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Why do dogs chase their tails? | Other than for grooming or injury reasons, it is abnormal for dogs to consistently chase their tails.
It can occur as an attention-getting activity or can escalate to a compulsive behavior that interferes with normal activities.
Compulsive behaviors are similar to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in people and one theory is that it results in an increase in endorphins in the brain thus acting to reinforce pleasure for the behavior | https://medium.com/@pvanush/why-do-dogs-chase-their-tails-10c5e0b67b4d | ['Anush Pv'] | 2020-12-26 07:28:52.640000+00:00 | ['Animals', 'Pets And Animals', 'Pet Behavior', 'Animal Behavior', 'Dogs'] |
Artis Turba COVID-19 Update | With the recent COVID-19 outbreak and the World Health Organization declaring the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic this leaves no country immune to the disease. On the 23 rd of March 2020, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national state of disaster with a nationwide lockdown for 21 days commencing at midnight on 26 March 2020 until midnight on 16 April 2020 in South Africa.
Artis Turba being a global community with physical offices in South Africa, Artis Turba’s offices would be closed from Thursday 26 March 2020 to Monday 20 April 2020 including telephone support. During this time our teams would be working remotely and email and ticket support will continue
uninterrupted.
As global citizens, Artis Turba strongly support these preventive measures to ensure we slow the spread of the virus and limit the social and economic impact as far as possible. We encourage our community to comply with recommendations, regulations and lockdowns as implemented by their governments and the World Health Organization to keep you and your loved ones safe.
Here are six basic protective measures against the new coronavirus as listed on the World Health Organization’s website;
1. Wash your hands regularly and thoroughly with an alcohol-based hand rub or wash them with soap and water
2. Maintain social distancing of at least 1 metre (3 feet) distance between yourself and anyone who is coughing or sneezing
3. Avoid touching eyes, nose and mouth
4. Covering your mouth and nose with your bent elbow or tissue when you cough or sneeze
5. If you have fever, cough and difficulty breathing, seek medical care immediately
6. Stay informed and follow advice given by your healthcare provider
You can find more information here https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-
2019/advice-for-public
Since our community are depositors, buyers, sellers and investors of cryptocurrencies we would like to emphasise that normal disciplines will continue to apply. We cannot predict the impact in the difficult time ahead of us, but want to ensure our community Artis Turba is open for business with the support you have become use to. At Artis Turba we’ve got you and you are good to go.
Keep Safe and Happy Trading,
Nigel and Nickey | https://medium.com/artisturba/artis-turba-covid-19-update-8966a7a1be62 | ['Artis Turba'] | 2020-03-26 08:02:33.897000+00:00 | ['Ripple', 'South Africa', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
The Hamster Trials Diary Entry #2: | The Hamster Trials Diary Entry #2:
Well, last night we learned that if you take the girls out of the cage to clean it and don’t keep a close eye on them they can disappear quick. Don’t let the stubby little legs fool you.
I took my eyes off of Coco-Chan for about 30 seconds and that resulted in a frantic 30 minute search by Kai, Chieko, and me to locate her. Eventually we found her about five feet away joyfully exploring the inside of my slipper. lol | https://medium.com/short-shots-city/the-hamster-trials-diary-entry-2-7d5e9517ad6c | ['Steve B Howard'] | 2020-12-03 23:26:24.868000+00:00 | ['Pets', 'Funny', 'Humor', 'Short Form', 'Short Read'] |
Learn best with the community | I had been in the game of self-learning for almost 1 and half years till now, but my learning remained still for a year. There was no potential growth I can observe, the graph of my learning was linear.
There were no improvements, no failures, not many achievements everything was stable, but I counted in that was the optimal way of learning pity I was wrong after all.
Halfway to 2020, many things came to light. My learning greatly shifted I came off from my comfort shell began to experiment. My growth so far has been during these 5 months.
How my learning got better?
I started to spend my time on Community and Forums, I get to meet a lot of peoples better than me with alike mindset. Solving other queries was one of my best learning indeed.
At the same time, I learned how to ask the right questions and got to know there doesn't exist something called dumb questions. Sharing in the forums was a great way to get to know about new emerging things.
Sharing my works and getting feedback is the key to boost my learning, I had it here. Forum is a great place to learn only if we intended to have an open mindset of learning from all means of sources.
Engage in forums and community, crave feedback, and answer other queries that are the best way to improve your learning especially when someone up to self-learning.
Good luck! | https://medium.com/@ashikshafi0/learn-best-with-the-community-69d23eec1bb4 | ['Ashik Shaffi'] | 2020-12-26 18:07:47.562000+00:00 | ['People', 'Learning', 'Learning To Code', 'Self Improvement', 'Community'] |
Our picks for the top 10 collaborative journalism projects of 2020 | Our picks for the top 10 collaborative journalism projects of 2020
By Betsy Abraham and Stefanie Murray
For the last few years, the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University has rounded up some of the most impactful and interesting collaborative journalism projects of the year. As part of our collaborative journalism program, we study and track collaborations in the U.S. and increasingly around the world.
This year it was hard to select a top 10. (Yes, we say that every year, we know!) We tried to showcase projects producing work that showed a demonstrable impact, broke an institutional barrier, or simply produced excellent journalism.
One thing to note about 2020 — and really, the last few years — is that we’ve seen a substantial number of new, ongoing collaboratives launch and produce exceptional work. Although their 2020 projects aren’t noted in the list below, they should be mentioned; that growing list includes such organizations as Resolve Philadelphia, the Granite State News Collaborative, the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative, the Colorado Media Project, Wichita Journalism Collaborative, Oklahoma Media Center, Great Lakes Now, Northeast Ohio Journalism Solutions Collaborative and Solving for Chicago.
The following projects are all excellent examples of what’s possible when news organizations reach across company lines and work together in the public interest. You can read more about these projects and many others at collaborativejournalism.org.
Word in Black
Word in Black is an important new collaborative of 10 Black publishers across the U.S. intended to frame “the narrative and foster solutions for racial inequities in America.” The group is unique because of how it’s structured and because it’s the only nationwide collaborative focused on the Black press. (It should be noted that Black media have long been leaders in collaborative journalism, well before most mainstream or white-owned media started to join in.)
The solutions journalism-oriented collaborative functions like this: First, a group of topics are identified. For each topic, the local publishers produce and publish a local story. Their stories are rolled into a single national story, written by Nick Charles, the project manager for Word in Black. The national story is then distributed to a wide array of media outlets that aren’t part of the collaborative.
The group’s first project this fall zeroed in on the impact of COVID-19 on K-12 education in Black communities. As of December, more than two dozen stories ranging from the mental health of students in the pandemic to parents grappling with school reopening plans and how special needs students are dealing with remote learning have been published. That reporting was supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Walton Family Foundation.
Word in Black got another boost earlier this month: A new $300,000 grant from the Google News Initiative that will allow it to launch as a national news brand in 2021.
FactChat
Led by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute, FactChat united U.S. fact-checking organizations with two major Spanish-language news broadcasters to fight mis- and disinformation during the 2020 presidential campaign. FactChat brought together U.S.-based journalists and fact-checkers in a bilingual alliance to give voters the information they needed to make their decisions based on facts.
Fact-checking and fighting misinformation has driven a lot of global collaboration over the last several years, led most notably by First Draft and IFCN. FactChat is significant in the U.S. because of its alliance with Spanish-language news broadcasters, as well as the fact that it united (otherwise competitive) fact-checkers across the nation for the first time. Partnerships between English and Spanish-language media entities have been growing and more are sorely needed.
The Circuit
There’s been several notable collaborative efforts to come out of Chicago recently, which has become one of the most interesting cities in the U.S. for journalistic innovation. (Hello, City Bureau!) This year, Chicago-based news organizations The Better Government Association, Injustice Watch, and The Chicago Reporter teamed up with tech consultant DataMade and researchers from the Harris School for Public Policy at the University of Chicago to form The Circuit — an investigative journalism collaboration that shined a spotlight on the Cook County Circuit Court, the second-largest unified court system in the world.
And what a spotlight it was. Over the course of two years, the team analyzed and organized criminal cases that came through the court system from 2000 to 2018, seeking to expose systemic inequity and bias. That included 3 million charges over 19 years. That kind of data gathering and analysis is always ripe for a collaborative effort like this. The investigation is ongoing, but the group has already produced several stories as well as a user-friendly interactive that breaks down its data.
First Draft
When you are First Draft — known globally for its work fighting misinformation — it’s hard to outdo yourself, but that is exactly what the organization did in 2020. First Draft’s collaborative work around the 2020 U.S. Elections was spectacular and critically important. From its active Slack group to its weekly office hours, U.S. 2020 dashboard, fantastic newsletters, SMS election updates, community alerts, and Local News Fellowship, First Draft provided a needed service to both its community and journalists around the country.
The Local News Fellowship was an interesting new addition this year, in which five paid local news fellows were placed in communities predicted to experience high levels of mis- and disinformation. The fellows collaborated with several local news outlets in their region, training other journalists on how to fight mis- and disinformation and creating non-branded local reporting.
FinCEN Files
Whenever the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists drops a new investigation in partnership with its worldwide network, you know it’s going to be good. The FinCEN Files followed in ICIJ’s previous footsteps of leveraging its global reach to dig deep into money laundering and financial malfeasance across continents.
The FinCEN Files revealed how banks’ profit motivations overwhelm their legal obligations to stop dirty money. Among some of the key collaboration highlights:
More than 2,600 total documents in the FinCEN Files dataset
110 media partners (counting ICIJ and BuzzFeed news)
400 journalists
88 countries representing among the media partners
16 months spent organizing and analyzing the documents
The Cartel Project
Since 2000, 119 journalists have been killed in Mexico, making the country one of the most dangerous places in the world for members of the press. That didn’t stop 60 journalists from 25 media organizations around the world from coming together to finish the work of one of their murdered colleagues: Regina Martínez. The Mexican journalist was murdered in 2012 and the consortium of writers for the Cartel Project, run out of Forbidden Stories, put out five investigations exploring the global networks of Mexican drug cartels and their political connections around the world. Their findings were explosive: journalists linked the former governor to an embezzlement scandal, uncovered that the official narrative around Martinez’ death was spread through a disinformation campaign, and exposed how cyber-surveillance technology was being repeatedly misused in Mexico, including against journalists, among other bombshells.
This collaboration was intended to send a message: “Killing the journalist won’t kill the story.” And with its worldwide scope, enormity, and fearlessness in taking on criminals and authorities, it did just that.
Nowhere to Go
There are more than a half-million unhoused people in America, living in cars, shelters, and on the street. To find out more about the plight and drivers of homelessness, as well as how communities are responding, a national consortium of student reporters fanned out across the country for “Nowhere to go.”
Boston University graduate student Ryoma Komiyama reporting from his desk during COVID-19 for Nowhere to Go. Photo by Kamome Komiyama.
The stories are gut-wrenching and they shine a light on an often ignored segment of the U.S. population. The collaboration itself is noteworthy because we’re fairly confident it’s the largest collaboration of collegiate journalists ever, with more than 270 students from seven universities working in concert. Led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists as their instructors, the cohort produced nearly 40 stories on how people are experiencing homelessness, exploring everything from evictions, to criminalization, to the treatment of those living in encampments. Their work not only humanizes the problem of homelessness, but it also serves as an example of what can be accomplished when teaching collaborative journalism at the collegiate level.
Slammed: Rural health care and COVID-19
Rural America is often overlooked in national and regional reporting, which makes Slammed so particularly important. The project highlights the unique challenges faced by rural communities as they clash head-to-head with the coronavirus pandemic — challenges that included barriers to healthcare, natural disasters, economic hardships, and a large elderly population with more chronic health conditions. Media partners examined the various ways the pandemic was affecting rural health care, putting together maps on the counties with the highest infections, conducting Facebook Lives to address how meat packing plants were spreading the virus, and examining the increased adoption and use of telemedicine.
Hidden epidemics: The mounting mental health toll of disasters
Since 2010, the U.S. has had 37 wildfires, hurricanes and floods causing at least a billion dollars in damage each. But beyond the impact to property, the toll of natural disasters on mental health has also been staggering, with survivors suffering depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
The Center for Public Integrity and Columbia Journalism Investigations, along with its partner news organizations, were able to do a deep dive into the mental health needs of disaster survivors. They covered the impact of repetitive fires in the West, rebuilding from floods in the south, and the healing process in the wake of hurricanes in Puerto Rico.
The stories not only captured the lingering psychological impacts of these disasters, but also how people were healing from them. Reporting partners highlighted the stories of community support groups and those of other survivors. By using a networked approach, the project was able to get insights at the community level, including from mental health professionals and social workers, by utilizing the resources of local partners across the country.
Courtesy Pixabay
The COVID Tracking Project
There have been countless COVID trackers to come out over the last several months but this one takes the cake for most impressive simply because it is so extremely thorough. Tests, cases, hospitalizations, racial data: the site includes data about all of it and is incredibly accessible and user-friendly. And for those of us without a health degree, the data definition index and various interactives breaking down the information are also super helpful.
Spearheaded by The Atlantic, the project draws upon the expertise of journalists as well as developers, universities, scientists, and medical professionals — not to mention an army of volunteers compiling the latest daily numbers on tests, cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every U.S. state and territory. More than just a one-stop shop for coronavirus information, the project has been an incredible public service, powering research and reporting not only for media outlets but for institutions such as John Hopkins and even the White House. | https://medium.com/centerforcooperativemedia/our-picks-for-the-top-10-collaborative-journalism-projects-of-2020-ecf4c6aa7d7c | ['Betsy Abraham'] | 2020-12-22 14:49:29.536000+00:00 | ['2020', 'Journalism', 'Top 10', 'Collaboration Tools', 'Lists'] |
Want to look the best for your Big day— The Wedding Nutrition | Hounded by Photographers…
Amidst the Limelight…
Looking fit and fabulous is every Groom’s and Bride’s dream!
These factors drive the would be’s to keep their body fit, slim and gorgeous, when the wedding is around the corner. But sadly, during this time, they will also be quite stressed which can hamper their fitness goals. Planning a wedding is not a cakewalk and it can take a toll on the waistline.
Looking to lose excess weight and to be fit, you need to have and and follow a Nutrition Plan, not a Diet Plan! Once you start a diet, you will have t o follow it to the T and restrict your favorite foods, and definitely this is not the time to miss out some indulgence and rejoice the wedding season.
To achieve your fitness goals, you don’t need to spend hours in the gym every day. Making simple changes to your Nutrition schedule and some exercise will make all the difference.
Here is an action plan that can help you manage your wedding nutrition plan. These healthy nutrition tips will come handy especially when you are trying to lose weight.
6–12 Months before the Wedding
If you have around 6–12 months, then you have a long time to follow your wedding diet plan as well as make some necessary changes in your lifestyle.
In such a long time, you will get time to lose weight gradually and sustainably. A sustainable weight loss will also help you keep the weight off in the long run.
1. Increased Protein Intake
Try consuming more proteins than extra carbohydrates and fats. Protein requires more energy to break down which result in increasing your metabolism.It also helps in suppressing the hunger hormone, Ghrelin. Protein lets you feel full for a long time and helps in revealing leaner muscles. This will give you a toned look in your wedding outfit.
Add protein to each meal to sustain your energy levels, intensive preparations and shopping will leave you drained.
2. Avoid Refined Carbohydrates
Instead of binging on refined carbohydrates such as pasta, macaroni, noodles, pizza and burger, start having complex carbohydrates.
Refined carbohydrates have zero nutritional value. On the other hand, complex carbohydrates provide your body with essential nutrients like vitamins and minerals, also keeping you energized throughout the day. They provide good satiety than refined ones.
You can opt for whole grains like whole wheat, brown rice, millets like bajra, ragi and jowar.
3. Fibre
Increasing fibre in your diet by including fruits and nuts can help you meet your fitness goals. They contain fewer calories and eases digestion. Fibre helps in burning more calories and reduces hunger.
Fruits are rich in antioxidants, vitamins and minerals that will provide you are glowing skin; Adding walnuts to your diet will also have a simpler effect.
4. Don’t Miss Breakfast
When dieting, never skip the first meal of the day. Our body’s energy gets refuelled after breakfast.
It has been shown through research that our breakfast should be the heaviest meals as it provides the body with the essential nutrients.
Moreover, a healthy breakfast helps in avoiding craving during the latter part of the day which often leads to unhealthy eating.
5. Little Meals Throughout The Day
You eat five little meals a day instead of three big meals a day. This will keep your hunger at moderate levels and also regulates the sugar levels.
Nutritionists recommend that you don’t have to eat the full meals. You can make these three meals and two snacks.
6. Eating in Moderate Levels
The key is not to cut anything but to eat a variety of food in moderation. When you decide to cut on a particular food, you will start craving for it, and you are less likely to control yourself. You end up binge eating it.
Losing weight for the D-day shouldn’t become a punishment for you. Rather it should be a positive approach towards a healthy lifestyle. It isn’t about healthy or unhealthy food but making informed decisions.
3 Months before the Wedding
Many people may think that three months is a very short time to follow a wedding diet, but in reality, even this much time is enough to bring the necessary changes in your lifestyle. It is still not too late to lose some extra kilos before your big day.
Don’t worry we will not advise you any sorts of crash diets or fad diets that are unhealthy and unsustainable.
Start following the instructions same as mentioned for 6–12 months but there are few additional steps that shall help you lose extra fat in 3 months of time.
Exercise will play a major role here. If you were exercising say for 30 minutes earlier, then now increase it to 45 minutes to 1 hour. This will accelerate your fat loss. At times, shifting from a regular activity like walking to something like strength training or yoga can also help.
You can also increase inclusions of superfoods or function foods like
Ginger+Lemon cinnamon detox water
Flaxseeds
Chia seeds
Wheatgrass etc. which will help in weight management. By eating superfoods, you will also get several nutritional benefits.
However, one thing that you shouldn’t forget is that you can lose weight in this much time, but it won’t be as much as you intended to, and secondly, starving is neither healthy nor sustainable.
A good way to start your wedding diet plan 12 weeks before the big day is by getting a rough idea of how many calories are required by your body.
There are many calorie calculators available online. It can help you in estimating the calories you will burn each day after exercising.
It is simple mathematics; you have to intake fewer calories per day than the value presented by the calculator. This will let your body lose weight.
While it may seem a tempting idea to lower your calorie level further, you should keep in mind that it should not fall below 1,200 calories per day for women and 1500 calories for men.
If you consume fewer calories than required, it can slow your metabolism and even lead to loss of muscle and lead to nutrient deficiencies.
And importantly, don’t become calorie-obsessed. More than the calories, the nutritional value of the food matters a lot. For instance, a small slice of pizza and a bowl of a salad may have the same 100 calories. But to lose weight effectively and be energetic, you should choose the latter.
4 Weeks before the Wedding
Realistically, it is quite difficult to change your diet and lose weight in such a short period. Going on a liquid diet is not recommended since it causes water retention and will make you feel heavier. A liquid diet can also make you look pale and low on energy.
Nutritionists say that such a short-term wedding diet requires detailed research to find out if it will be right for you and your type of body.
Taking professional help can help you a lot when you have less time. This can help you in controlling the calorie intake as well as make sure that you are meeting your protein requirements and other important nutrients of the body.
They may recommend you supportive supplements as well so that you shed those extra kilos and still feel energetic throughout the day.
Pre Wedding Diet plan for weight loss
Below are two diet plans for vegetarians and non-vegetarians. Following these will help you lose weight efficiently and healthily.
Vegetarian Meal Plan (Women)
Early Morning- 1 glass of lemon cinnamon water + 2 tsp. soaked chia seeds.
Breakfast-1 cup Vegetable Upma + 1 glass Skim milk + 1 cup Sprouts
Mid Morning- Tender Coconut water/ 1 Seasonal Fruit
Lunch- 1 bowl Salad + 2 Roti + 1 cup Dal
Mid Evening Snacks- 1 glass of Buttermilk
Evening Snacks 2- Green Tea + Roasted Flax seeds 2tbsp.
Dinner- 1 bowl Vegetable Soup(Homemade) + 2 vegetable dal chilla/ dosa + 1 tbsp Chutney | https://medium.com/@dt.deepikavasudevan/want-to-look-the-best-for-your-big-day-the-wedding-nutrition-204e7038f1d | [] | 2020-02-20 11:35:46.899000+00:00 | ['Fitness', 'Weddings', 'Nutrition', 'Health', 'Beauty'] |
Avoid a Dirty Git Repo | Why Is Git Slowing Down Over Time?
Each time you interact with your repo, you create Git objects. Unpacked, loose Git objects are created with each change. Unused Git objects and unused reflog paths are only creating a mess in your Git repo.
Loose objects in most cases cause slowdown. By default, Git creates new objects for each change you make. Take into account big files that will be duplicated, with little changes between them. To combat this, Git packs those files into packfiles to reduce file size. More on this topic can be found here.
I will show you two methods to clean your Git repo. | https://medium.com/better-programming/avoid-a-dirty-git-repo-4e9518d7914c | ['Živković Miloš'] | 2020-07-10 15:58:49.511000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Coding', 'Git', 'Programming', 'Version Control'] |
20 Chatbot Creators: How to Build Your Customized Chatbot | 20 Chatbot Creators: How to Build Your Customized Chatbot
A Chatbot is a program that mimics human interaction. It automatically chats with internet users and gives a series of pre-prepared answers according to what they ask. It is actually an interactive FAQ tool that becomes more and more useful as you add more and more questions and answers to it.
Examples of chatbots:
You can build anything you imagine, with chatbots possibilities is endless.
Creating a Chatbot used to involve a lot of programming and hard work, but now there are Chatbot creator apps and tools that help you create a Chatbot without any (and/or with minimal) coding involved.
1. Chatfuel
The interface makes programming your tool very easy. The Chatfuel creators have spent a lot of time making the Chatbot-creation function very user-friendly. As with most bots, it recognized words that are very similar to the ones you have entered into the tool, which means your users may make spelling mistakes.
2. Botsify
It has a very simple bot design interface and allows for a series of different greeting configurations. It works with WordPress, and it has media support that allows you to use video, image and audio files as part of your Chatbot answers.
3. Smooch
With this tool, you are able to integrate the Facebook messenger into your website and/or communication process. Smooch’s power comes from its ability to integrate with numerous other tools, which makes it a very flexible and almost-unique chatting tool.
4. Facebook Messenger Platform
Just like Smooch, the Facebook Messenger Platform uses Facebook Messenger as its Chatbot. However, Smooch’s power comes from other-software integration, whereas the Facebook Messenger Platform’s power comes from the ability to specifically tailor your Facebook Messenger Bot.
5. Beep Boop
With this developer platform, you will be able to build your own Slack integrations. You may host, share and deploy your Slack integrations very quickly. With this tool and within Slack, you will be able to build your own customer support tools.
6. Telegram Bots
The Telegram Bots is a reasonably powerful tool for developers that want to do some, but not all of the legwork for their Chatbot. The tool allows developers to create a series of different bots. The tool is very flexible and the more time you spend on your bot, then the better it becomes and the better it looks.
7. Botkit
This is the howdy.ai botkit. If you have a little programming experience, then this should be a very big contender for your attention. It is an open-source tool for creating bots, and its simplicity is only matched by its expansive power. It is tricky to use, but it is worth learning.
8. Kit Bot
The Kit Bot is probably the most out of place on this list. It is a tool that helps you stay in touch with the people you know. It is a personal Chatbot that tells you things such as who you saw yesterday, and it reminds you about the people you haven’t sent a message to in a while.
9. Init.ai
Build chatbots with this tool, feed them information so that they become more useful, and launch them. The more you add to your tool, the more intelligent it appears. Reach users where they are with SMS, on the web, chat, or create a custom experience within your existing product.
10. FlowXO
With FlowXO, you are able to build bots for Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack and SMS. You may build bots without needing to use any sort of code, and you may manage and scale your bots as you see fit. Build it once, and the same Chatbot works on Facebook messenger, Twilio SMS, Telegram and Slack.
11. API.ai
You may use the API tool wherever you are using the Facebook Messenger tool. Have it create automatic responses for you. Enter enough information that is cleverly thought out and tested, and you may give the impression that the tool has intelligence.
12. Converse.ai
Engage with your customers with a well-designed Chatbot. Create a Chatbot that easily integrates with your other tools, provide more than just text, and create instant responses for your users. Create push conversations and use the automated services to provide a better customer support tool.
13. Microsoft Bot Platform
Microsoft has a wide number of online and offline services, which is why a Microsoft Bot may be your best solution. It integrates with SMS services, Slack, Office 365, Slack and Skype. Building a Skype bot may be a great idea since Skype is very popular these days.
14. ChatScript
The ChatScript developer tool is very powerful and very flexible. It should be a strong contender for any developers that wish to do some, but not all, of the work required to create a strong and unique Chatbot that is as customizable as you allow it to be.
15. PandoraBot
The bot uses natural language processing and your inputted information to create audio and text-based conversations with users. They have a very popular playground, which is a sandbox method that allows you to play with the tool. It is a good testing function that helps beginners familiarize themselves with the tool and its many functions.
16. Rebot.me
It is hard to figure out which target audience the Robot.me developers were aiming for. It comes across as somewhat of a tool for casual users that want to play with the idea of a ChatBot. It may be useful for people that want to test the water with a new Chatbot.
17. Imperson
The Imperson Company has tried hard to make their tool less of an automated FAQ tool. The developers have created a system that encourages you to enter lots of information in a way that generates longer and more in-depth conversations.
18. Gupshup.io
The GupShup tools are mostly for people that understand a fair amount about programming. Yet, even with little programming knowledge, you are able to create a Chatbot very quickly and very efficiently. The website makes creating your bot very easy.
19. Onsequel.com
With this tool, you are able to create a Chatbot that appears personable and friendly. It is a good tool for getting people started with a conversation before a real-life person takes over. You may create interactive stories with branching plots.
20. Bot qq
Create a Chatbot that offers fast publishing, semantic understanding, and voice/image processing. Create custom scripts that you may build in your own language. There is also a release testing function that allow say to test your Chatbot before it goes online.
Conclusion
As you can see by this article, there is plenty of choice out there for people that wish to create chatbots. The most obvious piece of advice is that you should shop around to find one that suits your purposes and your budget. It is also worth learning as much as you can about each tool so that you may customize it more deeply and create a Chatbot that mimics artificial intelligence more effectively. | https://medium.com/@brendasavoie/20-chatbot-creators-how-to-build-your-customized-chatbot-94509ced94f2 | ['Brenda Savoie'] | 2016-11-10 11:03:34.712000+00:00 | ['Bots', 'Messaging'] |
My Final Eurotrip Blog | July 23rd, 2010
I met a lot of people on my solo trip through Europe. The Facebook group I started says I met 182 people in 70 days, and those are just the ones whose actual information I was able to gather. These are the people that defined this amazing journey across a continent, one in which I set out on alone…
I met other Americans from dozens of US states… the crazy trio from Seattle, the adorable sisters from Cali, the journalist from Atlanta. Some were seeking cultural experiences like myself, and others with the intent of causing alcohol-induced brain damage (I’m obviously guilty of this too).
I met Canadians from every province, and yes, they are all hockey-crazed lunatics (one of which turned out to be my itinerary-planning soul mate! We met up in five different countries!) I met two Finns who taught me more about European people in three days then I had known my entire life. I met a bunch of Belgians that can’t stop dancing, and have a fondness of beer that makes Americans look like school girls.
I met a Spanish rugby team that enthusiastically kept an entire hostel awake, but apologized for it the following morning and invited me to their tournament. I stayed with a French couple who were incredulous of all things American, yet after meeting me, have a better idea of why we are such a proud nation. I met two Ecuadorian guys who had been backpacking and working local jobs all over the globe for so long, they couldn’t remember their home addresses (they estimated being gone for three years). I met a couple of South Africans who wear soccer uniforms to work, and fear of a rugby renaissance in America (all we need is 15 studs out of 350 million and we can take the world!)
I shared a 6-bed hostel room with five Hungarian girls, who read bible verses to each other every night before bed in their native tongue. I met an Argentinean travel guide who was so enthusiastic about his job, I took two of his tours. I met a Dutch quantum physicist, who chose to follow a career as an electrician because physics made his mind race so furiously with ideas, he could never get anything accomplished. I met a 20-year-old English soldier relaxing on a patio outside of a bar, who on his 21st birthday, was willingly heading back to Afghanistan to continue the fight against the Taliban (he was originally sent over on his 19th birthday… not to mention he was missing a few teeth from an IED blast).
I met two British girls who accompanied me for seven days over mountains and across beaches (and laughed my ass off when they cut up their bed sheets to make English flags for the world cup). I met three lunatic Aussies that party just as hard as me, with all of us easily finishing a Century Club. I met an American and Chilean who made such an odd travel couple, but felt like my brothers by the time they left, especially after narrowly avoiding death several times while bombing around Barcelona in go carts (me and this same Chilean would later wreck havoc on Athens with a bottle of ouzo in hand).
I went scuba diving with a Brazilian, and got inked with him as we disturbed two octopi having sex. I got a random ride to a massive club with three Canadian girls from an Italian who didn’t speak a word of English. I rode quads over the Greek islands with a Kiwi, and went sky diving over the Swiss Alps several days later. I tore my MCL the next day canyoning, and wasn’t even bitter about it because of the friends I met that night while dancing on crutches!
I met a group of ‘frolicking pterodactyls’ in Budapest, and literally had one of the best weeks of my life with these loons. I couchsurfed with a handful of the sweetest people in the world, who willingly let me into their home for free, and in the end, became some of my best friends along the way. The Turkish girl in Berlin who took me to an outdoor karaoke jam, the German girl in Bruges who took me on a beer tour and to a Boombal, the sweetheart in Munich who taught me so much about German culture, and to the fantastic trio in Budapest, who not only threw me a party, but instantly became friends for a lifetime! And while I met all of these people, I chronicled all of it in a travel blog…
I kept this blog for several reasons; I wanted to have an extensive travel journal of my accounts, so in years to come I could recount the great times. I also wanted to provide an unbiased account of my interactions with people from around the world, so that anyone following my tales could maybe learn something about a foreign culture. But most of all, I kept this blog to inspire. I set out on this journey alone with the hope I could meet everyone in the world. Obviously, that is impossible; but wherever I saw a smile, I approached and befriended. And in doing so, I became a better person these past 70 days. So, to everyone who read these posts, I thank you for your interest. However, I propose to you a challenge. Far too often do we become complacent in our jobs or our current academic endeavors, and completely forget how amazing this world is. I ask you to pick up where I left off and make your own stories. I had hoped that these posts would inspire you, and if I can just get one person to travel overseas, then I have accomplished my goal. I’m not saying you need to go solo for 70 days to 14 countries; of course, a trip of this magnitude is incredibly intimidating and daunting to some of you. But instead of upgrading your 60-inch plasma screen TV to a 72-inch screen this year, why not take that money and go somewhere! Anywhere! Get out of your cubicle, put down your servers’ apron, close that calculus book, and go meet someone that you would never meet in the states! I promise you it will be one of the most enriching experiences of your life. So again, I thank everyone for following me, and even those of you morbid assholes that only checked to see if I was dead! But now I sit back and hope to sometime soon be regaling in your travel blog.
Au revoir, ciao, auf wiedersehen!
-Batty | https://medium.com/@batty2279/my-final-eurotrip-blog-ddbd46f34bfb | ['Matt Batty'] | 2020-12-17 15:41:45.402000+00:00 | ['Backpacking', 'Europe'] |
Ethereum 2.0 staking rewards are coming for crypto traders soon | The much-anticipated Ethereum 2.0 staking has got major succor as all the top global cryptocurrency exchanges are all set to support it.
Plans are in full swing to inaugurate ETH2 staking, trading, and conversion services from early next year. Users can convert their Ethereum tokens into ETH2 and earn staking rewards. The staked ETH2 tokens will remain locked on the beacon chain. Trading will be enabled between ETH2 and ETH and all other supported currencies, ensuring sufficient liquidity for the platform’s users.
The migration and distribution of ETH 2.0 staking rewards will also be supported.
Ethereum’s efforts for Ethereum 2.0 staking
Ethereum is already in full swing to upgrade its network from a proof of work consensus mechanism to a proof of stake concept.
The proof of stake method is more energy-efficient and sustainable for validating users’ transactions on the network.
It will reduce the risks of centralization, lower the transaction costs, prevent network congestion issues, and be more resistant to any attacks.
Ethereum is already supporting many DApps, DeFi projects, and games on its network with a vibrant developer community.
ETH2 aims to solve two main issues within blockchain development: limited scalability and high gas prices.
Ethereum 2.0 needs the support of at least 16384 validators and a combined value of 524,288 ETH to launch its services.
It wants to make itself be used by anyone in the world regardless of the hardware available to them, in a manner that is resistant to any form of censorship.
ETH 2.0 has a whopping speed of 100,000 transactions per second.
Some factors to consider before going for Ethereum 2.0 staking
Those investors planning to put their money for the long run will use their assets to support the blockchain network’s health and earn some yield along the way.
While yields can be up to 20%, sometimes the staked ETH of users will be locked up, making it illiquid for an indefinite period.
Stakers will also face the possibility of being slashed if they fail to perform their duties properly on the platform.
Potential stakers have to decide whether to do the entire process themselves or delegate the task to stake providers or third parties.
Since a minimum of 32 ETH ($18,816) will be required, many may opt to join staking pools that aggregate small amounts of ETH.
There is also a likelihood of the staked ETH on the beacon chain to be tokenized. This will lead to a derivative of the asset to be created that can be used and traded freely.
There are pooling alternatives in the form of Rocket Pool where even a small amount of 0.01 ETH can be staked easily, and the users’ can receive a tokenized staking deposit.
Though the staking of Ethereum 2.0 is not entirely risk-free, the crypto world is daring enough to experiment with it. Since the ETH stakeholders play a central role in the beacon chain upkeep, they receive rewards regularly for securing the network and constant validation.
Blockchain App Factory has also kept pace with the changing trends by offering Ethereum 2.0 staking where users can earn passive income. The rewards will be calculated based on the quantity of staked assets, the staking duration, inflation rate, and the network issuance rate. | https://medium.com/security-token-offering/ethereum-2-0-staking-rewards-are-coming-for-crypto-traders-soon-c92180cb9fdc | ['Scott Macy'] | 2020-12-08 09:19:23.565000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Ethereum Token', 'Eth', 'Token Development', 'Ethereum 2'] |
Firestore Nedir?. Herkese Merhaba, | 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/keove/so%C4%9Fuk-bir-karantina-gecesinde-firestore-firestore-nedir-f0ae8dad9457 | ['Gökmen Bayram'] | 2021-01-09 11:15:11.081000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Android', 'Firestore', 'Firebase', 'Kotlin'] |
Why Go Vegan? | Some Food For Thought
I think a lot of people who start to eat healthier come to a point where they have to explain their eating habits to others. Why can’t you come with us to this restaurant? Can’t we just go to Burger King? What’s wrong with this salad? This is especially true for vegans, at least this is my personal experience.
So What Is The Vegan Diet?
Vegans simply don’t eat anything that comes directly or indirectly from animals (except the natural act of dusting a blossom). For an easy start, you should have this list in mind
no meat (neither pork, beef, chicken, lamb or kangaroo)
no fish and no seafood
no milk and other dairy products
no cheese (especially)
no eggs
no honey
But beware of some pitfalls. If you want to live strictly vegan, there are some nasty ingredients, you also have to avoid.
Gelatin is made out of the bone marrow of a pig and is used in gummy bear sweets, jello, mousses and a lot of other stuff
is made out of the bone marrow of a pig and is used in gummy bear sweets, jello, mousses and a lot of other stuff Many wines and kinds of vinegar, especially red wines are also cleared with gelatin. This goes also for a lot of soft drinks from apple juice to lemonades depending on the brand
and kinds of vinegar, especially red wines are also cleared with gelatin. This goes also for a lot of from apple juice to lemonades depending on the brand A lot of non-german beer brands clear their products with isinglass, which is a substance from a fish’s swim bladder. However, the situation on that matter is getting better every year.
brands clear their products with isinglass, which is a substance from a fish’s swim bladder. However, the situation on that matter is getting better every year. Some of the famous E food additives are not vegan like E 120 carmine (red colour coming from a coccid insect), E 322 lecithin (could come from egg protein), E 901 bee wax, E 904 shellac (also from a coccid) and several others with potential animal origin
Why should We Do That?
Actually, there are 3 major reasons for becoming a vegan and personal taste is actually not one of them. Believe me, no one wants to look on every package to see which E additives are used. So we directly go to the important stuff.
Reason 1: The Animals
Most vegans are animal friends or even animal activists. The life of an animal is not worth less than the life of a human. But even if you are not such a radical mind with genes to actively fight against animal inequality, you will definitely sooner or later see that things go very wrong in the meat industry. There are too many of us and therefore the demand for meat and animal products is much too high to be able to produce this in a humane and non-painful way for the animals.
It starts with the obvious. Just go for some real-world documentaries on chicken farming, cow slaughter processes and pig stables.
But even processes that are established for centuries are crude. A cow, that should give milk, for example, needs one pregnancy and one calf per year. The calf is then separated from its mother directly after birth and kept within listening distance, which is a torture for the cow and the calf as you could imagine. And that’s just for having a product, that is specially designed by nature as nutrition for a calf. Humans in their first months have to get accustomed to this and some of them have an intolerance against it for their whole lifetime.
Reason 2: Health
There are several aspects that concern the health area. Maybe the most important ones are the lack of cholesterol in almost every meal, which is especially good for a bureau worker with a genetical predisposition for heart disease reaching back several generations like me.
Secondly, you automatically eat fresher and more conscious, buy more organic products, which gives me vitamins en masse without taking any pill. And adding to that, things like antibiotics in cheap meat, mouldy and rotten products and rainbow-coloured slices of sausage are a thing from the past.
And thirdly for me most importantly, by restricting to only vegan products the temptation is gone to go for a snack, a doughnut, a piece of cake or chocolate while working. You will quit convenience food, microwave stuff and deep-frozen pizza automatically because any of these products surely contain ingredients you don’t eat as a vegan.
Reason 3: The Environment
To me, the most important aspect overall was to reduce my personal ecologic footprint. I try to find a low energy flat, quit my car some years ago and drink water directly from the tap.
Did you know that CO₂ coming from the industrial sector, cars and heating are actually not the only main reason for the greenhouse effect? No, stock farming is almost always missing on the lists with a share of over 20 %. Imagine giant cattle herds in South America and the US. A cow produces methane which has 28 times higher greenhouse potential than the same amount of CO₂ and remains much longer in the atmosphere because the resorption rate is lower.
For an equivalent to a delicious well-hung rib eye steak from good Argentinian or Japanese beef in a restaurant in my neighbourhood, I could easily get into a Porsche Cayenne, drive from Hamburg to the Côte d’Azur (and back) and have an even more delicious vegan meal there — both have the same impact on the greenhouse effect.
Are There Any Downsides?
Ther are, of course, disadvantages. Living as a vegan is a much less challenging task these days as compared to — let’s say — 20 years ago. It even was harder six years ago, when I became a vegan. But still, there are some things to consider:
There is one essential vitamin that you can’t get from your diet. That is B 12. So you’ll have to supplement this. The rest is coming if you choose your ingredients in a balanced way.
There is still a rather mixed situation regarding food packaging and the information on it. While the vegan flower label can be seen on more and more products, for many others, this still means reading 3-point font size ingredient lists in the supermarket. So don’t forget your glasses.
In restaurants, you need to have trust that vegan or veganized orders are cooked with standards similar to your own and that the chef knows the rules. Especially for (my beloved) Thai food for example, where fish sauce is essential in all otherwise vegan dishes, this is going to be hard.
Final Words
Three important reasons pro veganism. At least for me. That’s why I can’t imagine going back anymore. Since we (me and my wife) do it, we have more variability in our everyday food, have found out about ingredients, we’ve never tasted before and have learned things about cruelties in the production chain of meat, milk and eggs, we’d rather like to never have known. Therefore my personal suggestion is: try it out. For the business people among you: it’s a win-win situation. | https://medium.com/@aithir/why-go-vegan-d8f9d35998eb | ['Matthias Reis'] | 2020-12-23 10:42:12.181000+00:00 | ['Vegan', 'Climate Change', 'Health', 'Veganism'] |
The WFP humanitarian who went from tackling Ebola to coronavirus | Chiara Camassa is an administration officer for the World Food Programme in Haiti, where there are currently 72 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Five people have died. Since arriving in the Caribbean country four months ago, Camassa has been the WFP ‘focal point’ for COVID-19 issues — largely due to her experience of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Below, she talks about her work.
Tell us about how you came to tackle Ebola?
I landed in WFP’s regional response hub of Accra, Ghana, with the responsibility to deploy and track assets throughout three affected countries: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. What we mean by ‘assets’ is mostly generators, prefabs, sanitation structures … and generally, anything that helps us or our partners set up treatment centres, offices and infrastructure in a very short time.
Temperature check at a food distribution in Nippes, Haiti. Photo: Caritas
We often think of WFP as the organization delivering food assistance, but it also plays an important role in procuring and moving such assets, and participating in the construction of treatment centres.
I was always travelling between the three countries, sometimes to remote villages by helicopter, to keep track of assets and understand how they were being deployed and used.
What were your impressions of WFP’s response?
Going into these remote villages, often not accessible by road, or where trucks would get stuck in the mud, it was rewarding to see that our food assistance was reaching the families that needed it.
A UN Humanitarian Air Service helicopter transports medical staff, medicines and hospital equipment across Haiti. Photo: WFP/Antoine Vallas
The assistance meant that people would not have to take long journeys to buy food to put on the table. It allowed them to stay at home and avoid contact with others, which helped to prevent the spread of the virus.
What lessons can be learned from the Ebola response?
In both contexts, food assistance can help facilitate sheltering at home. Here in Haiti, we’ve delivered a month’s worth of food rations to the people in Ennery in the town of Artibonite, just as it was about to be placed under quarantine by the Government. | https://medium.com/world-food-programme-insight/the-wfp-humanitarian-who-went-from-tackling-ebola-to-covid-19-19422a16b6a8 | ['Antoine Vallas'] | 2020-05-28 12:54:37.754000+00:00 | ['Humanitarian', 'Covid 19', 'Ebola', 'Haiti', 'Wfp'] |
JavaScript Graph Visualization Libraries Updated — Check Out AnyChart 8.7.0 with New Cool Features! | AnyChart 8.7.0 is out with a lot of new awesome data visualization features. Look what we’ve added to our JavaScript graph libraries in this major update.
New Features in AnyChart 8.7.0
Client-Side Export
We’ve added the client-side export feature to all our libraries — AnyChart, AnyStock, AnyGantt, AnyMap. Save your charts as SVG, PNG, JPG, and PDF without a roundtrip to the server.
Stock UI Controls: Swap and Maximize
AnyStock is now provided with new UI controls — “Up,” “Down,” and “Maximize.” These buttons allow swapping the adjoining charts and maximizing one of them so it fills the entire page.
Stock Plot Splitter
A splitter is now automatically created between stock chart plots. It enables the viewer to change the relative height of the charts by dragging it up or down, facilitating analysis when multiple charts are on the page.
Infinite Range Annotations
We’ve also delivered two new annotations to AnyStock — infinite ranges, horizontal and vertical. So now they can be drawn using a ready-to-use UI. Look at two demos — horizontal range; vertical range.
New Technical Indicators
5 new indicators for technical analysis are now available: Envelope (ENV), Ichimoku Cloud (IKH), Price Oscillator (PPO), Rank Correlation Index (RCI), and Psychological Line (PSY). See examples.
Milestone Preview on Parent Task Bar
Milestone preview on parent task bars is now available in AnyGantt, allowing the viewer to quickly understand the milestones of such a task. Gantt w/ milestone preview example.
Custom Marker for Milestone
We’ve also added an option to customize milestone markers on Gantt charts by type and color. Use it to differentiate between the milestones of non-identical nature. Here’s an example.
Custom Basic Year
Previously, our Gantt charts only supported the calendar year as the basic year period. Now, it is possible to define a custom one. For example, you can go ahead and set a fiscal year, or academic year, or any other kind of year.
Polygonal Selection in Maps
We’ve made it possible to select points on JS maps in AnyMap by drawing a polygon. Such a complex, polygonal selection can now be easily configured using API and is also available from the context menu. Demo.
More JavaScript Graph Visualization Improvements in Version 8.7.0
In fact, release 8.7.0 has delivered even more improvements as well as bug fixes.
Check out the version histories of our products for more information:
The next major update of our JavaScript graph visualization libraries will bring multiple other improvements. In the meantime, feel free to send us new feature requests along with any other suggestions — just get in touch with our Support Team, and we’d love to hear from you exactly what you want to get.
