale.
These huge return buttons are pretty comfy
Grouping imports into stages
A great strategy to optimize and automate imports a bit is to group them into import stages, grouped and ordered in a way that reflects data relations. If you have to import 100 different types of entities, out of which 20 are independent dictionaries, there’s nothing against importing them simultaneously.
In our case, we used the Symfony feature that makes it possible to programmatically run predefined commands. We created configs that described stages, their relationships, and the import data types they were responsible for. It lowered the number of steps needed to migrate the full dataset from over 100 to about 20. Less clicking, less space for human errors.
Ensuring data integrity
One of the problems with migrations chunked into stages is maintaining data integrity and its relationships in a new application. Assuming that the ID of every entity might change, we have to come up with a mechanism that will make it happen.
Let’s take a look at the following example — a doctor and his offices. These are two different entities in a one-to-many relationship. To migrate this dataset in a proper way, we first need to determine the correct order. Of course, we will pick the Doctor entity first, as in this data set it remains independent. The doctor will be imported and will be given a new ID that is compatible with the target application.
The next step would be to migrate the doctors’ offices data. But how to maintain the relation, when previously imported doctor entities have new IDs? There are two ways out of this problem. The first one is creating a new column in the doctor entity definition, that will hold ID from the source system. I do not recommend this one as this approach will force you to modify the schema of every entity you import, which will result in more cleaning up afterward, plus it is not transparent to other developers in the organization.
A better solution is to go into a bit more “hacky” way. Create a single table, that will have a fieldset of the source entity identifier, target entity identifier, and entity type. If you migrate data from multiple systems into one, you can add another column determining the source.
I called this approach “hacky” because this way you lose what most RDBMSs offer you — relation checking. In other words, you cannot have external keys. On the other hand, what you gain is having a single place where all of the mappings belong, fully transparent of the production code of your target system. Therefore, while importing doctors’ offices, just exchange the old doctor id for the new one using this table, and you are good to go.
Maximizing amount of properly imported data
Chances that you will manage to migrate all of the data between systems that have a lot of differences in business logic are, sadly, low. It’s definitely achievable, but pragmatically it’s better to find a compromise between the amount of imported data and time spent to normalize it.
Let’s take a look at another example — the phone number field. In Docpanner’s marketplace, we were always very strict when it comes to phone numbers handling. We always checked if they are real, then formatted them to uniform format before persisting. Doctoralia on the other hand was a bit more tolerant in this matter — the system allowed any input that looked like a phone number. It could be a single phone, a couple of them separated by spacebar or comma, combined with internal PBX numbers and so on.
To some extent, you can define patterns that will define how most people tend to write their phone numbers, but if you have a dataset of a couple of millions of records, it’s unlikely that you will cover every case. Sometimes it’s even impossible not for technical reasons, but for business ones — you received three phone numbers in your input, while the target system can handle only two. In these situations, you have to aim for maximization of the number of situations you are able to handle but never target for 100% coverage, unless it’s crucial for the business.
Just a reminder here to use what you already have in your target system — if you already have pretty decent data validators, use them instead of building new ones.
Migration monitoring in practice
When your timeframe to import millions of records is limited to a couple of night hours and you want to have the best control possible over the situation, traditional data logging is not the thing that you should look for.
This is why we created our own monitoring system, which is both pretty easy and efficient.
When a new task is created by the generator, we create a new record corresponding to it — it contains ID and type of imported item. When the task is being processed later by the handler, it updates this record according to the import result — success or failure. If the import failed, we also persist information about why it failed, so we have a quick overview of the situation.
Having in mind heavy database loads during the import procedure, we use separate MongoDB instance to store these logs.
To calculate the overall estimations and performance, we also log separately some metadata about the whole import batch itself — like type, date started.
To view logs in realtime, we created a command-line tool, that displays multiple import stats and estimates in the realtime. If something is wrong, the red flag starts to blink and we can react instantly.
Our homemade migration process monitor
Important steps after successful data migration
After the migration is done, there’s a bunch of actions required to perform before switching production to the new app.
