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Free Amy | You may know Amy Locane from season one of “Melrose Place,” the iconic John Waters’ film, “Cry Baby,” or any number of films in her IMDB credits. I know Amy as my friend from high school. We met when we were 15 and friends ever since.
In more recent years, you may know Amy Locane from her legal troubles, bandied about in online news outlets.
Here’s the timeline:
- June 27, 2010 — Driving while intoxicated, Amy was involved in a fatal motor vehicle accident.
- November 2012 — Amy was convicted of Vehicular Manslaughter, sentenced to 3 years in NJ State Women’s Prison
- June 2015 — Amy was released on parole. Immediately after her release, her husband filed for divorce and custody of their two daughters
- July 2020 — NJ Appeals Court ruled her initial sentencing was insufficient/inappropriate and in September of 2020, Amy was re-sentenced to serve 8 years in NJ State Prison.
The pieces that are missing from this timeline are that Amy served her time, has been rehabilitated and a productive person in society. Amy takes complete responsibility for her actions on that fateful night. June 27, 2010 was the last time she had an alcoholic beverage. Since her release from prison in 2015, Amy has made it her mission to speak to kids as a cautionary tale. She takes her sobriety seriously. She has also spent many years repairing the relationship lost with her daughters while in prison and regaining their trust that “Mom isn’t going anywhere. I’m here for you and with you.” And now, all of this has been stripped away. Amy is back in prison. Her daughters are suffering again. The family who lost their loved one in that horrible accident seem intent on revenge, not justice.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/mar/10/to-get-thrown-back-in-jail-its-cruel-the-legal-nightmare-of-actor-amy-locane
We can all agree: drinking, driving, loss of life… horrible, horrific, tragic, senseless.
But I ask the question: how can we keep nailing Amy to the cross? While some may think the original sentencing was too lenient, and maybe it was, but it was the court-ordered sentencing and Amy served her time. How is it possible that she is re-sentenced for the same crime, and forced to serve time again in prison, for a crime which she had already been sentenced and time served?
I thought there was something called, “double jeopardy.” That you couldn’t be re-tried and re-sentenced for the same crime. Apparently, not in the state of New Jersey.
I’m putting this out into the social media universe because this is worthy of attention. Amy and this injustice are worth your time and attention. Her daughters are worth your time and attention. And everyone who has come before her and after suffering the same injustice, are worth your time and attention.
Please share this with everyone you know. Please follow her story. Please keep her family in your prayers.
I thank each and every one of you for taking the time to read this. | https://medium.com/@rbarnhisel/free-amy-6d726de56a13 | ['Rhonda Montera Barnhisel'] | 2021-07-26 13:28:57.628000+00:00 | ['Prison Reform', 'Injustice', 'Wrongful Conviction', 'Amy Locane'] |
Matic Network Seeks Support and Unification From the Ethereum Blockchain Community | As is common knowledge in the wider Crypto community, Matic Network’s native token plunged 70% on the 10th of December. This was unprecedented in many respects and was totally unexpected even by those who are regarded as experts. It is conceded that many experts did foresee some sort of drop in price, possibly 10% or even 20% but the massive plunge initially left the community shocked and disturbed. In an effort to restore trust and confidence in the project Matic seeks support and unification from the Ethereum Blockchain Community.
At first, it was thought that the Matic team themselves had sold off huge amounts of tokens, but this was proved to be incorrect. CZ of Binance (Twitter) made the following statement on Twitter “Our team is still investigating the data, but it’s already clear that the MATIC team has nothing to do with it. A number of big traders panicked, causing a cycle. Going to be a tough call on how much an exchange should interfere with people’s trading.” After further investigation it was determined that, at the time of the dump, malicious and false rumours were started on Twitter which created panic; which resulted in whales dumping and the market following. The unfortunate event to the minds of many was an attack on Matic that was clearly manipulated, planned, and orchestrated.
Sandeep Nailwal (Matic Blog 2019) to corroborate the tweet by CZ made the following statement and provided evidence that the Matic team was not responsible; “We want to strongly state that the allegations of token movement from our Foundation account, made by a FUD account against Matic team are completely baseless. Even Binance confirmed it. As for the Token movements, We already announced that there will be a release of 2.5% (248mn) tokens as communicated in our post, which coincides with the aggregated outward movement.”
The false erroneous statements spread on Twitter stated that the team had transferred 1.3 billion tokens to Binance and that the team was going to sell them; it was advised to dump before the team. This resulted in several whales dumping and thus the panic which resulted in the Matic price crash. The team tokens are still in the address that they provided for the community in their efforts to be completely transparent. The mentioned address can be located here https://etherscan.io/address/0xB316FA9FA91700D7084D377BFDC81EB9F232F5FF
The above explanation covers to a large extent what actually happened; however, other circumstances may also have contributed, for example, the shorts market which triggered stop losses at the time of the crash.
In an effort to restore trust and confidence in the project Matic seeks solidarity from the Ethereum Blockchain Community. The Matic teams’ primary purpose is to provide a layer 2 solution for the Ethereum layer 1 existing problems which are preventing mass adoption of numerous applications. Matic provides a side chain network on the Ethereum Blockchain purposefully designed to remove existing problems and enhance the functionality and efficiency of all existing decentralized applications (Dapps) which are remapping the world’s technological landscape. In other words, Matic is providing technological advancement sorely needed by Dapps to achieve future success.
Matic is a part of the Ethereum Blockchain and should be accepted and adopted, rather than seen as some kind of opposition or threat. Ethereum the world’s most used blockchain needs to retain its dominance and outstanding projects such as Matic make this possible. Although there are numerous reasons for this, three main ones thrust themselves for attention. They are scalability, slow transaction speeds if the network is busy, and higher than necessary transaction fees. In an article written by Jaynti Kanani in 2018 he makes the following observation:
Blockchain Smart contract platforms and cryptocurrencies have captured mass attention but still haven’t been able to achieve mass adoption due to scalability and user experience issues. Even on Ethereum, which is the most widely used smart contracts platform, there have been no significant Dapps which have seen mass adoption. There have been a few cases where one or the other application temporarily succeeded in achieving a significant user base, but it led to crippling of the entire network during the high load times. Essentially meaning that even the most advanced and widely used platforms are not ready for mass adoption.
The same article by Kanani (2018) highlighted some of the keys features of Matic
As previously stated, although much progress is being made by Dapps, it is still not sufficient to scale the demand for mass adoption. Matic solves the following problems that are hindering advancement: Scalability (Bitcoin 4.6; Ethereum 15; Matic 10 000), slow transactions, high transaction fees, low transaction throughput, poor usability, enabling multiple micropayments.
In summary, Matic is providing a solution to a major problem. The solution is innovative and visionary; an enhancement to Dapps that are built on the Ethereum Blockchain and other blockchains. Matic is at the forefront of blockchain technology advancement; led by a highly capable and effective team.
If you are keen to transition from a layer 1 to a layer 2 Dapp then show your support and unification for the project by contacting a member of the Matic team. Matic will make your product fully scalable, save you a lot of money in fees and remove the issues related to slow transactions and throughput, along with numerous other advantages that will place your Dapp in a solid position for future success.
Screenshot of some of the Matic Team from the website https://matic.network/about
Contact information
https://matic.network/about
https://matic.network
References
Matic Foundation Tokens address: https://etherscan.io/address/0xB316FA9FA91700D7084D377BFDC81EB9F232F5FF
Sandeep Nailwal statement regarding token movement allegations https://blog.matic.network/foundation-token-movement-accounting
What is Matic
https://medium.com/matic-network/what-is-matic-network-466a2c493ae1
https://blog.matic.network/what-is-matic-network/
CZ Binance Tweet
https://t.co/wOVF6tEBkQ | https://medium.com/@perryhessenauer/matic-network-seeks-support-and-unification-from-the-ethereum-blockchain-community-a0e0f7103e2b | ['Perry Hessenauer'] | 2019-12-16 17:04:30.390000+00:00 | ['Matic Network', 'Ethereum Blockchain', 'Blockchain', 'Matic Cz Binance', 'Scalability'] |
A high-level roadmap for what’s in the pipeline for Transient | A high-level roadmap for what’s in the pipeline for Transient Transient Follow Aug 25 · 5 min read
Buzz. Excitement. Eagerness. And most of all — anticipation of what’s to come.
Google Meet sessions that were due to go hours have morphed into lengthier discussions to ensure that we are building an ecosystem capable of living up to the Transient brand (through the process we may have also become Miro and Trello VIPs).
These conversations were critically important as we focused on the assessment of the opportunity landscape, prototyping and at times even challenging each other about the true value of an idea or objective — asking ourselves, is it really moving us in the direction we strive for.
Given the number of ideas and concepts that were brought up, a number of core principles were created which would allow us to align our roadmap to strategic pillars, based on our vision, mission and objectives to give the world the Amazon of Smart Contracts.
Through this process the leadership team adopted three key pillars:
- Accessible by anyone, any time.
- Interoperability and scalability at the core.
- If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.
Our team have built and run delivery programs across several industries across the globe and are experts in executing technology and product roadmaps — this is why, at Transient we intend to go about things a little differently.
Based on our core pillars we have derived three specific distinct streams of delivery to ensure our focus is on today, tomorrow and beyond simultaneously — continuously building upon our core and putting ourselves in the position to leverage opportunity as it arises allowing true agility:
Accessible by anyone, any time.
Is the idea or concept going to get us closer or further away to truly providing an experience, where — whether you are a freelancer designer in Belgium coordinating your next engagement or a multi-billion dollar online bookmaker operating out of Ireland — that you have access to a dApp on Transient’s global marketplace.
Does the idea or concept provide a best-in-class experience in seamlessly onboarding the user to allow frictionless management of their Smart Contracts and does it represent the simplest path to their goal?
Interoperability and scalability at the core.
Does the idea or concept allow us to enable more specific use cases and impact a greater number of people by leveraging our existing and building new partnerships with a focus of delivering a superior on-chain, off-chain and cross-chain experience?
Does the idea or concept enable an ability to create an ecosystem that can service high-demand and scalability with ease and does it allow us to partner with industry leaders in a range of disciplines across the DeFi landscape?
If the answer to the above is no, then the idea is de-prioritised and replaced as it does not align to our strategic pillars and our overall objectives.
If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.
Innovation is key to driving the conversation of mass adoption and bringing to life use cases to the real world.
Constantly asking ourselves how we disrupt an experience or industry is paramount to striving for continuous improvement and the ability to add to our ever-growing global marketplace.
Innovation doesn’t happen by chance. This is why, at Transient, we carve out a specific stream to ensure we are always identifying and assessing the next highly valuable opportunity, working with partners to experiment and prototype how we can solve old problems with new and emerging technology and practices.
Under the hood
For Transient, to deliver in the short to medium term against each of its strategic pillars is has prioritised to execute a roadmap comprising of the following:
Accessible by anyone, any time.
- TSC-Core — our flagship product and the first proponent of the Transient Network — focussing on standard Smart Contract creation and management, TSC-Core will add value to the community on day one
- TSC-Pooling — our first dApp in our marketplace focussing on the ability for users to create their own pools for crypto-price predictions and share in the winnings — with creators being rewarded for their contributions
- TSC-eSports — our second dApp creating an ecosystem of P2P market creation of your favourite competitions and a number of services relating to facilitating eSports competitions and team management — taking social betting and content driven experiences to the next level
- TSC-NDA — our third dApp creating a home for anything and everything to do with allowing you to work with your partners or clients at ease — with our legal advisor providing first-hand experience and expertise to ensure a seamless product is bulletproof within the legal landscape
Interoperability and scalability at the core.
- TSC-Core — testnet and mainnet launch
- TSC-Pooling — testnet and mainnet launch
- HECO-chain integration — extending our network to reach Houbi eco-chain
- Discovery into the ability to create zero-touch automated Smart Contracts
- Security and auditing partnership announcements
- Oracle provider partnership announcement
If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.
Discovery, feasibility, and assessment across several industries and use cases to allow ruthless prioritisation for our next block of deliverables:
- Crypto: token services (liquidity locking, multi-token sender, etc.)
- Online Gambling: Poker Staking
- Online Gambling: Instant Payout
- Online Gambling: Instant Bonus
- Crypto — on ramp/off-ramp
- Crypto — escrow
- Insurance: policy management
- Insurance: instant claims
- Real-estate: escrow
- Real-estate: asset transfer
- Law: marriage certificates and pre-nups
- Digital sovereignty: KYC/AML
- Freelancers: digital management portal
- Influencers: digital management portal
- And much more
The team are beyond excited to start showcasing our TSC-Core and TSC-Pooling products, if you want to know more and stay up to date about what’s happening in the Transient Network, follow us here:
Website: transientnetwork.io
Twitter: twitter.com/transient_sc
Telegram: t.me/transientnetwork
Telegram ANN: t.me/transientnetwork_ann
Medium: medium.com/transient-network | https://medium.com/transient-network/a-high-level-roadmap-for-whats-in-the-pipeline-for-transient-664d3f3b6b15 | [] | 2021-08-25 22:43:28.272000+00:00 | ['Transient', 'Smart Contracts', 'Blockchain', 'Transient Sc'] |
Einstein’s Formula for a Happy Life | Einstein’s Formula for a Happy Life
A few days before Einstein twirled into the Reaper’s grim arms, his assistant — Dukas — found him in the hospital bed, “in agony, unable to lift his head.”
Yet on the very next day, a mere 24 hours or so away from his death-day, Einstein “asked Dukas to get him his glasses, papers, and pencil, and he proceeded to jot down a few calculations.”
“He worked as long as he could,” noted biographer Walter Issacson, “and when the pain got too great he went to sleep,” for the final time. Indeed, Einstein died doing the one thing he loved most — working. Ah, circumstances reveal character!
“Genius is one percent inspiration,” said Einstein, “and 99 percent perspiration.” Indeed, it’s not by accident that no one has ever become great by accident. After all, as Einstein once noted: “Only a monomaniac gets what we commonly refer to as results.”
Show me someone great and I’ll show you someone obsessed. Besides, what more is “greatness” than the child of an obsession?
For the above reason, when Einstein was asked for the secret to a happy life, though the questioner expected an answer long and sour, Einstein kept it short and sweet:
“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”
Here lies Einstein’s formula for a happy life. | https://medium.com/mind-cafe/einsteins-formula-for-a-happy-life-b29aff61a9c7 | ['Genius Turner'] | 2020-12-27 12:14:20.610000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Self', 'Productivity'] |
Q30 Innovations: Changing the Game in Brain Trauma | Q30 Innovations: Changing the Game in Brain Trauma
Concussions. Skull Fractures. Hemorrhages. Just three types of brain trauma, these injuries have impacted and taken the lives of millions of people in the United States.
Every year, there are between 1.6 and 3.8 million concussions
2% of Americans live with disabilities that have resulted from traumatic brain injury
And shockingly enough, nearly 25% of Americans have had a concussion
The biggest group of victims? — Athletes and Military Personell.
Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash
1 out of 5 high school contact sport athletes will be victim to a concussion this year
Nearly 50% of Veterans have had at least one traumatic brain injury
In comes Q30 Innovations, a neurotech startup working to revolutionize brain trauma prevention. Their product, the Q-collar, is a device worn around the neck that works to protect those in high impact situations from brain and head injuries. By applying light pressure to the jugular veins in two key areas, the Q-collar creates a slight increase in blood volume inside the skull that reduces brain movement and therefore reduces risk of brain injury upon impact. In theory, this increase in blood volume inside the head leads to a “cushion” of sorts that prevents the brain from extreme trauma when impacted.
“The brains ability to move inside the skull is perhaps the main reason traumatic brain injury occurs” — Dr. Julian Bailes, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Northshore University Hospital
By their research, the Q-Collar seems to be highly effective as tests have shown the Q-Collar to reduce damage to brain neurons/axons by over 80%. Additionally, their studies have shown that the Q-Collar apparently has no negative affect on athletic performance, neither does it invoke side effects of any sort.
Skepticism
Though many are on board and vehemently backing the product, it has also been cause for speculation by a number of academics. For instance, High Point University Professor James Smoliga has raised concerns abouts the methods of testing used to verify the effectivity of the Q-Collar. One of his arguments included that the testing for the product couldn’t have been accurate as trauma impact was tested on mice as opposed to something with a closer effect range to human beings. Further, Dr. Smoliga also found that the Q30 Innovation’s claim of the Q-Collar creating a “safety cussion” for the brain was invalid because such a small amount of increase in blood volume would not be enough to yield such an effect.
But not only is Smoliga skeptical about the effectiveness of the Q-Collar, he believes that it could actually cause more harm as athletes may begin to believe they are “bulletproof” by wearing the Q-Collar, leading them to rougher playing that could put them in harms way.
Shannon Donovan, executive director of Football Canada, believes that sport organizations have no reason to purchase the Q-Collar until there is sufficient evidence that it A. does not cause long-term side effects and B. concrete research evidence that the Q-Collar can in fact prevent concussions.
Investment History
Q30 Innovations has amassed funding at a total of 12.3 Million dollars
In a June 2014 Seed funding round, Q30 Innovations raised 3 million dollars
In a September 2020 Series A Funding round, Q30 Innovations raised 9.3 Million dollars
Product Availability
Though it is available for purchase in Canada, because it has yet to be approved by the FDA, the Q-Collar is not yet available for sale in the United States market. In Canada, it retails for prices ranging from $199 — $249. | https://medium.com/@shanelpouatcha/q30-innovations-changing-the-game-in-brain-trauma-a928e3fd474e | ['Shanel Pouatcha'] | 2020-12-25 22:50:03.920000+00:00 | ['Brain Injury', 'Technews', 'Neurotechnology', 'Military', 'Sports'] |
Soft Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning algorithm | A general representation of reinforcement learning one-time step process. Source: [1]
Soft Actor-Critic(SAC) is one of the states of the art reinforcement learning algorithm developed jointly by UC Berkely and Google[2]. It is considered as one of the most efficient RL algorithms to apply in real-world robotics[2].
The algorithm is based on a maximum entropy RL where the objective is to find the optimal policy that maximises the expected long term reward and long term entropy[2][3].
The objective function of Maximum entropy RL. Source[3]
Read this article to know more about Maximum entropy RL
Actor-Critic architecture. Source: [4]
As the name suggests SAC is an actor-critic algorithm as shown in the above figure. In a simple description, actor-critic is a combination of policy-based and value-based approach.
If you want to know more about actor-critic, read this article
Learning of the actor is based policy gradient approach and critic is learned in value-based fashion. In SAC, there are three networks: the first network represents state-value(V) parameterised by ψ, the second one is a policy function that parameterised by ϕ, and the last one represents soft q function parameterised by θ.
Learning of the state-value function, Vψ
The learning of the state-value function by minimising the minimize the squared residual error as shown below:
Source: [6]
It means the learning of the state-value function, v is done by minimising the squared difference between the prediction of the value network and expected prediction of Q function with the entropy of the policy, π[5].
When we take the gradient or first-order derivative of the above equation, we can get the below equation:
Gradient objective of the state-value function, Vψ. Source: [6]
Learning of Q function, Qθ
Training of the Q function is based on the below equation:
Source: [6]
Where
Source: [6]
In simple words, training is done by minimizing the squared difference between predicted Q value and reward plus the discounted expectation of state-value of next state. The state value function is same as Vψ that explained above.
For enabling gradient-based learning, we take the first-order derivative of the above equation:
Grad objective of the Q value function. Source: [6]
Learning of policy, πϕ
Finally, policy network learning is based on the below equation:
.Source: [6]
Where
It’s a parameterising technique to make sure sampling from the policy is differentiable. ϵ is t is an input noise vector, sampled from some fixed distribution, such as a spherical Gaussian. Source: [6]
Where we take the gradient, we can get the below equation:
Grad objective function of policy function π. Source: [6]
As you can see in typical actor-critic architecture, policy learning depends on the Q-value to reduce the variance.
If you like my write up, follow me on Github, Linkedin, and/or Medium profile. | https://medium.com/intro-to-artificial-intelligence/soft-actor-critic-reinforcement-learning-algorithm-1934a2c3087f | ['Dhanoop Karunakaran'] | 2020-12-02 07:10:40.207000+00:00 | ['Robotics', 'Software Development', 'Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Reinforcement Learning'] |
‘I May Destroy You’ takes on a holistic look at sexual assault, rape, relationships | ‘I May Destroy You’ takes on a holistic look at sexual assault, rape, relationships
Biagio and the passport scene: He was 100% right
Photo credit: ConvertKit/Unsplash
Spoiler Alert: I have no idea how to write this post without ruining several scenes of “I May Destroy You.” If you have not seen all of the episodes on HBO, please don’t read this until you have. And if you do, don’t leave me angry comments about how I spoiled it for you. You’ve been warned.
When Trevor Noah (the host of “The Daily Show”) told actress/screenwriter Michaela Coel, “I know [Arabella] was a victim of sexual assault, but she’s an asshole,” my first thought was, “What in the world is ‘I May Destroy You’ and how do I watch this show immediately?” I don’t think I’d ever heard a sexual assault victim be described this way in the same sentence. Considering I’d already watched Netflix’s “Chewing Gum” multiple times, I knew Coel would come through. But I didn’t expect her to come through quite like this.
While watching HBO’s “I May Destroy You,” I had a few conversations with my Baby Boomer mother about sexual assault and rape. It started off with me describing a very uncomfortable story about Tisha Campbell’s babysitter in “Uncensored” and delved off into other #MeToo topics. One remark stood out to me while listening to her talk about sexual assault, “I just don’t think it was happening like this when I was a kid.”
I paused before I responded. “Mom, I believe you believe that. But you wouldn’t be the complexion you are if American history could prove that. Rape and sexual assault in America — and beyond — were happening long before you and I were both alive. We have centuries of examples of this happening.”
It took her a full 24 hours to marinate on that one before she agreed that a bigger issue was Baby Boomers tended to keep their secrets close to the vest while Millennials, Generation Y and Zers are fed up and talking about it. For that reason alone, I love everything about how problematic “I May Destroy You” is.
While many shows have explored molestation, rape and sexual assault, this is the first show I’ve seen that takes a holistic look at both sides. Tyler Perry, screenwriter and playwright, is a primary example of someone who does tell these tales. However, it’s done in a way that may help viewers relate to a character but not really understand the story. Coel delves into the brains of those who have been affected by it — whether they are the friends and loved ones of sexual assault survivors or the characters themselves.
If you’ve ever experienced stealthing, then you will grit your teeth during a trash can scene. If you’ve ever had friends leave you in a bar high or drunk out of your mind, or been the friend that did, you’ll quickly connect to the major plot of this entire story. If you’ve been accused of sexual assault or rape, knowing full well you were innocent, there are some mind-numbingly frustrating scenes that can trigger you, too. If you’ve ever had a hookup on an online dating site that went left — or maybe not — and you were worried about your safety, “I May Destroy You” could make you move differently.
About the only scene that I thought had no value was the blood clot scene. I will admit that I’m prudish about women happily oversharing about menstrual cycles. It’s one thing to want to know something for health purposes. It’s another to imagine I have a white coat and a stethoscope on and really give a damn about what’s going on with you in the bathroom. I wish I could unsee that entire scene. (It also reminds me of a ghostwriting project I opted out of with a character who took a tampon out with his teeth. Everything you think in your head does not have to be put on a page, but I’m also not a fan of erotica so there’s that.)
But it’s not all wild and crazy drama, or gross. There are also topics like friendships, dating, parenthood, sibling rivalries and relationships. Then there are two storylines in particular that will really draw the line in the sand for some viewers. | https://medium.com/we-need-to-talk/i-may-destroy-you-takes-on-a-holistic-look-at-sexual-assault-rape-relationships-e0c7d0be75c3 | ['Shamontiel L. Vaughn'] | 2020-10-27 20:14:56.708000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Sexual Assault', 'Homophobia', 'I May Destroy You', 'Michaela Coel'] |
3 Bad things about living in Israel after Belarus | You can’t get married
Photo by Jon Tyson
The Law of Return is an Israeli law, passed on 5 July 1950, which gives Jews the right to come and live in Israel and to gain Israeli citizenship. Section 1 of the Law of Return declares:
“every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh [immigrant].”
In the Law of Return, the State of Israel gave effect to the Zionist movement’s “credo” which called for the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state.
In 1970, the right of entry and settlement was extended to people with one Jewish grandparent and a person who is married to a Jew, whether or not he or she is considered Jewish under Orthodox interpretations of Halakha.
From this, we going on. I’m the grandchild of my grandfather. Not Jewish, not Christian but I could gain Israeli citizenship. In Israel, weddings take place in religious institutions such as the synagogue. And if you are not a Jew by halakha (by your mother), then you cannot marry or get married.
According to Israeli law, only those couples in which both future spouses or Jews or both do not belong to any religion can marry on the territory of our country. Mixed couples must register their marriage abroad.
This is my third bad thing about Israel. | https://medium.com/@lokshtanov/3-bad-things-about-living-in-israel-after-belarus-d1c10d001835 | ['Dmitry Lokshtanov'] | 2020-12-16 15:43:55.009000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Human Rights', 'Israel', 'Life Stile'] |
Sexuality is something we all talk about and discuss and label but as I think from my experience… | Sexuality is something we all talk about and discuss and label but as I think from my experience, ever thing is not limited everything is fluid more than we can ever imagine
As much as gender is fluid and as a gender fluid person I can say a lot about it
I’ve never imagined that what we used to put in categories is all wrong
Nothing stays in it’s please, nothing unchangeable
I always thought I’m a gay male until i discovered that I’m just queer as the word can mean | https://medium.com/@abdaskef0000/sexuality-is-something-we-all-tale-about-and-discuss-and-label-but-as-i-think-from-my-experience-7af772c5ba2b | [] | 2020-12-13 16:38:17.449000+00:00 | ['Queer', 'Sexuality', 'Queerness', 'LGBTQ', 'Gender'] |
Complete Roadmap for Full Stack Web Development | Photo by Bruno Bergher on Unsplash
Hello folks
Today we are going to discuss about the complete roadmap for web development. It is a general trend students who are in their initial days of engineering thinks about learning web development, as we all encounter many websites in our day-to-day lives and developing these websites is really very interesting which is why many individuals are attracted towards this domain.
But web development consist of many things it consist of many technologies, languages and frameworks and there are many different players in the industry also, the resources for learning web development are huge as web development is very popular and many people publish blogs, create tutorials, video series and courses and the number of such resources is really huge, it leads to a huge dilemma of which resource to follow and which stack is perfect and beginner students spend a lot of time searching for these resources or trying different resources and in the end you would end up wasting all your time.
So, I am sharing with you a complete web development roadmap to begin with in which I will share the various technologies used and various components of web development and along with that I will share with you the appropriate resources to follow so that you can become good in web development.
Web Development
Web development is simple thing it is the skill of developing a website but, developing a fully functional website is not an easy task and it many many components, the whole web development can be broadly divided into two sub-parts i.e. frontend and backend, let’s see about them in a little more detail:
Frontend Development
Fontend development as the name suggests is the front part the visible part of your website the part with which your user will interact. Everything which you see on a website is frontend the various textboxes, images, texts, colors, the background, fonts etc. etc. these all are covered in frontend.
Let’s take an example, all of us have seen a simple login form of any website it consist of the company icon, headings, user icon, input boxes, buttons, links and many others all of these components, all this styling comes under frontend when you submit your credentials then request will be sent that too is a part of frontend development.
Backend Development
Backend development deals with all the tasks that occurs in the back part of website i.e. behind the curtain, the part related to whatever happening in the background. Everything related to server and database it consists of receiving requests, sending response, saving, creating, updating and deleting data in the database.
Let’s get back to our example, what happens when we click the submit button? The credentials we enter in the form is sent to the server which receive them and then verify them from the database and if got verified it will let you enter the website.
So a website consist of a client side which interacts with the user and a server side which will deals with all the technicalities that takes place in the background.
Components
Now let’s look at each component of web development one by one.
HTML
HTML is the first step, it is also referred to as the skeleton of the website it is used to create the basic structure of the website and hence it is the basic building block of website.
We create basic structure of website, HTML is used to create skeletal features including:
Header and Footer
Input Forms
Navigation Bars
Website Content
Video player
Links. etc…..
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML. CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen. CSS stylize the website and make it more beautiful and much more user-friendly if you want to be a website designer then this is a very crucial skill.
In a website CSS is used to add features like:
Background
Font
Font-size
Margin and Padding
Buttons
Cards
Icons
Bootstrap
The next step would be to learn using bootstrap.
Bootstrap is a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, front-end web development. It is an excellent framework and will surely make you work super easy, you will not have to write long CSS properties for some common task all of it is just a class away (literally) i.e. one has to add classes to add any required styling.
To learn bootstrap you can just refer to official website of bootstrap and there is nothing to be learned, it is required to just add a class.
Using it is pretty easy:
Add bootstrap(downloaded) or its CDN (refer to official website) in to your website.
Go to official website and search for the thing you want for example, navbar.
If whole code is required then copy the code and modify it according to you needs else you would just need to add classes.
You can directly use many classes like “btn-large”, “col-md-3” etc.
JavaScript
JavaScript (JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, or just-in-time compiled programming language with first-class functions. While it is most well-known as the scripting language for Web pages, many non-browser environments also use it, such as NodeJs. It is used to add functionality in your website it is the connecting link between frontend and backend and frontend all the data transfer from frontend to backend is done using JS.
Validating User’s Input
Simple Client-side Calculations
Greater Control
Handling Dates and Time
Generating HTML Content
Frontend Framework
Writing vanilla(plain) javascript is a hectic task and at production level frameworks are used to do the work efficiently and much faster. There are many frameworks available but I am just recommending courses on two of most popular frameworks both of them are great and you can learn any of them, if you are confused I would recommend learn any one and after having enough experience in one you can easily learn the other if needed.
AngularJs
AngularJS is a JavaScript-based open-source front-end web framework mainly maintained by Google.
ReactJs
React is an open-source JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It is maintained by Facebook.
NodeJs
As you might be aware that javascript is the most popular language(acc to survey done by Stackoverflow) the main reason for such an amazing popularity is nodejs as it enables developer to use javascript at both front and backend also, it is very efficient, fast and scalable and that’s why it is so much popular.
Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside a web browser. It is used at server side to manage backend operations it is the connecting link between frontend and database, it can be called as the main functioning body of a website as it is responsible for all the operations that are happening at backend. It also makes the website dynamic that is you don’t need to hardcode everything data would be added through database.
Mongo DB
MongoDB is a cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc.
MongoDB is part of stack i.e. MEAN or MERN stack, that’s why it is recommended when working with node.
Mastering Web Development — A Myth
Before moving on to resources I first want to share with you something. There are many people who claim to make you a master of web development and I have seen many questions on different discussion forums where students ask how to master web dev in 6,3 or even one month and there are many resources which also claim so but, let me tell you one cannot master web development in such a sort time.
Mastering web development takes a lot of time (3–5years) and all the sources one can come across teaches only the basics of web development and other advanced concepts can only be learned by experience while working on projects. So stop thinking too much about it and just learn the basics and start building some cool projects which you can showcase on your resume and you will learn a lot while working on these projects.
Resources
Udemy Courses : One thing before moving on udemy courses are best and cheapest among paid courses and you won’t find such detailed beginner-friendly resource anywhere else so, if you might be thinking I am referring to a course then this is the reason behind it.
My Advice
Before moving on to the roadmap part here’s an advice from me. I would highly recommend you to take a very popular course on udemy — The Web Development Bootcamp by Colt Steele, I myself have done this course and it is an amazing course it will give you a complete sense of what web development is and you would be able to see the big picture it is a perfect course for giving you a perfect headstart. Do it if you want but I would highly recommend it.
Ending Note…..
At the end I would say that learning web development is a continuous process and you also might be aware that learning never stops, after learning these basics you won’t get any courses for advanced concepts and your only friend would be the official documentation and you can learn only by making projects and taking part in hackathons. I am telling you this because when you reach that phase you might get stuck and couldn’t figure out what to do then follow this approach:
Work on projects.
Read Official Documentation.
Try to clone good websites.
Try to add any good feature which you observe on others website
Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
Hope you liked my blog and if you are reading this article till this end then you surely are stepping in the world of web development, so wish you a very good luck for your excited journey in the world of web development. | https://medium.com/roottech/complete-roadmap-for-full-stack-web-development-89efde320e77 | ['Aman Kumar Goyal'] | 2020-08-31 13:50:55.726000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Web Design', 'Roadmaps', 'Programming', 'Computer Science'] |
Gloucester Township BOE reorganizes | Gloucester Township BOE reorganizes
Three new members of the Gloucester Township Public Schools Board of Education were sworn in to their seats on Monday, Jan.7 Matthew Shinkle Jan 11, 2019·3 min read
The Gloucester Township Board of Education held its annual reorganization meeting Monday, Jan. 7, at the administration building to welcome three new board members elected this past November.
The ballot listed 15 registered candidates, according to the Camden County Board of Elections, with the three winners of the election being the only three candidates to receive a double-digit percentage of the vote.
Carolyn Grace received 14.13 percent, while Brian Reagan received 13.03 percent, and Anthony Marks received 10.99 percent of the more than 45,000 votes cast.
The three were sworn in together by Solicitor Dan Long at the reorganization meeting before taking their seats on the board and being welcomed by Superintendent John Bilodeau. All members of the board were present for the meeting.
At the meeting, MaryJo Dintino was elected as board president, and Mark Gallo was elected vice president, with the only “no” vote for both candidates coming from Jennifer O’Donnell.
Bilodeau made a few announcements to the board and to the public, saying the efforts of the district and additional organizations to raise money for the family for Michelle Barrett, a Chews Landing Elementary School teacher who died in a car accident in early December, have raised more than $7,000. At a previous meeting, Bilodeau had reported a lower figure.
Bilodeau also stated the board will be posting for an HR position in the near future, however it will have to discuss it a future personnel committee meeting before posting the job opening.
There were no comments from the public during public portion, however O’Donnell did make a comment as a board member near the end of the meeting.
“I will refuse to surrender my independent judgment to special interests or partisan political groups or to use the schools for political gain and for the use of friends,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell’s comment is the word-for-word statement made under letter F in the Code of Ethics for School Board Members, according to the state Department of Education.
Speaking as an individual and not a board representative later in a phone call with The Sun, O’Donnell said she takes school board ethics very seriously and wanted to simply state that out loud to remind the board of that specific line.
“I do feel that there is politics on our school board, and I’ve been saying that out loud for the two years that I’ve served over and over again,” O’Donnell said. “In my last year of the BOE, it’s been my goal to get politics off of the board. That’s my intent, that’s my goal.”
She said she was voted in to represent the public and to take everything into account and determine what is in the best interest of the children in the district for the taxpayers. | https://medium.com/@mshinkle/gloucester-township-boe-reorganizes-62d1c023ba04 | ['Matthew Shinkle'] | 2019-01-11 15:03:55.459000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Students', 'New Jersey', 'Board Of Education', 'Schools'] |
No New Year’s Resolutions But The Reminders Is What You Need For 2021 | As always, let me know your thoughts on the topic. I’d love to hear your ideas and views in the comments below.
Also, if you would like to read more captivating stuff on the topics of entrepreneurship, marketing, social media, leadership, technology, innovation, and venture capital via my regular posts then please click ‘Follow’ and feel free to connect via SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
P.S. here are my other Articles on Linkedin & Articles on Medium. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/no-new-years-resolutions-but-the-reminders-you-need-for-2021-63582e5cb9b4 | ['Abhishek Shah'] | 2020-12-24 02:02:33.309000+00:00 | ['Purpose', 'Life Lessons', 'Statusgood', 'New Year Resolution', '2021'] |
Towards … Coding For All. For us, we need researchers who can… | Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash
For us, we need researchers who can code. The industry increasingly needs people who can code and script, so sometime soon we will have to create a workforce that does not run away from coding and sees it as natural as using a spread. Excel has been our friend for decades, but it is becoming cumbersome in a world of open-source dataset and machine learning. It is a package that has hardly changed over the years, and still basically remains the same as it did all those years ago.
So how are we going to do this? Setup kids at school with Linux virtual desktops and get then to use vi to edit their code? No. It’s much easier than this. Let’s them use Jupyter Notebooks for their key lessons, and they will start to code naturally. A few lessons on Python as a start, and then integrate it with Maths, Physical, Biology, and anywhere else there is the need to solve things, draw graphs, and, in fact, anything that has tutorial/lab work.
We are all too hung up on teaching software developers the syntax of languages, and forget that coding is for everyone now. For most, it’s a few lines of Python to do the things that they used to do in Excel. It might be to download the latest COVID-19 data and then to chart its progress, or a monitor the statistics on the Web site.
For some reason, we are keeping coding hidden in a lab someone, and forgetting that Python is the new pocket calculator. Our students often use Python to do calculations, in the same way, that the calculator would have been done in the past.
And so this week we saw a massive step forward with Microsoft adding Jupyter Notebooks functionality to Visual Studio Code (VS Code) code editor. While many focused on Python, these notebooks can support other languages such as R and Julia. The sharing possibilities are almost endless.
and then it becomes easy to create new notebooks:
Juypter Notebooks
And what an amazing impact we could make at school if every child ran Juypter Notebooks for the maths and science lessons, of a shared cloud system, and with full GitHub integration. We could create a whole of data scientists and cybersecurity professionals, and who would under how to apply methods into code. For some, this is the revolution that is waiting:
And so some academics moving this forward, such as:
https://jupyter4edu.github.io/jupyter-edu-book/
Within this online resources, we see how lessons can be easily integrated in maths and science, and how it brings the subjects alive:
For us, we have integrated GitHub into our delivery, and in Semester 2, we are going to move to use Juypter Notebooks for the delivery of our cryptography classes. I see my PhD students using it, and it’s a great way to evolve methods and show the testing in-between.
Academia is now adopting Juypter Notebooks and there are many examples of the integrate of syllabuses within many countries around the world, including within engineering [here]:
and in mapping hurricanes [here]:
Teachers could easily share code, workbooks and lessons over GitHub, and we could start to apply coding/scripting into many other areas, including within music lessons and the creative arts. The great thing, is that we can easily guide students through the first stages of a method or experiment with a ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ approach.
And it’s not just Python that the Notebooks support, pupils can integrate Java, Julia, R, and so many more languages. GitHub is taking over the world just now, and schools should integrate with it in order to share lessons, and allow parents/industry to get involved, too. Increasingly, too, there’s no need to run code on school networks on complex desktops, as Notebook can run the code off a server, and on virtually every device (and yes, an iPad, too).
And so our kids would learn to code and enhance their learning. In the Computer Science class they would still be using Juypter Notebooks but could learn about machine learning in Python, or interfacing to electronic sensors, or even learning a bit about cryptography.
Conclusions
Our teaching of software is still stuck in the 1980s, and we have not moved on since. We often switch our kids off at an early age. So go and get our kids coding/script, and learning about the beauty of this word …
… to me, every child should code/script naturally … only then will we create a tech-ready nation that is fit for the 21st Century. Until then, coding will be seen as a niche subject for “techies”. We must all be techies in the future! | https://billatnapier.medium.com/towards-coding-for-all-f57a28d78a48 | ['Prof Bill Buchanan Obe'] | 2020-11-14 08:57:00.446000+00:00 | ['Coding'] |
Breaking Bad episode review — 1.7 — A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal | Original air date: March 9, 2008
Director: Tim Hunter
Writer: Peter Gould
Rating: 9/10
This is a great season finale. It doesn’t end so much on a cliffhanger as it ends on a point of escalation that’s certain to raise the stakes for future seasons, which is how a show like this should work.
And there’s a lot going on here. Jesse tries to sell his house because he doesn’t want to be reminded of what happened to Emilio and Krazy-8. Walt has sex with Skyler in their car just outside of the high school. And with a shortage of pseudoephedrine, Walt figures out a way to make meth without it.
The result is the meth looking blue, but still of the same quality.
This culminates in the drug deal with Tuco at an old junkyard, which Walt arranges. After the deal is done, one of Tuco’s men says something pretty innocent, but Tuco takes it the wrong way and ends up beating him to death.
This is a trope that’s generally used way too much in film and TV, where a villain kills one of his own men to show you how scary he is. Here, though, it’s legitimately intimidating, and happening at the end of the season is great, as it just leaves you with the feeling that Walt and Jesse are in way over their heads. | https://medium.com/as-vast-as-space-and-as-timeless-as-infinity/breaking-bad-episode-review-1-7-a-no-rough-stuff-type-deal-ee6ddf79658f | ['Patrick J Mullen'] | 2020-07-01 12:21:01.326000+00:00 | ['Tv Reviews', 'TV', 'Drama', 'Breaking Bad', 'Television'] |
It’s spicy. It’s hot. It’s Indian Food! | A popular TV host and actor Madhur Jaffrey exclaimed: “The word Curry was just a generalized way of addressing food from India by the British” in an episode of Ugly Delicious. It is a show, where popular chef Dave Chang travels the world to really understand the origin and originality of the cuisines of this world. In the episode shot for India, he along with Aziz Ansari, a stand-up comedian discovers the nuances of Indian food in different regions of India.
Everywhere in the world except India, food from India is oversimplified. It is stuffed into a single category called “curry” with extra “hotness” and “Spiciness”. While it may be true that some cuisines in India are spicy, a generalization of all cuisines of India to be spicy is a sign of ignorance. It takes a lot of unlearning for someone from the west to honestly appreciate the nuance and flavours present in India. Although the level of spice intake outside India is down to the basics, it still does not justify the generalization of cuisines from India as “spicy”.
There is so much more to it than just it being labelled as “Curry”. While in the south of India, cuisines were constructed with tamarind water and coconut milk as the base. The north of India uses a tomato-onion puree as the base for a number of its dishes. Although this may just be a minuscule of a difference, it is relevant to understand, food from India is very complex. Oversimplifying it into a single small box is rather foolish.
Every state in India has its own set of specialized cuisines that have originated there. Each of these has a unique spice palette which is a reflection of the native ingredients grown in those regions. For example, in Kerala, a common spice in their cuisines is the black pepper which is native to this state.
There is also a national angle to this argument of simplification. The difference between the culture in the North and the South of India is so diverse, we really wouldn’t appreciate the nuances of the cuisines of India unless we experience them. A simple yet my favourite example is that of Sambar. Sambar, which is a lentil-based semi-thick soup is interpreted so differently in every state it is popular, one might misunderstand their local encounter of sambar to be an original. There are also so many different pronunciations for Sambar available and now would the time to hone your math skills!
The dilution of the complexity across the country also gives room to oversimplify that which is incomprehensible. This is also why interpretations of various unoriginal cuisines become very normalized that we often are naive to boldly investigate its authenticity.
Have you ever wondered something that was so normal was, in fact, foreign to that origin? In the next few weeks, this blog will attempt to learn, explain, and question food from India as we know it. Gain your inspiration to question by watching the episode “Don’t call it curry” on the show called Ugly Delicious on Netflix. | https://medium.com/@nithinsuresh/its-spicy-it-s-hot-it-s-indian-food-16e68080a0a8 | ['Id Spi'] | 2020-07-03 05:52:27.910000+00:00 | ['South Indian Food', 'Food', 'Indian Food', 'South Indian Restaurant', 'Foodies'] |
Assess but not stress! | Assess but not stress!
“Empathy is the medicine the world needs”- Judith Orloff
Reread this quote and take a minute to understand it. This is the time we can understand this quote better than ever.
We as an individual, as a nation, as a human race are all going through this tough pandemic and all we can do for each other is empathize at this time. It’s a core value that one needs to take account of. One way to do it is to understand the difficulties and problems of others and put yourself in their shoes.