Enjoy AnyChart JS Charts 8.7.0! | https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/javascript-graph-visualization-libraries-updated-check-out-anychart-8-7-0-with-new-cool-features-cc9b744c6bc5 | [] | 2019-08-14 17:10:27.559000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Front End Development', 'Data Visualization', 'Business Intelligence', 'Web Development'] |
Building a low-code platform with Neo4j (3/4) — Frames and Views | Part 3/4 of this series on how to start creating a low-code platform explains the design and the functionality to create pages. It is the UI-‘engine’ of the platform that lets (low-code) developers and end-users actually use the platform.
Requirements
Flexibility is on top of the list. Let’s make that more tangible. Two of the main aspects to achieve that are:
Display any kind of data in any way — Genericity is paramount. Any specifics should be left out here, because that would render the low-code bit useless. So, the pages should be able to display any kind of data in any way. Since we already have twig, half the work is done. The other half is to make these twig templates consume that data in a sensible way.
Inline data loading /actions— Behavior is also needed: Something needs to happen when the user clicks things. Usually more/different data is loaded or executing actions. (We’ll leave the actions for a different time :-).
Meta model for Screens
A lot of directions can be taken here. This one is far from finished, but gets the point across well. It shows what can be done with a few basic concepts:
Meta model for Screens
In Symfony, a page that is loaded via an URL can be a normal html or symfony/twig type of page. In the PoC, I’ve added the concept of Frames (the ../Frame/.. and ../FrameN/..-routes) . The following is done when using Frames:
The Frame and its startView are loaded, rendered and sent to the browser.
The browser might execute an onLoad, where it might trigger other views to be loaded (by way of ajax-call).
Once fully loaded, the user can click something that triggers another View/Frame to be loaded. (For every View the context (metaType) needs to be given, so the back-end knows what what parameters to pass to the view-queries.)
Since the PoC uses the capabilities of the Screens meta model, having twig is very useful. Its versatility helps in quickly creating Frames and Views. Using its inclusion methods, these parts can be sliced into any granularity.
Every View has a Query attached to it. This is where the data in the View comes from. And if this weren’t a PoC, it would not be the raw Neo4j query. To create a query, I imagine you clicking through your meta model and selecting Nodes, Relations and Attributes you want to display and selecting how you want to display them.
How does it look?
Everything in the PoC are Frames and Views. The the list pages from the databrowser itself (mentioned in part 2) are composed of Frames and Views. Since it’s all built on html/twig, it can look like anything you want. For those who haven’t tried, the PoC looks like this: | https://medium.com/dev-genius/building-a-low-code-platform-with-neo4j-3-4-frames-and-views-ae7441eb051a | ['Stefan Dreverman'] | 2020-06-19 08:24:58.860000+00:00 | ['Low Code', 'Symfony', 'Neo4j', 'Software Development', 'Software Architecture'] |
Top 3 ATS Myths That Just Won’t Die | So if ATS aren’t all-powerful employment genies, what does that mean for job candidates?
It means the resume writing process just got a lot more complex. Especially for candidates who’ve held the same job for years and are stepping back into the market for the first time in decades, the contemporary resume in 2019 is a different kind of beast.
A resume used to be a record of work and a reflection of achievements — usually a proportional one. I still get candidates asking me whether it’s okay for a work entry to consist of 20% financial analysis duties if they only spent 10% of their average workday doing it.
The answer is: Of course it is. In fact, if you’re structuring your resume according to what you do now, you’re demonstrably not structuring your resume according to what employers — and ATS — care about, which is their preset list of keywords, skills, and qualifications. That’s it; that’s the game.
Today, the resume is a document that has to be optimized with sufficient keywords to get past an ATS while also maintaining maximum readability for the human recruiter waiting at the other end of the bot scan. The vast majority of ATS require exact matches to make their light turn green, which means if your resume states that you excel in “budget administration” but the recruiter entered the phrase “budget management,” you’ve missed an opportunity to enhance your ATS results.
In a ideal world, job seekers would have unlimited time and could easily customize every resume to the specific lexicon deployed in the job ad for maximum points in the ATS. But since that’s not the case, most job seekers settle for a middling amount of keywords and pray that their resume makes it to a pair of human eyes.
Alternative, you could engage The Modern Resume to do the work for you.
Follow us on Twitter for daily no-nonsense job search and resume writing tips. | https://medium.com/@themodernresume/top-3-ats-myths-that-just-wont-die-3eb402275b15 | ['The Modern Resume'] | 2019-06-17 23:52:44.571000+00:00 | ['Resume Writing', 'Resumes', 'Job Hunting', 'Job Search', 'The Modern Resume'] |
#WHHSH: What Happens Here Stays Here | The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s “What Happens Here Stays Here” advertising campaign is much more than a series of TV spots, it’s become a part of the American lexicon. Their longtime ad agency R&R Partners wanted to relaunch the brand on digital and social and partnered with my team at bpg to create a digital 360 campaign based around a hashtag version of their classic ad tagline, “#WHHSH.”
After a series of strategy meetings, and a ton of white-boarding sessions, we dreamed up a metaphor for Las Vegas, and central campaign theme that we could rally around – the “Mystery Box.” Inspired by J.J. Abrams’ TED Talk, where he describes the value of anticipation of not knowing as potentially more vital to generating excitement than actual experience, we searched for ways to make Las Vegas the ultimate Mystery Box.
The six-month campaign was divided into three phases: Tease, Reveal and Continuity, all centered around debuting the box, opening it, then revealing at what was inside – everything you can become while shedding your “normal self” when you visit the city. We found power in the idea that Las Vegas, more than any other tourist location, inspires visitors to let go and become a version of themselves they can only be while in the glow of those singular neon lights. | https://medium.com/steveisaacs/whhsh-what-happens-here-stays-here-1037c3ffe32c | ['Steve Isaacs'] | 2018-10-07 03:18:52.573000+00:00 | ['Las Vegas', 'Creative Direction', 'Marketing', 'Portfolio', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Understanding binary cross-entropy / log loss: a visual explanation | Photo by G. Crescoli on Unsplash
Introduction
If you are training a binary classifier, chances are you are using binary cross-entropy / log loss as your loss function.
Have you ever thought about what exactly does it mean to use this loss function? The thing is, given the ease of use of today’s libraries and frameworks, it is very easy to overlook the true meaning of the loss function used.
Motivation
I was looking for a blog post that would explain the concepts behind binary cross-entropy / log loss in a visually clear and concise manner, so I could show it to my students at Data Science Retreat. Since I could not find any that would fit my purpose, I took the task of writing it myself :-)
A Simple Classification Problem
Let’s start with 10 random points:
x = [-2.2, -1.4, -0.8, 0.2, 0.4, 0.8, 1.2, 2.2, 2.9, 4.6]
This is our only feature: x.
Figure 0: the feature
Now, let’s assign some colors to our points: red and green. These are our labels.
Figure 1: the data
So, our classification problem is quite straightforward: given our feature x, we need to predict its label: red or green.
Since this is a binary classification, we can also pose this problem as: “is the point green” or, even better, “what is the probability of the point being green”? Ideally, green points would have a probability of 1.0 (of being green), while red points would have a probability of 0.0 (of being green).
In this setting, green points belong to the positive class (YES, they are green), while red points belong to the negative class (NO, they are not green).
If we fit a model to perform this classification, it will predict a probability of being green to each one of our points. Given what we know about the color of the points, how can we evaluate how good (or bad) are the predicted probabilities? This is the whole purpose of the loss function! It should return high values for bad predictions and low values for good predictions.
For a binary classification like our example, the typical loss function is the binary cross-entropy / log loss.
Loss Function: Binary Cross-Entropy / Log Loss
If you look this loss function up, this is what you’ll find:
Binary Cross-Entropy / Log Loss
where y is the label (1 for green points and 0 for red points) and p(y) is the predicted probability of the point being green for all N points.
Reading this formula, it tells you that, for each green point (y=1), it adds log(p(y)) to the loss, that is, the log probability of it being green. Conversely, it adds log(1-p(y)), that is, the log probability of it being red, for each red point (y=0). Not necessarily difficult, sure, but no so intuitive too…
Besides, what does entropy have to do with all this? Why are we taking log of probabilities in the first place? These are valid questions and I hope to answer them on the “Show me the math” section below.
But, before going into more formulas, let me show you a visual representation of the formula above…
Computing the Loss — the visual way
First, let’s split the points according to their classes, positive or negative, like the figure below:
Figure 2: splitting the data!
Now, let’s train a Logistic Regression to classify our points. The fitted regression is a sigmoid curve representing the probability of a point being green for any given x . It looks like this:
Figure 3: fitting a Logistic Regression
Then, for all points belonging to the positive class (green), what are the predicted probabilities given by our classifier? These are the green bars under the sigmoid curve, at the x coordinates corresponding to the points.
Figure 4: probabilities of classifying points in the POSITIVE class correctly
OK, so far, so good! What about the points in the negative class? Remember, the green bars under the sigmoid curve represent the probability of a given point being green. So, what is the probability of a given point being red? The red bars ABOVE the sigmoid curve, of course :-)
Figure 5: probabilities of classifying points in the NEGATIVE class correctly
Putting it all together, we end up with something like this:
Figure 6: all probabilities put together!
The bars represent the predicted probabilities associated with the corresponding true class of each point!
OK, we have the predicted probabilities… time to evaluate them by computing the binary cross-entropy / log loss!
These probabilities are all we need, so, let’s get rid of the x axis and bring the bars next to each other:
Figure 7: probabilities of all points
Well, the hanging bars don’t make much sense anymore, so let’s reposition them:
Figure 8: probabilities of all points — much better :-)
Since we’re trying to compute a loss, we need to penalize bad predictions, right? If the probability associated with the true class is 1.0, we need its loss to be zero. Conversely, if that probability is low, say, 0.01, we need its loss to be HUGE!
It turns out, taking the (negative) log of the probability suits us well enough for this purpose (since the log of values between 0.0 and 1.0 is negative, we take the negative log to obtain a positive value for the loss).
Actually, the reason we use log for this comes from the definition of cross-entropy, please check the “Show me the math” section below for more details.
The plot below gives us a clear picture —as the predicted probability of the true class gets closer to zero, the loss increases exponentially:
Figure 9: Log Loss for different probabilities
Fair enough! Let’s take the (negative) log of the probabilities — these are the corresponding losses of each and every point.
Finally, we compute the mean of all these losses.
Figure 10: finally, the loss!
Voilà! We have successfully computed the binary cross-entropy / log loss of this toy example. It is 0.3329!
Show me the code
If you want to double check the value we found, just run the code below and see for yourself :-)
Show me the math (really?!)
Jokes aside, this post is not intended to be very mathematically inclined… but for those of you, my readers, looking to understand the role of entropy, logarithms in all this, here we go :-)
If you want to go deeper into information theory, including all these concepts — entropy, cross-entropy and much, much more — check Chris Olah’s post out, it is incredibly detailed!
Distribution
Let’s start with the distribution of our points. Since y represents the classes of our points (we have 3 red points and 7 green points), this is what its distribution, let’s call it q(y), looks like:
Figure 11: q(y), the distribution of our points
Entropy
Entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a given distribution q(y).
What if all our points were green? What would be the uncertainty of that distribution? ZERO, right? After all, there would be no doubt about the color of a point: it is always green! So, entropy is zero!
On the other hand, what if we knew exactly half of the points were green and the other half, red? That’s the worst case scenario, right? We would have absolutely no edge on guessing the color of a point: it is totally random! For that case, entropy is given by the formula below (we have two classes (colors)— red or green — hence, 2):
Entropy for a half-half distribution
For every other case in between, we can compute the entropy of a distribution, like our q(y), using the formula below, where C is the number of classes:
Entropy
So, if we know the true distribution of a random variable, we can compute its entropy. But, if that’s the case, why bother training a classifier in the first place? After all, we KNOW the true distribution…
But, what if we DON’T? Can we try to approximate the true distribution with some other distribution, say, p(y)? Sure we can! :-)
Cross-Entropy
Let’s assume our points follow this other distribution p(y). But we know they are actually coming from the true (unknown) distribution q(y), right?
If we compute entropy like this, we are actually computing the cross-entropy between both distributions:
Cross-Entropy
If we, somewhat miraculously, match p(y) to q(y) perfectly, the computed values for both cross-entropy and entropy will match as well.
Since this is likely never happening, cross-entropy will have a BIGGER value than the entropy computed on the true distribution.
Cross-Entropy minus Entropy
It turns out, this difference between cross-entropy and entropy has a name…
Kullback-Leibler Divergence
The Kullback-Leibler Divergence,or “KL Divergence” for short, is a measure of dissimilarity between two distributions:
KL Divergence
This means that, the closer p(y) gets to q(y), the lower the divergence and, consequently, the cross-entropy, will be.
So, we need to find a good p(y) to use… but, this is what our classifier should do, isn’t it?! And indeed it does! It looks for the best possible p(y), which is the one that minimizes the cross-entropy.
Loss Function
During its training, the classifier uses each of the N points in its training set to compute the cross-entropy loss, effectively fitting the distribution p(y)! Since the probability of each point is 1/N, cross-entropy is given by:
Cross-Entropy —point by point
Remember Figures 6 to 10 above? We need to compute the cross-entropy on top of the probabilities associated with the true class of each point. It means using the green bars for the points in the positive class (y=1) and the red hanging bars for the points in the negative class (y=0) or, mathematically speaking:
Mathematical expression corresponding to Figure 10 :-)
The final step is to compute the average of all points in both classes, positive and negative:
Binary Cross-Entropy — computed over positive and negative classes
Finally, with a little bit of manipulation, we can take any point, either from the positive or negative classes, under the same formula:
Binary Cross-Entropy — the usual formula
Voilà! We got back to the original formula for binary cross-entropy / log loss :-)
Final Thoughts
I truly hope this post was able shine some new light on a concept that is quite often taken for granted, that of binary cross-entropy as loss function. Moreover, I also hope it served to show you a little bit how Machine Learning and Information Theory are linked together.
If you have any thoughts, comments or questions, please leave a comment below or contact me on Twitter. | https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-binary-cross-entropy-log-loss-a-visual-explanation-a3ac6025181a | ['Daniel Godoy'] | 2019-02-07 19:32:53.021000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Classification', 'Entropy', 'Loss Function', 'Towards Data Science'] |
Five Classroom Elements to Discuss with Students the First Day of School | It’s that time again: the first day of school is just around the corner! Like many teachers, you’re probably a giddy mix of emotions: excitement to meet your new students, nervous about making a strong impression, and eager to get a start on this year’s learning experiences. That’s what makes education such a timeless and engaging field: whether you’re a seasoned expert or a first-year teacher, there’s more to learn every time you enter the classroom. The teacher-student relationship is a dynamic, interactive pattern of exchanging knowledge that revamps every year as new students fall under your wing. As you think about what lessons you hope to pass on and take away from your students this school year, start with the very first day. To help you get inspired, we’ve put together 5 important elements of the learning environment to discuss with your students that will set the foundation for a productive, responsive, and engaging experience.
Their Classmates
In today’s classroom, one of the most important elements of which students should be fully aware is each other. The success of collaborative problem solving and project based learning depends on a positive classroom environment, respectful relationships between students, and a certain degree of intellectual comfort among classmates: they should always feel like they can share their perspectives and ideas. As a teacher, the foundation and maintenance of that atmosphere stems from your attitude and actions. Start off the year by ensuring that your students are comfortable interacting with one another in an academic setting — use icebreakers or fun activities as conversation starters to ease their nerves.
2. The Rules
As much as they may resist, most students genuinely like having expectations in place. It provides guidance that, in turn, establishes a sense of security. If you’re a first-year teacher, you’ve probably been mulling over your classroom rules for a while now. Don’t overthink it too much: set no more than 5, and chose those that make sense and feel natural to you. Depending on the age of your students, you’ll need to gauge how much of the rules to base on behavior, procedure, and academic misconduct. If you’re an experienced teacher, take a moment to reflect on the rules you’ve been using: do they need refreshed? Is it time to set higher or alternative expectations for your students? Consider the changes you’ve seen in the classroom in the past, and how your expectations can reflect those trends.
3. The Goals
Setting goals is absolutely crucial to leading a productive classroom. Pick a manageable number — maybe around 5 — of key learning objectives and display them creatively in your classroom, where you can refer back to them throughout the year. On the first day, it’s best to give a more general overview of these goals, potentially with a few examples of the activities that will help them reach it. It’s also important to write these goals in a language that your students can understand (without too much educational jargon). You can later use these goals to maintain some structure throughout the year, by emphasizing when one has been tackled or is coming up, which will give your kids a sense of achievement and progression. Depending on your classroom and students, you could also experiment with tracking goal achievement by individual student, either with public postings, competitions, or just individual, private records discussed in conferences.
4. The Academic Content
It might seem a little over-eager to dive into academic content on the first day of school — and by the time you get through the first three elements of the classroom, there will probably be little time left for curriculum talk. But even if it’s only a few minutes, this is your chance to get kids excited about what they’re going to learn this year. Pick one of the most exciting bits of content — for a high school English class, maybe you’ll be reading a sci-fi novel, or for elementary, maybe you’ll be introducing astronomy — and give a sort of teaser trailer. Read a page of the coolest book, show a short video clip of the most exciting topic, or even do a quick interactive activity to gauge the kids’ interests.
5. You!
If teaching and learning is a back-and-forth relationship between educators and students, then it’s important to make sure your students have a healthy sense of you before they dive into the school year. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should tell them anything too personal or talk about yourself the whole time you’re with them, but something as little as showing them a picture of your dog or talking about your favorite foods can really go a long way in making your students feel comfortable. Remember to open up, relax, and don’t be afraid to convey your excitement about the upcoming year: hopefully, your enthusiasm will catch! | https://medium.com/inspired-ideas-prek-12/5-classroom-elements-to-discuss-with-students-the-first-day-of-school-7271e2f2e702 | ['Mcgraw Hill'] | 2019-04-16 19:27:07.662000+00:00 | ['Teaching', 'Back To School', 'Art Of Teaching', 'Education', 'Classroom Management'] |
AWS Well-Architected Framework 1O1 | The AWS Well-Architected Framework assists you in understanding the benefits and drawbacks of decisions you make while creating systems on AWS. Using the Framework, customers will discover architectural best practices for creating and maintaining cloud-based systems that are reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective. It allows customers to continuously compare their designs to best practices and discover areas for improvement. The architecture review process is not an audit instrument, but rather a productive discourse regarding architectural decisions.
The framework establishes a standardized method for assessing systems against the attributes customers expect from modern cloud-based systems, as well as the repairs necessary to attain those attributes. This framework is meant for technology professionals such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architects, developers, and members of the operations team. It offers AWS best practices and techniques for developing and running a cloud workload, as well as links to additional implementation details and architectural patterns. The AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool) is a cloud service that allows customers to examine and assess their architecture using the AWS Well-Architected Framework in a consistent manner.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is based on five pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.
Customers generally have a central team for technology architecture in on-premises systems, which functions as an overlay to other product or feature teams to verify they are following best practices. Technical Architects, Solutions Architects, Data Architects, Networking Architects, and Security Architects are common jobs in technology architecture teams. As part of an enterprise architectural capability, these teams frequently use TOGAF or the Zachman Framework.
The Well-Architected Framework provides a set of generic design principles to help with successful cloud design:
Operational Excellence
The capacity to support development and operate workloads effectively, acquire insight into customers’ operations, and constantly enhance supporting processes and procedures to generate business value is included in the Operational Excellence pillar. Design principles for operational excellence in the cloud:
Perform operations as code
Make frequent, small, reversible changes
Refine operations procedures frequently
Anticipate failure
Learn from all operational failures
Security
The Security pillar includes the capacity to safeguard data, systems, and assets in order to benefit from cloud technologies and increase customer security. Design principles for security in the cloud:
Implement a strong identity foundation
Enable traceability
Apply security at all layers
Automate security best practices
Protect data in transit and at rest
Keep people away from data
Prepare for security events
Reliability
The Reliability pillar comprises a workload’s ability to fulfill its intended function accurately and consistently when expected. This involves being able to run and test the workload during its entire lifespan. Design principles for reliability in the cloud:
Automatically recover from failure
Test recovery procedures
Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability
Stop guessing capacity
Manage change in automation
Performance Efficiency
The capacity to use computational resources efficiently to satisfy system needs, and to retain that efficiency as demand changes and technology improve, is included in the Performance Efficiency pillar. Design principles for performance efficiency in the cloud:
Democratize advanced technologies
Go global in minutes
Use serverless architectures
Experiment more often
Consider mechanical sympathy
Cost Optimization
The ability to manage systems to offer business value at the lowest possible cost is included in the Cost Optimization pillar. The cost optimization pillar introduces design concepts, best practices, and questions. Design principles for cost optimization in the cloud:
Implement Cloud Financial Management
Adopt a consumption model
Measure overall efficiency
Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
Analyze and attribute expenditure
Architectures must be reviewed in a consistent manner, with a blameless approach that invites deep dives. It should be a light-weight approach that is more like a discussion than an audit. The goal of examining an architecture is to discover any important concerns that need to be addressed or areas that may be improved. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is consistent with how AWS evaluates systems and services internally.
Using the Well-architected Framework in architecture will assist clients in producing reliable and efficient systems, allowing them to concentrate on their functional requirements.
Please feel free to write @ [email protected] for any queries on AWS Well-Architected Framework & stay tuned for next write-up.
Thank You ! | https://medium.com/@piyushj02/aws-well-architected-framework-1o1-1c9521403046 | ['Piyush Jalan'] | 2021-06-05 10:00:28.553000+00:00 | ['Cloud Computing', 'AWS', 'Framework', 'Amazon Web Services', 'Well Architected'] |
Bernie-Backed Candidate Headed for Win in Race for Top Prosecutor Job | A candidate who has promised to dial back drug prosecutions tonight won the Democratic primary runoff for District Attorney, defeating the more conservative Democratic incumbent Margaret Moore.
José P. Garza is a former federal public defender and immigrant rights activist. During the campaign he won endorsements from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and he also secured the backing of the local chapter of Democratic Socialists.
Preliminary election night results from the Travis County Clerk show Garza with a 31,126 vote lead over Moore, with 86% of the votes Moore’s 32%. That tally includes mail votes and early voting, but doesn’t include actual election day results.
Still, the lead appeared insurmountable to Margaret Moore, who conceded the race in an election night statement. Bernie Sanders soon thereafter tweeted his congratulations to Garza, writing, “We need progressive leaders everywhere who will reform our broken and racist criminal justice system, and I look forward to seeing José bring change in Texas.”
In her concession statement, Moore said, “I want to thank the voters of Travis County for giving me the opportunity to serve our community over the last three years.”
During her time in office, she said that local prosecutors “made significant improvements to ensure police officers are being held accountable, to prioritize the prosecution of sexual assault cases, and establish new diversion programs for first-time offenders.”
If Garza goes on to win against a Republican opponent in November — a strong possibility given the heavy blue tilt of Travis County — then he’ll take over the District Attorney’s Office starting next year. He’ll have oversight of prosecutions of the most serious crimes in Austin, including felony charges like drug dealing.
The DA’s office doesn’t handle misdemeanors, which are prosecuted in county courts.
‘Fear-Mongering Around Substance Use’
During the campaign, Moore and Garza differed over felony drug prosecutions. The challenger accused local prosecutors of pursuing too many “low-level drug offenses,” which resulted in a disproportionate impact on minority communities.
In a televised debate, Moore responded to this criticism, saying, “I’ve got to get this across: It happens every day, somebody thinks we handle low-level marijuana cases. We do not. We are typically handling much more serious cases. And they involve drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine, crack, heroin — we have a big heroin problem.”
She insisted that the District Attorney’s Office has shifted resources away from lower-level drug cases but added, “We are also focusing on cases where there’s possession with intent to deliver, or there’s some sort of violence associated with it.”
“And what is happening in this county right now is an increase in violence related to narcotics trafficking. And we know we have to deal with that.”
Garza belittled this concern, saying, “It’s really time to end the fear-mongering around substance use. The data is overwhelmingly clear that for every day a person stays in custody who is struggling with substance use the likelihood that they will commit another crime goes up, continuing to spend our resources on these kinds of offenses makes us less safe.”
“Sitting in jail when you’re struggling with substance use doesn’t help you fight addiction. That’s not how addiction works… It is time to end the prosecution of low-level drug offenses here in Travis County.”
Garza’s experience includes clerking for Judge Richard W. Roberts in federal district court for the District of Columbia. He also worked along the texts border as an assistant public defender at Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, and a public defender in the U.S. Western District of Texas.
Republican Challenger in November
Garza will now face Republican Martin Harry in the November election. Martin’s campaign site describes the criminal justice system in Travis County as “broken,” saying, “It fails to keep the community safe from dangerous criminals.”
His win could play into a broader law-and-order message being pushed by Austin area candidates, from down-ballot candidates like Texas House challenger Justin Berry, a police officer, on up the ticket to the governor and president, who pushed a law-and-order message during recent street protests over the killing of a Black man in Minneapolis in May.
Matt Mackowiak, Travis County GOP Chairman, told Honest Austin that “Garza’s victory is a big win for criminals and a big loss for law abiding citizens.”
He said that Garza favors “decriminalization of all kinds of things,” adding, “We just elected a prosecutor who won’t prosecute.”
Underdog Candidate
The challenger in the District Attorney’s raise won despite being outspent by the incumbent. From February 23 through July 4, Garza raised $57,329 to Margaret Moore’s $159,998, according to a financial disclosure filed with the county government.
Still, he was helped by celebrity endorsements, including Sanders and Warren, and John Roger Stephens, better known by his stage name John Legend.
He also relied on video advertisements that touched on timely topics, including migration (a campaign ad featured a sketch of migrants in cages), and the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the last days of the campaign Garza was helped by outside spending by Reform Justice PAC for communications consulting ($2,400), and Texas Freedom Network PAC for digital advertising ($2,874.60) and text messaging services ($2,042.37), according to a disclosure report.
One of his biggest supporters was Serena Connelly, a Dallas philanthropist who died in April and gave $10,526.63 to the campaign. Amy Fikes, a Dallas board member of Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas, gave $5,263.47, and Richard Hartgrove of Austin gave $5,000. | https://medium.com/@honestaustin/bernie-backed-candidate-headed-for-win-in-race-for-top-prosecutor-job-eb8f60ed454 | ['Honest Austin'] | 2020-07-19 18:16:32.689000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Texas Politics', 'Bail Reform', 'Depolicing', 'Criminal Justice Reform'] |
This Year The Minimum Wage Can be Raised In The Majority Of States | Rally outside Seattle City Hall
The 2020 new year marks an historic landmark for dramatically improving many people’s living standards by increasing the minimum hourly wage. According to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 7 million workers will start the new year with higher wages. This is not due to Trump’s tax cut which reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to as low as 20 percent. That change resulted in doubling the number of companies paying zero in taxes, according to research from the Center for Public Integrity.
Instead, guaranteed higher wages was a result of citizens working in their communities to make local governments accountable to them. This year half of the states will have raised the minimum hourly wage, at effort that was led by 22 city and county governments, with states now trying to catch up.
The movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 first caught the nation’s attention when in 2013 the Washington State city of SeaTac, with a population of less than thirty-thousand, passed a citizen’s initiative establishing it. A coalition of unions, faith groups, immigrant and community groups came together, inspired by one-day walkout strikes by non-union fast-food workers in New York city in the late fall of 2012. They demanded better working conditions and a $15 minimum wage. Walkouts by fast food workers occurred early the next year in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee demanding a higher minimum wage.
SeaTac’s victory encouraged workers and citizens to mobilize in neighboring Seattle, with a population of over 600,000. Astonishingly, within six months of Sea-Tac’s victory Seattle became the first major city in the US to adopt a $15 minimum hourly wage for all employees, working part and full time, including those receiving tips.
Several books have described how this victory came about. My book, Becoming a Citizen Activist, begins with a glimpse of how the city council came to pass the legislation. More detailed descriptions of how the effort began in Sea-Tac and spread to Seattle are covered in David Rolf’s The Fight For $15 and Jonathan Rosenblum’s Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement.
The desire to raise minimum wages is not confined to large liberal cities. It crosses regional and political boundaries, uniting grassroot efforts challenge entrenched political parties who control the state governments. For example, look how voters in both New Jersey and Missouri increased the minimum wage, overturning their governor’s and state legislator’s actions.
In November 2013, New Jersey voters effectively overrode Governor Chris Christie’s veto of the minimum wage bill the legislature had passed. The voters approved an increase through a ballot measure. These were not hard-core democrats, since republican Christie and his lieutenant governor were re-elected with over 60% of the vote. In Missouri voters passed a higher state minimum wage at the ballot box after state lawmakers nullified city minimum wage ordinances that had been enacted by local governments in Kansas City and St. Louis. Missouri is a trifecta state, where the republicans simultaneously hold the governor’s office and majorities in both state legislative chambers and since 2000, has voted 100% for a republican presidential candidate. Raising the minimum wage once again was critical to voters who also voted republican.
These local and state actions have become necessary because congress, under the control of either the democrats or the republicans, has up to now, been unwilling or unable to increase the minimum wage. And it is about time that they act. The federal government last raised the minimum wage to $7.25 in July 2009, and since then its purchasing power has declined by 17 percent. This past July, the democratic controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Raise the Wage Act of 2019”, a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025.
It has been sent to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but he has denied it an opportunity to be voted on, along with a hundred other bills from the House of Representatives that have been referred to the Senate.
However, no matter what occurs in D.C. this November, organizing must continue at the local and state level. Below are some strategies to consider for doing so.
Five Critical Strategic Steps For Passing Higher Minimum Wage Legislation at the Local Level.
First, Have dedicated staff — there must be full time staff working with community groups to provide them outreach services. Unions, like SEIU and HERE Unite, that have been in the forefront and others who are involved, may have paid staff to fill that role. Unions provided the organizational strength that allowed both SeaTac and Seattle to ultimately succeed. Meanwhile, the faith community’s organizations are more likely to provide a pool of volunteers to work with paid staff and reach out regularly to their membership.
Second, Do good research — it is critical to provide reliable data to the public. The executive director, John Burbank, and the policy director, Marilyn Watkins, of the local and nationally recognized think tank, the Economic Opportunity Institute, provided data to convince both politicians and the pubic that raising the minimum wage was good for the economy. On a national level, Economic Policy Institute’s David Cooper continues to track efforts to increase the minimum wage throughout the nation. That research does not end after legislation is passed, because those opposed to this type of government regulation will continue to site studies that could eliminate or hamper such legislation. Watkins’ article Poor research leads to poor findings on minimum wage, provides a perfect example of why such attention is needed, as she systematically dissects a study critical of increasing the minimum wage.
Third, Work with politicians — community groups need to identify and work with elected officials who are willing to champion, support or even discuss the need for increasing the minimum wage. Timing is important. If there is an election, use it to promote increasing the minimum wage. As a city council candidate, socialist Kshama Sawant built a grassroots $15 Now campaign and made increasing the minimum wage an issue that both Mayoral candidates adopted in the general election.
Even without introducing legislation, a local councilmember can hold public forums to get information out to the public and to other politicians. Ady Barkan, the founding director of the national network of one thousand elected municipal officials, Local Progress, writes in his book Eyes to the Wind, how Local Progress worked with me to bring national experts and councilmembers from other cities to a Seattle symposium to discuss how minimum wage legislation could help employees avoid poverty while expanding the economy. Three months later the Seattle City Council passed the legislation.
Fourth, Involve national groups — without the support of groups like Local Progress and SEIU, Seattle’s effort would have had to rely just on local resources. National groups are not going to win a campaign, but they can bring in resources, like speakers, national media, and critical strategic advice. If they can send a representative to your city, make it a media event by inviting the public to hear them. Also, line up interviews for them with reporters, bloggers, politicians and opinion leaders.
Fifth, Feed all types of media — use social media to broadcast events, solicit volunteers and educate the public. Use radio to appear on talk show programs, all of them. It doesn’t matter if the host is a conservative, as long as you can get your message out, you will pick up some support. Meet regularly with bloggers to give them an inside look at what is happening on this issue and do the same with newspaper columnists and reporters. Don’t forget to reach out to community, church, and any group that has an electronic newsletter.
To borrow from Eric Liu’s book title, You’re More Powerful than You Think. Now you just have to work with others to exercise that power to get your local government to raise the minimum wage.
Nick Licata, was a 5 term Seattle City Councilmember, named progressive municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive municipal officials.
Author of Becoming a Citizen Activist. http://www.becomingacitizenactivist.org/changemakers/
Subscribe to Licata’s newsletter Urban Politics http://www.becomingacitizenactivist.org/ | https://nicklicata.medium.com/this-year-the-minimum-wage-can-be-raised-in-the-majority-of-states-fc39329c64de | ['Nick Licata'] | 2020-01-12 23:33:08.577000+00:00 | ['Congress', 'Organizing', 'Seattle', 'Local Government', 'Minimum Wage'] |
Capacity Factor: Why solar and wind are impossible fantasy. | The red line below is a real demand curve. The blue line is a real solar supply curve. . Figures, Germany.
I am not the only one to criticize the solar and wind fantasy. So did Clack, et al. Unfortunately, in scientific papers plain language is rarely found, so laymen are left with the fantasies of propagandists for big oil, gas and coal. Make no mistake about this — those anti-nuclear and pro-solar activists are promoted by big oil. David Brower was funded by big oil — $200,000 in 1970, which is the equivalent of $1.3 million today — to take over the Sierra Club and make it anti-nuclear. Mark Z Jacobson at Stanford has received 100% of his grant money from oil company cutouts. The same is true of Energiewende, which was started by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who is the chairman of the board or Rosneft, in charge of selling oil and gas to Germany. You see, they know solar and wind cannot work. But let’s get to the technical problems with solar and wind, starting here with solar.
Keep in mind that the grid must exactly balance demand to supply 24 hours a day, without fail. If there is not enough supply, it must switch off sections of the grid. If there is too much, it must reject, dump, or store the excess.
“Not sure I understand the argument about renewable intermittency causing us to burn more fossil fuels. We’re technically burning less if we only have to burn in the off hours.”
https://pveducation.com/solar-concepts/solar-system-output/ The area under the curve also is your fraction of full capacity you can get from the solar panel.
Problem is that if you look at that graph above, there are huge deviations during the day — not just between day and night, between what the solar panels are providing, and what the grid needs. The red line is demand, and the blue is solar supply. To the left is a graph of what real supply looks like.
Another thing renewable detractors always fail to take into account is the massive leaps on energy storage we’re seeing every year. The 2022 Ford F150 Lightning will be able to power your house if the grid goes down.
Brand new, the F-150 Lightning fully charged is 115–150 kWH. Household use averages 29 kWH per day. But during heat events, for instance the 2021 summer heat wave, use can double or more, and those EVs are not supposed to be grid connected. You would need a special circuit installed in your home to switch off the grid and use your truck’s battery. The driving range of a new truck, full-charge, is 230–300 miles, without load. That drops with loads, but let’s assume normal driving of 100 miles per day, which is 43.4–33% of capacity. When you arrive home is when you will need that power, and it will happen on the worst possible day when temperatures are in the 115 to 120 F.
For maximum battery life, an EV battery should not be discharged below 20%, and should not be charged above 80% of capacity.
Energy storage is more complicated than it looks, and the requirements are beyond huge. 96 gigawatt hours would be roughly half the needs of a medium large (6 million people or so) city for 1 or 2 days, and that is 240 times the size of the largest installation yet, which is 400 megawatt hours and will take 5 years to complete building. Let’s figure 75% of global population (6 billion people) will have electricity in the future, population will not grow, per capita use will not grow, and in emergencies, only half of that population will get electricity for half a day or so. Batteries (which would need replacing every 10 years) would need to store 96 trillion watt hours. This translates to 6 billion EV batteries or more, when we are wondering how to meet the requirements for just 30 million EVs. This is very expensive electricity already.
So, let’s get into capacity factor which is the amount of energy you can expect from your solar panels. We will use a simple, one house “off the grid” example in order to see how this really works, because “off the grid” just means you run your own little grid locally, just for yourself. I will develop this step by step for novices.
Typical home solar panels are rated at around 7.5 kW. People say, “Great, you get over seven thousand watts of power from them!” Well, not really…
Let’s take a 100 watt panel. Let’s slow and synchronize the Earth’s rotation so the the Sun is always overhead at the perfect angle for my panel.
Let’s look at the power produced over the course of 100 hours. It would be 100 watts X 100 hours, that’s 10,000 watt-hours, or as it is more commonly expressed, 10 kWH, or 10 kilowatt hours.
But we can’t park the sun overhead. That 100 hours is a little over 4 days, so let’s pretend the sun rose and set instantly each day and each day was 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night… and let’s DEFINITELY ignore the impossibility of making that happen. Well, now my 100 watt solar panel actually makes 50 kWH.
If we make a fraction of the actual power divided by the power rating on the label of the device, we would have capacity factor and it would be .5 or 50%. Great, you say. Still sounds good.
We’re not done.
The sunlight peaks in the middle of the day and falls off dramatically in morning and late afternoon. Clouds. Rain. Smoke including smoke mud left on panels courtesy of morning dew. Dust, including dust on the panels. Snow.
Days aren’t divided 50/50 between day and night. Length of day and night varies by latitude and season and weather.
All of those are factors that make solar capacity factor just a little over .3 in the very best case (much of the globe is considerably less)… on average… taken over a long time.
But, if you haven’t noticed, there is still a problem. Your electric heat pump doesn’t care about averages. If it needs power at 3 AM and your solar panels are sitting in darkness, then power has to come from something else.
Batteries? Critical factors are energy storage capacity, discharge power capacity, and battery life at the rated charge/discharge capacities.
An example: you have an early plane to catch… It is SUPER hot outside… you wake up at 3 AM. You need to take a shower, turn up the AC a bit, make breakfast, watch the news… oh, and throw some clothes in the dryer from last night’s wash.
Your house is all electric according to the new environmental rules.
Heat pump 15 kW; Water heater 4 kW; Toaster 1 kW; AV equipment .3 kW; Dryer 2 kW. Other things are running, too. Lights, refrigeration, device chargers, hair dryers 1.2 kW. Ignoring those other bits, like lights, we are looking at a burst of:
Around 22 kW on this morning dash when you just need things to work for you on your way out the door.
Let’s throw that load onto your Tesla Powerwall, so we can do all this while saving the planet. The second generation power wall can deliver 5 kW (7, if you push if for less than a minute… so we will use 4 powerwalls for this exercise. (But really it should be 5, because pushing your batteries to deliver peak power will age them faster, which is very expensive in the long run.)
Installed cost of one Powerwall is about $13,000.
Five Powerwalls ganged together to feed this scenario: $13,000 x 4 = $52,000.
You have to be in the class that owns a Tesla car to consider this affordable. Don’t forget replacing them every 10–12 years, if you treat them nicely, and never drain them all the way — which happens pretty frequently with EVs, and should happen easily with Powerwalls as well.
Maybe 1% to 2% of the USA’s population can afford this. (Remember that when you think about expanding this to cover the world with electrical power — who is going to pay for that capacity —unlikely that you who are reading this can afford your fair share.) Replacing every 10–12 years or so, over 20–25 years, you will pay $52,000 x 3 = $156,000 for batteries, and that doesn’t include installation costs. (First you must buy the initial system, and then replace batteries twice.)
But we are not done — We didn’t factor in the solar panel oversupply requirement if you use batteries, and the seasonal cycle. The solar panels must be able to store enough power in a time period, timeX, to be able to replenish them to carry the home through some time period timeY. For this exercise when we were just looking at your house, that creates a little mini-grid that illustrates the problem.
The usual proposed numbers are that the batteries should be able to hold the home for 3 days (timeX). And the batteries should fully charge in 2 days (timeY). But batteries are supposed to kick in mostly at night. For simplification, we will assume night use only for batteries. That means that the house must run off the solar panels during the day, and they must also have enough left over to charge the batteries for 3 days in 2 days. Do the math on that, and you need 1.5 days + 1 day of daily power production capacity in the solar panels, or 2.5 times what the house will actually use in one day!
However, this worst-case need scenario doesn’t kick in except for a few times, generally in winter months. The rest of the time the panels will be dealing with full batteries. So that means that most of the year, the solar panels will throw away 60% of their power generating capacity (or a lot more — we are getting to that). It takes 2 years for modern panels to pay for themselves in electricity. Dumping 60% of power means 40% is used, so it now takes 5 years for panels to pay back the energy used to make them. “Ok,” you say. But we are not done.
You may be thinking, “But the grid makes this work by taking up all or most of that power in the real world.” Yes, sometimes that is true as long as total grid power is not overbuilt (it is in Germany for summer peak), but this is only when you are connected to the grid. (And remember that our one house scenario is a small model of the whole grid.) And if you don’t overbuild, then you must supplement with — fossil fuel, nuclear or hydro.
Hydro is the one everyone talks about — pump water uphill and solve everything. It is central to Mark Z Jacobson’s renewable fantasy that plentiful water will always be available. Looked at lake Oroville lately? The assumption that plenty of water is available for pumping to use for energy storage is nonsense. (We are doing this for one house, off the grid so that you can see what the problem is for a big grid. It’s the same problem — just much bigger.)
Lake Oroville, July 22, 2021 https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/05/lake-oroville-reaches-all-time-low-level-hydroelectric-plant-will-shut-down-for-first-time-ever/
I have had people tell me things like: We can just pump seawater into the Sierras! But I worked in civil engineering, and even the standard method of lining with bentonite is fiscally unfeasible for any significant size valley. And if it could be done it would not keep brine from penetrating into the underlying soil and rock, which would flow down hill and come out as springs and penetration of groundwater aquifers in the Central Valley. This would poison anything it reached. The brine that penetrated would not be salt water like the ocean. It would be concentrated brine, because such a reservoir would have to be open to the air. Replenishing endlessly with more salt water would slowly produce more and more concentrated brine. That brine would run back downhill to generate power and be much warmer than normal temperature. Let’s remember that the supposed reasoning for shutting down Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is the effect of slight warming the Pacific near the plant. (No meaningful effect on sea life is documented, so the discharge would be ok.)
But there is a problem, sun energy varies during the year. We did this calculation presuming that the solar generating capacity was the same all year round. This might work reasonably well near the equator, and it’s bad enough. Most of the industrialized world is not like this. And none of the future inhabitable world of global warming is like this. That future inhabitable world has been predicted to be above the 40th parallel due to climate change extreme temperatures. (Or so we thought, until the recent heat domes in the north that hit 120 F for several days. We are probably in much more serious trouble than we thought.)
Black line is the red demand curve shifted down (because shifting the blue line up is not practical here) until solar can fill the batteries for winter. All the energy above the black line would be thrown away — excess capacity that would not get used. Here, that is over 90% of all the PV energy possible to generate. Wind has a similar, but different problem with overcapacity needs.
So, now let’s add in the seasonal cycle.
What we have to do here is to add solar capacity until the blue line can intersect the red line to the point that we can charge our batteries at the bottom of that cycle. In the image to the left, that is shown in black. If we were to do that, we would not be throwing away 60% of the power. We would be throwing away all the power between the red line and the blue line. Shift that red line way down to the bottom. Essentially, what this does is force us to throw away around 92%-97% or so of all the potential solar generating power for our system. Now it takes 25–66 years to pay back the energy used to make them from our panels. Modern panels have a projected life of 25 years. We have not included energy required to make the batteries.
We will never receive from the system the amount of energy required to make it, let alone install it. This is a net electricity consumer. That means it is impossible.
In this exercise, your single home has its own “grid” that it uses to distribute power to the house. Scale it up to a state or national level and you haven’t changed anything but the size and cost. The problem remains mostly the same.
Well, in fact, you have changed something when you scale it up. You will run into the limits of minerals we have to make things like batteries. You will also run into limits of rare earths for solar panels.
What this really means is that the idea of a solar powered world is an impossible fantasy, literally less feasible than providing a real live unicorn to every child that wants one, complete with rainbow colors of mane and tail. Not joking.
The solar power fantasy needs to be buried where it belongs. It can practically supplement a grid with 10%-15% of total power. But it isn’t necessary, it is costly, and causes difficulties operating the grid. | https://medium.com/@brianhanley/capacity-factor-why-solar-and-wind-are-impossible-fantasy-a2d15059011 | ['Brian Hanley'] | 2021-09-10 21:22:09.647000+00:00 | ['Solar Fantasy', 'Renewables', 'Unicorns', 'Mark Z Jacobson', 'Solar Power'] |
Is ‘Sex and the City’ Something We Need to Reboot? | Dating myself, I watched Sex and the City (SATC) when it originally aired between 1998 and 2004. During my late teens and 20s, I was a fan. I was excited when Jay-Z referenced it in “03 Bonnie & Clyde,” because that meant his wife — a.k.a Beyoncé — also watched it too. I read Candace Bushnell’s book Sex and the City, as well as the subsequent releases Four Blondes and Trading Up.
In my romanticized memory, the show was an iconic part of the feminine divine. Miranda Hobbs, Charlotte York, Samantha Jones, and the show’s central protagonist Carrie Bradshaw were our guides to what it was like to be single and sexy in New York City.