The first move is to run a set of crucial tests to determine if all of the main functionalities work fine. If everything is fine, we rollback the temporary changes that I mentioned in the earlier stages. At the same time, we start the migration of the freshly populated database to the production servers.
The last step is to update the DNS records, warm up the cache, and populate ElasticSearch.
Congratulations, your migration process is now complete :)
One of the mornings after another country successfully migrated
Tips & tricks
Test period before the migration
The extensive testing phase before the migration is your (and your organization’s) best friend. That’s why we always aimed for 2–3 month testing phases instead of 2–3 weeks ones. Plan this process in advance the way to have some time to not only test the importers themselves but also:
cooperating with the product folks, prepare a comprehensive set of test scenarios, and conduct them across the whole service, from different aspects — user, doctor, employee,
make sure that all of the people that will be working on a new app, will get proper training on test data sets before production migration,
show a new version of your service to a narrowed group of your clients to gather more feedback and detect more potential bugs.
Talking a little bit more about employee training. What turned out to be really cool is what happened during the migration of the Brasil market — we used gamification methods to conduct it. In our office in Curitiba, there was always a couple of computers with test environment running accessible for everyone, so each employee could check it out, ask some questions to the product expert we sent to the site. For most active employees, there were small gifts to encourage them a little bit more.
While planning test migrations, plan to do at least one of them with full power available. This way you can estimate if you gonna fit into the planned migration timeframe, as well as to test if scaling works properly. In our case, this practice quickly revealed performance problems with the RabbitMQ instance, which sometimes refused to handle too heavy batches of incoming tasks.
What’s the best moment to start the whole process?
It’s best to conduct migration during the night of your end-users. So for us, it was sometimes during our night hours, while sometimes, when we were migrating Latin America countries, it happened during the day.
If your migration estimation is not as optimistic as it could be, it’s best to find a reasonable compromise between limiting functionalities to as little group of users as possible, at the same time maintaining a safety margin, so if something goes wrong, you still have time to react and fix it.
Cost optimization
Watch out for potential money traps. There are, in general, two places to optimize — things that cost a lot to compute or gather that don’t change much during every migration. Also, consider the costs of unused resources in the test environment.
For instance — we have around 600.000 doctors in Brazil. Most of them have profile pictures attached. There is no point in converting these pictures on every import — it will both burn time and money related to computing power that you have to pay for. Do the conversion once instead, correlate new assets with corresponding doctor ids from the source system, then store for further iterations. On the next iterations, detect and recompute only things that have changed.
Another example is optimizing the cost of the test environment. While final migration needs as much power as possible, during the test period the app is being used by so small group of people, that it makes no sense to have the best performing servers running it.
Maintaining a good SEO
It’s almost sure that both of the systems share different URL schemas for the same resource, for example, doctor profile. Don’t forget to let Google know that URL schemas changed, so your SEO will remain good and healthy. How to do that? Just create a bunch of HTTP 301 redirect routings from the old scheme to the new one, using what you already have (e.g. mappings of id’s from the source system). It’s pretty straightforward in Symfony and should be also easy to achieve in any other framework.
Be prepared for errors
Chances that migration will go totally smooth are close to none. Be prepared, that you will have to face unexpected problems both during and after the migration process. Make sure that you have the right set of people, who can handle stressful situations easily. Build your team out of people who know almost everything about both of the apps you’re dealing with. Apart from the knowledge itself, they should have proper access rights, a lot of experience, and a steady hand, when it comes to doing something that might lead to a terrible crash.
And if, by any chance, you use some asynchronous communication or processing in your service, keep in mind that errors related to this topic are the hardest to detect and most painful to fix.
Mathias Verraes at Twitter.com
Team setup
To add a little bit more about choosing the right people for the job. What kind of people you should look for while building your team? Not only the ones who have 10+ years of experience in coding or product management but mostly the ones that are patient, long runners, and are able to handle stressful situations easily.
20 hours run in the office without sleep? Hold my tea
Our fusion was definitely a long-term undertaking, filled both with interesting challenges, but also the ability to interact with enormous computing power, as for some markets we used to have hundreds of worker machines running. But’s that’s just a grain of sand compared to the number of hard decisions we had to make, repetitive and boring tasks, work under pressure, stress, and responsibility.
