title
stringlengths 1
200
⌀ | text
stringlengths 10
100k
| url
stringlengths 32
885
| authors
stringlengths 2
392
| timestamp
stringlengths 19
32
⌀ | tags
stringlengths 6
263
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Top 31 Tableau Interview Questions asked in recent Tableau Interviews | Recently I faced interviews for tableau developer and reporting analyst in Accenture, Marsh Mclennan, General Mills, BNP Paribas, Unifrax, TCS, Deloitte, and Prudential.
They had asked the below questions in all interviews. Sometimes they are just asking about your project and responsibilities and if they found you from the same working conditions like domain, technology then they will not ask further questions.
But if there are many rounds like a basic technical interview, Advanced technical Interview then there are more chances to ask the below questions.
So be prepared for the Tableau technical round Interview questions just by overviewing the below questions.
Just read the below questions and try to answer them yourself then you will definitely crack your interview. Check below the list of Tableau Interviews I had faced in my interviews.
You can take the help of my recent blog on medium.com to answer these questions:
Also check my youtube video for some more questions well explained and impressive answers by industry experts:
Tableau Interview questions asked in recent interviews:
Explain your day-to-day life activities in the company you are working in. Answer What are the projects you worked on and what are your responsibilities and role? Answer What are the KPIs you have defined in your dashboard? Answer Are you working in a team or an individual contributor? What are the parameters? Explain any case where you have used parameters in your project? What are the types of filters in tableau? What is a context filter? What is the difference between parameters and filters? What is the difference between group and set in tableau? What is an extract? Difference between Live and Extract database connection. What are the advanced charts you worked on? What is the difference between dimensions and measures? What is LOD? Explain with examples. Can you explain any issue or biggest problem you have faced while working on a project and how you approach that problem? Why do you want to do your career in Tableau or reporting or visualization? How to optimize the performance of the dashboard in tableau? How are you publishing reports to clients? Have you ever done testing of your reports? What are the different databases you have used? If you are using SQL then please prepare for some basic queries like clauses, where, select, having, group by, order by, sort by, aggregation functions, etc What are the new features in Tableau's latest version? What are the action filters in tableau? How will you use parameters with a set? What is the difference between joining and blending? What are the different types of joins used in tableau? When to use cross-database join? What is the difference between data blending and cross-database join in Tableau? What is custom SQL in Tableau? What is scheduled refresh and incremental refresh?
This is a rare question interviewer may ask- How is tableau server migration done from on-premises computers to VM in the cloud? Have you done it at all? For answer click here.
These questions are asked in recent interviews I faced.
Please follow me for more information and comment if you need more from me.
Happy Learning!!
Thank You! | https://medium.com/@truptiranjan11/tableau-interview-questions-asked-in-recent-tableau-interviews-488ade964baa | ['Trupti Sudrik'] | 2021-02-17 14:31:40.135000+00:00 | ['Interview Questions', 'Data Visualization', 'Tableau Real Time Cases', 'Tableau Interview', 'Tableau'] |
Time to Act Iowa | We are still in the Paris Climate Agreement, we may not be in officially but President-elect Joe Biden has promised to enter into the Paris Climate Agreement along with other sweeping climate action measures. We are still in the Paris Climate Agreement, not because we want to be but because we have to be in the international accord. Every year Iowa gets hotter and hotter and to mitigate these heatwave trends it’s going to take an international agreement. Currently much of Iowa is under drought conditions and we desperately need increased precipitation that will help us bank up water for soil moisture. Most of Iowa is running out of time to reverse drought conditions & we are moving into months that are typically drier. Iowa is not alone in climate change fueled disasters.