‘SATC’ was so steeped in white heteronormative behaviors and characters that when there was even small introduction to anything Black, gay, lower-class, or something ‘other,’ it became very jarring and cringeworthy to watch.
As a Black woman from the Bay Area, I couldn’t racially or financially identify with any of them, their problems, or experiences but that was part of the fun; the fantasy and escapism of it all. Contextually, in the ‘90s and early 2000s, the show was risque and progressive. In the years prior, HBO brought us Def Comedy Jam, Taxicab Confessions, and Oz. (But heavens: Now there were four well-to-do white women talking about sex during brunch? Clutch the pearls.)
Since SATC’s ending in 2004 and two films — one in 2008 and the other in 2010—the world has changed so much. At times, it feels like we’ve just lived through a blur of chaos over the past five years, alone.
There was no way a woman who wrote with that many ellipses on a columnist salary, had a lack of technological skills in using a flip phone and poor budgeting skills, was not invoking the spirit of Cardi B’s and Megan Thee Stallion’s foremothers to get her bills paid.
In just 2020, we global pandemic upend our lives; murder hornets began establishing colonies along the Pacific Northwest; our economy fell into a tailspin; racial protests were held in virtually every city across the nation; historic forest fires (some from gender reveal parties)caused record-breaking levels of bad air quality; and Cynthia Nixon —“Miranda”—ran for Governor of New York on a platform of marijuana legalization. Billionaire went into space.
And through all this, I couldn’t help but wonder… Did we really need to be back in that city with those women?
There was already talk about a reboot of Sex and the City surfacing and much like everything in the show, pages from the show's script were leaked to Page Six, the high society TMZ for the well-heeled.
Prior to the buzz of anticipation for discarded words and the scathing fan betrayal of Kim Catrell not returning in her role as Samantha Jones, I started rewatching original episodes. This was not solely because of the rumors of the reboot.
My intentions were far more nefarious. I was thoroughly convinced that Carrie Bradshaw was a kept woman. There was no way a woman who wrote with that many ellipses on a columnist salary, had a lack of technological skills in using a flip phone and poor budgeting skills, was not invoking the spirit of Cardi B’s and Megan Thee Stallion’s foremothers to get her bills paid. Carrie was given a $900 cashmere scarf for her birthday, Aidan bought her apartment and Big wrote her a check for $30,000 when Aidan broke up with her to buy the said apartment. You can’t convince me otherwise.
When the first film was released in 2008, I was front and center to watch my favorite four women in clothes I could neither fit nor afford. When the sequel happened in 2010 it happened in the worst possible way. There’s a point where the self-absorption and lack of awareness lead me to question why I loved this show in the first place?
Then I remembered I loved SATC in my twenties because I too was narcissistic, vapid, communicated horribly, and was insecure. But these women weren’t in their twenties as the show frequently reminds us (See titles of S1 Ep 4 and S2 Ep 17). These women were caricatures of what being an adult woman in a big city was like.
Every opportunity the show or the movies had to introduce something that challenged a norm or did not fit the status quo, it was done clumsily laughing and pointing.
Much like I didn’t notice that Big’s real name, John Preston, was never uttered early on in the series, it wasn’t until later I noticed the lack of cultural awareness. SATC was so steeped in white heteronormative behaviors and characters that when there were introductions to anything Black, gay, lower-class, or something “other,” it became very jarring and cringeworthy to watch.” Was I so enmeshed with the characters’ worlds that the absence of anything that resembled me was only made apparent by its appearance?
We left Sex and the City 2 following a “big gay wedding” for the only two gay characters, Stanford and Anthony, where Liza Minelli officiated their ceremony. Then the movie flies us to Abu Dhabi where we land with name-brand luggage full of stereotypes and classism. Here the audience is supposed to sympathize with the difficulties of the rich escaping their privilege to a foreign country on an adventure of being chased down by a mob of angry men to be saved by women who remove their burqa in an alleyway to reveal they are wearing the 2010 Louis Vuitton Spring collection.
Let’s all laugh when Miranda says “Something, something Arab women.” These are only a small piece of SATC’s problematic pie.
Every opportunity the show or the movies had to introduce something that challenged a norm or did not fit the status quo, it was done clumsily laughing and pointing. When they introduced bisexuality and gender norms (S3 EP4) they quickly dismissed them and continued normalizing heterosexuality calling anything bisexual “greedy.”
Ms, Bradshaw, who was reading this sex column of yours?
‘Sex and the City’ existed in a time before Olivia Pope came onto our screens dating a married white man and told everyone what to do.
When presented to mock Stanford or Anthony’s sexual preferences the audience is reminded that being gay is the butt of every joke. New ideas are shooed away with a wave of manicured hands as if to say they are too old to learn anything new. This all changed by season four when Samantha dated the show’s only Latina character, Maria. Apparently, bisexuality is only acceptable when it’s women.
And then, just like that, somewhere in the middle of season three we finally get to see a Black woman speak and she has a name — Adeena.
Somewhere between the phrase “liberal Black talk”, the awkward use of slang terms, and Samantha being outraged because Adeena has a problem with interracial dating, there’s a refreshing concoction of tone-deaf mixed with a sense of entitlement. I’m surprised they didn’t call this one “I don’t see color”. The episode ends painting the show’s first and only Black woman as the bad guy and Samantha being coddled after the hair-pulling she so rightfully deserved for yelling “Get your big black ass out of my face and your okra wasn’t all that.” I’m still conflicted on whether Charlotte’s reminder in the episode that race is a very sensitive topic was a help or further solidified that we would never have this discussion with SATC again.
As the reboot looms I’m sure there will be some more of these fun moments of tone-deaf delight on behalf of anyone who doesn’t fit the mold the show has created. The truth is these characters contributed marginalization with a host of arbitrary rules and norms.
Sex and the City existed in a time before Olivia Pope came onto our screens dating a married white man and told everyone what to do. It existed before LGTBQI+ or interracial families were in commercials; It existed before RuPaul could be considered problematic on VH1.
With every episode, I began thinking about more questions than Carrie Bradshaw could help but wonder. Rewatching this show reminded me that we took a lot of shit and honestly I don’t want to go back to it. I watched mesmerized and in judgment about how two-dimensional each woman was.
In a world now with the likes of Molly and Issa Rae, Sex and the City is not how I want to see women or women’s friendships portrayed any longer.
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And there it was: They’re still a fascinating trainwreck to watch but there’s something lacking in growth and personality that reminds me these aren’t women that I need to see rebooted. | https://thebolditalic.com/is-sex-in-the-city-something-we-need-to-reboot-165f2764de84 | ['Brandy Collins'] | 2021-07-28 05:40:25.539000+00:00 | ['Essay', 'Bay Area', 'Sex And The City', 'San Francisco'] |
The safety factor — Employing staff in a post-pandemic workplace | There can be little doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the workplace forever. In fact, it has not only changed it; it may well have changed it in a fundamental way for the foreseeable future. Covid is going to be something we need to think about for some time, so what does that mean for potential employers and candidates? The interviewing and selection processes are going to be impacted, clearly, but the need to have the right candidate on your team is not going to change. Looking back to the beginning of this situation, we were all talking about getting back to normal. As it gradually became clear that it wasn’t going to happen, we settled for a ‘new normal’.
Well, here we are in the new normal, and now we need to adapt. Employers still need to attract the right candidates, but there is now a new item on the agenda, Covid awareness.
Here are some hacks and tips we think will help:
Recognise Covid in your recruiting and onboarding process
People have differing views on the pandemic. Some are hyper-aware of Covid safety, and some people are simply not concerned. Regardless of the view of the candidate though, we think it’s important to acknowledge coronavirus safety in your recruiting process. If you don’t, you run the risk of seeming out of touch, or worse, not caring about the safety of your employees.
Stay up to date with the latest changes and adapt as needed
- With areas going in and out of different levels of protection, it is important that you stay up to date with the latest advice. Again, regardless of personal opinions or the inconvenience, it is important to demonstrate to candidates that you have their welfare at heart. Where possible, try to put the current situation in the context of practical response.
- Some roles are more sensitive to Covid safety than others, so a one fits all policy may not be appropriate.
Take practical steps and use them to encourage candidates
The initial response to Covid was knee jerk temporary solutions. Now we have had time to adapt, it’s a great idea to demonstrate to candidates in what way you have adapted, and show how you have responded. Maybe include a rundown of your Covid safety policy but in a narrative way. So rather than list your processes, put them in practical terms. Stating ‘All our desks have shielding’ is fine, but ‘Every desk has a convenient, clear, shield to allow normal interaction and conversation while maintaining Covid protection’ adds a layer of practical use and empathy.
Revisit your contracts and job descriptions
Candidates are bound to be worried about the effect that further Covid incidents will have on their jobs. There is a common misconception that money is the most important factor for a candidate, but in actual fact, the offer of job satisfaction is just as important, and often more so. If you can demonstrate that you have as many of the various potential situations covered so the work will continue without disruption, it will really appeal to candidates.
‘Online’ works better if it is more than just a replacement for ‘in person’
- There are some aspects of the recruitment process that are less viable at the moment. However, online is never going to replace face to face. They are different things, so we suggest embracing the difference.
- Rather than dropping the walk round, could you make a video tour? Meeting the team may not be possible in person, but how about a breakout room on Zoom where candidates can chat to existing staff?
- Rather than thinking of online as a replacement, leverage it as a recruitment tool by seeing at as an opportunity rather than a second-best solution.
Mental wellbeing
Last though, but certainly not least, is that the last year has been an eye-opener for all of us when it comes to mental wellbeing. Candidates, employees, business owners, and senior management teams have all been through the same stresses and difficulties. There may or may not be more to come, but we all need to be aware of that potential.
When it comes to recruitment and Covid safety, the one thing that certainly hasn’t changed is the need to attract great candidates. With a good recruitment partner (and some slight tweaks to your recruitment process), some good could potentially come out of a difficult situation, and you could cement a team that will help you grow in the new normal.
Contact us if you want to talk through your recruitment needs. | https://medium.com/@afrconsulting/the-safety-factor-employing-staff-in-a-post-pandemic-workplace-379f29327e9f | ['Afr Consulting'] | 2021-01-12 11:05:15.749000+00:00 | ['Recruitment', 'Pandemic', 'Workplace', 'Safety'] |
Regulatory Comment: “Objective Factors for Classifying Weapons with ‘Stabilizing Braces’” | What follows is my comment on the ATF’s recent and highly problematic notice. Nearly 50,000 comments have been submitted over the past few days. I encourage you to add your own, but please be thoughtful about what you write — explain what’s wrong with the proposed guidance. Don’t just rail against the NFA. I like doing that, too, but this isn’t the place for it.
Dear Acting Director Lombardo,
As a firearms policy researcher and certified firearms instructor, I wish to offer my thoughts on “Objective Factors for Classifying Weapons with ‘Stabilizing Braces’” (85 FR 82516, Docket No. 2020R-10).
The notice correctly recognizes that the “GCA and NFA generally regulate ‘firearms’ and not individual components and, as such, ATF does not classify unregulated components or accessories alone.” The notice also states that the “ATF must evaluate whether a particular firearm configured with a stabilizing brace bears the objective features of a firearm designed and intended to be fired from the shoulder, and thus subject to the NFA, on a case-by-case basis.”
The notice thus indicates the ATF’s intent to “holistically” consider the characteristics of a brace-equipped firearm to determine if it is in fact an NFA firearm (rather than a pistol). However, several of the characteristics by which the ATF seeks to make this determination do not actually and/or consistently convey information that illuminates whether or not the firearm is designed or intended to be fired from the shoulder.
If the ATF is making its determinations on the basis of factors which do not convey that information, then those determinations will be arbitrary, inconsistent, and legally perilous for peaceful and otherwise law-abiding Americans.
Type and Caliber
The notice states, without any further explanation, that a weapon’s “type” may be used in determining if the weapon is intended to be fired from the shoulder. Obviously, this is problematically vague and circular guidance. “Type” is a veritable catchall by which any number of design elements might be subjectively regarded as being characteristic of weapons fired from the shoulder. That is not an actionable guideline for manufacturers or consumers.
The notice also states that “(a) large caliber firearm that is impractical to fire with one hand because of recoil or other factors, even with an arm brace, is likely to be considered a rifle or shotgun.” However, a weapon’s caliber is largely irrelevant to determining whether or not it is designed or intended to be shouldered. Large-caliber cartridges with heavy recoil (such as .500 S&W, .50 AE, .454 Casull .460 S&W, and .44 Magnum) are very commonly used in handguns even without stabilizer braces. Conversely, very small and soft-recoiling calibers (such as .17 HMR and .22LR) are commonly used in firearms (rifles) that are in fact designed and intended to be fired from the shoulder.
Caliber size and recoil force do not intrinsically convey information about how a firearm is designed and intended to be held, and are therefore not pertinent to determining whether a firearm falls within the scope of the NFA.
Finally, it must be noted that colloquial terms like “pistol caliber” and “rifle caliber” do not have strict or technical definitions and are not tied to particular cartridge dimensions or ballistic parameters. Moreover, there is a very long history of chambering rifles in what are colloquially called “pistol calibers” and vice-versa. These terms are therefore not useful in making the sort of legal determinations at issue here.
Weight, Length, and Length of Pull
The notice states that “(a) firearm that is so heavy that it is impractical to fire or aim with one hand, or so long that it is difficult to balance the firearm to fire with one hand, is likely to be considered a rifle or shotgun.” The problem here is that “heavy” and “long,” in the absence of explicit numerical definitions, are relative to the strength and size of the shooter.
The notice is proposing a rule by which the same firearm could be either a pistol or an NFA firearm depending on physical attributes which vary from shooter to shooter, and also across time (as training, aging, injuries, etc. alter the shooter’s physical abilities).
Conceivably, a large brace-equipped weapon could be determined to be a pistol for a large, strong person, while the same weapon could be determined to be an NFA firearm (SBR) for a smaller, weaker person. And a shooter who once used a brace-equipped pistol comfortably in one hand could become a felon as he aged, lost the ability to use that pistol as such, and the classification of the weapon magically changed from “pistol” to “SBR” as the shooter’s strength diminished. This is obviously an extremely problematic rule.
Likewise for length of pull: a pistol brace of appropriate length to be used as such by a large man might be deemed to be of excessive length — and therefore, an SBR stock — in the hands of his petite wife. This is particularly true as optimal length of pull for a rifle varies not only from person to person, but also with clothing and other equipment choices.
The proposed rule creates situations in which a weapon is variously determined to be legal or felonious depending on who handles said weapon, when they do so, and under what particular circumstances. It is unjust for a rule to be constructed such that determinations of the weapon’s classification are so variable: this situation exposes innocent gun owners, through no fault of their own, to severe criminal liability.
Finally, without explicit, numerical length of pull guidelines, gun owners may unwittingly find themselves victimized by subjective and inconsistent determinations of what exactly constitutes a “stock-like” length of pull. Vague, subjective guidance does not help consumers and manufacturers to make legal decisions.
Conclusion
The guidance provided in “Objective Factors for Classifying Weapons with ‘Stabilizing Braces’” is unhelpful — and certainly not objective. The proposed criteria by which brace-equipped weapons may be determined to be NFA firearms are deeply flawed and collapse under scrutiny. These criteria are rife with subjectivity and carry tremendous potential to penalize innocent gun owners.
Revised criteria must better recognize that thousands of Americans acquired (or assembled) and have been using millions of brace-equipped firearms in a manner which they have justifiably understood to be perfectly legal. None of these people should have to fear becoming felons on account of entirely unreasonable changes in regulatory guidance. | https://medium.com/@marklivesthings/regulatory-comment-objective-factors-for-classifying-weapons-with-stabilizing-braces-2b1bfc4bb3b4 | ['Mark Houser'] | 2020-12-24 00:36:53.716000+00:00 | ['Regulation', 'Civil Rights', 'Guns', 'Atf', 'Gun Rights'] |
Hacking with scala spray-json | Spray-json
Spray-json provides a simple way to write marshalers and unmarshalers for scala case class objects. In this post I’m discussing about various types of marshalers and unmarshalers that can be implemented with spary-json. All the source code which relates to this post available in gitlab.
1. Simple object
Spray-json provides toJson and parseJson functions to marshal and unmarshal simple case class objects.
2. Option fields
Spray-json can automatically handles option fields. If options field does not exists when unmarshaling, it identifies the field as a None .
3. Nested object
When handling nested objects, spray-json required to define the JSON format of the root object and the nested objects.
4. Custom read
We can read custom JSON objects into case class objects by overriding read method of the RootJsonFormat .
5. Nested read
To read custom values from nested JSON objects, we can define multiple RootJsonFormat .
6. Complex read
We can extract the specific fields from JSON object and create the case classes by overriding read method of the RootJsonFormat .
7. Custom write
By overriding write method of RootJsonFormat we can build JSON objects with custom fields.
8. Trait types
We can marshal and unmarshal case classes with custom super types(type defined with trait ) by extending RootJsonFormat .
9. More than 22 fields
The maximum json format supports by spray-json is jsonFormat22 . To marshal/unmarshal case classes which has more than 22 fields we need to write custom RootJsonFormat .
Reference | https://medium.com/rahasak/json-handling-in-scala-spray-json-afbab0e9eaba | [] | 2019-10-07 01:54:17.055000+00:00 | ['Spray Json', 'Big Data', 'DevOps', 'Scala', 'Json'] |
Kai W is giving out NordVPN discount — read here how to get the deal | Kai W is giving out NordVPN discount — read here how to get the deal Joffrey Upton Jun 15, 2020·3 min read
If you’re into photography, then you must’ve heard of Kai W YouTube channel. It is a massive repository of useful videos, tips, technological reviews, and more that has to do with photography. The channel was created in 2013 and since then gathered an astonishing number of 869k subscribers that generated 60 million views. Impressive statistics. In the playlist, you’ll find old school photography, nest photo gear, tips & helpful stuff, and more — it worth taking a look. Another useful thing in there is a recommendation and a discount for NordVPN, a privacy protection software.
How to get Kai W NordVPN discount?
Kai W is well aware that the Internet today might be a dangerous place, and that’s why he’s recommending a privacy protection software NordVPN. With his unique 70% discount, you can get it for just $3.49/month for a three-year plan, which is a well-worth investment in online protection. You can get this service from Google Play by clicking here, or follow this link to download it for your iOS.
Click here to get the exclusive 70% NordVPN discount from Kai W
What does NordVPN do?
NordVPN is a Virtual Private Network, and it’s a privacy protection oriented cybersecurity service. It works by establishing a secured and encrypted tunnel between your device and one of its servers. Then it reroutes all data-flow through the chosen server. This way no peeping Toms, including your ISP, can see what you’re doing online and use your confidential information for whatever reasons they have.
But this is not everything. NordVPN lets you change your IP address, which is related to your geographical location. Some web pages monitor user IP address, and if it does not come from a required country, it denies access to content. These are called geographical restrictions. By picking a server in a different country, you will get that country IP address, and you can change to the one required to access the content in question. Or even unlock full streaming services libraries.
Who exactly is Kai W?
His name is Kaiman Wong, and he was born in Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom. He moved to Manchester where he studied Film and Media and ended up making YT video for other people: Redwolf Airsoft and DigitalRev. However, he was so good at what he does that he established Kai W YouTube channel, which is popular, to say the least.
However, if you don’t like photography that much, there are a lot more YouTube channels to choose from, and I can name at least two, which I hope you’ll find entertaining. You can check out The Armchair Historian chan if history is more of your thing. Or visit Variant Comics for spectacular comics material. Both of these channels also suggest using NordVPN!
Stop hesitating and protect your online traffic with NordVPN | https://medium.com/@madamtutou/kai-w-is-giving-out-nordvpn-discount-6995136b1629 | ['Joffrey Upton'] | 2020-06-15 14:32:12.921000+00:00 | ['Cybersecurity', 'Discount', 'Deal', 'Privacy', 'VPN'] |
2 Months of Supervised Machine Learning Curriculum in 2 Charts | Add in some cross-validation, matplotlib visualizations, and bam! You are on your way to a complete project.
While I have some time on my hands, I am also contemplating making a “Which Machine Learning Model Are You?” BuzzFeed style quiz for all my fellow data science nerds out there, so stay tuned for that.*
If there is anything in these charts that you disagree with or would like to add to, please comment below or send me a message! Thanks for reading, and if you found this to be a helpful resource, share it with others you know who are learning data science.
credit to canva.com for the templates for these images
*edit: I did not create a quiz, but I did write a short, fun article about it: | https://towardsdatascience.com/2-months-of-supervised-machine-learning-curriculum-in-2-charts-259970e38a63 | ['Megan Dibble'] | 2020-04-03 19:14:18.424000+00:00 | ['Supervised Learning', 'Sklearn', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Data Science Bootcamp'] |
When You Speak | standing there
with the salt in your hair
whispers of the world
washing quickly over us
nothing new, nothing true
we’re alone but not blue
there’s something about the water
like there’s something about you —
a calm dark tide
slowly drawn out over time
a promising wave
that tells us we’re okay
the sound of peace
yes, that sound does exist
you’ll know it when you hear it
I hear it when you speak
© Jessica Lovejoy 2020. All Rights Reserved. | https://medium.com/caf%C3%A9-con-leche/when-you-speak-1bdf9bbbc07a | ['Jessica Lovejoy'] | 2020-01-17 12:01:03.433000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Nature', 'Love', 'Poetry', 'Poem'] |
CFL365.Finance Investor Spotlight Series: NewTribe Capital | CFL365.Finance is happy to announce our next investor — NewTribe Capital, an early-stage, growth-oriented digital Venture Capital fund based out of the Middle East.
Partnership Vision
Blockchain technology will disrupt all industries across the globe in the near future and the industry would harness the expertise of many new users for its development & growth. The journey of a new user starts with experimentation, CFL365.Finance is bridging the gap between the legacy finance and DeFi ecosystem through a digitally advanced skill based gaming platform providing opportunities to experiment & learn. Users participate in leagues/games and hone their skills before trading with real cryptocurrency. NewTribe Capital partnership is strategic to CFL365.Finance plans, would provide market access, marketing support, and early stage investment to fuel the ambition.
“CFL365 is here to revolutionize the virtual marketplace ecosystem and enable users to anticipate the price actions of global stocks and crypto assets in real time market conditions without actually owning them. NewTribe Capital is extremely excited to be a part of this journey!” — Juliet Su, Partner at NewTribe Capital
“Our goal is to make DeFi a commonplace for non crypto users, we use skill based gaming to make them comfortable in this industry. We are excited to have NewTribe capital as our growth partner, this would provide us access to the booming Middle East markets which have a lot of untapped potential and new users.” — Syed Shoeb, CFL365.Finance Co-founder and CEO
About NewTribe Capital
NewTribe is an early-stage, growth-oriented digital Venture Capital fund based out of the Middle East. Its aim is to invest in projects that strive to add value and create a long term impact in the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem.
Read more about NewTribe Capital here:
Website | Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | Email
About CFL 365 Finance
CFL365.Finance is a trustless, decentralised, skill based virtual stocks and crypto trading platform. It offers real time experience with 500+ cryptocurrencies in synchronous market conditions without actually buying the coins & tokens. Users participate in leagues and compete against each other to win rewards.
Follow the latest updates on CFL365.Finance here:
Website | Telegram | Twitter | Medium | https://medium.com/@cfl365.fin/cfl365-finance-investor-spotlight-series-newtribe-capital-173d3e9368df | [] | 2021-07-07 05:24:47.303000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Simulation', 'New Tribe Capital', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Cfl365'] |
Calling Abroad Numbers freely with the satellite phone | We can call any abroad local number freely using a satellite app of sipgate. This is very awesome, I heard this app from my german friend.
The magic of satellite is that you can be reached worldwide under a mobile phone number, regardless of the provider. You don’t need a cellular connection (GSM), just your cell phone and a data connection. It doesn’t matter whether you use a data SIM (5G, 4G, 3G, Edge) or WiFi, the voice quality is always top. And unlike most VoIP apps, satellite behaves like your phone’s standard telephony. This protects the battery and everything works as you are used to.
Anyone who calls you on your satellite number pays their normal charge for German mobile phone numbers
The app link → https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.sipgate.app.satellite&hl=en
Advantages over other applications
Requirements
VPN connection using German Server A friend from German who can receive the code from post and send it to you
Setup the satellite app
First, connect the german VPN because this app will work in german not in our country. If you search app from play store without this vpn, you will not see this app also Download the application from the playstore
4. Click the start button to use satellite app
5. You need to create an account and these steps are very easy but you need a friend from german to receive your which will be sent fro you in that german postal address.
You have to ask your friend to get the zip code, street and home number. this information we need to give it to the satellite app to receive the code via postal address.
click the button verify via letter, they will send a verification code to your friend.
Limitations of satellite app
With satellite you are currently making calls to 64 countries. It doesn’t matter whether you want to call landlines or cell phones and where you are. You only need a sufficient, unrestricted data connection.
Australia Bangladesh Belgium Bermuda Bhutan Brazil Brunei Bulgaria
China Costa Rica Denmark Germany Faroe Islands Finland France Greece
Great Britain Hong Kong India Indonesia Ireland Iceland Italy Japan
Cambodia Canada Colombia Croatia Kuwait Laos Liechtenstein Lithuania
Luxembourg Malaysia Malta Mexico Mongolia Namibia New Zealand
Netherlands Nigeria Norway Austria Pakistan Paraguay Peru
Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Romania Sweden Singapore
Slovakia Slovenia Spain South Korea Taiwan Thailand Czech Republic
Hungary United States Vatican CityVietnam Cyprus
2. Per month we have only 100 minutes to call. I think it is enough for us to call our relatives. If you need you can go with satellite plus.
Visit this official site to learn more. | https://medium.com/@rcvaram/calling-abroad-numbers-freely-with-the-satellite-phone-4f64bf0ac75a | ['Sivaram Rasathurai'] | 2020-05-25 03:35:32.274000+00:00 | ['WhatsApp', 'Telephony', 'Satellite Technology', 'VPN', 'Social'] |
Are Movie Theaters Going the Way of the Abacus? | MARKETING | MOVIE THEATERS
Are Movie Theaters Going the Way of the Abacus?
Netflix teed them up for the kill. Covid is swinging the bat.
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash
I hate paying fifteen bucks for a tub of popcorn and a drink at the movies.
“But you get free refills.”
If I were to eat the entire (admittedly delicious) wheelbarrow-sized tub of buttered popcorn and go back for a refill, I might as well live directly in a pigsty. Also, I end up drinking the accompanying pony-keg-sized soft drink during the previews to the previews. Which perfectly times my first restroom run twenty minutes into the feature film.
I have calculated that each time I have to pee during a movie at the theater it costs me around thirty cents worth of viewing time.
Water Smuggling and Ticket Prices
To avoid the exorbitant drink prices, I have been known to smuggle a water bottle in my pants and make do with that. Never you mind where I stash it in my pants.
And, of course, none of the above even takes into account the ticket prices. The average single-ticket price before Covid-19 was $9.16. That’s right in line with an entire month of Netflix’s basic plan, which offers thousands of movies and television shows from the comfort of your own couch, which hopefully doesn’t have spilled popcorn and smashed Raisinettes on the floor in front of it. That calculation doesn’t count what the typical household pays for internet connectivity, but that is typically a sunk cost, anyway.
Now, multiply all that by however many people you go to the theater with. You need to borrow against your 401K just to visit the theater and eat snacks.
Another complication is that the big streaming platforms are creating ever-better original content. And lots of it.
All in all, that’s an uphill fight for theaters.
The Hammer Before the Final Fall
Enter Covid-19.
I drive past the main theater in our town every few days and, frankly, it’s a pitiful sight most of the week. The lights are on, but no one is home. Occasionally, tractor-trailers use the parking lot as an overnight place to stay. It looks like a picture of a movie theater where all signs of normal life were photoshopped out. I’m waiting to see tumbleweeds blowing through the parking lot.
With AMC being in danger of running out of cash in early 2021 and Regal shutting down all 536 U.S. theaters this past October, theater chains are under serious financial pressure.
Adding more fuel to the dumpster fire, movie studios are experimenting with streamed movie openings (Hello, “Mulan” on Disney+). How Disney rolled out Mulan is a story for another time, but the fact is that movies have successfully opened direct-to-streaming. Or successful enough, anyway. Universal’s “Troll World Tour” bypassed closed theaters in April and earned $100 million in the first three weeks.
If Covid continues to be the bane of human existence, movie studios will open more and more big-budget movies to non-theater audiences.
Movies are Loss Leaders
But given that theater owners think of movies as a loss leader, the days of theaters have to be all but numbered. It’s an expensive way to basically sell popcorn, candy, and drinks. Even though the chalk outline hasn’t been drawn around the body yet, theaters are dying in their present form.
Showing movies to essentially sell snacks at prices that piss most people off is no longer a sustainable long-term business concept when virtually every movie ever made can be streamed right to a consumer’s television.
Theaters and Culture
The big “but” to the bad news is that the movie theater, when it’s open, has an enormous screen and an awesome sound system. Great for the Avatar- and Star Wars-type films. Regardless, given all of the challenges I mentioned above, I really have to want to see a movie before I will show my face (and my wallet) in the theater. But when I go, I generally enjoy the experience.
I’m not a cinephile personally. Honestly, that sounds like an extremely naughty word. But movies are a deep part of our culture. And going to a movie theater is a big part of our culture as well.
Theater operators, just a quick appeal to you. Make the prices more affordable and make it up on the volume of new movie-goers you would attract. For cinephiles (there’s that word again), AMC Stubs and Regal’s Unlimited subscription seem like a step in the right direction.
I truly don’t want to see this historic section of culture wiped away. It will never have the power it once held. That is gone. But I would like to visit a comfortable, clean theater every once in a while, and really absorb a good movie with all my senses.
I’m hoping that movie theaters don’t go the way of the dodo bird, the abacus, and Blockbuster Video, but I’m convinced they will.
If Netflix and other streaming services kill them in a competitive marketplace, so be it. But please don’t let Covid do it.
I’ll contribute my part and go see Wonder Woman 1984 and Black Widow and other theater-worthy movies in my local cinema. I might even buy some popcorn to go with my smuggled water.
But movie theaters are treading water in choppy seas. Sharks and hurricanes are coming fast. And popcorn sales won’t save them. | https://medium.com/illumination/are-movie-theaters-going-the-way-of-the-abacus-f168994edb80 | ['Walker Sweet'] | 2020-12-14 21:56:00.126000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Business', 'Netflix', 'Marketing', 'Disney'] |
Super Connect for Good 2021 Meet the Judges exclusive: Marcus Orton, Innovate UK EDGE | Super Connect for Good 2021 Meet the Judges exclusive: Marcus Orton, Innovate UK EDGE
As we celebrate the success of Empact Ventures’ 2021 Super Connect for Good competition, we catch up with Regional Partner and Judge for the North of England region, Marcus Orton, Senior Innovation and Growth Specialist, Innovate UK EDGE. Top Business Tech Dec 17, 2021·7 min read
As we celebrate the success of Hays’ and Empact Ventures’ 2021 Super Connect for Good competition, we catch up with Regional Partner and Judge for the North of England region, Marcus Orton, Senior Innovation and Growth Specialist, Innovate UK EDGE.
Hays’ and Empact Ventures’ 2021 Super Connect for Good was a resounding success. The virtual final, which took place in November, saw the regional winners go head-to-head by pitching live for the Super Connect for Good 2021 Overall Champion. We spoke to Regional Partner and Judge for the North of England region, Marcus Orton, The Senior Innovation and Growth Specialist, Innovate UK EDGE. Innovate UK EDGE is an integral part of the grant funding organization, Innovate UK, which focuses exclusively on innovation-led companies with high growth potential. Innovate UK Edge was launched earlier in 2021, and is an initiative dedicated to helping such companies along growth journeys to scale.
Orton joined Innovate UK a year ago as an independent consultant, working with medical device sector advisors and supporting companies with regulatory compliance, risk management, product development, assessments, and services. He was also a managing director of NHS spinout company SwabTech, which sought to bring blood recovery technology to the market. Though SwabTech was unable to obtain the funding needed to enter the market, it brought Orton to the “very exciting” opportunity to work with the Innovate UK team, operating in the North of the UK. Innovate UK EDGE provides a national service, is led by seasoned specialists with diverse experience and international track records at the business-end of innovation.
Orton’s experience in product development, largely in medical devices, notably orthopaedic instrumentation and implant system development, positioned him well as a specialist in the organization. He shares that he joined a team with a holistic set of skills, including marketing, corporate finance, accountancy, local government and public sector, and support services, all from across various industries such as manufacturing, retail, hospitality and science and technology. “We’re an extended team of advisors,” he explains, “we can work either individually or as teams with clients from these sectors.”
Navigating a turbulent climate
Drawing on his experience at Innovate UK EDGE, Orton reflects on the current challenges facing startups today. He notes that startups must balance a focus on present operations while also remaining aware of the future as a business progresses. He shares that many contextual economic factors have impacted companies of all sizes in recent years: Britain’s decision to leave the EU, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the growing need for climate action vocalized at COP26. “These are immediate and long-term components to take into account, let alone rival and competitive competitor influences.
“At Innovate UK EDGE, we are a regular touchpoint and sounding board to what a startup’s or SME strategy is, and how its business plan responds to that strategy and evolves with it, both in the context of the business developing and changing economy,” he said.
As startups navigate this turbulent climate, Innovate UK EDGE provides a funded service “so that the cost to the participants in our work is primarily the time that they would invest in working with us,” explains Orton. Leveraging knowledge from Innovate UK, The Knowledge Transfer Network, The Catapults, and grant funding bodies such as Innovate UK and the EU Horizon project, Innovate UK EDGE provides a wealth of knowledge and connectivity to the businesses they work with, to meet the wider economic challenges head-on.
In the context of the healthcare industry, Orton shares that “organizations are coming from Europe as they see the UK as a very promising economy to be working with. There is more investment going into the healthcare economy, and the demand is increasing, almost as a consequence of how successful our health system is in tackling existing challenges.”
From an environmental aspect, society is taking a more active approach to mitigating climate change, which is reflected in emerging startups. “We’re seeing the increased interest in electric vehicles and alternatives to carbon-based gas, which will enable us to live more environmentally responsible lives.”
For both of these trends, Orton emphasizes, “if individual companies have an idea, they need to realize the work that is needed to bring that idea to market, to evaluate its potential and to engage successfully with relevant stakeholders; be they manufacturers, suppliers, or distributors. These are the themes we see across our work.”
The makings of a great startup
“Creativity is at the heart of a good startup,” says Orton, “And an openness to what is driving them to create a new solution. This can mean a driving passion and perseverance that is internal to the company, but a great startup also needs to have a realistic understanding that a solution can sustainably serve a market need, and that other bodies will engage with the need that they are responding to.” Orton adds that this is an iterative process where startups need to remain flexible as they grow and learn from customers and market peers while remaining open and actively listening to stakeholders.
Scaling up
To those startups looking to scaleup, Orton reminds these startups that many people have been through this process before. “Speak to others who have been through the scaleup process. You don’t have to like everything they say to you, but keep in mind; it’s quite a journey. We’re very privileged to work with a variety of companies in a short amount of time, and from this, we have gained an insight into a multitude of successes and failures, and being able to gain from this is key. It’s important to remember that you’re not on your own in this process.”
“I’ve been impressed by the Super Connect For Good programme. These hosts have a great knowledge of how virtual environments work, run excellent programmes and have provided a platform for some really fantastic businesses.” Orton emphasizes the importance of startups coming together to celebrate these accomplishments and the chance to meet other organizations that will support them in their journey. He adds that the quality of the companies he saw this year has given him hope that emerging technology will certainly have a role in overcoming the challenges that he previously outlined.
Innovate UK EDGE supports startups by facilitating grant funding applications, business cases, and presentations. He describes the quality of the presentations at the Super Connect for Good as sophisticated, but sobering. “While it’s exciting to see such a high standard of presentations, it is also sobering, as so few recipients can be awarded grant funding. This is where our support extends into other aspects of supporting business growth”.
Orton explains that there is a limitation on funding resources nationally, and if there is an successful appeal to the wider parts of the community, that have more resources, be it financial or otherwise, more businesses with much-needed solutions will thrive. “If investors took a lower return or placed more resources into businesses, the nation may see an overall improvement in economic progress.” He continues, “We’d also like to see more government money going into social services, transport systems, and businesses to not only to improve the support for our society and communities, but as an investment to develop and strengthen the next generation of products, services and professionals.”
READ MORE:
About Marcus Orton, Senior Innovation and Growth Specialist, Innovate UK EDGE
About Marcus Orton, Senior Innovation and Growth Specialist, Innovate UK EDGE
An experienced medical device developer, business leader and innovator, Marcus Orton is committed to delivering world-class products, services, business process solutions, sustainable and effective management of resources, founded on experience gained in leading multinational corporations, UK healthcare and academic organizations, startup and SME business settings.
As an innovation specialist, he provides product, business and regulatory development support and coaching. This work draws on work with medical device business teams, healthcare service providers and academic technology transfer and teaching programs. Services include gap analysis, planning, risk management, theme-based workshops, documentation review and direct support for the development of business plans, grant applications and product development projects.
As an NHS spinout, startup CEO, Orton leads the business and product development of an innovative enhancement to surgical blood recovery systems. While it did not succeed in reaching a commercial market position, the work successfully secured grant and investor resources, technology, supply-chain, and IP development. This drew on experience gained in medical device product development, product launch and scale-up delivery and has supported clinical innovation in orthopaedic medical device and surgical instrumentation sectors, the delivery of private healthcare change management, and technology transfer and transformation in academic research and business innovation management roles.
For more news from Top Business Tech, don’t forget to subscribe to our daily bulletin!
Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter | https://medium.com/tbtech-news/super-connect-for-good-2021-meet-the-judges-exclusive-marcus-orton-innovate-uk-edge-9be494329481 | ['Top Business Tech'] | 2021-12-17 09:15:31.233000+00:00 | ['It', 'Technology', 'Innovate Uk Edge', 'Startups', 'News'] |
Laravel 9 Tutorial: Laravel 9 new features | With the different features of Laravel, it is the most favorite framework amongst developers and companies using the PHP programming language. This adoption is due to the elegancy and scalability nature of the framework.
With the Laravel 9 release, the Laravel team switches from the traditional 6-month release cycle to a 12-month release cycle using the Semantic Versioning(Semver) approach.
The initial schedule of the Laravel 9 release was supposed to be September 2021, following the traditional approach. Still, the release date changed to January 2022 as stated by the creator and with a few valid reasons, as noted below.
In this article, we will discuss in detail Laravel 9 and the best features of Laravel. We will also detail how to update or upgrade to Laravel 9 and install and start building an app with the new Laravel 9.
Before you dive in, if you’re a backend developer or looking at delving into this career path, join other developers to receive daily articles on backend development that will boost your productivity.
What is Laravel?
Laravel is an open-source PHP web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It is an MVC framework for building simple to complex web applications using the PHP programming language.
Laravel strictly follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architectural pattern. It is known for its beautiful and elegant syntax as a web framework.
If you haven’t used Laravel, you can read through the ultimate guide to Laravel and peek at Laravel 8 new features to get started.
Laravel 9 and What to Expect
Laravel 9 is the first Long Term Support (LTS) released in a 12-month release cycle and was initially scheduled to be released by September 2021; however. The Laravel team decided to push it to January 2022.
This release schedule is due to these reasons outlined below: with these reasons below, the release date was pushed forward.
Laravel as a framework relies on different community-driven and 9 Symfony libraries, and Symfony is planning to release v6.0 by November 2021, making the Laravel team delay release of Laravel v9. To update or upgrade the entire Laravel framework to the latest version of Symfony will take a while and also lots of testing and monitoring against any breaking changes before releasing it to the public. Finally, delaying the release of Laravel 9 till January 2022 will better position the Laravel team to release subsequent LTS yearly which gives the Laravel team 2 months after Symfony’s releases.
Now that we know the reasons for the changes, let’s explore the new Laravel v9 before it is released by January 2022.
Newest Features in Laravel 9
Below is the newest features and improvement that we should expect in the Laravel v9 by January 2022:
Minimum PHP Requirement
Laravel 9 requires the newest version of PHP 8, PHPUnit 9, and a few other requirements specified in the future.
The PHP 8 requirement is because Laravel 9 is solely dependant on Symfony’s latest v6.0 release, which depends on PHP 8.
You can explore what is new in PHP 8 and the different PHP versions benchmarks to grasp the improvements and features of PHP 8 from Just-In-Time compiler (JIT) to constructor property promotion.
Anonymous Stub Migration
The anonymous stub migration released in Laravel version 8.37 to solve this Github Issue will be the default behavior of the newest Laravel 9.
Anonymous Stub Migration eliminates the collision of migration class names. The collision happens when multiple migrations have the same class name, it’ll cause issues when trying to recreate the database from scratch.
Here is the sample code snippet of how the new migration file will look like:
<?php use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema; return new class extends Migration {
/** * Run the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/ public function up() {
Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->string('first_name')->nullable();
});
} };
This code snippet uses Schema::table instead of the traditional Schema::create() method.
New Query Builder Interface
Type hinting is crucial as developers highly rely on refactoring, static analysis, and code completion in their IDEs.
With Laravel 9, developers can now enjoy a shared interface or inheritance between Query\Builder , Eloquent\Builder and Eloquent\Relation with the new Query Builder Interface.
You can read through this for all the details:
<?php return Model::query() ->whereNotExists(function($query) { // $query is a Query\Builder
}) ->whereHas('relation', function($query) { // $query is an Eloquent\Builder
}) ->with('relation', function($query) { // $query is an Eloquent\Relation
});
Laravel v9 added the new Illuminate\Contracts\Database\QueryBuilder interface and Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Concerns\DecoratesQueryBuilder trait that will implement the interface in place of the existing __call magic method.
PHP 8 String Functions
Laravel v9 requires PHP v8, so the Laravel team agreed to merge a PR to use the newest PHP 8 String functions.
The suggested functions include str_contains() , str_starts_with() , and str_ends_with() to be used internally in the \Illuminate\Support\Str class.
And More
Laravel v9 is still in active development and will introduce more future improvements and features that we have not listed yet in this article. Laravel v9 will most definitely come with lots of significant changes, bug fixes, features, and of course, many breaking changes.
Do well to subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead.
How to install Laravel 9
If you’re like us, we love to explore the newest technologies before being open to the public. You can start playing with the upcoming Laravel v9 for development and testing purposes. You can easily install and run it on your local machine following the guide below.
In addition, Laravel 9 supports PHP version 8. Make sure to check and upgrade your PHP version to use Laravel 9 before next January 2022.
To install Laravel 9, the first method is the Laravel global CLI which creates a new Laravel project from the branch specified. In this case, we will choose to create the new Laravel project from the dev branch.
Run the following command below in your directory to create a new Laravel 9 project. Make sure to have Laravel CLI installed globally.
laravel new laravel-9-todo-app --dev
Next, to install Laravel 9 using composer, run the following command to install Laravel v9:
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel-9-todo-app dev-develop
The composer command will create a new Laravel project with project name as laravel-9-todo-app , using the dev-develop will result in the latest Laravel 9.
Now that we have Laravel 9 installed, you can navigate to the new laravel-9-todo-app directory and run the following artisan command to check the version:
cd laravel-9-dev
php artisan --version //Laravel Framework 9.x-dev
Now that you have Laravel 9 installed, you should read the ultimate guide to Laravel to learn how to build scalable Laravel applications.
Conclusion
This article detailed the features of Laravel 9 and what to expect in future releases. It also explored how to update or upgrade to Laravel 9 and install and start building an app with the new Laravel 9. | https://medium.com/backenders-club/laravel-9-tutorial-laravel-9-new-features-3d1af79edad7 | ['Solomon Eseme'] | 2021-07-21 13:36:39.343000+00:00 | ['Laravel', 'Backend Development', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming'] |
Introduction to our blog | Hi guys, welcome to our blog about the double burden of Tuberculosis (TB) and diabetes in Brazil!
With our blog, we would like to give you a little bit more insight into the global problem called the double burden of disease.
The double burden of disease refers to the rise of communicable diseases as well as non-communicable diseases in a country, and the correlation between them (1). Especially in low-middle income countries, the double burden of disease leads to significant health problems. In many countries, the double burden of disease has been increasing. Due to inefficient healthcare systems and rapid urbanization, the prevalence of communicable diseases such as HIV, Malaria, and Tuberculosis has been increasing. At the same time, due to a number of interrelated trends, the prevalence of non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease has been rising as well (1). One of these trends includes the decrease in childhood deaths due to better nutrition, public health and medicine. This results in longer life expectancies as more children survive into adulthood which makes them more vulnerable to non-communicable diseases. The most important risk factors for developing non-communicable diseases are unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, tobacco use, and excessive alcohol consumption. These factors mostly occur due to lifestyle choices that are mostly influenced by economic development and urban living (1). In addition, the risk of developing a non-communicable disease increases with age.