What really matters are the people, not the code
The last two years taught me a lot of things. For example, for a lot of problems you have to approach with a proper distance, make some cold-blood decisions when needed, and do not let emotions control you.
Jumping into the car and heading to the office in the middle of the night I wasn’t thinking that I’m stressed or sleepy. What I always felt is that I’m going to do something great with all these amazing people I had a chance to work with. All of the procedures, fuckups, and issues, despite huge amounts of stress, I tended to hide behind a thick layer of abstraction.
Our team consisted of around a dozen folks, but what we were doing impacted the whole ~1,5k organization. We used to cooperate with a lot of other people from other teams, departments, and countries — product owners, country managers, experts, customer care specialists, moderators — basically everyone.
The abstraction that I mentioned, gave me a little shock kick at the end of our journey. After migrating the last market, our Product Owner arranged a gathering for everyone involved to spend some time together, have some common activity outside of the office. When I stepped outside of the building, I’ve seen more than 50 people. Some of them I met the first time in my life, even though I was working at Docplanner for many years.
Our team having some good time after the last migration is done. It was totally worth it!
What was common between all these folks was happiness, openness, joy. It wasn’t about a feeling of relief that “it’s finally over”. On a daily basis, all of these people are experts in what they do and they love cooperating together, generating a great atmosphere every day.
What makes me happy even more is that thanks to this project, we are able to grow faster and serve a better product to our patients and doctors. I personally believe that what we do changes our lives in a really good way.
That’s all folks
That day had to come eventually. Around a year after the last migration, we removed all of the migration code from our codebase.
If you consider conducting a similar process in your company, feel free to contact me — we will try to share more of our experiences and help. | https://medium.com/docplanner-tech/how-to-migrate-your-company-to-a-new-product-overnight-b6d29509c31c | ['Maciej Szkamruk'] | 2020-11-17 07:37:09.988000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Mergers And Acquisitions', 'Programming', 'Product Management', 'Merger'] |
Osmanlı Amirali Pîrî Reis’ in Serüveni | Izmir University of Economics ACM Student Chapter aims to facilitate communication and collaboration with students studying in the university’s computer science fields and with ACM communities at other universities by organizing, workshops, programming competitions and seminars. | https://medium.com/izmir-university-of-economics-acm-student-chapter/osmanl%C4%B1-amirali-p%C3%AEr%C3%AE-reis-in-ser%C3%BCveni-ce62eeb239bc | ['Alican Akca'] | 2020-12-20 12:08:14.260000+00:00 | ['Türkçe', 'Tarih', 'Ieuacm'] |
Watson Studio Desktop and Watson Machine Learning Server 2.0 Beta is now open for registration | Watson Studio Desktop and Watson Machine Learning Server enable business analysts and data scientists to get insights and create values from data easier and faster with a wide range of tools. You can build models automatically with the new AutoAI capabilities, drag-and-drop capabilities of SPSS Modeler, or write code using open source tools like Jupyter Notebooks. You can also offload model training workload, deploy and manage models through Watson Machine Learning Server easily with graphical UI.
With the 2.0 Beta, Watson Studio Desktop and Watson Machine Learning Server will be more flexible and powerful than ever. Let’s take a look at the new features.
For clarification, all mentions of SPSS Modeler refer to the version within Watson Studio Desktop, not the classic standalone SPSS Modeler.
Build machine learning models with AutoAI
AutoAI Experiment UI
The AutoAI graphical tool in Watson Studio automatically analyzes your structured data and generates candidate model pipelines customized for your predictive modeling problem. These model pipelines are created iteratively as AutoAI analyzes your data set and discovers data transformations, algorithms, and parameter settings that work best for your problem settings.
AutoAI is NOT a vendor lock-in black box solution. You can save model pipelines to your project as an automatically generated Python notebook where every step is clearly written and reproducible in other open-source environments.
Please take a look at these AutoAI demos to learn more about its applications in different industry use cases.
New enhancements in SPSS Modeler
New CPLEX Optimization Node
SPSS Modeler adds several new nodes including the new CPLEX Optimization node. It can build and solve complex optimization models to identify the best possible actions using mathematical and constraint programming. You can learn more about how CPLEX optimization delivers cost savings on this page.