It’s been a year of devastating hurricanes and wildfires and record breaking temperatures, all with a mountain of evidence based science that it is clear climate change is here and threatening our livelihoods. The continued trend of extreme weather is devastating our health, environment and our economy. The last four years has been nothing but rollback after rollback by the Trump administration and the EPA have only made matters worse. We cannot continue our current course of inaction. Iowa needs to be at the table in the Paris Climate Agreement and Senator Grassley needs to bring his focus on combating climate change through international agreements. Think Iowa act global. | https://medium.com/@tylergranger77climatechange/time-to-act-iowa-45a79a5ed7da | [] | 2020-12-03 19:58:13.393000+00:00 | ['Paris Climate Agreement', 'Climate Action', 'Drought', 'Iowa', 'Climate Change'] |
How to Neutralize the Poison of Anger in Relationships | Being in love is far more than just a good feeling, when two people love each other they are on a rollercoaster ride of different emotions and anger is one of them. When you are in a relationship, there are situations when two people cannot agree on some matters. Such words are said that later people have regrets about, but sometimes people lament the poison they are capable of spitting out.
Are you finding it difficult to cope with the intense anger of your partner? You are not alone as a great deal of the couples face such circumstances where one partner has issues with anger management while the other also has to undergo undesirable circumstances. Unfortunately, it usually doesn’t end well as both of the individuals keep argue over things that are not a cause and hence, don’t see the real problems.
Here are things you should consider before cutting the ties that anger can be a symptom of a mental condition. Intermittent impulsive disorder (IED) is a condition that causes unwarranted anger with impulsivity and outbursts — and individuals with increased anger need assistance and support. Anger can cause immense damage to the relationships if it is not controlled promptly.
For every negative emotion, there is always a source associated with it. So if you feel that your partner is expressing strong emotions — try to find out the source, the more you know your partner, the more you will be prepared to deal with your partner’s anger.
You need to ask yourself some questions to get you to the root of what really happens to your partner, which makes his anger explode. These questions (or others) may lead you to help your partner in suppressing his aggression and motivate him/her to find a solution and be better. Some questions can be:
Who or what makes him feel angry?
Do I give others power over my own emotions?
What things or actions directly affect how he feels?
Photo by Imam Muhaimin on Unsplash
Learn for example how to handle your partner’s hatred or anger. You can talk to them and guide them to do meditation, take professional advice to give him daily strategies, or become a more spiritual being. You can help him to learn that the power of change resides in them and that they are able to be better — to do better.
In a relationship, chances to indulging in arguments and get angry arise many times a day, so to avoid the accumulation of bad feelings you have to deal with your partner’s anger as soon as it begins to form in his mind. Similarly, you must strive to remove clutter from your mind as soon as it appears to disturb your relationship because if you allow it to accumulate, it will become increasingly difficult to deal with.
A relationship in which there are many frictions and conflicts of interest is also an unprecedented opportunity to diminish our self-esteem and selfishness, which are the true sources of many of a couple’s problems. If you can learn to be more patient and understand, above all, that your partner does not intend, much less to hurt you, it will be easier to support him and control the feelings of anger at the time of argument.
Once you will learn to accept your partner (or friends, family, etc.), you will stop considering them as the root of many of your problems and support them. In addition, if you are able to act with acceptance and patience, you will be able to help your partner to better overcome their anger. Feeling accepted is very different from feeling judged. When feeling judged, a person will automatically respond with negative feelings: they will become defensive, they will start to judge too, or they will become depressed. But if they feel loved and positively valued, they will relax and all of their positive qualities will emerge more easily.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
And really this is the key. People are shown to perform dramatically better when they feel valued and motivated in their workplace. The same is true in personal relationships. Patience, tolerance, and generosity are certain concepts that will improve the quality of their relationship, while anger and resentment deteriorate the relation. And although conflicts are inevitable in coexistence, they can be resolved without being carried away by anger.
As has been observed, it seems that proper anger management is essential to prevent a series of consequences that can compromise both physical and psychological health. And if you cannot find any way to manage their anger, you can take professional help from a psychologist to make things better. | https://medium.com/psychologically/how-to-neutralize-the-poison-of-anger-in-relationships-8fe973f365cb | ['Sadia Awan'] | 2020-11-30 13:34:30.357000+00:00 | ['Tackling Toxics', 'Partners', 'Relationships', 'Family Support', 'Anger Management'] |
Arlo and Alarm.com bow similar but different touchless video doorbells | Arlo and Alarm.com bow similar but different touchless video doorbells Alex Jan 16·3 min read
Don’t want anyone touching your doorbell in the age of COVID-19? We don’t blame you, and now two smart home companies—Arlo and Alarm.com—have arrived at this year’s virtual CES with their own touchless video doorbells.