"The Double Burden of Disease has been rising and causing significant health problems, all over the globe."
Non-communicable diseases have been a serious problem in high-income countries for a longer period of time. However, in these countries, the prevalence of communicable diseases has decreased to a point where they are not really a big health problem anymore which means the health system can mainly focus on non-communicable diseases. In low-middle income countries, they still have to face the burden of communicable diseases as well, which forces their health systems to divide their resources which makes them kind of unable to tackle both problems.
In our upcoming blog posts, we would like to tell you more about one specific double burden of disease problem: tuberculosis, diabetes and their correlation, which makes the double burden of disease regarding this situation even worse. Especially in Brazil, the correlation between tuberculosis and diabetes is a significant problem. That is why we will talk about the consequences of the diseases and their correlation in Brazil!
We hope you guys enjoy it! | https://medium.com/@doubleburden/introduction-to-our-blog-bfff5da0f1e2 | ['Double Burden Of Tb'] | 2021-11-18 13:05:46.554000+00:00 | ['Double Burden Of Disease', 'Tuberculosis', 'Diabetes', 'First Post', 'Brazil'] |
Adventures with Neo4j and Timetrees | The new and improved FT website, launching 5 October, has many exciting and engaging new features, one of which is the subject of my own team’s focus: myFT.
myFT offers a means of curating a personalised FT newsfeed and email digest of specific topics chosen by the subscriber. One of the ways in which subscribers can find their preferred topics is via our recommendation engine, which we’ve developed by harnessing the power of the Neo4j graph database.
Neo4j is wonderfully suited to this sort of problem domain and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed using it.
The problem: travelling through time with Neo4j
Soon enough, we found ourselves in a situation where we needed to be able to select a set of nodes on a particular day or between two points in time. This proved to be surprisingly tricky using Neo4j.
Thus far, our approach to recording time had been to add a millisecond timestamp property to nodes and relationships. As explained in this excellent blog by GraphAware, when taking this naive approach, selecting events that occurred within a set time range requires a full scan of all candidate nodes. When the nodes in question represent FT article read events this can be a very expensive scan.
The solution: timetrees
The solution, as explained in GraphAware’s blog, is to introduce a timetree structure into the database which allows units of time to be selected as nodes. The timetree nodes can act as the start of a localised search that takes full advantage of the strengths of a graph database.
After first experimenting with GraphAware’s instant timetree plugin to generate the timetree on demand, we found our needs were more suited to building the timetree structure in advance. Following a blog by Mark Needham, we wrote a query to generate a timetree to the granularity of one day, including NEXT relationships representing the sequence of the days. You can see our finished query here. We can then represent the times at which events occur by adding relationships between the event and day nodes.
This is great! We can now select whole swathes of results between two dates with refreshing ease and efficiency. For example…
Selecting events by day
To get hold of all the events that happened on a particular day in our brave new timetree world, we can do something like this:
// returns all event that happened on 14/3/2016
MATCH (:Year {value: 2016}) — (:Month {value: 3}) — (d:Day {value: 14})<-[:at_time]-(e:Event)
RETURN e
I’ll dissect this a bit. On the left-hand side of the MATCH clause we have this snippet:
MATCH (:Year {value: 2016}) — (:Month {value: 3}) — (d:Day {value: 14})
Starting from the Year node, this snippet traverses the timetree to select our desired Day node.
The rest of this query is concerned with matching and returning all event notes that have an at_time relationship with this Day node.
Selecting events within a range of time
To bring up data of the events that happened over a period of 3 days, we can do this:
// returns all events that happened between 12/3/2016 and 14/3/2016 (inclusive)
MATCH (:Year {value: 2016}) — (:Month {value: 3}) — (:Day {value: 15})<-[:NEXT*..3]-(days:Day)<-[:at_time]-(e:Event)
RETURN e
The first snippet of the query is similar to the start of the single-day query above:
MATCH (:Year {value: 2016}) — (:Month {value: 3}) — (:Day {value: 15})
We traverse the timetree to find the node for the day after our desired range.
The next snippet uses this day-after node as a starting point to find our range:
<-[:NEXT*..3]-(days:Day)
I mentioned earlier that our timetree has NEXT relationships linking its Day nodes. These allow the timetree to be traversed horizontally across days. The [:NEXT*..3] snippet uses variable-length relationship matching to select a three-deep chain of Day nodes that matches our desired range.
The rest of the query matches all event nodes that have an at_time relationship with any of the three nodes matched in the days parameter.
Room for improvement in performance and aesthetics
The timetree solution allows us to get hold of all of our events pretty darn speedily. However, there are drawbacks.
First of all, it asks us to compromise on our readability and DRYness principals within our timetree-using queries, in that we are required to repeat the sizeable year-month-day traversal for each one. (That’s this bit: MATCH (:Year {value: 2016}) — (:Month {value: 3}) — (:Day {value: 15})).
We also took exception to the small but niggling overhead of the timetree-traversal query that had to take place for every execution, which we calculated as roughly 150 database hits per query.
Elegant time travel: the date string index trick
We came up with a solution to these problems that we’re fairly pleased with. We indexed all of the Day nodes by a string representation of that particular date, allowing us to perform what are effectively the same queries using the following pattern:
// returns all event that happened on 14/3/2016
MATCH (e:Event)-[:at_time]->(:Day {dayString:’14/3/2016'})
RETURN e
// returns all events that happened between 12/3/2016 and 14/3/2016 (inclusive)
MATCH(:Day {dayString:’15/3/2016'})<-[:NEXT*..3]-(days:Day)<-[:at_time]-(e:Event)
RETURN e
Year-month-day traversal boilerplate? Gone. Readability of query? Through the roof. Unnecessary timetree-related DB hits? Poof!
Wow! Tell me how
We want our day nodes to look something like this:
And to do this we’ve written a query that you can take a look at here: https://gist.github.com/laurieboyes/7df68f0cf600411acdbfe2c9840b0a5f
You might notice that in this query we add a similar property to the Month nodes. This allows us to use the same approach to select all events that occur on particular months, as well as days.
Once this step is done, we make the indexes, and we’re ready for time travel:
CREATE INDEX ON :Day(uuid)
The benefit of hindsight
There are of course, parts of this solution that we wish we had done differently, and certainly will do in the future.
‘Order by’-friendly date format
One of these days we may go back and retrofit an opportunity that, unfortunately, we didn’t spot at the time. You might notice that we’ve stored our date index property in little-endian format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Date_format), e.g. 14/3/2016.
This makes the property really nice and readable (particularly if you’re not from the United States). However, if we had stored the date in big-endian format with zero padding, e.g. 2016/03/16, we would have created a situation wherein it was very easy to order query results by date, with only a very slight compromise to readability.
Doing it wrong
Before the date string idea came along, we trialled a much less palatable solution to a situation that required us to make lots of queries starting from the Day node representing the actual current day.
Willfully flouting the recommendations laid out in the Neo4J documentation (http://neo4j.com/docs/developer-manual/current/cypher/#match-node-by-id), our approach was to query and cache the internal Neo4j ID of the current Day node once an hour and use this to look up that node to start each query.
In our defense, this was just as fast as our final solution, but it was also very fiddly and really rather messy, so we were pleased when a better idea came along and we were able to sweep this one under the rug.
Controversial property names
Finally, I do feel a twinge of regret when I remember that our date string properties all have the key ‘uuid’, as, clearly, they do not contain UUIDs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier).
This is a convention we adopted to fit our own identifiers around Neo4j’s reserved id property, which makes a great deal of sense for our nodes that are indexed against UUIDs, but less sense here. We made the decision to keep the uuid property as a convention across nodes in our graph for consistency’s sake.
Regardless, hooray!
You can sample the fruits of our labours on myFT at the new FT.com, and take comfort in the knowledge that the timetree-based queries under the hood read like poetry. | https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/adventures-with-neo4j-and-timetrees-5413f97f8a82 | ['Ft Product'] | 2018-02-20 12:04:30.654000+00:00 | ['Project', 'Graph Databases', 'Ft', 'Databases', 'Financial Times'] |
Threnody for the Educated | poem — © 2019 Matthew de Lacey Davidson
We live in a world of “I don’t know”
where “what we do” is proudly displayed
inside the advertisements of
a tedious twenty-two minute sit-com
upon the latest forty-two inch flat screen television.
Laocoön’s no longer strangled by the snakes,
and Romulus and Remus found no cities;
I run away from the Hydra,
never to complete the other eleven labours;
the riddle of the Sphynx remains unsolved,
Prometheus hasn’t any secrets to dispense,
and Klotho spins no more.
The above comprise a different mythical status:
a plastic shopping bag of information
that doesn’t truly benefit or concern us
(unless we read about them
in a supermarket tabloid
overdosing on dangerous drugs,
being treated for sex-addiction,
or cutting at their wrists and arms).
Aristophanes’ latest play
is called “The Tooth Fairies”
a sadly little tale about the demagogues
(corruptors of our democracy who
win their votes by casting aspersions
upon minorities and people of colour).
And the crowds within the colosseum cheer mightily,
while thumbs point up or down in a seemingly random manner.
The Magna Carta on a Sheepskin
I wrap about my hunching shoulders –
to keep me warm.
And when there is no other use for it,
I lay it down, to stop the tea-stains
from my teacup
messing up the table in the kitchen.
El pueblo que no conoce su historia
esta condenado a repertirla
and the moneyed and powerful could not care less
pretending their contentment in their Land of “I Don’t Know”.
Angels sigh
while Jules Laforgue
sweeps the morgue.
Passersby
shall read some words and never wonder “why?”
at poetry-dot-org.
Experts, few
with commerce, wed
(to earn more bread).
This, Shakespeare knew –
(but didn’t Chaucer have a day-job, too?)
Thus, all our souls are bled.
Meanwhile, the Lemmings wander out the gates of the Ivory Tower;
I see them, with graduate degrees hanging
around their necks, like leaden weights,
dragging them to many fathoms deep.
The Educated sit alone,
completely ostracized,
barely eking out a living –
an untouchable caste, cursed by their knowledge and degrees
which made them unintentionally unemployable in the first place.
So why does Jules Laforgue
sweep the morgue?
And why doesn’t he enjoy it?
It pays the bills — does it not?
But those whose skills which are appreciated
by the money changers
(who define and control the culture)
point and laugh derisively:
“Ha, ha, ha, those eggheads think they’re so smart,
but they can’t even get a real job,”
as if committing crimes on Wall Street,
and decreasing the incomes of
the bottom ninety-nine percent
is somehow, some huge accomplishment
worthy of humanity and our legacy.
In the darkness,
the apothecary moves towards me stealthily,
with his knife,
to tell me that I need a bleeding.
The strength of my objection doesn’t matter;
he’s the economic expert, wearing the long-nosed plague-mask
informing me that “that old invisible hand”
is being stymied by my outmoded attitudes,
and if only I’d believe
accepting him as my one-true-saviour
(with stigmata clearly on his hands)
life-everlasting could be mine.
But how can one expect to have the slightest inkling
of the world’s vicissitudes
and incertitudes
without an understanding of what came before?
It’s the arrogant vacuity that irks me to the quick –
the total lack of inquisitive desire
that precarious, precious element — a spark of delight
which makes us human more, and less amoeba-like.
The passion and enjoyment most delicious
that Eureka-moment showing us
that something we had not realised existed
actually does, and now it fills a void
where before we never knew there was one.
The realisation that we are never fully-formed;
but just a process growing –
(and a part of something larger than ourselves);
a newer knowledge quietly confessed –
until that point in time the Ancient Greeks
once said that we are truly blessed. | https://medium.com/the-junction/threnody-for-the-educated-fed93fce9322 | ['Matthew De Lacey Davidson'] | 2019-11-20 21:10:40.308000+00:00 | ['Ancient Greece', 'History', 'Classics', 'Ignorance', 'Education'] |
Young Social Impact Heroes: Why and How Sabrina Paseman of ‘Fix The Mask’ Is Helping To Change Our World | Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
When I was just getting started, I had to do small batch prototyping of our design. The prototype was made of a flexible silicone, which was a manufacturing process I was completely new to. I had a really generous mentor named Mark Deadrick who guided me through the process of making one at a time, but when I needed to scale up production to ten at a time, he referred me to one of his friends. It turns out that one industry that does lots of silicone molding in small batches is the film industry. As such, I got to meet Hollywood’s best mold maker and special effects artist, Pedro Valdez. He designed the molds for the initial Ironman helmet, which is pretty special because ironman is my personal hero. He’s also now able to say that he makes masks for all types of heroes, both superheroes as well as our frontline workers.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson or take away you learned from that?
Our product is designed to create a seal between a surgical mask and the wearer’s face. The first prototype was made with just rubber bands, and when I tried it on my own face, I was thrilled to find out that it worked perfectly — by securing a rubber band over my nose and mouth, I’d achieved the elusive N95 fit!
I was so excited. I stopped by my sister’s apartment to test the rubber band prototype on her and her boyfriend. Both of them said that it was uncomfortable, and they weren’t able to get a perfect seal like I was.
As we looked at each other’s faces, we had a revelation: I happen to have the world’s smallest nose and the world’s fattest cheeks. Since the front of my face is basically flat, it’s easy to create a product that covers my nose and mouth and creates a seal. And, to my surprise, most people don’t have a face that is the same shape as mine.
To make a brace that fits many faces, we had to evolve beyond rubber bands to the patent pending nose cushions on the Essential Mask Brace today. Since then, every version of our product has gone through extensive user testing before we’ve made it publicly available. My sister still makes fun of how flat my face is though.
None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?
As I said before, nobody knows anything before they start. I was blessed to have two amazing mentors from the get go, David McCalib and Bill Paseman.
I met David McCalib through a connection of a connection that happened to see my Linkedin post about my rubber band solution. We’d never met before, but even after reading about my underbaked idea online, he immediately saw the grander vision. We got on a video chat the next day, and we just clicked — it felt like we’d known each other for years. We brainstormed iterations via video chats and discussed business strategy by phone. David already had an established business so he was able to give me pointers at all the critical pointers. He’s been a huge cheerleader throughout the process and helps me in whatever way he can.
Bill Paseman is my father, and he’s been my advocate from Day 1. He founded a few companies in his time, so his advice when it comes to starting businesses has been invaluable. I’d always dreamed of starting a company and following in his footsteps, and It’s been really special to be able to share the highs and lows of Fix The Mask with him. My favorite story of his influence was when I was designing our latest iteration, the Essential Mask Brace. I’d been iterating on the design for a full week, 12 hours a day of nonstop failure after failure. I finally called him, defeated, saying that maybe this couldn’t work after all. In a 30 minute phone call, he picked me right back up onto my feet, dusted me off, and by the end we’d invented the concept for the nose cushions, which is the key feature to making our product work. Fix The Mask wouldn’t be here today without his support.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
Workers at dentists offices, homeless shelters, and universities have all tried the Essential Mask Brace, but my favorite and our earliest supporter is Loren Bast of Bainbridge Prepares
Bainbridge is a small island next to Seattle; Bainbridge Prepares is a nonprofit organization that provides a variety of services to help protect their small community from disasters like earthquakes, fires, and recently, pandemics.
Loren’s team performs fit testing which helps healthcare professionals determine what PPE is the best fit for them. He started including the Essential Mask Brace as a free option in September. Since then, he has purchased over 350 braces to distribute to the community of Bainbridge Island.
Loren’s support means so much to us because not only is he sharing our solution, he’s proving to each new user that they can receive N95 level fit without an expensive respirator. The greater Seattle area remains one of our most popular shipping destinations, and we can’t help but think it’s at least partially due to the word of mouth generated by Loren and Bainbridge Prepares.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
For our short term goal:
Recognize that a high quality mask is 50–100x more effective if it seals to your face than if it does not. Understand that we have the power of getting mask fit into the hands of everyone quickly Take action to recommend mask fit to be considered when picking a mask solution
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
Make sure you are solving the right problem: Often the answer for solving a problem well is one level deeper than most people want to dig. As an example, at the beginning of the pandemic, people became aware of PPE shortages, and an overwhelming amount of people turned to quickly producing face shields as a solution. The problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. Face shields aren’t effective against protecting individuals from an aerosolized virus like SARS-CoV-2, so while they were easy and straightforward to make, they weren’t actually solving the most critical PPE deficiency. Fix The Mask took a different approach and first learned about how the virus was transmitted. From there we were able to identify that the focus should actually be around well filtering, well fit masks, not shields.
Think critically about prior work in your field: If you’re a new player in any field, it’s easy to take “the way things are done” as the law of the land. But the benefit of being new is that you’re bringing a fresh perspective to your industry. There’s no harm in challenging core assumptions when you’re just starting out. Often, that’s where the best ideas come from.
We were told at the start of the pandemic that N95s are the best mask because they’re made of a special material that is a better filter than any other mask material.
Rather than taking that at face value, we decided to learn more about this material and what made it so special. What we found out is that the filtration medium of an N95, meltblown fabric, is the same material that surgical masks are made of. So the thing that makes N95s special is not just the filtration material, it’s also how well they fit.
Your mission is key: Starting a business is hard. Unforeseen problems will arise. If you don’t have a strong mission, it will be hard to know what you’re fighting for. Developing a strong mission will get everyone in your team aligned through the good times and the bad.
Pick the right team: Your team is imperative for success. When picking a team, do not get falsely swayed by people with impressive sounding backgrounds. Instead, understand what problems within your organization need to be solved, and understand how an individual’s specific skill set can help solve those problems.
Prioritization: In both life in business and outside of business, it’s hard to know what to do first. This comes down to setting clear quarterly goals, and then breaking them down into monthly, then daily chunks. If you find yourself working on something that does not help achieve your quarterly goal, stop doing it and pivot to something that does.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
If you’re struggling with lack of fulfillment in your day to day, do something about it. You have the power to make the difference that you want to see in the world.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
I never really had celebrity role models until I learned about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
When I turned 22, I thought I knew what successful women my age looked like. They had nice jobs at big companies, and got promoted every other year. They earned their success by not making waves and treading carefully on a well defined path paved by successful women before them.
AOC completely redefined my view of what women in their 20s could be. She taught me that if you are smart and care for others, you can actually change the world for the better, even if you’re a woman under the age of 30.
I remember watching her Instagram stories when they selected which office each congressperson would get to use that term. Her special mix of pride, honor, and giddiness is exactly how I felt when I signed the papers that incorporated Fix the Mask. I’d love to have lunch with her to thank her for being such a relatable, strong role model.
How can our readers follow you online?
Follow us @FixTheMask on twitter or Instagram, and subscribe to our newsletter at fixthemask.com
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work! | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/young-social-impact-heroes-why-and-how-sabrina-paseman-of-fix-the-mask-is-helping-to-change-our-caf46bc5cf77 | ['Penny Bauder'] | 2020-12-23 12:55:49.232000+00:00 | ['Social Impact'] |
The first terror attack of the Trump era was against Canadian Muslims | The first terror attack of the Trump era was against Canadian Muslims
Psychometrics and the mainstreaming of Christofascism
For immigrant folk like me, the question of the Trump administration wasn’t when authoritarianism would begin but how ghastly it would be. Justin Trudeau would speak out in the wake of the a mosque shooting that left 6 innocent Canadians dead at the Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre saying, “We will grieve with you. We will defend you. We will love you. And we will stand with you.” I wonder what words Trump had offered the prime minister given that 1 in 2 Americans are in support of his ban on Muslims or that the “lone-wolf” terrorist was pro-Trump. I also wonder whether there are really “lone-wolves” in a pack of rabid nativists.
Given how Americans would view other American Muslims (despite not knowing one) it’s hard to understand what condolences this country could offer to families as they were notified of the injuries and deaths at the crowded mosque. Standing at the San Francisco airport while we protested the xenophobic detainment of travelers, I hadn’t realized that Canada just witnessed terrorism nor that it was a religious hate-crime of the nature that Bannon and his ilk have promoted.
Meanwhile, widespread support of the ban and the dearth of reporting on a terrorist attack at a place of worship exemplifies the media’s complicity in Christofascism, as well as our own privileging of alt-right narratives. It’s alarming how the Trump administration effectively uses psychometrics to monitor our digital footprints and manage the nation’s emotional responses. And given how accurately our authoritarians in chief can now track individual sentiment thanks to public facebook data and disinformation, it’s unclear how we effectively push back against the mainstreaming of white supremacy, as seen with downplaying white terrorists or popular support of racially targeted policies.
The only sincere apology the administration should offer would be their complicity in a terrorist attack, an apology that Trump, Bannon and Guilani should jointly author just as they had the immigration executive orders. I’m curious how as Spicer says, “the president is taking steps to be proactive instead of reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security” when those steps inspire acts of terror in North America.
No surprise then that Bannon’s efforts pushed Canada to blacklist Breitbart saying, “The Government of Canada does not support advertising on websites that are deemed to incite racial hatred, discrimination or the subversion of Canada’s democratic system of government.” His platform Breitbart has also led 5 Democratic reps to write a letter urging Trump to remove Bannon from the National Security Council given that he’s “provided a platform for white nationalists and the alt-right, and he has also espoused a false theory of a violent clash of civilizations between the West and Islam that only serves to fuel violent extremism.”
At least this much is clear, white supremacy has deeply instituted itself in the White House which sadly aligns with the building’s construction by Black slaves. So as the economic contributions of immigrants to the nation swells, it seems Trump–Pence are poised to return America to a greatness built on exploitation and injustice. Some will argue that America never truly divested from those values but that’s an argument on how neo-liberalism had eroded our democracy.
This week the United States was downgraded from a full democracy to a flawed democracy. So it falls to us to citizens to govern and minimize the necropolitics of the current administration before more marginalized groups are traumatized, the EPA gets dismantled, or a war is launched, all while countering the mainstreaming of neo-Nazis.
It is not that I’m in disbelief of this historical moment. I left India as a child because of the poverty that colonial exploitation had wrought, and later left the United Arab Emirates because of the imperialist Gulf Wars. Growing up in Canada seemed to offer some respite from white legacy, except for the occasional nativist taunting of immigrants. The implicit popularity of white supremacy has stopped shocking me. What should shock us is the degree to which a small group of wealthy opportunists can explicitly overturn a nation in their white supremacists image.
So how does a conservative turn from sociology student to white supremacist eugenics. As Flavia Dzodan writes, “If you are going to ask readers to decide if it’s OK to punch a nazi, you better provide them with all the facts to answer that question.” But those facts will be all that much harder to realize under a psychometric regime in a flawed democracy.
Vikram Babu is a product designer and small business owner who thinks we should not normalize white supremacy. You can troll him on twitter. | https://medium.com/endless/the-first-attack-of-the-trump-era-was-by-a-white-terrorist-against-canadian-muslims-ab4a132096a5 | [] | 2017-02-02 00:59:26.233000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Big Data', 'Canada', 'Donald Trump', 'Politics'] |
The Art of Giving | dena prem lena kam govind radhe, lena dena donon vyapar bata de
This couplet is from Kripalu Bhakti Dhara and the explanation of it follows:
There are three kinds of people in this world: those who only give, those who only take, and those who give and take. The ones who only take are considered selfish and we call such people all kinds of derogatory names. They commit various wrongdoings because they have only one goal: to take from others. Those who give and take, on the other hand, are considered humane. They do not just take, but also give in return. For example, we all behave appropriately with our relatives. If we did not, then they would behave the same way with us. Suppose a relative of yours becomes sick, and you run here and there to get everything needed. You give him the medicine and stay up all night taking care of him. He would then do the same for you when you become sick. We call this social behaviour, and most people fall into this category and so they are not excessively selfish. Shopkeepers are not causelessly gracious, but they do behave nicely with their customers. They open their shops in the morning, clean and sweep, turn on the fans, and make it nice. If someone stands out the front of their shop, they warmly invite them to come inside. If the person says, “No, I’m just looking,” his response will be, “Oh.” In one second, the shopkeeper becomes neutral towards that person.
If that person remains outside his shop, then the shopkeeper will try again, “Look, why don’t you come inside and have a closer look?” Suppose the person enters and says, “I want a sari.” The shopkeeper will spread out ten or twenty before him. “But I only need one.” The shopkeeper will say, “Of course, take only one, but at least have a look.” This shopkeeper is very clever. He knows that if the customer sees many saris, he will end up liking one. If the customer really likes it, he also knows he can add an additional 10 rupees to the price. This is called give and take. The customer gives money in exchange for the shopkeeper’s goods. The whole world operates on this basis. Every government operates this way. If the balance of give and take is disturbed, then conflict arises.
The third category is to give and only give. Only the one who has true spiritual knowledge can give. Such a person desires divine love, true spiritual happiness, God’s divine bliss. He has been taught a new lesson: to give to God and Guru, not to the world. With the world it is only give and take. With God and Guru, it is only give and give. God and Guru do not desire anything from us; it is we who desire something from them. The form of giving we do in relation to God and Guru is called selfless love.
Most forms of devotion practiced nowadays are for fulfilling one’s own selfish desire. People go to great lengths to visit pilgrimage places with one aim in mind, “O Lord! Please fulfil my desire!” They give one percent and take ninety-nine. This does not work in the spiritual realm and is the reason why we do not advance in our devotion. Our devotional love does not increase through this, nor is our mind purified. This is the state of so-called faithful people who have practiced a lot of devotion. But when you do not have any understanding of spiritual philosophy, what kind of a devotee would you be? If you want something divine, you must first have correct understanding of spiritual philosophy.
Is there happiness in the world or not? No, there is not. Then why are you asking for the world from God? If you understood the first chapter of spiritual philosophy, that there is no happiness in the world and the happiness you desire is God, then all worldly desires would cease and our taking mentality would end. But if it remains, conflict is inevitable. No one is immune. Even if there is no conflict today, there will be in the future.
Surrender to God and Guru therefore means not applying your intellect. When we do, we are in opposition to surrender. Even if such a person had uncountable Gurus and remained with his Guru twenty-four hours a day, he would receive nothing. We have had the association of Saints uncountable times. If we have not attained our goal, it is for this reason: we secretly committed wrongful acts and thought against God and Guru. We never considered the limitations of our own intellect. Such a person can never fully surrender.
However, if we learn how to give and only give, then even if God or Guru exhibit some contrary behaviour, our love for them would not reduce. We must learn how to give and perfect our giving through practice. We have practiced taking since eternity and so it will take some amount of time to learn how to give. Shri Krishna explained this very point to Arjun in the Gita, 6.35. We must practice. When we were infants, we were unable to turn over. But with practice, we finally did. Then we had no knowledge of how to sit up. We accomplished this with practice too. We then learned how to stand with practice and how to walk with practice. We learned the alphabet and whatever we studied thereafter through practice. Without practice, nothing is accomplished in this world.
In the same way, to attain our goal related to God, we must practice. We must learn how to give, and we must practice giving. We should not ask for anything from God or Guru. Besides, what could we ask for, the world? We have already determined that there is no true happiness in the world. If asking is our nature, then ask God and Guru for their divine love, their divine vision, their divine bliss. But most importantly, we should keep the understanding of these three philosophies of give and take in mind and keep moving forward.
Originally spoken in Hindi by:
Jagadguru Shri Kripalu Ji Maharaj
8 December 2009
https://www.facebook.com/JKPIndia
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https://www.youtube.com/user/JKPliterature | https://medium.com/@jkpliterature/the-art-of-giving-c5e6ffd0df1 | ['Jagadguru Kripalu Bhaktiyoga Tattvadarshan'] | 2021-08-27 02:46:00.069000+00:00 | ['Devotion', 'Giving', 'Guru', 'Spiritual', 'Happiness'] |
Meeting… Jessie Wu, Software Engineer at The New York Times | Meeting… Jessie Wu, Software Engineer at The New York Times
Illustration by Claire Merchlinsky
What is your name?
Jessie Wu
What are your pronouns?
She/Her
What is your job?
I’m a full-stack engineer with a focus in UX engineering for the Care Platforms team.
What does that mean?
The Care Platforms team works on the customer relationship management, or CRM, software that our call center agents use for customer accounts, as well as the interactive voice response system behind 1–800-NYTIMES.
As a full-stack engineer, I focus on converting designs to code, building out our design system, optimizing the workflows between design, dev and business, and I advocate for our users.
How long have you been at The Times?
A little over a year.
Most Times employees are working remotely right now. Where are you working from these days?
Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood where people still say hi to each other in passing.
How do you start your day?
I start with a heavy breakfast and a quick meditation to mentally prepare for the day.
What is something you’ve worked on recently?
The Care team just started a diversity, equity and inclusion working group to complement the DEI efforts being done by the wider Times company. and I am working on strategies for hiring and sourcing opportunities to diversify our pipeline and career management within our team. It is at a very grassroots level and I am grateful we have the support from our team leads.
Tell us about a project you’ve worked on at The Times that you’re especially proud of.
My team and I received a Publisher’s Award last year for building the automated phone system for 1–800-NYTIMES. I learned how to build chatbots with Amazon Web Services, and I will never look at bots, voice-activated smart devices or calling customer service the same way again.
What was your first job?
I was 10 when I started working at my parents’ restaurant. I went from packing to-gos to running the restaurant over the span of 16 years. In 2018, I was able to take a two-week vacation; it was the first one I’d taken since I was a kid.
What is something most people don’t know about you?
I took wheelchair dancing classes when I worked with people with disabilities. I used to take multiple trips driving this large cargo van to transport everyone to the studio where we would learn how to dance salsa and ballroom.We learned how to take the lead and maneuver around our dancing partners in wheelchairs. I was not very good at it; I was much better at driving the cargo van.
What is your secret to career success?
Invest in yourself: take advantage of education stipends, take initiative for career development and take care of your mental well-being.
Invest in your team because when your colleagues succeed, so do you. Bring the best out of everyone and see their potential. When you treat people with respect you open up opportunities and referrals down the line. My favorite quote by Maya Angelou is, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
What is your superpower?
I am very fast at making Slack emojis and gifs of my team members.
What are you inspired by?
There have been a few conference talks that changed my perspective and shaped who I am today. Anjuan’s Lending Privilege made me realize being privileged doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing; use your privilege to lift others up with you. The other one is bdougie’s Swift vs. React Native talk where he compared the two languages to Taylor Swift and Kanye West. Since then, I tend to gravitate towards using analogies and gifs in my presentations.
Name one thing you’re excited about right now.
I am really into the Buy Nothing movement and similar local Facebook groups where people in your neighborhood give or lend each other things for free. Someone gave me their 100-percent silk Chinese comforter that reminded me of my childhood. I’ve seen posts looking for things like loft beds and people have actually replied saying they have one that they are happy to give away! Someone even lent me their steam mop.
What is your best advice for someone starting to work in your field?
Learn how to ask for help efficiently: explain the task you’re trying to accomplish, the steps you took, what you think the possible solutions are and where you are stuck. By looking into possible approaches, you’re doing half of the work for the other person.
Also, when it comes to debugging CSS for layouts and styling in general, it helps to add background colors or borders around elements to better understand their relationship to each other. | https://open.nytimes.com/meeting-jessie-wu-software-engineer-at-the-new-york-times-f31264d400bb | ['The Nyt Open Team'] | 2021-01-07 17:24:31.969000+00:00 | ['Women In Tech', 'Nyt Open Meeting', 'Software Development', 'Code', 'CRM'] |
Assets, Not Income Is What Make People Wealthy | Assets, Not Income Is What Make People Wealthy
Breaking down the difference between being rich and wealthy and what you can do to get there
Photo by BP Miller on Unsplash
Pass Go and Receive $200.
Some of the best financial lessons are learned in the simple board game of Monopoly. Everyone knows you can’t win Monopoly by just collecting the $200 and hoping you never land on someone’s property. But why do so many of us end up employing that strategy in our adult lives?
Ask yourself how many ways could you pay your rent/mortgage this month?
My guess is probably only one. That means you are employing the Pass Go and Recieve $200 wealth strategy. That strategy doesn’t work in Monopoly, and it doesn’t work in real-life.
Nobody Becomes Wealthy Off One Salary
There is a difference between being rich and being wealthy. Being rich means, you can go on a nice vacation a couple of times a year, drive a nice car, and live in a big house. But if you lose your job, your way of life dramatically changes like you have to sell your home. In this instance, you are rich, not wealthy. I know there are probably many people who would say that it is a high-quality problem. Still, most people desire that freedom that being wealthy provides, not just the luxuries being rich makes available. The reason I say that is most Americans are rich, based on global standards, and we are still looking for something else.
Being wealthy means you are not tied to one job, and you can weather volatile economic conditions without dramatically restructuring your life. That is the reason wealthy people generally get wealthier in tough times. They have multiple ways to pay their “rent,” so when one of their business is doing poorly, they have other ways to cover the bill. They are also generally able to buy things at a discount from people who have been forced to sell assets to cover expenses.
Also, people who rely on one salary for their wealth leave themselves exposed to workplace disruption. In America, for a long-time, the path to a rosy retirement was to work on the assembly line, make a steady income, and then retire with a pension.
Photo by 珏希 刘 on Unsplash
But, what happened when those jobs moved out of the country? The income engine of an entire region of the US was taken away and still hasn’t come back. We call it the Rust Belt now.
A lot of people are doing the same thing now, except they traded assembly lines for cubicles. COVID-19 and advances in white-collar automation look to unseat people from their income at a rate not seen since the Great Depression.
Assets are the Foundation of Wealth Creation
Now that I have shattered your preconceived notion that a steady job or a high salary is the key to becoming wealthy, you are probably wondering what is?
The answer is assets. If the goal is building wealth, we want appreciating assets. These are things that not only hold value but tend to grow in value.
For this, you need to start thinking about real estate, stocks, or equity in a business/franchise. All of these have the potential to increase in value over time, and can also generate additional income for you to buy more assets. You take income and buy assets, then you buy more assets with the revenue generated by these assets and on and on. Wealth generation has kind of a snowball effect.
Photo by Mirko Blicke on Unsplash
Example:
You buy ten shares of stock A at $100 per share. It pays a 3% dividend that you reinvest into the stock, and it grows 6% annually. That initial $1,000 investment will be worth $75,000 in 50 years!
Imagine if you are investing like that every quarter or every year. That is how people with average to below-average salaries can amass wealth and financial freedom.
Start Now!
I talk to so many people who say they will start worrying about finances once they have more money. That line of thinking doesn’t make sense. I understand that not everyone can put a lot of money down at first, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start.
That is like saying I will start working out when I am in better shape.
The earlier you can start investing in assets, the better. Having cash in a bank account is not an appreciating asset. The money you put in will stay the same and probably be worth less when you try to spend it because of inflation. Having a cash safety net is essential, but if your goal is to build wealth all of your cash can’t be sitting in a bank account.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Start early and be consistent. No matter how much it is. The best time is to start when you are young. Don’t buy into the notion that you can always save later — people who say that have to work in a job they disdain until they are 80.
The Takeaways…
Being reliant on an income alone at best can make you rich, but it will never make you wealthy. You must take this income and invest it in appreciating assets if you plan to grow wealth and reach financial freedom.
Passing Go and Collecting $200 is a lousy strategy to win Monopoly and build wealth in the real world.
Stay tuned for more articles on how to build wealth and gain financial freedom, until next time! | https://medium.com/makingofamillionaire/assets-not-income-is-what-make-people-wealthy-a6dd548bd06c | ['Michael Huskey'] | 2020-09-03 15:12:20.337000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Financial Literacy', 'Finance', 'Assets', 'Wealth'] |
Dubai | March 23, 2016
Dubai bills itself as the jewel of the Arab world, a shining Gem in the desert setting a standard of balancing history and modern times. Just thirty years ago Camels and wasteland occupied spaces now occupied by skyscrapers, Rolls Royces and a seemingly endless cache of Gold. Dubai is certainly “all its cracked up to be” and more…and less.
Window Shopping in Dubai
Day One
Our first impression when sailing into Dubai is of a coastline that is full of Skyscrapers that appear to be wedged next to each other leaving little space for air or breathing. The other thing you notice is that right in front of all of these skyscrapers are construction sites that are…. building more Skyscrapers, during our time there I was asking people what or who were in those skyscrapers and I’m still not sure. Dubai people like to promote their country but they don’t talk about it much, if that makes sense, in other words it’s like asking Don King about one of his fighters.
We ventured to the Gold and Spice Souk (market) and found a whole new level of aggressive selling, as I mentioned before nowhere is more aggressive than Columbia but Dubai is now in second place. When walking through the Souk everyone and I mean everyone tries to sell you a “copy watch” or “copy bag” and they really, really want to sell it. If you are crazy enough to respond to any of them (which we did) you get to go in a “secret shop” which is like going to the Bat cave. We walked down an alley, then another, then around a building then on an elevator to the third floor, knock on a door, and finally get allowed inside. Once inside you are greeted by two or three more vendors and the door is bolted behind you. One of the Vendors stares at a security camera that shows the outer hallway while his coworkers try to sell you a way overpriced item that you could get cheaper at Saks Fifth Avenue. With all of that security and pressure as soon as you say you want to leave they let you out without any hassle and even walk you back to where you started. The rest of the Souk is OK and we had a good time walking around and buying small items like shoes and various types of bags. Day one was a success!
Day Two
On Day Two we ventured out a bit and saw more of Dubai and I have a to tell you it’s like a nothing you’ve ever seen before, the opulence, shops and buildings are all amazing to look at. Dubai has the tallest building in the world the largest malls, the biggest this longest that…it truly is overwhelming and interesting to see. That being said, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that it was over the top in some respects. I mean how many malls do you need if you have one giant one with an Ice Skating Rink and Ski Slope in it? Do you really need another mall or hundreds if not thousands more stores and shops?? Dubai is in no way shape or form cheap or inexpensive, some of the prices were jaw dropping for stuff I can get at home cheaper. Hey somebody’s got pay the electric bill for all of those lights so they figure it might as well be the Wanderers that come there to shop I suppose.
Dubai traffic is another story altogether, endless delays and construction bog down traffic everyday. We were on a tour bus that sat in traffic for an hour for what should have been a 15 minute ride, the bus had Wi-Fi so we managed to get some downloads and updates so it wasn’t all bad. I will never ever complain about traffic delays again since being over there and seeing what real out of control traffic is like.
One shocking statistic I heard kind of explains all the questions I had about Dubai and all their buildings and shops, Dubai’s income from Oil is only 7% of their GDP, Tourism is their main source of income. The Dubai Mall had 70 Million visitors in 2013 so it’s not hard to realize how much they can make off tourism and they appear to be making a whole lot.
I may never get the chance to visit Dubai again and I’m glad I was fortunate enough to do so at least once. I can check it off my bucket list…my Gold Bucket List. | https://medium.com/@kshearer2/dubai-6ef4840aa66 | ['Kurt Shearer'] | 2021-12-23 22:24:19.723000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Shopping', 'Dubai', 'Travel Dubai', 'Touring'] |
Healthy Way To Lose Your Weight? | What Is the Smoothie Diet?
The Smoothie Diet is a 21-Day weight loss program designed to be used as a meal replacement. Created by Drew Sgoutas, a health coach, the all-natural diet plan which involves lots of fresh leafy greens and fruits which features delicious food recipes ensures that you attain your health and wellness goals in a month or so.
Is the Smoothie Diet Healthy for You?
This diet program is healthy for anyone wh1o wants to lose weight and remain healthy. For starters, it only features a guide with natural ingredients. Whatever you are going to use to prepare the drink, it should be natural.
Secondly, it features high amounts of essential nutrients that your body needs. This includes minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and proteins. You get to eat fresh leafy greens, fruits, and other organic additives with low calories and healthy fats.
How to Use the Smoothie Diet?
After the 3-day detox plan, you should use the Smoothie Diet, consistently for 21 days. This means that for three weeks, you should only consume one solid meal. The two remaining meal times should consist of this smoothie diet. However, you can also take healthy snacks.
Who Should Use the Smoothie Diet?
The health benefits of leafy greens and fresh fruits aren’t debatable. This makes the diet ideal for anyone keen on improving their wellness, especially those who are looking forward to starting their weight loss journey.
Besides that, the program also plays a critical role in providing people who are always on the go with the essential nutrients. While they can skip meals or be tempted to grab fast foods due to a busy lifestyle, the liquid diet comes in handy since it’s easy to make and can be consumed while you are on the go.
Benefits of The Smoothie Diet Weight Loss Plan
Emphasis on Fruits And Vegetable Consumption
Less Calorie-Counting and Food Tracking
Less Time Consuming
Detoxification
Increased Energy Production
Improved Mental Health and Self-Confidence
Lowering Blood Cholesterol
Lowering the Risk of Chronic Diseases
Promoting Natural Beauty
Yes I Want To Start Smoothie Diet 21- Day Program — Click Here | https://medium.com/@pratapb379/healthy-way-to-lose-your-weight-43dfa9ccdafd | ['Jessica Slashes'] | 2021-12-24 17:55:18.455000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Smoothies Diet', 'Weightloss Foods', 'Smoothie Recipe', 'Smoothies'] |
5 REASONS WHY GOOD COPYWRITING IS IMPORTANT FOR YOUR BUSINESS | 5 REASONS WHY GOOD COPYWRITING IS IMPORTANT FOR YOUR BUSINESS Godot Media ·Dec 1, 2020
Copywriting for your website is more than just words strung together to show people what your business is about. Good copywriting should reflect the values that your business holds close, while creating a lasting impact on the viewers, eventually driving them to engage in the action you want them to. And did we mention that all this should be achieved using copy that is clear, compact, and concise?
Read more >> https://www.godotmedia.com/blog/5-reasons-why-good-copywriting-is-important-for-your-business/ | https://medium.com/@godotmedia/5-reasons-why-good-copywriting-is-important-for-your-business-2a871efdae18 | ['Godot Media'] | 2020-12-01 12:55:34.295000+00:00 | ['Content', 'Content Writing', 'Copy', 'Business', 'Copywriting'] |
Children’s Holiday Classic Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer Or Cobra Kai? | Sign up for Yapjaw
By Slackjaw
Yapjaw is Medium's #1 newsletter for all things humor, and we're sorry to say you'll only receive it a few times a month. Take a look | https://medium.com/slackjaw/childrens-holiday-classic-rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer-or-cobra-kai-8ee012eae205 | ['Kristen Mulrooney'] | 2020-12-23 13:42:02.766000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Satire', 'Netflix', 'Christmas', 'Holidays'] |
How to Automate Google Sheets with Python | How to Automate Google Sheets with Python
How to use pygsheets python package to play around google sheets and to automate.
Google spreadsheets are easy to maintain, edit, and share with people with python package pygsheets. I have been using pygsheets for long time to automate my daily work in google spreadsheets.
pygsheets is a simple intuitive python library to access google spreadsheets through the Google Sheets API v4.
Automating Google Sheets with python is not as hard as climbing Mount Fuji. 😉
A picture from my Mount Fuji trekking.
Everyone knows what google spreadsheets are and how to use them. In this article , we will learn how to play around google spreadsheets with python. So, without further ado, let’s start.
Installation
pip install pygsheets
Get client secret
Obtain OAuth2 credentials from Google Developers Console for google spreadsheet api and drive api and save the file as client_secret.json in same directory as project. See complete guide here.
Authorization
import pygsheets
gc = pygsheets.authorize()
# Use customized credentials
gc = pygsheets.authorize(custom_credentials=my_credentials) # For the first time, it will may produce as a link to authorize
Open spreadsheets and worksheets
Google spreadsheets can be opened by name, id , and link. Worksheets can be accessed by name or index.
How to open a spreadsheet and worksheet with pygsheets.
Playing around spreadsheet
Authorize and open a spreadsheet
import pygsheets
gc = pygsheets.authorize() sh = gc.open('medium') # Open a spreadsheet with name 'medium'.