Undoubtedly, this pandemic has been miserable for all of us. Whether it be elders or youngers, teachers or students, parents or children, we all have gone through a tough time. But I empathize the most with the students at this time. They are the pillars of our society and due to the chaos their education has been affected the most. I personally have seen a lot of students who have no idea what their future is going to be they aren’t even sure of which path to take. and the worst thing is they are now also getting deviated from their studies and are losing attention hence I wanted to find a way such that I can help them in directing towards their goal and motivate them.
I being a student can feel the peer pressure each student has on him even at normal situations. Due to this pandemic every student has now to take online classes and most of the students don’t even take the online session due to the unavailability of gadgets or internet connection hence they are missing so much stuff and guidance.
One of the major issues I realized when interviewing a few kids of higher secondary classes was the mismanagement and unfair examinations. Almost all the students don’t take online assessments seriously and have to cheat for the sake of marks and grades. The teachers are also not used to such assessment systems and the markings done don’t prove to be helpful for the students.
Hence, considering the above situation I thought of an idea. When I recalled my time, when I was doing intermediate, I used to take different tests that were not marked and had nothing to do with my grades just so that I can improve and someone can point my mistakes out so that I won’t make these mistakes in my exams. So, I thought of a solution and of taking an initiative. I plan on making a platform for the students where I can prepare mock tests for them according to their grades and syllabus on the same pattern as of the board and ask my teachers, professors and somewhat to my own understanding to assess their responses. A proper feedback will be given to them. Each exam will be virtually invigilated and proper attention will be given to each student within strict time limits.
Conclusively, This idea will help students (especially the ones having their board exams this year) to realize how much they have prepared and how much more they need to. They will also be participating in it for the sake of their improvement as they won’t have the pressure of doing the exam correct and cheat as their tests won’t be graded but only the feedback will be given so that they can perform well in their final board exams. I really wish all of them a very good luck and hope we all get past this situation safely and soundly. Amen. | https://medium.com/@syeda-ariba176/assess-but-not-stress-3db31e4f1a4b | ['Syeda Ariba'] | 2020-12-25 18:38:30.478000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Amal Fellowship', 'Amal Academy', 'Students'] |
Remembering a Night Sky | I have two childhood memories about the stars.
The first was a warm summer evening when my sister, brother and I talked our parents into letting us sleep outside. We spread our blankets and pillows on the balcony and lay down under a night sky filled with stars. In hushed voices we searched for meteors and counted satellites until slowly and one-by-one we drifted off to sleep.
The second memory was with my Dad. If we were outside at night he had a habit of looking up at the sky — to check the phase of the moon or find a planet. One night, we were returning home from soccer practice (or maybe we were walking our dog — details have faded with time) and he did what he usually did. He stopped to look up at the night sky.
But this time he had a question for me. Did I know how far away the stars were?
I remember it was a bitterly cold evening. Our feet crunched on frosted ground and his frozen breath hung in the air. When I stood next to him and also looked up at all those stars, I was thinking, ‘this is a question that might have a long answer,’ which means staying out here in the cold instead of going on into the house where we could sit near the fireplace and drink hot chocolate.
And then he explained.
The light from the stars that we see now has been travelling for thousands and sometimes millions of years to reach us. “If,” he said, pointing at a one part of the sky, “that star is a thousand light years away and it exploded today, we wouldn’t see the explosion for another thousand years.”
I was staggered. I forgot I was cold. This truth about the size of our universe unfolded in my mind like a flower before the sun. | https://medium.com/descripter/remembering-a-night-sky-e47b85eab9ed | ['Craig Brett'] | 2020-08-26 08:14:18.779000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Space', 'Life', 'Science', 'Parenting'] |
How to plan better products while making friends with devs | How to plan better products while making friends with devs
Bring developers into your design process and use technical boundaries as a tool to create better user experiences
I often hear designers complain about how the development didn’t do justice to their prototypes, how the transitions aren’t smooth enough and the animations appear too late or too slow. Every time, I can imagine the moment of hand-off, when the developer sees the roller-coaster the designer had planned, and after failing to find the hoops to jump through to implement it somehow, struggles to explain why it’s technically impossible to recreate. To avoid frustration on both sides, I think the what-can-or-can’t-be-done talk should happen at an early stage of design. Setting expectations and boundaries that can help the designer plan a feasible experience that the developer can implement to the letter.
I once read about how clear boundaries give kids a space to explore and channel their creativity within–that way, they waste less creative energy on testing the limits. This made sense to me, not just in the context of kids, but in the world of collaboration among grown-ass designers and developers, too.
Don’t hate me, but function should come before form
As product designers, our job is to create good and whole experiences that provide value. Yes, even above a sparkling UI. Part of that value is a working product. What does it matter how amazing a transition is, if it never gets developed? What good does a whimsical animation do if the overall experience sucks? No amount of cute will save a faltering product. That’s why we, as designers, need to understand our limitations and define the boundaries before approaching any task. This way we can still create wonderful experiences, but ones that can actually be implemented and perform well.
Explore the boundaries
Before I begin designing a flow or a feature, as part of my research and planning, I always consult with my developers first (I use the term ‘my’ because I love’em and I’m theirs as much as they are mine). If possible, as early as the spec itself. I ask about loading times, errors or time-outs I should anticipate, performance and bundle sizes, services we use and how they connect to each other, or anything else they think I should take into account.
I often throw ideas in the air and they tell me what can or cannot be done, how complex or time-consuming these ideas are, and it’s not rare for them to suggest their own solutions, based on my ideas, that actually work better than my initial suggestion. By the time we finish, I often have 2–3 good and feasible ideas I can start working on.
Accept limits as a tool
Boundaries are often perceived as the enemies of creativity. Some may claim that letting technicalities limit you is like shooting your creativity in the foot. And while I won’t deny there might be something to that, I would argue, strongly, that shooting for the stars isn’t all that great either. You obviously want to have the freedom to be as creative as possible, but within the realm of reality. That’s why the boundaries need to be set together, as a team.
Set boundaries
The boundaries should adhere to two basic rules:
A) Being clear, for the designer to know when their design becomes too complex.
B) Being broad enough for the designer to have room to play around and explore creative solutions that, in contrast to many people’s beliefs, may include cool transitions and animations.
Create mind blowing experiences
Once you understand the constraints and with the boundaries in mind, you can unleash your creativity and think up crazy experiences that can actually be developed and be seen by users just as you planned and intended. Good luck, and have fun 🎉
The cherry on top
Other than the obvious benefit of creating experiences that will actually see the light of day, you’ll get a healthy relationship with the developers. First, you learn each other’s terms and language, thus improving communication. Second, there’s the element of Quid pro quo. When the developers know you take their needs into consideration, they will do their best to bring your designs into life, as pixel perfect as you intended, no matter the time or effort they’ll have to put into it. I swear. I’ve seen this happen with my own two eyes. | https://medium.com/soluto-engineering/how-to-plan-better-products-while-making-friends-with-devs-9dbbb2792fb5 | ['Julia Factor'] | 2019-09-05 12:27:39.566000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'UX', 'Teamwork', 'Design'] |
The End is Nigh — Part 1: Python analysis on Climate Change Database | How to Download the Dataset from Kaggle directly on Google Colab?
We’ll use this dataset from Kaggle in case you’re wondering. There are a couple of alternatives to using Kaggle files on Colab. The most common one, for example, is downloading the data to your drive and connecting that folder to Google Colab. That’s the methodology I usually use, mainly because after processing files and rearranging datasets, you can store them directly into Drive and reuse them without having to rerun the code again and again.
Create a Kaggle Account/Sign in:
Well, I mean, obviously, right?
Figure 1: Click on the black button if you don’t have an account.
2. Download your API Token from Kaggle
Under profile settings, there is the Account option which holds many relevant information, including our dear API key:
Figure 2: How to find the account.
Figure 3: Generate your new API token.
This will download a ‘.json’ file containing your username and key.
3. Connect your Google Colab with your Kaggle API key
Ok, so you have some alternatives in here:
a) first of you can upload it to your google drive and then simply reference it whenever you want for all the kaggle datasets you can download; or
b) upload it from your local machine every time you wish to download it.
We’ll go with path a) in here since it makes our job easier!
On Google Colab, just write the following code lines:
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
A brief explanation: the import drive will import the drive class which will connect to drive with the method drive.mount().
This will open a new tab asking you to validate your gmail account, and you’ll have to write your password, so don’t be scared of that. Also, don’t forget to upload your ‘.json’ file to your drive! It’s better to save it on a specific folder, for example, mine is:
path = "/content/drive/My Drive/A Duck's Dream/Climate Change/kaggle.json"
The “/content/drive/My Drive” is standard, so you’ll have to replicate that, but the remaining part will be the folder’s path of wherever you saved your file in.
We’ll have to use python’s json package in order to read the file and its content, so:
import json
path = "/content/drive/My Drive/A Duck's Dream/Climate Change/kaggle.json"
with open(path) as json_file:
data = json.load(json_file)
If you want to check whether the upload was successful, then just print the content of it like this:
print(data)
You should have something like this:
Figure 4: Did you really thought I was going to show it?
4. Install Kaggle Library and download kaggle dataset to your notebook
To install Kaggle you just use the commands from the prompt:
# Install Kaggle library
!pip install -q kaggle
The “-q” command means quiet, with as less verbose as possible.
So, our next should be to download our dataset, but in order to do this, Kaggle requires that our ‘kaggle.json’ API key is located in the folder, otherwise it won’t work:
/root/.kaggle
Our strategy in here is very simple: we create that folder, then we copy the ‘kaggle.json’ file in it, and finally we download our dataset. The command lines we need for that are below
!mkdir /root/.kaggle #create the folder
!ls /root/.kaggle #check if we actually created it
!cp "/content/drive/My Drive/A Duck's Dream/Climate Change/kaggle.json" /root/.kaggle #copy the file here
In case Python complains that there is already a “/root/.kaggle” folder, then just delete that line and copy the file. Notice that my path is different than yours! So replace it properly hehehe.
With all well documented, now the only thing we actually need to do is download our dataset:
!kaggle datasets download -d berkeleyearth/climate-change-earth-surface-temperature-data
The “-d” command in UNIX returns the path, and not the content itself, so we’re using that command to download the files from that path.
The whole operations takes about 2 seconds and then a new zip file containing the dataset will be available for you under the path:
Figure 5: Straight out of the oven.
5. Unzip our files and start using it:
First of all consider we don’t want to extract all of the files, let’s say we only want two of the ‘.csv’ files, for instance. We’ll need to use the ZipFile library in order to deal with the zips, and also Pandas in order to convert the file into a dataframe:
import zipfile
z = zipfile.ZipFile('/content/climate-change-earth-surface-temperature-data.zip','r')
df_city = pd.read_csv(z.open('GlobalLandTemperaturesByMajorCity.csv'))
df_country = pd.read_csv(z.open('GlobalLandTemperaturesByCountry.csv'))
And there you have it, everything in its right place.
Now, stay tuned for Part 2 where we start processing the file and applying EDA to it in order to extract relevant information from it! | https://medium.com/a-ducks-dream/the-end-is-nigh-part-1-python-analysis-on-climate-change-database-bb8f361ccd76 | ['Marco Aurélio Gemaque Cantuária'] | 2020-12-24 03:32:16.910000+00:00 | ['Kaggle Api', 'Climate Change', 'Pandas'] |
Building Smart Infrastructure on The People’s Network with DIMO | Today we’re excited to share the newest user of The People’s Network. Please give it up for DIMO!
DIMO started as an internal software tool and data service developed by Digital Infrastructure Services. As a consulting firm and product studio that also builds The People’s Network, DIMO enables innovative technology to actualize more quickly.
While providing service to the mobility, robotics, automotive, public sector, and logistics industries, DIMO has seen interesting and worthwhile projects get scrapped or unnecessarily delayed each step of the way from:
📝 The drawing board
📊 The financing process
😣 Inapt partner selection
⁉ Unclear regulations
🚧 Hidden development complexity
📉 Operations that don’t meet initial performance
Not to mention, projects often need ubiquitous and affordable network infrastructure and connectivity — which is where Helium comes in. With DIMO and the power of The People’s Network, risks are mitigated and potential is unlocked.
Fundamentally, DIMO makes it easier than ever for tech-enabled projects to be collaboratively designed, financed, built, and managed. Think Github and LinkedIn, but for building in the real world.
Projects launched on the Helium Network
How it Works: Three Easy Steps
DIMO allows users to identify where projects have been launched on the Network, conduct function-based searches, check device compatibility, and more. You can even compare other “Full Stack” networking Projects in the DIMO public dataset.
Designers, developer, or financiers interested in completing infrastructure projects using DIMO follow three simple steps:
Access information about service providers, their costs, and their history of delivering against project requirements via the DIMO database. Select from many DIMO pre-built project templates. Use the DIMO Knowledge Graph to assess where to take action:
Where have Projects been launched on the Helium Network?
Search Functions and Projects — what can you do with the Network?
Ultimately, DIMO users are able to surface the best technologies for their projects and connect with service providers to help them build faster.
All projects are easily sorted by a variety of metrics
A DIMOrphic Pairing
The addition of DIMO to The People’s Network signifies additional community resources and new projects in the works!
DIMO is currently working with network operators to provide real-time Hotspot performance data. Soon, the data from these Hotspots will allow The People’s Network and DIMO users to access information on service providers, costs, and their history of delivering against project requirements. Gone are the days of endless internet searching — DIMO and The People’s Network provide the template for building and operating networks as never before.
“We’re excited to use DIMO to move the idea of universally accessible, and locally supported, open networks forward. Helium is a fantastic step in that direction,” says DIMO Founder, Andy Chatham.
Get in Touch
If what DIMO is doing sounds interesting to you, learn more at dimo.zone and via Twitter. DIMO is also frequently adding new additions to its database; reach out if you’d like your service, organization, or project listed.
Register today for the June 23rd Uplink webinar dedicated to discussing the newest member of The People’s Network. | https://blog.helium.com/building-smart-infrastructure-on-the-peoples-network-with-dimo-cc287d47af48 | ['Mckenna Boen'] | 2021-06-22 18:22:47.914000+00:00 | ['Project Management', 'Smart Cities', 'Internet of Things', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Technology'] |
This Is How I Get The Most Out Of A Headline Analyser Tool. | Top Headline # 1 — This Is the Best Way To Think About …
Analyser Score: 85 points.
This is one headline type that points to the highest utility of thinking. There are many ways to skin a cat. And this is the best way.
You help readers save their time by presenting the best way ahead. It could be a short-cut or a life trivia.
In short, this is the way ahead.
Top Headline # 2 — This Is How I Got The Most Out Of …
Analyser Score: 82 points.
This shows the reader that you are an experimental scientist, and you found a way to extract the most value out of an activity.
This is about extracting and retaining the most information from a book, for instance. It is highly valued by students who are coping with their examinations.
Top Headline # 3 — How To … And Get The Most Out Of … When You Have No Time …
Analyser Score: 87 points.
As with the Top 2, this category is about showing the short-cut with a time dimension. What if all we have is 10 minutes? What is the best way to get the most out of a gym workout over a 30-minute lunch break?
People who struggle with time control will be attracted to such headlines.
Top Headline # 4 — How To Be … All The Time …
Analyser Score: 84 points.
This headline is about life lessons, in my opinion.
Try inserting different words in between “To Be” and “All The Time.”. You will realize that positive words make sense. Negative words do not.
Take, for instance, “How To Be Calm All The Time.”.
It showcases life lessons accumulated over time.
Many people need it. I need it. Thanks for writing it.
Top Headline # 5 — What You Can Do When You Are Sick And Tired Of …
Analyser Score: 84 points.
This headline deals with overcoming negativity.
I think it deserves a pre-set high score because we are all sick and tired of something. I am sick and tired of people trying to tell me what to do or what not to do.
I am sick and tired of listening to people telling me how to do things this way or that when they are not doing it.
You know, things like that.
Top Headline # 6 — What You Need To Know About … And How To Deal With it …
Analyser Score: 85 points.
This headline type deals with circumstances.
Insert in a difficult circumstance you have encountered, and you will know what I know. They can range from asking for a pay raise, emotional people, tendering a resignation.
It teaches readers to expect and how to deal with the next step.
Top Headline # 7 — What Happens When You Start Doing … For The First Time …
Analyser Score: 86 points.
This is about personal growth. It shows how uncomfortable we are attempting to do things for the first time.
It also shows how it really isn’t that difficult or how it is tough beyond comprehension. In any case, this is about a reflection. | https://medium.com/technology-hits/this-is-how-i-get-the-most-out-of-a-headline-analyser-tool-bb0365a8ead0 | ['Aldric Chen'] | 2020-12-26 12:51:45.031000+00:00 | ['Writing Tips', 'Technology', 'Productivity', 'Communication', 'Writing'] |
The Fat Lady Sang | I don’t know what it was about the Negro woman that intrigued me, I had an unexplainable attraction to her, it was with the force of lust, but without it’s lewdness, it seemed like Love, yet lacking the appeal required for it, so you see why I used the word "Intrigued".
It all started when I heard her sing.
Texas in the 60’s was your average American state, heavy on segregation of the whites from the negros. There was an uptight feeling in the air back then. I had a bar back in the days, an all white bar, and i had some black workers working menial temporary jobs, importantly jobs where they would have minimum interaction with the whites as possible. I like to think those years were the darkest of my life, I was a drunk and a compulsive gambler. My business suffered greatly due to my habits. In order to salvage the situation, I decided to organize a “sing off” to boost sales.
I got some pamphlets printed and asked my workers to take them around town, what I expected was they’d know by "around town" I meant white neighborhoods.
The day finally arrived, the people who wanted to contest were about 20, which was a fair number for a local bar, there was also, good incentive — the prize money of $100.
By 8pm the bar was packed full of people who wanted to watch, I made sure to get an entrance fee charged, and made it mandatory to get at least one drink to stay in the bar.
As each contestant sang, I got drunk, and more drunk, the contestants varied from The Good, the bad, and the terrible.
At the end of the day, after 19 people had sang, the judges - my permanent staff (excluding the negroes. Had almost decided who won, till a Negro Overweight woman stepped on stage almost,t out of nowhere.
The audience probably thought she wanted to solicit for help, as that wasn’t uncommon, till she said "I saw the ad for tha sing off, mind if I sing?" the audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats, like you would if you smelt beans enabled flatulence.
One of the judges was about to Chase her offstage when I shouted in my drunken frenzy
"it ain’t ova, till the fat lady sings!"
You could see the visible shock on people’s faces, not that I bothered, even the black staff were shocked, and this was practically their doing! And then she sang, I’d like to say she caught everyone off guard with how good she was, but frankly she wouldn’t have won the sing off, she was your average singer, but what happened next made it impossible for a winner to be announced.
People began to exit the bar, the new faces, the regulars, my staff, even my Negro staff! I didn’t really bother about the whites that left, but the negroes? It seemed like I’d broken some unspoken rule, the reaction from them at that point, the look of disappointment on their faces, seemed to spell some kind of class breach, the kind that exists when White male tips a black bartender, or how a Chauffeur would feel when his boss hugs him randomly, but this was worse, I breached a race, class and social divide!
Minutes after, it was just Clarisse the fat lady and i left in the bar, she tried to apologise, and so on, but I was enamored by her, she wasn’t of peculiar beauty, perhaps it was her courage which impressed me, I don’t know, I do know that I sheltered her in my home that night, the next morning my bar was burning, not that it mattered, for I had started making plans to elope, you see our county was a small one, you couldn’t get away with such an affront to the law, I could be excused from it’s full Brent, but she wouldn’t have survived it, so I told her my plans and we eloped in the middle of the night the next day.
We got married after settling in a county in Louisiana, we never had kids, and after 20 years, I’m still enamored by her, perhaps that’s why I write this while staring at her body, which I preserved after her death, perhaps I couldn’t bear to lose her, so I kept her after cancer took her. I really don’t know.
I really don’t know. | https://medium.com/@probablypagliacci/the-fat-lady-sang-20ebe646536a | ['Pagliacci'] | 2020-12-08 02:28:26.178000+00:00 | ['Texas', 'Class', 'Racism', 'Fiction'] |
Brighter Days Ahead | Brighter Days Ahead
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
I was speaking to someone the other day
A young soul with dreams and ambitions
She said to me, ‘I want to make everyone’s life better’.
A statement so seamlessly grandiose and simplistic
Yet, it felt true and and innocent
I hung on to every syllable and wondered why
We can’t all have simple dreams of a better world
We can work towards.
She craved not money, nor social standing
But a better tomorrow, the world she would live in.
We do not ever, think like this
We act like adults, and hedge our bets
Do what we can, forgetting the rest
Because of issues of bureaucracy
Where money goes and power plays
This evil game, called politics
Has cast a shroud, over our inner child
Usurped our ability to hope and dream
Making us choose, who we can help.
Responsible, grown-up reasoning
Subjecting others to their demise.
It is kind of like, making a deal with the devil
Maybe not as nefarious, but flirting around the edges
“We will let you save, a chosen few
Just to show a semblance of progress
But many others, perhaps the majority
Will be left for us, for continued exploitation.”
No wonder why the youth are rising and taking action
For their uncorrupted mind, is bereft of norms and knowledge
Of how things are supposed to be done.
All they see is inequity and climate destruction
When they rage and demand for change
They know not of the dollars invested
Or economic implications
For them there is wrong and right,
No grey areas in their visions.
“Meet me in the middle,
50–50, at least you will get something.”
The youth do not understand 50–50
Save half and abandon the rest
These words you speak are for a different generation.
“We would go partially green, work out the percentages
Divest a little, but no not everything
Surely you can understand, we must protect our margins
And at least we are giving you something.”
Science says, that is not enough
No deal then, the youth will march unrelenting
Till their desires are met, with no compromises.
So maybe, the statement made by this friend of mine
Was not so grand nor simple,
Perhaps it was, a look into
What our world could become
A place where each person could decide
That their goal in life was to make the world a better place
However they choose to do so
These basic words, highlight our unity
A recognition that we are all, inextricably related
For if you prosper, so shall I. | https://medium.com/resistance-poetry/brighter-days-ahead-366f708f167d | [] | 2020-12-24 12:21:46.690000+00:00 | ['Resistance Poetry', 'Climate Crisis', 'Change', 'Youth', 'Poetry'] |
Why You Need to Have Bull and Bird Eyes Simultaneously | Quite often, when you are on a path to self improvement or healing, you are faced with different kinds of challenges that are both internal pertinent to your own thoughts and feelings, but also external relevant to your circumstances and social circles.
As much as we like to believe that our support system will in fact be very supportive of our journey, most times you will be met with those who feel threatened by your own growth. Probably because they feel your growth will not include them.
In this case, we may sometimes fall into the guilt trap and tone down our light so we don’t make others feel left out. We may choose to keep it to ourselves and not allow our new and improved self to influence how we show up in the world.
Other times, we may feel resentment and anger for the lack of support and lose the very balance we have been working on.
While most people look out for what’s in their best interest, you on the other hand might feel that doing just that will make you a selfish person.
I personally have always believed that selfishness is a frowned upon trait, until I stumbled upon the term “SELF-ish”. Which I have interpreted to mean this:
Always choose what feeds your growth, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else’s.
So How Can You Stay Strong on Your Journey?
You need to have two different, yet equally important, sets of eyes
1. Bull’s Eyes
These eyes are always focused on your short term goals, habits, targets…etc. You need these eyes because they set the tone of your days.
I personally have a set of daily and weekly habits and goals that I know when I stick to them, I feel more centered and grounded.
Being grounded is very important when you are on any journey to self improvement and healing, it supports your commitment to your goals and gives you a boost of self confidence.
If you think about it, change and self improvement don’t happen in big leaps, they happen on a daily basis, that’s why you need your bull eyes to keep you on track on a daily basis.
What about those who feel threatened by your growth?
Well, I realized that when I have a set of habits and daily goals that I am happily working on, I am immune to distractions and to any criticism and disapproval. It’s like I am shielded from negativity, because just like a bull, I am focused on my target.
2. Bird’s Eyes
These are the eyes you look through to see the big picture, your life vision so to speak.
When you know how you want your life to look like, say in 5 years, everything you are doing now will make sense to you.
You know where you are headed and why you are committed to your short term goals to begin with.
Having such a view, will motivate you to take the smaller steps and embark on all the stepping stones that will lead you there | https://hiba-aloul.medium.com/why-you-need-to-have-bull-and-bird-eyes-simultaneously-39465afce629 | ['Hiba Aloul'] | 2019-09-17 15:28:11.762000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Self Improvement', 'Vision', 'Support', 'Goals'] |
Top 5 Quick SEO Wins for Your Business | 1. Check the Length of Your Text
The shorter your blog or article the more likely Google is to rate your website as “thin” and not relevant or valuable for readers. In fact, the recommended word count for blogs and articles is anywhere around 1,000–2,600 words. Anything less tends to rank pretty low.
This might be a surprise to some, especially considering the low attention span of readers today. However, keep in mind that today’s consumers are savvy and can easily fish out content for the sake of content vs. high-quality content that actually shares valuable, action-oriented, and authentic information.
A longer blog or article that shares detailed, accurate, and value-packed information directed at your ideal audience is going to keep your reader on your page for longer and that is what improves your ranking in Google.
But don’t take my word for it! Neil Patel, SEO master and co-founder of Neil Patel Digital, has written plenty on the topic and even suggests pushing for 3,000 words. His data proves that the longer (and more valuable to your reader) the blog, the better.
Source: Neil Patel (https://neilpatel.com/blog/longer-content-ranks-better/)
2. Add Outbound, Internal, and Inbound Links
By linking to previous blog posts or articles you’ve posted (internal links) or outside sources (outbound) you are saying to Google: “Look how relevant and related I am to other content out there!”
The key to this tip is understanding that Google cares a lot about relevancy and authority. By linking out to credible and trustworthy sources throughout your own site, you are indicating that your content is high quality and communicates accurate information.
To further establish yourself as a credible source on your topic, your writing should also be original and add to the conversation in a new way as opposed to regurgitating information.
Another way to build relevancy and rank in Google when it comes to links is to have backlinks (or inbound links) to your content. Backlinks are when another website links to your piece of content.
This is essentially another website saying “hey, we like what this other website is saying, go check them out!” The more backlinks you have to your site, the better you will rank because Google now has reason to believe that your website is a credible and relevant resource.
3. Don’t Forget About the Meta Description
Never heard of a meta description before? Don’t worry, this is a frequently missed component of a website. Although minor as this detail might seem, the meta description is super important when it comes to ranking (and how your website appears) on Google.
The meta description is the summary you see below the link to your site on Google (see image below). This is the text that Google searchers will read before deciding to click on your website. Each page on your site needs its own unique meta description. If you don’t fill in this information yourself, your website server will most likely fill in the blanks for you.
Your meta description invites your readers in and gives them a snapshot of exactly what they can expect from your page. To get more clicks to your site (and as a result, increase your Google ranking) make sure your text is inviting and clearly describes what your page is about. The recommended length for a meta description is 155–160 characters.
One thing to keep in mind though is that search engines are no dummies. If they think your meta description doesn’t accurately describe the page they might remove your description for their own. This doesn’t happen too frequently but it’s important to keep in mind as you craft the perfect description for your site.
Google image screenshot
4. Make Sure Your Content Is Easily Understood by a 6th Grader
It doesn’t matter if your target audience is college-educated professionals with years of experience because when it comes to successful website copy, blogs, and articles, your writing should be sixth-grade reading level or below.
Unless you are publishing a study or writing in an academic journal, most people want to read the way that they talk. They don’t want to use unnecessary brain power deciphering the meaning behind your complicated language and industry-specific jargon.
Google keeps track of how long users spend on your website and if readers are leaving your page because they feel confused or overwhelmed by your writing, then you aren’t really doing yourself or your reader any favors. If your content is easy to read it keeps people on your page for longer, which increases your Google ratings.
5. Include Key Search Terms or Phrases
Keyword research is the bread and butter of SEO. If you don’t know what keywords you want to rank for or what your competitors are ranking for, then it’s time to dig in and figure that out.
Keywords are the search terms that users are typing into Google’s search bar. It’s important to understand who exactly your target audience is and what solutions they are looking for before you begin implementing any keywords or phrases into your site.
Understanding your target audience and their buyer’s journey will allow you to better predict what search terms they are typing into Google so that you can try and rank for those terms.
By including key search terms and phrases that your target audience is searching for into your website copy, blogs, and articles, you make it easier for your website to pop up first. The best way to get into the mind of your ideal customer is by hearing directly from them. Use websites like Quora, Reddit, Wikipedia, and Facebook groups to seek out exactly what language, keywords, and phrases your audience is using and what questions they are asking.
Neil Patel is a great resource for keyword research planning and I highly recommend you check him out because there is a lot more to it than just popping in some commonly searched words to your blog. Like all SEO strategies, the more time you spend on this, the more it will pay off in the long run.
Source: Neil Patel (https://neilpatel.com/blog/keyword-research/)
Take a deep breath and remind yourself that you’ve got this! SEO is complicated for everyone (except maybe our buddy Neil Patel) and it always takes time to figure out the right strategy. When it comes to SEO, the more you learn and implement the more it will pay off in your ranking and the more love you will get from Google.
What SEO strategies are you implementing that you have found successful? I’d love to hear them! | https://bettermarketing.pub/top-5-quick-seo-wins-for-your-business-7cdac443dc9f | ['Megan Elizabeth Clark'] | 2021-04-21 15:03:15.173000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Search Engine Marketing', 'Copywriting', 'Search Engine Optimizati', 'Copywriting Tips'] |
DEK vs KSA Dream11 Prediction Today with Playing XI, Pitch Report & Player Stats | ECS-T10, ECS Greece, 2021, 7th and 8th Match, and The match are going to be played between Dekathlon squaring off towards Kallithea Sixers Athens at Marina Cricket Ground, Corfu This match can be going down on Wednesday, 20 Oct, 2021, at 01:00 PM
Preview
Decathlon has played 3 matches so far in this series out of which they have won 1 match and lost 2 matches and their recent form is very good and currently occupy the 3rd position in the list of table-toppers.
On the other hand, Kalithia Sixers Athens have not played any match in this series so far, today is their first match, the players of this team are very good, now it has to be seen who wins today’s match.
Pitch Report — DEK vs KSA
The pitch at the Marina Cricket Ground in Corfu is likely to be solid for batting, and the batsmen get a lot of support. Although the new ball may see some movement for the fast bowlers, the team winning the toss will bat first. Each of the five ECS T10 Corfu games played on the first day was won by the teams batting first.
Probable Playing XI — DEK vs KSA
Dekathlon Playing XI :-
- Amarpreet Mehmi
- Ramzan Muhammed (wk)
- Abbas Anjum
- Tahir Ali, Bilal Ghulam
- Ali Muaaz
- Aman Shah ©
- Shahbaz Akram
- Thomas Zotos
- Hasan Tutul
- Zubair Khan
Kallithea Sixers Athens Playing XI :-
- Clinton Freeman
- Awais Sahib
- Qasim Shah-I
- Hamid Nasir
- Asim Ameer
- Parveez Niazai
- Vaios Pringas
- Naqibullah Ahmadzai
- Meraj Naseer
- Akeel Sahib.
Most Picks Players:- DEK vs KSA
Dekathlon-
- Tahir Ali
- Ramzan Muhammad
- Thomas Zotos
Kallithea Sixers Athens-
- Aman Shah
- Abbas Anjum
- Hamza Ameer
- Thomas Zotos
- Amarpreet Mehmi
C & VC Selection :- DEK vs KSA
Safe Options :-
- Tahir Ali
- Ramzan Muhammad
- Thomas Zotos
Sunggested XI :- DEK vs KSA
The team for this match and all T10 matches and also local matches teams will only be provided on our BabaCric Prime channel. If you want to become our Prime member you can contact us through this–https://wa.link/463tj6
Team:- 1
join us in our Official Telegram channel for fast team updates –
Barbaric Telegram Channel | https://medium.com/@babacric/dek-vs-ksa-dream11-prediction-today-with-playing-xi-pitch-report-player-stats-e32b5ada5d16 | ['Baba Cric'] | 2021-10-20 07:15:44.262000+00:00 | ['Cricket'] |
Does it *Seem Legit*? A Crypto Research Guide to Finding A Winning Shitcoin | https://seems-legit.com
Bitcoin is back at it again and the mainstream media has been in a frenzy talking about it. There’s no doubt that this media craze and retail FOMO is contributing to the parabolic rise in bitcoin prices as it charged past $20k last week. Just like in 2017, this has led to a lot of new people joining the crypto space, making their first ever purchases and discovering the hundreds of alt coins out there. As we all experienced, trying to wade through and find legitimate projects among the multitude of shitcoins can be a daunting experience especially when asking for help can result in people shilling whatever their stacks in, and others screeching “DYOR!”. The problem is learning how to do your own research while avoiding the scammers or getting sucked into a rug pull project that’s all hype and no substance.
In light of this, we decided to put together a simple list of topics and some related questions you should be looking into while researching a coin. After all, the point is to grow your money, not watch it disappear.
People
Who are the key people and what is their track record with projects they have they been involved with in the past? Do they have a clear vision? Even though the media still portrays bitcoin as “anonymous” and the mystery of Satoshi lends credence to that, these days many of the top names in the crypto space are well known and plenty of projects have public faces associated with them. Take Vitalik Buterin for example, the founder of Ethereum still extremely active in the development and often makes public comments. His cofounder, Gavin Wood went on to be the leading face of PolkaDot, and even in the DeFi space there’s Andre Cronje, creator of Yearn Finance.
Technology
Does the technology have a clear use? A common critique of crypto and blockchain in general is that it’s a solution in search of a problem. While bitcoin has adopted the “digital gold” narrative and Ethereum is basically a decentralized operating system, many cryptocurrencies seem vague and unconvincing, leaving people often wondering why a new coin or token is even needed.
Does it have competitors and if so, how does it compare to them? Plenty of protocols have been touted as “Ethereum killers” and yet Ethereum remains the leader in the smart contract space.
Is it being actively developed? The fastest tech in the world means nothing if no one is building on it. While Ethereum may be considered “older” tech by those who like Cardano, Polkadot, or Avalanche, the developer ecosystem on Ethereum is far larger, helping it remain the leader in smart contracts.
Market
What the competition and what’s the ease of entry for a crypto solution vs traditional uses? Back to the “solution in search of a problem” criticism, adoption of any particular crypto will only come if it brings significant improvements to a problem. For example it’s clear that cryptocurrency can improve payments tech(xrp, nano), allow people to participate in decentralized finance (eth), or store value outside their countries fiat (btc) in ways that are unique to blockchain. If the current, traditional system isn’t in need of improvement, crypto doesn’t need to budge it’s way in. Even within crypto a lot of projects are vying against each other to be THE solution and we have yet to see whether a single chain will win out, or if several will survive and work together in a network.
Tokenomics
What are the supply and buy side economics? — how do new coins get minted, if at all? Some coins like bitcoin have a fixed supply and are mined in a predetermined, predictable manner while other coins are inflationary and issue new coins on a predictable schedule based on blocks being mined or staked. Neither of these methods are particularly “good” or “bad” but each have their pros and cons and this is something you definitely want to be aware of.
Are many coins centrally controlled? Decentralization is at the heart of the crypto movement, so many in the space see projects that have centralized aspects or a set of prominent whales and the “scam” concerns start to grow. For example, some see XRP as a way for the founders of Ripple to continuously fundraise for their private company by constantly selling XRP, and some chains’ exploration into Delegated Proof of Stake saw cartel-like behavior among the top nodes to centralize power.
Has it demonstrated strong growth recently? Where is the growth coming from? How else does the token provide utility/value? Other than being a speculative vehicle, the token should have some sort of use case that incentivizes people to hold it. Is it key to the network?
Does it have governance uses or just used to pay miners? Many people holding DeFi tokens like COMP, AAVE, and YFI believe in the potential of these projects and think they’ll gain wider adoption so holding the token gives them a say in the direction of the protocol.
Liquidity
Is there sufficient activity? What do the charts look like? If single high value purchases are impacting the price significantly and the spread across exchanges is wide, it’s obvious that no one is really trading the coin.
How volatile is the price of the coin? A lack of sufficient liquidity leads to volatility in the price which will ultimately keep people away if a few big holders can manipulate the price for their own interests.
Hype
Are people talking about the project? While much less important than the above factors, you should take in to account the hype around the project. Marketing works, otherwise corporations wouldn’t spend millions to get their product name blaring from TVs around the world. Take note of how much excitement the project is producing and whether are people talking about it. It shouldn’t be a shocker that a project is much more likely to be successful if people have actually heard of, and are excited about it.
There you have it. Now, we’re not saying you have to answer all of these questions like a checklist when researching or buying new coins, or even that they’re important for every coin. Hell, we’re just as prone to fomo’ing into some shitcoin just like anyone else. Just remember to never invest money you can’t afford to lose and be aware of what you’re buying. While buying into the top cryptocurrencies for the first time is exciting for newcomers, many quickly move on to searching for “the next bitcoin” which could bring them the multi thousand x returns everyone dreams of. Remember to keep your wits about you, follow our research guide, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll strike digital gold and you’ll be driving that lambo soon.
Thanks for reading.
Cheers,
JefeDix @ https://seems-legit.com | https://medium.com/@seemslegit/does-it-seem-legit-a-crypto-research-guide-to-finding-a-winning-shitcoin-8a0c8c23e840 | ['Seems Legit'] | 2020-12-20 00:13:22.936000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Investing', 'Altcoins', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
‘Night of the Juggler’ is light on crazed street performers, big on sleazy action | I didn’t need to know much more than the title of Night of the Juggler to know that it was something I wanted to see. The implication of a crazy street performer serial killer never makes it past my assumptions, however, the moment when Dan Hedaya is firing off shotgun rounds at James Brolin in crowded New York City streets during a foot chase through the Deuce is when this movie revealed its greatness to me. And that’s after James Brolin goes a couple of rounds in some peepshow fisticuffs looking for a stripper who picked up some evidence that will lead to locating the man who mistakenly kidnapped his daughter earlier in the film.
‘Night of the Juggler’ title card.
Directed by Robert Butler and based on the novel by William McGivern, 1980’s Night of the Juggler is basically what happens when crazy guy Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman) — whose nuttiness is a mix of Travis Bickle, the Joker, and Top Cat — becomes so hellbent on a million dollar ransom that he doesn’t care that he’s kidnapped the wrong mop-headed kid in frumpy overalls on her way to school. Being a slummy South Bronx property owner, Soltic’s got a real sore spot for rich land developers like Hampton Clayton (Marco St. John) whose daughter he actually meant to grab. But in this classic accidental switcheroo — not unlike the intricate plot point in an episode of Top Cat — Soltic’s kidnapping of ex-cop truck driver Sean Boyd’s (James Brolin) teenage daughter Kathy (Abby Bluestone) sends the next 20 minutes of this movie on one of the wildest chases you never hear anyone talk about, and then another chase after that, and one more for good measure with plenty of bone-crunching brawling in between complete with gangs and strippers.
You may have seen the classic kidnapper-holds-child-for-ransom movie before, but have you seen it with Dan Hedaya dangling upside-down from a chain-link fence being mauled by savage dogs? For the sake of throwing more rocks at James Brolin while he’s up in this child-for-ransom-kidnapping-chase-across-New York City tree, his ex-cop bona fides have him encounter angry ex-partner Sergeant Barnes (Dan Hedaya) whose marriage and career was nearly ruined after Boyd ratted him out for corruption involving a Puerto Rican hooker. With all of his ex-cop, ex-partner, and ex-wife trouble, Juggler could easily be the sequel to an equally entertaining movie about Boyd’s past.
The police in Juggler are portrayed as mildly corrupt, or at the very least, lazy, and even a little stupid. If Special Crimes Lieutentant Tonelli (Richard Castellano) worked half as hard at figuring out Soltic had the wrong kid as he does at trying to have less to do with his daughter’s wedding plans, well, we wouldn’t have much of a movie. Also, earlier in the film Tonelli storms out of a frozen yogurt stand after a brief bizarre conversation with its owner who reveals to him the disturbing bacterial science behind yogurt. “I got a feeling it’s gonna be another goddam New York day.”
At its heart, Night of the Juggler seems to be a comment on the crumbling social and economic state of the city at the time as well as a love letter to the spirit of New Yorkers. After all, it’s Boyd along with the help of a stripper (porn star Sharon Mitchell) and a dog shelter office worker (Julie Carmen) who tracks down Soltic, not the police. What else is amazing is the sheer lack of panic from Boyd throughout the film. Like any handsome dad would, armed with only his beard, his Vidal Sassoned hairdo, and his plaid flannel shirt unbuttoned down to here, Boyd confidently and relentlessly pursues his daughter’s kidnapper. And as for the movie’s anti-establishment comment, when it’s not being done to the extremes of Soltic’s crazy diatribes of injustice to the point of racist tirades and ransom, it seems like everyone is paying for something throughout the entire film; from hot dogs to taxes, from information to sex, everyone is having to shell out in a city that can barely pay its bills.
And while James Brolin is fantastic in this film, Cliff Gorman successfully manages convincing lines of crazy dialogue like, “You hear that, sucktooth,” and the pedophilic “It’s time to get the gold at the end of the rainbow, sweet meat.” Soltic’s not only pissed off at the establishment, but he’s also loaded with mommy issues to the point of essentially trying to turn Kathy into his mother — making her sit in his mother’s chair and wear her old clothes — and then professing his love to her, completely pegging out the creep-o-meter, during which Kathy remains surprisingly cool as a cucumber. If he weren’t so danged racist and pervy, you’d almost feel sorry for him; kind of like Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in 2019’s Most Annoying Movie of the Year The Joker (which I happened to like, but sure, it was annoying).
Jam-packed with enough action and car chases to make William Friedkin blush, you’d never guess that Juggler was a bit of a troubled production. Early during filming, James Brolin broke his foot and after the studio suggestion of having him finish the film in a cast, original director Sidney J. Furie (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, yikes!) left the movie, and the production was turned over to director Robert Butler. Still kicking, the 93 year old Butler has 100 credits to his name including the original unaired pilot of Star Trek, “The Cage.” Of course Brolin didn’t have to finish the film in a cast, but he does walk with a noticeable limp for part of it which was worked into the plot.
I may have spoiled the ending, but the ending doesn’t matter so much in this as the ride this movie takes you on. Besides, you already know from the start how this thing is gonna end up, but you’ll never expect how entertained you’ll be along the way. And to answer your question, there’s no juggling and the movie takes place mostly in the day time, but any other title might not have gotten my attention. Wasting the opportunity for making a perfectly good Batman villain, the only connection the film makes to juggling dangles by a thread in one of Soltic’s nutty rants: “They’re all in it together, juggling the books. Now they’re gonna pay. Now I’m gonna be the juggler. I’m gonna juggle the books my way and it’s gonna balance out for me.” Of course I don’t know how holding a real-estate developer’s daughter for ransom equates to juggling, but I’m also not a crazy person.
Unfortunately, this movie is not available on home video, but can be found out there somewhere on YouTube ripped from a VHS recording off Cinemax. And what’s even more unfortunate, that in spite of the racist, pervy antagonist meeting his doom, the social discomfort of this movie may ensure that it never sees the light of day in any official release.
But if you’re up for some great action with a little sleaze — and who isn’t! — Night of the Juggler is a low-pressure thrill ride, that takes a little light kidnapping in stride and isn’t disturbing enough to ruin your Sunday, but just enough fun to make you marvel that it was ever released by a major studio.