Besides new nodes, the Data Asset Export node has been redesigned. You can use the node to write to remote data sources using connections, write to a data file on your local computer, or write data to your project.
Also, you can now deploy Text Analytics models to a Watson Machine Learning Server as you can with other model types. And there are many new enhancements in SPSS Modeler not mentioned here due to limited space.
New visualization charts for Data Refinery and SPSS Modeler
Evaluation Chart
Getting insights from data is much easier now with new visualization charts available to build interactive and informative reports.
The list of new charts includes but is not limited to:
Bubble charts display each category in the groups as a bubble.
Circle packing charts display hierarchical data as a set of nested areas.
Evaluation charts are combination charts that measure the quality of a binary classifier.
Math curve charts display a group of curves based on equations that you enter.
Multi-charts display up to four combinations of Bar, Line, Pie, and Scatter plot charts.
Radar charts integrate three or more quantitative variables that are represented on axes (radii) into a single radial figure.
Sunburst charts display different depths of hierarchical groups.
Tree charts represent the hierarchy in a tree-like structure.
Theme river charts use a specialized flow graph that shows changes over time.
Time plot charts illustrate data points at successive intervals of time.
New operations and enhancements for Data Refinery
Data Refinery Join operation
With the new Join operation, users can join two data sets in a variety of ways. You can perform a full join, inner join, left join, right join, semi-join, or anti join. You can also select the columns you want to see in the result set, and if there are same-named columns between the two data sets, you can specify unique suffixes to differentiate them.
Also, you can now use the new Union operation to combine the rows from two data sets that share the same schema.
Besides new operators, there are many enhancements to existing operations. For example, you can now perform aggregate calculations on multiple columns. And when you open a file with date and timestamp data, they are automatically detected and converted to inferred data types. | https://medium.com/ibm-watson/watson-studio-desktop-and-watson-machine-learning-server-2-0-beta-is-now-open-for-registration-c01fcf1da2fd | ['Yin Chen'] | 2020-07-28 12:51:01.165000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Automation', 'Business Intelligence'] |
My Father Created an Imaginary Friend for Me | My imaginary friend’s name was Prunella Smith, and she was annoyingly perfect in every way. She got good grades, excelled at sports, did charity work in her limited spare time, and she never once failed to live up to expectation.
I didn’t do any of those things.
I thought not biting my nails was a considerable accomplishment.
If I had created this pretend frenemy, I would have come up with a much better name like Savannah Baudelaire-Longhouse or Harpsichord Jones. She’d have been sophisticated and cool like Kalinda Sharma on The Good Wife or fashionably evil like Villanelle in Killing Eve, not an ordinary schoolgirl.
If I were going to have an imaginary arch enemy, I would want them to be a bad-ass.
I was about eight when my father created Prunella and her family.
At first, I loved the alternative universe aspect to these yarns. My brother’s name was “Fritz,” and Prunella’s brother’s name was “Ritz.” What are the chances?
Prunella’s mother’s name was Carbara as opposed to my mother, Barbara, and even though Prunella’s mother was self-centered too, her mother never read under a tree rather than watch her daughter her master the breaststroke. However, my mother didn’t care about not measuring up to the bar which Carbara set.
Prunella’s dad worked for Kole Pineapple, not Dole Pineapple, and her dad drove. My father’s imagination was limited to letter change, not creating Sims-style strategic life simulations.
What would it be like to be part of the Smith family, I wondered? Was every day a mixture of rainbows and puppies? Did they poop Skittles? Besides the Smith family commitment to perfection, they were also devoutly Mormon. I think my dad added that small detail to give the Smiths a little flavor and because we lived down the street from a Mormon Temple.
In every way Prunella was flawless- I was flawed. When Prunella’s parents went to her parent/teacher conferences, her teachers fell over themselves, praising her. She never got called out for talking in class.
Prunella certainly never peed her pants in the first grade and had to stand in front of the radiator in the nurse’s office to dry them out. Prunella probably never had to pee at all.