Get spreadsheet title
sh.id # Returns id of spreadsheet
Get spreadsheet id
sh.title # Returns title of spreadsheet
Get spreadsheet url
sh.url # Returns url of spreadsheet
Check last update
sh.updated # Returns date and time of last update
Delete spreadsheet
sh.delete() # Delete spreadsheet
Get worksheets info
sh.worksheets() # Return information of worksheets
Share spreadsheet
sh.share('[email protected]', role='commenter', type='user', emailMessage='Here is the spreadsheet we talked about!') sh.share('', role='reader', type='anyone') # Make public
Remove permissions
sh.remove_permission('[email protected]', permission_id=None) # You can specify permission id
Add new worksheet
sh.add_worksheet('sheet3',rows=250, cols=20)
Delete worksheet
sh.del_worksheet('sheet3')
Playing around Worksheet
Open a worksheet
wk1 = sh.sheet1 or wk1 =sh[0] # Open first worksheet
Get title, id, and url of worksheet
wk1.title # Returns title of worksheet
wk1.id # Returns id of worksheet
wk1.url # Returns url of worksheet
Get rows and cols count
wk1.rows # returns number of rows
wk1.cols # returns number of columns
Get cell object and cell value
wk1.cell((row_number,col_number)) # Returns cell object
wk1.cell((row_number,col_number)).value # Returns cell value as string
Get value/values/records
wk1.get_value('A1') # Returns A1’s value
wk1.get_value('A1', 'B2') # Returns list of values
wk1.get_all_values() # Returns list of all values in worksheet
wk1.get_all_records() # Returns a list of dictionaries
Example of get_all_records
Update value/values
wk1.update_value('A8', '40') # Updates A8 with 40
or
wk1.update_value('A8','=A6+A7',True)#Updates A8 with sum of A6 and A7 wk1.update_values('A8', [['G',40]]) # Updates values in starting from A8
Get rows or columns
wk1.get_row(row_number) # Returns a list of all values in a row
wk1.get_col(col_number) # Returns a list of all values in a column
Add/delete rows and columns
wk1.add_rows(n) # Add n rows to worksheet at end
wk1.add_cols(n) # Add n columns to worksheet at end wk1.delete_rows(n) # Delete last n rows of worksheet
wk1.delete_rows(n) # Delete last n columns of worksheet
Insert rows and columns
wk1.insert_rows(row =1, number = 2) # inserts 2 new rows after 1st row wk1.insert_rows(row =1, number = 1, values =['AA', 40]) # insert 1 new row and insert values in same row wk1.insert_cols(col =6, number = 2) # inserts 2 new columns after 6th column wk1.insert_rows(col=6, number = 1, values =['AA', 40]) # insert a new column and insert values in same column
Update row and column
wk1.update_row(row_index, values, col_offset =0) # Updates values in a row from 1st column Example: >>> wk1.update_row(9, ['H', 45, 178, 81]) wk1.update_col(col_index, values, row_offset=0) # Updates values in a column from 1st row Example: >>> wk1.update_col(9, [78, 45, 178, 81])
Adjust width of column and height of row
wk1.adjust_column_width(start=0, end=3, pixel_size=50) # Updates column size to 50 pixel wk1.adjust_row_height(1,10, pixel_size=50) # Updates row height to 50 pixel
Resize and clear worksheet
wk1.clear('A9') # Clear all values starting from A9
wk1.clear('A9:D10') # Clear values in grid range A9 to D10 wks.resize(num_rows, num_cols) # Resize to given dimension
Add pandas dataframe to worksheet
wk1.set_dataframe(df, 'A9')#Inserts df in worksheet starting from A9 # Note: set copy_head =False if you don't want to add first row of df
Get worksheet values as pandas dataframe
wk1.get_as_df() # Returns a pandas dataframe of worksheet # Note: You can specify start and end to get specific range data
Example of get_of_df()
Add chart to worksheet
>>>wk1.add_chart(('A1', 'A6'), [('B1', 'B6')], 'Age Chart')
<Chart COLUMN 'Age Chart'>
Chart added to worksheet.
I guess, you have learned enough to play around google spreadsheets with python. Many more operations can be performed with pygsheets package. Please, see documentation of pygsheets to learn more operations.
Thank you for reading this article. Read my other Medium Articles here.
Reach out to me on LinkedIn, if you have query.
Reference: https://pygsheets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html | https://medium.com/game-of-data/play-with-google-spreadsheets-with-python-301dd4ee36eb | ['Dayal Chand Aichara'] | 2019-07-19 03:40:55.858000+00:00 | ['Pygsheets', 'Pandas', 'Python', 'Google Spreadsheets', 'Data Science'] |
Clinc’s Poised to Break New Ground with Recent Changes in Exec Regime | Clinc, an AI conversational leader based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan has recently announced major changes in their executive suite. On September 23, 2020, Clinc appointed John Newhard as the new Chief Executive Officer for the conversational AI startup. Newhard, previously the CEO of Trafficware, brings with him over 25 years of experience running companies in the IT industry.
With former leadership positions at Cubic Corporation, Kaplan Compliance Solutions, and New World Systems, Newhard is ready to lead Clinc and oversee future development of the company into several new verticals while strengthening Clinc’s positioning as the go-to AI research company for the finance industry and all banking institutions globally. Part of his new appointment strategy is to beef up marketing, engineering, and production teams with talented individuals from Ann Arbor and across the country.
Clinc Conversational AI Platform
With a recent surge in digital communications due to the social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic, AI is playing a more pivotal role in customer and business transactions than ever before. More and more companies worldwide are relying on Artificial Intelligence to provide their customers with an experience unlike any other in the industry. The Clinc conversational AI platform is a popular technology that allows for enhanced customer experiences while reducing business support costs.
Unlike most other AI platforms on the market, Clinc has been strategically developing its AI virtual assistant into the sophisticated technology that it is today since it opened its doors for the very first time in 2015. Clinc’s conversational AI technology can address customer questions competently and resolve these concerns at a 95 percent successful return rate. It understands messy language which allows the technology to follow a human’s conversational logic almost without any interruption and then supply an equally conversational reply, 95 percent of the time successfully meeting the customer’s needs with the answer given. Clinc’s AI technology is practically self-sufficient and has a very limited need to pass off customers to a live customer service team at any point while performing the services it has been taught. Clinc’s technology allows businesses the capability of scaling up their customer support exponentially without driving up costs by a penny.
A Revolutionized Marketing Strategy In Development
Shortly following the appointment of Newhard as CEO, Clinc announced on October 28, 2020, the onboarding of John Lichtenberg. As the new chief marketing officer (CMO), Lichtenberg oversees a revolutionized marketing strategy to drive more sustainable growth to Clinc.
Lichtenberg has announced new initiatives in the areas of brand management, public relations, and digital marketing. As a key player in driving company revenue growth and expansion, Lichtenberg brings a wealth of over 25 years of marketing experience to the AI industry. His long list of previous professional experience includes the roles of Vice President of Marketing for Park West Gallery, CMO for Fuel Leadership, and leadership rules in the Learning Care Group and New World Systems.
Clinc’s New Chief Customer Officer Announcement Proves Company Brand Reinvention Coming
If recent announcements of newly appointed CEOs and CMOs now from the Ann Arbor-based AI research platform Clinc do not symbolize a new era is on the horizon, then the most recent news out of the Clinc camp should make you a true believer of change coming. Shaking up the executive suite and truly giving a fresh trajectory for the conversational AI company, Mahesh Baxi was announced as Clinc’s Chief Customer Officer only days after CMO John Lichtenberg joined the team.
This trio of executive hires in a matter of two month’s time proves that Clinc is poised to receive a solid branding strategy overhaul to match the new company poster filled with all-new executive-level faces that are ready to take this AI company and its technology to soaring new levels. This new team also seems confident in their ability to expand Clinc’s reach across the entirety of the banking and finance sector around the world and even stretch it into brand new business verticals in the coming years
Clinc’s new CCO entrepreneur and proven CX leader and author Mahesh Baxi joins the Clinc C-suite with over 25 years of global IT Products and Services experience safely tucked away under his belt. He has built cultures of thought leadership and fostered innovation as the primary differentiator to create value-oriented engagement for the customers of his previous employers. Baxi has spent most of his professional life working directly with the customers and is very passionate about solving critical business problems on the executive level.
A 95 Percent Resolution Rate
Clinc is, without a doubt, a pioneer in the AI industry. As stated above, the company and its technology currently offer a 95 percent contact resolution rate, which is unheard of for the industry. Financial businesses that employ the use of Clinc’s AI platform are taking advantage of this cost-saving technology. This contact resolution rate, to reiterate the point, means that 95 percent of the time, customers who contact a business with a problem have that problem resolved without any human input.
This is excellent for a business’s support costs and needs. With the use of Clinc’s AI technology platform, businesses can substantially reduce their support costs. This allows customer support agents to deal with the remaining 5 percent comprised of more intricate customer problems. The best part is that consumers are getting their questions answered quickly and remain satisfied with their support experience.
A Highly Scalable Business Platform
The use of allows businesses to offer quality customer support 24/7. Restrictions based on office hours no longer apply, holidays, weekends, and other staffing disruptions will not slow down Clinc’s technology or stop it from continuously helping clients any time on any day. These automated solutions require no rest and no food and will not file a complaint for having to work around the clock to successfully answer customer inquiries.
Businesses that consistently deal with seasonal fluctuations in customer support demand can easily and immediately scale up with Clinc’s AI platform. Companies who implement it are less likely to get overwhelmed when customer support demands are high and don’t have to worry about service gaps associated with seasonal fluctuations.
The Future Of Clinc AI Technology
There’s no denying the fact that Clinc has firmly captured the title as an industry leader in the financial AI world with its release of Finie. This is a voice-operated AI virtual assistant that is specifically designed to handle the financial and banking services industry. Built with a vast, intricate financial knowledge-base and banking vocabulary, Finie rivals any real-life customer service specialist in the banking industry.
Clinc’s new C-suite tenants, Jon Newhard (CEO) and John Lichtenberg (CMO) and Mahesh Baxi (CCO), plan to use that proprietary software behind Finie to craft and adapt that AI technology for other industries. The proprietary software is constructed of a platform based on a unique machine learning system. The system can be easily trained with industry-specific vocabulary, business concepts, and product names.
With the highly versatile ability of this AI platform, it can be deployed in almost all industries. Currently, Clinc has fulfilled AI needs in banking, gaming, healthcare, restaurants, and automotive industries. Right now, the research platform is rapidly expanding its AI technology into many different industries.
New Clinc Leaders Breaking New Ground and Renovate the Old
With the additions of John Newhard, John Lichtenberg, and Mahesh Baxi, Clinc is poised for more success. Already a rapidly growing AI leader with highly valuable clients like Visa, Barclays, and Ford, Clinc is gearing up to expand its reach into many more industry sectors.
Expect miles of growth ahead for Clinc as even more new team members coming in the future will team with Clinc’s veteran researchers and AI wizards to provide the necessary knowledge to offer so much more cutting-edge AI performance in the months and years ahead. | https://medium.com/@clincai2020/clincs-poised-to-break-new-ground-with-recent-changes-in-exec-regime-62beb78dc97b | [] | 2020-11-03 15:57:38.305000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Clinc', 'Technology', 'Technology News', 'AI'] |
Depicting Quranic Lengths with Sentence Drawings Data Art | Depicting Quranic Lengths with Sentence Drawings Data Art
http://quranvis.shaham.ca (Works best only on Desktop)
This project is an attempt to visually model groups of chapters in the Quran. Verse translation texts are analyzed using NLP topic-modelling techniques and then visualization using a specific art concept of Stefanie Posavec’s Sentence Drawings.
The concept of Posavec’s sentence drawing is pretty simple: you draw a line relatively equivalent to the length of sentence (word count), make a right turn, draw a line corresponding to the next sentence, and so on and so on. What this results in is a visual that is congested where it encounters continuous short sentences and open where a long sentence appears.
Posavec’s original Legend and Basic Structure
As an extra, I also use pyLDAvis to allow users to explore the topic terms.
Example of pyLDAvis to explore topics and terms association
I had the code and visualization all set up from a previous project so I thought this would be another great application of similar techniques. For more details, process, inspirations, and how it works, please see the parent project:
Link to Interactive Visualizations:
Sample Usage
Getting a visual feel of where any given term appears | https://towardsdatascience.com/depicting-quranic-lengths-with-sentence-drawings-data-art-d34413317784 | [] | 2019-04-30 21:51:14.919000+00:00 | ['NLP', 'Quran', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Islam'] |
Can You REALLY Edit 1080p Video On A Raspberry Pi? | Image by Jason Evangelho
With my recent shift to full-time video production, I’m typically editing 1080p and 4K video on an expensive PC packing a Ryzen 12-core CPU, 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia RTX 2080 Super. So when someone suggested I try to slap together a video using the new $70 Raspberry Pi 400, I chuckled and tossed the idea aside like the idea of using Hannah Montana Linux as my daily driver.
But then my technological curiosity got the best of me (it always does) and I tackled it head on. I was expecting a downright infuriating experience, but the combination of ARM-friendly Linux distro Ubuntu MATE and open source video editor Kdenlive turned in results that legitimately surprised me.
The Raspberry Pi 400 is a fully functional $70 PC (it even ships with a free operating system) built inside of an official Raspberry Pi keyboard. It can drive two monitors and has an ethernet port and three USB ports. Spend an extra $30 and you’ll get the complete kit featuring a mouse, USB-C power adapter and a full-color book guiding beginners down the path of their first Raspberry Pi adventures.
(If you want to jump straight to the good stuff, watch my video to fully grasp just how awesome this is. Especially since you can see and hear the editing process in action. And especially since it’s all happening from a microSD card.)
Low Expectations (And Framerates)
When I bought the Raspberry Pi 400, I wondered if I — or anyone else — could use it as a daily driver. You know, just to get average, everyday PC user stuff done. Write emails, do video conferencing, check on social media, shop online, watch YouTube.
The first operating system I tried was the officially supported Raspberry Pi OS. It was serviceable but not entirely welcoming for beginners, and the first red flag I noticed was that I could barely stream YouTube at 720p. And it wasn’t a pleasant viewing experience.
You can see that and more in the companion video below:
I assumed things would fare better on Ubuntu 20.10, the most popular Linux distribution out there which now, finally, supported the Raspberry Pi on the desktop side of the fence. The YouTube experience was worse. Out of the box it could barely manage 480p with the included Firefox browser.
Then I remembered Ubuntu MATE, a distro that has cheerfully embraced the Pi for the last 5 years. Spoiler: It runs like dream considering the low-spec hardware. Not only was installation a piece of cake, but its software store is one of the most elegant I’ve seen. You can easily switch between multiple desktop layouts.
And yep, I could actually watch Youtube at 720p without things looking like a slideshow.
So How’d It Go?
OK then. Ubuntu MATE was where I’d try this insane video editing experiment. I installed Kdenlive with a single click from the Software Boutique, then I imported some random 1080p footage I’d captured, and even tossed a 4K clip of me playing guitar into the project bin because I felt overly ambitious.
I dragged a short animated logo clip into my timeline, slapped the spacebar to start playback and. . . it sputtered and choked, limping to each new frame.
Kdenlive on the Raspberry Pi 400
Thankfully, the solution was enabling proxy clips in Kdenlive’s settings. Proxy clips are basically lower resolution copies that you edit with to improve performance. When it’s time to render out your final project, it uses the original full quality footage.
This is also how I was able to work with that 4K clip. And to be fair, most modern $1000 PCs can’t even handle editing raw 4K footage — unless they have Apple M1 chips inside.
Soon I was trimming clips and layering on transitions, fading in audio and even added some color grading effects, which tends to tank performance. While that color graded clip struggled to play back smoothly, it looked fantastic in the end result.
Speaking of getting to that end result, rendering my humble 58-second video took a whopping 8 minutes. So if you’re thinking about doing any lengthy video editing on the Pi 400, be prepared to have patience and walk away for potentially hours.
That said, the final 1080p/30fps video was beautiful! Producing this wasn’t frustrating at all, and the performance was just good enough that it didn’t hamper precision or creativity. I’d feel confident handing a Raspberry Pi 400 to someone wanting to learn basic video editing skills, or to someone who wants to create some fun family videos.
Hobbyist stuff, not professional stuff. But that’s a lot of people. And this is a very, very cheap computer. | https://medium.com/linuxforeveryone/my-experience-editing-1080p-video-on-a-raspberry-pi-400-a2599f34981d | ['Jason Evangelho'] | 2020-12-21 16:16:36.552000+00:00 | ['Ubuntu Mate', 'Ubuntu', 'Linux', 'Video Editing', 'Raspberry Pi'] |
The Evolution of Kiki | via Getty Images: Dick Raphael
As you look back over the history of the NBA, there are some names that are so unique it’s hard to forget them. Names like Penny Hardaway, Spud Webb, Fat Lever, Magic Johnson, and Kiki VanDeWeghe have a certain jingle to them that allow them to stick out in your memory. Only one of these players, however, were born with their acclaimed name and that was German-born Kiki VanDeWeghe. VanDeWeghe is one of 25 players from the Deutschland to play in the NBA including other very German-sounding names like Dirk Nowitzki, Detlef Shcrempf, Moritz Wagner, and (my favorite) Uwe Blab.
Kiki was drafted 11th overall by the Denver Nuggets in 1980 to join three future Hall of Famers David “Skywalker” Thompson, Alex English, and Dan Issel. VanDeWeghe was a 6’8” slasher out of UCLA and his cutting ability and mid-range jumper led him to be the third-highest scorer in the NBA at 29.4 per game. Kiki’s knack for attacking the rack led to him dumping a career-high on The Detroit Bad Boys in his last year as a Nugget.
The Portland Trail Blazers paid a hefty fine for Kiki’s services, giving up 3 players and 2 picks, including our pal Fat Lever from paragraph 1. Once in Portland, KV started to shift his offensive approach which helped Kiki lead the NBA in 3-point percentage in ‘86-’87. Kiki was eventually traded to the Knicks for a late first-rounder. Kiki spent a quadrant of seasons playing in New York with legends like Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, and John Starks. | https://medium.com/@alexscottjames/the-evolution-of-kiki-ff6c5e8a78f6 | ['Alex James'] | 2020-05-20 22:01:09.106000+00:00 | ['Basketball', 'Vintage', 'NBA', 'NBA Playoffs'] |
Building My Dream Replica | Building My Dream Replica
Image courtesy of imdb.com
A Little Preamble
I’ve wanted Han Solo’s DL-44 heavy blaster pistol ever since I first saw Star Wars in the 1990’s. I found however that even as a child, the plastic toy versions just weren’t close enough to the real thing for my liking.
When I was 12, Master Replicas gained the license to make and sell Star Wars replicas. They produced two versions of the blaster in 2002 and 2006, both made with very restricted access to the props of the Lucasfilm archives. I was desperate to acquire one of these very sought after replicas, but the high-end price tag put them too far out of reach. By the time I was earning an income at the age of 17, the limited run of 1500 and 1250 blasters respectively had sold out, putting them even farther out of reach as third party sellers drove up prices.
Master Replica’s first DL-44 Replica. Image courtesy of Tested.com
My interest in the replica was reignited in 2013 when a video uploaded by Adam Savage’s Tested showcased the assembly of a blaster kit produced by Dark Energy Creations. The kit consisted of several parts machined from Aluminum and Pewter and were designed to fit on either a real, or replica Mauser C96. The replicated blaster parts were a result of intensive research, largely on the part of the RPF (Replica Prop Forum — you can view the research thread here, which is 224 pages at time of writing and climbing).
The original prop in all of its glory.
I never expected to own one of these kits myself, but when a new and limited run of parts was announced on the RPF I had to reserve one for myself. The completed kit came all the way from New York, and included a cheap Denix brand C96 Mauser on which to mount the included pieces.
I was happy with my replica at the time, but looking back on it now I cringe at how little effort I put into it. I rushed every step from assembly to finishing. To get a realistic look, some of the metal parts require bluing, a chemical process that gives the parts that ‘gun metal’ finish. I neglected to clean parts before hand, and skipped vital steps such as neutralizing the chemical with water between coats. It was a mess, and all because I wanted a finished product now.
Rebuilding the Blaster
Some years later, I decided I’d had enough of looking at a sub par, rushed result. I ordered a substantially more expensive kit of steel parts, detailed more accurately to match the original prop. I can’t say how many hours I put into building the new and improved replica, but it was a work in progress for a minimum of two years.
The replica C96 Mauser — note the soft looking metal and traces of the molding process.
I completely stripped back the factory paint job on the replica Mauser and took it to pieces. I reworked the trigger to give it a more realistic low profile instead of the chunky, molded trigger the gun came with. I filed definition into the grooves of the hammer and safety, while meticulously removing casting lines where possible.
Modifying the Mauser to give it a more realistic look.
I also spend hours sanding every inch of the gun to remove any pitting caused by the casting process and give it a flat appearance. This went a long way towards making it looks like a heavy, solid metal. My goal was original prop accuracy, and I feel I did about as well as I could with the cheap replica I had. This process took the longest, and was done over a period of weeks when I had time after work.
The refurbished hammer.
My dad had a big part to play in making these modifications, most of all by helping to mill the extractor from the bolt. This piece of metal was otherwise flat with a mold line up the middle. Once the extractor was shaped, I applied bluing compound to give it a dark appearance much like a real Mauser.
The milled extractor.
There are varying opinions when it comes to the original prop’s finish. While a real Mauser C96 was used, it was discovered that the top and bottom parts of the gun came from two separate Mausers; the bottom half being painted, and the top blued. Others believe the gun was completely blued, though chipping of the finish in original prop photos indicates that it was likely painted. Though not 100% confirmed, I elected to go with the half-painted finish as I liked the contrast between parts.
The assembled Mauser.
My hours of bluing have taught me patience and perseverance, and how important instructions can be. I can’t tell you how good it felt to achieve a finish after months of frustration.
The kit came with a steel flash hider and “bull barrel” to fit onto the cut-down barrel of the Mauser. The flash hider on the original prop was from a MG-81 machine gun, a German World War II aircraft mounted gun. These parts were blued, and I brushed the flash hider with steel wool to lighten it a bit.
For the scope mount, I purchased a stencil weathering kit from RPF user Scottjua. Scott is a master when it comes to the DL-44 prop, and produces film-accurate stencils for replicating weathering (not to mention fully completed blasters). The stencil is stuck onto the parts and then painted. When the stencil is removed, you are left with an accurate finish that I once dreaded trying to do by hand.
Applying the stencil.
The scope itself is a replica WWI era German sniper scope manufactured by Hensoldt Wetzlar. The text printed on the side of the replicas was deliberately incorrect in order to avoid any potential legal issues. The scope came with a dial and glass lenses — some prop makers like to apply futuristic looking reticles to the lenses however I wanted a more prop-realistic look, and left them as they were. The scope body was blued, and the mount, dial and clasps were painted a flat black and slightly weathered. To simulate paint chipping on the mount, I applied small dabs of toothpaste before painting which were removed afterwards, leaving areas of exposed metal.
The result of the toothpaste technique.
Once assembled, the replica was complete. I can happily say that after a number of years I’m finally happy with the finished product. This project was full of lessons, but most of all I learned that if you want to get the result you want, you have to put the time in. You can’t gain knowledge in anything without first trading time, and plenty of mistakes. There were points that I was set on giving up, or shelving the project indefinitely. Thankfully, I persevered. Now I have my dream replica, and I wouldn’t trade it for any of the official versions I once desperately wanted. This one is mine, and there will never be another just like it. For me, it carries memories; it’s something I shared with my dad and it’s a physical representation of all the lessons mentioned above.
Here are the images of the completed replica. I was lucky enough to have a stand made in a limited run by a member of the Replica Prop Forum.
Special Thanks
I couldn’t have finished this project without the beautiful kits sold by Dark Energy Creations, nor the endless advice provided by the Replica Prop Forum. Those guys have a real passion for what they do, and are still learning new things about this prop even now.
I also couldn’t have done it without the help of my dad, an amazing engineer and fountain of knowledge.
Last of all, thanks to all the people that listened to me rave about this prop over the years! (It’s probably not going to stop). | https://medium.com/@chillykiwi/building-my-dream-replica-db15b25ab06e | ['Matthew Morgan'] | 2020-11-04 09:05:29.138000+00:00 | ['Replica', 'Hobby', 'Movies', 'Star Wars', 'Guns'] |
Ever wonder why milk is pasteurized and homogenized? | Ever wonder why milk is pasteurized and homogenized?
Image by Couleur from Pixabay
In 1938, one food was responsible for 25% of all the foodborne illness in the US.
Care to venture a guess to which?
If you’re not sure, let me give you another clue.
This food caused a bunch of nasty diseases like tuberculosis, brucellosis, salmonellosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, septic sore throat, and dysentery.
What’s your best guess now?
I’m betting good ole’ milk didn’t come to mind, but it used to be deadly (and raw milk still is). It’s really scientific breakthroughs in processing milk — like homogenization and pasteurization — that have made it the safe, wholesome product we enjoy today.
So, what do those two words mean anyways?
Pasteurization makes milk safe
Named after the French Scientist Louis Pasteur, pasteurization is a heat treatment meant to destroy microorganisms in our food.
By Unknown author — US national library of medecine
In the 1860s, Pasteur realized that he could delay the spoilage of beer and wine by heating the liquid.
Sounds to me like Pasteur was a scientist of the people and was doing the experiments that really mattered.
Pasteur was thrilled to discover a step that could elongate the shelf life of food and beverages. At the time, he didn’t link it to the destruction of microorganisms since no one knew these tiny organisms existed yet. It would be a couple years before that connection was made.
Unknown author — Britannica Kids
Fast forward to today and in the U.S. there’s two main types of pasteurization: low temperature long time (LTLT) holds milk at 63°C (145°F) for 30 minutes whereas high temperature short time (HTST) pasteurization can be done in only 15 seconds at 72°C (161°F).
Now, these times and temperatures aren’t simply random. They were specifically chosen since the conditions destroy the most heat resistant pathogen (disease-causing microorganism) C. burnettii. So, if we know pasteurization has destroyed C. burnetti, we can confidently say it has also killed any other pathogens since they are more sensitive to the heat.
Although pasteurization destroys disease-causing microorganisms, it still leaves plenty of spoilage organisms as well as any toxins or spores. This explains why our milk does eventually spoil.
If you want to kill all life forms present in milk you need to bring out the maximum heat—ultra high temperature processing.
What’s ultra high temperature (UHT) milk?
To make UHT milk there’s no messing around. This milk is held at 150°C (300°F) for 2–3 seconds which destroys all life (microorganisms and spores).
This process obliterates both disease-causing and spoilage microorganisms.
The only problem is, using such high temperatures changes the milk a bit. It has a slightly brown color to it, and you’ll notice a cooked flavor that pasteurized milk doesn’t have.
On the bright side, microorganisms are so unlikely to grow after UHT processing that the milk can be stored at room temperature for over a year. No refrigeration needed, which makes it quite convenient.
Homogenization keeps milk stable
Imagine you twist open a milk carton to find a layer of fat sitting on top of the remaining liquid.
Would you drink this milk?
Gulp down that fatty layer before hitting the watery liquid that’s left?
Most of us would probably say no. We’re used to milk being one homogenous liquid even if it’s composed of both fat and water.
This uniform composition lends milk its characteristic texture and requires that the tiny oil droplets stay evenly dispersed within the greater liquid phase. No separation.
For that, we have the process of homogenization to thank.
During homogenization, high pressures are used to force hot milk through a tiny orifice, which breaks the oil into microscopic-sized droplets.
Usually, milk goes through two steps of homogenization. The first step reduces the size of the oil droplets, but often results in large clusters of droplets, so a second pass through another orifice is used to separate these clumps into individual oil droplets.
As the oil droplets become smaller, they are much slower to float to the top.
So slow that we don’t notice any changes as a carton of milk sits in our refrigerator for a week or two. That’s the magic of homogenization. | https://medium.com/no-fear-in-food-science/ever-wonder-why-milk-is-pasteurized-and-homogenized-780b7c23e06f | [] | 2020-12-26 15:41:30.840000+00:00 | ['Lifestyle', 'Agriculture', 'Science', 'Food'] |
[Paper] Backprop: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps (Weakly Supervised Object Localization) | [Paper] Backprop: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps (Weakly Supervised Object Localization)
Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) Using AlexNet
Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford
In this story, Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps (Backprop), by Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, is shortly presented. You may already know, this is a paper from the famous VGG research group. It is called Backprop since the latter papers call it Backprop when mentioning it.
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) is to find the bounding box of the main object within the image, with only the image-level label, but without the bounding box label.
In this paper:
Two visualizing methods are proposed: One is gradient-based method and one is saliency-based method.
are proposed: One is method and one is method. For saliency-based method, GraphCut is utilized for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL).
This is a paper in 2014 ICLR Workshop with over 2200 citations. (Sik-Ho Tsang @ Medium) | https://sh-tsang.medium.com/backprop-visualising-image-classification-models-and-saliency-maps-weakly-supervised-94392011b34a | ['Sik-Ho Tsang'] | 2020-11-29 06:29:43.996000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Object Localization', 'Convolutional Network', 'Deep Learning', 'Weakly Supervised'] |
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THE STORY
After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) forgoes the standard opportunities of seeking employment from big and lucrative law firms; deciding to head to Alabama to defend those wrongfully commended, with the support of local advocate, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson). One of his first, and most poignant, case is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, who, in 62, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 2-year-old girl in the community, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and one singular testimony against him by an individual that doesn’t quite seem to add up. Bryan begins to unravel the tangled threads of McMillian’s case, which becomes embroiled in a relentless labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt unabashed racism of the community as he fights for Walter’s name and others like him.
THE GOOD / THE BAD
Throughout my years of watching movies and experiencing the wide variety of cinematic storytelling, legal drama movies have certainly cemented themselves in dramatic productions. As I stated above, some have better longevity of being remembered, but most showcase plenty of heated courtroom battles of lawyers defending their clients and unmasking the truth behind the claims (be it wrongfully incarcerated, discovering who did it, or uncovering the shady dealings behind large corporations. Perhaps my first one legal drama was 624’s The Client (I was little young to get all the legality in the movie, but was still managed to get the gist of it all). My second one, which I loved, was probably Primal Fear, with Norton delivering my favorite character role. Of course, I did see To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the sixth grade for English class. Definitely quite a powerful film. And, of course, let’s not forget Philadelphia and want it meant / stand for. Plus, Hanks and Washington were great in the film. All in all, while not the most popular genre out there, legal drama films still provide a plethora of dramatic storytelling to capture the attention of moviegoers of truth and lies within a dubious justice.
Just Mercy is the latest legal crime drama feature and the whole purpose of this movie review. To be honest, I really didn’t much “buzz” about this movie when it was first announced (circa 206) when Broad Green Productions hired the film’s director (Cretton) and actor Michael B. Jordan in the lead role. It was then eventually bought by Warner Bros (the films rights) when Broad Green Productions went Bankrupt. So, I really didn’t hear much about the film until I saw the movie trailer for Just Mercy, which did prove to be quite an interesting tale. Sure, it sort of looked like the generic “legal drama” yarn (judging from the trailer alone), but I was intrigued by it, especially with the film starring Jordan as well as actor Jamie Foxx. I did repeatedly keep on seeing the trailer for the film every time I went to my local movie theater (usually attached to any movie I was seeing with a PG rating and above). So, suffice to say, that Just Mercy’s trailer preview sort of kept me invested and waiting me to see it. Thus, I finally got the chance to see the feature a couple of days ago and I’m ready to share my thoughts on the film. And what are they? Well, good ones….to say the least. While the movie does struggle within the standard framework of similar projects, Just Mercy is a solid legal drama that has plenty of fine cinematic nuances and great performances from its leads. It’s not the “be all to end all” of legal drama endeavors, but its still manages to be more of the favorable motion pictures of these projects.
Just Mercy is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous directorial works includes such movies like Short Term 6, I Am Not a Hipster, and Glass Castle. Given his past projects (consisting of shorts, documentaries, and a few theatrical motion pictures), Cretton makes Just Mercy is most ambitious endeavor, with the director getting the chance to flex his directorial muscles on a legal drama film, which (like I said above) can manage to evoke plenty of human emotions within its undertaking. Thankfully, Cretton is up to the task and never feels overwhelmed with the movie; approaching (and shaping) the film with respect and a touch of sincerity by speaking to the humanity within its characters, especially within lead characters of Stevenson and McMillian. Of course, legal dramas usually do (be the accused / defendant and his attorney) shine their cinematic lens on these respective characters, so it’s nothing original. However, Cretton does make for a compelling drama within the feature; speaking to some great character drama within its two main lead characters; staging plenty of moments of these twos individuals that ultimately work, including some of the heated courtroom sequences.
Like other recent movies (i.e. Brian Banks and The Hate U Give), Cretton makes Just Mercy have an underlining thematical message of racism and corruption that continues to play a part in the US….to this day (incredibly sad, but true). So, of course, the correlation and overall relatively between the movie’s narrative and today’s world is quite crystal-clear right from the get-go, but Cretton never gets overzealous / preachy within its context; allowing the feature to present the subject matter in a timely manner and doesn’t feel like unnecessary or intentionally a “sign of the times” motif. Additionally, the movie also highlights the frustration (almost harsh) injustice of the underprivileged face on a regular basis (most notable those looking to overturn their cases on death row due to negligence and wrongfully accused). Naturally, as somewhat expected (yet still palpable), Just Mercy is a movie about seeking the truth and uncovering corruption in the face of a broken system and ignorant prejudice, with Cretton never shying away from some of the ugly truths that Stevenson faced during the film’s story.
Plus, as a side-note, it’s quite admirable for what Bryan Stevenson (the real-life individual) did for his career, with him as well as others that have supported him (and the Equal Justice Initiative) over the years and how he fought for and freed many wrongfully incarcerated individuals that our justice system has failed (again, the poignancy behind the film’s themes / message). It’s great to see humanity being shined and showcased to seek the rights of the wronged and to dispel a flawed system. Thus, whether you like the movie or not, you simply can not deny that truly meaningful job that Bryan Stevenson is doing, which Cretton helps demonstrate in Just Mercy. From the bottom of my heart…. thank you, Mr. Stevenson.
In terms of presentation, Just Mercy is a solidly made feature film. Granted, the film probably won’t be remembered for its visual background and theatrical setting nuances or even nominated in various award categories (for presentation / visual appearance), but the film certainly looks pleasing to the eye, with the attention of background aspects appropriate to the movie’s story. Thus, all the usual areas that I mention in this section (i.e. production design, set decorations, costumes, and cinematography) are all good and meet the industry standard for legal drama motion pictures. That being said, the film’s score, which was done by Joel P. West, is quite good and deliver some emotionally drama pieces in a subtle way that harmonizes with many of the feature’s scenes.
There are a few problems that I noticed with Just Mercy that, while not completely derailing, just seem to hold the feature back from reaching its full creative cinematic potential. Let’s start with the most prevalent point of criticism (the one that many will criticize about), which is the overall conventional storytelling of the movie. What do I mean? Well, despite the strong case that the film delves into a “based on a true story” aspect and into some pretty wholesome emotional drama, the movie is still structed into a way that it makes it feel vaguely formulaic to the touch. That’s not to say that Just Mercy is a generic tale to be told as the film’s narrative is still quite engaging (with some great acting), but the story being told follows quite a predictable path from start to finish. Granted, I never really read Stevenson’s memoir nor read anything about McMillian’s case, but then I still could easily figure out how the movie was presumably gonna end…. even if the there were narrative problems / setbacks along the way. Basically, if you’ve seeing any legal drama endeavor out there, you’ll get that same formulaic touch with this movie. I kind of wanted see something a little bit different from the film’s structure, but the movie just ends up following the standard narrative beats (and progressions) of the genre. That being said, I still think that this movie is definitely probably one of the better legal dramas out there.
This also applies to the film’s script, which was penned by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, which does give plenty of solid entertainment narrative pieces throughout, but lacks the finesse of breaking the mold of the standard legal drama. There are also a couple parts of the movie’s script handling where you can tell that what was true and what fictional. Of course, this is somewhat a customary point of criticism with cinematic tales taking a certain “poetic license” when adapting a “based on a true story” narrative, so it’s not super heavily critical point with me as I expect this to happen. However, there were a few times I could certainly tell what actually happen and what was a tad bit fabricated for the movie. Plus, they were certain parts of the narrative that could’ve easily fleshed out, including what Morrison’s parents felt (and actually show them) during this whole process. Again, not a big deal-breaker, but it did take me out of the movie a few times. Lastly, the film’s script also focuses its light on a supporting character in the movie and, while this made with well-intention to flesh out the character, the camera spotlight on this character sort of goes off on a slight tangent during the feature’s second act. Basically, this storyline could’ve been removed from Just Mercy and still achieve the same palpability in the emotional department. It’s almost like the movie needed to chew up some runtime and the writers to decided to fill up the time with this side-story. Again, it’s good, but a bit slightly unnecessary.
What does help overlook (and elevate) some of these criticisms is the film’s cast, which are really good and definitely helps bring these various characters to life in a theatrical /dramatic way. Leading the charge in Just Mercy is actor Michael B. Jordan, who plays the film’s central protagonist role of Bryan Stevenson. Known for his roles in Creed, Fruitvale Station, and Black Panther, Jordan has certain prove himself to be quite a capable actor, with the actor rising to stardom over the past few years. This is most apparent in this movie, with Jordan making a strong characteristically portrayal as Bryan; showcasing plenty of underlining determination and compelling humanity in his character as he (as Bryan Stevenson) fights for the injustice of those who’s voices have been silenced or dismissed because of the circumstances. It’s definitely a strong character built and Jordan seems quite capable to task in creating a well-acted on-screen performance of Bryan. Behind Jordan is actor Jamie Foxx, who plays the other main lead in the role, Walter McMillian. Foxx, known for his roles in Baby Driver, Django Unchained, and Ray, has certainly been recognized as a talented actor, with plenty of credible roles under his belt. His participation in Just Mercy is another well-acted performance that deserve much praise as its getting (even receiving an Oscar nod for it), with Foxx portraying Walter with enough remorseful grit and humility that makes the character quite compelling to watch. Plus, seeing him and Jordan together in a scene is quite palpable and a joy to watch.
The last of the three marquee main leads of the movie is the character of Eva Ansley, the director of operations for EJI (i.e. Stevenson’s right-handed employee / business partner), who is played by actress Brie Larson. Up against the characters of Stevenson and McMillian, Ansley is the weaker of the three main lead; presented as supporting player in the movie, which is perfectly fine as the characters gets the job done (sort of speak) throughout the film’s narrative. However, Larson, known for her roles in Room, 6 Jump Street, and Captain Marvel, makes less of an impact in the role. Her acting is fine and everything works in her portrayal of Eva, but nothing really stands in her performance (again, considering Jordan and Foxx’s performances) and really could’ve been played by another actress and achieved the same goal.
The rest of the cast, including actor Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk and O Brother, Where Art Thou) as incarcerated inmate Ralph Meyers, actor Rafe Spall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Big Short) as legal attorney Tommy Champan, actress Karan Kendrick (The Hate U Give and Family) as Minnie McMillan, Walter’s wife, actor C.J. LeBlanc (Arsenal and School Spirts) as Walter’s son, John McMillian, actor Rob Morgan (Stranger Things and Mudbound) as death role inmate Herbert Richardson, actor O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Long Shot and Straight Outta Compton) as death role inmate Anthony “Ray” Hinton, actor Michael Harding (Triple 2 and The Young and the Restless) as Sheriff Tate, and actor Hayes Mercure (The Red Road and Mercy Street) as a prison guard named Jeremy, are in the small supporting cast variety. Of course, some have bigger roles than others, but all of these players, which are all acted well, bolster the film’s story within the performances and involvement in Just Mercy’s narrative.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s never too late to fight for justice as Bryan Stevenson fights for the injustice of Walter McMillian’s cast against a legal system that is flawed in the movie Just Mercy. Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s latest film takes a stance on a poignant case; demonstrating the injustice of one (and by extension those wrongfully incarcerated) and wrapping it up in a compelling cinematic story. While the movie does struggle within its standard structure framework (a sort of usual problem with “based on a true story” narrations) as well as some formulaic beats, the movie still manages to rise above those challenges (for the most part), especially thanks to Cretton’s direction (shaping and storytelling) and some great performances all around (most notable in Jordan and Foxx). Personally, I liked this movie. Sure, it definitely had its problem, but those didn’t distract me much from thoroughly enjoying this legal drama feature. Thus, my recommendation for the film is a solid “recommended”, especially those who liked the cast and poignant narratives of legality struggles and the injustice of a failed system / racism. In the end, while the movie isn’t the quintessential legal drama motion picture and doesn’t push the envelope in cinematic innovation, Just Mercy still is able to manage to be a compelling drama that’s powerful in its story, meaningful in its journey, and strong within its statement. Just like Bryan Stevenson says in the movie….” If we could look at ourselves closely…. we can change this world for the better”. Amen to that! | https://medium.com/@ver-ww84-2020-en-linea-hd/wonder-woman-1984-2020-ver-hd-p-e-l-i-c-u-l-a-completas-online-gratis-e8c7f7374f8a | ['Ver En Linea Hd'] | 2020-12-26 02:22:45.508000+00:00 | ['Adventure', 'Fantasy', 'Action', 'Movies'] |
Fradama — Promenade Sunset. Dave Mathers is a classically trained… | Dave Mathers is a classically trained pianist and composer from Scotland who loves all kinds of jazz music. He has been playing piano for 20 years (since he was 8) but still thinks he has much to learn, which is the right attitude to have. He started to release music last year under the moniker while working as a piano tutor for a music school in his country, and doubled his efforts this year in order to take advantage of the 2020 situation. Amongst his latest releases, I particularly liked his beautiful piano piece Promenade Sunset, which is a short but captivating track that is as relaxing as a walk in an actual seafront promenade.
Fradama hopes to get better known with time if he keeps releasing more music. Promenade Sunset demonstrates that he is talented enough to achieve his goals. All he needs is a little bit of luck. Give him a chance below.
Featured on the following mixtapes: | https://medium.com/@thealternativemixtapes/fradama-promenade-sunset-a1c0357a7284 | ['The Alternative Mixtapes'] | 2020-12-20 20:28:32.794000+00:00 | ['Spotify', 'Piano', 'Playlist', 'British Artist', 'Relaxing Music'] |
Is Decluttering Good for Your Creativity? | Is Decluttering Good for Your Creativity?
How cleaning up your act could be a boon to your brain, or lead to creative block.
Organizing and decluttering is all the rage these days. For that, we can largely thank the present-day titan of tidiness, Marie Kondo, whose KonMari method has fueled several books, a Netflix series, and invigorated an entire industry devoted to helping people maintain control over their physical possessions.
But as an architect who’s written a book about scientific research into the psychology of creative space, I have long wondered whether Ms Kondo’s prescriptions for self-dispossession were beneficial to creative types, many of whom work in home environments.
So I started to look into it.
My conclusion? Assuming you’re not a pathological hoarder, it depends.
Granted, that sounds a tad wishy-washy. Why the hesitation? And how could having an abundance of stuff be anything but detrimental to one’s creativity?
Let me explain.
KonMari and the Question of Science
A curious thing happens when you search for the word ‘science’ in Marie Kondo’s debut blockbuster manual, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: it doesn’t show up. Not once.
Hmmm.
How about the word ‘scientific’? Slightly more reassuring news: it appears a single time in a passage where the author acknowledges that she has no scientific basis for her theory that people accrue a variety of mental and physical health benefits from getting organized.
In this regard, Ms Kondo is misinformed. In truth, there’s a considerable body of research indicating that putting one’s house in order does exactly that. What’s more, these findings make it clear that a dishevelled environment can indeed depress creative task performance, largely by diminishing our well-being.
Home office. Austin, Texas. Architecture and interior design by Tim Cuppett Architects. Photography by Alec Hemer.
Take, for example, a 2010 study published in the scientific journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. It found that subjects who described their homes as cluttered exhibited greater depression and fatigue, diminished coping skills, and increased difficulty transitioning from work to home compared to people who viewed their place of residence more positively.
What’s the connection between unkempt physical surroundings and a lack of mental well-being? Biology. According to the researchers, the group with messy environments registered elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol, a substance released into the bloodstream by the adrenal glands. Normally, the body boosts the flow of cortisol when it perceives an external threat in order to sharpen our focus and analytic thinking skills, and by extension our ability to defend ourselves against potential harm. We then return to normal levels after the threat has passed. The problem with being stressed out by a messy environment is that the mess tends to remain in place, thereby leading to constant cortisol production and the kinds of disorders evident among subjects in the 2010 study.
And those are only some of the maladies linked to an oversupply of the hormone. Others include headaches, irritability, intestinal problems, high blood pressure, low libido, poor sleep, heart disease, suppressed immunity to disease, and difficulty recovering from exercise.
Home office. Scarborough, Maine. Architecture by Caleb Johnson Studio. Photography by Trent Bell.
But wait — there’s still more, as in more weight. That’s right — another potential consequence of mess-induced stress is weight gain. According to one source, people with unkempt homes are an eye-popping 77 per cent more likely to be overweight than those who reside in well-tended surroundings. Unsurprisingly, kitchens overladen with goods are especially detrimental for maintaining narrow waistlines; a 2017 study from the journal Environment and Behavior found that subjects living in chaotic food environments significantly upped their consumption of scale-busting high-calorie snacks (aka junk food), the effects of which become all too plain for everyone to see.
Other unhealthy consequences of clutter accrue indirectly. Air quality, for instance, often suffers in disorganized environments because the profusion of objects creates more surfaces to attract dust. The extra layers of dust not only increase the possibility of respiratory problems among occupants, but they can also reduce the amount of natural light inside a space by making those surfaces less reflective. Households with pets and in urban locations are particularly susceptible to the loss of light and dirtied air resulting from having too much stuff out and about.
And if all this weren’t enough to instantly turn you into a neat freak, clutter can also hamper your ability to focus on task completion. This insight comes to us via a 2011 paper out of Princeton University, where researchers found that our sensory apparatus can be easily overwhelmed by having too many things to look at at one time, thereby making it harder to sort out only those objects relevant to the task at hand. More stuff also makes it more likely that people will be distracted from what they’re doing as something new catches their eye with each pass of the room.