Four stars. | https://medium.com/the-front-row/night-of-the-juggler-is-light-on-crazed-street-performers-big-on-sleazy-action-5eea7fdb247a | ['Lucas Hardwick'] | 2020-09-08 09:45:46.800000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Action', 'Film', 'Film Reviews', 'New York'] |
Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 Free Download | Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 Free Download Latest Version for Windows. It is full offline installer standalone setup of Adobe Premiere Pro 2022.
Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 Overview
Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 is an outstanding and remarkable graphics editing application which allows you to create original video content for film, broadcast, web, and more.It is a powerful and comprehensive application which comes loaded with advanced video editing tools to help producers and filmmakers easily edit their footage without losing quality.It is a reliable tool which offers high processing functions with greater accuracy and smoothness.This efficient application uses GPU-accelerated Adobe Mercury Playback Engine which offers high-quality performance for video production and enables you to work dramatically faster.It has the ability to edit the video in resolution up to 10240×8192. You can also download Plugins for Adobe Premiere Pro Free Download.
Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 is a full-featured graphic editing suite which offers leading editing tools, motion graphics, visual effects, animation, and more that can enhance your video projects. It offers users to improve sound quality and add a precise and simple colour grading.It comes integrated with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to bring your creative ideas to life.The program also includes stereoscopic 3D editing, auto color adjustment and the audio keyframing features which helps you create amazing videos from social to the big screen.It also gives you the possibility to create Blu-ray and DVD movies with custom menu. It offers support for a very wide range of cameras like Sony, Panasonic and Nikon etc. The program offers a simple and straightforward interface with self-explaining options that incredibly simplify the video production process. You can also download Adobe Photoshop Elements 2022 Free Download.
Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 Features
Below are some noticeable features which you will experience afterAdobe Premiere Pro 2022 Free Download
Remarkable graphics editing application which allows you to create original video content for film, broadcast, web, and more.
Helps producers and filmmakers easily edit their footage without losing quality.
Offers high processing functions with greater accuracy and smoothness.
Uses GPU-accelerated Adobe Mercury Playback Engine which offers high-quality performance for video production.
Ability to edit the video in resolution up to 10240×8192.
Provides leading editing tools, motion graphics, visual effects, animation, and more that can enhance your video projects.
Allows users to improve sound quality and add a precise and simple colour grading.
Comes integrated with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to bring your creative ideas to life.
Includes stereoscopic 3D editing, auto color adjustment and the audio keyframing features to create amazing videos from social to the big screen.
Gives you the possibility to create Blu-ray and DVD movies with a custom menu.
Offers support for a very wide range of cameras like Sony, Panasonic and Nikon etc.
Has got a simple and straightforward interface with self-explaining options that incredibly simplify the video production process.
Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 Technical Setup Details
Prior to startAdobe Premiere Pro 2022 Free Download, ensure the availability of the below listed system specifications
Software Full Name: Adobe Premiere Pro 2022
Setup File Name: Adobe_Premiere_Pro_2022_v22.0.0.169.rar
Setup Size: 1.7 GB
Setup Type: Offline Installer / Full Standalone Setup
Compatibility Mechanical: 64 Bit (x64)
Latest Version Release Added On: 31th Oct 2021
Developers: Adobe
System Requirements for Adobe Premiere Pro 2022
Operating System: Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10
RAM: 8 GB
Hard Disk: 2 GB
Processor: Intel Dual Core or higher processor
Display: 1920 x 1080
Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 Free Download
Click on the link below to start Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 Free Download. This is a full offline installer standalone setup for Windows Operating System. This would be compatible with both 32 bit and 64 bit windows. | https://medium.com/@techysanoj/adobe-premiere-pro-2022-free-download-fa4a35ba7a37 | ['Techy Sanoj'] | 2021-12-18 14:04:38.280000+00:00 | ['Download', 'Adobe Premiere Pro Cc', 'Adobe Premiere Pro', 'Software', 'Adobe Premiere Pro Crack'] |
Five Glass Partition Ideas to Open Up Your Office Space | Five Glass Partition Ideas to Open Up Your Office Space
During COVID-19, Glass partitions will be a new trend to maintain social distancing. However, Glass partitions have always been a great idea to open up workspaces that have less space. The partitions do not look messy but elegant and sophisticated. Moreover, Glass Partitions let natural light come in and offices can seek Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Credits. Satkartar Glass Solutions is a leading provider of Glass Partition for offices in Delhi NCR.
Until now, Satkartar Glass Solutions has served many businesses by installing office wall partitions, which are cost-effective and easy to reuse. Here are few Glass Partition Walls ideas that might suit your office’s functioning and design.
Glass Wall Partitions Design Ideas for Offices
1. Frameless Conference Areas
While working in an open environment, you have to balance open spaces with the needs of privacy. You can opt for frameless glass partitions for your conference rooms with wooden doors. Wooden doors create a definite separation between the office and conference halls. You can use half frosted glasses for creating additional privacy and inlet of natural light. Half frosted glass partitions are a perfect choice to maintain privacy.
2. Custom Glass Partition Wall
You can give a personal touch to your office designs. You can use coloured or patterned glass partitions to separate waiting areas and reception. However, nowadays they are decorated glasses available, which can be used to design glass wall partition for cafeterias.
3. Separate Cubical Designs
Along with traditional partitions, you can use modular glass partitions for separating cubicles. Nowadays, fabric sandwich glass in Delhi NCR is quite famous. You can utilize them for freestanding glass partition for offices or design it according to cubicles for the outer office space.
4. Sliding Glass Partitions
You can install movable or sliding glass partitions, which can be created when required and hidden after use. You can cover up open spaces and make them conference halls for emergency meetings as and when required. Sliding glass partitions will surely serve the purpose and can be neatly moved away later. Satkartar Glass Solutions is a leading provider of Sliding Glass Partitions in Delhi NCR.
Related Information : Get the luxury at your home
5. Glass Partitioned Lobby Space
Lobby Spaces in offices are designed so well to attract the clients. Also, Glass Partitions in the lobby let in natural light and enhances the work environment. It also makes the place potential for LEED Credits.
Now that you have ideas to design your offices, so when are you planning to switch to glass partition walls? If you want your office to be designed with glass partition walls, you must check out Satkartar Glass Solutions’ services. They are best service provider for Glass Partition Walls for offices in Delhi NCR. So, what are you waiting for? Visit Satkartar Glass Solutions for more information.
Other Profile : Seedandspark | https://medium.com/@satkartarglasssolutions/five-glass-partition-ideas-to-open-up-your-office-space-3e8445d450e4 | ['Satkartar Glass Solutions'] | 2020-11-23 05:57:40.815000+00:00 | ['Home Decor', 'Office Furniture', 'Interior Design', 'Satkartar Glass Solutions'] |
Game Developer Guide For Beginner | In this tutorial, we going to look at how to start game development in C# and Unity. In this tutorial, we will learn the beginner level of the C # programming language, we will also examine the tools a game developer needs.
Contents Of The Guide
We will examine the concept of functions, simple output functions, Unity basic functions, variables, type conversion, and data types. If you have no knowledge of Unity, no problem, this tutorial will only focus on programming.
Function Logic In Programming
Let’s start by examining the concept of function, which is a term we will use a lot. Functions are blocks of code created to finish a specific task. Functions are usually in the form of the name(argument), which means the name of the function is written, then arguments are inserted in the brackets. Let’s pass to the output function.
Output Functions
Output functions are used to print data to the screen, it differs in Console and Unity projects, so we will examine it in two parts.
Console.WriteLine("Hello World"); // writes the given value and moves to the next line.
Console.Write("Hello World"); // writes the given value but don't pass to another row Debug.Log("Hello World"); // Write the given value on the Unity console
Debug.LogEror("Error Message"); // You can create an error message with this function.
In the code blocks above, we saw 4 functions separately for both console applications and Unity applications. Let’s look at variables and simple data types.
Variables And Basic Data Types
Variables are called structures that hold data in them. By keeping integers, decimals, logic values , and texts inside, they save the trouble of writing over and over again in the project.
In computer science and computer programming, the data type is an attribute of the data, which tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data.
1 — Variables
int a = 1 // In integer data type, we keep the value 1 in variable a.
string b = "Hello" // In String data type, we keep the value Hello in variable b.
bool c = True // In Bool data type, we keep the value 1 (Ture) in variable c.
float d = 1.25 // In Float data type, we keep the value 1.25 in variable d.
2 — Data Types
int = Integer
float = Decimal
bool = Logic
string = Text
Type Conversions
We can convert the data types we saw above between each other (We can only change certain ones, not all).
// With bool, int structures can be converted.
// int structures can be converted to string structures.
// float and int can be converted between each other. bool(variable) // Converts the value in the bool function to bool.
int(variable) // Convert the value in the int function to int.
str(variable) // Convert the value in the string function to str.
float(variable) // Convert the value in the float function to float.
Now, we going to look at the simple startup functions that come ready for Unity.
Basic Start Function In Unity
Unity has 5 special functions, these functions are Start function, Update function, Awake, FixedUpdate, and LateUpdate function. We going to learn these functions partly by part.
1 — Start Function
The start function is running in when start game, important info, if your script is disabled start function is not running, I’m saying this in preparation for the awake function, which will cover in a moment.
private void Start()
{
// Code is here
} // Everything written into the start function will run once when the game starts.
// is for comment, so this statement is not running in program, just for give information. For now, we don’t need to focus on the structure of the function, we’ll just look at its logic.
2 — Update Function
The update function runs until the stop game. The update function is repeated start in every frame if you don’t know frame, a frame is a digital data transmission unit in computer networking and telecommunication, and 1 second equals 24 frames, so every 24 frame is actually is 1 second in computer.
private void Update()
{
// Code is here
}
3 — Awake Function
The Awake and Start function is almost exactly the same, the only difference is that awake runs before the start and the script works even if it is not active.
private void Awake()
{
// Code is Here
}
4 — FixedUpdate Method
This method is mostly used for physics operations, while update is mostly used for inputs and other operations. The reason this method different the update method is that it works with seconds, not frames. Each 0.002 second is run once.
private void FixedUpdate()
{
//Code is here
}
5 — LateUpdate Function
The LateUpdate function starts when the other update functions have finished running, This function is mostly used in camera systems.
private void LateUpdate()
{
// Code is here
}
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU PASSED TO GAME DEVELOPER GUIDE FOR BEGINNER LEVEL! | https://medium.com/@mymasterdesigner/game-developer-guide-for-beginner-ea4fce7d74c4 | ['My Master Designer'] | 2020-12-06 17:32:37.987000+00:00 | ['Game Development', 'Games', 'Programming', 'Unity', 'C Sharp Programming'] |
Different Types of Home Theatre Room | As we are already know about the mini home theater and its components like mainly a room, surround sound system, projector or TV, fibre optics, projector screen etc. but the first step to make home theatre room is choosing theright room and elsewhere you can build theatre in your home.
1. Your living room can be a home theatre
Well, the living room is a great spot to build a home theatre. Firstly, it will be big in size so, more seats can be placed and you can enjoy with your whole family. Your living room should be acoustically treated in order to prevent sound reflections, you can install simple set-up or complex set-up (having many components), and you can hide your wiring and technology to make room more beautiful and tidy.
2. Your spare room can be a home theatre
If you have spare room you can add it to your list and make it a theatre. And it will be a perfect spot as there will be less disturbance or unwanted noise, you can completely change it from empty room to a dynamic home theatre. You can hire home theatre providing service or you can do it on your own. Well, its upto you. The room may have a shape of rectangle & square but if it is rectangle then you’re lucky, as it gives helpful dimension to build a theatre.
3. Your basement can be a home theatre
Your basement is a great idea to make theatre as there will be no noise, no disturbance. You can make use of your whole basement to stand an impressive theatre like a real cinema hall. But don’t worry if your basement is small in size, small theatre also rocks, but you have to properly build it since small mistake create a big difference. You need take ideas from here and build your dream theatre.
Well, you can make any room a theatre you need to keep in mind few things like a theatre needs less no. of windows, better flooring, carpet dark walls and many more.
Just Contact a home theater solutions provider in your city & they will do the rest process you just have to provide them room & their installation cost. | https://medium.com/@pankajgusain444/different-types-of-home-theatre-room-5a2e3e8a497b | ['Pankaj Gusain'] | 2020-03-14 11:25:30.230000+00:00 | ['Mini Home Theatre', 'Home Theater Room', 'Home Theater', 'Home Theater Installation'] |
5 Serverless AWS Core Services Everyone Should Have in Their Starter Toolkit | Original article here: https://dashbird.io/blog/5-core-aws-serverless-tools-starterkit/
When first looking into serverless migration and its architecture, it can feel like you’re staring down an endless shopping aisle of critical serverless tools that all need to be put into your basket straight away. Some services seem to offer the same function, while others can feel wildly different — both, as a result, can instill some doubts as to what is really necessary for your business and serverless application.
In this article, we break down the key AWS serverless tools needed to make up the core of your architecture, looking at their function and purpose as well as how they are charged. We also discuss how they can connect with other components and AWS services as you continue to build and scale for a successful serverless workflow.
AWS Lambda
Typically, we aren’t able to start discussing serverless applications without AWS Lambda being raised because of its centrality. Serverless applications are event-driven meaning its code is in response to an event, such as a request or a change in state.
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service. Its functions are triggered by events, from integrated sources such as AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS) or AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS), with the Lambda functions consuming and then producing new events for other services.
AWS Lambda is only charged on the compute time used through either every 100ms of code executed or the number of times code is triggered, making it incredibly cost-effective. For consistent high performance, you’re also able to optimize code execution time by selecting the right memory size for each function or set it so it’s able to respond within double-digit milliseconds.
SQS
AWS Simple Queuing Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service. With SQS, you can send, store and receive messages between components at any volume without losing messages or needing additional services to be available for its use.
By decoupling from other application components, queues (and other components) can run and fail independently, which increases the fault tolerance on your system.
AWS SQS is highly available and scalable, and manages all the ongoing operations, maintenance, and underlying infrastructure associated with middleware software. Its elasticity takes away capacity and pre-provisioning issues as there is no limit to the number of messages per queue, while standard queues provide nearly unlimited throughput.
Once again, costs are based on usage only, which is a huge cost saving to the “always-on” mode of traditional self-managed messaging middleware.
API Gateway
AWS API Gateway is a fully managed service making it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure APIs. The service manages all tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, throttling, and API version management.
You can build REST APIs optimized for serverless workloads in order to provide more features and full control of responses and requests. Its pricing structure is budget-friendly with no minimum fees involved and a sliding scale model against API usage, with charges for only the API calls received and the data transferred out.
DynamoDB
AWS DynamoDB is a high-performance key-value and document database. Its multi-region, secure, durable and scalable service means that some of the world’s largest businesses and enterprises across various industries rely on DynamoDB.
Being serverless and fully managed, availability and fault tolerance are built-in, with DynamoDB global tables replicate data across multiple AWS regions to provide fast, local access where needed and single-digit millisecond response times at all scales.
The service automatically scales tables up and down to suit capacity without compromising on performance; it can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and can support peaks of more than 20 million requests per second.
Step Functions
AWS Step Functions allows you to bring multiple AWS services together to create a serverless workflow, which can be updated and ran quickly. With this service, application development is simpler and more intuitive; it automatically starts and tracks each step in the workflow, and also retries when there are errors so there are no nasty surprises.
AWS Step Functions is also a great way to move away from monolithic applications and into microservices being used as a series of steps. This design principle enables users to work on code safely without disrupting operations while also being able to deliver new products and features ensuring business as usual.
With all of the above, the service means users don’t need to write additional code for workflow logic, timeouts, retries, or parallel processes. It’s essentially a neatly packaged way to bring together all of your curated AWS services and create a well-executed workflow for your application. You can find illustrated examples of some common and useful use cases for Step Functions in our Cloud Knowledge Base.
Final Thoughts
The beauty of serverless is its scalability and so even if some of these serverless tools may seem a little advanced or too large for where your business is right now, remember that there is always flexibility in how you use each service and highly important, for any organization no matter the size, you are only charged based on usage.
Serverless doesn’t mean having every service or functionality under the sun, but rather understanding the fundamentals needed within this type of architecture and how best to take advantage of the tools available so it works for your team and organization.
For us, these five serverless tools — AWS Lambda, AWS SQS, AWS API Gateways, AWS DynamoDB and AWS Step Functions — are a great starting point for your serverless starter pack as they each adequately cover and can scale the various core components needed; computing, events, automation, database, message queues, APIs and how each can be brought together to create your application.
But of course, once you’ve decided to adopt them, it’s important to keep an eye on their performance, so as a bonus sixth starter-kit service for your serverless application, we’ll throw in Dashbird’s monitoring platform, which helps you easily visualize the data and thus understand what’s going on in your application within seconds, and receive alerts when something is not working properly so that you can jump in and fix it before it starts affecting your end-users’ experience. | https://medium.com/swlh/5-serverless-aws-core-services-everyone-should-have-in-their-starter-toolkit-63a8b7f8201f | ['Taavi Rehemägi'] | 2020-07-24 11:08:53.371000+00:00 | ['Serverless', 'Cloud Computing', 'Serverless Architecture', 'Microservices', 'AWS'] |
Staking with NoodleSwap | Greeting everyone! A new update is coming to NOODLESWAP and you will be able to start Staking with NDL token for some serious profit!
WHAT IS STAKING?
Staking is the process of buying and holding coins to receive interest. This is achieved using a designated wallet on a network that uses the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm or some modification of it. The more user joining in, the higher the decentralization is and thus increase the security of the network with everyone having equal opportunities to earn a profit.
Where staking varies from mining, there is no need for a strong rig, nor do you have to spend huge amounts of money in order to be successful.
START STAKING WITH NDL
We are planning on 2 deposit brackets:
≤ 20,000 NDL — 240% APY
> 20,000 NDL — 360% APY
Interest will be given to you every day with a minimum withdrawal of 10,000 NDL.
HOW LONG WILL MY FUNDS BE LOCKED UP?
At the moment of writing, the locking period is 60 days. As we continue to work on improving the project this might be changed at some point with the introduction of new features and products.
WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF STAKING?
1. Easy to use: You don’t need to handle private keys, accumulate resources, do business, or conduct other complicated tasks to engage in Staking. By holding a token, you will earn a percentage of your interest. This is particularly useful for non-coiners and HODLers who do not have the time or money to trade.
2. Simple to get into: Very easy and straight forward method, anybody with little qualification may join in. There is no need for cumbersome equipment or professional expertise in the area.
3. Higher earnings: Staking reduces the exorbitant fees that come with trading capital. With a stable degree of risk, users are able to make the highest possible return.
WILL NOODLESWAP BEAR THE LOSES IF THERE IS AN ON-CHAIN CONTRACT ATTACK DURING STAKING?
No. Unfortunately, NoodleSwap serves only as a medium to promote projects and provide consumers with relevant resources, such as accessing funds on behalf of the user and sharing revenues, etc. NoodleSwap shall not be responsible for any damages suffered as a result of an on-chain contract security breach.
MARKETING PROGRAM
When you referred your friends to deposit, we’ll send a commission equal to 30 percent of your friend’s NDL stake.
Yes, we know that’s just 25%
The more the merrier, come join the fun!
ESTIMATED LAUNCH TIME: NOVEMBER 5TH, 10:00 UTC
More info will come on later posts.
Useful links
● Github
● SmartContract
● Uniswap NDL token swap
● Contact Email: [email protected] | https://medium.com/@noodleswapfinance/staking-with-noodleswap-e24eb1665e45 | ['Noodleswap Protocol'] | 2020-11-02 10:02:01.765000+00:00 | ['Staking'] |
How do free applications earn revenue? | Friday evening I was surfing on my WhatsApp. And there were few thoughts came in my mind on how do these companies recover their costs? Since they don’t even charge me a penny, how do their business even run? Leaving WhatsApp there are so many other applications like Facebook, Paytm, Zomato, etc. which are free of cost. They don’t charge for installing their application also provides free services. My these questions made me do research on how do these companies exactly work?
If any company wishes to build up its own app it would start with the initial investment made by the company, this investment would be either of their own or through some external funding. The cost involved in building the application is the server cost which is the computer program which offers services to other computer programs as well as its users. This server cost provides continuous 24*7 services to the users. Other costs like maintenance cost are the costs associated with the maintenance of any facility, equipment or asset. It includes the cost of support staff involved in problem identification and repair. It does not include the project costs associated with the development of new functionality and performance enhancement. Regular technology upgrade and operational cost i.e the expenses which relate to the operation of a business, or to the operation of a device, component, piece of equipment or facility. They are the cost of resources used by an organization to maintain its existence. If we calculate all these costs, any startup company has to invest 70 lacs to 100 lacs to incur these cost. The next question which arises is how do these companies recover these costs and run their business?
I also found out certain facts.
Using ads to monetize apps and make money is quite simple. An app owner needs to display commercials inside their mobile app and get paid from the third-party ad networks. Advertising also has many cons like the company data is being used, Misleads consumers create risky advertising approaches App publishers can choose to offer free content in their apps for a limited amount of time and then charge users for a subscription fee that will allow them to access full content without any restrictions. Many e-commerce businesses build free apps to sell physical goods such as toys, shirts, shoes, etc. these physical products can sell to the app or via email marketing. The app publishers can sell their users’ behavior data to these researchers and make a handsome amount of money. The data generally contains users’ email addresses, social media accounts, and their personal preferences. Selling data is the most threatening because of the actual data of the company is being used by some third party. When it comes to talking about freemium Upsell, freemium apps are available free of cost to download but contain paid or premium features. These paid and premium features accesses through in-app purchases. Increases audience size with no barriers to entry & no risks. It’s in safe hand because your data is not used by any person other than yourself. The best way to monetize your apps is transaction fees. It is the best way to make money from your free apps. It is especially possible with those apps that provide a platform, where digital transactions occur on a regular basis.
Let’s Talk About Future of Free Apps
As you can see from the above-mentioned statistics, the growth of the mobile app market isn’t stopping anytime soon. Despite increasing competition in the industry, publishers are also applying new Monetization methods and creating more useful free apps for users.
Coming on to a conclusion the apps generated by any company should secure, there shouldn’t be any misuse of the client’s data. Also, the unnecessary notifications which pop in without even using the app should be stopped. There are also a few searching problems faced by clients like when a client searches for a related product or services something other than that appears on the screen. Making sure that the clients using the apps are in safe hands. | https://medium.com/sminq/how-do-free-applications-earn-revenue-60995f61f5e2 | ['Payal Aryamane'] | 2019-05-16 08:49:12.133000+00:00 | ['Patients', 'Hospital', 'Doctors', 'Online Appointment', 'Healthcare'] |
The Evolution of the Coronavirus | By James Hamblin
In the final, darkest days of the deadliest year in U.S. history, the world received ominous news of a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Scientists in the U.K. had identified a form of the virus that was spreading rapidly throughout the nation. Then, on January 4, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a lockdown that began almost immediately and will last until at least the middle of February. “It’s been both frustrating and alarming to see the speed with which the new variant is spreading,” he said in an address, noting that “our scientists have confirmed this new variant is between 50 and 70 percent more transmissible” than previous strains.
Those figures, based on an early estimate by British government scientists in late December, made for terrifying push alerts and headlines. Though this strain of the virus (officially called “B.1.1.7”) quickly became known as “the U.K. variant,” it has already been found in 45 countries, suggesting that the opportunity to contain it with travel restrictions has passed. On January 8, Australia locked down Brisbane, a city of 2.3 million people, after discovering a single case.
Each day, B.1.1.7 is being found in more people in more places, including all around the United States. Experts have raised dire warnings that a 70 percent more transmissible form of the virus would overwhelm already severely stretched medical systems. Daily deaths have already tripled in recent months, and the virus is killing more than 3,000 Americans every day. From a purely mathematical perspective, considering exponential growth, a significantly more transmissible strain could theoretically lead to tens of thousands of daily deaths, with hospital beds lining sidewalks and filling parking lots.
To make matters worse, the warnings from Britain were followed by headlines about yet another variant, B.1.351, in South Africa. Then another concerning variant was identified in Brazil. News reports speculated that these strains may resist vaccines. Some experts cautioned that the mutations could render current treatments less effective. Scott Gottlieb, the former director of the FDA, said last week: “The South Africa variant is very concerning right now because it does appear that it may obviate some of our medical countermeasures, particularly the antibody drugs.” On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci echoed that concern, calling the variant “disturbing.”
These new variants demand to be taken seriously. Skyrocketing case counts in the U.K. suggest a potential to do enormous damage, and the identification of B.1.1.7 in so many countries is noteworthy. Still, we don’t yet know whether either variant will become as dominant worldwide as they have in their respective countries. They might spread widely and cause tremendous harm. They might also do neither.
The sheer scale and capacity of this virus are challenging many things we thought we knew, but the basic laws governing its evolution are not among them. All viruses are constantly evolving and changing, just as human populations are. When a virus is spreading as widely and rapidly as SARS-CoV-2, spinning through trillions of generations each minute, adaptation is inevitable. The transmissibility of the virus will change. The severity of the disease it causes will change. Its ability to evade our immune system will change. It very well may evolve to circumvent our current vaccines.
Thanks to genetic-sequencing technology, we can watch this evolution in real time. We can see the changes in a virus’s genes before we even know what they mean for the spread of disease. Charting the course of this evolution, and assessing its significance, has quickly become a foremost challenge of the pandemic. The peril is not that the virus will suddenly change in an extraordinary way that transforms the pandemic, but that it is changing in small, ordinary ways that are playing out on a vast scale, and whose significance we may not appreciate until it’s too late.
Almost exactly a year ago, in January of 2020, a flight attendant warned the renowned Chinese virologist Zhang Yongzhen: It was time to turn off all portable electronic devices. He was sitting with his phone to his ear. On the other end of the line, his Australian collaborator Eddie Holmes was pleading with him to publish the genetic code of the novel coronavirus.
The Chinese government had forbidden this. Yongzhen was torn. The world did not yet know the cause of the rapidly spreading respiratory infection, and he seemed to have uncovered it in a sample of sputum from a severely ill person in Wuhan. Using genomic sequencing to unravel the code of the virus, he had found what appeared to be the blueprint of a new coronavirus.
He told Holmes to publish the code. When Holmes did so on Twitter, the international scientific community pounced. Within days, researchers in Thailand were able to verify that the same virus had infected patients there. Scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health began to work on a vaccine. The code became the backbone of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which owe their development to the speedy identification and sharing of the genome.
The exact sequence that Holmes tweeted is now a relic. The virus it represented is gone, replaced by many, many, many subsequent generations. New lineages have arisen in different parts of the world, and hundreds of thousands of slightly different sequences have been added to an international database. There are now thousands of unique SARS-CoV-2 genomes, each the result of myriad permutations of mutations in the code. There is no single, standard genetic code for this coronavirus, any more than there is a standard human genome.
“The term variant is misleading, in that it creates the idea that all the other viruses are the same,” explains Ramon Lorenzo Redondo, a genomic analyst at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Technically, every version of the virus is a variant. Even within a single person, the virus changes and evolves many times. If you were to have your bodily fluids sequenced on different days, the viral strains would show new mutations. “Viruses operate as a cloud of mutants — a swarm of mutants,” Redondo told me.
This is not a flaw in the system, but rather the way viruses work. When it comes to reproduction, viruses are sloppy. The speed and scale of their replication come at the cost of accuracy; they operate like a spam email marketing scheme, favoring inundation over meticulous grammar. Insofar as a virus can be said to have a “goal,” the goal is to ensure as many future generations as possible. To that end, it fires off shotgun blasts of imperfect clones, gambling that a few will make their way to other cells and penetrate them.
Almost all of these accidental mutations are inconsequential: The virus still looks and functions just as its parent before it did. Over time, though, sets of mutations can layer on top of one another and accumulate, and the virus begins to function differently. Some of these differences confer an advantage of one sort or another — for example, increased transmissibility.
“What we’re observing is very expected,” Paul Turner, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, told me. “If a population can improve in its environment, evolution lets that happen. The virus population size is expanding, and mutations spontaneously occur.”
Although it’s not news that the virus has mutated, it’s extremely important to keep an eye on the general direction of the changes — and what they mean for the humans whose cells are being hijacked. “If you see a mutation that could allow the virus to escape detection by the immune system, or escape vaccine coverage, that’s very worrisome,” Turner said. “We don’t have evidence of that yet.”
The likelihood of these scenarios depends on a few factors. Some viruses mutate more readily than others: Influenza mutates so quickly that new strains spread around the world each year, requiring the creation of new vaccines. Measles, by contrast, mutates slowly, so people who were vaccinated decades ago are very likely still protected. “Coronaviruses typically don’t mutate very quickly,” Turner said. “I don’t see any evidence that this coronavirus is going to suddenly become like influenza. But right now there are so many people infected, and the virus is in a new environment [humans instead of bats], so I’m not surprised that evolution is pushing it to improve.”
In the long run, he believes, the spread of this coronavirus will more closely resemble measles than flu. Although we may need to update our vaccines occasionally, we won’t need to do so every year. But as long as rates of infection remain high, the coronavirus is likely to acquire, over months or years, the ability to at least partially bypass our immune responses. Second-time infections may be less severe, but their severity also depends on how the virus evolves. And we may develop immunity to one variant but not to another.
In anticipation of such complexities, Redondo and others have been creating and updating phylogenetic maps — essentially, family trees — for this coronavirus. Groups with a common ancestor are referred to as a “lineage.” A lineage is something like a human family: different individuals sharing a common ancestor. (B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 are separate lineages that evolved similar changes in their spike protein independently.)
Genetic commonalities can also define broader groups called “clades.” Last spring, a clade known as D614G came to dominate the world. This was attributed to a mutation in the spike protein that made this group more transmissible than previous strains. And this was just one part of a family tree that’s now more like a forest. “The two first clades that were defined have disappeared,” Redondo said. Right now five major clades are jockeying for dominance, he said, but the picture is constantly shifting.
The emergence of a new clade can be as difficult to predict as any rise to global domination. Obsolescence and dominance are determined by the qualities of the lineages, the characteristics of the host populations, and the legacies of previous microbial invaders. The fact that a lineage or clade is dominant in one place, within one group of humans, does not mean it will be in others. So far, the U.K. and South African variants are dominating local surges, but they are not expansive enough to be considered clades. The South African variant, for example, accounts for about 90 percent of the genetic sequences analyzed in the country, but remains a minor player elsewhere.
Similarly, the B.1.1.7 variant was identified in the U.K. in September, yet so far dominates only one geographic region. Although genomic testing in the U.S. is relatively sparse, “we’re doing enough sequencing that we know it’s not that common in the U.S.,” says Nathan Grubaugh, a microbial epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. “This variant doesn’t seem to be more than 1 or 2 percent of cases at the moment. It’s here, and it’s very widespread, but it’s low in frequency. I think, for the most part, this is true globally.”
For now, these variants may be thought of like weeds in a garden. They have shown that they have the capacity to take over in some areas. There is a plausible mechanism that could allow them to do so elsewhere: Both the U.K. and South African variants share a mutation that manifests as a subtle change in a key site where the virus binds to human cells. But weeds take over for many reasons, and sometimes they have more to do with the garden than the weed. Human populations vary in so many ways — behaviorally, genetically, immunologically, geographically, environmentally — that the degree to which a regional surge in cases is due to a change in the virus itself is extremely difficult to discern. And that leads to some uncertainty. “We may have it wrong in the end, [and] it’s not actually more transmissible,” Grubaugh told me. “It seems to be, but we may have been fooled.”
Even if these variants are indeed as transmissible as the rising case numbers suggest, transmissibility is only one determinant of a virus’s overall potential to do harm. Sometimes viruses become more transmissible but ultimately less dangerous. And of course, each new variant is but an intermediate step toward some other form of the virus. The real challenge is understanding how any given change fits into all of these larger patterns, and what that means for us.
The plot of Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, The Andromeda Strain, hinges on an extraterrestrial microorganism that “mutates” its way out of containment. A similar narrative device drives the film Outbreak, in which a bleed-from-the-eyes virus suddenly becomes airborne. What amounts to a lazy screenwriting cliché has loaded the word mutation with such horrifying subtext that it’s almost unusable. The process of viral evolution is much subtler, and requires a careful eye to detect. That subtlety is what makes it dangerous.
There are two basic ways that a coronavirus can become more transmissible. One is by binding more effectively to human cells. When this happens, a person who inhales viral particles becomes slightly more likely to develop an infection. The other is by replicating more efficiently, creating higher numbers of viral particles (higher “viral load”) in an infected person, so that they exhale more particles with each breath (making it statistically more likely that one of the particles will infect someone else). If a breath contains 10 percent more viral particles, it is that much more likely that one will land in someone else’s nose.
It’s unclear whether one or both of these mechanisms are at play in the U.K. and South African lineages, but we know their effects can be complex. If a person is carrying a much higher viral load, for example, they may get sick more quickly. That sounds bad — and it certainly is for that person. But a shorter asymptomatic period could ultimately make the virus easier to contain. This was the case with the first SARS coronavirus, in 2003 (SARS-CoV-1), which caused a more severe disease than SARS-CoV-2 does, but killed far fewer people in total because each case was identifiable.
By the same token, this coronavirus could evolve to cause a somewhat less severe illness — something slightly closer to that caused by the other four endemic coronaviruses. The common cold is extremely transmissible, yet rarely fatal. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: Viruses that kill their hosts are less likely to become dominant than those that don’t. “It could be that transmissibility correlates with being ‘kinder’ to your host,” Turner said. “We’ve observed that in other realms of virus evolution.” Natural selection would, hypothetically, favor the versions that leave people feeling well enough to be out and about, spreading the virus to other hosts.
Major changes in the severity of the disease — in either direction — are unlikely, but the scale at which this virus is operating means that small differences in things like transmissibility are amplified, and can manifest as significant changes in how many people get sick. Experts widely agree that playing it safe in the coming weeks is prudent. Oliver Pybus, a professor of evolution and infectious diseases at the University of Oxford, emphasizes that understanding why B.1.1.7 took over the U.K. “is extremely scientifically difficult.” He has been at the forefront of identifying and tracking the variant, but says huge questions remain unanswered. “There’s still considerable uncertainty as to the long-term consequences” of B.1.1.7, Pybus told me. “We don’t even know whether this lineage truly originated in the U.K., with so many countries not doing this surveillance.”
Though much of the world is now on alert for this particular variant, Pybus said that very few places are sequencing genomes as comprehensively as the U.K. is. In some places, institutions are sampling but not sharing findings in the public domain. Both elements are crucial. Testing with PCR or antigen tests alone is no longer sufficient. Positive tests must be followed by analyses of the genomes of the virus. The more genomes we have, the more effectively we can identify anomalous patterns, both to raise alarms early and to avoid raising false ones.
The U.S. is especially far behind the U.K. in this regard. Without a baseline level of genomic surveillance, Yale’s Grubaugh told me, we do not know if a city like New York would be as devastated by B.1.1.7 as London has been. The forecast for any given variant depends on context that we lack. “I don’t think any one state is doing enough sequencing yet,” Grubaugh said. “Sequencing is the most important thing. We don’t have a big organized project like in the U.K. What we have is a bunch of individual labs, mostly at academic medical centers.” Sporadic sequencing is arguably as bad as none at all, in that it can fail to represent how and why variants are spreading. And focusing too narrowly on hunting one particular variant can mean failing to notice other, possibly more consequential warning signs.
The hunt for any one variant also introduces selection bias, making it hard to know if the variant is truly spreading more readily than others, or if we are just looking harder for it. After finding a person carrying B.1.1.7 in New York last week, for example, state health officials sequenced the genomes of nearby cases — an approach that is likely to find a disproportionate number of B.1.1.7 cases. Without constant, widespread surveillance testing, Pybus said, it’s difficult to discern an accurate overall picture.
“The field of genomic epidemiology is going through its adolescence in public, developing in full view of the most extraordinary event of the century,” Pybus told me. The ability to identify new viral lineages before we even understand how they will affect people may allow epidemiologists to warn of consequential variants — but may undermine their credibility when strains don’t prove as dangerous as headlines predict.
Even if we cannot contain this particular variant, we’re learning from its spread. Preventing more virulent strains from becoming dominant — when they inevitably do arise — may be possible if we can track genomic patterns more widely, so that we have the context needed to determine whether a strain is indeed uniquely dangerous. If we can take steps to contain a new threat early enough, it may never become widespread. If we miss these opportunities, we risk repeating the kind of mistake that allowed the original SARS-CoV-2 strain to escape China in the first place.
Last week, Eddie Holmes reflected on the fateful moment when he tweeted the virus’s original genetic code. It was a moment of triumph for collaborative science, but the work was just beginning. The triumph must be repeated daily. “What worries me most of all is if politics gets in the way of data sharing and science,” he told Medscape. “Step one has to be immediate, rapid, open data sharing. Speed is of the essence in a pandemic. Any barrier to working together makes this a much less safe world. That should be the lesson of this outbreak.”
The changing genetic code of the coronavirus will not nullify our fundamental strategies for ending the pandemic. With better data, we can keep our vaccines and antibody treatments up to date and our shutdown measures as minimal as possible, and we can sever any ominous new chains of transmission. The spread of new variants is a stark reminder that we all have an immediate part to play in this. If you carry the virus, it will mutate within you. You could be the person in whom a new, even more threatening variant emerges. You could seed the entire world with it. But no matter how the virus mutates, the same basic preventive measures — the unglamorous ones we’ve been lectured about for nearly a year — will still have the power to ensure that you don’t. | https://medium.com/the-atlantic/the-evolution-of-the-coronavirus-4bb1e1ebc16b | ['James Hamblin'] | 2021-01-15 19:41:25.380000+00:00 | ['Genetics', 'Science', 'Coronavirus', 'Pandemic'] |
How to avoid risks in a gaming startup — Part 1 | Joakim Achrén is the Founder and CEO of Elite Game Developers, a Helsinki-based company that helps gaming entrepreneurs in starting their first games company.
This article is the first part on the topic of How to avoid risks in a gaming startup. It’s not easy out there for any games entrepreneur, even for the seasoned ones. First off, the biggest challenge that I see is that people are expecting to get revenues early on, but usually, it takes longer to see money flowing in.
When you want to have a profitable game, how do you minimize the risks involved? Game development has so many dead-end roads, and going from point A to point B isn’t just going to happen by itself. I’ve often reflected on projects in a way that “It looked like a path that we should go down”. But there are always risks involved. So what are those risks?
I’ve identified ten clear risks for gaming startup founders, and in this first article, I will share three of them. Part 2 and 3 will be released in the following weeks.
Risk #1 Not having a mission
The mission of the company states clearly what is the purpose of the company. Often times in gaming, people start companies because they have an excellent idea for a game, something that they are dreaming about. They’ve assembled a team of skillful co-founders and they start to work on the game.
Later, down the line, the game gets canceled with poor metrics. Now, what is the purpose of the company?
Purpose creates full alignment
I recently wrote an article about Simon Sinek’s book, “Start with Why?”. In that article, I pointed out how important it is to find a real purpose for your games company so that you can align everyone around a common purpose. You want to have the founders, the company staff, and the players of the games, understanding the purpose, that it is meaningful in similar ways to everyone.
Questions that reveal the alignment between founders, staff, and players will be: “Why am I showing up to work?”, “Why am I playing these games?”
Risk #2 Hiring
You are either hiring too early or too late. I’ve often been given the advice that if you raise venture capital, you want to start hiring early so that you’re ready to grow your business quickly when the product is launched. I’ll make the distinction here for a games company, that hiring early means that you don’t yet have a game ready, and proven with good metrics. Hiring too late would be that you have already launched the game, with some solid metrics, but you don’t have all the people in place to run a live game.
Hire too early
Hiring early can cause lots of issues. Each new team member is a new node in a network of people. You bring in more people to a team, and you need to start communicating more, have more one-on-ones, spending time with people.
Do you need two game artists for the game, or would one be enough? Or what if you hired that Performance Marketing or player support specialist, but your game is still several months from soft launch? Can they wear other hats, meaning if they are capable of doing other jobs in your startup while you are still working on finding the first game that has solid metrics?
Hiring managers early is an interesting endeavor. If you hire someone from an existing industry job, who is used to being a lead or a manager in their previous job, what will do in your startup of five people? Will the be ready to wear several hats? Will they be able to take on different kinds of leadership challenges when the company starts to grow?
Hire too late
The best part about hiring too late is that you can build an expectation in the team that people are expected to do several jobs, wear several hats. The CEO needs to understand game design, and needs to ask the right questions about what should be done about the product, about marketing.
Here are a few observations on how you can achieve Hiring Late & Wearing Several Hats mode:
Minimize business development This should be a given. When you don’t yet have a game that has proper metrics if doesn’t make sense to run around at gaming conferences. You can reach all the game publishers over intros and video calls. All the effort you can put into the company at the early stage is with your team working together, either at an office or if you work remotely, at your place of choice.
This should be a given. When you don’t yet have a game that has proper metrics if doesn’t make sense to run around at gaming conferences. You can reach all the game publishers over intros and video calls. All the effort you can put into the company at the early stage is with your team working together, either at an office or if you work remotely, at your place of choice. Hire people who thrive when working independently Make sure you hire people who have the right attitude to get things done and figure things out on their own. Programmers who are waiting for game design, or specs on what metrics should be measured, will slow you down. Prepare things before you start the work so that these people can fly.
Make sure you hire people who have the right attitude to get things done and figure things out on their own. Programmers who are waiting for game design, or specs on what metrics should be measured, will slow you down. Prepare things before you start the work so that these people can fly. Have stretch goals You should ask of your team to push for stretch goals. These are things that won’t be easy to achieve, but they break down the problems that you can face when reaching for the skies. You might not make it to Mars, but you can reach the Moon.
You should ask of your team to push for stretch goals. These are things that won’t be easy to achieve, but they break down the problems that you can face when reaching for the skies. You might not make it to Mars, but you can reach the Moon. Don’t wait for things to be perfect When you have a prototype with core gameplay in place, just launch it to get some metrics from player engagement. Then you’ll see the lay of the land, and you can ship the next build to try to improve the numbers from the previous release.
Hiring the wrong people
The one thing that I’ve noticed in running startups is that you won’t be able to change the people you hire. At least to the extent that they have certain traits that will stick with them and since you have a limited runway, you might not be able to change them in time before the money runs out.
The main observation is that they will change you, so keep this in mind. If you keep Brilliant Jerks, or ”Prophets of rage”, on your team, even when they weren’t the right fit, your lack of action will start to change the culture. Meaning that the company culture reflects the fact that it’s fine for toxic people to be on your team.
Risk #3 Fundraising
When I discuss with gaming founders on fundraising, they usually say that the biggest problem there is that investors just aren’t willing to believe in them and place a bet into the company. Most often, it’s the investors not believing in the game project that they have. I would always ask if they are already in the position to raise? Investors are happy to see the founders working on their company first without funding, and see that they are making progress on their own.
When thinking about the risks involved with fundraising, is the fact that you can’t raise the real problem? Actually, the more money you raise, the more problems you will have. First of all, do you already understand what the money is meant to be used for? Investor money is used to fuel the company, not a game project.
Some investors are considering gaming investments as lottery tickets, especially when they don’t have gaming experience. In these situations, gaming founders might be raising money from people who don’t have the experience but want to have control. The requirement of control will start to happen eventually, once you raise enough money, so be prepared to give some of the control to the investors. Or would you rather bootstrap the company for as long as possible?
One of the biggest risks comes from treating fundraising as a lifestyle upgrade for the founders. Suddenly you can pay salaries and take an expensive vacation again. An anonymous founder, recalling their experiences from their gaming startup “When we were more on the funding path, we were much less disciplined with our finances and a lot of the other details of the business. You just aren’t comparing yourself to profitable companies who aren’t raising.” The point is that if you raise money, it can be hard to focus on saving money and building the business with money coming from the paying players.