I knew Prunella wasn’t real, but it didn’t stop me from hating her. She was the shining example of everything I should and could be, and everything that my father wanted me to be.
When I listened to the Prunella stories, I only heard the same message, which was my father was disappointed in me. | https://medium.com/narrative/my-father-created-an-imaginary-friend-for-me-7f9f167fa9a2 | ['Christine Schoenwald'] | 2020-07-29 23:17:05.664000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Fathers', 'Relationships', 'Family History', 'Life Lessons'] |
Review : Figma, Free Design UI Software with Tons of Features | Figma, a Design UI Application with Tons of Features — Before going into today’s discussion, who have had a time where an entire application is redesigned because of miscommunication between teams? This can surely happen if there’s no visual communication between designer and developer regarding the layout of the application
It can be imagined how troublesome that would be, especially when the deadline is getting nearer and nearer.
Now, to minimalize the inconvenience that might happen such as the one above, we can just use Figma; with Figma, you can save time to verify designs because we can collaborate in the way of giving comments, advices, and even changing the design at the same time. Neat isn’t it? They’re one of the reasons we recommend this particular Design UI software.
As Sketch’s one of main competitors, Figma and Sketch functionalities doesn’t differ that much. The main difference they have is how they offers their services. This means that if Sketch offers its services to Apple and Mac OS devices, Figma offers its services to web-based application, making it able to be used on all platforms, be it Windows, Mac, or even Linux.
But this strength of Figma is also one of its weakness. Why? Because the nature of it being web-based means that if there’s no internet connection, then it can’t be used anymore.
Features in Figma
Figma by itself offers a couple of features that in our opinion very helpful in the making of application layout design. As an example, let’s take a loot at the plugins and what can they do.
Prototyping
Let’s start with prototyping. This feature makes it easier for us to test the prototype of a screen that has been made where we can run it as if it’s an application. This feature is quite helpful when we want to make look that’s connected to one another.
2. Smart Animate
Next is Smart Animate. This relatively new feature is used to add an animation where a transition between pages happens.
An animation that can be used for transition exists by default, but Smart Animate is specific to each and every component within a look. Not only that, but it’s also easy to use. User only need to go into Prototype tab, and choose Smart Animate for animations.
3. Auto Layout
We continue to the feature that makes it easier for us to arrange components within a design. With Auto Layout, arranging the main components will be easier, especially one that’s related to sizes and position. For example, if we change a text, we also need to adjust the other components that exists near it, be it size or position.
4. Plugin Support
Same with Smart Animate, this feature can be considered new. Like it’s name, we can use plugin to speed up the process of making application layout designs.
Figma provides a couple of plugins that are quite amazing. Google Sheet Sync being one of them. With this plugin we can show the data that’s in Google Sheet into the design layout that we’re creating.
Conclusion
Platform availability: Windows, Apple / Macbook, Linux
Main Function: Program Design and Simple Prototyping
Enjoy!!
You can download UI Design resource freebies with format sketch or figma
visit vreedi for download resource UI Design freebies. | https://medium.com/@vreedi/review-figma-free-design-ui-software-with-tons-of-features-e0e4f2976070 | [] | 2020-09-03 14:49:02.314000+00:00 | ['Figma', 'Ui Ux Design', 'Design Tools', 'Design', 'Product Design'] |
Mustang ‘Flashback’ Is A Supercharged 1967 Beast | The 1967 Ford Mustang is a generational icon, the epitome of American freedom, and a pure medium through which to express one’s love for cars. This particular Mustang, for example, comes equipped with a 5.4-liter supercharged V8. Just reading this you might think that I was talking about a new mustang but you’d be wrong, this is a beautiful restomodded 1967 ford mustang fastback.
The notable American icon has and always will be the coveted prize in the minds of every collector, enthusiast, and car person alike. The 1967 Mustang has such a good design that it was featured in many movies in its prime time. Some of these include the infamous ‘Stang from the movie Bullitt and the forever recognizable ‘Eleanor’ from Gone in 60 seconds. What is particularly fascinating about this car however is that while other Mustangs of that same year barely even run now, because of the modern performance upgrades this thing can duke it out with modern muscle/ pony cars too.