While the Alarm.com Touchless Video Doorbell might, at first glance, look like a standard smart doorbell, complete with an oval design and a camera lens, a telltale “don’t touch!” icon makes it clear that you won’t need to press any buttons.
Alarm.com The Alarm.com Touchless Video Doorbell has a telltale “don’t touch!” icon stamped on its shell.
Instead, visitors must stand on a doormat placed at a discreet distance from the doorbell (“Stand on mat to ring doorbell,” the doormat helpfully reads) while the doorbell’s person detection features will automatically ring the indoor chime, send an alert to your phone, and begin recording a video clip.
[ Further reading: The best video doorbells ]Alarm.com’s Touchless Video Doorbell also provides 1080p HDR video resolution, a vertical 150-degree field of vision, two-way audio, infrared night vision, and an onboard heater to keep the doorbell warm in cold conditions.
Arlo’s Touchless Video DoorbellMeanwhile, smart security manufacturer Arlo has its own Touchless Video Doorbell in the pipeline for 2021. Rather than having a visitor stand on a doormet, Arlo’s touchless doorbell uses a proximity sensor to detect someone approaching the doorstep. Once the doorbell spots a visitor, it will sound a chime and shine a light to let the person know that the doorbell has been rung.
Arlo has yet to release more details about its Touchless Video Doorbell (indeed, we don’t even have a picture yet), but the new device did manage to nab a 2021 CES Innovation Award.
Arlo already has a couple of other video doorbells in its lineup, including wired and wireless versions. Both of those doorbells support a maximum 1536 x 1536 video resolution, a 180-degree viewing angle, HDR and night vision, two-way audio, and a built-in siren.
Arlo Essential Indoor cameraIn addition to its Touchless Video Doorbell, Arlo also announced a new indoor camera with a privacy shield that blocks the lens when the camera is disarmed.
Arlo The Arlo Essential Indoor camera has a privacy shiend that’s automatically engaged whenever the camera is disarmed.
The Essentials Indoor camera will stop recording and turn off motion and audio detection when its privacy shield is engaged. When the camera is switched back to “armed” mode (which can be done manually via the Arlo mobile app), it disengages the privacy shield and resumes recording and motion detection.
As with its Touchless Video Doorbell, Arlo has yet to reveal more details about the Essentials Indoor camera, which (like the doorbell) won a CES Innovation Award. Conceptually, the camera sound like the Kangaroo Privacy Camera, which has an opaque lens that turns clear when it’s charged by an electrical field, and the Cync Indoor Camera that GE Lighting announced ahead of CES.
This story, "Arlo and Alarm.com bow similar but different touchless video doorbells" was originally published by Playlist.
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/@alex15979692/arlo-and-alarm-com-bow-similar-but-different-touchless-video-doorbells-a2c48ad2291d | [] | 2021-01-16 03:17:47.254000+00:00 | ['Home Tech', 'Chromecast'] |
If the conversation is only about consent, what do we do with the politics of desire? | If the conversation is only about consent, what do we do with the politics of desire? Schwartz Media Sep 9·12 min read
By Bri Lee in The Monthly
Philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s essays consider incels, consent and sexual discrimination
Amia Srinivasan © Cian Oba-Smith
When 22-year-old Elliot Rodger was part-way through his California killing spree on May 23, 2014, he took a break to go to Starbucks, order a coffee, upload a video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution” to his YouTube channel, and email a 107,000-word document titled “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger” to a number of people, including his parents and therapist. Then he continued killing before dying by suicide. By the end of the night, six people — plus Rodger himself — were dead, and 14 were seriously injured.
The document he sent off has come to be referred to as his “manifesto” and, together with the video, provided the world with something that many considered to be the extreme but natural endpoint of rape culture. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague published an opinion piece by sociologist Alex DiBranco describing the killings as an act of “male supremacist terrorism”. Rodger described himself as an “incel”, meaning he was “involuntarily celibate”. I envy you if you’ve not yet encountered this self-defining subculture of men who mostly congregate online to aggressively complain about the injustice of women depriving them of sex. In his manifesto, Rodger describes a privileged and happy childhood, and then explains: “All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.” When we read about Rodger wanting to “punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex”, what many of us heard was textbook male entitlement and misogyny dialled up to 11.