Library. Yonkers, New York. Architecture by Gary Brewer for Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Photography by Francis Dzikowski / Otto.
More Problems: Incompleteness and Control
The inability of people in disorganized settings to focus points to one of the reasons that clutter affects us as it does: a space in disarray imparts a sense of unfinished business. Sometimes that sense derives from projects or tasks that remain undone, the residue of which lingers in stacks of unfiled papers or the detritus of half-completed household chores. At other times it might stem from deferred decisions, such as whether to keep possession and if so, where to store it. Given the discomfort most people experience when confronted by a plethora of unresolved conditions, it’s hardly surprising that the unhappy subjects in the 2010 study I discussed at the beginning of this article repeatedly used the term ‘unfinished’ to describe their disorderly habitats.
A second possible explanation for the negative impact of disorganization involves a psychological construct known as the locus of control. In a nutshell, the concept proposes that people fall into two main camps: those who believe that they are in control of their lives, and those who believe that external forces largely determine their fate. As you might expect, people who create tidy environments for themselves tend to fall into the former category, while those in less organized surroundings often feel that their belongings have gotten the better of them through no fault or desire of their own. As also might be expected, a landmark British study found that people with an ‘internal’ locus of control are generally more successful, healthier, better educated, and less anxious than those with an ‘external’ locus.
Mark Twain, possibly at home in New York City. 1901. Photograph by Theodore C. Marceau. Library of Congress.
On the Other Hand…
So all this would strongly suggest that going full Kondo can only boost your creative performance by sparing you the downsides of disorganization. Why, then, did I qualify my judgment at the beginning of this essay by suggesting that there might be more than one side to the story?
Answer: Because there’s evidence that a messy environment can materially stimulate idea generation. Exhibit A: a 2013 study that found that a group of subjects brainstorming ideas around a messy table evinced greater creativity than a second group performing the same task around a tidy table. The researchers who oversaw the study theorized that the neat table primed the subjects for conformity because neatness is a socially acceptable norm, whereas the unkempt work surface suggested a more devil-may-care attitude toward conventional expectations. I would also add that the findings are entirely consistent with the observation that creative thinking is by nature a ‘messy’ process — that is, non-linear and riddled with unanticipated surprises.
As for Exhibit B: I offer you a cadre of historically eminent creatives who did some of their best work in messy spaces, Mark Twain being a revered avatar in this category.
So where does all this leave you? Mess or no mess?
As with nearly all techniques for enhancing creativity, ultimately it depends on your personal work habits, even when the scientific evidence suggests that your preferences might run counter to those of the general population. My suggestion, then, would be to test both conditions to determine which will be most beneficial to your work.
My apologies for not being more definitive, but in this case, I wouldn’t be truthful if I said I could give you a neat and tidy answer. | https://medium.com/the-creative-mind/is-decluttering-good-for-your-creativity-4ca5e6f66030 | ['Donald M. Rattner'] | 2020-03-15 21:31:10.526000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Konmari', 'Creativity', 'Interior Design', 'Psychology'] |
7 Free Courses to learn Bootstrap for Web Designers and Developers | 7 Free Courses to learn Bootstrap for Web Designers and Developers
Learn the Bootstrap CSS framework using these free courses to add an in-demand skill in your CV
Hello guys, you may know that Bootstrap is one of the most popular front-end libraries which provides a customizable template of HTML, CSS, and JS for creating a modern and responsive website.
All the beautiful website you see these days with large fonts and slick form fields are built using Bootstrap. If you want to learn Bootstrap and looking for some excellent online courses, then you have come to the right place.
In this article, I am going to share some of the excellent free Bootstrap courses, which are also completely online, and you can use them to kick-start your journey with the Bootstrap framework. If you are interested in modern web development, this is the framework you must learn this year.
As I have said before, web development is an important skill, and front-end development is an integral part of web development. Traditionally, programmers work with the backend, creating servers that powers front-end and GUI Designers are responsible for creating front-end GUI, but things have changed a lot.
Nowadays, everyone needs a full-stack engineer who can work with both front-end and back-end, and this means you not just need to learn backend frameworks like Spring and Spring Boot (for Java developers) but also need to learn front-end frameworks like Bootstrap.
Before we start with these online courses to learn Bootstrap, let me give you a bit of history of the Bootstrap framework. It came from Twitter, one of the popular social media websites.
It was initially named as Twitter Blueprint and development by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter as a framework to encourage consistency across internal tools. But, after its success, it was renamed from Twitter Blueprint to Bootstrap, and released as an open-source project on August 19, 2011.
If you don’t mind paying a few bucks to learn a useful skill like Bootstrap and website design then I also suggest you check out Bootstrap 4 From Scratch With 5 Projects course by Brad Traversy on Udemy. It’s an excellent resource for any beginner who wants to learn Bootstrap as you will learn so by creating actual real-world projects.
7 Free courses to learn Bootstrap Framework in 2021
Here is my list of some of the best courses to learn the Twitter Bootstrap framework from scratch. These courses are free, but it doesn’t mean that they are of poor quality. In fact, some of the courses are better than other paid courses. They are just made free by their instructor for promotional and educational reasons.
This is one of the best free courses to learn Bootstrap 4 in 2021. It’s comprehensive, hands-on, and also exciting to watch.
The instructor Brad Hussey has done a great job of explaining how to create responsive websites in Bootstrap 4. You will first start with downloading and installing Bootstrap and then set up an efficient website workflow.
After that, you will learn how to create an essential, responsive website, how to use a Bootstrap template, how to create a new startup landing page, and using Saas in your project. In short, a perfect course to learn Bootstrap in a quick time for free.
Here is the link to join this course —Bootstrap 4 Quick Start: Code Modern Responsive Websites
This is one of the comprehensive courses to learn the Bootstrap framework. It’s packed with 5 hours of content, which are divided into 36 lectures.
You will first start with Bootstrap fundamentals, and slowly, you will begin to building projects to apply the knowledge you have learned in the course. You will build not just one but three projects.
You will not just learn how to install Bootstrap and set up your development environment but also learn Bootstrap navigation, Flexbox grid, containers, and other important concepts.
This 5-hour long course has been trusted by more than 67,037 students which speaks a lot about its quality. If you need a hands-on course to learn Bootstrap this is probably eh best course to start with. In short, a perfect course to learn and master Bootstrap for free of cost.
Here is the link to join this course —Complete Bootstrap 4 course — build 3 projects
AS the name suggests, this is a classic hands-on course to learn the Bootstrap framework.
In this course, instructor Gary Simon will teach you how to download and install Bootstrap using Node Package Manager (npm). He will also tell you how to set up your development environment using Gulp.
After that, you will learn how to build a responsive layout using Bootstrap 4. It also covers advanced topics like customizing Bootstrap in Saas.
Overall a helpful little, hands-on course of 1-hour content where you will learn Bootstrap by actually doing some work. So, skip those monotonous courses full of slides and learn Bootstrap 4 by doing!
Here is the link to join this course — Understanding Bootstrap Grids and Columns
Grids and columns are an essential part of Modern Web GUI, and this short course is best to learn BootStrap Grids and Columns.
This is just a 40-minute course but teaches you how to build content layouts with the Bootstrap grid system.
Once you master the grid and columns in Bootstrap, it will save a lot of your web development time.
Here is the link to join this course — Understanding Bootstrap Grids and Columns
This is another great course to learn about Bootstrap by Scott Allen. As I have said before, Bootstrap is a sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development, and this course website also uses Bootstrap.
In this course, you’ll learn how to use Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript to turn plain HTML into navigational menus, picture carousels, split buttons, alerts, modal dialogs, pricing tables and many more modern GUI components you see on the website you use daily.
As an open-source and free gift from the developers at Twitter, Bootstrap is a pure CSS and JavaScript framework that you can use with any editor or server technology.
Here is the link to join this course — Introduction to Bootstrap
This is not precisely a free course as you need Pluralsight membership to access this course, but don’t worry. If you don’t have Pluralsight membership, you can still access this course by signing up for a 10-day free trial, which is more than enough to complete this course.
This is another awesome free online course to learn Bootstrap and ho you can create a website quickly using Bootstrap, the most popular CSS framework for web designers.
You will learn following this in this course:
How to create websites with Bootstrap
How to understand the Bootstrap grid system
How to create navbars using Bootstrap
After completing this course you will have necessary skills to create websites using Bootstrap. In short, an awesome course for both web designers web developers and its been trusted by more than 25,489 students
Here is the link to join this course for FREE — Get started with Bootstrap how to make websites from scratch
This is another great free course to learn Bootstrap on Udemy. This course is designed to show you how to build your own custom website from scratch using Bootstrap as a framework.
Bootstrap lets you take the repetitive styling work out of your web design projects and focus your time on the user experience, which is simply amazing, especially if you know the pain of styling web pages without Bootstrap and using plain CSS classes and selector.
Here are things you will learn in this course
how to use Bootstrap to apply classes to HTML pages for styling.
How to make responsive websites from scratch quickly
How to create a bootstrap website
Overall a nice course to learn how to apply Bootstrap classes for rapid web development and use Bootstrap as a framework for web design and development. Talking about social proof, more than 37,016 students have already enrolled in this course.
Here is the link to join this course for FREE — Rapid Website Design with Bootstrap
That’s all about some of the best free Bootstrap courses to learn this useful skill online by yourself. Bootstrap is a robust front-end framework, and there is a lot of demands for web developers and web designers who know Bootstrap.
If you are looking for a job in web design or front end development space or would like to start your own web development project, good knowledge of Bootstrap will go a long way to support your goal.
And, if you want to learn more about CSS I suggest you join Advanced CSS and Sass: Flexbox, Grid, Animations, and More! course by Jonas Schmedtmann on Udemy. I just bought this course is $12 on Udemy flash sale and it’s simply amazing.
It is one of the most advanced and modern CSS course on the internet: master flexbox, CSS Grid, responsive design, and so much more.
Other Web Development Articles you may like
Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like these free Bootstrap courses, then please share it with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions, then please drop a note.
P. S. — If you are new to the web development world and want to learn everything, a Web Developer should know that there is no better course than The Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt_Steele. It will not only teach you Bootstrap but also HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, Node JS and other modern technologies a web developer needs to know. | https://medium.com/javarevisited/7-free-courses-to-learn-bootstrap-for-web-designers-and-developers-5135215648f1 | [] | 2020-12-09 09:08:05.001000+00:00 | ['Bootstrap', 'Web Development', 'Website Design', 'Web Design', 'CSS'] |
2018 Trends: Influencer Marketing | Influencer marketing has certainly evolved throughout the years, and 2018 will be no different. We have been keeping a finger on the pulse of the industry, and below are the top trends we believe marketers will see when working with influencers in 2018.
Leveraging a plan for owned, earned and paid media will be even more important.
We have all read the articles speculating that Facebook and Instagram could be making changes to their algorithm and restricting organic viewability to influencer content tagged with their “paid” tool — but who knows what will actually happen. That being said, as a smart marketer, we have seen Facebook and Instagram make changes in the past, so it’s just good practice to start planning for paid support in all influencer content on social channels. Not only does this combat against any potential changes, but it also helps get your messaging in front of additional folks who wouldn’t see the content organically, increase engagement potential and give you the ability to target a very specific audience on these platforms.
In addition, brands are starting to understand the value of influencer content beyond just being posted on the influencer’s channels. By repurposing Influencer content via the brand’s owned avenues, we are seeing increased reach, awareness and engagement opportunities with potential customers. This also helps build the relationship between the influencer and the brand and makes the campaign seem more holistic and less of a one-off.
Long-term, substantial relationships between influencers and the brands they work with are no longer a “nice to have” but are a “must have.”
Consumers today are extremely socially savvy. They notice more and more when influencers are inauthentic or are just participating in a campaign to get paid, and are quick to call out a brand or Influencer for this. Brands are attempting to combat this by opting into long-term partnerships with influencers. These partnerships vary depending on the brand’s goals, but could be very immersive and include things like factory or office tours, first access to new product launches, representing the brand at conference or industry events, or serving as talent in brand TV or digital commercials. When brands and Influencers have a strong, long-term partnerships, the content the influencer creates is even more authentic, as their readers know the influencer truly believes in the brand and what it stands for.
ROI is an even bigger focus.
Influencer marketing is inherently a brand awareness and affinity marketing play, but many marketers are wondering how they can get their influencer content to do more for them as it relates to e-commerce and sales. You will see more campaigns that have specific calls-to-action to purchase, or test-and-learn programs with social media platforms that allow users to easily buy products shown in influencer content. You’re already seeing this in shoppable retail posts via platforms like Instagram, but we foresee more and more of this within influencer content in 2018. Marketers will also put more of an emphasis on tracking this type of content and determine campaign successes through KPIs, such as foot traffic, e-commerce sales, and subscriptions.
Crystal Duncan is a senior account supervisor, Influencer Marketing, Chicago. | https://medium.com/edelman/2018-trends-influencer-marketing-d8be47ee477 | [] | 2017-12-11 16:24:27.180000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Trends', 'Trends 2018', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Edelman'] |
How to use the Style Transfer API in React Native with Fritz | Fritz is a platform that’s intended to make it easy for developers to power their mobile apps with machine learning features. Currently, it has an SDK for both Android and iOS. The SDK contains ready-to-use APIs for the following features:
Today, we’ll explore how to use the Style Transfer API in React Native.
I was only able to develop and test in Android (no Macs here!) and got a working application.
The Style Transfer API styles images or video according to real art masterpieces. There are 11 pre-trained artwork styles, including Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Munch’s Scream, among others.
The app we’ll be developing allows the user to take a picture and convert it into a styled image. It will also allow the user to pick the artwork style they wish to use on the image.
The app will contain a Home page, where the user can pick the art style. It will also include a separate Camera View, where the user captures the image.
Note: The following tutorial is for the Android platform only.
Prerequisites
React Native CLI: run npm i -g react-native-cli to globally install the CLI
Since there is no default React Native module for Fritz, we’ll need to write our own. Writing a native module means writing real native code to use on one or both platforms.
Step 1 — Creating the RN app and install modules
To create the app, run the following command in the terminal:
react-native init <appname>
Move into the root of the folder to begin configuration.
For navigation, we’ll be using React Navigation and React Native Camera for the Camera View.
To install both dependencies, run the following command in the terminal:
npm i --save react-navigation react-native-camera
Follow the instructions here to configure React Navigation for the app. We’ll need to install react-native-gesture-handler as well, as it’s a dependency of React Navigation.
Follow the instructions here to configure the React Native Camera for the app. We can stop at step 6, as for this example we will not be using text, face, or barcode recognition.
Step 2 — Including Fritz SDK in the app
First, we need to create a Fritz account and a new project.
From the Project overview, click on Add to Android to include the SDK for the Android platform. We’ll need to include an App Name and the Application ID. The Application ID can be found in android/app/build.gradle , inside the tag defaultConfig .
Upon registering the app, we need to add the following lines in android/build.gradle :
allprojects {
.....
repositories {
.....
maven { url "https://raw.github.com/fritzlabs/fritz-repository/master" } //add this line
}
}
Afterward, include the dependency in the android/app/build.gradle :
dependencies {
implementation 'ai.fritz:core:3.0.2'
}
We’ll need to update the AndroidManifest.xml file to give the app permission to use the Internet and register the Fritz service:
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
.....
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
<application>
.....
<service
android:name="ai.fritz.core.FritzCustomModelService"
android:exported="true"
android:permission="android.permission.BIND_JOB_SERVICE" />
</application>
</manifest>
We then need to include the following method within the MainActivity.java :
import ai.fritz.core.Fritz;
import android.os.Bundle; //import these two as well public class MainActivity extends ReactActivity {
.....
@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
// Initialize Fritz
Fritz.configure(this, "<api-key>");
}
}
Step 3 — Create the Native Module
Since the SDK only supports iOS and Android, we’ll need to make the native module. To get a better understanding of this, refer to the docs here:
To make an Android Native module, we’ll need to make two new files. They will be within the root package of the Android source folder.
FritzStyleModule : This contains the code that will return the styled image FritzStylePackage : This registers the module so that it can be used by the JavaScript side of the app.
FritzStyleModule
The React method being used has a success and error callback. The chosen artwork style and a base64 of the original image are sent to the method. The error callback is invoked when an Exception is thrown and returns the error. The success callback returns a base64 encoded string of the converted image. On a high-level, the above code does the following:
Initializes the style predictor with the user’s choice of artwork. Converts the original base64 image into a Bitmap . Creates a FritzVisionImage , which is the input of the style predictor. Converts the FritzVisionImage into a styled FritzVisionStyleResult , which is the converted image. Gets a Bitmap out of the FritzVisionStyleResult . Converts the Bitmap into a base64 to be sent back to the JavaScript side of the app.
FritzStylePackage
This class is used to register the package so it can be called in the JavaScript side of the app.
This class is also initialized in the getPackages() of MainApplication.java :
@Override
protected List<ReactPackage> getPackages() {
return Arrays.<ReactPackage>asList(
new MainReactPackage(),
......,
new FritzStylePackage() //Add this line and import it on top
);
}
Now on to the JavaScript side of the application.
Step 4 — Creating the UI
To do this, we’ll be creating/updating the following pages:
Home.js — Display the picker of artwork styles and the final result. CameraContainer.js — Display the camera view to capture an image. FritzModule.js — Export the above-created Native module to the JavaScript side. App.js — Root of the app which includes the navigation stack.
Home.js
This page contains:
Text to display the app description. Picker to allow the user to select the artwork style of the converted image. Button to redirect the user to the Camera page. It will pass the selected artwork style to the CameraContainer. If the navigation prop contains the original and converted image, it will be displayed.
The page currently looks like this;
Home page before taking a picture
CameraContainer.js
The CameraContainer page displays a full page CameraView. It includes a button to take the picture at the bottom of the page. Upon clicking it, a spinner will be displayed to convey to the user that an action is taking place.
The image is first captured using the react-native-camera method takePictureAsync() . The original image is then saved into the state of the page. The setState method is asynchronous and thus has a success callback that runs after the state is set.
The getNewImage method from the FritzModule is run within this success callback. The original image and the filter (artwork style) picked from the Home Page is passed to the method. On the error callback, an alert is displayed to the user to convey that an error has occurred. On the success callback, the new styled image is saved into the state. On this second setState methods’ success callback, the user is redirected to the Home page with both the original and styled images.
CameraContainer on emulator
FritzModule.js
import { NativeModules } from 'react-native'; export default NativeModules.FritzStyle;
This page exposes the Native module, FritzStyle . This allows the JavaScript side to make calls to the method getNewImage .
App.js
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import Home from './src/Home';
import CameraContainer from './src/CameraContainer';
import { createStackNavigator, createAppContainer } from 'react-navigation'; const AppNavigator = createStackNavigator({
Home: { screen: Home },
Camera: { screen: CameraContainer }
}); const AppContainer = createAppContainer(AppNavigator); export default class App extends Component { render() {
return (<AppContainer />);
}
}
First, we create the Stack navigator with the Home Page and Camera View. The key ‘Home’ is used when navigating to the Home Page, and the key ‘Camera’ when navigating to the CameraContainer.
The AppContainer becomes the root component of the App. It’s also the component that manages the app’s state.
Now to see the entire app in function;
To recap, we have;
Created a React Native app, Included the Fritz SDK in it, Created a Native Module that makes use of the Style Transfer API, and Designed a UI to display the styled image.
Find the code repo, here.
For native iOS or Android implementations of Fritz’s Style Transfer API, check out the following tutorials: | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-use-the-style-transfer-api-in-react-native-with-fritz-e90bc609fb17 | ['Sameeha Rahman'] | 2019-04-02 20:53:56.801000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Mobile App Development', 'Technology', 'React Native', 'Programming'] |
Loop Structures: Opportunity or Risk? | What are the opportunities?
There may be many reasons for SA residents who qualify to benefit from Offshore Structures to wish to invest back into South Africa. One of the reasons may be that the Offshore Trust has grown considerably over time and now has sufficient funds to invest in opportunities in South Africa. Another reason may be that there is a need for the local assets to be held by the offshore structure for better efficiency or succession purposes, due to the CFC rules not being applicable. Whatever the reasons behind the inward investment into South Africa, opportunities for efficient growing of family wealth should be carefully considered.
Restructuring
If an Offshore Company owned by an Offshore Trust which has discretionary beneficiaries with no control or ownership by SA residents which reinvests into South Africa, it will not be subject to the CFC rules. If the Source of Funds that funded the Offshore Structure are “Authorised Foreign Assets” as described in the Manual, the transaction is likely to be reported to FinSurv.
This creates an opportunity for the establishment of a South African subsidiary of a non-CFC offshore structure (“the Subsidiary”). Assets owned by any SA resident can be transferred efficiently to the Subsidiary by way of asset-for-share transaction in terms of section 42 of the Income Tax Act. The structure will still provide asset protection similar to a South African Trust (as there is no individual ownership), but the added benefit is that there is likely to be an opportunity to be more tax efficient when surplus profit is remitted offshore as a dividend.
International Business Expansion
South African Family Businesses who trade internationally and who already have funds in a Trust offshore and that wish to expand their business globally have the opportunity to do so safely under the new legislation. A South African Headquarter Company can incorporate offshore subsidiaries as appropriate for the business growth and needs. In terms of the special tax dispensation for South African Headquarter companies, there may be a significant reduction of taxes where a South African resident company, which qualifies as such, earns prescribed global income, of which is included royalties and dividends. A South African resident company can elect to be taxed as a Headquarter company if certain requirements are met relating to the percentage of shareholding by each shareholder, the sources of income and the percentage ownership in other qualifying offshore companies. | https://medium.com/@Tarian_Trust/loop-structures-opportunity-or-risk-6990b86cad2d | ['Tarian Trust'] | 2021-09-09 16:33:43.286000+00:00 | ['Finance', 'Taxation', 'Fiduciary', 'South Africa', 'Financial Planning'] |
Telling Stories with Data Visualization | Guillermo Marin came to the 9th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival in New York to present his latest film Simulados. Executive Director of the festival Alexis Gambis meets up with him to discuss his work as a data visualization artist in Barcelona.
Watch Supercomputing and eScience on Labocine
Tell us a bit more about the videos presented today on Labocine?
These videos were made by the Visualization Group of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where I am film director and visualization artist. At the group, our mission is to help scientists to communicate their projects to society and to their peers by creating compelling visualizations of their data. The videos reflect that vision because in all four the data is the star, as it is in all our projects.
Watch Simulados on Labocine
In what context were these films made and what is the target audience? How have films been received?
The films feature scientific projects developed at or coordinated by the BSC and are aimed primarily to a general public. However, we try to make “multilayer” videos. It means that we try to add multiple layers of information so they can be enjoyed by a naive audience, but are also suitable for an expert. And the reception has been great in that range: most of our videos have been showcased or awarded in scientific film festivals, or used by scientists in conferences, but also watched by non-expert audiences in dissemination magazines, tv shows, online press, and so on.
How is imaging and creating these short animations/documentaries/films important for the scientific community and broader public?
Short films are very effective vehicles to communicate science to both types of audiences but they only go so far regarding technical weight, regarding depth. Our films intend to make people aware of these scientific projects, but also to make them want to learn more about it through other sources. Besides, for some projects we’ve developed interactive data visualizations instead of videos because we considered that this platform was more suitable for them.
It is the case of Atracktion that lets users explore a database of music popularity over the last 50 years in the US, or the Campanian Ignimbrite that explains a project to simulate a volcanic super-eruption. And they have the same goals: communicate in an appealing way and create an interest for more.
Watch Alya Red on Labocine
About the Author
Guillermo Marin is Lead Artist at the Visualization Group of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the Spanish national supercomputing facility. As part of the Visualization Group, he has directed and co-directed several scientific dissemination shortfilms and visualizations. Some of those have been awarded or selected in prestigious events like the NSF Visualization Challenge, the Academia Film Olomouc (AFO), and the Imagine Science Film Festival.
With a background in Fine Arts and Computer Animation, Guillermo has worked in the animation production industry for several years in either independent short films and commercial projects, and in almost all stages of an animation production, from script writing and concept art, to animation and rendering.
Currently, he applies his experience to create appealing and informative data visualizations. Guillermo is also co-director and lecturer in the Master in Computer Animation of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona. | https://medium.com/labocine/telling-stories-with-data-visualization-59cd3fa307e3 | [] | 2016-12-22 14:24:26.210000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Filmmaking', 'Science', 'Supercomputer', 'Design'] |
How To Install An Older Homebrew Package | How To Install An Older Homebrew Package remarkablemark Follow Nov 5 · 3 min read
Did you know it’s possible to install an older version of a homebrew package or formula?
Previously, you would do this by installing an older formula URL:
brew install <FORMULA_URL>
However, this no longer works:
Error: Calling Installation of <FORMULA> from a GitHub commit URL is disabled! Use 'brew extract <FORMULA>' to stable tap on GitHub instead.
Now, you need to replace the core or cask formula before installing:
# copy formula code
pbpaste > $(find $(brew --repository) -name <FORMULA>.rb)
brew install <FORMULA>
Example
The following steps outline how to install composer version 1.10.15 .
Prerequisites
Uninstall composer:
brew uninstall composer
Update brew:
brew update
Find the Formula
Find the formula in homebrew-core or homebrew-cask:
The formula filename should be composer.rb .
Open the file and click History:
Browse through the history and find the commit you want:
Go to the commit, click the ellipsis next to the file, and click View file:
Click Raw to open the raw file:
Replace the Formula
Select and copy the raw formula:
Open the local formula on your machine:
find $(brew --repository) -name composer.rb
Paste the copied formula so it replaces the local formula:
pbpaste > $(find $(brew --repository) -name composer.rb)
Install the formula:
brew install composer
Once that’s done, undo the changes to the formula:
cd $(find $(brew --repository) -name composer.rb -exec dirname {} \;)
git checkout .
Pin the formula to prevent accidental upgrade:
brew pin composer
Resources
Homebrew documentation: | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-to-install-an-older-homebrew-package-b4a4577fd00f | [] | 2020-11-06 03:13:24.463000+00:00 | ['Homebrew', 'Github', 'Software Development', 'Mac', 'Programming'] |
Write for Frazzled | Write for Frazzled
This is a cow. (Photo by Sophie Dale on Unsplash)
Frazzled is a place for parenting humor with a particular focus on fictionalized and conceptual humor about life with kids.
If you want to write parenting humor with us, send an email to [email protected] with a link to an unpublished draft or a note saying you’d like to be added as a writer. Put “New Writer” in the subject line, please.
Being added as a writer does not mean every piece you submit will be published, but we’ll do our best. Please keep in mind the following guidelines for content.
What we’re looking for:
1. Funny!
Funny stuff only, please. Nothing that will make us cry. Unless it’s tears of joy.
2. Parenting!
The funny stuff needs to be in some way related to parenting.
3. Conceptual Fiction, Lists, Fake News, Fake Advice
All of these are golden. Check out what we’ve published already to get a better idea. Other humorous formats are also great. Bring them on.
These are our 3 most read pieces to give you an idea of what we publish.
4. Nothing Terribly Offensive
We are very sensitive people, so please don’t scare us. | https://medium.com/frazzled/write-for-frazzled-5186a3ace035 | ['Andrew Knott'] | 2021-01-02 16:46:59.645000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Satire', 'Writing', 'Submission Guidelines', 'Humor'] |
Crypto and Poker | Poker.
A game of gambling, strategy, and skill. A card game of bluffing that’s only fun when you can see the other players…right?
Wrong!
Physical proximity might have been an important part of the game in the 19th century, but that was before the internet. Gambling laws can vary from state to state, playing for real money is mostly illegal in the US. The same goes for internet gambling, but many states and countries still allow it. A quick Google search yields thousands of sites — some legit looking, others more shady, and all with the allure of cold hard cash.
But like anything on the internet, it’s buyer beware.
Basically, poker sites only care about one thing: making money.
Your computer gets a virus and your online account get hacked? Too bad.
Player privacy is compromised? Sucks to be you.
Bots unfairly winning every hand? Better luck next time.
Not to mention all the processing fees, rake or commission, and lack of incentive and a player may start to wonder why they’re spending their time and money on online poker.
Poker playing doesn’t come cheap — according to an article on Deadspin.com in order to make $60K, you need to play tournaments with a combined buy-in of $240,000. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars of buy-ins each year in order to make what is a little above average income in the US.
If only there was a decentralized system that ensured security, privacy, and transparency.
Oh wait, there is: Blockchain.
Crypto Poker Club sees there has been no real improvement in online poker since the early 2000’s, and now they’re doing something about it. They built a platform on the Ethereum network with the goal of improving the game experience for players.
Using blockchain tech, crypto poker has improved the game by increasing security, eliminating withdrawal; and processing fees, and implementing a new shuffling system that is guaranteed to always be fair.
In 2017, one poker website reported over $800 million in revenue. Nothing to sneer at. Now just imagine that, but with blockchain powering it. Crypto poker could be HUGE.
Crypto poker is just one example of blockchain powered games. There are loads of new ways that developers are using the technology, from in-game achievement rewards to storing gameplay on a verified ledger. Basically, blockchain is allowing players more opportunities to collaborate, create, profit, and grow. Plus, developers can make games they never thought possible.
But gaming is a $100 billion industry worldwide. How will anything ever change that?!
Well, like any innovation, industries must adapt as new technologies are invented. Blockchain gaming is not looking to compete with the pre-existing gaming space, instead the gaming industry will have to incorporate blockchain in order to stay relevant in the 21st century.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Interested in a Crypto Poker Party? Email us at [email protected] | https://medium.com/teamglasses/crypto-and-poker-c1a112cd6778 | ['Claire Royle'] | 2018-08-13 02:20:20.555000+00:00 | ['Poker', 'Crypto', 'Team Glasses', 'Blockchain'] |
A Very Stark Christmas: Chapter 7 | A Very Stark Christmas: Chapter 7
A Stark mystery
Photo by Nadine Redlich on Unsplash
I looked around and it was clear I was spending the holiday season with a bunch of weirdos, again.
As I sat in a daze, wondering what had happened to the 12 days of romance that I had planned — or at least whatever could pass for romance on my tight budget — snippets of the lively conversations around me danced in my head.
“For the last time, we are not actual penguins….no, we won’t be providing proof.”
“Yes, I am actually dating that guy who looks like he tried to dress up as a private investigator for Halloween and came off looking like a below average accountant…no I am feeling okay in the head, but thanks for your concern.”
“I am as surprised as you are that a team of plumbers dressed as Santas aren’t the most successful family-owned plumbing business this side of the Mississippi.”
“I don’t care who you are, stop linking my diminutive appearance and the name my parents gave me — possibly as a joke, possibly because they weren’t the most creative people around — I mean who in their right mind names a baby, Ralph?”
“Danny…Danny Bonaduce! I used to pretend to play bass as a kid on a hit television show. You can’t say you haven’t heard of me!”
I couldn’t decide if this felt more like being trapped in a noisy school cafeteria, a dentist’s waiting room or a holding cell with the local sheriff. I had recent experience with all three.
I needed a drink.
Correction, I needed three drinks.
Carl, all of a sudden, took a sharp turn off the main road. Yelling out something that sounded either like an apology or the beginning of a recipe for a killer minestrone.
The crowded bus bumped along the road that was clearly long overdue for paving. I made a mental note to email the local town council. I also made a mental note to call my doctor to have those swollen veins in my lower rectum looked at as the prescribed cream wasn’t doing much.
In an obvious effort to lighten the mood and take our minds off of the bus that may need to stop for service any moment now, Helen asked if others wanted to join her in some Christmas carols. She looked my way with a look that could only be described as a combination of “when in Rome” and “you know how much I hate rear suspension issues on old country roads”.
As the off-key voices sang of sugar plums and reindeers and, oddly, a commentary on the relative busyness of sidewalks in and around cities during the holiday season, I settled in for what looked to be a turning into a wild goose chase. From previous experience, I hated chasing geese and, to a lesser degree, swans, ducks and the other members of the subfamily Anatidae.
I felt like I was trapped in one of those movies where the main character realizes, all too late, that he should have listened to his mother and gone to college and that he shouldn’t have accepted that job to save Christmas when he was vastly underqualified or vastly dehydrated or both.
How did I always find myself on these rambling, unpredictable, sort of randomly nonsensical journeys surrounded by oddballs, I wondered. Probably a New Year’s resolution in there somewhere if I chose to look.
“Stark!” Carl was calling me over the carolers, beckoning me to the front of the vehicle.
Reaching the front, after losing my balance numerous times and remembering my doctor had recommended actually entering a gym rather than solely gazing from the outside and calling it a day, I asked “Yeah?”
“This is our next stop.”
And with that, the door popped open.
I stepped out into what could only be described as a cow field mostly because it was a field populated solely with cows.
I looked back at the bus to see if Helen or Danny or any of the others would be accompanying me, but they were all too busy singing and, from the looks of it, enjoying a risqué holiday version of Truth or Dare.
Taking a deep breath before remembering the location, I spotted the barn and began wandering over, hoping that my next clue would be inside.
“Stark.”
A voice in the mist had said my name.
I scanned the field and saw no one.
“Stark. Over here.”
My eyes met a cow and, yes, it was a cow who spoke with, what I had to admit, was perfect diction and what sounded like a mid-western accent.
A talking cow?
It was clear I’d have to cut way back on expired fruitcake.
It continued.
“A word of advice. This is all going too slowly. You just don’t have time to gather all 12 items from the classic Christmas song, one by one, this isn’t a novel, it isn’t an epic journey and it’s almost January.”
Clearing my throat, I whispered “Sorry if this is a tad rude, but aren’t you a cow?”
“No, not the cow, you idiot, down here!” the exasperated voice replied.
Peering behind the large animal, I saw an older woman, with a pail and a stool.
“The name is Bessie.”
“Your name is Bessie?”
“No, you moron, who names a human female Bessie? That’s the cow’s name. I was raised to introduce livestock first. My name is Greta.”
I reached out to shake her hand and she looked at me with a look that one reserves for someone who has been living under a rock or knowingly ignoring all public health suggestions.
“I’m glad you are here, Stark. We are lucky to get a man of your considerable skills. You don’t have much time.”
It was dark, but I was fairly certain she had waggled air quotes around the words ‘considerable’ and ‘skills’ and possibly ‘man’.
“Wait a second. This is all starting to make sense,” I realized, connecting the dots. “The outfit, the props, the incessant mooing….you are a maid…who milks cows! Like in the song….but aren’t there supposed to be 8 of you?”
“Bravo, smart guy. There isn’t a moment to spare. The others are over in the barn, scared outta their wits. Danny called ahead and told us to be ready, but we have a problem. Someone has got to Kimberly. She had been acting weird for the last few days — shifty, obsessively checking her texts, eating lots of sunflower seeds. Then, this morning she arrived, without her stool — we all have to supply our own stools, company rules — and then about 15 minutes before you got here she got a call — she never gets calls — and then she turned to the rest of us, raised her arms above her head and screamed ‘THE BEST IS YET TO COME’ multiple times with a frenzied smile on her face and then she ran. And she took the milk!”
Perplexed, I stood there, shaking my head both confused about this case and many of my life decisions that had led to this moment.
Danny called from the bus, “Stark, get the maids and their pails of milk. We gotta go!”
Greta and the other 6 maids piled onto the seemingly-never-going-to-reach-capacity vehicle and, Greta pointed in the direction of where Kimberly ran off to.
It was away from the road, away from the town, away from the farm and toward the dark, mysterious hills.
Carl, shook his head, turned the key and took another sharp turn and called out
“Hold on, everyone, this is about to get rough.” | https://medium.com/out-of-ideas-out-of-time/a-very-stark-christmas-chapter-7-993f53f2841 | ['Tommy Paley'] | 2020-12-28 03:10:12.292000+00:00 | ['Stark Mystery', 'Mystery', 'Christmas', 'Fiction', 'Short Story'] |
I was thinking about lions the other day. | I was thinking about lions the other day.
When I was a kid, I loved the local zoo’s lion exhibit more than any other. The big cats are magnificent. Standing outside their habitat, I would try to get their attention. I would wave and yell at them. But they ignored me as if I were too insignificant to even notice. Sometimes they would sleep in the sun, or they would stand and yawn. And once in a great while, they would roar. It would startle me. And then I would laugh. It must be an incredible experience to see them in the wild.
I was thinking about lions the other day, and the thought occurred to me they have everything given to them: free food, free healthcare, free housing. In exchange for everything being given to them freely, they will never be free again. | https://medium.com/illumination/i-was-thinking-about-lions-the-other-day-a837d79aefa2 | ['Dayton Parks'] | 2020-12-14 07:09:48.984000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Freedom', 'Self Improvement', 'Life'] |
Best headphones and earphones for quality music at affordable prices | It is not that easy to find out reliable headphones or earphones at Aliexpress, but you can certainly find out the best quality ones there. Aliexpress is known for the best Chinese products at an affordable price. One thing you must know that you will get a lot more value for your money if you buy a headphone that comes with certain trust. Aliexpress has it all.
Here we are going to present a list of awesome 3 best headphones and 3 best earphones at Aliexpress. You will also know about the top 3 headphone and earphone sellers at Aliexpress. So, let’s begin.
Top 3 Chinese Headphones on Aliexpress 2019
#1 — Bluedio T6 Active Noise Cancelling Headphones Wireless Bluetooth Headset with a microphone $48
AliExpress.com Product — Bluedio T6 Active Noise Cancelling Headphones Wireless Bluetooth Headset with a microphone for phones and music
This fantastic headphone comes in three different colors, black red, and yellow. You can have around 25 hours of music, once the headphone is fully charged. The Bluetooth version for this one is 4.2. The best thing about the headphone is it takes just 1.5 to 2 hours for a full charge.
The noise cancellation feature will make your music more intriguing. With such great features, the headphone comes at a reasonable price of $48.84. The estimated time for delivery is within 9 to 18 days.
Price: $44
#2 — Oneodio Dynamic Headphone
Another gem of a product, this headphone is a must have for the headphone lovers. Oneodio is an up and coming brand on Aliexpress. This product boasts superior sound quality. 2 versions Studio Standard or Studio Pro/ They will be active when it is found connected with your smartphone, laptop, or pc. For the connectivity, there is a 3.5 mm or 6.5mm jack. The headphone is portable and is very good for office use having features like noise cancellation. Best quality music provider.
Price: $19.00
#3 — Edifier Bluetooth Headset $38
You can use this headphone for gaming also along with using it with your smartphone or mobile phones. The headphone is Bluetooth as well as can be connected with the device using a 3.5 mm jack. You can get this light frame headphone in 3 different colors.
We love the sound bass, the design and the flexibility of choosing wireless or wired control.
The price of the headphone is also affordable, and it is just less than $40. The product will be delivered to you within 12 to 20 days.
Price: $38
Top 3 Earphones on Aliexpress 2019
#1 — Xiaomi Earphone for Mobile Phone
These earphones from the brand Xiaomi are really good to have. This is a must have for people who like to listen to music while running or jogging. Four different colors are there to your liking. The headphone can be bought below $10.
You will get the product shipped to your destination free within 20 days.
Price: $6.79
#2 — GGMM C800 HiFi Earphone
The earphone has a cool metal design and max magnetic speakers. You can get it in three different colors. The best feature is obviously the crystal clear sound of the earphone. You can get it at a price of below $10, and the delivery will be done at your place within 19 to 39 days.
Price: $9.98
#3 — JBL J33 Fashion Go Best Xtreme Bass Stereo Earphone
We all know how much class JBL brings with it. This headphone is no different. It comes with amazing coil winding and magnetic drive technology. With them, you are certain to get superb sound quality with very low noise. You will be able to take this product home at $24.90, and the delivery of the product will be done within 19 to 39 days.
Price: $19.90
Best Three brands for Headphones and Earphones on Aliexpress
Bluedio Official Store
This 3-year old brand has 98% of people responding positively to them. Started way back in 2002, the company now covers more than 100 different countries. The slogan of the company is ‘Amazing Life.’
Check HERE.
Oneodio Official Store
Certainly one of the top brands in Aliexpress Oneodio- a year-old store. The brand is awesome and it is one of the biggest Bluetooth wireless device sellers. We love to feature them as they carry awesome beautiful products. They have positive feedback of 98.8%.
Check HERE.
Anker Official Store
Founded in 2011 in California, the founders know what they are doing. They are one of the best when you ask about Bluetooth headphones and earphones in Aliexpress. They enjoy positive feedback of 98.8%. They just stick to their motto, ‘ Make More Beautiful Sound.’
Check HERE. | https://medium.com/@andywanji56/best-headphones-and-earphones-for-quality-music-at-affordable-prices-11f3a1c73320 | ['Andrew Karanjah'] | 2019-06-09 19:31:19.316000+00:00 | ['Earphones', 'Headphones'] |
The Fold App Is Here. | Today, we’re giving away early access to Fold’s new app (and a ton of bitcoin). The earlier you get access, the more sats you’ll get. Refer friends to move up the list!
🤩
Fresh App, Dirty Fiat
Available on iOS and Android, Fold users can now spend fiat or bitcoin and get up to 20% cashback in bitcoin at retailers like Amazon, Uber, Starbucks, Hotels.com, and many more. It’s simple, sync your credit card or lightning wallet and spend via Fold at select retailers online, in-store or in-app, earning bitcoin on every purchase, instantly.
Fold users have earned nearly a hundred million satoshis in the last 30 days alone! Get up to 100k satoshis for being one of the first to #stacksats with the new app.
💳 🤷♂️⚡
Yellow App Good, Number Go Up
We give normies and maximalists alike the ability to earn bitcoin while shopping. If all rewards points issued last year (~$48B) were paid out in bitcoin, nearly 14mm bitcoin would have been distributed to ~170mm people with a present day value of ~$140b. Lol.
We’re changing the fact that rewards points are issued in the form of restricted airline miles, arbitrary points or depreciating fiat, instead of the best performing asset of the last decade: bitcoin. But, unlike existing rewards programs that require users to give up their privacy for points, Fold’s new app rewards users for shopping privately (amongst many, many other things).
🥞📈
Incognito Mode For Everyday Spending
We combine bitcoin, lightning network, prepaid cards and other privacy features to ensure your personal information, payment details and transaction data is kept private — safe from advertisers and attackers alike. We’re a payment gateway with rewards instead of fees and a rewards program with privacy instead of surveillance.
Fold is incognito mode for everyday spending— one of the most private forms of payment available.
🏴☠️
A Good App for a Mad World
It’s become dangerous to go shopping. Every time you make a purchase, you reveal a lot — personal details, payment information, transaction history and location data — to the retailer, card network, bank, financial apps, and payment processor, all of which are the target of frequent attacks. Of course, there’s also the increasing surveillance of everyday payments by advertisers, governments, corporations, and even employers.
Fold is one more tool in your arsenal to thwart the bad guys, right alongside your ad blocker, private browser, password manager, encrypted messaging, and lightning node. It’s time for the world to experience Bitcoin as a fundamentally better way to pay, save, and most importantly, live.
#OptOut
The Fold Family Grows
We’ve partnered with experienced investors to pursue our vision of making bitcoin accessible and rewarding for everyone. We want to give the warmest welcome to Craft Ventures, Coinshares, Slow Ventures, Goldcrest Capital, Fulgur Ventures, and others.
Also, many thanks to Fold’s technical and spiritual guides including, Elizabeth Stark, Alex Bosworth, Matt Luongo, James Prestwich, Marty Bent, Nic Carter, Meltem Demirors, Brian Murray, Pierre Rochard, Jill Carlson, Hodlonaut, Dan Held, Russell Okung, Jeremy Welch, George Mekhail, Jack Mallers, Alex Gladstein, Sam Lessin, and Oleg Mikhalsky. | https://medium.com/@wlrvs/the-fold-app-is-here-f3d874dce0a | ['Will Reeves'] | 2019-09-25 06:50:51.150000+00:00 | ['Lightning Network', 'Android', 'Bitcoin', 'Stackingsats', 'iOS'] |
Coinbase’s S-1 Journey / Germany Legalizes Digital Securities / MSFT & EY Expanding Blockchain Platform For Gaming | Photo by Misty Ladd on Unsplash
December 20, 2020
This week’s post was slightly delayed since the industry decided to sneak in an overflowing bag of presents before the year ends. Buddy the Elf’s excitement when he learns that Santa will arrive in NYC doesn’t do justice to the level of enthusiasm building as we head into 2021 (yes, I’m in full holiday mode). Now that I’ve brought you to my level, let’s jump right into the week’s highlights.