A lot of the time when people want a classic car they usually don’t get it, this is either due to money or the fact that it is so old that it would take forever to replace it. That is where resto-mods like this come into play. Gone are the days of having to sacrifice reliability for cool-factor, because this car is basically a brand new car with the body of a ’67 Mustang. With this car you don’t have to worry about putting even more miles on top of what it already had because it’s a new engine. Say goodbye to transmission issues because this comes equipped with a brand new automatic overdrive transmission. With this car the power backs up the looks and you can feel the speed dripping off of this car, a fine message to whatever lucky soul finds themselves in ownership of this fine masterpiece would be: Just have fun. See it here. | https://medium.com/motorious/mustang-flashback-is-a-supercharged-1967-beast-db52ad03d9c1 | ['Sam Maven'] | 2020-12-27 18:00:03.799000+00:00 | ['Newsletter', 'Muscle', 'Handpicked', 'American'] |
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http://www.sharktankdiets.com/xo-slim-elite-keto/ | https://medium.com/@kirentarkey/keto-extra-strength-new-solution-with-good-diet-results-d94989219ea3 | ['Kiren Tarkey'] | 2019-10-24 10:16:32.645000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Keto Extra Strength', 'Bodypositive', 'Healthypills', 'Fitness'] |
How do skills learned as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy translate to Dropbox? Eric Wittig fills us in | How do skills learned as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy translate to Dropbox? Eric Wittig fills us in Dropbox Follow Nov 6 · 5 min read
At Dropbox, we believe in celebrating our veterans all year long. And every November, in recognition of Veteran’s Day, we put a special emphasis on honoring their service to their country and learning about their unique journeys to Dropbox with our Veteran’s Appreciation Month. We spoke with Eric Wittig about his service as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy, how he has applied those skills to his role at Dropbox, and what he’s most excited about for the future of Virtual First work.
How long have you been working at Dropbox?
I’ve been working for Dropbox for almost three years as a Technical Program Manager (TPM) on the Core Systems team.
Where are you located?
Seattle, WA.
Can you tell us a little about your military service?
I was in the U.S. Navy for five years, and spent about four of those as a submarine officer on the USS Pennsylvania, stationed in Bangor, Washington. I was kind of a jack of all trades — I worked as the Electrical Officer, Main Propulsion Assistant, and Tactical Systems Officer. When I got to the sub, we were in the last year of a 2.5 year operation to refuel the reactor; you do this only once at the 20-year mark of a submarine’s life, so it’s a big evolution. We also updated the weapons system, and got to launch a Trident D-5 missile with telemetry warheads on it to test that the system worked, which is basically like launching a space shuttle off your sub. I was standing like 5 feet away from the missile tube when we launched, which is something not a lot of people get to do!
Why should other military veterans apply to Dropbox?
It’s a place where you can have a pretty big impact. You can take your skills from the military and directly apply them to how we’re running the business. There’s not a lot of structure to hold you back; people at Dropbox are very willing to listen to good ideas regardless of where they come from. Military veterans have a different way of looking at things that is uniquely valuable to running a business.
How have you seen your military experience support the skills you’ve needed to succeed at Dropbox?
The TPM role is pretty ambiguous; there are a lot of different roles you have to play, and that’s how the Navy was as well. You get thrown headfirst into the deep end and have to figure out what’s going on and how to make your team more efficient, so my military experience has been pretty relevant.
What was the biggest learning you took away from your military service?
My time in the Navy gave me a pretty good perspective on what is important. You’re just a small part of this amazing team, and it’s usually not life and death. This isn’t a submarine; we’re building software to help people work efficiently, and if we make a mistake, people aren’t going to die. It’s definitely given me a sense of calm under pressure. | https://medium.com/life-inside-dropbox/how-do-skills-learned-as-a-submarine-officer-in-the-u-s-navy-translate-to-dropbox-e2fb989b8586 | [] | 2020-11-06 22:36:03.266000+00:00 | ['Diversity In Tech', 'Diversity', 'Us Navy', 'Veterans', 'Dropbox'] |
What’s the Most Honest Sentence You Can Say Today? | What’s the Most Honest Sentence You Can Say Today?