Before raising money, you should ask these questions:
Can we still go for three months without raising money? Does it make sense to lose a stake in the company to investors? Can we do some projects on the side which pay our salaries, while we build our own on thing on the side?
What’s next
That’s it for part 1. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, coming out soon. To get notified about this, I suggest you subscribe to my newsletter where I’m sharing more on building successful gaming startups. Visit https://elitegamedevelopers.com/ to sign up. | https://medium.com/@joakim_a/how-to-avoid-risks-in-a-gaming-startup-part-1-6980148cbd68 | ['Joakim Achrén'] | 2020-01-09 10:01:01.295000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Fundraising', 'Gaming', 'Game Development', 'Risk Management'] |
Is It Fascism or Communism? A Simple Checklist | Is It Fascism or Communism? A Simple Checklist
Public Domain Images of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin | Collage by author
“Communism lives. This is what it does to people.”
That caption was posted by an Evangelical Christian friend of mine, from a Southern US state, as she shared a video of several Roma families being forcefully evicted from a homeless center in my home country, Bulgaria.
I am friends with these families and had been fighting against the eviction. I was grateful for her effort to raise awareness. But also, I had to send her a private message and say,
“Hey. The Roma families have been under attack by racist, fascist policies from the government that has been in power here for the last decade. The President, with whose help we were able to halt the eviction, is from the opposing socialist party (which used to be our communist party).”
I thought that was enough clarification. Bulgaria tangoed for several decades with Communism and I’m the last person to defend it: but facts are facts. After weeks of fruitless appeals to institutions and media, the only support we got in help of the Roma families was from our Socialist Party.
But then my friend replied.
“Got it! It’s safe to say that communism is behind the eviction?”
I got this message as I was walking into the Roma neighborhood to check in on the families who just the day before were out with their bags and children, not knowing where to go. At the last minute, they were told they can stay for two more months but the stress, trauma, and humiliation cannot be lifted as easily as an eviction order.
I sat down next to one of my friends and his kids. The video that spurred this “but it’s communism, it must be” conversation was filmed by him. He wanted to raise awareness, hoping that his children will not be left out on the street. He had no idea he was feeding a narrative all the way over in America. I took a deep breath, swallowed some anger, and texted back.
“No, it’s not communism. I blame a lot of things on communism but this eviction is not one of them.”
She removed the caption.
Don’t get me wrong. Communism did plenty of horrible things to ethnic minorities here in Bulgaria, with tangible consequences to this very day.
But there are differences. Let’s go over a quick checklist of how to tell Fascism and Communism apart. Then you can decide for yourself which one you are truly against — or for.
Let’s start with racism
Since Fascism and its close brother Nazism have turned into a default descriptor for racists, let’s tackle this one first.
The question here is not whether the Fascists/Nazis or the Communists are the true racists. They’re all racist. Racism is not created by these political doctrines — it is channeled and amplified by them.
Let’s see how.
The very foundation of Fascism (and Nazism) is a strict class divide and a doctrine of superiority. Fascists and Nazis can talk forever about just how they are different — and better — than this other group of people and just every other group of people. Their whole identity rests on being “better.”
The foundation of Communism is complete, absolute equality. Communism doesn’t acknowledge that there are differences between people: either cultural, historic, or ethnic. Everybody is the same. In practice, this translates to everyone is made the same.
An example from history
Under Nazism, the Roma people in Europe were persecuted based on their race and lost more than half of their population in the Holocaust. They were targeted for being different and “inferior.”
Under Communism, in 1970s and 1980s Bulgaria, Roma newspapers, theaters, and political and cultural organizations were all closed down. Roma names were forcibly changed to Bulgarian names. (To this day, many Roma people have an official “Bulgarian name” on their documents and a Roma name that is only used inside the community.) Under Communism, it was not allowed to even refer to Roma people as Roma — only as Bulgarian.
The racism checklist: Fascist or Communist?
Do you think marginalized groups have no one to blame, and it’s also not your fault your ancestors were glorious colonizers?
Verdict: You’re a Fascist.
Do you try to neutralize all conversations about racism with “I don’t see color?”
Verdict: You’re a Communist.
Do you believe your culture, language, and history are inherently better (usually because your country built a lot of buildings or fought a lot of wars)?
Verdict: You’re a Fascist.
Do you defend marginalized groups by pointing out specific examples of people who have completely absorbed and integrated into your culture and society?
Verdict: You’re a Communist.
Do you like to cling to your history and racial identity and also ridicule other races and cultures as “losers” and “savages”?
Verdict: You’re a Fascist.
Do you not care much about history or identity, and just believe that we’re all the same, nothing in the past matters, differences don’t exist, and everyone today has the exact same opportunities?
Verdict: You’re a Communist.
Disclaimer: In both cases, you’re racist. In both cases, you feel your culture is superior and “the other” needs to disappear: either by being killed, or moved out of sight, or devoured into the mainstream society.
Next one up: religion
This one is much easier to tell apart.
Do you weaponize your religion? Do you believe it should dictate policies? Do you believe that, because of your religion, you’re better than everyone else? Do you turn to the sacred texts of your religion to look for justification for violence and abuse you want inflicted on others as “punishment?”
Verdict: You’re a Fascist.
Do you think religion, faith, and any kind of belief beyond what the eyes can see is “stupid?” Do you believe that people of faith, people into metaphysics, people who listen to their instincts and intuition are all confused and ridiculous? Do you believe there is one single authority in this world — an institution, an organization, the government — and it is the only thing that can tell you what is real?
Verdict: You’re a Communist.
Where does identity come from
Political doctrines like Communism and Fascism provide an unshakeable sense of identity to their followers. They replace the inner voice, even the inner soul, with a much louder and prouder cookie-cutter alternative.
Is your sense of identity tied strongly to the idea that your nation is the best one in the world? Are you very proud of your nation’s military and your country’s “glorious” militaristic past?
Verdict: This is Fascism.
Is your sense of identity tied to your productivity? Do you measure your value with how much you’ve worked, how great you are at meeting and exceeding expectations, and how else you can prove yourself? Is praise from authority your ultimate reward?
Verdict: This is Communism.
(Note to the more alert readers: Yes, this sounds familiar. Communism and corporate life have a lot in common.)
Who is the enemy?
A great way to know thyself is to ask: Who is my enemy? Who am I fighting? And above all: Who do I fear most?
If your enemy is foreigners, immigrants, and just generally “other” people and if you fear the destruction of your great country (read “great civilization”) by the presence of other cultures, you’re a Fascist.
If your enemy is “the ruling class” — and your solution is to overthrow it and replace it with an authoritarian ruling class of your own — you’re a Communist.
So which one is worse?
Both, obviously.
Here, we touched on the differences. But the similarities are much more. The all-engulfing idealism, the propaganda, and brainwashing, the demand for loyalty, the strict punishment system for disobedience, the lack of concern for the individual. Concentration camps existed under Hitler and under Stalin.
On the surface, we have rejected both Fascism and Communism. But since they tap into very dark parts of human nature, they will never be truly gone until we deal with the reasons they rose to such prominence and in such a soul-destroying way.
So, do your homework. Learn some history. Then use the labels. | https://historyofyesterday.com/is-it-fascism-or-communism-a-simple-checklist-e1665b9b4210 | ['Martina Petkova'] | 2021-07-19 17:03:13.880000+00:00 | ['Communism', 'History', 'Racism', 'Nazis', 'Fascism'] |
A/B Testing With Ruby on Rails | Some of the latest features we introduced on the Livewire Market’s platform were firstly running as an experiment for a few weeks. What’s an experiment? When you know your end goal (“Increase the number of users that discover this new page”) and you also have a few ideas on how to achieve it, you can choose to experiment with them simultaneously. Ideas are not enough though — what if by implementing them you’ve been detracting users from doing the same thing you want them to do? Or maybe, you were sure that a button with a blue navy background colour is working the best, while your users are engaging more with a gold one?
The experiment
An experiment allows you, as a product owner, to run multiple variants you want to try in order to achieve your goal. You split the variants between the users on your site, either equally or by some formula (“60% A, 40% B”). It’s what A/B Testing means — test variants (A and B, maybe C and D too) and find the one that works the best.
An experiment for a user has a start — The user is experiencing one of the variants you set them up with. It also has an end — the same user decides to follow the lead and go and check that new page. That is called a Conversion (the user “completes” the experiment).
A winner is born
When you spot a trend of a variant outperforming the others, you can choose to declare it as a winner and force that variant to everyone, concluding the experiment. Be careful not to jump to any conclusions too early in the process. You want to observe the experiment long enough before making a decision.
A/B Testing on Rails
There are a few Ruby libraries which allow experiment development for Rails. We’ve been using split — they allow running multiple experiments all at once, each with multiple variants, and has plenty of configuration options and it “just works” with our Redis configuration.
In this example of our test server, you can see the different variants (or alternatives, as split calls them), how many participants (users) experienced them and how many completed.
Setup
We configured split to support multiple experiments and to persist in a cookie the chosen variant of an experiment for one day. Read more about it here.
Then, we set up the different alternatives in our Yaml file:
If you look carefully, the ‘wire_byline’ is distributed evenly between two alternatives, each with its own metadata, while ‘similar contributors’ having 4 alternatives, 3 that are together shown to roughly 10% of our users (distributed evenly) and for 90% it is not presented at all. | https://medium.com/swlh/a-b-testing-with-ruby-on-rails-3782c6aa1066 | ['Amit Friedmann'] | 2020-11-20 23:36:43.200000+00:00 | ['Livewire', 'A B Testing', 'Engineering', 'Rails', 'Split'] |
How Liberal Education Isn’t So Liberal | How Liberal Education Isn’t So Liberal
Students are inadequately prepared for carrying on the task of advancing Western civilization.
Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash
Legend has it that the greatest school that ever existed was on a street corner in Athens with Socrates engaging in a dialogue with a student or two. We Americans likely would think that this definition is quaint and cute because American education is about as far removed from this as it can get.
Instead of a meaningful dialogue using the Socratic method, American education suffers from aimlessness and confusion.
While Socrates and his students were engaged in one-on-one dialogue, America’s education factories become larger and larger and what passes for education inside them becomes less serious, less rigorous, and less effective.
Consequently, the students coming out of these factories are less equipped than previous generations, have less develop minds and even less developed characters.
Students are inadequately prepared for carrying on the task of advancing Western civilization.
Educators and policy makers have failed America’s students by failing to think hard and be imaginative about what education is supposed to entail.
Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash
The problem is that most of us stop with the word “education” itself and imagine it as a kind of “hocus pocus” or “abracadabra” where miracles can happen if we would only mention the word. If there is a problem with our economy, “education” can fix it.
The belief is that since our public discourse is failing us, more “education” will cure it.
People believe that if crime and juvenile delinquency runs rampant in our cities, then “education” will save our youth. Or, if our popular culture is in the toilet and more people watch SouthPark than PBS, “education” can arrest the downward trend of our cultural literacy.
We expect to save people and people expect to be saved by a word that they cannot even define.
One of the problems is that those who are in the education profession have done away with some of the very things that were once considered the purpose of education in the first place.
There has been a concerted effort on the part of the postmodern sociologists to deny that human beings have a nature which can only be fulfilled when the higher faculties of humankind are cultivated. America’s so-called “progressive” education is a departure from the educational and intellectual ideals that have been cultivated and practiced since the time of the Israelites and Greeks from classical antiquity.
Photo by Fine Photographics on Unsplash
In order for civilization to survive — in order for absolutes like truth and values to survive — the educational system must be allowed to cultivate those truths and values that are necessary for that survival. | https://medium.com/fat-daddys-farm/how-liberal-education-isnt-so-liberal-72aade1bcaf9 | ['William Matthew Mccarter'] | 2019-10-13 03:44:20.039000+00:00 | ['Teaching', 'Culture', 'College', 'Students', 'Education'] |
Major Setback | There’s always a proportion of adults who have been pulled away from an opportunity of an education. This pandemic would likely increase it.
Photo by Edmund Lou on Unsplash
In poor countries, the barrier to leaving a poverty-stricken life is already high. The pandemic combined with poor governance will drive this barrier even higher.
During the initial wave of global lockdowns, I could not help but think of the poor that I wrote my thoughts here. The children who beg in the streets of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, were already aplenty before this pandemic. Now, school closures and job losses would have pushed many families to tap their children and their idle time as an easy source of labour. The working conditions they would be subjected to would barely be protected.
If families can barely eat three meals a day, these children will be pulled into working longer than the lockdown. The longer they are out of school, the more unlikely they are to return to school.
Years from now, we will hear of grown children whose life path was completely altered by lockdowns and school temporary closures. I’m referring to those who don’t return to school. They would have more challenges getting jobs, higher likelihood of producing more children than they could support, have poorer health choices, higher levels of desperation which could lead to crime, and so on.
If people recourse to policy to lower the barriers to escaping poverty, including having an education, maybe we can minimise this impact. Unfortunately in poor countries like the Philippines, many policy-makers are not voted based on policy-setting capabilities.
We probably do not see how big a setback this pandemic is and will continue to be. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/major-setback-fc262135efe | ['Valerie Dela Cruz'] | 2020-09-28 18:24:38.415000+00:00 | ['Poverty', 'Education', 'Pandemic'] |
I’ve lost the thread of myself | I’ve lost the thread of myself
Photo credit: Michael Dziedzic via Unsplash
I’ve lost the thread of myself.
I let go in the midst of all this
Life.
Swirling
Overwhelming
That caught and grabbed me.
Inconstant grip slackened
The thread, unattended,
Slipped away.
I have a clue.
Like all lost things
The trick is to retrace your steps.
Where did you last see it?
What were you doing
when you recall having it last?
And so it is that writing comes into view again.
Obscured
Then revealed
Again.
I would kick myself for forgetting,
But this has become a familiar path.
The way back is to word.
To write myself back into being.
The thread dangles
Tantalizing,
Elusive,
But it is there. | https://medium.com/@mw.waterman/ive-lost-the-thread-of-myself-8725dbd8c60f | ['Muffie Waterman'] | 2020-12-01 16:47:24.603000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Micropoetry', 'Free Verse', 'Creativity', 'Life Lessons'] |
How to Survive Christmas While Pregnant | Navigating life while pregnant can be complicated enough, never mind trying to cope with Christmas and avoid all the sherry soaked trifles…However, being pregnant doesn’t mean being boring this Christmas!
You are growing a tiny human! Use this opportunity to enjoy every scrap of Christmas food that crosses your path, as well as be pampered beyond belief!
After all, you are giving everyone the best Christmas present ever this year…It might not be right now, but the best gifts take time and effort, so put your feet up and enjoy!
(DISCLAIMER!: Food and indulgence not guaranteed. Not all families celebrate Christmas/appreciate the difficulties of being pregnant at this time of year.
Please check with your doctor before indulging in too much food and relaxation. I am not a Professional Christmas advisor, nor am I an elf or any other Christmas related expert. I can only speak from experience. Please do not attempt to take any of these steps seriously, unless you are actually pregnant and would like to enjoy your final Christmas as yourself, and not “MUUUUUUMMMM!!!” — Which is what is coming once your sprog is born…)
(Oh, and this post may contain affiliate links! Using them won’t cost you any extra, but they help me keep the lights on! Thank you!)
Enjoy!
Step One: Prepare yourself for the hilarious experience that is being sober at Christmas!
This also applies to New Years!
Watching everyone else ‘let their hair down’, and knowing you’ll probably be the only one who will remember it all the next day, can be surprisingly fun!
You can make this even more entertaining by starting a list of all of the strange and embarrassing quotes that people come up with while wasted!
(Not that I’ve ever done that…👀)
Step Two: Avoid the chaos that is Christmas shopping
Pregnant people should not be exposed to crowded places, germy people, stress and massive ques for the loo, so take advantage of the amazing world of online shopping and enjoy your pjs a little longer!
Step Three: Use Pregnancy cravings as a reason to eat ALL the food
You’re eating for two now, right?
No one can deny that you need to eat all of the mince pies, roast potatoes, turkey and Christmas pud that you could want!
Step Four: Don’t let them overstay their welcome!
You need your rest and hosting people when you need a nap is not fun!
So feel free to kick them out or just generally refuse them entry to your home altogether!
If they want to see you this Christmas, they will have to wait until you have rested… (Let’s be honest, no one wants all those people around anyway!)
Step Five: Establish that someone else is cooking the Christmas dinner this year.
Apart from the fact that you couldn’t possibly stand up and sweat in the kitchen for all that time while you have a baby wriggling around your stomach, there is no guarantee that if you did attempt to cook the dinner, it would all make it to the table without being nibbled…
Step Six: Expect (and accept) that most of your gifts this year will be baby related!
I’m not saying that baby related gifts are a bad thing, I’m just saying that I hope there was nothing you actually wanted this Christmas, because it’s probably not happening!
To be honest, when you’re pregnant, all those cute little baby grows and shoes and toys will probably get you all emotional and sappy, because…hormones…
Step Seven: Have a box of tissues with you AT ALL TIMES!
Have you seen the adverts they play at Christmas?
Let alone the movies and the songs that are on a never ending cycle… If you thought you were tearing up with very little prompting before, you just wait until that snowman melts at the end of the movie, or John Lewis do some cute bear advert again…
Even the Coca-cola advert will have you in floods this year, so be prepared!
Step Eight: Enjoy every moment of this Christmas and relish in all the attention you’ll be getting, because next Christmas, you won’t get a look in!
This Christmas, you are v.i.p.p, Very Important Pregnant Person!
Enjoy the luxuries that come with not having to help clear the table and being pampered by your loved ones, because next year all eyes will be on the little one enjoying their first ever Christmas!
And you’ll be on nappy changing duty…
Remember, just because you can’t drink the mulled wine, or eat the sherry trifle, it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the magic of Christmas!
Sit back, relax, let everyone pamper you.
Merry Christmas, Everyone!
(Second Disclaimer! All Pregnancy Christmas’ in 2020 should be enjoyed safely and as amazingly as possible! I actually wrote this waaay in advance, pre the crazy virus! Stay safe and have a wonderful Christmas!)
— Lizzy ❤ x | https://medium.com/@caffeinated-housemum/pregnancy-surviving-christmas-c604722b811c | ['Caffeinated Housemum'] | 2021-01-09 13:18:12.999000+00:00 | ['Step By Step', 'Sarcasm', 'Christmas', 'Survival', 'Pregnancy'] |
OUR FOUNDLING FATHERS | OUR FOUNDLING FATHERS
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was Europe’s bloodiest war. The pretext of the war was religion: Catholic vs. Protestant. A higher percentage of Germans perished in this war (20% of the entire population) than in World War I and World War II combined. Entire cities were burnt to the ground and all their adult inhabitants massacred. The result was hundreds of thousands of children orphaned and left abandoned — viz. foundlings.
American historians estimate between one-half and two-thirds of white immigrants to the American colonies between 1630 and the American Revolution came as white slaves/indentured servants. And the vast majority of those didn’t come as religious refugees but rather economic — mostly young Germans left orphaned by the Thirty Years War. More white Americans today are descended from these German foundlings than from any other ethnic group.
All first-hand narratives contemporaneous to these events are collaboration. They are scarce and differ slightly but they all share a common storyline — the same underlying structure. On a side note, most source material is written primarily in German — not English — because the majority of those trapped in white slavery were Germans. Interestingly, recent source material was discovered not here but in Germany written by former indentures who subsequently were able to return to Europe. They all attest that while in America, they were given Anglicized names by their owners just as African slaves were. The narratives all detail sprawling allegations of fraud and abuse leading to enslavement.
The Old World loved the products from the New World but the New World for Old World products — not so much. Cargo ships were built to carry cargo. Without cargo they rode too high in the water and sailed poorly. So, ships’ captains would send out agents to “recruit” passengers to the New World. The agents would use any means necessary to convince, lure, trick, dupe or dope these young orphans of the war to board a ship. If that didn’t work, they would seize, threaten or beat them into submission. Once captive aboard ship, it was both physically and psychologically impossible to leave. Trapped, they could not trust their own decision-making process. Once docked in the New World, the ship’s captain would auction them off stripped naked — both men and women alike — to the highest bidder. The ship’s captain had complete discretion as to what period the indenture would be. The only restriction was that it could not be “for life”.
Make no mistake, indentured servantry is slavery. The legal definition of slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to persons, allowing individuals to own, buy, and sell other individuals as a (de jure) form of property. Moreover, a slave is unable to withdraw unilaterally from such an arrangement and works without renumeration. Indentured servitude was often more brutal than slavery with a high percent of servants dying prior to the expiration of indentures. And white woman were especially maltreated since unlike with slaves whose children were bonded for life, an indenture’s children were “free” and therefore garnered less economic benefit to their title holders.
The facts about indentured servitude in the colonies doesn’t fit the politically prescribed narrative — not for Blacks nor for whites. White indentures were worked and beaten more mercilessly than Black slaves. This is because their overseers knew they could only be kept in bondage for a pre-determined number of years vs. a lifetime for Blacks. This is cold calculated logic. Most people are more likely to abuse a rent-a-car more than one which they own. It is well-known that George Washington freed his slaves after his death. What is far less known is that he did not free any of his white indentures after his death. Furthermore, there exists no documentation that George Washington went after any of his escaped Black slaves but we do have documentation that he sent the dogs/blood hounds after and put a bounty on his white indentures — mostly Germans — when they escaped. And indentured servitude continued well past the Civil War. The idea that Africans were brought here as slaves but most whites came here as free persons is a complete and total fabrication. Its purpose was to reinforce the American ideal as the land of the free. U.S. historians estimate between 3/4 and 4/5 of white Americans are descendants of those early arrivals who came here as white slaves.
In one week, on December 18, 2020, we will be commemorating the 400th anniversary — the quadricentennial — of the landing of the Mayflower. But quit acting like your ancestors arrived on the Mayflower or were Founding Fathers. They didn’t and they weren’t. And if they did — all that means is that they participated in suffocating, drowning or burning alive old women whose property they wished to confiscate. In fact, if you cannot trace your ancestry to Europe, you are far and away more likely to have an indenture as a direct ancestor. But take heart, these foundlings and their descendants had more to do with shaping the American character — warts and all — than descendants of the Mayflower or Founding Fathers did. And the one thing that binds the vast majority of American is that their immigrant ancestors almost all came over in some form of bonded servitude — white, Black, Hispanic, Asian. ALL! | https://medium.com/@shmavonian/our-foundling-fathers-5cb93021df81 | ['Gerald Shmavonian'] | 2020-12-12 17:17:11.845000+00:00 | ['George Washington', 'Slaves', 'Black Lives Mater', 'Fake News', 'Secrets'] |
Protecting data and critical assets against cyber attacks | Federal agencies and a cyber-security service provider that counts the government and Fortune 500 companies among its clients are all victims of recent cyber attacks in the United States. There are fears that the hackers may also be targeting the private sector. Analysts suspect that a foreign power is behind the security breaches.
Nation states are turning increasingly to cyber warfare to achieve political, economic and military goals. The attacks do not stop at government agencies, but also target critical infrastructure and private corporations to steal sensitive data that can be sold for profit.
Cyber warfare enables nation states to inflict serious damage on rival powers. It is not only agile and cost-effective, but also less likely to trigger military retaliation. It is almost impossible to pinpoint the origin of sophisticated attacks, especially when nation states employ cyber mercenaries based in other countries.
Government agencies and most private businesses can defend themselves by implementing an information security management system (ISMS), as described in ISO/IEC 27001. The well-known international standard defines a cyber risk management-based approach to managing people, processes, services and technology.
Using ISO/IEC 27001 helps organizations to manage their information security risks, including threats, vulnerabilities and impacts, as well as designing controls to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data and for regulating access to critical information systems and networks.
In addition, ISO/IEC 27001 is now part of the approved process scheme that provides for the independent assessment and issuing of an international IECQ certificate of conformity for organizations that have demonstrated compliance with the relevant publications. IECQ ISMS facility assessments under the IECQ AP scheme ensure a focus on the key technical and administrative elements that provide confidence that the requirements of ISO/IEC 27001 have been met.
Cyber physical systems, including the power grid and industrial plants face a different set of challenges. Cyber physical systems are smart systems that integrate computational components, engineering, networking and physical process. The power grid is a physical system with an information infrastructure overlaid on it, which is a cyber system. This makes cyber physical systems quite different from just plain computers, which IT typically deals with.
Unfortunately, those responsible for security often overlook the operational constraints in sectors such as energy, health, manufacturing, or transport. From a cyber-security perspective, the challenge is that unlike business systems, industrial automation and control systems (IACS) are actually designed to facilitate ease of access from different networks.
That is because industrial environments have to cope with different kinds of risk. Where IT security focuses in equal measure on protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data — the so-called “C-I-A triad” — for cyber physical systems, availability is of foremost importance. Priorities for cyber physical environments focus on health and safety and protecting the environment. In the event of an emergency, in order to be able to protect personnel or to minimize the impacts of natural disasters, it is vital that operators can receive accurate and timely information and can quickly take appropriate actions, such as shutting off power or shifting to backup equipment.
Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, which are used to oversee electric grids as well as plant and machinery in industrial installations, often have widespread communication networks. They reach, directly or indirectly, into thousands of facilities, with increasing threats (both deliberate and inadvertent) potentially causing serious harm to people and to equipment.
Probably the best-known cyber-attack on critical infrastructure was in the Ukraine in 2015, when hackers suspected of working for a nation state infiltrated the electric utility’s SCADA system. Key circuit breakers were tripped, and the SCADA system was turned into a “brick”, causing a system-wide power blackout. It left nearly a quarter of a million people without electricity, in the middle of winter, for up to six hours.
International standards provide solutions to many of these challenges. For example, IEC 62443, is designed to keep cyber physical systems running. It can be applied to any industrial environment, including critical infrastructure facilities, such as power utilities or nuclear plants, as well as in the health and transport sectors.
The industrial cyber-security programme of the IECEE — the IEC System for Conformity Assessment Schemes for Electrotechnical Equipment and Components — tests and certifies cybersecurity in the industrial automation sector. The IECEE Conformity Assessment Scheme includes a programme that provides certification to standards within the IEC 62443 series. | https://medium.com/e-tech/protecting-data-and-critical-assets-against-cyber-attacks-f29d8583aa55 | ['Mike Mullane'] | 2020-12-16 10:37:18.303000+00:00 | ['Cybersecurity', 'Critical Infrastructure', 'Cyber Physical Systems', 'Cyber Warfare'] |
Practical Introduction to Strategy Design Pattern Using Java | Class Diagram
What is Strategy Design Pattern?
Strategy design pattern is a behavioural design pattern. It is a tried and tested way of code design that can be used in scenarios where we need to pick up a specific approach (algorithm) from a pool of available related approaches during runtime to achieve something.
This design pattern is also sometimes referred to as the policy pattern.
In this article, let’s look at a practical scenario to utilize this design pattern and let’s write some code in Java to get a hands-on exposure.
The Scenario:
Let’s assume that we have our fictional application that contains some awesome articles and their corresponding URLs (think of Hackernews, maybe?).
you have built this app for the sole purpose of sharing cool articles. now, a rather fascinating idea dawns upon you while you are in the loo. What if you had a feature where your users could share these article links with their connections on various social media? after all, every application and its mother have this feature these days.
After reading through a couple of API documents of different social media apps, you quickly understand that not all social media share API are created equally. sigh :(
so now we are at the point where we have a variety of methods to share the content and we have to choose one depending on the social media app selected by the user (at runtime, in essence). Somehow this sounds familiar to you because this a textbook situation to use a strategy pattern, by definition.
The Approach:
The first step in architecting code following a strategy design pattern is to declare the policy or the strategy (algorithm family). In our case, it would be the steps we would need to share links.
What better way to create a contract or a policy than to use an interface? so, we jump on the keyboard and design the SocialActions interface as follows:
The Interface / Policy:
The Adapters:
Now that we have the family defined (which is “Share”), we need to create a pool of algorithms.
In our case, the sharing algorithm varies depending on the platform on which it is to be shared. So we abstract out the implementation of the sharing algorithm for each platform into its own corresponding adapter classes. By this way, our application at any time has to deal with only a single share method with a pre-defined signature.
For the sake of simplicity and to stay on the point of demonstrating the design pattern, let’s just do only console logs in these variants of the share algorithms instead of actually implementing the sharing mechanisms.
The Context Class:
Now we have four different sharing algorithms to choose from and it is time we created a way to simplify the selection process at runtime for our app by creating a layer of abstraction and expose a consistent and predictable method to share URLs.
This not only makes our code cleaner but also makes the maintenance process less of a nightmare.
The usage:
Finally, let’s look at an example usage of the code we have crafted so far:
The output of the sample driver code above will be as follows: | https://medium.com/swlh/practical-introduction-to-strategy-design-pattern-using-java-bb664b3f2889 | ['Parthipan Natkunam'] | 2020-12-13 20:55:05.178000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Clean Code', 'Design Patterns', 'Programming', 'Solid Principles'] |
How To Make A Man Obsessed With You | What Men Really Want In A Relationship | How To Make A Man Obsessed With You | What Men Really Want In A Relationship Relation Sep 9·2 min read
There’s something every man is secretly obsessed with, more than love, money, even more than sex!
Photo by Kristina Litvjak on Unsplash
You need to trigger his hero instinct! Achieve that, and you’ll be astonished by what happens next. He’ll become so loving, so attentive, so much more interested in a committed, long-term relationship, that you will never want things to go back to the way they were.
The hero instinct is a subconscious drive to gravitate toward people who make him feel like a hero. But it’s amplified in his romantic relationships.
Some ideas really are life-changing. And for romantic relationships, this is one of them. That is the reason I’ve made an online video presentation so you can claim this secret as your own.
Because triggering his hero instinct is one thing. Figuring out how to do it again and again requires a couple of tips and advices.
The fact is, women don’t need someone to rescue them. Especially in this day and age. Yet here’s the ironic truth…
Men do still need someone to rescue. Because it’s built into their DNA to seek out relationships that allow them to feel like a provider.
This one little distinction in male and female genetics creates a BIG difference in what attracts men to the women. He feels attracted to any. woman who allows him to step into the role of a hero. Since his instincts normally cause him to thirst for that social role.
Here’s the really cool thing about this. He won’t even know why he feels so attracted to you. Which is why you can use this method under the radar. It triggers attraction at a subconscious level.
He’ll feel the undeniable tug on his emotions. But if his buddy asks him why he’s so crazy about you, he won’t be able to put it into words. | https://medium.com/@moikabu43/how-to-make-a-man-obsessed-with-you-what-men-really-want-in-a-relationship-1732d16f159c | [] | 2021-09-15 18:14:06.621000+00:00 | ['Relationships Love Dating', 'Relationship Advice', 'Dating Advice', 'Relationships', 'Relationship Building'] |
The Price We Pay To Fit In | Hi, my sweet lonely feeling.
Hi, sweet Jordin. I’m here again.
Yes, you are. How come? Tell me more.
Well, I come to visit you any time you’re pursuing fitting in rather than belonging.
Oh shit. That’s deep.
It is everything. Belonging is everything. You crave it so much — all parts of you in here long to feel like they belong. I show up when some parts of you don’t feel like they belong.
[As I was writing this, I realized this part had some important things to say to me and I listen better to them when I journal with them instead of type it out. So at the point of the conversation, I moved to my journal].
Okay, lonely part, I can hear you better now. What were you saying?
I am a part of you that feels like it doesn’t belong. So I give you a lonely feeling to let you know I am in distress.
I’m so sorry you don’t feel like you belong. I know it is something I am doing and how our internal system is being run right now. So I want to make it better. Tell me more.
Well when you go see these friends, a bunch of your other parts jump in and push me aside. They are the parts that jump in and try to impress other people. When those parts are in charge, you become more interested in fitting in that including all of us. That makes those of us not included feel lonely. It makes us feel like like you did when you were alone in your room listening to the cool kids plan the game outside that you weren’t invited to play with them.
Oh, sweetie. I know that feeling. Wow. I am so sorry. What do you need from me to feel included?
I need you to not hide away parts of yourself, including me, in order to fit in. I need you to care less about fitting in with other people and more about belonging to yourself.
Damn. Yes. Thank you for framing it this way. Wow this is a huge realization. So what does that look like?
I guess it looks like checking in wtih the parts like me who feel lonely and hearing our voices, including us in the game or party, not trying to hide us away but taking the time to get to know us. We are important parts of you, too.
You are. I’m sorry — another part of me in here is jumping in saying there isn’t enough time one sec.
[Another part of me kept jumping in and reminding me of the time, worried I won’t have enough time to go into too much detail with this part. It also kept reminding me that my boyfriend wanted to spend time with me this morning and so I better hurry up and make sure I do that. I tried to get this part to step back so I could talk to my lonely part more but this part refused and kept getting louder. There is more work to do with this part but since I was short on time, I just had to be honest and start bringing the conversation with my lonely part to a close.]
Okay, this part is insistant and not stepping back. I bet this makes you feel even lonelier that this part is trying to drag me away from talking with you.
Yeah it used to make me feel lonelier but now I know not to take it so personally. I know this part is just trying to protect you also. What I’ve shared with you is enough for now. I’ll keep speaking up through loneliness if you’re out of alignment with belonging to yourself. But for now can you just check in with me when we’re at the party? That would really make me feel like you understand and are working to help us all in here feel like we belong together.
Yes of course. Thank you so much for being so tender and understanding and wise. I will check in with you tonight when I have some moments to myself. Give you a hug or a high-five!
That would be great, thank you! Thank you for stopping to talk with me even. I already feel like I belong more!
Great! Yay! Yeah, this is new for me so thank you for being my teacher. I know this conversation doesn’t solve the root of it and there is still much to discuss but I am committed to taking these small baby steps toward an inner system where all my parts feel like they belong.
Love it. Muah! Now let’s go have some fun! | https://medium.com/just-jordin/the-price-we-pay-to-fit-in-8d35aecb0d53 | ['Jordin James'] | 2020-10-31 16:52:07+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Inspiration', 'Spirituality', 'Mental Health', 'Self'] |
The Increasing Polarisation of Indian Media | By Nureen I. Shah
In today’s digital age, the media is widely considered as the 4th pillar of democracy. From the Gutenberg Printing Press to news alerts on our smart phones, the media’s journey from a source of amusement for the informed elite to an irreplaceable global phenomenon deserves not just one, but hundreds (if not thousands) of articles like this one, to describe in some detail. However, the focus of this article, as reflected in the title above, is narrowed down to the story of contemporary media in India. More specifically, on how the latter has become increasingly polarised in the past few years.
In India till 1991, there was only one television channel — Doordarshan, the public service broadcaster. The opening up of the Indian economy in early 1990s enabled the entry of private broadcasters in India. The number of television channels has proliferated manifold. By 2005, India had more than 200 digital channels. The number of television channels has grown from around 600 in 2010 to 1600 in 2016. This includes more than 400 news and current affairs channels(1).
Although privatisation has been a boon for the media industry in terms of its unparalleled growth and huge returns in the last three decades, it has also raised very important questions vis-a-vis the nature of media coverage in general. It is pertinent to understand that ever since news channels became private entities, anyone can own or invest in them. Politicians are no exception. From the word go, there have been accusations of bias and unfair reporting against one media house or the other. In case of some channels the bias may not be as apparent. However, there are many others (especially nowadays) who do not shy away from taking sides outright and act as propagators and supporters of policies, actions and statements of political parties on both ends of the spectrum.
On one hand we have channels like India New and News 24, which are deemed pro-Congress by a lot of commentators. Pertinently, the owner of the latter channel Anuradha Prasad is the wife of Congress Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Shukla.
On the other hand, we have a much more aggressive and jingoistic brand of journalism characterised and symbolised by channels like Zee News — whose owner Subhash Chandra was an active aspirant for the BJP ticket from Hisar in 2014 Haryana Assembly Election; Republic TV — initially owned and funded by ARG Outlier Asianet News, in turn owned by BJP MP Rajeev Chandrashekar; India TV — owned by Rajat Sharma, a former ABVP General Secretary; etc.(2)
This is the same brand of channels whose reporting of the many issues of critical national importance has been extremely polar and biased in all-out favor of the right wing.
Whether it be the issue of demonetisation, Goods and Services tax (GST), Indo-Pakistan relations, Article 370/Kashmir, the clashes with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), etc. On all these, and many other issues, these channels either blatantly supported the ruling dispensation or completely ignored them while substituting them with issues they deemed as most important. For example, the Sushant Singh Rajput case, where an all-out trial was launched by dozens of channels openly declaring that this was an open-and-shut case, and that Rhea Chakraborty was responsible for murdering SSR. It is a different story that the subsequent AIIMS report ruled out any possibility of foul play and confirmed it was a case of suicide .(3)
This three-month drama, however, helped in completely shifting the focus of our population from the crushing impact of the lockdown on our economy as well as the occupation of our territory and deaths of our soldiers at the hands of the Chinese PLA in Ladakh. On Kashmir, most of these media houses celebrated the fact that the constitutionally-guaranteed identity of 1.5 crore people was stripped away without their consent, and a draconian communications lockdown and censorship was imposed which continues to this day, albeit with some relaxations. While these media houses openly back the government and its policies, they have seldom taken the pains to ask the same government tough questions on any of those issues. Any panelist on TV debates on such channels who tries to express a view contrary to the popular majoritarian mood is trolled and shut down by the anchors themselves.
Anyone who expresses a dissenting opinion is termed as an anti-national.
This polarised approach of Indian media has brought it great disrepute internationally. Many international news channels have done programs on this subject openly criticising and mocking the falling standards and ethics of journalism in India.
It is therefore high time that the media oligarchy in India introspects as to how it has moved from being a source of information and knowledge for the people into a political tool to be used — and misused — at will.
References:
1. Rani, Dr. Padma (2013) Privatization, convergence and broadcast regulations: A Case study of the Indian Television Industry.
2. Malla, Vikram “The Politics of Media Houses” May 6, 2019https://medium.com/@vikrammalla/the-politics-of-indian-media-houses-by-ownership-82ecbe2dafab
3. “AIIMS Panel Rules Out Murder In SSR Death Case: Report” Outlook, Oct 3, 2020 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.outlookindia.com/website/amp/india-news-according-to-sources-aiims-panel-rules-out-murder-in-ssr-death-case/361402 | https://medium.com/@lighthousemag-mh/the-increasing-polarisation-of-indian-media-19a10fe42d1c | ['Lighthouse Magazine'] | 2020-11-17 11:04:27.541000+00:00 | ['Sociology', 'Media Criticism', 'Perspective', 'Bias', 'Polarization'] |
Whom should you tell if you have COVID-19? | W ould you tell your friends and family of your situation and urge those you had recent contact with to test themselves, or would you keep quiet about it?
Right now, if you said you had COVID-19 what do you think the reaction would be? Would it be panic from those who know you? What about if you told them this news 6 months from now? Worse yet, what if we don’t find a vaccine for this as quickly as we hope? What if we are in the “worst case scenario” — that is if we will have to co-exist with COVID-19 right into 2021 which, by the way, is when a vaccine is more likely to appear. What if you had to reveal, after weeks of lock-down, that you were infected?
Dealing with the “stigma”
Past social experiments have proved that the vast majority will opt to disclose such information about conditions that do not carry an associated stigma. For example, an inhibitor to mitigating the impact of AIDS in the 80’s was the associated stigma of the particular illness. The attempt by public health officials to quarantine the gay community by closing gay bathhouses and discouraging unprotected gay sex in the early 1980s had violated two sets of social norms: the gay community’s reluctance to accept any negative information about their activities, and the general public’s reluctance to acknowledge gay sexuality at all.
Inhibitors to Transparency
The Covid-19 quarantine measures do not appear to violate such social norms. While everyone appears to agree that social-distancing is the responsible way to deal with the issue, it is safe to assume that most of us will be happy to disclose our situation should we fall ill to Covid-19. Disclosure of being a Covid-19 victim is not just a thing that public figures do for… publicity reasons, it just happens to be the responsible thing to do.
There are two important exceptions, however:
Some religious groups have continued to hold worship services, some of them quite large. Presumably their faith position is that prayer offers them Divine protection. They might, therefore, find it awkward to publicize if they all get sick. Similarly, a few countries have reported markedly lower infection rates than their neighbours, possibly because of strict social distancing policies implemented early. It is also possibly because they didn’t do much testing or did it with defective test kits. These countries, having boasted of the success of their containment policies, might wish to discourage reports of incidence.
In both of these conjectured situations, the effect we would expect is wider spread in the population groups involved. If the effect is sufficiently widespread and consequential, we might see governments and major religious movements destabilised by the ensuing reactions of the people affected.
Meanwhile, though, non-disclosure, for whatever reasons, is clearly likely to contribute to spread.
The role of modern Data Analytics
In the past few weeks, many of us involved with data analysis in the “social media era”, made our case about the goodness of recording and sharing personal data such as professional affiliation-status and mobility metrics in order to help our communities implement good social distancing policies and help save lives.
Sadly, this prospect is being confronted with skepticism by great thinkers like Yuval Harari (read his brilliant essay for the FT), as well as many privacy advocates.
How location data can help epidemiologists
As both Google (since March 2020) and Facebook (since May 2019) have started to disclose mobility data of their members in order to help institutions & governments around the globe assess the true impact of their epidemiological initiatives, let’s face the facts:
As noted in this great article, even back in the 19th century, location data were utilised by epidemiologists in order to fight cholera in London; they were used to great success by both Florence Nightingale and John Snow — the father of modern epidemiology.
Yet, many opt to not make a creative use of modern tools in order to protect our communities: Their approach is equivalent to possessing a tool (any tool) that can have much more precision and accuracy than our old tool, but being reluctant to use it due to fear of a future different from the known past/present! Even more striking is the fact that such arguments — against technical progress and for maintaining the “status quo” — are uttered by people who consider themselves “progressives”. Also, governments may opt to withhold data for fear of revealing vulnerability. The 1918 influenza is generally known as the “Spanish Flu” because Spain was the first country to report it. But it did not originate in Spain. The US, UK, France, Germany and Austria-Hungary elected not to disclose the illness among their troops lest they alert their enemies to reduced troop effectiveness. (John M. Barry, 2005, “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History”)
Past century statistics are metrics of such things as victims by age & sex, or per country, county, or city. These are, by and large, the statistics that are reported nowadays in the daily briefings and the local press, but they have limited immediate and personalised relevance to us.
Making others safe by allowing the Covid-19 patients to mark themselves
Let’s imagine that Facebook would give us the option to mark ourselves Covid-19 positive (as they might give us the option to mark ourselves safe after a terrorist attack), and in return we would give it permission to share our anonymous (or eponymous, if we chose to) data about our location in the past couple of weeks.
Sharing such data would not mean that our friends and family (or employer, or partner that we may be cheating on and might feel embarrassed about sharing our true location all along) would have access to all our journeys for the past two weeks, but they would see only the data that are relevant to them. The friends with whom we never crossed paths in the past couple of weeks would see nothing; but all our connections (or members of the network) that crossed paths with would be instantly informed.
Educating our friends
It is surprising how many victims remain unaware of the symptoms of Covid-19, until it is too late. By having their friends posting their status (and symptoms) it is expected that we will practically help one another in order to act in a timely manner.
Helping our immediate communities
More important, our data would be able to be shared with institutions that we consider vital in these times of uncertainty (e.g., clinics and pharmacies, public transportation and supermarkets) in order to be able to test and protect their staff who might have come into contact with us, and who we may have unknowingly infected. Obviously, we would feel responsible for the harm we may have caused to them — unknowingly, given the long incubation period of the virus.