In 2018, philosopher Amia Srinivasan published an essay in the London Review of Books titled “The Right to Sex” (now titled “Does anyone have the right to sex?” online). It won several awards and catapulted Srinivasan from famous-in-Oxford to famous-in-the-writing-world. I found it revelatory. In a sea of hot takes responding to Rodger’s words and actions with understandably righteous outrage, Srinivasan’s approach was one of firm and serious probing. One of the core questions it asks is: if nobody is entitled to sex, and individual choice is the paramount consideration for each sexual interaction, how do we make sense of the fact that some people are discriminated against to the extent that they are denied affection and intimacy? What is the middle zone in which we grapple with how our preferences are shaped by social and cultural forces? If the conversation is only about consent, what do we do with the politics of desire?
Her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, is a collection of six essays, including an edited version of that excellent piece from 2018. Srinivasan went from undergrad at Yale to a Rhodes Scholarship, and then won one of the most competitive and prestigious fellowships at All Souls College, at Oxford. In 2020, when aged just 35, she took up a tenured position there as Chichele professor of social and political theory. She has described The Right to Sex as “a set of feminist essays — on desire, power, porn, freedom, capitalism, carceralism, campus sex — that reaches back to an older feminist tradition while trying to say something new”. The claim to the former is a slam dunk — Srinivasan’s grasp on the arguments and movements of her forebears is spectacular. Her ability to explain complex concepts and issues simply makes the reader’s job both easy and enjoyable. But this is unsurprising. What I’m more interested in is whether Srinivasan manages the latter — what “new” things is she saying?
Much of Rodger’s obsession about the hierarchy of sexual appeal was racially based and he himself was biracial. Srinivasan describes him as “half white and half Malaysian Chinese”. Something that made him exceptionally angry was the example he gave of a “white girl” being intimate with a “black boy” rather than him: “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves.” Rodger targeted the “hottest sorority” of the college near him. The word “blonde” appears in his manifesto 62 times.
Srinivasan’s willingness and ability to examine what we mean by “fuckability” is crucial. It’s a term most prominent in the dating app arena but which has undeniably spread into wider culture, describing who is and isn’t considered sexually desirable: “NO DICKS, NO FEMS, NO FATS, NO BLACKS, NO ARABS, NO RICE NO SPICE”, et cetera. Srinivasan cites an example from the web series What the Flip?, in which an East-Asian man and a Caucasian man swap profiles on the queer dating app Grindr to see whether it affects who responds to them, and “the results are predictably grim”. How can groups of people who have been historically excluded from the “fuckable” category, on the basis of an aspect of their identity, draw attention to the prejudice they face without accusing people of “depriving” them of sex? If our conversations about sex being “okay” or “not okay” only extend to the question of consent, we are ignoring some crucial context.
Another recent nonfiction release relevant to these questions is Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel. The British academic questions our reliance on consent as the solution to the problem of sexual violence and unwanted/painful/bad sex. It’s unfair and an oversimplification to tell women they must be better at communicating what they do and don’t want. It keeps women in the position of sexual gatekeeper, forcing them to achieve some artificial standard of self-knowledge and confidence before they are allowed to engage in sexual activity. As well as this, women typically get punished for expressing their sexual desires. In terms of the progression of the consent movement, “no means no” definitely had its limitations, but it would be a mistake to think “yes means yes” will solve all our problems too. Consent is “being asked to bear too great a burden,” Angel says, “to address problems it is not equipped to resolve”.
Srinivasan leverages the weight of the philosophical and academic tradition against contemporary culture’s treatment of consent as the central ethical consideration. She also frequently draws on class analysis:
Sex is no longer morally problematic or unproblematic: it is instead merely wanted or unwanted. In this sense, the norms of sex are like the norms of capitalist free exchange. What matters is not what conditions give rise to the dynamics of supply and demand — why some people need to sell their labour while others buy it — but only that both buyer and seller have agreed to the transfer.