The single question Ernest Hemingway asked himself every day.
Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash
Before he started to write, Ernest Hemingway would ask himself the same question every morning. In his memoir ‘A Moveable Feast,’ he writes:
“I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”
In the past five days, I used Hemingway’s question to write down the most honest sentence I can say that day.
1) Family is best treated like a delicate band of friendship.
I’ve been aiming for a healthy relationship with my sister for years. Most of the time, I fail, and we leave the conversation frustrated. When talking to Sarah, a coach, yoga teacher, and one of the most reflective persons I know, something clicked.
We shouldn’t take a good relationship with our family for granted.
Sarah helped me to dismantle toxic beliefs like: “Your family must make you feel good. Your family should always be there for you. Your family should always care for you.”
Would you treat a single friend with these “must” and “should’s”?
Let’s stop taking the family for granted and holding them to unachievable standards. Instead, let’s treat our family bonds like a delicate band of friendship.
2) I fear Lockdown 2.0 turns my generation into working machines.
From 2016–2018 I finished a business master's in Vienna, and most of my former colleagues didn’t break up with their résumé but went into management consulting or joined one of the Big Four.
Two months ago, one friend quit his consultant job and joined a corporate to improve his work-life balance. In our monthly alumni meetup, he said a sentence that stuck with me:
„It’s a different kind of life quality when you can stop working at 7 PM and still have some parts of the evening to enjoy with your girlfriend, with friends, or doing sports. It’s better than coming home around 10 PM, falling straight into bed, getting up the next day to start the same thing all over again.“
While I’m happy, my friend made a choice that improved his life quality, I wonder what kind of life we’re living if we’re celebrating to stop working at 7 PM instead of 10 PM.
Do we live to work? Or do we live to live?
Lockdown 2.0 nudges us into living for work. No cafés, no bars, no sports events, no meet-ups — we’re mostly working. A lot. For knowledge workers, work seems the only element that continues like before, and it takes up a lot of space in our lives.
3) Meditation can decrease human suffering.
Yuval Noah Harari says we’ve accumulated material wealth over the last decades. And yet, we can’t say whether we’re happier than our ancestors in the stone-age. We have not yet figured how to measure and decrease human suffering.
Many people have fancy gadgets, like fitness-trackers, self-driving cars, or smart home devices. We accumulate possessions and meanwhile forget to look inside ourselves.
Yuval Noah Harari, who meditates for two hours a day and visits a silent meditation retreat once a year, writes:
“People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In medittion, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing — joy, anger, boredom, lust — but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.”
Once we stop looking for external satisfaction and start looking inside ourselves, most worries will vanish. I absolutely agree that meditation can decrease our suffering and make us feel more connected.
4) Our generation forgot most about female pleasure.
Porn and our imagination of what makes „good sex“are so far from our inherent truths. We’re on the blink of forgetting what it feels like to really reunite with each other.
My partner and I spent the last three years exploring sex. We tried evidence-based female pleasure techniques, talked to befriended couples, took an online course by a psychiatrist specialized in desire, and read the comics of Liv Strömquist and books by Diana Richardson.
If women don’t enjoy sex and, as a result, don’t want to have regular sex, there’s nothing wrong with them. Instead, they haven’t learned about the endless alternatives to male-centric sex. A clitoric climax and a woman pleasing a man to come to an end have nothing to do with the feeling of true reunion.
And while there’s so much I don’t know yet; it feels sincere to say our generation forgot most about female pleasure.
5) It’s better to ask questions than to give answers.
Life is more interesting when we ask and ask and ask. By asking instead of talking, we learn about different realities and break flawed storylines that make up your life. The more we start to question our beliefs, the richer our worldview becomes.
Giving answers boosts our egos, asking questions improves our lives.
All of us are ignorant in some way or another. Just ask yourself if you have never changed your opinion on a deep-held belief. Have you ever questioned the basics?