Coinbase decided why not, it’s 2020, and announced their submission of a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC in preparation to go public. This is the not first time we’ve heard this news, and no timeline has been set….yet. The U.S. Treasury Department decided to go full naughty list and released a proposed rule (late on Friday, by the way) around a requirement of KYC/AML for exchanges and wallets. Stay tuned for more on this and its rippling effects on now just the industry but the financially underserved, DApps, and more. Shifting back to the nice list, E.Y. and Microsoft announced an expansion of Microsoft’s blockchain solution enabling its Xbox gaming partners and network of artists, musicians, writers & other content creators to gain increased visibility into tracking, management, and payment processing for royalty contracts. Visa shares a technical paper on the use of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) or “digital cash” & how they could benefit consumers & economies. Speaking of digital currencies…Bitcoin tops $24k, which is worth mentioning for many reasons but in particular as Northern Trust and Standard Chartered partner on a new custody solution AND Coinstar expands its Coinme Bitcoin ATM fleet to 5,000 providing greater access to digital currencies.
Germany legalizes digitized securities by passing a new law that will end the requirement to have a paper certificate for the sale of a security. IDEO CoLab launches collaborative DeFi Incubator & Residency Program. Compound releases a whitepaper for Compound Chain, a distributed ledger capable of transferring value & liquidity between peer ledgers. Baseline Protocol revels Ethereum interoperability. Kraken Exchange plans to integrate Bitcoin’s Lightning Network later next year. While Square’s Cash App now allows customers to receive Bitcoin back on purchases. BitGo provides multi-signature wallet technology for Hedera Hashgraph. Blockdata and CBinsights share with us 2020’s Blockchain Top 50.
If you thought that was the end, refill your cocoa as we’ve got new 11 funding announcements, including Paxos’s monstrous Series C and American Express’s recent investment in the industry. Plus DApps round-ups, research, and much more! Enjoy! | https://medium.com/coinmonks/coinbases-s-1-journey-germany-legalizes-digital-securities-msft-ey-expanding-blockchain-96171fdccba6 | ['Kyle Ellicott'] | 2020-12-28 13:10:50.248000+00:00 | ['Web3', 'Venture Capital', 'Coinbase', 'Dapps', 'Blockchain'] |
Yclub Finance Presale Information | We are pleased to announce the launch of our public pre-sale on 29 December, 2020.
We decided to organize the presale of Yclub’s Token on Bounce Finance.
Details about our presale will be updated on all social media platforms . (Name of the Pool, Pool ID)
The Yclub Finance public presale would run from December 29, 2020 at 10AM UTC to December 31, 2020 at 10AM UTC.
The price per token during the presale is 0.05 ETH per token, 20 tokens/ETH*. During this period a limited amount of 20,000 YCLUB tokens are available.
Token allocation comes at a “first come, first serve” basis.
The following is official YCLUB ERC-20 contract address : 0xd8ed729d63891ed6985d21622301c809e62c0e6e
As listed on https://yclub.finance
ANY OTHER ADDRESSES SHOULD BE DISREGARDED
YCLUB Token
The YCLUB Token (symbol “YCLUB”) is the native token of Yclub Finance ecosystem. YCLUB will serve as the means of communication between users and the different products of Yclub Finance. To interact with any product line, a user must hold a given unit of YCLUB.
Yclub holders control the ecosystem of Yclub Finance and are entitled to receive a portion of the protocol income. Thus, Yclub represents a right to rule the site and an earnings claim. Profits from each of the products of Yclub Finance are collected.
YCLUB Metrics
Ticker : YCLUB
Platform : ERC-20
Total token supply : 40,000 YCLUB
Staking & Farming Rewards: 10,000 YCLUB
Circulating supply : 27,000 YCLUB + Staking & Farming Rewards
YCLUB Pre-sale price : 0.05 ETH
Uniswap Liquidity YCLUB : 7,000 YCLUB
Uniswap Liquidity ETH: 380 ETH
Uniswap Listing Price: 0.056 ETH
Soft cap : 400 ETH
Hard cap : 1000 ETH
Liquidity Locked: via Unicrypt
Reserved Team Tokens: Locked for 12 months
Token Distribution
Reserved Tokens
Unsold tokens will be burned.
KYC
KYC is not mandatory for the participants of the Yclub public presale.
Join our official telegram community and follow us on twitter to stay upto date on our latest developments and announcements.
About Us: | https://medium.com/@yclubfinance/yclub-finance-presale-information-be96006c29cd | ['Yclub Finance'] | 2020-12-26 09:09:15.278000+00:00 | ['Presales', 'Farm', 'Yclub', 'Defi'] |
iPhone 12 Pro vs Samsung s20+ | Tech Today Review | Samsung’s s Series of phones, upon introduction, suffered immediately from sticker shock. They were viewed as not too expensive but as way too expensive. To say the least, they got off to a rocky start. Then the reviews started and the next thing that was obviously a problem was the colours were pitiful for such expensive devices. Putting these things aside however, when you compare running your s20+ against an iPhone 12 Pro the Samsung is in many ways the better handling device while the iPhone 12 pro has Apple’s ecosystem and software stacked in its favour.
The s20+ is the better Device
Putting aside software for the moment and this is very hard to do, Samsung’s s20+ is the better device to use. The weight is the same between the two but on the s20+ you have a gorgeous 6.7" display running at 120 MHZ a solid plus for the s20+. Download and upload speeds on a wifi network are better with the s20 and finally it just feels nicer in the hand than the newly designed iPhone 12 pro.
As far as speed goes, even though from a stats perspective, the iPhone 12 pro is the much stronger device, when you use them speed wise they don’t feel any different. Further, some things feel zippier in operation on the s20+ than the iPhone 12 pro.
If I have both phones in front of me, when I go to pick up a device, in about 90% of the cases I always pick up the s20+. It is just that much nicer to use. However, if there is something I need to do with an app that doesn’t run on the s20+ (only two that I regularly use) I’ll grab the iPhone 12 pro.
Software is in Apple’s Favour
When I first started with an Android about five years ago, there was cross platform software but it was no where near as robust as it is today. Everything I use is Apple based but a few years back I started to tire of of the iPhone. The only thing I changed was the Smartphone and to spice things up a bit I got an Android.
The first problem I experienced and the only major problem was that of software. There are now two apps which I have run for years — OmniFocus and DEVONthink — which only runs on Apple and it will likely remain this way. In the case of OmniFocus, I have found another task manager TickTick which is probably the best on the market now and it is fully cross platform. Ticktick has risen from a good app to this is the one to beat in 2020.
DEVONthink is another case in point . There is nothing that really competes with DEVONthink Pro Office. There are programs that are similar but there is nothing as comprehensive. This is a problem as I have put so much information in DEVONthink. I can operate around it with my other devices but there are times where you need something with you. I can put the item in Nimbus Notes or Evernote if I know what I need but sometimes you don’t know what you need till you’re in a spot.
Realistically, due to the integration in the Apple environment or the Apple ecosystem, I am better served by the iPhone. From a use perspective, I simply prefer the s20+.
What’s the Answer
If you have an all Apple environment you’re likely better served by the iPhone. Further, if you have applications that you rely on, you will most likely want an iPhone for consistent integration.
However, you can integrate an Android quite successfully using Exchange or Fruux for your contacts, calendars and reminders. If you use cross platform apps like Todoist or Ticktick they will run equally well on your Android connected to a Mac as would an iPhone.
However, if there is an app that you have come to rely on that is not cross platform and you want it to run on your Smartphone you need an iPhone. You could either:
just have an iPhone
or have an iPhone plus your s20
For many the latter is not practical. If it is there is no problem. You use what you prefer.
For some though they simply use, as long as it is not an extensive number, the apps on their computer and possibly an iPad. There are certain apps that don’t need to be with you all the time on your smartphone.
This kind of situation is a very personal decision based on your needs. For myself, I simply prefer the way the s20+ works more than the iPhone. I also prefer the way it looks and feels. The iPhone is the most practical all around solution though but it is not the only solution. I may decide to go fully iPhone or have a combination of the two phones or just for this one app decide to only use it on my Desktop and iPad.
The s20+ on Sale
Of late, we are seeing the s20+ on some very good sales. The initial sticker shock blends away in this scenario. Some might opt for the s20 FE that was just released at an excellent price having about 95% of what the s20+ has. I’m still drawn the s20+ though as it is just finished a bit nicer.
Samsung’s initial sticker shock mistake may be a thing of the past. Possibly they’ve learned a lesson. An actually good phone got clobbered by both the reviewers and buyers primarily due to the high price that in no way seemed justified. As the price has moderated through sales, one would wonder if the sales numbers have improved. A problem that can occur when a phone is introduced to bad reviews is it is very difficult to shake the early impressions. Samsung is quickly readying their s21 series possibly to shake what happened with the s20s and/or to keep up or surpass the competition. Apple is on a high roll with their iPhone 12s.
The s20+ is after all a very good phone. As cross platform becomes a broader reality, people’s choice will broaden allowing them to use the hardware they prefer. Currently, it is difficult for the average user to break out of Apple’s highly regarded ecosystem. For the odd person it won’t be that challenging. Yet, open systems and the broadening of cross platform will further liberate user choice and allow them to, without massive thought, be able to use what they feel is the best for them. | https://medium.com/@kerry-d/iphone-12-pro-vs-samsung-s20-tech-today-review-9037c05bb844 | ['Kerry Dawson'] | 2020-11-04 17:22:23.565000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Samsung', 'S Series', 'iOS', 'Iphone 12 Pro'] |
Viruses Explained in 9 Images | At the beginning of this pandemic like everyone I was hearing lots about viruses, but realised I didn’t know that much about what they are. So I did a load of research and have summarised what I learned in these nine images.
You can also watch this as a video here on my YouTube channel Domain of Science.
Viruses are the most abundant form of life on Earth. But are they life? Not really. They can’t reproduce on their own so they have to invade other cells and take over their molecular machinery to reproduce using the steps shown here. So a fair characterisation for virus is the ‘edge of life’.
There are an unknown number of different kinds of virus, definitely in the millions, but only about six thousand have been studied in detail. They vary wildly, invading all kinds of cells, animals, plants, bacteria and archaea and none of them work in precisely the same way. Despite the bewildering range it is possible to make some categorisations, although please be aware that there are exceptions to any category that I’m defining. That’s the nature of any subject as complex as virology.
With that in mind viruses always contain a genome, the instructions for making more viruses, and a protective shell made of proteins called a capsid which keeps the virus safe and helps the virus stick to and enter cells.
Some viruses are also coated in an envelope, a greasy cover taken from the membrane of the last cell they infected. These are called enveloped viruses.
Viruses are incredibly small. For example an average human cell is a bit smaller than a tenth of a millimetre or a hundred micrometres. And viruses are around a thousand times smaller than that, ranging from about 20 nanometres upwards. Above are a few virus particles drawn to scale.
For some viruses the genome is really small coding for just two proteins, but other viruses code for up to 2500 proteins for the largest genomes.
There are a few ways to classify viruses.
The genome of a virus is either based on DNA or RNA. And either single stranded or double stranded.
Viruses come in a wide range of shapes. The capsid of viruses are made of many of the same shaped proteins that self assemble into different shapes like helical which is a spiral, icosahedral, made of shapes like triangles or hexagons or pentagons to make a shape like a twenty sided dice or soccer ball. Prolate which is the same kind of thing but stretched out. Complex which covers a wide range viruses that don’t fit into the other categories, and finally enveloped viruses which we mentioned earlier.
There is a scientific way to classify viruses by following the official taxonomy.
Another useful classification technique is the Baltimore classification, which looks at the genome of a virus, and it’s pathway to encoding messenger RNA or mRNA which is a single stranded molecule that the host cell uses to make the virus proteins.
There are seven classes in the Baltimore classification which represent different forms of single and double stranded DNA and RNA.
The coronavirus that caused the 2020 pandemic is an enveloped virus, which means it is very vulnerable to soap which rips of the outer protective coat destroying it, which is why we are all washing our hands with soap so much. And in the Baltimore classification it is a class four virus which is a single stranded RNA virus with a positive sense.
This is different to seasonal flu which is a class five virus, so the two are not related.
Now let’s look in a bit more detail about how viruses get into cells, how they reproduce and how they get back out again.
There are three main ways viruses get their genetic material into a cell:
Enveloped viruses attach to receptors on the surface of the cell which then fuses with the membrane. Remember they are made of the same stuff because the virus took it’s envelope from the last cell it was in, so the new cell doesn’t see that it is an invader. Viruses without an envelope essentially trick the cell into thinking that the virus is a harmless resource like nutrition, and engulfs it. This is called endocytosis and viruses with an envelope can enter a cell this way too. This virus then has to break out of this vesicle to release its genetic material. Genetic injection is where the virus punches a hole in the cell membrane and directly injects its genetic material into the cell. Bacteriophages do this to bacteria, but not human cells.
Replication is very complex so I’m breaking it down into perhaps an overly simplistic description, but it’s a start.
In general RNA viruses replicate in the cell cytoplasm, and DNA viruses replicate in the cell’s nucleus, but there are exceptions to this.
The host cell starts transcribing the viral genetic material without knowing that it is not native to the cell. The virus codes for essentially two things, an enzyme called polymerase and proteins which form the capsid shell.
Polymerase creates copies of the viral genome. This is also when mutations to the virus can happen. Viruses mutate quickly, RNA viruses more quickly than DNA viruses because RNA is inherently less stable than DNA. These mutations are random, most having little effect on the virus, but sometimes they can make the virus more dangerous or less dangerous to the host.
The capsid proteins self assemble, from a couple of simple shapes they can form large complicated three dimensional structures which enclose copies of the genetic material inside, to form a new virus particle ready to leave the cell.
Retroviruses are a type of virus that insert their viral DNA into the DNA of their host. This has happened a lot through our evolutionary history and in fact viral DNA sequences make up 8% of our genome, a lot of which we share with our common ancestors.
There are three ways viruses leave cells:
Apoptosis results in the death of the cell through a self-destruct mechanism. The viruses either burst out as shown here, or more usually the cell death is a more controlled process where sections clump off to be absorbed by other cells like macrophages. Budding is where the virus exits the cell, taking with it an envelope of the cell’s membrane. This doesn’t kill the cell, but will degrades it over time and will eventually lead to the cell’s death. A kind of opposite process is exocytosis where the virus has an envelope inside the cell, which it got from the nucleus membrane, or another membrane in the cell. Then the virus exits through the cell wall leaving the membrane behind. This doesn’t kill the cell.
I should also mention that some viruses can stay dormant inside cells for years at a time which is called latency.
The range of a virus is how many different kinds of organism the virus can infect. Plant viruses don’t infect animals and most animal viruses can’t infect humans. In most cases viruses are adapted to a single species, but some like rabies have a larger range and others can cross over to other species when they mutate.
If we look at humans we can group viruses that have been with us for a long time, and ones which have recently crossed over. Equilibrium viruses have had a long time to adapt to our biology so tend not to be lethal to us. It is more effective for the virus to keep us alive to infect other people rather than killing us.
Non-equlibrium viruses are a lot more dangerous because the virus is not adapted to our biology and so the mortality rate from these infections is a lot higher as different people’s immune systems react to them in many different ways.
Here are some examples of non-equilibrium viruses including of course the coronavirus pandemic we are currently experiencing.
Influenza has a segmented genome, a genome in many parts which means that different strains can swap genes if they infect the same host. This means they are more likely to cross over species and is called antigenic shift, which is what happened in the 2009 H1N1 epidemic.
Our bodies have sophisticated mechanisms to detect and destroy viral infections.
It starts when a virus is ingested by an antigen-presenting cell which breaks it down and displays portions of the virus to activate T-helper cells. The T-helper cells activate two responses to the virus.
B cells produce antibodies that are targeted at the specific virus. These antibodies bind to the outer surface of the virus neutralising it, and also tag the virus to be destroyed if it enters a cell by enzymes within the cell.
Cells in our body continually display what proteins they have inside on their surface. If a cytotoxic T cell recognises a viral protein on the surface of an infected cell, it will destroy that cell.
Our body’s B and T cell’s keep a memory of the virus which can make us immune to future infections from that specific virus, but this immunity wears off over time. Sometimes this immunity lasts many years, but other times like for the viruses that cause the common cold and flu, our immunity is poor because of the high variability in these viruses, or because our antibody response is poor.
Vaccines are incredibly effective ways of preventing viral infections. It is possible to completely eradicate viral infections of human equilibrium viruses which we managed with smallpox, and is possible with polio, measles, mumps and rubella if only people would listen.
Vaccines contain a modified form of the virus that has been weakened in some way so that they no longer cause an infection but do stimulate an immune response, teaching our immune system to recognise the virus.
Antiviral drugs can be used to treat viral infections where there is no vaccine. Although development of these drugs is difficult because they only target a specific virus which are continually mutating. One example of an antiviral technique are drugs that fool the virus into incorporating dummy DNA into their genomes which stops them from having the instructions to replicate any more.
Conclusion
So that covers everything I wanted to talk about, if you want to dig deeper there are a bunch of links to my source material in the description of the video.
If you like these graphics I have made loads more. You can check them out on flickr or buy a poster on my DFTBA store. | https://medium.com/@dominicwalliman/viruses-explained-in-9-images-53dfb710fc5c | ['Dominic Walliman'] | 2020-08-11 21:51:39.518000+00:00 | ['Virus', 'Covid 19', 'Infographic', 'Explainer', 'Science'] |
Sunday | All my duties done before leaving for sunrise. A brisk walk to near the river, a brisk walk to countryside paths, a brisk walk to be warm in this frost landscape.
People and dogs, runners, cyclists and my daily dance to the sun. To feel my body before sunshine. Suddenly the Sun flourishes, opening happiness, a new day.
Returning indoors to eat yesterday’s leftovers. With my conscious chewing food practice I eat less and for longer periods. | https://medium.com/@mariadpdc/sunday-ee1bcb91f93 | ['Maria Del Pilar'] | 2020-12-27 14:13:38.385000+00:00 | ['Sunrise', 'Food', 'Sun', 'Cooking', 'Relationships'] |
Artificial Silk 10 Heads Lime Green Rose Flower Bouquet By Aleko Onsales Discount Prices. | Artificial Silk 10 Heads Lime Green Rose Flower Bouquet By Aleko Onsales Discount Prices. Sean Oct 20, 2019·3 min read
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Sale!, HURRY UP! Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, Hyperlinks to supporting retailers on This post on medium.com are automatically made into affiliate links, and if you purchase a product through these links, We may get a small commission on the sale. Discount for this seasonal, limited time offer.
More Detail! | https://medium.com/@sean_58460/artificial-silk-10-heads-lime-green-rose-flower-bouquet-by-aleko-onsales-discount-prices-957a242ad47a | [] | 2019-10-20 01:43:32.561000+00:00 | ['Flowers'] |
Precious Metals Investing: The Do’s and Don’ts | Profitable Tips for Precious Metals Investors
People who consider themselves savvy investors have minimal experience with alternative investments, especially precious metals investing. The reasons for that are diverse and plentiful, but some of the more common are:
Risk aversion because of the complexity of the subject
Price fluctuation
Limited knowledge of the impact of precious metals in a balanced portfolio
People use precious metals as an investment to offset risk and serve as a hedge against inflation. Investors usually own other investment assets in a complete portfolio. So what are some examples of precious metals?
Precious metals are seen as an insurance policy for your overall assets. This is because the price of both primary precious metals-gold and silver-usually move inversely to the economy. If the stock market is up, gold and silver are usually down a notch. But when the stock market crashes, precious metals take on a whole new luster, as seen during the Great Recession.
All four precious metals have seen gains in the past five years:
Gold is trading at $1,795.50, which is an increase of about +429.05. Silver is trading at $26.15, which is an increase of about +5.72. Platinum is trading at $1,090, which is an increase of about +14.00. Palladium is trading at 2,795.00, which is an increase of about +2,145.50.
With that in mind, here are the 5 “do’s” and 4 “don’ts” to know if you are considering investments in precious metals:
The 5 Do’s of Precious Metals Investing
1. Educate yourself.
Understand the difference between bullion and numismatic products. Read up on whether you want to own a physical amount of precious metals ( tangible asset) or a precious metals exchange traded fund (ETF), which is considered “gold on paper” (intangible asset). Physical metals are allocated in your name, whereas paper gold is allocated to a bank-run fund.
2. Keep your precious metals investment scalable.
Most financial advisors recommend an allocation amount of between 5 to 10% of your total investable assets. Again, this is why precious metals are seen as a hedge (or, insurance policy) against other investments in your portfolio. Precious metals can also easily be added to existing IRA accounts.
3. Keep a close eye on spot prices and research buying and selling trends.
Spot prices are the exact amount that a precious metal is trading per ounce, and can be viewed in real time. One of the best resources for checking spot prices is Kitco News. With the technology available to us today, it’s possible to do a minimum amount of research and see how prices have behaved relative to common economic factors.
4. Watch the dollar cost average of your precious metals investment.
This is a tactic for minimizing asset risk by calculation over regular intervals, and is one reason why it is recommended that investors buy precious metals periodically.
5. Make a plan for storing your precious metals.
Bank safety-deposit boxes do not ensure precious metals like FDIC-approved deposits. If your investment is substantial, look into storing your precious metals at a secure depository.
The 4 Don’ts of Precious Metals Investing
1. Don’t over-invest.
They don’t call it “Gold Fever” for nothing. A good financial advisor can guide you to an appropriate investment level of precious metals. Keep in mind that your goal is to have a balanced portfolio, with precious metals acting as an internal insurance policy.
2. Don’t buy from unauthorized or disreputable precious metals wholesalers.
Look for dealers with a solid history of doing business in the industry. The good guys should be easier to spot than the bad guys. A good place to start is checking with the Industry Council for Tangible Assets (ICTA) and the Professional Numismatists Guild (PNG).
3. Don’t fail to compare pricing information.
If you wouldn’t pay retail price at a jewelry store, put the same effort into finding the best price per ounce for your precious metals investments. “Buy low, sell high” applies to precious metals, just like any other investment asset.
4. Don’t brag to friends and acquaintances about your recent purchase of precious metals.
Don’t do this especially if you’re storing the assets at your home. All it takes are a few bad intentions and a poor hiding place to invite theft, or even worse.
The world of precious metals investing is complex but very rewarding for savvy investors. Like anything in the world of alternative investments, do your due diligence and apply common sense, and you’ll be on your way to a truly balanced portfolio.
[ Editors’ Note: To learn more about this and related topics, you may want to attend the following webinars: All About Asset Allocation and Personal Finance & Investing Fundamentals 2.0. This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 18, 2019.]
©All Rights Reserved. July, 2021. DailyDAC TM, LLC d/b/a/ Financial Poise TM | https://medium.com/@financialpoise/precious-metals-investing-the-dos-and-don-ts-479eedfb990f | ['Financial Poise'] | 2021-08-23 19:27:22.662000+00:00 | ['Precious Metals', 'Gold', 'Precious Metal Trading', 'Precious Metal Investing', 'Silver'] |
What Every Writer (And Politician) Can Learn From Shel Silverstein. | “What you’ve got to say, you say.” Shel Silverstein
As simple as Shel Silverstein’s poems may seem, they were a daily struggle for this writer of at least eight published children’s books, a dozen albums, two Grammy award-winning songs and numerous screenplays. He was a constant revisionist, what some might call a niggler. Every poem and lyric used the fewest words possible, including this one about life itself:
Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird/ And catch the worm for your breakfast plate/If you’re a bird, be an early bird — /But if you’re a worm, sleep late
Describing Silverstein as a children’s book author misses the significance of this simplicity. Adults reading his stories to their kids soon find themselves moved without perhaps understanding why. In The Giving Tree, for instance, there’s something so universal about the tree “giving without consideration of itself,” that it speaks to all of us (parents in particular).
Keep it short, make sure a thirteen-year-old can understand it. That doesn’t mean talking down, it actually means talking up, respecting the reader’s time and ultimately their patience.
In our complicated lives, where we’re filled without filling, busy without learning, Silverstein’s words make more than sense — they make us realize how profound simplicity is, and so contrary to “mass without meaning.” We live with mass and meaninglessness. Silverstein made a point of meaning.
There’s a rule in Reader’s Digest: Keep it short, make sure a thirteen-year-old can understand it. That doesn’t mean talking down, it actually means talking up, respecting the reader’s time and ultimately their patience. This helped explain Silverstein’s book Falling Up. We spend more time worrying about being respected and admired, adding volume instead of brevity.
Maybe that’s the problem today. We aren’t reading words that respect our time. Take a headline like “You’ll never have to ask for love again.” I started reading this article, only to be more confused at the end than I was at the beginning:
“To judge yourself kindly is to feel worthy and respected and appreciated, and that’s when you’re open to receiving love instead of constantly having to ask for it, which is when you stop doubting your ability to BE loved and find the love you always desired.”
A worm that loves attracts many worms, and they’ll get eaten first.
I’m all for finding love and fulfillment, but I got lost. Why couldn’t the writer just say: “If you love yourself, others will figure you must be onto something.” Isn’t that the basis of love? Or as Silverstein might have written: A worm that loves attracts many worms, and they’ll get eaten first.
It’s also interesting how writers can fall back on worn-out phrases, turning interesting thoughts into professional monotony:
“As more and more individuals and organizations become semi-proficient on these various platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram in particular) are we destined to endure one long streaming feed of incessant babbling?”
Isn’t what we’ve just read “incessant babbling”?
It’s like René Descartes and his: “I think, therefore I am.” Hundreds of years later, he’s still a genius, and we get nothing for writing in a washroom cubicle: “I think, therefore I flush.”
“What you’ve got to say, you say,” Shel Silverstein once summarized. Who among us doesn’t admire that kind of brevity? And who among us isn’t telling themselves “I could have come up with that.”
It’s like René Descartes and his: “I think, therefore I am.” Hundreds of years later, he’s still a genius. Even variations of that theme on a washroom cubicle gets at least a chuckle: “I think, therefore I flush.”
So why do we tangle our words? Why do platitudes constantly sneak into our sentences? The answer to the second is wrapped up in the first. Tangled words seem to cut off our supply of common sense.
After the Las Vegas shootings, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority put out the following billboard: “We’ve been there for you during the good times. Thank you for being there for us now.” Someone wrote this one word response: “Goosebumps.” That gave him goosebumps?
Considering the nuttiness that exists today, you’d think our writing would at least be as colourful. Yet we fall back on worn-out phrases all the time.
I got goosebumps seeing people take a direct flight to Nunavut rather than hang around McCarran airport that day. I mean, if a mentally threadbare accountant can take 16 assault weapons into a hotel, imagine the level of weaponry in the airport’s executive lounge.
Considering the nuttiness that exists today, you’d think our writing would at least be as colourful. Yet we fall back on worn-out phrases instead.
I think back to authors like James Thurber and E.B. White who could spend a week on one paragraph.
Hunter S. Thompson once typed out the entire “The Great Gatsby,” just to understand the rhythms and compactness of Fitzgerald’s writing. He had good reason. Here’s just one line from Fitzgerald’s greatest novel:
“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of mortal attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”
We’d rather take comfort in knowing we didn’t offend anybody than having a unique thought.
Think of how the rest of us write. How often do we spend more time qualifying our thoughts, hoping not to offend, than on the thought itself?
At the beginning of my career, I wrote In Memoriams for a country radio station. The funeral homes would call in the details with the same words of condolence every time. These days, it seems like we’re doing the identical thing. We trot out old words and phrases like they’re death notices.
One writer who continually writes great copy is Dave Barry, former humorist with the Miami Herald. When asked to defend the media’s coverage of the stock market, Barry explained it this way:
“Perhaps you wonder how come we here in the news media always make such a big deal about the stock market. The answer is simple: We don’t understand it. We have an old saying in journalism: ‘If you don’t understand something, it must be important.’”
The great thing about Dave Barry is he doesn’t sound like everyone else. Rather than tangle his words, he makes them funny. Somehow it comes across as true — or at least asinine — which is often truth as well.
Surely, we can do better than funeral homes
Perhaps that’s what we all need in our writing. We need a little truth, a little asinine bravery, and, perhaps, something funny. Otherwise, we’ll continue sounding like those In Memoriams.
Surely, we can do better than funeral homes. We need to stop tangling and abusing words. We need to become simple-ists like Shel Silverstein. Look how he handled the difference between rich and poor:
The little fish eats the tiny fish/The big fish eats the little fish — /So only the big fish get fat/ Do you know any folks like that?
Who but Shel Silverstein could explain American economics so simply—and completely? Some might call it child-like, but compared to the descriptions given by politicians these days, I’m more inclined to stick to Silverstein.
Perhaps if we all took a lesson from this, we’d understand economics—and life—a whole lot better than we do now. Obviously, we don’t. I blame the tangle of words, the obfuscation present in so much of what we read and hear.
Maybe we all need to sit down with The Giving Tree (hopefully again) instead of reading newspapers or social media. Maybe then we’ll understand what clarity and brevity really means. Otherwise we doomed to repeat the platitudes—the meatless, pointless nonsense—we’re engaged in now.
Robert Cormack is a satirist, novelist, and former advertising copywriter. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)” is available online and at most major bookstores. Check out Skyhorse Press or Simon and Schuster for more details. | https://medium.com/never-fear/what-every-writer-and-politician-can-learn-from-shel-silverstein-39f230b5baed | ['Robert Cormack'] | 2020-10-19 22:07:00.394000+00:00 | ['Shel Silverstein', 'Political Correctness', 'Marketing', 'Writing', 'News'] |
Knowledge Account — Update Preview! | The Knowledge Account has seen incredible growth of registered users since launching in 2018. The next major update to the Knowledge Ecosystem is full withdrawal & deposit functionality coming soon to the Knowledge Account.
The Knowledge team is proud of the growth of the Knowledge Ecosystem and is focused on deeper KNW Token utilization via the Knowledge Account.
Knowledge Account — withdrawal & deposit launch to be announced soon
By the end of May our team will be announcing a launch date for withdrawal and deposit functionality in the Knowledge Account. When the launch announcement is released, details including withdrawal fees will be additionally available to the community.
Follow our Medium for the most up to date announcements on Knowledge Ecosystem updates, or message the team directly on Telegram!
Knowledge Quicklinks
Download TriviaSpar: https://triviaspar.com/download/
Create a Knowledge Account: https://account.knowledge.io/sign-up/get-started | https://medium.com/knowledgeio/knowledge-account-update-preview-15f82a823c43 | [] | 2019-05-13 00:02:47.021000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain Startup', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain'] |
13 Corners of the Internet to Find Inspiration for Web Design | This curated list targets not only the adventurers who are seeking some inspiration in starting up fresh with some awesome projects, simply the ones that are looking to fill a gap in their design, but also the perfectionists who would like to try out different things until they reach their digital Fata Morgana.
If you are like me, then in most cases, after a thorough brainstorming, you end up firing new projects at your GitHub account faster than the rate of finishing them. Way, way faster.
After some self-reflection and poor judgment, I realized that in most cases I would end up being caught in a design loop every time I would try bringing my ideas to life. Basically, by not aiming at something, you end up improving something that always ‘can be better’ or you might be tempted to try out different things until you decide that you are happy with your current design. If, you will ever be truly happy!
Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash
Reasoning
If we start tapping into the reasoning of such a flaw, the main trigger for such a decision scarecrow is the inability to see the bigger picture while you lay the foundation of your website, <div> by </div>, brick by brick. Having a clear goal of what you are trying to build will not only tremendously boost up your development speed but it will also offer you the chance of creating milestones in your journey, that you can celebrate while achieving them. And this is definitely a key motivator, especially when you are developing for yourself, for fun, or even on a normal basis.
If this struggle sounds familiar, then you are in the right place. Below, you will find a list of some of the finest resources that you can use to spice up your ideas while you bring them to life.
For your convenience, I have separated them into some main categories, which will keep you on track with your current needs.
Design
Even if it’s for peeking at a fully unrolled web design, a nice footer, or, even more granular, for some specific component ideas, as I have already said earlier, it is a vital step to set some goals when we are trying to materialize our ideas and the best way to do so is by deciding on what we are trying to build before we move on to understand how we are going to do it. | https://medium.com/blue-harvest-tech-blog/13-corners-of-the-internet-to-find-inspiration-for-web-design-555d75e15a5 | ['George Gabriel Luță'] | 2020-12-01 19:41:48.124000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Website Design', 'Web Development', 'Front End Development', 'Web Design'] |
Dear Mom and Dad | Dear Mom and Dad
A letter from my daughter
Dear Mom and Dad,
I have a news flash for you: I’m not a baby anymore. I’m still super cute and adorable, but if you haven’t realized yet, I have become a person. I know that may be hard for you to digest, but it’s time you start accepting reality. In the biological sense, I’ve always been a person, but I think you know what I mean — capable of forming thoughts, showing emotion, doing things by myself.
I am in a good mood today, so I thought I’d let you in on a few secrets:
Fear: I’ve recently discovered this emotion, and quite frankly it sucks. You may not be able to empathize, but that animatronic dog at Chuck E. Cheese is freaky as heck and scared the s**t out of me. Even things I used to enjoy, like doggies and certain structures at the park, are starting to scare me. I can’t help it, but please don’t act like you are completely fearless. I’ve seen you freak out when getting splashed by water. Yea, that’s right — I’m an observant little bugger.
I’ve recently discovered this emotion, and quite frankly it sucks. You may not be able to empathize, but that animatronic dog at Chuck E. Cheese is freaky as heck and scared the s**t out of me. Even things I used to enjoy, like doggies and certain structures at the park, are starting to scare me. I can’t help it, but please don’t act like you are completely fearless. I’ve seen you freak out when getting splashed by water. Yea, that’s right — I’m an observant little bugger. Trolling: I troll you guys all the time because, well, I can. For example, I know I’m not supposed to bother my baby brother, but I do it anyways. Pay attention and you’ll see me giving that “I’m about to test you look” before I actually do anything. I truly find that kid adorable, so long term you have nothing to worry about. I guess you can say I’m testing limits, so it’s on you to keep me check. Here’s another tip: If you ask me a question, my answer will be “no”. It’s a phase. If you don’t like hearing me say “no” all the time, maybe you should just ask me fewer questions.
I troll you guys all the time because, well, I can. For example, I know I’m not supposed to bother my baby brother, but I do it anyways. Pay attention and you’ll see me giving that “I’m about to test you look” before I actually do anything. I truly find that kid adorable, so long term you have nothing to worry about. I guess you can say I’m testing limits, so it’s on you to keep me check. Here’s another tip: If you ask me a question, my answer will be “no”. It’s a phase. If you don’t like hearing me say “no” all the time, maybe you should just ask me fewer questions. Potty training: You remember what Boss Baby said about diapers? “Astronauts and race car drivers wear them too.” I don’t know what’s your urgency around getting me potty trained, but can you please just slow your role? You probably can’t understand how chill it is to be able to go to the bathroom anytime, anyplace. I can — it’s pretty awesome. You’ll know when I am ready, so in the meantime just relax…but keep getting me the blue pull up diapers, they’re awesome!
You remember what Boss Baby said about diapers? “Astronauts and race car drivers wear them too.” I don’t know what’s your urgency around getting me potty trained, but can you please just slow your role? You probably can’t understand how chill it is to be able to go to the bathroom anytime, anyplace. I can — it’s pretty awesome. You’ll know when I am ready, so in the meantime just relax…but keep getting me the blue pull up diapers, they’re awesome! Mind games: Do you notice how sometimes I’m like “I want Mommy!” and other times, “I want Daddy!” Here’s a secret: I’m playing you like a fiddle. Both of you are great parents and I can come to either of you with any issue. I just act like I want one of you more at any given time to make you feel special. I have both of you wrapped around my finger, it’s borderline Machiavellian.
Do you notice how sometimes I’m like “I want Mommy!” and other times, “I want Daddy!” Here’s a secret: I’m playing you like a fiddle. Both of you are great parents and I can come to either of you with any issue. I just act like I want one of you more at any given time to make you feel special. I have both of you wrapped around my finger, it’s borderline Machiavellian. Independence: I’m sure you’ve noticed my recent desire to do everything by myself. There’s probably a lot of things I can’t fully do by myself yet, but if I don’t try, how do you expect me to learn? For example, I’ve become fairly good at putting my shoes on and pretty soon will never need your help on this again. That will save you effort down the road. If you’re willing to put up with some short term growing pain, it will benefit both of us long term.
At the end of the day, what’s going on in my head is no different than the Pixar movie “Inside Out.” Just like you, I have different emotions. I am starting to become more aware of them and am beginning to experience life in the context of my emotions. It’s kinda weird to be honest.
I know that I am super difficult at times, but I do want you to know that I love you both very much. You are my everything and I am thankful to have you as my parents.
Love,
Maya | https://medium.com/digitaldad/dear-mom-and-dad-41f76ff73c81 | ['Sumip Patel'] | 2018-07-27 21:34:06.071000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Kids', 'Dads', 'Parenting', 'Life'] |
Open Redirect in SLACK | I discovered an Open Redirect Vulnerability on slack-redir.net . Another low risk bug that i found xD
Step to Reproduce
Go to https://slack-redir.net/link?url=https://abaykan.com/ This will redirect you automatically.
Request
GET /link?url=https://abaykan.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host: slack-redir.net
Connection: close
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.96 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9,ht;q=0.8,id;q=0.7,so;q=0.6,es;q=0.5
Response
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2019 17:36:15 GMT
Server: Apache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
location: https://abaykan.com/
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
X-Via: haproxy-www-ok5p
Unfortunately I got an error while trying to inject XSS.
Suggested Fix
https://github.com/OWASP/CheatSheetSeries/blob/master/cheatsheets/Unvalidated_Redirects_and_Forwards_Cheat_Sheet.md
Impact
The attacker can redirect the victim to the malicious site using legit slack-redir.net domain name, which can be the copy of the real site, asking for the user credentials.
But because of special conditions (security policy) from SLACK, this report is considered invalid (Not Applicable). | https://medium.com/@abaykandotcom/open-redirect-in-slack-385eb34b7c5f | [] | 2019-02-16 09:54:16.761000+00:00 | ['Slack', 'Open Redirect', 'Bug Bounty'] |
White spaces help tiny graphics make a big impact | Why do we need to format our documents?
Instead of printing out our text documents by filling all the available space from left to right and top to bottom, we add white borders around it and use bigger characters for titles, spaces between paragraphs and so on. This is needed to make our articles readable and understandable.
The same way, to succeed with tiny graphics you need-besides data-based arguments-to remove all barriers between you and the reader.
This means first to simplify your visuals by removing most if not all gridlines and labels, and keeping just the essence. Then, use colours to get closer to your audience. Colours need to take a second role only to give touches to the picture and make the connection to your proposed solution.
Replace labels, axis, and gridlines using white and empty spaces around your graphs and text to make your graphics more readable (here a graphic created for ZentoShop)
Maximise the impact of your graphics by using white (or empty) spaces
The human eye is quickly attracted by colours and labels, but even more so by visuals. To increase the impact of your graphics, on top of using colours and limiting your visual elements, you need to use white and empty spaces.
Remove gridlines, but keep the space between data and your graphic’s margins
Replace labels and axis with white or empty borders
Sparsely use text and leave space between different visual components
Leave space so that your reader’s eyes look towards your graphics by removing all unnecessary obstacles.
Your turn now
Maximise white and empty spaces in your tiny graphics for a bigger impact.
Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.
PS
Another example of content which deserves to be simplified are application screens made by developers, which you can easily find in internal tools. White space, colours and simplified grids and labels can greatly improve these interfaces, even when there is a limited audience. | https://medium.com/@mapopescu/white-spaces-help-tiny-graphics-make-a-big-impact-dc5a8bb3cc3a | ['Marius Popescu'] | 2020-12-24 15:25:57.171000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Infographics', 'Dashboard', 'Graphics', 'Tiny'] |
Knowledge Base — Your New Bitbon System Guide | Interesting fact: the blockchain operation principle was developed back in 1991 by research scientists Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta as a solution for storing digital documents with timestamps. Documents could not be forged or drawn up post factum in this way. However, due to certain reasons, the idea failed at that time, and the patent was not obtained.
After a while, this technology found its place in the world and set a brand new trend owing to cryptocurrencies starting with the well-known bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto. Since 2008, blockchain has become a real hit applicable in many areas, including for the infamous ICOs. In turn, this attracted the attention of government regulators and showed there was a need for a different approach to using distributed ledger technologies.
Back at the stage of developing the Bitbon System concept, we eliminated the shortcomings of the existing blockchain platforms using the related world experience gained over the years, as well as the results of our own research. Every year the distributed ledger technologies information base is growing, as the modern society obviously needs complex and multifunctional systems for the organization and development of the virtual currency market.
Realizing this, we created a knowledge base — a special section on the Bitbon Space website, which contains structured information on the development of the distributed ledger virtual asset market, as well as blockchain-based platforms, in particular, the Bitbon System, where distributed ledger tokens and their accounting units are the object of relations between participants. New useful materials will be regularly added to this section, which you can learn about from the news on the official information resources of the Bitbon System.
Thus, you now have a convenient source of information for studying the Bitbon System features, which you can use to write your own articles or scientific papers or to make presentations or videos. The knowledge base will be useful not only for lawyers, scientists and entrepreneurs, but also for everyone who wants to keep up with the times and be aware of the progressive trends of the modern world.
Click this link to go to the knowledge base: https://www.bitbon.space/en/knowledge-base/ | https://medium.com/bitbon/knowledge-base-your-new-bitbon-system-guide-9f6987180617 | ['Bitbon System'] | 2020-12-18 15:47:37.178000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Knowledge', 'Satoshi Nakamoto', 'Bitbon', 'Blockchain Technology'] |
[GEEKY] Mac Sound Converter Utility | Apparently (not sure why yet) on Android, sound effects files using the OGG format work better than those using wav or mp3. It might be an AndEngine thing, I am not sure. Anyway, here’s my result of half hour googling and experimenting for a reliable way to convert the files. I tried a bunch of things, and I finally settled on MediaHuman AudioConverter. Use it. It really works and is nice and simple. | https://medium.com/pito-s-blog/geeky-mac-sound-converter-utility-e91cd2089105 | ['Pito Salas'] | 2017-06-08 19:19:58.601000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'MP3', 'Programming', 'Wav', 'Ogg'] |
Raspberry Pi Install Docker and Kubernetes | Install Kubernetes with K3s
Before starting the installation we need to make a change and enable cgroups, which is not enabled by default on ARM machines.
Let’s edit the file:
sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt
and add the following string to the end of the file:
cgroup_enable=memory cgroup_memory=1
Now we can proceed with the installation:
sudo curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -s - --docker
With the “-docker” statement we are telling K3s to use Docker as the runtime system for Containers.
Once the installation is complete, check the status of the K3s service:
sudo systemctl status k3s
and we can see our node on the Kubernetes cluster:
sudo kubectl get nodes
And we will have an output similar to this:
Kubernetes Nodes
The commands to stop and start K3s are as follows:
sudo systemctl stop k3s sudo systemctl status k3s sudo systemctl start k3s
Configuring the Kubernetes Dashboard (K3s)
To enable the Kubernets dashboard we need to run the following commands:
GITHUB_URL=https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard/releases VERSION_KUBE_DASHBOARD=$(curl -w '%{url_effective}' -I -L -s -S ${GITHUB_URL}/latest -o /dev/null | sed -e 's|.*/||') sudo k3s kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/dashboard/${VERSION_KUBE_DASHBOARD}/aio/deploy/recommended.yaml
The mode to access the interface is via Bearer Token, to retrieve it we must first create an RBAC (Role-based access control) configuration for the Dashboard.
Let’s create the dashboard.admin-user.yml file with the following content:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
name: admin-user
namespace: kubernetes-dashboard
Let’s create the dashboard.admin-user-role.yml file with the following content:
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
name: admin-user
roleRef:
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
kind: ClusterRole
name: cluster-admin
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
name: admin-user
namespace: kubernetes-dashboard
and then deploy the configurations:
sudo k3s kubectl create -f dashboard.admin-user.yml -f dashboard.admin-user-role.yml
Now to get the Token we can use the command:
sudo k3s kubectl -n kubernetes-dashboard describe secret admin-user-token | grep ^token
We enable the port-forwarding to expose the dashboard to the outside:
sudo k3s kubectl port-forward -n kubernetes-dashboard service/kubernetes-dashboard 10443:443 --address 0.0.0.0
Now the dashboard will be visible from the following url: https://<IP>:10443/
Choosing the Token Authentication mode, and inserting the recovered Token from the command line we will have full access to the Dashboard: | https://medium.com/digital-software-architecture/raspberry-pi-install-docker-and-kubernetes-b347bff37ce | ['Andrea Scanzani'] | 2020-12-10 16:09:06.201000+00:00 | ['Raspberry Pi', 'Docker', 'Kubernetes', 'Clustering'] |
A start-up language start-up | Welcome back to the View from the Monolith! I’ve spent the last few years siloed in a monolithic organisation, but now I am adventuring in the world of start-ups. In this blog, I share the learning I glean along the way.
Every industry has its language: words or phrases that mean something specific in that culture which baffles outsiders who might stumble across them. The language of start-ups is a hybrid of business terms and technical ones, so depending on your background, some or all may already be familiar to you. But in today’s blog post, I thought I’d offer up some of my learning: phrases that were new to me (well, except one of them).