Assuming that many would be able to share such anonymous data, meta-analysis would be able to let us know information such as the “statistically safest” store in our area (e.g., the supermarket that was visited by fewer victims in the past two weeks.) Then the store would also be able to identify measures, tests, decontaminations that they could take to help our fellow human beings who work there to help us.
Mobility data can also provide further insights about the broader behaviour of communities in order to offer them further support in other domains such as financial support; The New York Times -by using location and mobility data- recently reported that social distancing is a luxury for many.
The benefits are endless.
Handling of the unintended consequences
Will there be unintended consequences? Of course there will be. But, provided that we are all acting responsibly at a time of war against the common enemy, these can be mitigated with relative ease.
An obvious such “unintended consequence” is the further strengthening of the social media conglomerates; competitors and privacy advocates appear to oppose this uptake of “power” by the social media platforms, even if this power can be a force of good to the community. Some may feel unease in sharing information with Corporations that may profit from such disclosures even as they understand the positive impact to their community, as they may fear that in the long run such disclosures may used against them by their Insurance Companies and other entities. If the situation was limited to a few thousands of incidents, State security services could have monitored the cases — as is the case in South Korea and Israel. But given the vast number of incidents, self-reporting to known platforms that we already trust with personal, if not intimate, details of our private lives ought to be utilised. Some Governments that consider the US as their adversary, may also feel threatened about the prospect of relying in US based social media platforms, even though they are currently unable not only to devise and implement such tools themselves but to even source respirators for their citizens; even masks and sanitisers for their doctors and nurses. Finally, the capabilities developed to address this epidemic could be used easily for more stigmatized conditions. We most likely do not want to create capabilities and legal precedents that could later be used to deny health insurance coverage, employment and other benefits to people with, say, STDs, drug abuse problems, or mental illness. Many people react reflexively against improved data collection and analysis because of these concerns. In the case of mental illness, in particular there is considerable room for disagreement about an individual’s diagnosis — or lack of one. Disclosure of all the available assessments, including those not clearly verified, could be extremely harmful, not only to the individual affected but to society as a whole. Among other harmful consequences, the resultant unwillingness to disclose relevant information would make it impossible to detect an epidemic of mental disorder caused by some biological or chemical agent. In fact, that impossibility is pretty much what we have now.
These inhibitors to such a Public-Private Partnerships will have to be addressed in a transparent manner, possibly in a global scale as this issue is a global concern. Sooner or later, countries will need to re-open their borders and may need to devise global protocols regarding the assessment of the travellers who are crossing their borders. Possibly the best health certification one could present would be the proof that he or she had suffered from Covid-19 months ago and thus is supposedly immune to the virus. This would not work, however, if it turns out that immunity from having had the disease is transient, or, worse yet, that the person can become infectious again without becoming reinfected.
Nowadays, the empowerment of the social media platforms is a popular topic in political debate. However, history demonstrates that democracies opt to even break down (or nationalise) private corporations when their power becomes a threat to the public. This tendency is unlikely to be any different now, should enough people decide that the circumstances demand.
Until then, we should ensure that there will be no associated stigma with the status disclosure and that the focus will be on how to make the most of the technology and data available in our disposal.
Instead of demanding less data\information, we ought to demand for deeper analysis of our data to be universally accessible, so that people around the world, who happen to live in countries that do not have the means or the willingness to develop such tools, can gain access
I for one, feel that Google should make available even more detailed and granular data, and\or provide protocols to anonymised data that interested parties can analyse, visualise and help make sense in an “Open Data” context. David Brin’s notion of “reciprocal transparency” is more relevant and valid than ever before.
I would like to thank:
Doug Samuelson for pointing my attention to his brilliant essays “Can Operations Research Help Stop The Invisible Plague?” c.2004 & “Can We Detect ‘The Coming Plague?’” c.2008 published at INFORMS OR-MS Today Journal and his permission to re-use some of his paradigms contained therein.
Jim Dewar, Warren Walker, Mike Rouse, Christos Diamantis & Pythagoras Petratos for their review and suggestions while editing the draft. | https://medium.com/predict/whom-should-you-tell-if-you-have-covid-19-161f96cd3dfc | ['Dimitris Vayenas'] | 2020-04-11 00:09:29.041000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Data Science', 'Location Tracking', 'Facebook', 'Google'] |
Buzz Tracking — Know What Audience Says About Your Brand | As a marketer or a business owner, you might be having a large fan base who could be mentioning, liking, commenting, or tweeting about your brand. But, have you been able to track any of these? If not, then it’s time for you to resort to buzz tracking or buzz monitoring to catch every brand mention in the online space.
Nearly 97% of consumers use online media to research any product or service they want to buy. Upon that, 89% of consumers read online reviews and business responses to understand the way you react. Now, how are these statistics relatable to buzz tracking?
It indicates that customers are talking about your brand online. They want reassurance before they invest in your products or services. For this, they are turning to every possible medium in the online space right from online review sites to social media sites. All they want is to learn about your products and services. They repeatedly visit your website and talk about your brand everywhere that creates buzz, which acts as social proof.
There are numerous ways you can track buzz that we will be discussing in this blog, but before moving forward, let’s see how you can create a buzz.
Here’s how you can create a social buzz
A great way to create social buzz is by launching new products and services and bringing them into the public eye. And, one that’s hot and trending currently is sharing teasers that get the customer excited. However, you have to be clear with the platform you choose to release teasers. Here, Twitter is the appropriate platform that would be useful for your products and build anticipation. Also, email marketing will play a significant role in sharing the details further.
The best example is the Amazon that created a buzz for their gadget “The Echo” or popularly known as Amazon Alexa for which it created three teaser ads. Missy Elliott, Alec Baldwin, and former Miami Dolphins quarterback, Dan Marino were the stars who acted in the commercial. You can have a look at the commercial down below-
Another great way to get the people talking is by building awareness that the non-profit organization- Worldwide Breast Cancer did so well. The organization created a campaign known as #KnowYourLemons. It used a crate of 12 lemons to explain different warning signs, as shown in the image down below.
We can say that it is one of the biggest and most powerful routes to persuade customers into buying your products and services. It is crucial that you accurately track your buzz on various digital avenues. All you need to do is to tap into customer conversations, opinions, and recommendations. Other important things you have to consider are:
Public discussion avenues on the Internet like boards and forums
Consumer ratings
Moblogs
Social networking sites
What Will You Get Out of Buzz Tracking?
When it comes to buzz tracking, the most important benefit it gives is marketing insight into the consumer attitude and perception that it has for your brand. Other than this, there are many more benefits that will compel you to resort to buzz tracking. Here are some of them noted below, let’s have a look:
Sentiment Analysis
When it comes to buzz tracking the very first thing that comes to our mind is sentiment analysis. Buzz tracking aids the identification of important topics that trigger a specific sentiment and shapes public perceptions. Whether positive or negative comments surround your brand, they will help you spot the key factors or trigger points that you might not have otherwise. And, working on those key factors you can attract a large customer base by creating a marketing strategy around their sentiments.
More Market Intelligence
One of the biggest advantages of buzz tracking is the ability to locate your market and get more insights about who is talking about what and when. As soon as you get insights into your niche market, you get to know which product or service of yours people are looking for. This way, you can reach people, help them, and generate a sale. Moreover, you can benefit your brand’s image tremendously.
Apart from this, pinpointing your customers will allow for more effective targeting. You can also identify influencers in your industry who could assist you in spreading brand awareness and gauge customer opinions.
Access to all Relevant Discussions
Buzz tracking gives you access to what and how much people are talking about your brand. Whether you are a small business owner or a fortune 500, you will know what is being talked about you. It is always great to have a positive comment about your brand; however, even if you get a negative comment or negative buzz, it will help you spot the issues. When you solve their problems it gives an impression that you are concerned about them. This way, you can make your unhappy customers happy and get things right.
Also, it shows their side of the story that helps you identify the common issues customers face when they use your products or services.
So, now that you know how buzz tracking can benefit your brand, let’s have a look at the steps you can follow and leverage all the social data at your disposal.
2 Steps to Buzz Tracking and Benchmarking Social Conversations
You will get to know the steps to create a buzz baseline to gauge consumer opinion. So, let’s have a look at the outlined steps at different stages of the campaign:
#1 Before You Start A Campaign
The best way to begin buzz tracking is to chart day-to-day conversations and general sentiment about your brand across various marketing avenues available online. Here’s what you need to do:
Find Your Baseline
When we talk about establishing a baseline, begin tracking social channels and understand what people have to say about your brand today. Also, consider how many times you have been a part of the discussion.
The purpose is to know and understand the conversations your brand already generates usually, without the need to launch a campaign. You will also know what your target customers are currently talking about and what is their concern? Also, you will know the buzzwords they are using. All these insights will help you in developing a marketing strategy. You will exactly know what to include in your message and what to leave.
Find Your Competitors’ Baseline
In the step above you have been setting the baseline for your brand. But in this step, you will set the baseline for your competitors. Here you have to consider their brand mentions, likes, comments, traffic, shares, and other important elements. You can use social media analytics tools to get the insights as manually it takes a lot of time.
Consider what their customers have to say about their brand. You will get to know whether they are happy or complaining, which could be a valuable insight to feed your own marketing strategy.
Find Your Industry Baseline
Now you have to set your industry baseline. The purpose is to know what people have to say about your industry, and how often they like to talk about it. Consider industry mentions and take a look at the conversation around the mentions.
Set Goals
Now that you have set a baseline, it’s time to set the goals that can give you a meaningful comparison. You will know how far you have been successful in persuading people at the end of the campaign. The common goals include traffic, lead generation, thought leadership, brand awareness, crisis management, or leads. As long as you delve into the practice of creating social media campaigns and running them across different avenues, you will realize that your marketing goals and predictions are becoming more accurate.
#2 During the Campaign
Look at the Right Numbers
As discussed in the above point, the marketing goals of buzz tracking could be different, but creating a buzz can help you fulfill many goals. Let’s see how you can tap into the conversation and track them to achieve your marketing objective:
Traffic
When it comes to traffic, track what people are more likely to share. It gives you an idea, what appeals to the audience the most. You can also consider the email traffic you received, the number of time people stayed on your page and the source from where people are coming.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is related to sales activities that take place on your page. So, the factors would be different from others, where social shopping is the main focus; especially, if it is an eCommerce website. Here you can track social listening metrics that include conversations, feedback, suggestions, and product reviews.
Thought Leadership
After lead generations come thought leadership, where you have to track different elements. It includes- mentions of your brand or thought leaders, referral visits to your website, backlinks, comments, shares, and retweets.
Brand Awareness
Brand recall and brand recognition are two parameters that come to mind when we think of awareness. To measure brand awareness and the buzz created around your brand, you need to track the following:
Impressions, reach, brand mentions, the share of voice, likes comments, and shares, and lastly the public sentiment that surrounds your brand. Monitoring these, you will know whether you are heading in the right direction or not.
Look Beyond the Numbers
Many marketers are fooled as they completely focus on numbers. They only consider the volume of posts, mentions, likes, shares, and followers. Based on these, they decide whether their marketing campaign is a hit or a miss. But, when it comes to buzz tracking, a completely different picture emerges in the absence of context and sentiments that surround your brand.
When you consider public sentiments and context, you get a closer look at what type of buzz surrounding your brand. You need to look into public perception by reading the comments and understanding the discussions. Supposedly, you encounter negative reviews and frustration, it’s too early to equate the number of comments and shares with success. So, ignoring the context can prove dangerous.
Make Changes as Needed
Now that you have considered every aspect of buzz tracking the biggest advantage you can have is the margin and opportunity to make changes in the strategy of the campaign.
Real-time buzz tracking will allow you to tweak the tonality of the message you want to spread, or change the concept after discovering the trigger points. However, make sure that you plan for a long-running campaign to have a more accurate picture of the buzz it will generate. Also, you have more time and margin to make changes as campaigns designed for a short duration don’t give a complete picture. We would recommend you to follow a structured plan even if you are making changes so you can use the social data to its full capacity.
Summarize and Record
After considering numerous elements and measuring the results, it’s time to record what you did and the time you made the change. As you aggregate and summarize the results, you can refer to them later on for review and incorporate all that you learned into your next marketing campaign. It provides for a better ground of comparison and understands the intensity of impact it left on your customers.
How Mentionlytics Can Help in Buzz Tracking?
Buzz tracking involves loads of information available online that your consumers or audience share on different marketing avenues. It can be challenging to track this and more time-consuming. Instead, we recommend using social media monitoring tools for buzz tracking. It will give you a complete picture of your customers’ behaviour, preferences, sentiments, and engagement.
One such social media monitoring tool is Mentionlytics. With Mentionlytics, you can enjoy a hassle-free time tracking loads of information in one go. It offers numerous features that are incredibly beneficial for your brand management that include:
You can collect important insights,
Look for trends and strategize your campaign
Access to mention insights,
Find the right influencers for your brand,
Grow your brand’s reputation and sales
Know about your competitors, products, and industry
Discover public opinion about your brand
Complete media coverage, including social media, online news, blogs, and any website.
Apart from this, you can also join in forum discussions, comments, and blog posts to spread awareness about your brand with Mentionlytics.
So, what are you waiting for?
Get started with a free version here!
Original article: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/buzz-tracking-know-what-audience-says-about-your-brand/ | https://medium.com/@mentionlytics/buzz-tracking-know-what-audience-says-about-your-brand-84b92ab8e167 | [] | 2021-03-22 17:39:24.670000+00:00 | ['Audience', 'Tracking', 'Brand Strategy', 'Monitoring'] |
Statistics & Telemetry Dashboard For User Management | When it comes to monitoring any software application, telemetry is an integral component of this process. As the term seems to suggest, telemetry is the process of recording and monitoring data from any remote source or system through the use of technology.
In the IT and software domain, telemetry and monitoring are deployed for observing various application metrics such as server load and performance, memory usage, and even its impact on user experience.
Despite its latest innovations, telemetry systems are not a new development and have been in existence since the 19th century. For example, automated communication systems have been designed to collect real-time data remotely and transmit the data for better monitoring. Additionally, telemetry systems have been utilized in transportation and meteorology industries for emergency management, remote troubleshooting of any issues, and even for enhancing cybersecurity.
In this article, we shall focus on the scope of telemetry in the data analytics domain and how the statistics and telemetry dashboards facilitate better user management.
What are the Statistics and Telemetry Dashboard?
Among the common tools used for real-time telemetry and monitoring, the Statistics and Telemetry dashboard act as an effective data visualization tool for implementing an informed response.
Here is the typical four-point response strategy (enabled by this dashboard) in application monitoring:
Early detection of any application issue along with a root cause analysis of the problem.
Easier communication with any business executive or stakeholder who can take an informed and accurate decision for any reported issue.
Immediate fixes to any reported issues thus enabling the application to be restored.
Future or long-term response to prevent similar application problems.
Take the case of the Microsoft Office Telemetry dashboard. Compatible with Office 2016, Office 2019, and Office 365, this dashboard tool can collect and present inventory and health-related data about Office documents and installed solutions.
Next, let’s look at the role of the Statistics and Telemetry dashboard in the user management process along with the benefits and key metrics used in this process.
User Management With the Statistics & Telemetry Dashboard
In the software domain, telemetry can be used to gather valuable data and insights on the usage and performance of software applications from remote locations. For example, telemetry can be used to measure:
The use of product features
The loading time of the application
The number of application crashes or failures
Statistics related to general application usage
Thanks to telemetry tools, software companies or developers can collect remote data about application usage, which is not available through in-house means.
When it comes to monitoring end-user activities, telemetry plays a very critical role. Once a software company ships and delivers a software tool to a remote client, they cannot possibly monitor how the end-users are engaging with their product. However, thanks to telemetry, the following insights can be delivered on any dashboard:
How are users engaging with your product or are they using new product features?
How frequently are smartphone users using your software app and for what duration? (This has been enabled by web page telemetry .)
.) What software configuration settings are end-users using the most? Do they mostly prefer a certain display setting or orientation?
How are users responding to an application or mobile app crash? Are crashes most common due to a particular feature or task?
Be it a software application or mobile app, these insights allow software companies to understand user sentiment and accordingly enhance the product features and more crucially, the user experience.
What are the key metrics that must be monitored for improving user management using statistics and telemetry? Let’s evaluate that next.
Statistics & Telemetry — Key Metrics
As outlined in the introduction, application monitoring metrics like server performance and memory consumption are key to ensure optimum user experience. However, there are several other metrics and KPIs that can be included and monitored through the statistics and telemetry dashboard.
These metrics can be classified under the following categories:
Server-specific metrics
App infrastructure metrics
Cloud-related metrics
Advanced application-specific metrics
Let’s discuss each of these categories in detail:
Server-specific metrics
Server-specific metrics in application telemetry goes beyond simply monitoring if your server is experiencing uptime or downtime. These metrics aim to target measures like the server CPU utilization (including peak and average usage) and time-based memory usage in servers.
Additionally, server-specific metrics can include user-related activities like the number of user requests in a selected time frame or concurrent user requests on your server.
App infrastructure metrics
In addition to application monitoring, network monitoring is crucial for assessing your network and storage infrastructure. Each of these app infrastructure metrics can ultimately impact user management and experience.
Network monitoring is crucial for measures like bandwidth usage and uptime for the specific application. Additionally, it can provide insights into network performance and application utilization, along with point to any security or performance issues.
Cloud-related metrics
With the increase in public cloud platforms for business applications, cloud-related metrics for telemetry is also becoming important. Cloud-related metrics are applicable at any point before (or after) the application is hosted on any cloud platform.
Application monitoring on the cloud typically includes measuring cloud platform availability (or outages) and Internet latency. It can also be extended to measuring Internet routing paths, latency for internal & external requests, and hybrid cloud usages.
Advanced application-specific metrics
Finally, application-specific metrics can be extended to measuring the number of transactions each second or to observe if they satisfy the goals in the company’s service level agreement (or SLAs).
Furthermore, you could include metrics specific to a particular industry domain. For example, eCommerce application metrics could include online sales figures, credit card transactions, or the growth in database data.
For example, here’s a telemetry dashboard with metrics specific to a software release.
Statistics & Telemetry Dashboard — Business Benefits
Primarily, application telemetry and monitoring enable product developers in evaluating how well (or not well) end-users are taking to their product. These data insights are delivered through a visual dashboard, which makes it easier for executives to make the right decisions.
What are the business benefits of developing a Statistics and Telemetry dashboard? Here are a few of them:
It provides real-time insight into customer usage.
Logging tools during product development can help in diagnosing errors or any code flaws. On the other hand, telemetry tools are much more beneficial as they enable the business to collect customer usage data after the application is released in the open market.
It can be used in a variety of industries
Application telemetry and monitoring can be used for remote data collection and analysis in a variety of industries. This includes tracking and monitoring spacecraft, medical conditions, law enforcement, and so on.
Provides a wealth of valuable analytics
Telemetry provides valuable data analytics that can be used to improve the customer experience. The telemetry dashboard answers many product-related questions pertaining to customer engagement with the product, popular product or app features, purchases of free trial products as against paid versions, and so on.
These product-related analytics are a valuable asset to any product development team as they plan to add features and other improvements in future releases.
It can be aligned with your business goals
Finally, application telemetry can be used to measure your business goals. Typically, this includes measuring business goals such as:
Customer acquisition: Is the product enabling you to acquire more customers? What product features or marketing strategies are driving customer acquisitions?
Business revenue: What are the features or functionalities that set your product apart from your competition? Are customers comfortable with your current pricing strategy?
Customer engagement and success: Is your product driving customer success in the marketplace and which features are enabling it? What is the measure of customer engagement with your product?
Business vision: Are your customers aligned with your business vision and philosophy?
Even with challenges like user privacy issues, application monitoring using telemetry will continue to be used to determine customer needs and expectations in the future. With telemetry-related processes happening in the background, even privacy-loving users hardly notice or simply ignore the process. In short, telemetry will continue to drive product development through effective data analytics.
Conclusion
Apart from application monitoring, telemetry tools such as the statistics and telemetry dashboard enable devising a well-planned response to the product- or customer-related data.
As a global data analytics and business intelligence solution provider, Countants has enabled its customers to leverage their insights from rich and interactive data visualization solutions. Through easy and scalable user dashboards, we have brought data-driven insights closer to business decision-makers. If you want to implement application monitoring using telemetry, call us up for our services and we will be glad to help. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/statistics-telemetry-dashboard-for-user-management-9b1e7ade5170 | [] | 2020-01-20 07:05:45.034000+00:00 | ['Data Analytics', 'Data Visualization', 'Dashboard', 'Dataviz', 'Telemetry'] |
Weekly Roundup: Moorestown Doctor, Barbara Rich top this week’s stories | Weekly Roundup: Moorestown Doctor, Barbara Rich top this week’s stories
Dr. David Condoluci has been awarded for his years of service, and Barbara Rich is getting special recognition from Moorestown Township Council. Catch up on everything from the past week in the Weekly Roundup.
Moorestown doctor recognized for his service, passion for healing
At a time when many doctors were afraid to treat patients with HIV, Dr. David Condoluci wanted to help.
“There was a lot of fear,” Condoluci said. “My values were there. There was a need, and I had a passion for trying to serve this group, and I really loved doing it.”
The New Jersey Hospital Association has taken notice of Condoluci’s unfailing desire to give back by awarding him its Distinguished Service Award at its 100th annual meeting. The award is given to health-care leaders who “demonstrate strength, integrity, professionalism and a relentless commitment to a New Jersey-based hospital or health system.
Rich recognized for her trailblazing environmental protection efforts
Blink and you might miss it, but along Creek Road in Moorestown is an unassuming open space known as “The Little Woods on the Rancocas.” With shrubbery and trees lining the small path, the space might not look like much to those speeding by, but follow the path a ways and you’ll find an unexpected 11-acre open space that opens up to a priceless view of the Rancocas River.
Unassuming might also be a fitting a description for the open space’s new namesake. As of February, the space will be renamed “Barbara Rich’s Little Woods.” Small in stature and exceedingly modest, Rich doesn’t like to call attention to herself, but that hasn’t helped her escape notice from the Moorestown Council, which is honoring her for her stewardship of Moorestown’s open spaces. | https://medium.com/the-moorestown-sun/weekly-roundup-moorestown-doctor-barbara-rich-top-this-weeks-stories-62b896ab843e | ['Kelly Flynn'] | 2019-02-12 20:31:41.757000+00:00 | ['Giving', 'Wellness', 'Health', 'People'] |
Working From Home- New Normal In The Vocational World | 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/gaurav-aggarwal/working-from-home-new-normal-in-the-vocational-world-43c54d68642e | ['Gaurav Aggarwal'] | 2020-12-18 07:20:09.372000+00:00 | ['Work From Home', 'Work Life Balance', 'Workforce', 'Employees', 'Workplace'] |
Curing olives, for the eating | Here in Davis, we have lots of olive trees lining the streets, and I find most of them fall to the ground unused, except as skateboard obstacles. What to do with them?
Olive oil would be great, but it takes a lot of olives to make olive oil (1:5 or 1:10 weight ratio yield), and it’s kind of a hassle. Meanwhile cured olives cost more per pre-processed pound, and there’s more opportunity to tweak small batch flavors. So I do that instead. Here’s some notes.
Picking
First, it’s useful to know when to pick. The key piece here is that the difference between a green and black olive is just how ripe it is (you’ll find both on the same tree).
Woah, different color olives on the same branch!
Very generally, green olives are hard and I use them mostly for a lye-based treatment. Green/brown olives are good for a salt-brine, and dark, softer, olives are great for a salt cure (e.g. the shriveled Moroccan style olives).
Experts will tell you the best picking time depends on the variety and the weather and so forth — and it does — but basically just pay attention to when they start to turn dark and then either go for it (if you want green olives) or wait a month (if you want more ripe).
Actually picking
This is surprisingly easy. Get a metal rake and a large tarp, and rake the olives onto the tarp. I just aim for the low hanging fruit, but if you want to optimize your yield per tree, bring a ladder as well. I usually hit a couple trees and get a few 5 gallon buckets full in less then 10 minutes. Of course your timing will depend on the individual tree, and how long you want to risk getting caught. Haha obviously only grab from public trees.
Sorting
This is the most annoying part of the whole process. I’m slowly working to automate this, but for now I force my family to help. Here’s the general flow:
You probably got a bunch of bad olives and leaves and branches mixed in from the last step. If you have a lot of olives it might be worth pouring them into a bucket full of water from a fair height, with a blower that blows all the leaves/twigs away as they fall. Otherwise just pick them out.
Next, take out all the bad olives. Some people seem very concerned about any olives with small holes (or hints of them), in case it means the dreaded fruit fly has gotten in. But unless the olive looks pretty gnarly I don’t think it will affect the processing or the taste/texture, and I’m not a vegetarian. Also I’d lose a lot of olives.
When you’re done, you want to organize them by color, and size if there is lots of variance. This is because different sizes/colors will take different amounts of time to cure for a given method (except for salt-curing in which case you can skip sizing).
Curing
Finally, you’re ready for this long PDF with all the details on how to cure olives: It does a way better job than I will, but here’s my summary:
The easiest (and survey says best-tasting) method is lye-curing. The only real downside here is you have to eat them within a few months, whereas the other methods let you store for much longer. Oh and also it’s a deadly poison that could blind you or worse if you screw up while processing. But the olives taste great and it’s by far the easiest method.
Here’s how you do it: Make a lye solution (see instructions in pdf and wear eye protection), soak the olives for ~10 hours, rinse (carefully putting lye solution down your house drain and not storm drain), and then rinse again daily for a few days+. Always make sure your olives are submerged through these steps and beyond. Now you’re done!
To give them more flavor, throw them in a salt brine and whatever aromatics you want (this year I’ve been inclined to just add garlic and hot peppers). In just a few hours (but a day+ is better) they’ll acquire the taste of whatever you put them in. You can also replace their flavor if it didn’t turn out great by replacing the brine.
Other methods include: salt curing (just put dark olives in lots of salt and wait) and salt-brining, which requires making a cut into each olive and is thus a bit more time consuming.
Conclusion
Homemade olives are cheap and yum. | https://medium.com/land-and-ladle/curing-olives-for-the-eating-e9c94075ab5e | ['Josh Livni'] | 2018-11-25 03:22:05.090000+00:00 | ['Canning', 'Olives', 'Food'] |
PT-BOT KidsBIT | powered by micro: bit
The PTKidsBIT controller board support the micro: bit microcontroller. The Microsoft Programming Experience Toolkit or Microsoft PXT Block Editor, JavaScript and Python software is recommended. PTKidsBIT supports dc motors, servos, and sensors, suitable for controlling robots and learn programming basics.
Specification
Support the micro: bit microcontroller
Size : 70 mm. x 70 mm. x 12 mm.
8 channels analog input from ADC converter (ADS7828)
Piezo speaker
2 channels dc motor 1.2A per channel (3.2A peak)
2 channels servo motor
Power 5-14 VDC with reverse polarity protection circuit
Usage
Line follower robot | https://medium.com/@ptbot/pt-bot-kidsbit-aa923a5caeaa | [] | 2020-12-11 08:09:08.346000+00:00 | ['Microbit', 'Line Follower', 'Robots'] |
The Yin and Yang of Dance | The Yin and Yang of Dance
How the choreography of our time can use technology, separation, and mindbody wisdom wisely to bring people together and to connect with ourselves
By Katherine Relf-Cañas
The Essinova Artful Life series capped off its playful Saturday program on August 29th, with dance. A lot of milestone experiences that are essential rituals in life involve dancing because humans have been dancing for a long time — anywhere from 150,000 to 6 million years. We’re not alone in this. Even animals dance — whether to attract a mate or to bob and strut for fun.
My husband and I set up two orange yoga mats in our living room and were one of the couples who were not part of the virtual dance partnering. Anu and the facilitators used the Zoom ‘pin’ feature to pair partners across the Atlantic and in a few other time zones. We closed up social distance using technology to connect on multiple levels. Joe and I both found the playshop sweet, and agree that it is fun to indulge in being a little silly. Also, as Belinda Chlouber, participant and a playshop facilitator in the series, mentioned during the event, we need to MOVE MORE!
The series finale playshop was an invitation to dance with the Artful Life community, to dance with one another, and also to dance with ourselves. If silent disco comes to mind, think again. This was more about holistic practices and mind-body exploration than prom. Yet, dance can and does involve nuance: it is ritual, social engagement, and workout as well as a way to upgrade our neuro-muscular pathways for deep mindbody integration. The big takeaway: consider using dance and movement in your daily life just like other mindful arts activities presented in this series. Yes, try this at home!
The Yin and Yang of Dance Playshop introduced us first to three dancer-researcher-educators: Sarah Holmes, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Fides Matzdorf and Ramen Sen, both in Sheffield, England. All came to us virtually via Zoom. Sarah started us off on our yoga mats or chairs in an elemental integration movement of somatic experiencing. She brought up how this type of practice can relieve tension in the body. We did Xs with our arms above outstretched, and some of us rolled into a fetal position, a left/right side of the body and whole-brain stimulating series of dynamic and fluid poses. This warmup served to enhance our embodied cognitive awareness and to upgrade our neuro-muscular pathways.
Laptops on a nearby surface — separating and coming back to the group online was part of the dance — we alternated using the pin feature of Zoom to have two individuals dance with each other, then all of us rejoin our group. The music was upbeat and had that ‘makes you want to move’ quality that got us revved up. There were no steps to follow or dances to learn. Rather, the instruction was about tuning in to ourselves and one another. Oh, and we also danced with our pillows and stuffed animals, both of which were referred to as ‘fluffy friends.’ See ours below. We appreciated that Fides had a flair for whimsy. Overall, it was about bringing awareness to the experience and to the movement itself. | https://medium.com/essinova/the-yin-and-yang-of-dance-bringing-people-together-and-connecting-to-oneself-with-bodymind-wisdom-b206350fb5ca | ['Beibei Song 宋贝贝'] | 2020-09-04 19:53:27.048000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Dance', 'Somatic', 'Mind Body', 'Movement'] |
How to Study Monera for NEET? | Monera is one of the key topics of Plant diversity and it is frequently figured in NEET. The questions are mostly conceptual and require very less factual details. Students, in general, suffer from the misconception that it requires lots of mugging. They often get confused after seeing the name of the species as an option which in more than one occasion symbolizes one or other groups. Answering such questions, therefore, require conceptual clarity.
Let’s try to understand the correct and pragmatic way to learn the concept of Monera from the NEET perspective.
Baterial Cell
Monera in NEET includes Eubacteria, Archaebacteria Cyanobacteria, Mycoplasma, Actinomycetes, Chlamydia, and Rickettsia. Eubacteria is the main where we need to learn the cellular structure and reproduction.
Conceptual Key Notes:
Concept of Eubacteria and Archaebacteria The cell wall of gram +ve and gram –ve bacteria The genetic makeup of Eubacteria and difference with a typical Eukaryotes and Bacterial reproduction. Archaebacteria and its forms Specialized cells of Cyanobacteria: Heterocyst, Harmogonia etc Commercial application of Actinomycetes & Nitrogen fixation by Frankia Nature of Rickettsia and Chlamydia
Eubacteria Vs Archaebacteria
Eubacteria are true bacteria. All bacteria having a cell wall is made up of peptidoglycan are true bacteria. On the contrary, Archaebacteria is a false bacteria as its cell wall is made up of polysaccharides.
Cell Wall of Gram ‘+’ve and Gram ‘-ve’
Cell walls of these two groups of bacteria are distinguished based on the amount of peptidoglycan and the presence of LPS. Gram ‘+’ve has 80% of a cell wall made up of peptidoglycan whereas in gram ‘-‘ve it constitutes just 10–15%. Secondly, LPS is not found in gram ‘+’ve bacteria. The reason for the retention of the crystal violet or gram stain by gram ‘+’ve is the structural distribution of peptidoglycan as shown in the diagram.
One interesting point is worth noting that almost all monerans which are included in the syllabus are gram ‘-‘ve except Actinomycetes.
Genetic Constitution of Eubacteria and Eukaryotes
Genome in Eubacteria is made up of circular chromosomes having circular DNA. They lack histone protein. A typical Eukaryotes has a linear DNA with histone protein. Secondly, prokaryotic genomes are further characterized by having a high amount of GC.
Bacteria are mostly reproduced by binary fission. Sexual reproduction in bacteria is absent as there is no meiosis. However, it undergoes genetic recombination to produce variants. Different types of genetic recombination (Transformation, Conjugation, Transduction, and Sexduction) have been recognized based on the mode of transfer of genetic material from the donor to recipient.
Typical genetic recombination of eukaryotes can be differentiated from moneran recombination based on the transfer of genome. In bacteria, it is always partial and forms merozygote. However, in eukaryote transfer of genome is complete and it forms a zygote.
Archaebacteria and its forms
Archaebacteria are ancient bacteria. They have gone for the least structural changes since their evolution, hence, known as living fossils. One of the reasons for resisting change is the presence of branched-chain lipid in their cell membrane which makes them environmentally tough. It exists in two forms: Obligate anaerobes and Facultative aerobe. Methanogens & Halophiles are obligate anaerobes. Thermoacidophyls are facultative aerobe.
Cyanobacteria
Cyanobacteria is a gram ‘-‘ve aerobic bacteria. Here photosynthesis is oxygenic. The ecological significance of cyanobacteria is owing to their ability to fix atmospheric N2. Heterocyst is the specialized cell having nitrogenase enzyme which carries the process of biological nitrogen fixation. Fragments of filaments of cyanobacteria form harmgonia.
Actinomycetes
Actinomycetes are soil bacteria where it acts as saprophytes. It forms a mycelial like structure and is often known as a connecting link between bacteria and fungi. It is commercially used for the production of wide-spectrum antibiotics. Frankia is a type of actinomycetes that are known for symbiotic nitrogen fixation.
Mycoplasma (PPLO)
It is the smallest living organism (0.1um) and even cannot be filtered by the bacterial filtrate. It lacks a cell wall, hence, can change its shape and therefore known as ‘Jokers among the plant kingdom’. It causes diseases like pleuropneumonia in human and witch broom’s disease in plants.
Rickettsia and Chlamydia
It is an obligate intracellular parasite and is often considered as a connecting link between Prokaryotes and viruses. It is known for causing diseases like hey fever, Rocky mountain fever, etc.
Chlamydia is also an intracellular parasite and causes human respiratory and genitourinary tract disease, and in birds, they cause respiratory disease.
Do’s:
1. Learn 2 to 4 representatives of each group.
2. Emphasize on those name having commercial/evolutionary significance
3. Ecological and evolutionary significance of the members of monerans
4. Build Mind Maps for Monerans.
5. Refer to Mind Maps — Biology — XI (Bestseller in amazon for NEET) https://www.amazon.in/BIOLOGY-MINDMAPS-Dr-Pankaj-Kumar/dp/B0863TWLKR
Don’ts:
1. Never try to over-emphasize in learning/mugging the name of species
2. Do not study the cellular details except those of bacteria.
(Next: How to Study Protista?) | https://medium.com/@drpk/how-to-study-monera-for-neet-9c81c1be4bd6 | ['Dr. Pankaj Kumar'] | 2020-12-16 12:27:10.708000+00:00 | ['Mindmap', 'Medical Entrance', 'Biology', 'Neet', 'Monera'] |
GOROOT와 GOPATH | 제대로 설명이된 사이트가 많지 않아 정리.
GOROOT는 JAVA로 치면 JAVA_HOME 과 동일한 개념을 보면된다.
내가 사용할 GO 툴이 설치된 위치다.
예를들어 GO 홈페이지에서 tar.gz로된 GO 1.6 버전 파일을 내려받은 후, 유저 홈 디렉토리에 압축을 풀었을 경우에는 GOROOT가 $HOME/go가 된다.
따라서 다음과 같이 환경변수를 설정하면된다.
export GOROOT=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin
그렇다면 GOPATH는 뭘까?
공식문서에는 다음과 같이 설명하고 있다.
The GOPATH environment variable is used to specify directories outside of $GOROOT that contain the source for Go projects and their binaries.
쉽게 말해서 내가 현재 만들고있는 GO 프로그램의 위치다. go get으로 패키지를 설치하고, go build로 빌드를 할때 GOROOT와 더불어 패키지와 명령들을 찾을 위치를 지정하는 것이다.
예를들어 /Workspace/GoExample 이라는 디렉토리에서 GO 프로그램을 개발한다면 다음과 같이 GOPATH와 PATH를 설정하면 된다.
export GOPATH=/Workspace/GoExample
export PATH=$PATH:GOPATH/bin
참고 : https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GOPATH | https://medium.com/chequer/goroot%EC%99%80-gopath-77f44cbaa1d8 | ['Brant Hwang'] | 2018-02-03 14:49:09.098000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Go', 'Goapth', 'Golang', 'Goroot'] |
Like The Weather | Like The Weather
A poem
Paul Klee, Picture Album, Public Domain
.
.
Time, the great bringer
of things,
is suspended
on wings gliding
nowhere
in particular,
cutting through
the bluest
slivers of sky.
Hope is as wayward
as any summer breeze,
it blows wisps
of suspended disbelief
in evil and ignorance,
for a moment
before
it evaporates.
Dark clouds
fill marble corridors,
mahogany chambers,
charged air ignites
the people’s house,
and strikes stark raving mad,
unashamed in the face
of all those who didn’t have
to die just yet.
There’s a storm
trooping through
post offices,
cities and towns,
can’t you hear it rumbling?
Mourning time
strikes every hour,
more lives ended,
dreams thwarted,
promise memorialized
instead of realized.
Meals missed,
hunger sets in
as children wonder
if their parents will live.
Will the autumn winds
blow the wisdom
of five-year olds
who see all
the contours of right
and wrong and decorate
it with sidewalk chalk
in rainbow colors of fair,
loving and kind?
When will
there be blue
skies again?
Reality blows back
in successive gusts
and all I can see
is a dark reign of pain,
a downpouring of hate,
and the horror
that some welcome
this weather.
~
© 2020, A. Breslin. All Rights Reserved | https://medium.com/annapoetics/like-the-weather-1a65c637d1c4 | ['Anna Breslin'] | 2020-08-12 12:43:00.202000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Life', 'Politics', 'Love'] |
On Digital Platforms’ Social Responsibility: Facebook and Fake News | A Facebook billboard advert can be seen at Earls Court underground station in London, Britain, July 28, 2018. (REUTERS/Henry Nicholls)
“We know people want to see accurate information on Facebook — and so do we”, that’s how Facebook begins its blogpost “Working to Stop Misinformation and False News”. The platform details how it’s focusing on this goal through three key areas. If Facebook was really implementing those actions, then why is it still making headlines for not doing enough to combat fake news?
The spread of news on Facebook goes back to September 2006, ever since the launch of its news feed. The platform gradually changed from a place to connect with family and friends to more of a place in which millions of users around the world rely on as the primary source of news.
Mark Zuckerberg updated Facebook’s mission in 2017, and the platform became focused on “giving people the power to build community and bring the world together”. So, Zuckerberg was better realizing the need for free speech, which also became more dictated by the algorithm, as Facebook was feeding users’ news feeds with content it considered as the most viewed by individuals. The platform used various technological tools to filter the news appearing on users’ feeds.
If Facebook was able to develop powerful tools enabling it to dig deeper into people’s interests, hence targeting more specific ads based on users’ views, likes, and interactions, it’s probably able to develop tools enabling it to combat fake news and fake clicks on ads. In fact, Facebook has been deploying “Stormchaser” since the 2016 US elections to track false information. More recently, during the 2020 US elections, Facebook and Twitter were taking emergency steps against victory claims. Facebook was also removing false claims related to “COVID-19”. So, it combated fake news through tech tools and experts, but was it enough?
Since the digital platform’s business model is focused on revenue from targeted ads, then developing tools for fake clicks on ads would then be quite risky for a platform which makes 99% of its revenue from ads (Facebook’s revenue grew from $8 billion in 2013 to $40 billion in 2017).
Facebook’s revenue and net income from 2007 to 2019. (Statista 2020)
This also explains why Facebook is not doing enough to stop fake clicks on ads. Bloomberg mentions that “Facebook Inc. can block bots from viewing and clicking on ads but the social-media company isn’t doing enough to stop it, web analytics firm Method Media Intelligence found”. Since Facebook charges advertisers for ad views and clicks, it is ultimately benefiting from this situation. “An investigation by MMI revealed that Facebook makes it easy for bots to log in, view pages and click ads”, the article mentions.
From the Cambridge Analytica data scandal to numerous cases against Facebook regarding combating fake news, social responsibility lies in a digital platform enhancing its monitoring tools to protect users’ interests. After all, millions of users rely on Facebook and other digital platforms as safe places for free speech, and those platforms are being used to start movements leading to change. Beyond short-term monetary gains, the long term gain is much bigger and more effective. | https://medium.com/@zeinawnasser8/on-digital-platforms-social-responsibility-facebook-and-fake-news-91b0aa40d537 | ['Zeina Nasser'] | 2020-12-04 11:29:20.456000+00:00 | ['Digital', 'Misinformation', 'Algorithms', 'Fake News', 'Facebook'] |
Here are some of the historic firsts of Biden’s incoming administration Here | Here are some of the historic firsts of Biden’s incoming administration Here
Since winning the election, Biden has made moves to carry out his campaign promise of building an administration that looks like and reflects the diversity of America.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has already shattered a monumental barrier by becoming the first woman elected Vice President.
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Here are other people who would be historic firsts:
First Black deputy secretary of the Treasury
Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo: Adeyemo currently serves as the president of the Obama Foundation. Adeyemo served during the Obama administration as the President’s senior international economic adviser, and also served as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the National Economic Council, the first chief of staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and senior adviser and deputy chief of staff at the Department of the Treasury.
First Hispanic American White House social secretary
Carlos Elizondo: Elizondo was a special assistant to the president and social secretary to the Bidens for all eight years of the Obama administration. He will be the first Hispanic American appointed to this position. During the Clinton administration, Elizondo served in both the White House and in the Office of the US Chief of Protocol.
First woman to lead the US intelligence community
Avril Haines: Haines would become the first woman to serve as director of national intelligence. Haines served as assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama. She chaired the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee, which is responsible for formulating the administration’s national security and foreign policy. Haines previously served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Avril was also legal adviser to the NSC. She served as deputy chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Biden served as chairman.
First Latino and immigrant as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
Alejandro Mayorkas: Mayorkas would be the first Latino and immigrant as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security if confirmed by the Senate. He was deputy secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. While at USCIS, Mayorkas oversaw the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was an executive action under Obama that protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation. President Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017 but was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court from doing so.
First woman as Treasury secretary
Janet Yellen: Yellen would make history as the first woman to serve as Treasury secretary. Yellen already made history as the first woman to have chaired the Federal Reserve, and did so from 2014 to 2018. She previously served for four years as the vice chair of the board, and president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for four years prior to that. Yellen was also chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999. | https://medium.com/@gesapw/here-are-some-of-the-historic-firsts-of-bidens-incoming-administration-here-25ac71475f13 | ['Gesap Maxcu'] | 2020-12-01 18:35:33.521000+00:00 | ['News', 'Administration', 'Trum', 'Biden', 'President'] |
Apple just told the world it has no idea who the Mac is for | The MacBook Air is dead, which is great news, but why are there two MacBook Pro 13" now? The only difference is one doesn’t have the touch strip, but why not just… call it the new MacBook air to alleviate confusion?
Adding an additional option, without the touch bar was a smart move. I was speaking with a number of friends on Slack during the event, who all said they’d buy the new Mac if you could get it with a normal function row. Then, Apple dropped this and they were interested. But as a final “fuck you” for those that get this, it has two less ports, slower memory and a worse GPU– and to add them back it’s basically the same price.