Our world would be more peaceful if we dared to find a person who believes things strongly different from us. Then, have an honest conversation with this person. Or, as Euripides put it: | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/whats-the-most-honest-sentence-you-can-say-today-73a0f7147a24 | ['Eva Keiffenheim'] | 2020-12-05 11:27:28.149000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Honesty', 'Advice', 'Reflections', 'Female Sexuality'] |
Ten Thousand? | 1 Corinthians 4:15 (KJV)
For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel.
A common term among preachers today might be to jokingly say a statement was an “exaggeration for effect.” It used to be they would jokingly call it “just preaching.” The idea is to overstate a thing. It might be to grab attention. It might be to add color. It is intended that the hearer understand it to be an overstatement. It is sometimes criticized but it is also demonstrated right here to be in the pages of God’s Word.
There is almost no possibility that the Corinthians had ten thousand instructors in Christ. The implication of the statement is that they had more than they could count and even too many. No one was expected to go count them out and be sure there were actually ten thousand of them.
Some people look for things to criticize.
Some people have difficulty with hyperbole
Still, it is a valid tool in speech and used in the Word of God. It is likely it can be overused (though those who are given to it are known for it and therefore the hearer is less likely to think of it as more than it is.) But it is a useful tool in both speaking and writing.
To my readers:
First of all, thank you! It is a great joy to me to know you read the thoughts and lessons God has given me in His word. Secondly, I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to leave comments.
Donate to Bible Baptist Church every time you make an Amazon purchase through this link, https://smile.amazon.com/ch/91-1265824
For this and more than 5100 earlier Daily Visits with God visit https://mckenzie-visit-with-god.blogspot.com. There you will find daily visits going back to 2005.
If you have been blessed by this blog, please subscribe to my feed and share it with others.
For more resources from Pastor Marvin McKenzie visit http://puyallupbaptistchurch.com.
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https://marvinmckenzie.org
1 Corinthians 4:15 (KJV) Ten Thousand?
photos from pexels.com. | https://medium.com/daily-visit-with-god/ten-thousand-1238d517d827 | ['Marvin Mckenzie'] | 2020-12-21 18:33:54.780000+00:00 | ['Bible Study', 'Christianity', 'Christian Living', 'Faith and Life', 'Christian'] |
Safe way to store SQL query in database column | There are many instances where we have to store SQL Queries in database.
It could be anything of the below or even some other usecase:
A job to be run on a query.
Store query to be referenced later.
A custom query from an engineer to help them automate task based on query.
or something else.
The problem with storing a query inside a column is SQL Injection or SQLi. As this time we purposely want to store a query inside a query that too coming from someone who knows how to form queries.
But how?
Imagine you have table future_jobs_data and one of the column as backup_sql which will hold the query and will be used to run some jobs in future. The easiest way to furm such query is:
INSERT INTO future_jobs_data
(job_name, backup_sql, run_date, run_time)
VALUES
("Job-1", "select * from abc", "12-3-2022", "12:00");
Now imagine some user entering backup_sql as
"); DROP DATABASE db_name; --
Now put this in your query:
INSERT INTO future_jobs_data
(job_name, backup_sql, run_date, run_time)
VALUES
("Job-1", ""); DROP DATABASE db_name; -- ", "12-3-2022", "12:00");
This will result in breaking your query into 2 queries and one comment. where 2nd query is the malicious one.
How to avoid it?
Best way is to store any query after encryting it. Do not give raw query inside a column.
Assume this to be your server code which receives the input and form a query:
let query = "INSERT INTO future_jobs_data
(job_name, backup_sql, run_date, run_time)
VALUES
(
${job_name},
${backup_sql},
${run_date},
${run_time}
);" db.insert(query);
Here just encrypt the backup_sql or even other variables before inserting into the table.
let query = "INSERT INTO future_jobs_data
(job_name, backup_sql, run_date, run_time)
VALUES
(
${job_name},
${encryptWithKey(backup_sql)},
${run_date},
${run_time}
);" db.insert(query);
Also after fetching the data decrypt with the same key and perform the action with the query. | https://medium.com/@voidvic/safe-way-to-store-sql-query-in-database-column-2b599e3456a2 | ['Ankit Sharma'] | 2021-06-08 19:11:47.166000+00:00 | ['Encryption', 'Sqli', 'Sql'] |
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