Almost have it…
Ideation. The creative process of forming ideas. Of “ideating”.
The concept this word embodies is exactly what I assumed it would be, but I was still surprised to discover it was a real word in the dictionary and everything. Apparently, it goes back to the 1820s, so perhaps I’m the only person who hasn’t encountered it before. Nevertheless, it seems it’s a common word around start-ups.
Incubator. An early-stage program, incubators provide a venue to develop and refine ideas.
Often established in a specific location, or focussing on one market, incubators help entrepreneurs at the very early stages, developing ideas into viable start-ups.
Loot!
Angel Investor. Provides the seed money to get the start-up moving.
They invest capital in the company, usually in exchange for an equity share. This generally happens before Venture Capitalists get involved, and Angels would typically be investing less money than a VC would.
Full disclosure, I had heard the term Angel Investor before, but I really wanted to draw an angel with a bag of money. I think she turned out quite well.
Accelerator. A program aimed at really getting a start-up moving.
Accelerators will provide seed money and a mentorship program which help start-ups accelerate their growth, generally for the fixed duration of the program. One of the most well-established accelerators is the Y-Combinator program.
Y-Combinator. The Y-Combinator program, often abbreviated to YC. Originating at Stanford University, it teaches entrepreneurship skills and provides seed investment for start-ups. Much of the training program is available online. For start-ups accepted into the program, YC acts as an accelerator.
Jack Attack!
Growth Hacking. Finding and using tactics to keep the start-up growing.
As a writer, words fascinate me, and ‘hacking’ is so interesting. Most of the older uses of the word are destructive or at least negative, viewed in that light, it’s easy to imagine growth hacking as undercutting growth. But, of course, that is not the case. In recent years, a ‘hack’ has come to mean a strategy, trick (or Shortcut!) to achieve something. So growth hacking becomes finding ways to keep your start-up growing; an essential element of success.
Runway. How long until the money runs out.
When I first heard this term, I had it the wrong way round. If your start-up has a runway of two months, that doesn’t mean two months to launch, it means that after two months your runway, and cash, runs out, and you’re not taking off at all!
Thanks for reading. I may revisit this idea as my own understanding of start-ups grow, but for now, time to move onto something practical. Join me next time when I share with you the advice we’ve received about recruitment at start-ups. And if you want to read this series from the start, check out the first View from the Monolith. | https://medium.com/the-shortcut/a-start-up-language-start-up-b3b5faaac41f | ['Rob Edwards'] | 2019-01-02 12:46:01.732000+00:00 | ['Stories', 'Startup'] |
Do Not Forget This When Setting Your New Year’s Resolution | A question that most people never consider is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” — Mark Mason in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
As we near the end of the year, we find so many of us starting out on our new year’s resolutions. A new year brings a new start and a fresh page. It is the best time to eliminate bad habits and start something you always wanted to do.
But did you know that only 8% of people, achieve their New Year’s resolutions? Most of our new year’s resolutions look like this:
Lose weight Earn more money Buy X, Y, Z Find your passion Become a writer
…you get the point.
There might be so many different reasons for people not keeping up with their resolutions, like it being too many, or too unrealistic. But I am not going to talk about all those points in this article. I am going to focus on the one-step which a lot of us fail to do.
Disclaimer: This will only work when you set realistic expectations and resolutions.
You focus only on the goal and not the path.
This is the mistake that most of us do. For e.g., I keep a resolution this year, that I want to lose 20 kgs by the end of 2021. I am only focusing on the goal now. But what am I going to do for it? Am I ready to undergo the rigorous workouts, or controlling my intake, which is required for losing weight?
Most of us stop pursuing our resolutions because we do not see immediate results. Or, we only realize the reality aspect of the goal after we start pursuing it. All we set is this one big goal, a target that we have to reach.
How many of us decided the path we are willing to take?
1. Break the goal into smaller chunks
Again let me take the example of losing 20 kgs next year. So approximately, I would need to lose 1.67 kgs a month. This sounds less daunting than my earlier resolution, right? Because it is a smaller number.
Now the goal sounds realistic and more doable. One advantage of this method is that you stop procrastinating the effort. You stop doing stupid things like losing the same weight in 6 months using these “lose weight fast” methods.
Also, if I do meet my monthly/weekly goals, it would motivate me to pursue it further.
2. Next, what are you ready to do to achieve the goal?
I can fool myself by telling myself that I am never going to eat junk in my life. And I am going to work out every single day. But then, I will be the stupidest person in the world. Because I know it is impossible!!
Write down what you can and what you cannot do. These were some questions I wrote for myself
Can you walk X number of steps per week? Yes
Can you eat junk only on Sundays? Yes
Can you go to gym Y times a week? No (because I get claustrophobic there)
Deciding what you can and what you cannot do early on, will greatly reduce the chances of you stopping the process in between. Because you can always tell yourself that it was you who decided this. Again, the most important part of this task is to ask yourself and set a realistic list of what your boundaries are.
3. What are you going to do to achieve smaller goals?
Okay, now that you have decided your smaller goals, and what you can let go for them, it is time for you to decide what you are going to do every day for achieving the goal.
For e.g. I order food from outside, when 1) I do not know what to cook or I am too lazy or/and 2) When required groceries are not available at home. I know this. So what do I do to reduce my eating outside?
Set a weekly calendar to go out and buy groceries. I usually buy them when something gets over at home.
Set time aside on weekends for deciding what to cook throughout the week. So that I do not spend time thinking about what to cook during weekdays, and end up buying food from outside.
Allotting a time for these activities in my calendar makes my resolution more realistic. You can also have other small tips and techniques for fulfilling your goal. For e.g., I am planning to complete the preparation part in bulk (once in 2 days) so that I would not feel lazy to cook later.
Tip: Keep a resolution journal to track your progress. When you write down what you have done and what you have not, things will become much more clear to you. | https://medium.com/be-unique/do-not-forget-this-when-setting-your-new-years-resolution-3b8f911db29b | ['Shruthi Sundaram'] | 2020-12-09 10:40:30.276000+00:00 | ['Resolutions', 'Advice', 'Personal Development', 'Self', 'Life'] |
Where is my electric vehicle, Uber? | Last Sunday, I had a shower thought wondering why ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft lack an electric vehicle option. You can share a sedan, hail a luxury SUV, and call a wheelchair-accessible ride. But you can’t choose to ride in an electric vehicle. What gives?
Uber facilitates over 10,000 rides every minute. The transportation unicorn’s 3 million drivers have logged over 5 billion trips worldwide, but very few vehicles in the fleet are electric or hybrid. With this incredible reach, ride sharing companies have much more climate change power than they credit themselves. While some incentives are built in for ride sharing drivers to switch to EVs, Uber does not incentivize the customer. The hybrid, electric, and autonomous vehicle revolution may hit the U.S. eventually, but ride sharing services can do more to speed up adoption.
A few ride sharing ideas:
Offer renting and leasing options to drivers favoring electric vehicles. Uber’s EV incentive today is only for the UK, and they partner with Hertz, Getaround, and Fair for renting. Promotion of the $7,500 U.S. federal rebate on new electric vehicle purchases would be a great starting point. Invest in charging infrastructure, not renewable energy credits. Many companies, Lyft included, claim they are 100% carbon neutral via extensive investment in renewable projects or credits. In my opinion, this is a workaround to investing in on-site solar, storage, and charging infrastructure — physical proof the company is serious about being green and a signal to employees their purchase of an EV is welcome. Modify vehicle requirements for drivers. ie. Your car must be no more than 8 years old or hybrid/electric. As EVs become more popular, this rule becomes increasingly important to wean out petrol. Test an ‘Uber EV’ option. Yes, I hear you. Uber would never launch this service unless it was profitable. However, Uber is losing ~$1 billion per quarter ahead of their 2019 public offering with plans to profit from new businesses like Uber Eats. I wouldn’t underestimate the number of green ride sharing users willing to pay one or two dollars more per ride to help electric transportation adoption.
Consumers will adopt clean energy solutions once they are convenient and affordable. Solar, storage, EV chargers — these are remarkable advancements but often expensive or unattainable by the average home owner or city dweller, respectively. So, can mainstream services like ride sharing fuel clean energy adoption sooner?
(Happy to continue the conversation on Twitter)
//UPDATE//
In early June 2019, it was announced ridesharing and taxi services in India might have to achieve 40 percent electrification by 2026 via legislation. This could be a huge step towards to mainstream electrification in a developing world, and perhaps convince the largest emitters to follow suit in some fashion. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/where-is-my-electric-vehicle-uber-2b8d2c212c18 | ['Matt Bloom'] | 2019-06-11 17:26:28.508000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Electric Vehicles', 'Uber', 'Transportation', 'Climate Change'] |
Zhongli is underwhelming, but salvageable. | I need to preface a few things before diving into the meat of this article. I honestly love Genshin Impact. I play multiple hours a day. This is not a MiHoYo bashing article. This is not a Zhongli bashing article. I was really excited for his release and have enough Primogems to guarantee pulling him. This is not a “5 star characters are too expensive” article. This is a “Zhongli does not offer enough for me to want him” article. This does not mean Zhongli is horrible. Every single character in Genshin Impact is usable for content. This is not to attack people who enjoy playing with Zhongli. Zhongli has beautiful animations and all of his voice actors are incredible. His Elemental Burst, Planet Befall, is breathtaking and epic. The artists who collaborated to make Zhongli blew away expectations. His gameplay design feels unique and interesting, but does not feel rewarding to invest in. Players invest their Mora, experience, weapons, and time into Zhongli and are disappointed by Zhongli’s performance. Some time between the closed beta tests and his live release, his numbers and gameplay kit were kneecapped. This is expected, to some extent — if all the circulating rumors about how strong he was were true, he could easily have been the strongest unit in the game. We would like to see some middle ground, but right now he is currently in contention for the weakest 5 star character.
How good is Zhongli?
I am going to make some comparisons to show how powerful Zhongli is relative to other characters.
Main Physical DPS:
Let’s look at him as a main DPS. Multiple people have done frame-by-frame comparisons and all the math, so I will not run back through them, just refer you to this video that also talks about their disappointing experiences. The relevant part is that they found Zhongli’s DPS to be comparable to Xiangling (4 star). He’s serviceable, but outclassed by Razor (4 star). So anyone using him as a main DPS is doing it because they love Zhongli and his amazing animations, which is entirely valid.
Energy Generator:
Zhongli’s Elemental Skill creates a stele that stays on the field and deals AoE Geo Damage every two seconds, generating an energy particle… sometimes. Turns out it’s completely random with about a 50% chance. So one particle every four seconds, usually. That’s if the enemy stays in the fairly small AoE.You can increase the AoE with other Geo Constructs, but they do not increase the energy generation. Even Zhongli’s Constellation 1, which allows him to have a second pillar, will not increase the energy generation, just the AoE, making it a little more consistent. This puts him on par with Ningguang (4 star) for energy generation. The caveat is that Ningguang can use the catalyst Sacrificial Fragments to create more energy, while Zhongli does not have access to a Sacrificial weapon. Even if he did, Ningguang would still outpace him, as her Elemental Skill generates more particles up front. In addition, Ningguang’s Constellation 2 allows her to nearly double the number of times she can use her Elemental Skill. Zhongli is sadly outclassed in this department and even needs assistance to consistently make use of his own Elemental Burst.
Tankiness:
He’s a Geo character that pumps out Crystallize reactions like nobody’s business. He even has damage scaling on his Elemental Burst when he builds HP. All signs point to potentially being able to replace a healer in a team. The problem is how shields work. They do not stack and protect one another. They all take damage simultaneously. You cannot use Zhongli to extend the lifespan of Xinyan or anyone else’s shield. A Crystallize shield, at any given moment, is only going to take one or two hits in late game Spiral Abyss. The hold version of his Elemental Skill only gives 5550 shield if you have 20000 HP. The ice cages in floor 12 Spiral Abyss deal around 7000 damage. He can act as an off-healer, but he will not be able to replace the main healer. Maybe you can get away when running Xingqiu alongside him, as he is also an off-healer. For the majority of players, though, Zhongli’s extra tankiness is superficial in nature.
Burst Support:
This is probably his best role right now. The Elemental Burst costs 40 energy on a 12 second cooldown with great damage. The cooldown perfectly matches the Noblesse Oblige 4-set piece buff. If he were Pyro/Hydro, people would probably say he is broken. Unfortunately, this wraps back around to the energy generation problem. Despite having a low energy requirement, he cannot reliably reach it.
So what would it take for me to pull Zhongli?
At minimum, his energy generation needs to be consistent. With so much of his power being in his burst, both in terms of numbers and visuals, the fact his energy generation is random is frankly inexcusable. Even if he generated one particle every 2 seconds, it would be around the same level as Ningguang with Constellation 2. Considering he is a 5 star, I think this is perfectly acceptable and not overpowered.
In addition, I’d like to see at least one of the following be improved:
His normal/charged attack string: He has a beautifully animated attack string. Sadly its damage is similar to Xiangling. This is honestly where I’d prefer them to take power away if they must. Alternatively, if they make this a focal point, it will be fun to watch and damn satisfying.
Energy generation: I was honestly hoping he’d be an insane battery. Again, his Burst is only 40 energy with a 12 second cooldown, which sounds perfect for Noblesse Oblige, just like Ningguang. Except he doesn’t get Prototype Malice and his energy generation is weak. I would love to see him turned into an energy battery as even standalone, it would mean the player would be able to get more use out of his Elemental Burst.
Supportive damage boosts: The closed beta test leaks had his Petrify amplifying damage, much like Mona’s Burst. They may have decided that was too strong to include in his power budget, but there are more options. He could give Geo Dmg boost to anyone in his Elemental Skill range. The Petrify could have the Shatter Reaction or also have Geo Dmg boost. They could do something similar to Xinyan, where anyone shielded by Zhongli would receive a damage boost.
Tankiness: There’s plenty of characters that currently offer damage reduction. Zhongli could easily be added to the list. Xinqiu’s water swords offer damage reduction, damage, Hydro debuff, and healing. Zhongli’s shield offers…shield.
Ultimately, Zhongli suffers from poor power distribution. It is split among tankiness, his normal attack string, and his burst. His unique mechanic received the least power and suffers from randomness on top of it. This makes him feel far less unique and exciting compared to other 5 stars. It is honestly a shame, as I suspect that he still performed well in terms of sales, so we may not see any changes. Everything else around him, from the story to the voice acting, makes him incredible. I am sure many people are happy with their Zhongli, but I have also seen a large number of people be disappointed. I hope this illustrates the ways Zhongli falls short and shows how MiHoYo can adjust some numbers to make him more satisfying. They have made clear attempts to listen to the community in other areas, so I hope that with the next feedback survey, they will respond positively and help Zhongli out. | https://medium.com/@lastlightgg/zhongli-is-underwhelming-but-salvageable-37441737e567 | ['Last Light'] | 2020-12-07 16:26:31.851000+00:00 | ['Game Design', 'Genshinimpact'] |
Beginning Forex Algorithmic Trading With Python | I finally got around to implementing my first Forex trading robot!
Photo by Clemens Van Lay on Unsplash
Introduction
For years, I have fantasized about building a Forex trading robot that would slowly and consistently increase its account balance. However, I was never really sure where to start. What company to use? How do I access the APIs? Is it safe?
Recently, I blocked off some time to learn what would be needed to develop such a system and it culminated in a very simple to implement python script. In the remainder of this article, I will detail how it works.
Disclosure: This article is not investment, tax, or legal advice, nor is it a solicitation for investment. Furthermore, I am not a financial expert and offer this only as a way to share my experiences.
Methods
Step 1 — Get a Forex Account
The first step is to open an account with a broker. After a bit of research, I decided to go with forex.com. Specifically their standard online account here. They have been around since 2006 and are part of the GAIN Global Markets Inc group which has been around since 1999. Their user base and trading volume seemed to make them a trustworthy platform. However, I have never used another broker so have no basis for comparison.
Creating an account on their platform can be done by following the instructions on their website and will work much the same way as opening an account with any other investment platform or bank.
Once you have created your account, email them at [email protected] to request access to your API credentials. You will require a $5k balance if you want to trade on your main account or you can opt to have an account created with a virtual balance (not real money) of $50k. I chose the latter.
Step 2 — Write Trader Script
I started reading over the provided API documentation but it left much to be desired. In the hope of streamlining the process, I started searching forex.com’s forums and came across this open source Python client!
Important: Whenever dealing with sensitive information such as financial data it is important to vet any code you use to ensure it is not going to improperly expose your data. Don’t take my vetting of this library for granted. At the time of this writing, most of the library’s relevant code is in this short file. I recommend inspecting the code.
The open source python library abstracts the APIs into simple functions that allows us to retrieve price information, buy/sell currency pairs, check our open orders and more. So how should our trading robot work?
There are many ways that a trading robot can work. Several of which may be better than the one I will present. However, I chose the following approach since it is easy to understand and debug.
Our script will consist of three parts:
Two helper functions check_sell_criteria and check_buy_criteria where our actual algorithm will reside. A configuration step that will be run once when the script is started and will authenticate, get account information and select the currency pair we will be trading. A periodic loop that will retrieve price information, and invoke the helper functions of part 1 to determine based on the most recent price data if it should place a buy/sell order or just continue to next loop. Note: For simplicity we skip partial/no trading days (Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays).
The full script can be found below:
Step 3 — Trading Algorithm
This is the part that I am currently working on and that will require the most time and effort to hone in.
Developing a trading algorithm that consistently makes a profit is no small task. Some guidelines I believe are important for a good trading algorithm:
Profitable: We want an algorithm that nets positive when run over extended periods of time. No tripling the account in a day and then loosing everything in an hour. Predictable: It performs in a manner that is expected given a certain set of conditions. This is useful since it allows proper debugging to ensure it won’t behave unexpectedly under new market conditions.
Since I have not tested my algorithms for long enough, I will not be placing them here and risk having someone lose money. However, a search on Google Scholar (not main Google) shows hundreds of possible algorithms and spending some time looking over trading charts and existing indicators may give you some ideas on how to begin!
Starting with simple algorithms such as checking that current price is below a moving average in order to buy may be a good starting point to learn the script’s behavior.
Conclusion and Future Work
The simple Python trading script shown above is able to trade a currency pair using the forex.com platform.
However, as with most things worth doing: There is still much to explore. Including: | https://medium.com/swlh/beginning-forex-algorithmic-trading-with-python-1fb1ecb4e6ff | ['Paulo Carvalho'] | 2020-10-22 13:33:31.728000+00:00 | ['Beginners Guide', 'Forex', 'Python', 'Forex Trading', 'Algorithmic Trading'] |
To My High School Psychologist: | Image from Pexels.com
CW: talk of depression, self-harm, and suicide (attempts, ideation, loss)
Dear Doctor,
I saw recently that you retired. Isn’t that great? You probably get some sort of benefits and can live the rest of your days in comfort. Wouldn’t it have been nice if you could say the same for your students?
You likely don’t remember me, and I don’t expect you to. It’s been over seven years since I saw you, and a lot about me has changed- different face, different name, different pronouns. Then again, I doubt even my deadname would stick out to you in a sea of thousands of struggling teenagers. But your name sure sticks out to me on that local retiree list.
I was never a well-liked person. I was bullied a lot for the vast majority of my life, and it was often over stupid stuff. By high school, my depression and anxiety had fully set in. I was constantly wallowing in a seemingly-endless pit of despair and self-loathing, seeing no way out but a bottle of pills. My parents refused to take me seriously when I said I needed help. My friends distanced themselves from me. I had no one. So I came to you with a list of all the different possibilities of what I thought I could be going through, depression being the main thing. You just rolled your eyes and pretended to listen. You pretended to care. But I kept coming to you; I had no other choice. It was you or no one.
Do you remember when I came to you and showed you the bandage on my wrist? That was junior year. I’d already been struggling with self-harm for a little over a year by then. You laughed at me. You laughed as you spoke to me, as if I were a small child saying something in a game of pretend. How many other kids have you laughed at? How many cuts and scars have you seen?
Do remember when we lost a classmate to suicide? That was freshman year. We were all about fourteen. You shooed everyone out of your office and locked the door. The counselor from the middle school, the only good public school mental health professional I’ve ever met, came to sit with us and try to get us through that horrific time. You just pretended it never happened. How many kids have you known who one day didn’t show up to school and never returned? Have you ever cared about any of them?
Well, maybe you did care when a student was a serious threat to their own safety, and ignoring it could reflect badly on you. I came to you when my best friend at the time confided in me that she had attempted to overdose the night before. You demanded to know her name and called her to your office- no, to the social worker’s office down the hall- to make sure she wasn’t going to do it again. Do you only care when you could’ve been in big trouble for not acting on a tip like that? That could’ve been me. If I hadn’t been so damn stubborn, it would’ve been me. You didn’t care. As long as the pills stayed in the bottle, why should you concern yourself with why I’m thinking about opening it?
Seeing an article about that trans girl who posted a video of her school counselor yelling at her about a week before she took her own life, it makes me disgusted, and it makes me think about how you would’ve reacted to my coming out. Would you have yelled at me too? Would you have laughed at me? Would you have shooed me away? Maybe all three.
You may be retired now, but you should know, you are now and have always been a fraud. You can hang whatever degree on the wall near your lopsided file cabinet, but you have never been a real doctor. You made worse for me an already painful time, and from what I saw, you were no good to anyone else. A real doctor helps. You only hurt. I will forever hear you laughing at my bandaged wrist. I will forever see my classmates coming out of your office in mournful tears before you shut the door behind them. I will forever be relieved I was able to find real help by myself.
I guess the one good thing you did do right was teach me the lesson that even those supposed to help you sometimes will be as useless as a dead battery. No, no, not a dead battery; dead batteries were once useful.
I am also forever relieved you are retired and can’t hurt any students anymore.
Good riddance. | https://medium.com/@baileycelis/to-my-high-school-psychologist-94465514645 | ['Bailey C. Elis'] | 2020-12-27 03:14:28.961000+00:00 | ['Trauma', 'LGBTQ', 'Psychology', 'High School', 'Depression'] |
How magically are relationships formed? | Photo by Carly Rae Hobbins on Unsplash
Do you know or have you ever thought what facts make us bond with certain people could be with our friends, romantic partners or any other form of a relationship? There are a few interesting facts we can take into consideration. There is plenty of research on that the most prominent points could be proximity or familiar once would be our closest relatives. Have you heard of the mere-exposure effect by Dr. Robert Zajonc he arrived that more we get contact with a person the more we tend to like that person or have positive regard toward him or her?
Do opposites attract?
The research says that there is a big chance for us to like. Especially to have romantic relationships with people who are very similar to us. Such as people with similar lifestyles, likes dislikes, characteristics, upbringing or any other similarities they have. Simply we attract people who are more like us. Now you may wonder why? Yes, there is a reasonable cause its easy to have contacts with people who are similar to us, Isn’t that so? Have a thought for a while do you agree with what I say? Is not it easy to have a conversation with someone who has similar beliefs like you, someone who has similar hobbies like you!
What is homophily?
The tendency to form either a romantic relationship or friendship with a person who are similar to us. Reciprocity and self-disclosure are essential as well to maintain a specific relationship, what are those? Reciprocity is merely giving and taking, the relationship goes on for some kind of mutual exchange of a benefit. At the same time, self-disclosure means sharing your inner thoughts with the other such as your dreams, goals, fears, ambitions. These two play an essential role in a relationship.
What could be the other essential facts? Have a thought on your relationships what the vital factors are made you two good friends, lovers, business partners etc.
Before I get into further details, I would like to mention that the Love we have for our friends, parents, siblings and lovers are different these relationships have their own way of loving.
Physical attractiveness also takes an important role, meaning if the person has eye-pleasing looks. Though Love has a deep meaning, this certainly has an impact on our brain when we get attracted to someone. Though I was mentioning the research findings, I know you may think some of the facts are not agreeable. Yes, Love and attraction are really magical and a mystery, even I personally believe there have been more facts than that.
Finally, why do relationships exist?
Thus, We need relationships cause we are social creatures, we don’t like to be alone. Love is the best medicine in the world. I would say which helps us to maintain our physical and mental health in many ways. Furthermore, experiments are shown the connection between pain and relationships how amazingly being with your partners make you feel less pain. Evidence has shown at least having a picture of your loved one when you are in a critical situation tends to help you with a positive impact to reduce the pain.
Relationships teach us the way to love someone and the way to be loved as well. Love is a magical feeling we feel in our hearts, which can not be touched. Getting into healthy relationships makes happy, self-confident individuals!! | https://medium.com/@ayesh934dissanayake/how-magically-are-relationships-formed-47f3e32de9da | ['Ayeshmanthi Dissanayake'] | 2020-12-20 18:41:24.603000+00:00 | ['Dating', 'Why', 'Relationships', 'Relationships Love Dating', 'Psychology'] |
Fixing a common problem with a Git Merge | Fixing a common problem with a Git Merge
“Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary”
I recently finished working on this article on how to create a blog with Netlify as a CMS. While working on this article, I tried to make a merge and ended up not being able to. I had this message:
# Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary,
# especially if it merges an updated upstream into a topic branch.
#
# Lines starting with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts
# the commit.
~
~
"~/Documents/Projets/medium/netlify-cms-medium/.git/MERGE_MSG" 6L, 297C Merge branch 'master' of https://github.com/marieqg/netlify-cms-medium # Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary,# especially if it merges an updated upstream into a topic branch.# Lines starting with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts# the commit."~/Documents/Projets/medium/netlify-cms-medium/.git/MERGE_MSG" 6L, 297C
It’s not the first time I had it, but it was sure the last time. And I was stuck there for a while again. They are a few methods to go out of this depending on the editor that you are using.
Step 1: Understand why
Firstly, let’s try to understand why we got this message.
There a few options :
This happens when a commit was made to the branch you are working on (you try to push a commit: git push) before pulling the changes ( git pull)
You updated your git client
You never had a local branch which was ahead of the remote before
Your git config was changed recently
You should have done git rebase or git pull --rebase instead of a merge | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/problem-with-git-merge-please-enter-a-commit-message-to-explain-why-this-merge-is-necessary-854757988c17 | [] | 2020-06-07 00:59:02.107000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Web Development', 'Development', 'Github', 'Git'] |
What’s a Linked List, Anyway? [Part 1] | Information is all around us.
In the world of software, the ways that we choose to organize our information is half the battle. Here’s the thing though: there are so many ways to solve a problem. And when it comes to organizing our data, there are lots of tools that could work for the job. The trick is knowing which tool is the right one to use.
Regardless of which language we start coding in, one of the first things that we encounter are data structures, which are the different ways that we can organize our data; variables, arrays, hashes, and objects are all types of data structures. But these are still just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to data structures; there are a lot more, some of which start to sound super complicated the more that you hear about them.
One of those complicated things for me has always been linked lists. I’ve known about linked lists for a few years now, but I can never quite keep them straight in my head. I only really think about them when I’m preparing for (or sometimes, in the middle of) a technical interview, and someone asks me about them. I’ll do a little research and think that I understand what they’re about, but after a few weeks, I forget them again. The whole thing is pretty inefficient, and it all stems from the fact that I know they exist, but I don’t fundamentally understand them! So, it’s time to change that and answer the question: what on earth is a linked list, anyway?
Linear data structures
If we really want to understand the basics of linked lists, it’s important that we talk about what type of data structure they are.
One characteristic of linked lists is that they are linear data structures, which means that there is a sequence and an order to how they are constructed and traversed. We can think of a linear data structure like a game of hopscotch: in order to get to the end of the list, we have to go through all of the items in the list in order, or sequentially. Linear structures, however, are the opposite of non-linear structures. In non-linear data structures, items don’t have to be arranged in order, which means that we could traverse the data structure non-sequentially.
Linear versus non-linear data structures
We might not always realize it, but we all work with linear and non-linear data structures everyday! When we organize our data into hashes (sometimes called dictionaries), we’re implementing a non-linear data structure. Trees and graphs are also non-linear data structures that we traverse in different ways, but we’ll talk more about them in more depth later in the year.
Similarly, when we use arrays in our code, we’re implementing a linear data structure! It can be helpful to think of arrays and linked lists as being similar in the way that we sequence data. In both of these structures, order matters. But what makes arrays and linked lists different?
Memory management
The biggest differentiator between arrays and linked lists is the way that they use memory in our machines. Those of us who work with dynamically typed languages like Ruby, JavaScript, or Python don’t have to think about how much memory an array uses when we write our code on a day to day basis because there are several layers of abstraction that end up with us not having to worry about memory allocation at all.
But that doesn’t mean that memory allocation isn’t happening! Abstraction isn’t magic, it’s just the simplicity of hiding away things that you don’t need to see or deal with all of the time. Even if we don’t have to think about memory allocation when we write code, if we want to truly understand what’s going on in a linked list and what makes it powerful, we have to get down to the rudimentary level.
We’ve already learned about binary and how data can be broken up into bits and bytes. Just as characters, numbers, words, sentences require bytes of memory to represent them, so do data structures.
When an array is created, it needs a certain amount of memory. If we had 7 letters that we needed to store in an array, we would need 7 bytes of memory to represent that array. But, we’d need all of that memory in one contiguous block. That is to say, our computer would need to locate 7 bytes of memory that was free, one byte next to the another, all together, in one place.
On the other hand, when a linked list is born, it doesn’t need 7 bytes of memory all in one place. One byte could live somewhere, while the next byte could be stored in another place in memory altogether! Linked lists don’t need to take up a single block of memory; instead, the memory that they use can be scattered throughout.
Memory allocation in static versus dynamic data structures
The fundamental difference between arrays and linked lists is that arrays are static data structures, while linked lists are dynamic data structures. A static data structure needs all of its resources to be allocated when the structure is created; this means that even if the structure was to grow or shrink in size and elements were to be added or removed, it still always needs a given size and amount of memory. If more elements needed to be added to a static data structure and it didn’t have enough memory, you’d need to copy the data of that array, for example, and recreate it with more memory, so that you could add elements to it.
On the other hand, a dynamic data structure can shrink and grow in memory. It doesn’t need a set amount of memory to be allocated in order to exist, and its size and shape can change, and the amount of memory it needs can change as well.
By now, we can already begin to see some major differences between arrays and linked lists. But this begs the question: what allows a linked list to have its memory scattered everywhere? To answer this question, we need to look at the way that a linked list is structured.
Parts of a linked list
A linked list can be small or huge, but no matter the size, the parts that make it up are actually fairly simple. A linked list is made up of a series of nodes, which are the elements of the list.
The starting point of the list is a reference to the first node, which is referred to as the head. Nearly all linked lists must have a head, because this is effectively the only entry point to the list and all of its elements, and without it, you wouldn’t know where to start! The end of the list isn’t a node, but rather a node that points to null, or an empty value.
Parts of a linked list: it’s all just a bunch of nodes, really.
A single node is also pretty simple. It has just two parts: data, or the information that the node contains, and a reference to the next node.
If we can wrap our heads around this, then we’re halfway there. The way that nodes work is super important, and super powerful, and could be summarized as this:
A node only knows about what data it contains, and who its neighbor is.
A single node doesn’t know how long the linked list is, and it may not necessarily even know where it starts, or where it ends. All a node is concerned with is the data it contains, and which node its pointer references to — the next node in the list.
And this is the very reason why a linked list doesn’t need a contiguous block of memory. Because a single node has the “address” or a reference to the next node, they don’t need to live right next to one another, the way that the elements have to in an array. Instead, we can just rely on the fact that we can traverse our list by leaning on the pointer references to the next node, which means that our machines don’t need to block off a single chunk of memory in order to represent our list.
This is also the explanation for why linked lists can grow and shrink dynamically during a program’s execution. Adding or removing a node with a linked list becomes as simple as rearranging some pointers, rather than copying over the elements of an array! However, there are also some drawbacks to linked lists that I’m not mentioning to you just yet — but more on those next week.
For now, we’ll just bask in the glory of how cool linked lists are!
Lists for all shapes and sizes
Even though the parts of a linked list don’t change, the way that we structure our linked lists can be quite different. Like most things in software, depending on the problem that we’re trying to solve, one type of linked lists might be a better tool for the job than another.
Singly linked lists are the simplest type of linked list, based solely on the fact that they only go in one direction. There is a single track that we can traverse the list in; we start at the head node, and traverse from the root until the last node, which will end at an empty null value.
But just as a node can reference its subsequent neighbor node, it can also have a reference pointer to its preceding node, too! This is what we call a doubly linked list, because there are two references contained within each node: a reference to the next node, as well as the previous node. This can be helpful if we wanted to be able to traverse our data structure not just in a single track or direction, but also backwards, too.
For example, if we wanted to be able to hop between one node and the node previous without having to go back to the very beginning of the list, a doubly linked list would be a better data structure than a singly linked list. However, everything requires space and memory, so if our node had to store two reference pointers instead of just one, that would be another thing to consider.
Different types of linked lists
A circular linked list is a little odd in that it doesn’t end with a node pointing to a null value. Instead, it has a node that acts as the tail of the list (rather than the conventional head node), and the node after the tail node is the beginning of the list. This organization structure makes it really easy to add something to the end of the list, because you can begin traversing it at the tail node, as the first element and last element point to one another. Circular linked lists can start to get really crazy because we can turn both a singly linked list and a doubly linked list into a circular linked list!
But no matter how complicated a linked list is, if we can remember the fundamentals of a node and how it works and how the different pointer references in our list are structured, there’s no linked list we can’t tackle!
Next week, in part 2 of this series, we’ll sink our teeth into the space time complexity of linked lists, and how they compare to their cousin, the array. I promise that it’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds!
Resources
If you think linked lists are super cool, check out these helpful resources. | https://medium.com/basecs/whats-a-linked-list-anyway-part-1-d8b7e6508b9d | ['Vaidehi Joshi'] | 2017-05-25 21:34:16.060000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Data Structures', 'Programming', 'Tech', 'Computer Science'] |
What happens in Vegas? | Follows you to South Carolina.
Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash
There is a lot of interesting data to look back on from Iowa and New Hampshire.
We will dive deeper soon…
For now, at a high level:
— Monitoring search interest in Iowa and New Hampshire surfaced candidate momentum.
—In some cases, analyzing the positive/negative sentiment split in online discussion tracked with candidate “upward mobility potential” (positive sentiment lean) and also registered attacks as a candidate’s profile increased (negative sentiment jump).
For instance, leading up to Iowa, Buttigieg maintained a high “positive to negative” sentiment split and was very competitive with Bernie in search interest.
Biden showed the exact opposite.
This type of data tracked well ahead of polling, which showed Biden in 2nd all the way up to caucus day, and informed an accurate guess of Election Day results.
Revisiting RCP IA Averages:
LSSS: Internal Pre-IA Analysis and Predictions:
“1st Preference: 1.) Bernie, 2.) Warren, 3.) Buttigieg, 4.) Biden, 5.) Klobuchar, 6.) Yang, 7.) Steyer 2nd Preference: 1.) Bernie, 2.) Buttigieg, 3.) Warren, 4.) Biden Enjoy the night, friends.”
Looking at data from search trends and sentiment helped inform our guess that Biden would fall flat and Buttigieg would over perform. We correctly guessed the raw vote rank.
I say “guess” because look, I get it, this was not based on actual mathematical/statistical analysis. We looked at polling, monitored real-time trends, and mixed it all together with some good old fashioned political/campaign acumen.
In this case at least, our simple recipe resulted in a delicious bowl of “we were right” soup.
From IA to NH
Search trends tracked in-line with what you would expect moving from Iowa to New Hampshire — Buttigieg gained momentum, Biden and Warren faded, and Klobuchar came on strong.
In the end, Klobuchar’s late surge (which also showed up in our analysis) probably kept Buttigieg from besting Bernie.
These posts below wrap up our New Hampshire commentary nicely:
— In the end, we feasted once again on prediction glory:
“New Hampshire: Very close #1 and #2 respectively — Sanders and Buttigieg — if Buttigieg squeaks a win it again points to his strong ground game (which is a strong sign going into Nevada). #3 Klobuchar rises #4 Warren barely tops #5 Biden who has a lot more than 99 problems.”
— And related to Klobuchar, we noted: | https://medium.com/listening-for-secrets-searching-for-sounds/what-happens-in-vegas-2ebba68beb2 | ['Adam Meldrum'] | 2020-02-16 13:21:38.591000+00:00 | ['Democratic Primary', 'Nevada Caucus', 'South Carolina Primary', 'Google Trends', 'Sentiment Analysis'] |
The Purpose to Your Purpose is Your Actual Purpose | Did I just spin you around in circles and let go with you in a dizzy circling for answers? Maybe because it is your purpose to find your own way.
“The purpose of life is a life of purpose.” -Robert Byrne
You have heard it. I have heard it. Any inspirational speaker ever goes to the crowd: “Live towards your passion.” Yes, Batman certainly lived out his “passion” of beating up the criminally ill in Gotham as a passion to give the city a sense of justice. Or perhaps Spider-man’s passion is to actually be web shooting camera man, the best in all of New York City.
We never know exactly where passion leads us. Perhaps aimlessly around in a forest while on a trip from the best shrooms around. I never been on a trip like this before, anyone who has can comment about it and let me know.
When you wake up in the morning and feel sure of yourself; you are different and unique. The level of focus that comes with this feeling is immeasurable when considering anything else.
Now, you are wondering how do you find purpose? Is there a step by step guide or certain habits that you need to put in place to make it happen? Should I spend a day in complete solitude and allow thoughts to come in and out. Then vent them out to come to an answer.
Well, yes you can give a step by step guide to those who feel good with a procedural mindset for all of my mathematical and logical folks out there. Then there is habits and being habitual with what you put in place by holding yourself accountable from this point onward. Be creative with your habits by having them connect to something you already enjoy. Finally, let me not forget solitude where someone can view from the inward on out. Self-reflection allows us to see our behaviors and how they affect our choices.
All of those have been written in nauseam and I do not plan on restating what you already heard and just read it worded differently. But I would give you one principle that works for me.
Yes, only one principle you can take with you to find purpose within your strengths by using this site to help guide you: https://www.viacharacter.org/survey/account/register.
I came across this website and survey on Coursera called The Science of Wellbeing. (If you haven’t taken the course on there with Yale Professor Laurie Santos then I highly suggest you give it a go!)
The deeper question I ask you is: Does your purpose align with your strengths or does your strengths against your purpose?
Finding the answer to this question I hope will give you more answers than they do questions. But if you got more questions for yourself than work still needs to be done.
I believe in you, now believe in yourself and get it done.
As the wise Buddha once said, “You yourself as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
Let this marinate for a bit before going into an inception like dig inside of your brain. How is it simmering now? Did it come to a boil yet? Is it ready to be unveiled?
Great, this is the time to follow some steps, which are:
Grab a pen Grab your journal (if you do not have a journal get one before this practice) Write down the first five thoughts you have Share it with a close friend Give them the same set of steps Rinse and repeat
What is now occurring with this process? Spreading of information and meaningful conversation is starting to accumulate. This is how purpose is built with community of individuals to go through the process with another like minded individual.
Let me know how this goes in the comment section what you and your friend thought. I would be interested to know.
In the end, it all comes down to finding the right sign pointing to your purpose and it can be right in front of you the whole time. Keep going, you got this! | https://medium.com/@lylegrossi/the-purpose-to-your-purpose-is-your-actual-purpose-9db2d9790bf4 | ['Lyle Grossi'] | 2021-01-11 22:54:19.631000+00:00 | ['Connection', 'Wisdom', 'Self Reflection', 'Purpose Of Life', 'Innovation'] |
Do Motivational Quotes Work? | Several articles were on the list but let me show you a couple of them. One feature is written by Amy Morin and another from Stefan Palios.
Amy Morin is a psychotherapist. In her article, she mentioned vision boards do more harm than good. She expressed that focusing on the goal instead of paying attention to the means of achieving that goal increases your chances of failure.
She has a point. Motivation on paper defeats its purpose of inspiring you if you don’t follow the necessary steps to reach your life goals.
If we lived in a fantasy world, then perhaps these goals will emerge with the swish of a magic wand. Why don’t we add a little hand choreography along with incantation to give it a final touch?
Reality check.
Stefan Palios, on the other hand, explained a case for, and against, motivational quotes in his article. He cited three uses for motivational quotes. They are:
To inspire action
To offer a view into the possibility
To show a different perspective
These cases detail my experience with motivational quotes. As I mentioned earlier, they give me a nudge. Often, it begins with the nudge and ends with procrastination.
Back to Stefan, he added three cases against motivational quotes. And they are:
They are useless and dull
They are annoying
They offer no context
Overused statements can be annoying and dull. Frequent exposure to the same quote creates a lower emotional impact on the person exposed to it.
For example, I’ve seen the quote “Too blessed to be stressed” more times than I can blink in one minute. Now, my initial reaction is ‘No, not again’ whenever I see the line on a random day.
Are they useless? Not if they give me a needed nudge. Perhaps, useless when it’s not the quote I’m looking for as encouragement. We skim until we find the line we think we need.
Do quotes offer context?
Stefan gives the perfect example in his article mentioning the famous slogan/motivational quote “Just do it”.
There can be plenty of interpretations for ‘it’. Hopefully ‘it’ doesn’t point to any misdeed. You don’t want to say ‘Just do it’ to someone who plans to rob a bank. Nope. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/do-motivational-quotes-work-d10dab9a3a08 | [] | 2020-12-04 02:52:47.221000+00:00 | ['Goal Setting', 'Self Improvement', 'Self-awareness', 'Motivation', 'Self Help'] |
The iRobot Roomba 981 vacuum is just $400 today (an all-time low) | Roombas are known for easy-peasy home cleaning, with their robotic vacuuming feeling part futuristic, part super convenient, and part just plain awesome. But they can also carry sky-high price tags. Today on Amazon, however, you can get the iRobot Roomba 981 for $400Remove non-product link, down from a list price of $589 and the cheapest price we’ve seen it.
This robot vacuum’s power-lifting suction increases automatically when it moves onto carpet, ensuring a deep clean no matter which surface type it’s cleaning. Floor-tracking sensors allow it to find its way around your home and clean in neat rows, while Dirt Detect sensors allow for a deeper clean in high-traffic areas. If you have pets, dual multi-surface rubber brushes will come in handy, as they won’t get tangled up with pet hair, and the vacuum’s high-efficiency filter will capture 99% of pet allergens, according to Roomba. In addition, this Roomba can learn schedules and connect to Google Assistant and Alexa, so you can control it with just your voice.
This robot vacuum averages 4.5 stars out of 5 across more than 600 user ratings on Amazon.
[ Today’s deal: iRobot Roomba 981 for $400Remove non-product link. ]
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@alisa22953538/the-irobot-roomba-981-vacuum-is-just-400-today-an-all-time-low-4369b2835936 | [] | 2020-11-23 10:45:03.697000+00:00 | ['Security Cameras', 'Cord', 'Streaming', 'Services'] |
I did a Design Hackathon. Here are my tips for other newbies | UX Result’s tweet from a challenge winner
Last weekend I did a hackathon with a few friends from my Flatiron design bootcamp. Our school emails out events and this one through UX result caught our attention. If you’re not familiar with hackathons they are basically events where you are working in teams to solve some sort of prompted problem over a given period of time. They can be coding hackathons, design hackathons, etc.
This was the first time for everyone on my team. There are a few things I wish I would’ve known going in.
1. Read all of the info
All of the challenges, Q&As, submission info, etc. Read it all and learn it all. You do not want any surprises you could have better prepared for while you are working under pressure.
2. Follow a process
Even if time is short, you should still follow some sort of framework to get the end result. In this instance, we still needed to utilize design thinking and empathize with our users to come up with solutions that can be tested and improved.
Judges also are looking for this in presentations. A team that had a clear process and executed on their goals will be in a much better position than one that threw a lot together.
3. Choose teams wisely
You will be working under pressure. Choose people that you get along with and can work with. It’s a waste of everyone’s time if you spend any of it arguing or working through cooperation issues Luckily my team was fantastic and we were able to split up the work, use our strengths, and come up with something we are proud of.
4. Schedule ahead of time as much as you can
This is kind of going back to the tip about following a process. We were not expecting to conduct usability tests the day-of (also read the Q&A) so we had to reach out last-minute to some friends. We lucked out because we knew a lot of people that fit our persona and didn’t have weekend plans. In the future, I would have planned this much more in advance.
5. Take breaks
Our only breaks from 10:00 AM-8:15 PM were 15 minutes at lunch and five minutes prior to recording our presentation. We made the decision to power through, but in hindsight, more breaks would have been nice. I’m a fan of the two-minute dance break to get active and refresh blood flow roughly every hour. Take more frequent breaks if you can, it’ll only help your product and keep the ideas flowing. | https://medium.com/@hayley-smith/i-did-a-design-hackathon-here-are-my-tips-for-other-newbies-98d550bc6e06 | ['Hayley Smith'] | 2020-12-14 00:14:00.188000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Hackathons', 'Ux Bootcamp', 'UX', 'Ux Newbie'] |
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