“The fact that Apple itself considered the MacBook Pro as a competitor to the MacBook Air shows it’s not really a Pro.”
-@lapcatsoftware
What video editors are going to do edits on a tiny touch bar below the screen? What DJ — like Apple demonstrated — wants to use a tiny touch bar to mix their music when the action is… on their screen?
The event also left Apple with a ton of bizarre loose ends. At the iPhone event in September, Apple told the world that headphone jacks were dead because wireless headphones are superior — so why is there a headphone jack on the Mac? Even worse, Apple has delayed its wireless headphones which were supposed to change the world.
From there, the questions just get even more ridiculous:
Why can’t you plug the Lightning headphones that come in the iPhone box into the new Mac? Why doesn’t the iPhone come with the right cable for the new MacBook Pro? Why doesn’t Apple make a screen that properly works with its own devices? Why did Apple highlight how great the Touch Bar is for Messaging, but didn’t even port most of the new iMessage features to macOS properly? Do I have to carry two pairs of headphones now? How do I charge my Lightning cable mouse? Why remove the HDMI port, a standard that’s still incredibly popular for plugging into TVs? Why remove the SD card, a popular slot for… creatives using cameras?
“Watching someone DJ with the top of a keyboard was just embarrassing, doubly so from the company that makes the iPad and as recently as this year’s WWDC showed off its ability to be used by blind people.”
Even worse, what took so long to get to this point? Many people have been waiting a year or more for a refresh, and this itself wasn’t even that notable.
The new MacBook Pro has a Skylake chip, not the Kaby Lake one that’s recently landed– if you look at benchmarks at the top-end it’s pretty clear something is wrong: the CPU in this MacBook Pro actually appears to perform worse than the older one.
CNET spoke to Apple’s marketing head, Phil Schiller, who said:
Marketing chief Phil Schiller, software engineering lead Craig Federighi and top designer Jony Ive explained, in exclusive interviews earlier this week, why the Mac matters. Since they say it’s so important to Apple, we asked them why it took four years, four months and 16 days to deliver what they call a “milestone” and a “big step forward” for its top-of-the-line laptops. “The calendar isn’t what drives any of the decisions,” Schiller says in a 90-minute briefing at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. “We challenge the teams to do great work and sometimes that great work can be done in one year, sometimes it takes three years… What we really care about is creating new innovations in the Mac and continuing the story that has really defined Apple for so many years.”
What does that even mean? It took four years to add a touch bar to the keyboard, which delayed any meaningful progress in the meantime? Apple’s customers are those that need powerful machines, but it delayed them infinitely for what amounts to a vanity project that the core demographic of Apple’s customers probably won’t even use.
This does, indeed, speak to the longevity of the machines that Apple sells: you can use a MacBook from 2012 right now and probably can’t tell the difference. But therein lies the problem — the company waited four years, then didn’t really deliver any real future-value other than it’s “new.” | https://medium.com/charged-tech/apple-just-told-the-world-it-has-no-idea-who-the-mac-is-for-722a2438389b | ['Owen Williams'] | 2016-10-31 13:34:47.393000+00:00 | ['MacBook', 'Apple'] |
Forecasting at scale with Facebook Prophet — a case study on its merits & limitations | Forecasting at scale with Facebook Prophet — a case study on its merits & limitations
Background
Time series forecasting is usually a complex task because the structure of already univariate data often contains many unobserved factors. Standard models such as ARIMA, or filters, e.g. Kalman Filter are complex models that often need tweaking which requires a rigorous understanding of the underlying theory.
Practitioners with good domain knowledge but little statistics know-how want to make use of machine learning and forecasting methodologies to inform their business decisions. So a number of software packages and libraries attempt to bridge this gap by offering automated solutions.
The aim of this article is to investigate a promising library by Facebook, called Prophet. The promise of Prophet is to generate forecasts automatically at scale.
Results
Unfortunately, the hopes that an engine can do reliable forecasts at scale without any interaction were too high, even under laboratory circumstances. After some tweaking, however, the library performs well and recognizes all the elements that were put into the test data. So with having a little knowledge on the domain, the library produces useful results
The case
To set things up, load the forecasting library, ggplot for pretty graphics and zoo for some time series magic.
Now generate the data. We will use 5 years of data with three different seasonal patterns and a changing trend after the first half of the time horizon.
Trigonometric functions can be used to generate seasonal patterns by recognizing that sin(2π/b) has a cycle-length of b. In other words, every b periods, the pattern repeats itself. We will use a yearly pattern (b=360), a monthly cycle (b=30), and a weekly cycle (b=7).
The trend will be lifted after half of the observation horizon to test whether the FB Prophet can figure this change of structure out. We will see, that it indeed does well on this challenge.
Other features that the prophet can capture are trend saturation and special events, such as holidays. But these will not be addressed here.
The model will be trained on the first four years of data. The fifth year of data is used to assess the performance of the model.
At first, we run Prophet without further information:
To create a forecast from it, a data frame that will hold the forecast needs to be invoked:
Fit of data and forecast (Image by author)
From the plot, it’s easy to grasp that the fit is improvable. The peaks of the seasons are not well captured. To get a better understanding of what is going on, let us look at the residuals:
Residual plot (Image by author)
The range of residuals is rather wide, and a clear structure is visible. So there is a component missing in the model. Let us try to specify the yearly seasonality explicitly:
Fit of data and forecast (Image by author)
Looks better, but still not perfect. Keep in mind,that the model data is produced without noise, so the model should be able to fit the data with almost 100% accuracy.
However, the residuals show a different issue this time:
Residual plot (Image by author)
This is a prime example why domain knowledge is important. Since we know the frequencies of the underlying data, we can specify it with the parameter period.
To do that, we set up the model without a seasonal component and add them manually:
Residual plot (Image by author)
This looks better, apart from the break that occurs around the trend change. However, there is still a structure in the residuals. The problem here is overfitting, which is induced by the parameter fourier.order. The standard value of this parameter is 10.
Prophet estimates the seasonal component using a Fourier transform. The underlying idea is that any arbitrary signal can be approximated with a sufficient number of sin curves. The Fourier order parameter specifies how many of them should be used here. Since we have created each component only with a single sin curve, the true order is 1.
So let us see what happens when we inform the Prophet about this aspect of the model:
Residual plot
The residuals look much better now, apart from the disturbance when the trend changes, but this is not surprising as it poses a sudden break for the nice regular pattern of the data.
Let us now look at the out-of-sample forecast to see whether the good fit of the training data set translates into a good forecast:
Real data (grey) and fit (blue) // (Image by author)
The forecast is now perfectly in line with the real data!
Take aways
Automated forecasting is a convenient feature for large scale business applications. However, these methods do not always work out of the box. We had to weave in a great amount of knowledge from the data generation process to create a good model fit.
Without these insights, the model was still useful, but nevertheless not exact, although the data generation process follows exactly the same logic of the data exploration method. | https://towardsdatascience.com/forecasting-at-scale-with-facebook-prophet-a-case-study-on-its-merits-limitations-b24a694dd7c7 | ['Konrad Hoppe'] | 2021-05-01 16:53:24.358000+00:00 | ['Fbprophet', 'Machine Learning', 'Time Series Forecasting', 'Statistics'] |
Implementing GraphX/Graph-frames in Apache Spark | Example
Find all the edges connected to Andrew
Find all incoming connection to Andrew
Determine the number of links coming out from Andrew using the outDegrees
Triangle Count Problem
This count column identifies how many triangle relationships the vertex is participating in.
The output shows that Andrew and Sierra have the maximum triangle counts, since they are involved in three kinds of relationships apply a PageRank Algorithm. It was originally started by Google’s founders to identify the most important pages on the Internet. The PageRank algorithm measures the importance of each vertex in a graph. Assume a scenario where one Twitter user has 10 important followers, and each of those followers has multiple followers in turn. This is to say that the PageRank algorithm considers each important follower a legitimate endorsement of the Twitter user and thereby gives a higher ranking to the user.
>>> pageRank = graph.pageRank(resetProbability=0.20, maxIter=10)
Here, we are calling the PageRank algorithm using the pageRank methods. It takes two attributes
resetProbablity: This value is a random value reset probability (alpha). maxIter: This is the number of times you want pageRank to run.
You can see from the original person’s schema that a new column has been added called PageRank and new column weight has been added to the original relationship schema. These both columns contributed to the PageRank score
What is the PageRank Score?
Let’s look at the weight: weight is the determining factor to calculate page rank
As you can see from the table William’s relationship with Andrew gets the maximum weight since it is unique. No one other than Andrew is a friend to William. By applying the Breadth-First Algorithm let’s find the shortest way to connect to the people. We are going to apply for BFS.
You might have often noticed LinkedIn telling you how far you are from any new user. For example, you will notice that a user whom you would like to connect to is a second connection or a third connection. This tells you that you are two vertices away from the vertex from where you are looking. This is one way of identifying how far a vertex is to another vertex.
Another example is finding the shortest path between two cities or two airports. Breadth-First Search is one of the shortest path-finding algorithms and it helps us identify the shortest path between two vertices.
Find the connection between Bob and William Since only Andrew is directly connected to William. So, for Bob to be able to connect to William.
What is the Shortest Path? How to Find it?
GraphFrames provides an API, called bfs(Breadth-first search), which takes a minimum of two parameters. Those are fromExpr: Expression to identify the from vertex. toExpr: Expression to identify the vertex.
graph.bfs(fromExpr=””Name=’Bob’””,toExpr=””Name=’William’””).show()
This shows the shortest path between William and Bob. It can be more practical if we try to find the real distance. You can replace people’s names with city names and find the shortest path. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/relationship-analysis-inspark-using-graphx-57ffcce8773f | ['Neupane Parlad'] | 2020-09-13 16:24:00.531000+00:00 | ['Apache Spark', 'Graphx', 'Data Science', 'Programming', 'Python'] |
Machine Learning Algorithms from Start to Finish in Python: Linear Regression | Machine Learning Algorithms from Start to Finish in Python: Linear Regression
Learn, Understand and implement the most important and fundamental algorithm in all of Data Science and Machine Learning.
Photo by Julian Ebert on Unsplash
Probably one of the most common algorithms around, Linear Regression is a must know for Machine Learning Practitioners. This is usually a beginner’s first exposure to a real Machine Learning algorithm, and knowing how it operates on a deeper level is crucial to gain a better understanding of it.
So, briefly, let’s break down the real question; What really is Linear Regression?
Linear Regression Definition
Linear Regression is a supervised learning algorithm that aims at taking a linear approach at modelling the relation between a dependent variable and an independent variable. In other words, It aims to fit a linear trendline that best captures the relationship of the data, and, from this line, it can predict what the target values may be.
Photo by Wikipedia
Great, I know the definition, but how does it really work? Great question! In order to answer the question, let’s run through a step by step process of how Linear Regression really operates:
A trendline is fit to the data(as illustrated above). The distance between the points(the red dots on the figure being the points, and the green line being the distance) is calculated, and then squared, before they are summed(The values are squared to ensure that negative values do not produce an incorrect value and hinder the calculation). This is the error of the algorithm, or better knows as the residual The residual for the iteration is stored Based on an optimisation algorithm, the line is slightly “shifted” so that the line may fit the data better. Steps 2–4 are repeated until a desirable result is reached, or the residual error has decreased to zero.
This method of fitting a line is known as Least Squares.
The math behind Linear Regression
Note: Feel free to skip this part, as it unfortunately does contain some bizarre-looking LaTeX. However, if you want to really understand what is going on, I suggest to risk it for a biscuit and continue reading!
Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash
The Linear Regression algorithm is the following:
Photo By Author
Which can be shortened to:
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The following algorithm will basically do the following:
Take in a Y vector(the labels of your data,(house price, stock price, etc..))
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This is your target vector and will be used to later evaluate your data(more on that later).
2. Take in a matrix X(the features of the data):
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This is your data’s features, i.e Age, Gender, Sex, Height, etc. This is the data that the algorithm will actually use to make predictions. Note how there is a feature x0. This is called your intercept term and is always equal to 1.
3. Take is a vector of weights, and transpose them:
Photo By Author
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This is the magic bit of the algorithm. All your feature vectors will get multiplied by these weights. This is known as a dot product. Essentially, you will be trying to find the best combination of these values for a given dataset. This is known as optimisation.
4. And get a vector of outputs:
Photo By Author
This is the prediction vector that is outputted from your data. You can then use this to evaluate your model’s performance by using a cost function. | https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-algorithms-from-start-to-finish-in-python-linear-regression-aa8c1d6b1169 | ['Vagif Aliyev'] | 2020-10-24 09:36:23.461000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Visualization', 'Algorithms'] |
“When this COVID mess is over, we need to get together!” | “When this COVID mess is over, we need to get together!” I will bet that we all have had many similar conversations with friends and relatives. For me, the frequency of these has increased since the vaccine announcements, and some now suggest tentative dates.
I will need months to honor all these promises. The sheer number of engagements we have all planned will mean busy restaurants and mandatory reservations. Highways and parking lots will be more crowded, but we will welcome all that cheerfully.
Or will we? This morning, my mind took a pessimistic turn. Is it when or if?
Consider all the mask deniers we still have. Add that we don’t know how long the vaccine will remain effective and that the virus has already mutated and will mutate again. And then, of course, we have all the people who will refuse to be vaccinated.
Is it almost over? | https://medium.com/family-and-love/when-this-covid-mess-is-over-we-need-to-get-together-99136545bf4 | ['Anthony Lawrence'] | 2020-12-26 11:14:53.892000+00:00 | ['Masks', 'Vaccines', 'Friends', 'Covid 19', 'Family'] |
Peut-on aimer librement? | in In Bitcoin We Trust | https://medium.com/@thoriq-yahya/peut-on-aimer-librement-c6650e6a35f9 | [] | 2020-11-22 13:35:30.685000+00:00 | ['Forbidden', 'Love', 'LGBT', 'Poème'] |
1. H&M | Best Fashion brands
1. H&M
This brand was first founded by Erling person in 1947. He opened his first shop in Sweden. Shop called Hennes (Swedish for hers).
H&M is a multinational clothing company. This brand is popular in many countries because of its unique and trendy fashion. this brand sells their clothes with high quality.
H&M Sell clothes for Men, Women, teenagers, and children. People like their brand because of their outstanding and fabulous stuff.
2. ZARA
Zara is a girl named called radiance. ZARA is a brand of Spain.
It is also a multinational clothing, accessories, shoes, bags company.
It's popular because of its fashion. This brand Is unique because it changes its design every two weeks while other brand changes to design in 2 to 3 months. people invest their money in this brand because their stuff is durable as well as comfortable
3. NIKE
This company was founded on January 25, 1964, as blue ribbon sports. this is an American brand this brand was first introduced by Bowerman and Phill knight then officially become Nike.
Nike is famous for its clothes and shoes. this company sells their products in 170 countries.
4. FOREVER 21
FOREVER 21 is an international American brand and its headquarters is in Los Angeles, California. It was first founded on 21st April 1984. forever 21 is a fashion brand. It began as the store called fashion 21. This brand is very popular for its latest and trendy clothes, accessories, shoes. This brand operates more than 550 stores in 27 countries.
5. ONLY
Only is an international brand and is a leading brand of Europe. It was first founded in 1975. Its headquarters is in New york city. This is a clothing brand and famous in 1980s for its denim jackets.this brand have beautiful jeans, jackets and many more.they have unique collections and people love them. | https://medium.com/@savitarana5099/1-h-m-dc233892f403 | ['Savita Rana'] | 2021-12-17 12:59:10.640000+00:00 | ['Clothing', 'Brands', 'Lifestyle', 'Fashion', 'Zara'] |
The Road to Revenue | The Road to Revenue
Louise Daw, Strategy and Innovation Adviser at Hexagon Mining, shares tips from her journey about raising revenue without diluting your company.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
The path to taking your business idea to generating revenue doesn’t have to be a long journey. In fact it should be as short as possible. Before starting my own business I sought advice from people who had been there and done that and the key takeaway was don’t dilute. Just don’t do it.
It left me thinking how can you possibly build a product and take it to market without raising capital because ultimately that’s what you need to generate revenue….or is it?
You are the capital: You have started a business, that means you have an idea, you are self-motivated and you are looking at how to solve the problems your industry faces as opposed to just working around them. That knowledge is worth something, so in the early days use it to generate revenue. My co-founder and I generated revenue from day one by using our industry knowledge to consult to businesses who would ultimately become our first clients. This revenue allowed us to fund product development. The model also opened doors to potential clients all over the world as we built our reputation as thought leaders in the industry. Be Creative: Being focused on the end vision may mean you miss the opportunities to realize revenue along the way. No development project should be longer than 12 months before some aspects can be commercialized. If it requires longer, then rethink how you are taking the product to market. Be strict with this rule. The element of our product that would differentiate our business required a lot of capital, time and resources to complete. By breaking the development of the project into modules we could meet client needs in stages. Each module was commercialized immediately and generated reoccurring revenue for the business. It took seven years to build our vision but we generated revenue within 6 months of starting. Collaborate: Expanding on the point above you may not be able to build all you need in the timeframe required so find partners who can. Building relationships with other businesses who have mutually beneficial interests can completely change how rapidly you can get product to market. Our solution needed analytics but it’s a red ocean and we didn’t want to spend time building an analytics engine. We found an Analytics business who had a great product but was looking for new customers, we resold their solution to our clients delivering them value whilst buying our business valuable time to complete the additional features our product needed. Educate Yourself: Ignorance is hazardous. You may have the ‘Idea’ and know how to run a business but not understand the technical aspects of building the product, or perhaps you understand the technical but are not interested in the financials or marketing. Making the effort to understand the basic mechanics of all aspects required to run your business is essential. Managing costs and ensuring time is not wasted unnecessarily is a must from day one and the only way you can do that is by taking the time to educate yourself.
Using the above tips we managed to bootstrap our business for the first 5 years without dilution or debt. This changed the narrative entirely when we went for seed funding as we already had products, clients and a strong history of revenue. We controlled the narrative and found the best investors for our business without ever coming close to giving up a majority of ownership.
Louise Daw is the founder of the MiPlan mining software company which was acquired by Hexagon in 2017. Louise remains at Hexagon as an Innovation and Strategy Advisor, is a board member for INX Software Pty Ltd and mentors several startups.
Her extensive experience in the software industry and MiPlan journey resulted in being named Ernst Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year (Western Region) in 2017. Louise has worked with some of the worlds largest software firms responsible for product design and delivery, go to market strategies for new product lines and solution implementation.
Louise holds a Bachelor of Commerce (IT and ECommerce) from Curtin University. She is ITIL certified, a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a proud Springboard Alumni. | https://medium.com/been-there-run-that/the-road-to-revenue-82a6087f17f0 | ['Springboard Enterprises'] | 2020-11-20 14:41:32.497000+00:00 | ['Women In Business', 'Investment', 'Revenue Management', 'Entrepreneur', 'Raising Capital'] |
Discovering the “Story Cubes” | Last month I discovered the Story Cubes while navigating on my Instagram feed. One of the users I follow, @peregrinogris, started the #100dayproject using this kids toy that boost creativity.
Fright, Animalia and Mythic dices packs
They are basically packs of themed dices that you roll to create stories. It’s recommended to mix dices from different sets to generate an interesting story. Another tip is to start by writing 100-words stories. Constraints are another way to boost creativity.
What the creators say:
We started out making a creative problem solving tool combining evocative symbols and story making to fire the imagination. It has evolved into a universal story generator, satisfying an almost tribal need for storytelling.
People say that reading is a great way to improve your writing, and since I’m happy with my recent read habit reinforcement (thanks to 1984 and Creativity Inc.), the next step is to start writing more again.
Dices rolled by @peregrinogris
My plan is to start writing 100-word stories each day and post a weekly article with them. I already ordered this pack on Amazon!
Update: I already wrote my first stories
Never settle. | https://medium.com/the-web-is-the-platform/discovering-the-story-cubes-d3d9f5fa8ce6 | ['Fernando Agüero'] | 2016-06-12 21:11:11.428000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Creativity', ' first stories', 'Storytelling'] |
Consumer response drives the growth of hemp and CBD markets | The legalization of hemp and CBD via the 2018 Farm Bill was a huge symbol of CBD’s mainstream acceptance in the U.S. Yet legislation and consumer response are two very different things. The immense creativity now being shown in the creation of CBD products is ultimately driven by consumer demand. With the market for hemp-derived CBD expected to grow to $22 billion by 2022, a variety of events and media outlets are emerging to join in the gold rush.
With major U.S. states legalizing both CBD and cannabis, the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill, the explosion of creative CBD product development and the enthusiastic response of consumers from all walks of life, it should be no surprise that the CBD market is expected to grow dramatically. One market prediction expects the hemp-derived CBD market to reach $22 billion by 2022. Such numbers may sound overly optimistic but there are good reasons to believe current projections remain low.
The boom has just begun
For example, one often sees media coverage about new CBD products being undercut by comments about the lack of research. So what happens if in a few years, when time-intensive peer-reviewed research is complete, researchers find the results are as dramatic as families and medical people are reporting from around the globe? And what happens if major media figures and popular natural health advocates that drive sales of supplements come on board? Since one might reasonably expect both to happen, that means exponential market growth is quite likely.
There was already a strong creative wave of CBD-products before the 2018 Farm Bill. Almost every delivery method is now available including lotions, drinks and edibles, vapes, coffee and supplements. One can purchase CBD power to add to one’s cooking. Even bars and restaurants are creating new concoctions that delight their customers.
But a true industry has many facets and pathways to success that go beyond products alone. CBD and hemp media is a new sector of the media industry that is growing organically in response to the CBD boom. Business events and conferences are also growing along with the rest of the CBD industry. Examples include a new industry publication called PotNetwork and a variety of events organized by both commercial and non-profit organizations.
Industry media outlets
PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. (OTCMKTS:POTN) is best known for its unique line of hemp-derived CBD products available through wholly-owned subsidiary Diamond CBD. Its latest news in CBD products is the Brain Chill CBD Slushy machine which is likely to keep its reputation for unique product creation front and center. POTN’s extensive background in the industry also set the stage for a new offering from another wholly-owned subsidiary, PotNetwork.
PotNetwork’s Brain Chill CBD Slushy machine is its latest unique CBD product.
PotNetwork News launched as a website featuring news from across the larger CBD, hemp and cannabis industry. However, this new digital media outlet is going analog with an even newer media product, a print magazine called PotNetwork. For PotNetwork Holdings, such an industry publication will greatly strengthen their profile on many fronts as an industry leader.
Industry events
Another industry media outlet, Hemp Business Journal, is focused on the many uses of hemp. Its business events page reveals the growing range of conferences and summits related to the hemp industry. Such events include Organic Hemp Innovations in Denver, Balkannabis in Athens, Greece and the Expo West CBD Summit in Anaheim, California. While conferences can be a big business in and of themselves, nonprofits are also getting involved.
Organic Hemp Innovations is one of many events sponsored by the Industrial Hemp Research Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to hemp-related research and education. Though not a business, such organizations are key to any new industry for legitimacy and information. For hemp and hemp-derived product businesses, the Industrial Hemp Research Foundation helps bring consumers and entrepreneurs together as well as providing research to support further development.
Scratching the surface
The above examples of media outlets and industry events only scratch the surface of what is happening in the cannabis industry as a whole. And what is happening now indicates even larger possibilities ahead for hemp and hemp-derived CBD products. If one feels overwhelmed by the sheer amount of activity, much of which is driven by entrepreneurial energy, then it is time to educate oneself about what the industry has become and where it is going. Beyond simply familiarizing oneself with the growing range of hemp-related products, investors and future entrepreneurs can also now turn to industry-specific publications and events for further networking and education. | https://blog.markgrowth.com/consumer-response-drives-the-growth-of-hemp-and-cbd-markets-d4c2da40ede7 | ['Angelique Moss'] | 2019-11-06 04:46:49.447000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Growth', 'Mark Growth', 'Consumerism', 'Cannabis'] |
How to Emotionally Prepare for Election Day, No Matter the Result | How to Emotionally Prepare for Election Day, No Matter the Result
Getting our emotional houses in order will serve us way more than refreshing polling data and doomscrolling social media.
Next week, the world will change. Or will it?
However the election goes won’t change that the three richest Americans — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg — own as a much as the poorest half.
That police violence is a leading cause of death for young Black men. That veterans of the war in Afghanistan are now watching their kids deploy to the same war. That this week an already-scorched California faces its highest fire risk so far in 2020.
That a plague has taken over 225,000 American lives, left millions unemployed, and closed nearly 10,000 small businesses.
Getting Trump out is crucial. But Joe Biden will only mildly reform capitalism, the political and economic system holding us back from true, lasting change.
But those facts don’t change how I feel. A part of me hopes something, anything will shift on Tuesday. The same part that wakes up every morning hoping all of this — Trump, the plague, climate change — was a nightmare. The same part that wants to get back to “normal.”
If I’ve learned anything through meditation practice, it’s that the mind is almost constantly leaving the present moment.
The boredom, the sadness, the anger, the anxiety is too much to handle. So the mind churns. About how things should be. How I should be. How things could’ve been. How things will be if I just do this or that.
No wonder racism is such a powerful political tool. The number one reason British people voted to leave the European Union back in 2016 was a lack of economic mobility. They didn’t think life was going to get any better the way things were headed.
Like Trump, the leaders of the Brexit campaign successfully channeled this discontent into blaming immigrants of color.
What do we do with this part of ourselves that wants a better future? Isn’t it normal and healthy to hope for the best?
It is. It’s how our minds work. It’s human.
The problem comes when we’re banking on some massive shift to change how we feel. Some deus ex machina that’s going to swoop in and fix everything.
Trump crawling back to Trump Tower never to be seen again. A vaccine wiping out coronavirus with the snap of a finger.
These fantasies distance us from the cold, hard, messy truth. They keep us out of the hot, sticky, muddy river that is what the poet Mary Oliver called our “one wild and precious life.”
But like any thought patterns, they’re information. They point out our needs right here, right now — if we just slow down enough to look at them.
“External, measurable outcomes all point to the internal, subjective experiences or feelings that we most want to have in our lives,” writes the professional coach Tripp Lanier.
In other words, our mind fantasizes about the future, but our emotions point to what we need right here, right now.
What would it feel like if Trump loses? What would you do, right now, if a coronavirus disappeared?
Psychotherapists call this exercise “the Miracle Question.” They have clients imagine an ideal future. They ask what the clients would feel if that future happened. Then they connect those feelings to actions that can be taken in the present.
I don’t know about you, but if Trump loses in a landslide, I’d feel a lot. I’d feel free, motivated, fully alive, safer, connected.
So, what can I do today, regardless of the circumstances, to feel that way?
Who can I call or text, right now, to feel connected? What tough conversation am I avoiding? (Because there’s always at least one.) What hike have I been longing to do? How can I engage in local politics beyond Tuesday?
Bottom line: Getting our emotional houses in order before Tuesday will serve us way more than refreshing polling data and doomscrolling social media. | https://medium.com/curious/how-to-emotionally-prepare-for-the-election-no-matter-the-result-b681330cb7f6 | ['Jeremy Mohler'] | 2020-10-29 17:24:03.483000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Mindfulness', 'Life', 'Trump', 'Psychology'] |
What is the point in responding to a tweet by Trump? | What would Twitter be without Trump raging about political enemies, bragging about his success or tweeting random comments while watching Fox & Friends? We all would be back to re-tweeting cat pictures.
We all are going crazy when it comes to the latest Trump tweet. Some even set Twitter alerts and use pre-written responses to be among the first to reply. But where is the point in responding to his tweets? I think there are at least two groups of people replying.
The first group consists of those naively thinking the president would actually dig through the flood of mentions. And we are talking about a hell of a lot of mentions! Even if there is no recent tweet from @realdonaldtrump this account receives about 60–100 replies. Per minute and around the clock! And this number easily triples the moment he dropped a tweet. Supporters, “Best President Ever”-bots (have you ever noticed that these tweets mostly come from users in foreign countries?), haters, comedians, democrats, activists, journalists — the whole internet jumps into a huge and messy discussion about impeachment, indiction and the 2020 election. His mentions have turned into an ongoing noisy chatroom with thousands of people quarreling at the same time.
Assuming Donald Trump sleeps for an average of 8 hours he has around 28.800 to 48.000 mentions waiting in his Twitter account by the time he wakes up! Even if he would just fly over all of them it would roughly take him ten hours per day. I hate to break it to you, but Donald Trump will very likely never read any of your replies. And since a federal judge declared Trump’s favorite strategy of blocking his critics as unconstitutional you won’t even get the fame for being blocked by the President of the United States any longer (even though Stephen King still seems to remain blocked).
Anyway, you will get a lot of attention of others following Trump — especially if you are among the very first people to reply to his tweet! Prepare yourself for a lot hatred from impeachment-activists or #MAGA fanatics (depending on your reply). But you will get a lot of interactions, that is for sure!
And that is exactly the motivation of group number two: Getting their share of the Twitter-fame! Replying to Trump within the first few seconds gains the most attention of his followers (58 Million!) and is one of the most effective platforms for self-promotion! As The Atlantic notes, it is prime media real estate. Many people even set their Twitter App’s mobile notification solely for Trump’s tweets to be among the first to reply, because surfing the Trump Tweet Wave is the golden opportunity to raise your tweet’s impressions and engagements to tens of thousands within the first minute!
However the real intentions of those who frequently race for the first reply are highly questionable. Do they really want to argue with Trump (unlikely) or (more likely) simply take advantage of the attention? This phenomenon fuels a parasitic economy in which people compete to ride Trumps digital coattails. They obsessively re-tweet, analyze, comment and attack. This helps Trump tremendously by focusing massive attention on his agenda while this also makes him seem larger than life. This again produces a cognitive effect called the “focusing illusion” and it helps explain how Trump ascended from political clown to the presidency. It’s a double-edged sword and we all should question ourselves whether we really want to change the fate of this country or put us in a spotlight out of vanity. | https://medium.com/@crankydan/what-is-the-point-in-responding-to-a-tweet-by-trump-1eea47ba447c | ['Daniel Van Moll'] | 2020-12-25 14:53:07.986000+00:00 | ['Twitter', 'Donald Trump', 'Social Media', 'Politics'] |
The problem with politics and the ideal politician | The national elections that was held on July 7 in Greece as well as the previous European elections and developments in the USA have troubled me about the state of politics both in my country and in general. That is why I intend to express my views on how one should go about being a good politician , what is happening in modern politics and how it can be changed.
First of all, politics is something that exists from the moment people were organized into a society. Since ancient times, there have been many philosophers, thinkers and writers who have wondered what the right politician should be. Of course, this is somewhat subjective, depending on each society, but some conclusions can certainly be drawn. It seems that the most important characteristic of a politician is to aim for the common good.This, of course, is as follows: someone involved in politics should not aim to serve personal interests (for example, pass laws in Parliament in order to be paid by a company), but do what is in the best interests of the people.Of course, he should not ignore the will of the people because he believes that what he is doing is right, but to listen to them and take his own will into account. Even when he does something that the people do not like, he must be willing to take political responsibility and whatever that entails (possibly even resignation). The politician is first and foremost a role model. It is not possible for someone who uses vulgarities and insults against other people to be considered a good politician.Because of course there will be disagreements, but it is the politician’s job to disagree with subtlety and to respond with logical arguments , not with emotion (such as “those who want the best for our country and are patriots know what they will vote for” recently heard by an MP of a neighboring country) but not with personal confrontations and insults (as unfortunately was heard in our Parliament by the Prime Minister and the leader of the official opposition).The politician must be willing to change his mind, if his own mistakes are proven, or if new facts emerge, he must reconsider them. He has a duty to be open to discussion and to acknowledge the validity of other point of views. Finally, it is necessary to serve the truth and not partisan interests, which harm the country in the long run.
Of course, the current situation is generally the opposite. Apart from the example of insults, it is clear that the majority of politicians serve their own interests. In fact, they do not hesitate to use lies and empty promises to achieve their re-election. Moreover, the Greek parliament has more members than several European countries, although it has a similar or smaller population, which is a sign of an unhealthy amount of corruption.
Proportionally, Greece has the largest number of MPs than any other country, but without feeling better represented. So this is an indication that there is a fundamental problem with this political system, which as mentioned before is probably corruption (because the politicians could lower the number if they wanted to, or try to stop the patronage which is widely spread and rooted in the greek mind) .The american system also seems very corrupt on the premise of having lobying being so widely available and almost a prerequisite to run. Politicians, on the other hand, often try to manipulate the people and keep them ignorant, so that they do not know what is in their best interest.Typical proof of this position is the education system or rather the changes applied to it. Almost every time a minister of education changes in Greece for example, the education system changes, and even the nationwide university exams, which are the most important part of it for many students (since it allows admission to universities or technical colleges), change fundamentaly and in a short time (such as replacing latin with sociology).In other countries, the education system is fool of propaganda , especially in the Balkans and in the USA .However, it is not only education that keeps the people in ignorance but also the media, which succumbs to interests of politicians too often and does not defend open and fair discussion( prime example is the media in the USA, which is very polarized about the parties. In Europe, it is a problem too but definetlely not to that extent) and lastly too much bureaucracy, which prevents citizens from understanding the ways the state operates.
Of course, the most important factor that citizens remain unaware of is that they themselves do not seek to know about political events, a phenomenon known as apoliticalization. To some extent, apoliticization exists in every country, but here in Greece it is on the rise( I believe it happens to other countries too,but I can only speak about Greece with certainty). Usually most people who are not involved in politics (that is, they do not vote) are people with skills and critical thinking who are frustrated with the current situation and do not think that their vote matters. Thus, they let others decide their fate .And it is true that the political situation in most countries including Greece is not healthy as already mentioned, but this is not a reason for the citizens to stray away from voting. Simultaneously with this phenomenon, in Greece there is the brain drain (ie people who are educated here, usually quite specialized and with a high level leave abroad) and so the country loses remarkable people who could be involved in politics. Strengthening the wrong politicians is a logical consequence. Furthermore, many people decide to vote without this meaning that they are voting in the right way. Let me explain myself: under normal circumstances, people vote after carefully checking and examining the candidates (apart from the European and elections, unfortunately, most of whom vote for the party just like the american elections) and after taking into account their own interests and those of the social group to which they belong. However, mainly in Greece and the USA and in some other countries, there is a tendency for many people to vote partisanly or based on the patronage system and therelation it creates with the politician. In other words, they have blind trust in the party and do not think about whether they agree with its policy (of course this is best done in the US, with bipartisanship and blind trust in the two major parties).Others are even worse, either because they are manipulated or because they are frustrated with all the parties, they become fanatised and turn to the extreme parties. In this way, they contribute to the representation of these parties in Parliament and to promote these ideas. In conclusion, a fairly large percentage of population that belongs to the electorate either leaves abroad or does not vote, while a significant percentage of those vote incorrectly either show blind trust in the party or are extremely fanatical in Greece. as in other countries.
It is obvious that such a situation should be corrected, but the question is how to improve the political system . Unfortunately, as in other matters, it is impossible to change the mentality of society (at least without the use of the media, which would not renounce the interests of themselves and politicians, who often favor ignorance and lack of critical thought). But that doesn’t mean nothing can be done to improve the situation. A person realizing how to vote and exercise the right to vote is a— albeit small — gain. It may not bring about mass change, but only if it is done by several people, some results will begin to show. Of course, it’s best to influence a lot of people through articles and speeches and of course by appearing in the media (if that’s possible). As we find ourselves in a world with parliamentaries democracies, it seems necessary for someone to form a party in order to be able to influence decision-making.Therefore, it becomes necessary to encourage those who are really worthy of engaging in politics. However, there is not much that can be done to bring those who deserve it to power, except for the right vote and the capability of them becoming candidates(its their choise after all).So, we, the citizens, need to wake up as many of our fellow citizens as possible and pressure the politicians in any way we can, either through protests (which, of course, did not seem to be very successful in recent years) or even better to combine them with our vote, as this is the main interest of many politicians and they will be forced to pay attentiont and cater to it.
Of course, all solutions presuppose the activism of even some citizens, in order to try to improve the conditions. Only the society of active citizens can contribute to the awakening of the people, as the perception has prevailed (to citizens and politicians) that the state belongs in the ruling party or parties, a dangerous perception, which is the cause of most arbitrariness and it is being reinforced by the media. So, although the mentality of the citizens as a whole is not very likely to change, we must try with all the means at our disposal. | https://medium.com/@ChristosPapadopoulos/the-problem-with-politics-and-the-ideal-politician-96f60115464e | ['Christos Papadopoulos'] | 2020-04-04 21:57:58.099000+00:00 | ['State', 'Elections', 'Greece', 'Politics'] |
Does data make humans beautiful? | Does data make humans beautiful?
UX Design for Cybernetic Applications
Figure 1 @lilianpereir on unsplash
Corporation ‘X’ thinks there is a huge market for a new product in endurance sports such as swimming, biking, and running. How should they design one? Determining ‘Worth’ is a great place to start. How important would the product be to society?
Product Worth.
Let’s conjecture why most people participate in endurance sports, including all the training it requires. Do they want to…
A. Become a professional athlete?
B. Grow into a healthier and more beautiful versions of themselves?
C. Socially engage others, including obtaining acceptance and personal meaning?
D. All of the above?
Assuming some or all of these are important to a lot of people, then a product could have significant worth.
The worth could be demonstrated to them by revealing the beauty of how they use data to achieve more.
The human and data are working together to reach an optimized performance, which feels brilliant. Think of the last time you ran faster, felt strong and beautiful, and posted your performance to a social application?
Should data be designed Intrinsically or Extrinsically?
Photo by Natasha Connell on unsplash.com https://unsplash.com/photos/byp5TTxUbL0
We have at least two options for the design of a product: intrinsic and extrinsic data interaction. In short, data interaction can feel as if it is a natural part of our existence but it can also feel separate and outside of our existence. This is important because it determines how the product works with the human body as a means to measure, visualize, and suggest insights into how to become better versions of ourselves.
An Intrinsic interaction could be biologically integrated. This could be done perhaps by implanting an electrode that receives electrical signals from our brain [1]. An Extrinsic interface could gather data from sensors. This could be through contact the outside of the body [2].
Although we can assume that most people we talked to prefer extrinsic design, do you find intrinsic design unsettling? Why?
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Design for Humans and Machines
Art from undraw.co
Determining answers to how people will interact with the products the next step after we find out the worth of the product to people. This is because although the product may seem important to them it doesn’t mean it will make them feel its importance. There are many reasons for this. Much of it has to do with the human sensory system(s).
Designers need to determine how to relate digital processes to our brains. This is because they are essentially creating inputs by which we learn. These must match what we pay attention to which is principally driven by our sensory motor cortex and pain vs pleasure feedback [3]. This is done in our email and calendars when we quickly create appointments. Creating the appointment can take longer if we are using a mouse or finger to physically touch a device but we receive a sensory signal that it happened and thus they seem more extrinsic. This can even be true if we ask Siri or Alexa to do something. There is audio feedback. Less extrinsic interactions occur when we don’t have the sensory signal for the prompting of the calendar event creation. There is less perceived agency when the system asks us if we would like to complete the task based on the information it maintains about us. The question and confirmation make it sufficiently extrinsic.
What if the system had something distinct and seemingly independent about it such as making calendar decisions without asking us to confirm them and providing no notification of the occurrence? That is, when our own internal thought processes are automated in systems outside of ourselves.
At this point we simulate intrinsic design when we forget we are dispatching the externalized things, but the design is still inherently extrinsic, since it is removed from our body’s biological processes.
For instance, what if an application on your phone learned how you like to bank based on transfers you make, when you check your account, and maybe when you purchase things? Psychologically it diminishes a sense of agency or causality for the human and a greater awareness of the system.
What if your colleagues and friends were all doing the same thing? They relegated choices to electronic systems so that their calendars were no longer being planned on their selections but rather on their general preferences. Would these preferences change based on how the network’s preferences changed? This could lead to new and seemingly bizarre social patterns, especially if you didn’t have access to the system.
How should we arrange things that seem discreet and to exist independently of us? Should we feel physically connected? Should we only be able to sense them through some external cue whether through hearing, seeing, or feeling?
In the next discussion, we will form a hypothesis as to what product would create product worth: | https://uxdesign.cc/does-data-make-humans-beautiful-c3205c11d70d | ['Micah Tinklepaugh'] | 2020-06-25 21:33:16.332000+00:00 | ['Cybernetics', 'Triathlon', 'Visual Design', 'UX', 'Data Science'] |
Just How Toxic has the Internet Become? | When I began creating content on Youtube in 2018, I was well aware that I would be met with harsh criticism, after all, I am discussing prison, addiction and mental health. These topics are becoming less taboo, however, the haters online did not receive that memo.
As a content creator, I care deeply about what I do and how my subscribers feel about the content I put out. I want to hear from them, engage with them and understand how to better help within my niche as well. This can be very heavy and time consuming.
My channel currently sits at about 350,000 subscribers with an average of 1 million views per month. If I spent my entire day, just reading comments I would in no way be able to get to them all. Which in turn makes me feel awful because everyone deserves the same time and attention from me.
I was once told by a creator whom I respect dearly, to never read the comments. That advice is common among content creators, however, I wanted to create something different. I wanted to have a relationship with my subscribers, get to know them, understand their struggles and hear what they had to say. Over time this has become increasingly difficult.
One thing has always remained the same. The amount of negatively I receive daily. For me personally, I believe the good far out weighs the bad, however, that does not make living my life online any easier. I have received dozens of death threats, been told I am to fat, or to skinny, been told to take my own life and the list just goes on and on. It seems as though, trolling online, has become a full time job to some. Which begs the question, what is going so wrong in their life that they feel the need to attack strangers.
It would be foolish to take these comments to heart. They say more about the person writing them than they do myself. Nevertheless, I would like to understand how and why they seem so determined to bring others down.
Does this and ‘cancel culture’ go hand and hand? Are people just watching and waiting for us to make a mistake so we can be canceled at the drop of a hat?
When comedians, content creators, actors and influencers feel as though they have to walk on egg shells online, we all miss out. We are not getting an accurate representation of their lives which in turn doesn't help the average person with their mental health. Let me explain.
Phone addiction is a real thing. When we are on social media, it is natural to compare our lives to the lives we see online. However, that is just the highlight real you're seeing. Some do not post the hard times, their battles with mental health, possibly addiction, financial issues, struggles as parents or at work etc.
I am guilty of comparison as well. Seeing everyone's perfect pictures online made it so difficult for me to get the courage to share my experience in prison. The thought of telling the world that I had my first daughter in prison, was absolutely gut wrenching. I sincerely thought Youtube was for makeup, clothes, fun family vlogs and cooking. I had no idea that I had the power to make such an enormous impact, right from my phone.
One day, I pressed record. The first three months where very difficult. The hate came flooding in. Not just from the average ‘hater’ but from other content creators in my niche. Once a few creators decided they did not like me, I was devastated. I wanted to join the prison community and work together to help break down the stigma of addiction and prison.
I spent three months debating on quitting Youtube altogether. I ultimately decided that my message of hope, long term recovery and awareness was to important not share.
You might be wondering if there is a positive side to what I do. The answer is unequivocally, yes. Knowing I am making a difference is the only ‘reward’ I need. I also have an amazing group of like minded followers who are cheering me on everyday. They keep me going and are ‘with me’ in everything I do.
Creating content is not for the faint of heart. It comes with a lot of pressure, daily criticism, cruel onlookers, unnecessarily mean comments and a moral responsibly to have be a role model to those who look up to you. However, if done with passion and sincerity, Youtube can be an amazing place to find a purpose and a sense of self.
Youtube changed my life and allowed me to believe in myself again. I have my subscribers to thank for that. | https://medium.com/swlh/just-how-toxic-has-the-internet-become-c6bc8041e2ba | ['Jessica Kent'] | 2020-12-22 22:54:03.711000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Entrepreneur', 'Prison', 'Addiction Recovery', 'YouTube'] |
Benefits Of 3D Interior Design? | Wouldn’t it’s great if you’ll visualize how your space will appear as if before you really pack it together with your design ideas? Yes, certainly it might be. But, the challenge is, how does one set about accomplishing it? Worry not; it’s easy with 3D interior design. Though previously handmade sketches and 2D drawings helped with visualizations, the designs were abstract and this made people unable to know how the real-life space would appear as if within the end. Things began to vary with the birth of 3D interior design and now one can see the proposed plan wake up ahead of his/her eyes, even before the weather start falling in situ . And this is often not the sole benefit that you simply enjoy once you choose a 3D interior design; it’s tons more in its pocket. What are they? to seek out them out, inspect this blog.
What is 3D Interior Design?
3D Interior Design is that the process of designing and designing the inner space of any brick and mortar structure and visualizing the ultimate image of it during a three-dimensional form, i.e. with width, height and depth. In non-technical terms, 3D interior design gives a sensible view of the space from various angles with a transparent picture of all the small print like — What elements (such as structural components, furniture, appliances, etc.) space will hold, how they’re going to be (in terms of colors , textures, etc.) and where they’re going to be (position and angle) — all before the development of the space is even started.
What are its benefits of 3D Interior Design?
Easy visualization:
With 3D interior design, you’ll take a virtual walkthrough of your space and obtain a wholesome impression and a real visualization of its final image easily, even before the particular work starts. this is able to include the small print old all the structural and style elements, from floor to ceiling, which can fall in situ because the project begins unveiling. So, whether it’s a broad bookshelf, small window or narrow foyer, you’ll clearly understand where every single element are going to be and the way it’ll be — with an outcome one step closer to because it are going to be in your finished space. you’ll even have a glance at the aesthetic benefits also as technical aspects of the planning by closely examining the inside from every angle, which was a serious challenge with the 2D interior design.
Design flexibility:
Do you wish to undertake different colour combinations for your curtains? or Would you wish to ascertain how your long couch will look in your living room? or simply want to feature doors or windows to your kitchen? — Anything are often accomplished virtually with 3D interior design. It offers you the pliability of exploring various possibilities and trying out many design permutations and combinations for your space, like experimenting with various styles, colour schemes, textures, patterns, layouts, etc., all without physically shifting, moving or touching one element and at absolutely no cost.
Easy amendments:
3D interior designing provides a collaborative platform where you and your designer can work together to vary , add, remove, replace or shift elements (in a virtual environment) or items that don’t meet your requirements within the rough drafts or initial versions of the plan. Yes, with 3D interior design, you get unlimited opportunities to amend and improvise the planning for creating it fairer or more accurate as you envisioned it to be. For eg: if you don’t adore the supply of swinging door wardrobes in your bedroom, you’ll easily replace it with a door wardrobe or walk-in wardrobe of your choice in only a couple of minutes by having a fast call together with your designer . | https://medium.com/@studioar001/benefits-of-3d-interior-design-25b96c58a6ca | ['Ar Studio'] | 2021-01-18 22:03:09.280000+00:00 | ['Services', '3d Interior Design Studio', '3d Interior Design', 'Company', '3d Interior Rendering'] |
Progressive Democrats Should Abandon the Socialist Label | What is socialism? Well, the classical definition is ‘a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.’ Based on this definition, not one elected Democrat in either chamber of Congress is a socialist, not even the junior senator from Vermont and self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.
Instead, progressives within the Democratic Party align with a center-left position that has long been the dominant ideology in European politics — social democracy. Social democrats toe the line between capitalism and socialism. They have come to the rather sensible conclusion that each system has its strengths and weaknesses, and that a society is most stable and prosperous when the two are mixed. The result of this blending of economic systems is the creation of a social market economy. In a social market economy, the free market exists alongside the central government. It is the responsibility of the central government to provide expansive social services and to intervene in the market in order to maintain its integrity.
This economic system is the foundation of the post-1945 European success story. After all, it was the social market economies of Western Europe — whose creation was subsidized by American taxpayers through the Marshall Plan — which eventually prevailed against the socialist Eastern Bloc.
So, why do many progressive Democrats describe themselves as socialists? Is it ignorance? Is it stubbornness? Perhaps, given the Democratic Party’s leftward shift in recent years, progressives are no longer afraid of being characterized as radical by their Republican foes. Their acceptance of the socialist label is then an affirmation of what they believe is the true political ideology of the Democratic Party.
If this is true, then it is not only a mistaken affirmation, as well as a misguided one. Republican politicians and operatives are expected to rely heavily on the ‘Democrats are socialists and socialism=evil’ line in the 2022 and 2024 elections. By continuing to erroneously identify as socialists, progressive Democrats are needlessly giving their opponents ammunition in these upcoming political battles.
Though it seems unlikely at this stage, progressives should abandon the socialist label and proudly identify as social democrats. Not only would it be an accurate ideological descriptor, but it also might allow them to avoid the pitfalls which Republicans have planned for them in future elections. | https://medium.com/@nickbradford_55262/progressive-democrats-should-abandon-the-socialist-label-e82ab538decc | ['A.N. Bradford'] | 2021-08-15 06:31:28.111000+00:00 | ['American Politics', 'Bernie Sanders', 'Social Democracy', 'Socialism', 'Democratic Party'] |
Oil Politics and the theatre of absurdity | Oil politics was always a theatre of absurd and it couldn’t have become worse after the recent Israel UAE deal and President Trump getting nominated for the Nobel Peace award. What meets the eye is that this deal is an arrangement of convenience, it gives Trump something to talk of, before the Presidential election, Prime minister Netanyahu to ward off corruption charges, and UAE rulers to have the US on their side under threat of Democratic backlash. However, many believe that it’s also a realignment of the Middle East/North Africa politics, where Turkey and Qatar are on one side and UAE and Saudi on the other. Chinese investing big time in Iran makes the equation even more interesting.
In midst of all this, what is forgotten is the weakening financial power of Oil-producing nations. They have dominated world politics over many decades because of Petrodollar power. But the future appears bleak for them for many reasons. Most important of it is likely the declining demand for oil. If one has to believe Tony Seba of Stanford, Electric Vehicles are going to be the biggest disrupter. He predicts that by 2030, the demand of oil for transportation would decline by 30% and share of EVs will keep rising. To add to the misery, Covid has sort of advanced the crisis. Pandemic shaved off 30 million barrels a day of demand( broadly the output of USA, Russia, and Saudi Arabia put together ). We all know that even for Saudi Arabia any rate less than $ 80 a barrel would not support their national budget. So is the case with other oil-dependent economies. The biggest cartel of the world is finding it difficult to put its act together because of Iran getting a huge boost in form of investment from China and enough surplus in the US, the biggest consumer of Oil, from shale. To say the least, it will have a catastrophic impact on many economies but more importantly on the social fabric of countries dependent on oil money.
What is in store for India out of this current and potential crisis? It can be good as well as bad news for India. While on the economic front it’s no brainier that it will help us reduce our import bill. When the crude price tanked below $ 40, Indian Government smartly invested big money to fill up all its strategic oil storage ( 5 million tonnes +) and also entered into long term contracts. Yes, we are no match to what storage capacity China has but one believes that we have overall covered close to 90 days of nations requirement. Oil companies smartly jacked-up retail prices regularly to get revenue for the government which was otherwise struggling to meet two ends due to poor GST collections. What may come as a pleasant surprise is that low crude prices may last much longer than anticipated. While on the economic front it’s all good news, what worries me is the likely instability in the Islamic World due to potential economic crisis. On one hand, it will impact the employment market for Indians, on the other Fundamentalists will gain an upper hand in those countries. We know India will be their obvious target. We can’t rule out China acting as a catalyst.
Instead of bothering with what is not controllable, India needs to chart out its road map carefully. Developing Nonfossil based, especially renewable power generation is an obvious solution. But what will be crucial for its success is developing a Utility-scale battery storage system. Australia and the USA are front runners on this front. India must invest in its own indigenous solutions. We are land with a lot of sun and also wind but a better, more efficient, storage system will make renewable energy economically more viable. Fortunately, the capital cost of solar panels has come down drastically over the decade but so has the rate of solar power purchase. The country needs to find ways and means of getting more investment in this sector, by keeping it financially profitable. Having said that, make no mistake that usage of Oil can be avoided completely, especially in the transportation sector. As they say that cartel is born out of weakness, so we can hope that OPEC remains weak and we enjoy the benefit of low crude prices. | https://medium.com/@resham-cchhabra/oil-politics-and-the-theatre-of-absurdity-f509f0864e58 | ['Resham Chhabra'] | 2020-12-02 09:37:40.731000+00:00 | ['Crude Oil', 'Petrodollar', 'Oil', 'Middle East', 'India'] |
A Dear John To My Intel MacBook Pro | A Dear John To My Intel MacBook Pro
Dear 2017 13-Inch Intel MacBook Pro (Serial Number A96JJFFMQ150),
I have a confession to make. For the past four weeks, I’ve been tempted by another Mac. Who am I kidding? You’ve seen my browser history. Yes, I’ve fallen in love with the M1 Air.
…
Please! Let me finish.
I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on your Retina screen in that Best Buy all those years ago. You had the most beautiful Retina screen I’ve ever seen … way prettier than that 15-Inch MacBook Pro with her pretentious Touch Bar. My gosh! Your pixels were so tight! And your nits! Umph!
But I can’t hold back my feelings for Apple Silicon anymore. I …
It’s all YouTube’s fault! Engadget and The Verge! With their bloody subliminal messaging! Six more hours of battery life on a single charge! Geekbench 5 scores of 1,619/6,292! Stick a geek up your bench, you friggin’ jerkwads!!! No one cares about how fast you can scrub through your friggin’ videos!!!
No, I’m sorry, Intel Macbook Pro (Serial Number A96JJFFMQ150). It’s my fault. It’s not you; it’s me … What can I say? I’m weak!
…
No, she’s not prettier than you! Come to think of it, she looks exactly like you.
Ok, maybe she’s a little skinnier —
…
Not by a lot! Not by a lot!
…
No, I’m not tempted by another Pro. I’m not going to spend another $400 on a friggin’ fan.
…
Right, the M1 Air doesn’t have a fan.
Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash
…
No, Intel Macbook Pro (Serial Number A96JJFFMQ150), your fan is wonderful the way it is! It’s just …
Remember when I had a GoToMeeting with the guys at work, and I had to share my Chrome session because —
…
— That’s right, with the grumpy Brazilian guy. Anyways, your fan was whirring in the background, and it was driving everyone —
…
— Yes, I know you were running a lot of processes in the background!
…
No, I can’t switch to Safari if all the guys are using Chrome! Look, Intel Macbook Pro (Serial Number A96JJFFMQ150), I don’t want to talk about this!
…
What do I see in her? I don’t know. Everything is just snappier with her. Everything she does is just so … smooth.
…
No, I never said you’re slow, Intel MacBook Pro (Serial Number A96JJFFMQ150). I’m perfectly fine with how fast you perform my tasks. Why do you think I paid that bloody Apple tax for you?
…
No! I was thrilled with your purchase.
…
No, she’s not cheaper than you. Well, the M1 Mac Mini is … God, I’m tempted by the Mac Mini too! I’m a disgusting pig!
…
Yeah, I know I would need to spend an additional $150 on an Apple trackpad.
…
No, I love your trackpad! That’s one of my favourite things about you! | https://medium.com/the-haven/a-dear-john-to-my-intel-macbook-pro-9e6129154755 | ['Andrew Cheng'] | 2020-12-23 23:34:12.870000+00:00 | ['Gadgets', 'Humor', 'Satire', 'MacBook', 'Technology'] |
Solve Invalid username or password error. | Note:- Problem faced if you are using git through HTTPS.
Guys some time we clone or push or any activity on the GitHub account through the command prompt but every time it gives the same issue as the image.
After spending a single day I found a solution, and I am very happy to share it with you.
If you have enabled two-factor authentication then you can face the same problem as me. So if you are using git through HTTPS via command prompts then you should disable two-factor authentication. If you want to enable it, Then you should use git through the ssh key.
That’s it for this time! I hope you enjoyed this post. As always, I welcome questions, notes, comments and requests for posts on topics you’d like to read. See you next time! Happy Coding !!!!! | https://medium.com/@rajputankit22/solve-invalid-username-or-password-error-47639727450 | ['Ankit Kumar Rajpoot'] | 2020-12-20 11:34:11.218000+00:00 | ['Passwords', 'Github', 'Git', 'Invalid', 'Https'] |
Emotional Abuse | A Different way of looking at it”
(Note: I am using he and she. Depending on your sex, you may have to switch them for the sake of being able to relate to this story.)
Life is Sun and Surf
Imagine this scene. You and your spouse are out in the water in the ocean. You are enjoying yourself just standing there and she is nearby splashing around too. You are up to your shoulders, but comfortable and standing easily.
Then, for no apparent reason, she starts clawing at your arm, giving you scratches, swinging her arms around, hitting you in the head. She even pushed your head under the water on a couple of occasions, all the while shouting at you. Shouting, you’re not quite sure what.
Is this abusive? Sure could be!
Does this feel like abuse? Absolutely!
So, what’s going on?
Well, keep imagining the scene. Unbeknownst to you, all this time you’ve been standing there on the edge of a little shelf under the water, surrounded by really deep water. Meanwhile, she has been standing on a couple of rocks which just fell away. And, she can’t swim.
So, let’s look at that scenario again. A drowning person is not going to be very gentle in how they reach out to you. I remember learning this in Life Guard training. The safest thing to do is reach out with a pole or something, or you risk getting beat up and drowned yourself. And, don’t expect any rational calm description of the situation. She doesn’t even really know what just happened either. And now is not the time to calmly explain the situation to her, and how she should rationally work through this little issue we have.
She never knew it was just some rocks she was on or that you were standing on a stable shelf.
The way the relationship was set up was perfectly fine for you. It started out OK for her too. Less comfortable than you had it, less secure, but OK. She never knew that something better was even possible.
I was talking to two friends last week who used to term emotional abuse. I’ve been hearing this more often recently (Stay tuned for how this relates to COVID in a future blog.) | https://medium.com/@alexcarrysgh/emotional-abuse-415330d27387 | [] | 2020-12-19 23:53:01.283000+00:00 | ['Marriage', 'Spiritual Growth', 'Personal Growth', 'Psychology', 'Lifestyle'] |
Nurturing Individual and Organizational Creativity | Picture Credits — HBR
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous I don’t know,” said the poet Wislawa Szymborska in her Nobel acceptance speech. Having sat around in a school that laurels itself on the creativity of its students, I am inspired by the creative depth some of my friends have displayed in both their professional and personal spaces. Watching the stunning presentations & creative writing to well-designed work environments and bedrooms, I have often found myself thinking the question — Am I creative? If yes, what is my creative output?
There are two interesting books I came across recently when trying to learn about this elusive superpower — Creative Confidence by Tom Kelly and David Kelly and Loonshots by Safi Bahcall. Both are of the bestseller creed and impart essential lessons on nurturing a creative curiosity as an individual and preserving the creative edge in organizations which tends to fade as the teams grow and expand.
I’m confident that you’re familiar with most of these ideas and my objective would only be to reinforce them, and help with a realization if not an epiphany that you are well on to the road of creativity and need a push.
Creative Confidence
Tom and David Kelly, the authors, are brothers and founders of the design thinking pioneers — IDEO and Stanford’s d.School.
There are many ways to convince oneself of the mind’s creative limitations — no training or exposure, and in some cases, people blame it onto their genes. I can easily say that the last one is false — one of my favourite music artists, John Mayer, has parents who were both school teachers.
Then what’s the way to become creative and achieve creative confidence?
Guided Mastery
Coined by psychologist Albert Bandura, the process of ‘Guided Mastery draws on the power of the first-hand experience to remove false beliefs.’ Bandura designed this process to help people with their phobias in a stepwise and guided manner where they gradually moved closer to the object of their aversion — say a snake. The idea here is to avoid diving right into the expectations of creating your magnum opus but identifying the right steps to lead towards a tangible goal.
Bandura’s research shows that once people overcame one challenge, they ‘undertook tougher challenges, persevered longer and became resilient in the face of obstacles and failure.’
There are a bunch of insights you can act on:
1. Failure is okay
Early failure is almost always crucial to innovation. Many terms identify this phenomenon such as iterative adaption where failure and experimentation lead to new ideas and subsequent experiments. Discovery of some of the most critical drugs has come through failure and iterative adaptation. Even the Wright Brothers before making their ‘first flight’ practised at locations that would draw less media attention to their attempts.
2. Develop ‘Action Bias’, or cultivate a ‘Creative Spark’
All achievements are first actions. One great analogy of this comes from the Venture Capital industry. The industry funds a few ideas but is insistent on going through many pitches before deciding on which one to invest. They call it the ‘deal flow’ — how many startups get funded amongst those who pitched? The greater the deal flow, the more are the chances of making successful investments. Similarly, people should increase their ‘idea flow’ — thinking or exposing to more ideas will lead to acting on more ideas.
3. Use constraints for motivation:
Every team likes one more resource or more time or budget to complete a project. Tim Harford talks about this story of Keith Jarrett, once made to play on a piano that was ‘unplayable’, since the only other options were to find another piano or cancel the concert. The recording of that performance has become the best-selling piano album of all time. Constraints, in most cases, fuel creativity rather than stifle it, and it is always worth rethinking what the real constraints are and how they impact performance and execution.
4. Create an environment for yourself
‘The muses can be fickle.’
As much as we sometimes want to work on our passion projects, there are way too many hindrances that come in the way, procrastination being one. It is therefore vital to be conscious and motivated for your projects which you can do by feeding some natural stimulators in your environment or building a creative support network. At one of the IDEO offices is a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard in a restroom which acts as an informal forum of new ideas. Whiteboards and reminders are some of the ways you can use for yourself, and there are new productivity applications which are based on great insights to keep you on track.
Loonshots
The long list of non-fiction greats that begin with Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis eventually leads to Safi Bahcall. In Loonshots, Bahcall analyses the tendency of organizations to dismiss projects and its champions. While much literature talks about organization culture for either nurturing or stifling innovation and creativity, little is known about how structure plays an important role. Military, for example, is not an organization that is known for experimentation and encouraging its workforce to come up with new ideas and spend time on passion projects. At the same time, startups, on the other end, thrive on the supply of new thinking.
Broadly, people in the organization are either artists and soldiers and both groups have their importance, strengths, and weaknesses. In Steve Jobs’ second stint at Apple, he brought in Jony Ivy, the Artist and Tim Cook, the Soldier for their vastly contrasting strengths and he acted as the bridge between the two.
While individual creativity and innovation are essential, large organizations need several other skills to achieve the desired objectives. For example, a small group of researchers and doctors develop a drug, it requires different capabilities to take the medicine to the consumer, i.e. manufacturing, marketing, distribution etc.
These two short examples also explain the crux of the book.
There are three crucial rules in regulating your organizations to be the best mix of creativity and efficiency:
1.Separation of Phases
The artists need to function separately from the soldiers and not be affected by the culture of the other group. The organization also needs to watch its blind side and not lean on any one of the two while nurturing both equally.
2. Create Dynamic Equilibrium
The leadership needs to love both groups, of artists and soldiers equally. It must only manage the transfer and interaction between the two groups and not the object, i.e. technology, product etc. As the organization grows, the leadership should train and appoint champions to bridge the divide.
3. Spread a System Mindset
The organization needs to keep asking itself on the ‘why’ of the decisions and choices it makes and ‘how’ it can improve the decision-making process. Once the organization becomes consistent in answering these questions, it will find ways to improve.
It is a tragedy that most startups don’t succeed; the number of organizations that scale in India is also not particularly heartening
(there is a public policy case to be made there as well, but I’ll wait for some other day) due to the way they are structured.
I recommend both of these not only because of the hoard of insights they are, but the amount of trivia they throw at the reader along the way — pure joy. | https://medium.com/catch-me-if-you-plan/nurturing-individual-and-organizational-creativity-a2982b3b4379 | ['Aditya Batra'] | 2020-09-02 12:21:00.129000+00:00 | ['Creative Confidence', 'Productivity', 'Work From Home', 'Loonshots', 'Creativity'] |
Business Etiquette in Japan: How Not to Make an Ass Out of Yourself | If you’re a foreigner doing business in Japan, here are a few ways to build relationship while increasing your chances of success
Photo Credit : @Bantersnaps
Before any traveler sets foot in such a spectacular country, it would behoove him or her to become better acquainted with Japanese formalities. Doing so will not only broaden the traveler’s horizons, but also deliver a clear message of respect to business executives. To be clear, there is no set expectation from Japanese business members that a foreigner be 100% acquainted with tradition; however, demonstrating some familiarity in certain practices confirms genuine interest in the partnership.
Image by AKI HIGASHINO from Pixabay
Some blog writers inadvertently draw a parallel between the formalities of a business meeting to the rules and precise etiquette needed during Kyoto tea ceremonies. Take it from someone who has been engaged in international business for 20 years — it is not that complicated.
The ‘key’ (and what Westerners should keep in mind) is that Japanese Etiquette is based on being respectful, polite and courteous. This is true in both face-to-face encounters as is with Telephone and e-mail communications.
Leading up to the meeting, visitors should have provided an incredibly detailed and precise agenda to the Japan team along with soft and hard copies of the presentation. A piece of advice: rather than taking hard copies of the presentation on the plane, ship them ahead of schedule to your hotel. Doing so eliminates the possibility of ‘forgetting’ the deck in the shuffle of international travel preparations.
Late arrivals are unacceptable, yet, not always in our control. If this does occur, call 45 minutes to one hour before the set time, apologize and alert the Japanese team of the new expected arrival time. In the event time is on your side, arrive 10–15 minutes ahead of schedule.
Bonus: If you do not have Japanese speaking co-worker attending and feel a fluent speaker is needed, consider rendering the services of a Japanese interpreter.
Japanese Honorifics: San or Sama
When dealing with Japanese business counterparts, there are multiple Honorifics to consider (San, Sama, Kun, Dono, Chan) However, the most common two I have encountered are San and Sama
San (informal) is the equivalent of “Mr” or “Ms” in English. It has to be added right after person’s family name. San is most common and often said between coworkers and senior members. If two or more are in conversation and share the same title, they too use ‘San’.
Sama (formal) is considered very polite and respectable. This reference is more common in business. The foreigner may notice it being used when writing letters and meeting with customers/Sr. co-workers.
Business Card Exchange
During the meet-and-greet, the Japan side will introduce their team in order of importance. It is recommended to wait for all Japanese attendees to identify themselves before handing out business cards; not doing so places the visitor in a position where one could potentially give out a card to a Junior before a member of Senior leadership….a big no-no.
Now, the card handoff….
Unless your objective is to secure a position at a Las Vegas card table, do not, I repeat, do NOT deal, slide, flick, or throw your business card at any businessperson! The action is incredibly disrespectful to not only to the attendees, but also the company in which you represent (not to mention, you’ll look like a complete idiot).
Image by englishlikeanative from Pixabay
The proper hand off is using both hands, pinching the sides with the thumb/index fingers –writing side facing upright toward the receiver. What you may in turn see is a member of the Japanese team lowering their card underneath yours — a rather kind, humbling gesture. When the business card is passed to you, ensure the card is received with both hands and thank him/her for the exchange.
Do not ‘doodle’ on any of the business cards — this action is unacceptable and distasteful.
Most intra-Japanese companies will have double- sided cards. Japanese on front, English in the back. Although this is not a requirement for foreign visitors, it certainly adds a nice touch.
Note: when the meeting is over, make sure all cards are picked up, leaving none behind. NOT doing so is dismissing that individual and his/her role..
Attire
Gentlemen, wear a suit and tie… keep it simple! Black, charcoal gray, dark navy suits in combination with white shirts and a tie is the most favorable option. I strongly advise against wearing the ‘sad’ trifecta of black suit, black tie, white shirt as this is normally reserved for funerals.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Ladies, we too should keep it simple. Long skirts or trousers suits do provide a bit more variety than our male counterparts; however, we are to remain mindful of colors and loud patterns. As for accessories (i.e. high heels, jewelry), minimal is best. The same suggestions apply to make-up; make sure it adds to your beauty, not take away from it.
Photo by Mrs Zazou on Unsplash
Note: Japan experiences seasons — depending on the month of travel, don’t forget the rain or formal coat!
Greeting the Team
It is customary to bow as it shows appreciation and respect. Meeting attendees are to bow at the torso, roughly 30-degree angle. Big bonus if the visitor follows with “Ohayo Gozaimasu” (good morning), or “Konnichi Wa (good afternoon) makes it that much more expressive. During the bow, share your name and what your role is in the company.
Gentlemen, during the bow, keep your arms to your side. Ladies join your hands right under the belly.
Note: the Japanese have been known to ‘shake hands’ when dealing with foreign visitors. If that is the case, do not grasp his or her hand with bone-crushing power. The handshake of the Japanese may be less firm than that of our Western counterparts.
Meeting Room
Now that we have gotten though the greeting and exchange of business cards…where should you sit?
Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash
Seating arrangements are always pre-arranged — wait till you’re taken to where you are to be seated. Keep in mind all the teammates from the same company tend to be seated on the same side of the table. In some Japanese settings, furthest from the door is viewed as the seat of honor, whereas the least important person will sit closest to the door.
If the meeting is scheduled for an 11:00 AM start, 12:00 PM finish, respect the time allotted. The presenter(s) must use the time wisely, ensuring there is enough time for Q & A.
Note: During presentations it is not uncommon to see participants nodding. Nodding delivers a message to all attendees that you’re actively listening; it is a powerful non-verbal method to show engagement.
Silence should not be perceived as a negative. In the Japanese culture, there is no need to ‘force discussion’ to maintain conversation flow.
In other words, speak when spoken to or have something valuable to add. | https://medium.com/@essentialetiquette/business-etiquette-in-japan-how-not-to-make-an-ass-out-of-yourself-418aadee690d | ['Essential Etiquette'] | 2020-12-27 23:52:09.875000+00:00 | ['Etiquette', 'Japan', 'Love', 'Business', 'Japanese Culture'] |
A New Narrative Control Firm Works To Destroy Alternative Media | The frenzied, hysterical Russia narrative being promoted day in and day out by western mass media has had two of its major stories ripped to shreds in the last three days.
A report seeded throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials back in September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being “sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon” from Russia. A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by scientists and turned out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket. Neurologists and other brain specialists have challenged the claim that any US government workers suffered any neurological damage of any kind, saying test results on the alleged victims were misinterpreted. The actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that some government workers heard some crickets in Cuba.
Another report which dominated news headlines all of yesterday claimed that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (the same Paul Manafort who the Guardian falsely claimed met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy) had shared polling data with a Russian associate and asked him to pass it along to Oleg Deripaska, who is often labeled a “Russian oligarch” by western media. The polling data was mostly public already, and the rest was just more polling information shared in the spring of 2016, but Deripaska’s involvement had Russiagaters burning the midnight oil with breathless excitement. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall went so far as to publish an article titled “The ‘Collusion’ Debate Ended Last Night”, substantiating his click-generating headline with the claim that “What’s crystal clear is that the transfer to Kilimnik came with explicit instructions to give the information to Deripaska. And that’s enough.”
Except Manafort didn’t give any explicit instructions to share the polling data with Deripaska, but with two Ukrainian oligarchs (who are denying it). The New York Times was forced to print this embarrassing correction to the story it broke, adding in the process that Manafort’s motivation was likely not collusion, but money.
These are just the latest in a long, ongoing pattern of terrible mass media debacles as reporters eager to demonstrate their unquestioning fealty to the US-centralized empire fall all over themselves to report any story that makes Russia look bad without practicing due diligence. The only voices who have been questioning the establishment Russia narrative that is being fed to mass media outlets by secretive government agencies have been those which the mass media refuses to platform. Alternative media outlets are the only major platforms for dissent from the authorized narratives of the plutocrat-owned political/media class.
Imagine, then, how disastrous it would be if these last strongholds of skepticism and holding power to account were removed from the media landscape. Well, that’s exactly what a shady organization called NewsGuard is trying to do, with some success already.
A new report by journalist Whitney Webb for MintPress News details how NewsGuard is working to hide and demonetize alternative media outlets like MintPress, marketing itself directly to tech companies, social media platforms, libraries and schools. NewsGuard is led by some of the most virulently pro-imperialist individuals in America, and its agenda to shore up narrative control for the ruling power establishment is clear.
The product which NewsGuard markets to the general public is a browser plugin which advises online media consumers whether a news media outlet is trustworthy or untrustworthy based on a formula with a very pro-establishment bias which sees outlets like Fox News and the US propaganda outlet Voice of America getting trustworthy ratings while outlets like RT get very low ratings for trustworthiness. This plugin dominates the bulk of what comes up when you start researching NewsGuard, but circulating a plugin which individual internet users can voluntarily download to help their rulers control their minds is not one of the more nefarious agendas being pursued by this company. The full MintPress article gives a thorough breakdown of the yucky things NewsGuard has its fingers in, but here’s a summary of five of its more disturbing revelations:
1. The company has created a service called BrandGuard, billed as a “brand safety tool aimed at helping advertisers keep their brands off of unreliable news and information sites while giving them the assurance they need to support thousands of Green-rated [i.e., Newsguard-approved] news and information sites, big and small.” Popularizing the use of this service will attack the advertising revenue of unapproved alternative media outlets which run ads. NewsGuard is aggressively marketing this service to “ad tech firms, leading agencies, and major advertisers”.
2. NewsGuard’s advisory board reads like the fellowships list of a neocon think tank, and indeed one of its CEOs, Louis Gordon Crovitz, is a Council on Foreign Relations member who has worked with the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. Members of the advisory board include George W Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, deep intelligence community insider Michael Hayden, and the Obama administration’s Richard Stengel, who once publicly supported the need for domestic propaganda in the US. All of these men have appeared in influential think tanks geared toward putting a public smiley face on sociopathic warmongering agendas.
3. Despite one of its criteria for trustworthy sources being whether or not they are transparent about their funding, the specifics of NewsGuard’s financing is kept secret.
4. NewsGuard is also planning to get its news-ranking system integrated into social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, pursuing a partnership which will make pro-establishment media consumption a part of your experience at those sites regardless of whether or not you download a NewsGuard app or plugin.
5. NewsGuard markets itself to state governments in order to get its plugin installed in all of that state’s public schools and libraries to keep internet users from consuming unauthorized narratives. It has already succeeded in accomplishing this in the state of Hawaii, with all of its library branches now running the NewsGuard plugin.
We may be absolutely certain that NewsGuard will continue giving a positive, trustworthy ranking to the New York Times no matter how many spectacular flubs it makes in its coverage of the establishment Russia narrative, because the agenda to popularize anti-Russia narratives lines up perfectly with the neoconservative, government agency-serving agendas of the powers behind NewsGuard. Any attempt to advance the hegemony of the US-centralized power establishment will be rewarded by its lackeys, and any skepticism of it will be punished.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Ruling power’s desire to regulate people’s access to information is so desperate that it has become as clumsy and ham-fisted as a teenager pawing at his date in the back seat of a car, and it feels about as enjoyable. They’re barely even concealing their desire to control our minds anymore, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to wake everyone up to their manipulations. We need to use every inch of our ability to communicate with each other before it gets shut down for good.
______________________
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2 | https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/a-new-narrative-control-firm-works-to-destroy-alternative-media-6b6ba43dc8ce | ['Caitlin Johnstone'] | 2019-01-10 21:21:09.441000+00:00 | ['Media', 'Media Criticism', 'Politics', 'Propaganda', 'Journalism'] |
How learning a foreign language helps you learn to code | The road to becoming a software developer is a long and difficult one, especially for individuals like me who come from a completely non-technical background. I am a communication-oriented person. I have a passion for speaking foreign languages, immersing myself in foreign cultures, and trying all sorts of new food.
I am a humanities guy. A liberal arts guy. How did I learn how to code? My obsession with foreign language had a lot to do with it.
I grew up in Tampa, a beautiful city on the west coast of Florida with a rich Hispanic heritage. My ancestry is Scotch-Irish and my parents moved to Tampa around 30 years ago from North Carolina. My father worked in the famous Columbia restaurant where I remember eating chicken and yellow rice while watching flamenco shows at a young age.
Flamenco show at the Columbia Restaurant. Impressive and intense. Credit to columbiarestaurant.
Many of my friends in school grew up bilingual. I heard them speaking Spanish with their parents at pick-up time. It always fascinated me how they could communicate between themselves without me understanding. It was a certain power I didn’t have. It was like magic. Moreover, my best friend was Brazilian. When he spoke to his family in Portuguese, even my Spanish-speaking friends couldn’t understand. I remember promising myself in the 6th grade that one day I would be trilingual. My dream was to wield the magic of language.
Fast forward about 15 years.
I had accomplished my goal. I studied Linguistics, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American Studies, and Teaching English as a Second Language at the University of Florida (GO GATORS! 🐊). I spent time in Sevilla, Barcelona, and Rio de Janeiro during my language studies. As a post-graduation trip, I hiked up Machu Picchu in Peru.
My knowledge of foreign languages opened up so many doors for me. I connected with people from completely different cultures, regions, and perspectives. I chowed down on local delicacies: alpaca burgers, cow hearts, fried guinea pig, seared rabbit, roasted chicken hearts, and more.
Brazilian chicken hearts. SO GOOD. Credit to Brazilian Chef.
But ultimately, I decided not to pursue a career in foreign language education like I had planned. The reasons behind that decision are many, and for a different post entirely.
I ended up as a software developer, and I couldn’t be happier. However, there was a lot of self-doubt along the way because I made such a leap career-wise. As it turns out, though, learning two foreign languages in the past greatly benefitted me as I learned how to code.
I argue that anyone who has learned a foreign language is uniquely suited for learning how to program. There are a lot of similarities between learning a human language and a programming language. I think that these similarities can be boiled down to two main points:
The learning process The learning mindset
The Learning Process
The processes through which you learn a human language and a programming language are remarkably similar. You have to pass through similar steps in the same order to learn them effectively.
Step 1: Learn the Building Blocks
When you’re learning a foreign language, you start with memorizing vocabulary words. Vocabulary words are the building blocks of the language. You learn the words that are used most often and the words that form the basics of the human experience: names, numbers, colors, family members, days of the week, months of the year, etc.
You don’t know how these words fit together, but you learn them and their definitions. You may even sing songs or chant them in order to memorize them.
In programming, there is a similar step. How does the language handle numbers? How do you perform operations on those numbers? How do you declare a variable and store its value? How do you write, “Hello, world”?
Step 2: Put the Blocks Together
The next step in learning a foreign language is putting words together. There’s no real understanding of grammar yet, but you start to understand that words go together to create more complex meaning.
For example, Me llamo Dylan means My name is Dylan . At this point in my journey in Spanish I wouldn’t understand that me is a reflexive pronoun that is attached to the verb llamarse , and I wouldn’t understand that llamo is the first person present conjugation of llamarse , but I would know that the way to say your name is to say the phrase Me llamo [name] .
Similarly, while beginning to learn JavaScript, you may not fully understand why the following code is written how it is, but you’ll understand that it returns the values in the array less than 50:
let prices = [25, 30, 80, 90, 100]
prices.filter(price => price < 50)
// returns [25, 30]
You could have written the above code differently. I didn’t have to write it with an arrow function. But at this point, those kinds of subtleties aren’t the most important thing. The most important thing is realizing that you can manipulate arrays through functions.
Step 3: Learn Syntax
This is the turning point in language learning. This is where you learn how to construct meaningful ideas by using grammar to string together ideas. You learn how to conjugate verbs. You learn the difference between tenses. You learn purely functional words — words that don’t really mean anything on their own, but help us connect phrases and ideas. The Spanish word que is a good example. It is often used as a subordinating conjunction, a word that connects clauses together.
Grammar is a hard part of learning a new language because it is more abstract than learning words that have real-life references. mesa in Spanish is table . That’s easy to picture. ni siquiera is a phrase that means not even , like “I wouldn’t date him not even for a million dollars.” How do you picture the idea of “not even”? But it’s an important connector put into a specific place in the sentence to determine a relationship between the desire (or lack thereof) to date him and the idea of one million dollars.
My favorite example of learning syntax in programming is this in JavaScript. It’s a confusing topic at first. Why are we writing this before function calls? What does this mean? Why is it called this ? Keywords like this are the grammar of programming. this accesses the context object in which the current code is executing. It don’t necessarily mean anything on its own, but it helps us connect parts of our code.
It’s worth mentioning that grammar varies wildly from one human language to another. That goes for programming languages, too. Just imagine the differences between object-oriented languages and functional languages. Also strongly-typed and weakly-typed languages. They look and act differently.
Step 4: Speak Like a Native
At this step you can get the message across, but it sounds weird. People can tell you’re not a native speaker. Maybe you have a heavy accent. Maybe your grammar makes sense logically, but it’s just not the way people would normally express the idea.
Working on this step is the most rewarding but also the most difficult. Language students pride themselves on sounding native. Your accent is a big part of this, but there are a lot of other things to keep in mind. Using idiomatic phrases is one. Word choice is another. Register — when to be formal, when to be casual, when to be vulgar — is another complicated part of sounding native.
When I was studying abroad in Rio de Janeiro, my host mother was showing me around town on the first day. I lived in Copacabana three blocks from the beach. I was thinking how beautiful it would be to watch the sunset from the beach, but I didn’t know the word for “sunset!” So I asked instead, At what time does the sun disappear? Horribly formal, very stilted way to ask about the sunset. But the way I asked was completely grammatically correct, so she shot me a weird look and answered. Then politely provided me with pôr-do-sol as the word for sunset.
Sunset over Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Credit to Shutterstock.
Coding is the same. You have many options (in some languages more than others) to express an idea. There is a creative — maybe even artistic — side to coding due to the flexibility with which you can accomplish your goals.
But sounding native in code is important, too. I learned early on that your code should be readable by other developers. No one wants to read code that is improperly indented or where there’s weird unnecessary whitespace. People want logically organized code. People want variable names that make sense. People want helpful comments.
Similarly, following conventions is important. Can you use div s to make headers and footers for a page? Yes. But why would you? HTML5 gave us header and footer tags to help with SEO, accessibility, and readability of code by other developers. If you continue to use div s, the code will execute fine, but people will raise an eyebrow at it.
The Learning Mindset
It takes a certain mindset to excel as a language student. You have to be childlike: hungry to understand the world around you, willing to accept new information as you discover it, and unafraid of making mistakes or looking silly.
Learning a foreign language is frustrating because you have to learn certain basics or rules of the language then later find out that there are a ton of exceptions to those rules. For example, in Spanish you usually put the adjective after the noun. So pretty woman would be mujer bonita , where “bonita” is “pretty”. This is awkward for English speakers learning Spanish because in English you generally put the adjectives before the nouns.
As it turns out, though, there are plenty of instances in Spanish where the adjective goes before the noun! In fact, some adjectives you can put either before or after the noun, and the placement changes the meaning of the sentence:
Mi amiga vieja // My old (in terms of age) friend
Mi vieja amiga // My old (you have known her for a long time) friend
A successful language student is able to work through the frustration that comes along with these paradigm shifts. Instead of thinking, “What do you mean adjectives can come before nouns?! What a waste of time! You should have told me that in the first place!” they would say, “How interesting! So it turns out that there are instances where an adjective before a noun adds nuance to the sentence’s meaning. I’m glad I learned the general rule first and then the exceptions so I didn’t get confused.”
A good language student does not seek to understand a language all at once. They realize that it’s a constant practice. And furthermore, the understanding of a language is a moving target. Languages are constantly changing and evolving. As a language student, you have to accept that standards and conventions are constantly changing and you have to keep up to date with them.
You need a similar learning mindset when learning to program.
When I first learned how to iterate through arrays in JavaScript, I did so with a for loop. That was the only way I knew how to. Later on, I discovered .forEach() , .filter() , and .map() . Those blew my mind at the time! Even later I discovered .every() , .some() , and .reduce() . It turns out that there are many more ways to iterate through arrays than I originally knew, but I built my base knowledge of iteration with for loops, then added to and modified my understanding of iteration as time went on.
Just as human languages evolve, so do programming languages. I have heard a lot of developers complain about having to learn new frameworks every several years. I don’t understand the complaints. New frameworks often make using the language easier. It’s our job as a software developer to stay current on the best practices and new trends within programming languages.
Software developers also have to stay up to date with the release of new language versions. For example, with the release of ES6 JavaScript, arrow functions became (deservedly) popular. Oftentimes, they make code easier to read and write. Why stick with ES5 syntax when there is a better alternative? It doesn’t make sense to be stuck in old ways.
Perhaps the most important character trait in a successful language learner is the ability to make mistakes.
Fear holds us back from learning. Fear of failure. Fear of looking stupid. Fear of not measuring up to expectations. Fear of making mistakes. So a lot of people keep their mouth shut. They figure that if they don’t talk in a foreign language then they can’t make mistakes. This is, of course, a poor strategy since the crux of learning a foreign language is speaking.
I think that this is one reason that children are such good learners. They’re not afraid! They make mistake after mistake and don’t feel ashamed. They say nonsensical things all the time. They blabber. They make up words. They tell stories with no clear purpose or plot. They experiment. And through all their mess-ups and trials and errors, they discover the accepted patterns of their native language.
It’s much harder for adults to adopt this mindset with a second language, but I believe that if you learn how to laugh at yourself you can take the sting out of mistakes and enjoy the learning journey.
I remember the summer I studied abroad in Sevilla, Spain. I had just begun to take learning Spanish seriously. I was so excited to be in the beautiful south of Spain, but boy was it hot! And I’m from Florida, so that’s saying something!
One night I was walking home from a bar with a group of Spaniards and some American friends. We were all sweating it was so hot even with the sun down. I had had enough, and I exclaimed ¡Dios mío, estoy caliente! which translates to Oh my god, I'm horny! 🤦🏻♂️
After a moment of shocked silence they erupted into laughter. What I should have said was ¡Dios mío, tengo calor! . It’s a common mistake among English speakers learning Spanish. I was embarrassed, but I was laughing as hard as they were once I realized my mistake. It became one of our favorite stories to tell back home. And trust me, I’ve never forgotten how to say I'm hot since.
Plaza de España in Sevilla, Spain. What a beautiful city. Credit to HandLuggageOnly.
The Bottom Line
Don’t be afraid to learn how to code if you’re a humanities person like me. Many dev teams are looking for people with strong interpersonal skills!
Your background is a double-edged sword. You will certainly have to play catch up, but on the other hand, you are predisposed to learn programming very effectively. And the best news is that you bring a whole swath of soft skills to the table that traditional programmers might not.
Learning a second language can be fun, rewarding, and fulfilling. I found that learning programming can be fun, rewarding, and fulfilling, too. With an understanding of the learning process and the right attitude you can succeed at — and enjoy — both. | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-learning-a-foreign-language-helps-you-learn-to-code-937e20b351f6 | ['Dylan Attal'] | 2019-03-28 15:32:40.348000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Coding', 'Foreign Language', 'Tech', 'JavaScript'] |
Classifying Soy Plagues using Convolutional Neural Networks | To improve our model, we also include in our dataset some negative images. That is, some images that are not part of the labeled classes. These pictures were mainly of other insect species that could have been easily mistaken as the ones in our class labels. Our dataset was not that large, but we made sure to choose high-quality images.
For the Southern Green Stink Bug, 36 images were selected.
Neotropical Brown Stink Bug, 56 images.
29 images were selected for the Velvetbean Caterpillar.
Red-banded Stink Bug had 24 images.
There were 125 negative images.
Pre-processing
Firstly, all images were resized using Imutils’ resize function. The bigger dimension on width or height was chosen and resized to the size of the smaller dimension of the two. For example, if the width is smaller than the height, then the height would be resized to the size of the width.
Secondly, a data normalization technique was applied, a mean pre-processor. In this stage, we computed the average Red, Green, and Blue pixel intensities between all images in the training dataset. with these averages, we performed a pixel-wise subtraction of these values from our input images.
The next step was, in order to reduce overfitting, we had to regularize the data. For that matter, we randomly sampled regions of some images during the training process. This strategy was only applied when the spatial dimensions of the input images were larger than what the CNN expected.
After that, we applied an oversampling method, on which we cropped the corners of the input image plus the center region, and then we flipped it horizontally, for a total of ten samples per input image. This method usually increases classification accuracy.
CNN Model
Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNNs, are a class of deep neural networks used most commonly in image processing. It takes some aspects of the image and differentiates them from one another. If you want to take a closer look at CNNs, there is a simple guide on the following website:
In our problem, we choose to implement an architecture based on AlexNet architecture. AlexNet is a leading architecture for any object-detection task and may have huge applications in the computer vision sector of artificial intelligence problems.
Our architecture can be separated into five blocks. Three of them with convolutional layers combined with linear rectifier activation functions, batch normalizations, overlapping poolings, and dropouts. And the latter two with fully connected layers.
For the implementation, we used an API called Keras that is a high-level API of TensorFlow for creating and training deep learning models more easily.
The neural network ran through a hundred epochs, and we had the following results:
Loss/Accuracy for each epoch for both the training and validation sets
Metrics for the classification of each class label
As we can see, for all classes we had a pretty good performance overall in the classification problem. For some classes, the algorithm could predict almost all of the test samples correctly. The final accuracy on the test set was 68.57%.
It is valid to point that most of the insects treated in this classification problem are considerably similar. Three of them are of the same family of insects, which could make the classification problem considerably harder. Another point to consider is that if the dataset was bigger, probably we could have higher final accuracy.
Conclusion and some remarks
With this deep learning application, we could practice the pipeline for an image classification problem and also solve a real-world problem that could be implemented for the sponsor company in order to assist in plague control for soy plantations.
The algorithm could classify with good performance between the labeled classes, which could help greatly in the choice of the method of plague control that can be used in a soy plantation based on the specimen of insect found there.
The code exemplified in this article is available at:
https://github.com/camilabga/cocamar-bugs | https://medium.com/@lucassolanoc/classifying-soy-plagues-using-convolutional-neural-networks-ab14f9f463b5 | ['Lucas Solano'] | 2020-12-19 01:52:54.774000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Convolutional Network', 'Image Processing', 'Classification Algorithms', 'Deep Learning'] |
Amazon Is Waging War With FedEx | Amazon Is Waging War With FedEx
For the creator of one- and two-day delivery, shipping dominance is worth almost any risk
Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images
E-commerce is on a tear, which means shipping is too. In the six months ending August 31, ground deliveries by FedEx surged 20% from the same period a year ago. UPS is so overwhelmed that on Monday it actually imposed a quota on six big retailers — Gap, L.L. Bean, and Nike among them — limiting how much they’re allowed to ship during the holiday.
But this is not just a shipping boom — it’s a war. Amazon, the creator of one- and two-day delivery of everything from groceries to books and furniture, is now out to dominate shipping too. At a time when U.S. and European regulators are filing more and more antitrust cases against Amazon, the e-commerce giant is getting its machine ready, talking of taking over cavernous mall spaces formerly occupied by Sears and J.C. Penney, and converting them to fulfillment centers close to customers. It has leased 12 Boeing 767s, creating a fleet of more than 80 aircraft.
This is the opposite of laying low. As David H. Freedman writes this week in Marker, Amazon, in the case of shipping, has needled what might have stacked up as an ordinary rivalry into something nasty. Reminiscent of the ruthless shenanigans that led to the Supreme Court’s watershed 1911 breakup of Standard Oil, Amazon last Christmas season banned merchants from using FedEx to ship their goods.
Does Amazon wish to be broken up by antitrust regulators — to be forced to stop replicating the merchandise sold by third-party merchants and selling it at cut-rate prices? Does it wish to be forced to do away with Amazon Prime and its cut-rate, money-losing delivery options, which almost no small merchant can hope to match?
There is dissonance in this picture: The Trump Justice Department’s antitrust division has been aggressive. The Biden Administration is expected to be as tough or tougher. The European Union is not letting up on Amazon. Yet judging by its behavior, Big Tech thinks it’s business as usual.
“What, me worry?” seems to be a highly risky strategy. But when watching Amazon, the impression is less indifference than the conviction that shipping dominance is worth almost any risk.
This is a calculus of Amazon’s own making: If it is in a fix, feeling it must always up its shipping game and now capture the commanding heights of yet another industry, it’s because it itself created unusual — and perhaps unreasonable — customer expectations. But now, if in doing so it gets tripwired by the Justice Department or the EU, it has no one else to blame. | https://marker.medium.com/amazon-is-waging-war-with-fedex-bcd8c8fc2edb | ['Steve Levine'] | 2020-12-04 17:58:29.032000+00:00 | ['Amazon', 'E Commerce Business', 'Business', 'Retail'] |
What are the backlinks, and How do I make my backlinks better quality? | newsboxwithrazi.com | What are the backlinks, and How do I make my backlinks better quality? | newsboxwithrazi.com Raziahmed ·Dec 26, 2020
What are backlinks?
The backlink is a process that can be increased to our web page, and this process of backlinks plays a very effective role in the rating webpage on the search engines.
Google’s index performs better in your web site as much as the links in the post SEO is the importance of backlinks more than your ideas for on-page and off-page activity.
You will need to practice backward of the backlinks and take advantage of this.
There are several terms of backlinks that are considered to be important and to perform in a timely, Which will be significantly increased your website rankings and performance.
We will try to provide you with more information and support about backlinks. | https://medium.com/@raziahmed345/what-are-the-backlinks-and-how-do-i-make-my-backlinks-better-quality-newsboxwithrazi-com-15f4eb0ed60 | [] | 2020-12-26 17:24:15.013000+00:00 | ['Backlinks In Seo', 'Quality Backlinks', 'Blog', 'Blogger'] |
Two Arcs of My Immigration Story | Photo by Rohan on Unsplash
I can tell my immigration story two different ways. One, I came here with $200 and two suitcases holding almost all of my worldly possessions. Two, I came here with a full scholarship to a rich liberal arts college. Both are true, and have shaped who I am and the way I view the world. Give or take a few details, my story is not that different from that of other immigrants who came to the U.S. for higher education or white collar jobs since the post-Civil Rights era. But immigrant narratives are rife with stories with the first arc — we came here with nothing, worked hard, and succeeded, look at us now!
Of course, most of us came here with very little. We started out with few worldly possessions, only what we could cram into our suitcases. We struggled to find our footing, away from family and friends. But we were among the most privileged. Even for those of us who did not come from affluence, we had enough to pay our fare or at least the social capital to be able to borrow against future income potential. That $200 and a one-way ticket almost wiped out my parents’ entire life savings. Yet, my family could afford that airfare, even if just one-way — a luxury still not available to most of the people back home.
Hard work definitely played a big role in my success. But, the scholarship gave me a flying start (regardless of whether you look at it as charity to save a Third World Brown girl or a more sinister agenda to undermine the Civil Rights movement by creating a buffer community). It gave me freedom and helped me save up even on a nonprofit starter salary — a luxury not available to majority of my friends from the U.S. who are still paying off their education debt.
My time in the U.S. hasn’t been all milk and honey. For more than a decade, I was constantly running an obstacle course set up by the U.S. immigration system. I spent countless number of hours gathering documents to prove my worth and tens of thousands of dollars to pay the lawyers and the U.S. government. Things fell through, and my life almost fell apart. A last minute contact with a wonderful immigration attorney saved the day, thanks to the social and financial capital I had been able to build — a luxury not available to millions of immigrants.
So, if I tell my story as coming to the U.S. with $200 and two suitcases, I would be lying, even if every single word is factually correct. | https://medium.com/@lunaranjit/two-arcs-of-my-immigration-story-3478f7a5e587 | ['Luna Ranjit'] | 2021-01-08 22:47:57.882000+00:00 | ['United States', 'Immigrant Stories', 'Immigration'] |
Stopping in mid-flight with A Wild Winter Swan | Stopping in mid-flight with A Wild Winter Swan
Gregory Maguire’s newest fairy tale revision is rich in atmosphere but poor in plot
Cultural Pitfalls leading to A Brave New World
As the brain behind the original story that inspired hit Broadway musical Wicked, Gregory Maguire is celebrated as a storyteller with clout when it comes on putting a new spin on beloved fairy tales. Yet the famed magic touch of the writer of the Nutcracker retelling Hiddensee seems somewhat lacking in his newest novel. Described by Maguire himself as ‘comfort food during the pandemic’, it follows that description to a T- a wholesome yet not engrossing read.
Following the fate of 15-year old Laura Ciardi who grows up in the 1960’s version of New York’s Upper East Side, it’s a modern re-imaging of one of Hans Christian Andersen’s lesser known fairytales, The Wild Swans. The original story describes how a clever princess manages to lift a curse on her eleven brothers who have been turned into swans by an evil sorceress by knitting flaxen shirts for them. The tale ends happily, the only oddity being that the youngest brother ends up stuck with a swan’s wing because his sister runs out of yarn when making the arm of his shirt.
Imagine that same young boy crash-landing into the window of an adolescent girl and the shenanigans that may cause and you pretty much have the gist of A Wild Winter Swan.
As a premise, it’s promising yet the author fails to deliver on that account.
Laura as a protagonist is your typical moody teenager, struggling with mean girls and bullying at school, reeling from the loss of an absent mother and a complicated family history as well as the inevitable generational struggle of living under the roof of her well-meaning yet in some ways conservative wealthy Italian immigrant grandparents. There is much scope here for an investigation of class differences as well as gender roles yet in Laura we have a heroine who comes across as more of an All-American brat rather than the lonely and misunderstood girl she is supposed to represent. Correct me if I’m wrong, but living in an affluent home with family willing to pay one’s way into a cushy boarding school and willing to give you the space needed (a separate bathroom!), with understanding to spare for emotional pain endured is not something to sniff one’s nose at. (As someone who grew up as the daughter of immigrant parents, I can only wonder at yet another brand of entitlement and white privilege.)
Instead we see a girl so caught up in perceived wrongs ‘done to her’, both by family as well as school colleagues that there is little room for exploration of other minds or relationships.
That’s unfortunate, considering that the cast of surrounding characters, especially her Grandmother (‘Nonna’), have much more to say than they are given room for.
The age-old immigrant story of failure and success, of rising above oneself and building something from scratch does not fail to attract when we see the interactions of Laura’s grandparents with everyone ranging from their employees to direct famile-people with a nouveau rich mindset but simultaneously attached to their Italian heritage. In the course of elaborate meal preparations for a penultimate Italian themed Christmas dinner that will make or break the Ciardi’s who are hoping to wine and dine a lucrative investor, A Wild Winter Swan expounds on the most interesting passage to date.
Laura’s grandmother explains how Christmas used to be like when she was growing up and it sheds light on her slightly acerbic character in the present.
Back in those broke-tooth days, who had the means to offer even one fish on Christmas Eve? Not us, cara mia. But for weeks we saved all our bread crumbs in a clay pot, so we could scatter the tablecloth with them. Waiting until people were walking to church at midnight past our house, my mama would flap the tablecloth out the window in the moonlight, making the crumbs sparkle like this damn snow, to prove we had so much to serve we couldn’t even finish the crumbs.
Laura’s answer to that speech? She ‘stifles a yawn’ and proclaims ‘that it’s ridiculous to gorge oneself on seven kinds of fish in one meal when one ‘scrounged for bread crumbs in Italy’. A teenager can’t be expected to understand the ins and outs of family pride and the need to showcase that one ‘has made it’ but for someone portrayed as a loner who throughout the story delivers little imagined paragraphs of fiction, paraphrasing her life in prose, this level of understanding comes across as somewhat shocking.
If nothing else, her lackadaisical manner provides the reader with a rather glorious defence for capitalist greed and the need for showcasing splendour to relative strangers. | https://medium.com/books-are-our-superpower/stopping-in-mid-flight-with-a-wild-winter-swan-fd4cd7d4ce5e | ['Jasmin James'] | 2020-12-08 07:32:38.271000+00:00 | ['Fairy Tale', 'Christmas', 'Fantasy', 'Reading', 'Books'] |
The Coronavirus Funeral. | The Coronavirus Funeral.
Remembering a Day of Mourning.
Photo by Fernando Meloni on Unsplash
We cannot hug one another. We wear masks. It is a beautiful day and the cemetery is full…the parking lot reminds me of how the mall parking lots used to look.
We are not the only service. I see hearse after hearse. Each one containing a loved one.
People on the news talk about allowing the old and sick to die so that the economy can restart. But everyone dies…whether you’re old or sick or not. So what is the idea situation? Let all of us die, and let the economy run on perfect robots, who do not die, do not complain, do not fear?
There is the issue of a Zoom call for those who want to attend but cannot, because we’re only allowed 10 people. Who is good enough to be on this call? Who has the right to protest its existence? What would the deceased want? How can we hypothesize that, since the situation is unprecedented? Given the situation, isn’t it important to help the living grieve, even if it’s through a phone?
Philosophical questions with no one right answer.
It’s hard.
But the day, at least the day is beautiful.
The prayers are automatic, taught to me in childhood by the same person who is in the coffin. | https://medium.com/are-you-okay/the-coronavirus-funeral-c738874b15b8 | ['Lisa Martens'] | 2020-05-01 12:54:53.432000+00:00 | ['Humanity', 'New York', 'Grief', 'Society', 'Coronavirus'] |
Communist Workers League: Youth Joint Statement in Regards to the Recent Takeover | The following statement is in regards to the takeover of the Communist Workers League carried out on June 15th, 2019, when a minority grouping of veteran comrades summarily expelled youth in the Chicago and Detroit branches, demanded an unreasonable amount of ideological conformity, and effectively silenced all principled political discussion that was taking place internally. The purpose of this statement is to inform budding activists and organizers of our experience working with CWL so that they can make more educated decisions when choosing who to organize with.
We, the youth cadre, condemn this action utterly. As well, we condemn the long-term working conditions and improper foundation of the Communist Workers League entirely, which was formed prematurely and dishonestly. We condemn this betrayal of our trust, however misplaced, and this betrayal of our organizing principles, to which we recommit more strongly. Solidarity has carried us through being betrayed by our elders, and will continue to carry us forward even without a formal organization. We will continue working in earnest, seeking new strategies and new allies. We encourage all disciplined comrades in the struggle to dedicate themselves to democratic centralism, comradely conduct, and good consent behavior in their formal and informal organizing. We look forward to working with all who struggle for communist revolution and to providing active, revolutionary education to those who do not. Finally, we promise to keep growing from experience, to keep studying Marxism-Leninism, and to grow together as cadre in order to overcome the immense challenges facing our movement, as that is the only way that we can win.
The following details the events leading up to this statement:
On June 14th, 2019, David Sole (the Treasurer of the Communist Workers League and part owner of 5920 Second Avenue LLC) changed the locks to the League’s headquarters, a valuable organizing asset for comrades and community members alike, at 5920 Second Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. This was done without clearance from CWL Detroit’s Steering Committee (the decision-making body of the local League between meetings) or the Building and Finance Committee, and occurred without any announcement to any membership of their organization. This change was a direct attempt to lock out and manipulate a majority grouping which the LLC did not want to engage in political discussion with. Locking out this majority grouping, made up of CWL members in good standing, was an explicit violation not only of the League’s standards of action but also their self-proclaimed policy of building ownership via the long-time acceptance of pledges from their membership, including those undergoing financial struggles, for upkeep.
When queer youth comrades working on their Taking Back Pride Initiative arrived at the office later that day for a coalition meeting, they discovered that the office locks had been changed without warning.
When these comrades asked for clarification, expecting a misunderstanding, they were lied to by Mike Shane (a CWL member and part owner of 5920 Second Avenue LLC) regarding the reasons for this lock change; he claimed that the lights had been left on, the refrigerator door had been left open, and that a “ham was on the floor of the kitchen.” The members who admitted to having changed the locks were criticized for their undisciplined behavior — the unauthorized denial of access to an organizational resource — but the CWL youth were prepared to move forward and meet the next day for the organization’s local internal meeting. However, this act was the first step in a coup that was being executed by the handful of veteran members who were legal owners of the building — the 5920 Second Avenue LLC (comprised of David Sole, Abayomi Azikiwe, Mike Shane, Debbie Johnson, non-CWL member Cheryl Labash, and their public representative Jerome Goldberg) — and their minority supporters in the national organization. This coup — a term they accepted and used to describe the split — not only violated the rules of the organizations but also betrayed the Marxist-Leninist principle of democratic centralism that was supposedly so dear to these long-time communist organizers.
The coup, according to those perpetrating it, was triggered by ongoing discussions within the organization’s national email listserv, largely centering around the Chicago branch of the CWL. The Chicago branch (a diverse group of six young comrades who were fully accepted into the organization nearly half a year before this conflict) had formerly been candidates in Workers World Party and were engaged in writing articles for the CWL’s online publication. These articles, especially one on the pro-choice movement, were responded to with outright hostility rather than constructive criticism, leading to ongoing discussions over email. These discussions revealed a failing of the older comrades to engage in good-faith communication, education, and struggle through disagreements and political questions as they arise. The coup perpetrators escalated the email communication into conflict, declaring the issues “irreconcilable” and shutting down further debate. Additionally, the two veteran CWL members who were tasked with mentoring the Chicago branch cited one of the problems with the Chicago comrades was a lack of any real organizing (even though there were several other CWL national members and localities who often said they were not engaged in any organizing work but were never criticized for it). Upon investigation, it was discovered that one of these mentors had never even contacted the Chicago branch to learn about their organizing efforts, and that the other had indeed been aware of the Chicago branch’s work, including the Chicago branch’s many trips to support that mentor’s projects.
The day after changing the locks, on June 15th, 2019, David Sole announced at the CWL Detroit branch’s June internal meeting that the leaders of the Chicago branch had been unilaterally expelled from the organization by this minority clique. He went on to say that the youth of the organization should split from the CWL if they hold any of these political stances that the Chicago comrades were unjustly ousted for voicing. These stances, though vaguely defined, were centered around the term “social fascism” — which is a Trotskyist dog whistle — and the coup perpetrators’ condemnation of the Taking Back Pride Initiative, a successful queer-led, queer-determined event and coalition. In this discussion, David Sole admitted that the locks had been changed as part of this coup and that it was orchestrated by the owners of the building, two other local comrades, and the handful of national comrades who were not in Chicago (again, many of whom were self-admittedly inactive). It was stated that there would be no further discussion on these topics as the social fascism question had been “settled in the 30s.” This is the result of what we believe to be a deliberate ploy to hide their true ideologies. Social fascism had never been a part of the CWL’s limited political discussions or candidate education, and therefore many comrades were not familiar with the line that had been broken without it ever having been properly adopted.
The discussion that followed became very heated. It became clear immediately that this coup was profoundly undisciplined, that it would be incredibly self-destructive for what would survive of the CWL (an organization that was already losing membership rapidly), and that the political reasons of this coup were not irreconcilable but only required good-faith discussion to achieve synthesis and a willingness to organize together on a non-sectarian basis, something that CWL’s resignation statement (written when they split from Workers World party) claimed they wished to do, and that the outgoing youth had desired as well. However, this development reveals the true issue with this organization, very similar to the major issue that caused the collapse of Workers World Party before it: an unelected self-proclaimed leadership bullying comrades into being bodies and investors for the organization without hearing their voices or input, and organizing around defunct, unwritten and unannounced political lines that are expected to be intuited rather than taught. The CWL youth cadre, before voting to end that internal, voted unanimously to denounce this undemocratic action and to rescind the expulsions of these comrades; these youth comrades outnumbered those perpetrating the coup, locally and nationally (even if the Chicago comrades who were unjustly expelled or subsequently left are not included). Despite this unanimous vote, David Sole decreed that he would not recognize it, making his disdain for democratic centralism all the more abundantly clear. Later that night, Mike Shane — who did not attend this meeting but supported the coup — blocked all youth admin access to CWL pages and to the Fighting Words online publication.
Following this meeting, the youth cadre held frequent emergency meetings to discuss these actions and the broader patterns of bad-faith behavior and abusive tendencies in the organization, and to reorganize moving forward. This soon grew into broader meetings including non-CWL comrades, discussing the issues in organizing in the left and planning their responses to the coup as well as to execute Taking Back Pride. These comrades refrained from formally resigning from the Communist Workers League until the Taking Back Pride event took place, as the coup perpetrators had leverage over event page access. Following the successful Taking Back Pride event, they all have since resigned from the organization or, in some cases, even been removed without having submitted any resignation statement at all.
Democratic centralism, as a methodology, insists that we value the voices of our comrades and agree to work mutually, to organize and work as a unit. Organizing necessitates not only working against the systems we are fighting, but refusing to allow our own organizations to replicate oppressive structures and ideals. The Communist Workers League refused, time and time again, to hear principled critique by the majority voices in their organization, choosing instead to deny and minimize the serious problems in how they worked. In doing so, they proved that they are structurally incapable of educating or organizing themselves, let alone the masses. They have internalized bourgeois legalism as far as private property rights go. They have refused to hold veteran comrades and LLC owners (such as Jerome Goldberg and Kris Hamel, as well as David Sole and Mike Shane) responsible for abusive behaviors. They practiced ableism and transphobia towards many youth comrades, refusing to make their space accessible. They demonstrate a complete disconnect with actual working class conditions, still tied to factory union struggles despite the working environment changing radically since the writings of Sam Marcy. They alienated all the youth among their nationally oppressed comrades months before the coup while using the national question as a club to bully the remaining youth comrades. Finally, they have failed to assess their own efficacy or analyze conditions; they do not adapt, take stock, or update their techniques in any meaningful ways. Their persistence over the decades has gained them recognition in local organizing circles, but gained few material victories. When given an opportunity to grow, they have structurally failed to seize it, ballooning by dozens of members with the upswing in socialist popularity and then shrinking right back down to the same membership a few years later. Changing times demand adaption, which this organization has made clear they view only with contempt.
How then did this clear contradiction manage to survive so long unaddressed and unresolved in the Communist Workers League? How did a formation that claimed to be a “Leninist” organization come to be filled with active, dedicated comrades who are genuine Marxist-Lenininsts only to later purge them, and how was this coup so surprising to those newcomers? These questions are explained by the deliberate tactics used by the handful of veteran members employing practices from the highly questionable Marcyist school of Orthodox Trotskyism. This tendency, among other failings, rejects democratic centralism and criticism utterly; employing it would inevitably fail to organize genuine Marxist-Leninists, communists or leftists in general, let alone the masses. Because of this failing, Marcyists must resort to hiding their actual ideologies behind lies and obfuscations. This tendency has abused an obscure term that Karl Marx wrote in a letter (“mild in manner, bold in matter”) to apologize for lies of omission and for targeting Marxist-Leninists to grow their organization while at every turn slyly promoting Trotskyism. This was the case in the CWL and the Detroit formation which preceded it. Many discussions were openly known as being off the table, including discussions relating to the history of Trotsky and Stalin, which were shut down if ever approached. These veteran members would unilaterally avoid any discussions which might come close to their true political stances and silence any who raised such topics. Through this pattern, the true problem became not their ideologies, but rather their refusal to acknowledge or discuss them.
How can an organization structurally refuse to have any discussion, to educate on a topic, or to debate that topic? How can a communist organization demand ideological blind spots — contradictions — not to be reconciled? We believe that this occurs when the organization or those in power within it know that their position is indefensible. Indeed, when asked hot-topic questions or urged to critically analyze their work, these veteran members would give only two responses: one, that the comrade asking the question should merely “read [a specific Marcy text] to understand”; or two, that the comrade simply does not have enough experience for these ideas and that only struggle — struggle in the community in the specific, limited manner in which the veterans decide — will teach them the obvious truth before them. This disingenuous strategy utterly fails to practically educate anyone. The only outcome that can be drawn is now quite clear: this grouping refused to educate or struggle with their new members because their political stances are so full of internal contradictions and obvious falsehoods that attempting to teach them will only disprove them. To remedy this, these handful were willing to centralize their body, just not democratically; their criticisms of the Workers World Party’s similar failings were proven to be merely projection as the Detroit branch of some half decade ago (which would later become CWL) wanted to grow in numbers without growing in voices. This coup and the dysfunctional working conditions leading up to it were the inevitable outcome. The ideologically-isolated members of the organization they claimed to lead had failed to move their recruits towards their point of view, and so felt the need to seize control of its meager assets, attempting to use them in a final bid to bully their comrades into acceptance of a Trotskyist line. Naturally, they have failed.
Now, as a cadre, we must move on from this dysfunctional organization and direct ourselves more fully towards the struggle. Building a strong communist movement is the essential task to which we all remain committed. This cannot be accomplished by reinventing organizations from past eras or repeating the same strategies over and over; we must continuously and rigorously analyze our past and present in order to develop successful strategies. Though we do have political differences with the Marcyist organizations we’ve departed from, the real catalyst has been our former comrades’ refusal to grow, change, learn, and teach — and incorrect political lines inevitably result from this attitude. This has little to do with age differences and more to do with acting as principled, sincere Marxist-Leninists. We re-dedicate ourselves to organizing the working class rather than “networking” in organizing circles; we re-dedicate ourselves to principled criticism and self-criticism; and we re-dedicate ourselves to our comrades and our communities.
Signed,
Former CWL Members:
Adele H.
Jamie S.
Jeff P.
Jesse Ayres
Josh K.
Kaitlyn G. (Chicago)
Katherine Cavanaugh (Chicago)
Katya Derevo
Koz Mo
Laika K. (Chicago)
Mike C.
Sav Jpg
Thomrade
Trever
Victoria Gilbert
Non-CWL Comrades:
Alexander S.
George V.
Keysha Wall
Ravyn K. | https://medium.com/@formercwlyouthcadre/youth-joint-statement-in-regards-to-the-recent-takeover-of-the-communist-workers-league-13d47a7ab291 | ['Former Cwl Youth Cadre'] | 2019-07-10 04:34:16.302000+00:00 | ['Local Organizing', 'Politics', 'Communism'] |
Angular and legacy JavaScript integrations | Angular and legacy JavaScript integrations
Most systems that provide certain features that are commonly used, also provide some kind of integration. Let's say that graphics and charts library, documented in old-plain legacy JavaScript (< ES5), with old styled HTML &<script> code, just to include a bar chart. Or some site that allows visitors buy event tickets, no API, no web components, just a block of code with a "insert this script on your code" which imports a Javascript file, a CSS file and embeds an iframe. You probably have seen this, and if you haven't you'll do sometime (trust me…)
This integrations, most of the times, are meant for non-developers, "include this code and it will work", magic.
But, what if you have to make this integrations work with your Angular SPA?
I recently fought against iFrame resizer library , had to add some 3rd party code block that included an iframe, a js file, and a CSS file to an Angular component. "To improve UX add this script to the head of your HTML…" and there comes iframe resizer. By the way iframes in absolutely NO WAY improve UX, iframes just look as a Post It on a screen.
Short story, I read the docs, and none of the recommendations worked for me.
So here's what I did:
Dynamically load all external required files
This will be adding the required scripts and css to the DOM but not by pasting the code on the component's template. We'll be using a service for this:
This service takes an URL for the script or CSS file and appends it to the HTML DOM. Include it as a provider in your app.module.ts file so you can have a single instance of the service and avoid loading the files if you already loaded them.
Declare a global variable to wrap the script
On your component you'll need to declare a wrapper for the 3rd party script you're trying to include. There's a slight hope you know the internals of this script, so you can define an interface that may allow autocompleting the code. As we usually don't, we'll just use the any type.
Why global? Well, in the company I'm working for, we have some dynamic form validations that are loaded this way. We were having some issues with Safari and declaring the script object variables as global solved the problem.
and finally…
Use the 3rd party script as suggested
You can now use the scripts as shown on the documentation (the code must be included after being sure the scripts were loaded, this is between lines 34 and 36. For eg.:
// ... Promise.all(scriptArray).then(_ => {
console.log('All scripts loaded'); // These are not real methods, just placed them
// for illustrative purposes
externalLibrary.loadData(this.data);
externalLibrary.renderChart('barchart', 'chart-container');
otherExternalLibrary.validateRoles(); )}; // ...
By the way, don't just copy paste the code on the GISTs, I think I'm missing a few closing brackets :)
What about jQuery?
Yes, there's still people that use jQuery. jQuery is another story, once tried loading it this way and failed. So ended finding out that the only way jQuery did work was to add it on the last lines of the polyfills.ts file like this:
import * as jQuery from 'jquery';
window['$'] = jQuery;
and you should be able to use $ as usual.
Hope it helps. | https://itnext.io/angular-and-legacy-javascript-integrations-f0e9d47a58fc | ['Jose I Santa Cruz G'] | 2021-01-05 15:48:05.156000+00:00 | ['Legacy Code', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript', 'Integrations', 'Angular'] |
Blockstream Markets Weekly — Aug 27, 2021 | Blockstream Markets Weekly — Aug 27, 2021
Blockstream raises $210M and acquires hardware maker Spondoolies, BTC held by funds/corporates ticks higher as MST buys another $177M worth of BTC and fund flows flip positive, Morgan Stanley funds expand GBTC positions, futures-backed ETF may be just weeks away, and Cuba looks to follow El Salvador’s lead on Bitcoin Blockstream Follow Aug 27 · 7 min read
By Jesse Knutson
What’s happening in the markets?
Jackson Hole
Bitcoin is on pace to give up a five-week win streak to end just north of 200-day moving average support.
Global stonks and gold looked set to end the week higher with the USD and Bitcoin set to end the week lower.
Traditional markets caught an end-of-week bid and will be focused on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s comments at Jackson Hole later today. Indications that fed officials preferred tapering sooner rather than later were offset by expectations that Powell was more inclined to take a wait-and-see approach.
As mentioned last week it’s interesting to see Bitcoin continuing to trade more in line with the USD than stonks.
I think BTC declines into the end of the week were probably, to some degree, tied to monthly options expiry today. Fund flows actually look to be tentatively turning positive. The 200-day moving average continues to be a key line of support.
Blockstream, fund flows, and sovereign adoption
Headlines this week were led by Blockstream’s $210M raise at a $3.2B valuation and the acquisition of mining hardware manufacturer Spondoolies as the first step in the establishment of Blockstream’s new ASIC division.
Outside of that, fund flows, corporate treasuries, and sovereign adoption were the key themes of the week.
It looks like, at the aggregate, Bitcoin holdings with funds/corporate treasuries are just off of an all-time high. The tick higher this week was led by MicroStrategy buying an additional 3,907 BTC, but I think is also supported by a reacceleration of fund flows including several Morgan Stanley funds revealing an increase in GBTC allocation. Bloomberg Intelligence also said this week that they expect approval for a futures-backed BTC ETF by early 4Q21.
On the sovereign adoption front, we saw headlines this week that Cuba is preparing to recognize cryptocurrencies for payment as El Salvador prepares to implement Bitcoin as legal tender from mid next month.
Muddy waters
There was a bit of confusion this week around on-chain data analysis with indications of de-risking and profit-taking from long-term holders as well as metrics showing a sharp increase in BTC being sent to exchanges.
I think a lot of this data was probably muddied by the monthly options expiry today which I think is probably closely entwined with hedge fund inflows and outflows and not necessarily reflective of a long-term directional view.
Spot exchange balances remain very low and, historically, it has not been uncommon to see price pushed lower into the month-end expiry.
The overall setup continues to look constructive. A tentative increase in overall leverage this week was quickly de-risked with~ $400M in liquidations over the past few days. Overall market leverage now continues to look low relative to the current price.
I think the relatively low degree of leverage in the market, the modest long bias, reacceleration of fund flows, and clearing of the expiry overhang probably puts us in a fairly good spot for the coming weeks.
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Bitcoin markets news
Valued at $3.2 billion after a $210 million series B raise
Blockstream also announced the acquisition of mining hardware manufacturer Spondoolies
Spondoolies IP and key team members will form the core of Blockstream’s new ASIC arm
Latest acquisition totals ~ $177M and brings MSTR’s total holdings to around $5.1B
MSTR’s is up around +75% from a total costs basis of roughly $2.92B
Cuba’s government said Thursday it will recognize — and regulate — cryptocurrencies for payments on the island
Looks like early days still, though, with not much detail available yet. The Central Bank has yet to set rules or establish a licensing regime
Taiwan Semiconductor prices for 7nm and 5nm chips are expected to increase 7% to 9%
Prices for its more mature processes will be increased by ~20%
The price hikes are thought to be in response to TSMC’s plan to boost capital expenditures by US$100B over the next three years, in addition to its overseas expansion plans in the U.S. and Japan
This is probably positive to holders of the Blockstream Mining Note and miners with hardware already deployed
An SEC filing revealed that over 30 Morgan Stanley funds have built GBTC positions
Morgan’s Insight Fund is the largest with over 928,051 GBTC shares worth ~ $36M or over 700 Bitcoin
A June filing with the SEC showed that the Europe Opportunity Fund had acquired ~ 28,000 GBTC shares
Follows an earlier filing in April that allowed each of five funds to invest up to 25% of assets into Bitcoin-related products
Analyst Eric Balchunas says that the shelving of ETH ETF applications from ProShares and VanEck are probably positive foreshadowing for their BTC ETF applications
ProShares is thought as the most likely to win approval
Balchunas expects a muted reception to the first round of futures backed ETF’s though
“…the excitement will be only half that what it would be for a real bitcoin ETF. The best metaphor I can come up with is this is like serving O’Doul’s when the party wants real beer. Will they drink it anyway? We’ll soon find out.”
Bitcoin miners outside of China are reaping rewards from China’s ban, generating ever-higher profits by filling a vacuum left by the sharp correction in global hashrate
Shane Downey, CFO of Hut 8 Mining said:
“Think of average daily global bitcoin production as the pie. The size of the pie stayed the same, and each existing miner was able to help themselves to a much bigger piece”
You can get a gauge of mining profitability on the Blockstream Finance page. Each BMN (2,000 TH sold for €200,000) has mined 0.943 BTC over the past 52 days
The tone of the article isn’t exactly supportive
Dollarized economies around the world will likely be watching how this plays out very carefully
Email subscription platform Substack has integrated Bitcoin Lightning payments in collaboration with OpenNode, a payment processor offering Bitcoin and Lightning optimized API solutions for businesses
OpenNode will now power both on-chain and off-chain Bitcoin and Lightning payments on the Substack platform, meaning journalists and writers can now effectively make a living in Bitcoin as independent writers.
Charts
Monthly expire driving declines | https://medium.com/blockstream-markets-weekly/blockstream-markets-weekly-aug-27-2021-908082f560c3 | [] | 2021-08-27 10:19:36.424000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin News', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Trading'] |
Let Them Eat Cake | LET THEM EAT CAKE!… Our $600.00 worth of cake crumbs will hardly help citizens get through the winter.
This is a clip from an email I got today…Wow, the new COVID bill actually has money for Israel written into it. Not even kidding.
Attached is the full document. Here is a snippet that can be found on page 341.
(INCLUDING TRANSFER OF FUNDS)
2 SEC. 8072. Of the amounts appropriated in this Act
3 under the headings ‘‘Procurement, Defense-Wide’’ and
4 ‘‘Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-
5 Wide’’, $500,000,000 shall be for the Israeli Cooperative
6 Programs: Provided, That of this amount, $73,000,000
7 shall be for the Secretary of Defense to provide to the Gov-
8 ernment of Israel for the procurement of the Iron Dome
9 defense system to counter short-range rocket threats, sub-
10 ject to the U.S.-Israel Iron Dome Procurement Agree-
11 ment, as amended; $177,000,000 shall be for the Short
12 Range Ballistic Missile Defense (SRBMD) program, in-
13 cluding cruise missile defense research and development
14 under the SRBMD program, of which $50,000,000 shall
15 be for co-production activities of SRBMD systems in the
16 United States and in Israel to meet Israel’s defense re-
17 quirements consistent with each nation’s laws, regulations,
18 and procedures, subject to the U.S.-Israeli co-production
19 agreement for SRBMD, as amended; $77,000,000 shall
20 be for an upper-tier component to the Israeli Missile De-
21 fense Architecture, of which $77,000,000 shall be for co-
22 production activities of Arrow 3 Upper Tier systems in
23 the United States and in Israel to meet Israel’s defense
24 requirements consistent with each nation’s laws, regula-
25 tions, and procedures, subject to the U.S.-Israeli co-production
War seems more important to Congress than the U.S citizens. | https://medium.com/@robinlaurain/let-them-eat-cake-e4d0cdf7cc28 | ['Robin Lea Laurain'] | 2020-12-23 05:35:53.232000+00:00 | ['Let Them Eat Cake', 'Hunger', 'Congress', 'Stimulus Package', 'Democrats'] |
The Tangled Skein | The Tangled Skein
By Brandon Marlon
Exhausted of doxologies, the thoughtful suspire
plaints and doubts, spurred by the urge for truth,
eager to identify veridical strands from the morass
of beliefs and opinions about our existential quandary,
deep waters ventured solely by those who refuse
to indefinitely remain mired in misprision,
who have experienced each in their turn
faith, skepticism, disbelief,
and are ever unnerved by the possibility
of a universe amoral and arational,
by the helices of history that so often seem to us
intolerably desultory and esoteric.
We admit to being at times disinterested yet
never objective; always we weigh equiprobable
notions in our cosmic calculus, keen to perceive
the seams of existence evincing a seamer,
longing to dispel uncertainties, anxious to calm
the gnawing angst in our midst.
Somehow we live with qualms and contradictions;
we recognize the geology of truth and its substrata.
Whoever would our world inspect for intellect,
design, purpose, or meaning by definition
braves an array of questions unanswerable
and considerations unsettling reality itself,
unweaving the fabric of the known
for the sake of glimpsing behind the curtain.
What is science but the art of detecting
hints and clues that reveal piecemeal
prints and marks concealed yet ultimately traceable
to a retiring originator most comfortable
cloaked amid shadow?
We are brazen; the darkness is not for us.
So we comb, quest, and seek without surcease,
just in case.
After all, who among us could forgo the chance
to goad the inexcusably withdrawn and demand
just what the big idea is, anyway? | https://medium.com/the-scene-heard/the-tangled-skein-2c5e6ec11f61 | [] | 2017-09-17 15:00:47.654000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Thesceneandheard', 'Existentialism', 'Life', 'Meaning Of Life'] |
DESIGN THINKING: The New Era of Designing — Better experience design — BED | Understanding consumer problems and transmitting ideas into physical solutions is the prime way of creating an efficient design. No matter what the product is, its design must provide ease and comfort to the user.
Until a few years ago, days design was either aesthetic or functional. But today, it has escalated to a much complex level. Designing today requires innovation and a human-centric perspective. Complex level designs are pretty hard to design and need a different approach. This is an advanced approach is what we call DESIGN THINKING in today’s era.
Models of Design Thinking:
The Design Thinking stages essentially range from five to seven. The seven-stage model was initially proposed in 1969 by Noble Prize laureate Herbert Simon in his seminal text ‘The Sciences of the Artificial’. This was further simplified by a five-stage Design Thinking model was proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
Let’s know more about it!
Design thinking is basically a modern approach towards design where designers ideally use a five-stage process to come out with solution-oriented, user friendly, and impressive design. Although it is a non-linear and repetitive process, designers work in teams to understand the human design problems, challenge assumptions, and finally create a handsome and efficient design. This process helps in providing solutions to ill-defined problems by rearranging elements in more human-centric ways. Design thinking consists of five different stages which are not necessarily sequential. These phases depend on the user experience and what difficulties they face while operating the product. Let us take a closer look over the five stages of Design Thinking.
1) Empathize:
Understanding consumer behaviour with the product and empathizing with their inconveniences during its use are the principle of this stage. This includes conversing with the experts in order to dig deeper into the problem and understand its origin through observations and engagement. Empathizing the customer issues helps designers to set aside their own opinions and assumptions about user experience and understand the actual user needs.
Thus, in this stage, the designers collect the required information about the problem statement and use it in the further stages to ideate solutions.
2) Define the Problem:
Now that you have gathered all the necessary data in the ‘Empathize’ stage, it’s now time for the team to observe and analyze the core problems. The ‘Define’ stage also involves going to the core and establishing features, functions, and elements. This helps in solving the problem statement in a more efficient and systematic manner.
Once the problem is defined, one can brainstorm for solutions.
3) Ideate:
The third stage of Design Thinking is where the team has to ‘think out of the box’ and put forth ideas that would resolve the problem statement. At this stage, one will have enough knowledge about the users and their problem statements as they have already studied them in the first two stages.
Thus, ideating alternative solutions to the problem and looking at it through different perspectives would result in a successful idea. But it is necessary to ensure that we pick the best feasible idea from the heap of ideas that are born during brainstorming.
4) Prototype:
In order to transmit the ideas into reality and execute them in the product, it is crucial to investigate the existing features of the product. So, the ideas which were chosen in the previous stage now experiment.
The only aim of this stage is to choose the best possible solution for the problems which were observed in the first three stages. Hence, prototypes are created using the best-selected ideas and the user experience is examined. This gives a clear picture for the team to reject or qualify a particular solution-based idea.
Apart from that, it also provides an understanding of consumer behaviour with the prototype which narrows down the options.
5) Test:
The prototyping stage opens the door for the final stage of Design Thinking which is Testing. Intensive testing of the finalized solutions is tested and the results are analyzed. The results lead to more alternations in the end product depending on the experience of the user.
Hence, even in the testing stage, the end product is optimized and refinements are made based on the convenience and usability of the consumer.
This is how the five stages of Design Thinking are coordinated. Although the above stages are linear, it need not be the same every time. It can be done quite flexibly. For instance, the designers may create various prototypes which would eventually lead to the solving of an undefined problem.
Thus, carrying out these stages even in a non-linear manner contributes to the development of the product.
Whatsoever, this concept of Design Thinking has brought a revolution in the design industry. It has undeniably made the designing process simpler, efficient, and aesthetic. Most importantly, it gives the user just what they want! | https://medium.com/@prabodhan-p/design-thinking-the-new-era-of-designing-better-experience-design-bed-923d0279c010 | ['Prabodhan P'] | 2020-08-15 05:22:15.378000+00:00 | ['Design Patterns', 'Design Thinking', 'Designer', 'Design', 'Design Process'] |
As an artist I desperately want to do something against current madness. | As an artist I desperately want to do something against current madness. So yesterday I decided to dedicate all my creativity from now on to celebrating freedom, self determination, togetherness, openness, independence, choice. Faces without masks, hands holding, hugs, crowds, rituals, festivals… Join me if you want the life ever go back to normal. | https://medium.com/@linandara/as-an-artist-i-desperately-want-to-do-something-against-current-madness-13ad1242a310 | ['Alexandra Cook'] | 2020-12-21 20:06:52.134000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Independence', 'Freedom', 'Togetherness', 'Self Determination'] |
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