She acknowledges that “generations of feminists and gay and lesbian activists have fought hard to free sex from shame, stigma, coercion, abuse, and unwanted pain”, but is resolutely sceptical: “it would be disingenuous to make nothing of the convergence, however unintentional, between sex positivity and liberalism in their shared reluctance to interrogate the formation of our desires.”
One risk (of many, which the author acknowledges) in even posing questions like this is their potential to undermine the “born this way” rhetoric that has been so crucial to the assertion of queer and transgender rights. What do we do, for example, with the fact that many people express an absolute refusal to be intimate with transgender people, claiming not to desire them as sexual partners, and that this is undeniably connected to the more widespread prejudice and hatred the trans community faces in society and life? We cannot, of course, tell people whom they should want to have sex with. When the power to dictate desire is exercised, it usually causes terrible harm. Forced marriage, gay conversion therapy and many other interventions have proven this (with the exception of a near-universal prohibition on paedophilia). The closest thing Srinivasan gives us to a “conclusion” to this essay, and the “ambivalent space” it asks us to think within, is an encouragement to try to be more creative with our desires, to let ourselves be surprised by what might happen if we try harder to switch off the “fuckability” filters all around us.
What follows the “Right to Sex” essay in the book is a “Coda” of 85 numbered segments, some single sentences, some long paragraphs, that variously add to the original essay or address other people’s responses to it. This includes Srinivasan unnecessarily stooping to defend her position against people on Twitter who had wilfully misinterpreted (or perhaps not even read) the original essay. It’s a hit-and-miss format, although she does include one “arresting email” from “a man in Sydney — a multicultural city in a country notorious for its racism”. Born in Sri Lanka and adopted by white parents, he was “profoundly lonely”, as were his other Asian friends, and he gave many examples of the prejudice they faced when dating: “I certainly don’t feel the right to Sex, nor do I feel the right to Love. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. I suppose I have the right to feel hurt.” Examples such as this, as well as things Srinivasan’s students and friends tell her, lend an intimate and emotional counterpoint to the intellectual rigour in the rest of the work.
In the preface, Srinivasan writes that some of the essays are “adamant” while others are “ambivalent”, warning the reader that they “do not offer a home”. She maintains that a critical component of the original idea of intersectional feminism, which has been lost in its adoption by the mainstream, is that “a truly inclusionary politics is an uncomfortable, unsafe politics”. Inevitably when feminists try to unite under a single banner, the collateral damage is any kind of identity or experience that might “trouble the domestic idyll”. In other words: a feminism that only focuses on the common experiences of women (sex) and excludes the others (ability, race et cetera) will be shit.
The book’s opening essay, “The Conspiracy Against Men” will be received with gratitude and relief by people who are constantly having to explain to people that the #MeToo movement isn’t unfairly ruining men’s lives. Its insights into racist policing are also obviously pertinent to the Australian context:
Well-off white men instinctively and correctly trust that the legal justice system will take care of them: will not plant drugs on them, will not gun them down and later claim to have seen a weapon, will not harass them for walking in a neighbourhood where they “don’t belong”, will give them a pass for carrying that gram of cocaine or bag of weed. But in the case of rape, well-off white men worry that the growing demand that women be believed will cut against their right to be shielded from the prejudices of the law.
Srinivasan eviscerates the letter US college student Brock Turner’s father wrote for his son’s sentencing for three counts of sexual assault — “this is the way you talk about a golden retriever, not an adult human” — and is similarly scathing of those who leant their weight and support to Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. These are easy targets, but drawing on examples from New Delhi to New York, Srinivasan is also willing to wade into the difficult waters of “Believe women” being a blunt tool: believe which women and their allegations against which men?
In this essay we are also asked, in the context of how much terrible sex exists that isn’t necessarily assault, “How do we formulate a regulation that prohibits the sort of sex that is produced by patriarchy?” Srinivasan suggests the answer to this question is that “the law is simply the wrong tool for the job”.
It is interesting, then, that the essay on carceral feminism, “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism” appears last, when it provides such a valuable flow-on from the opening work. “The problem,” Srinivasan writes, about turning to the coercive power of the police, courts and prisons to achieve gender justice, “is that carceral ‘solutions’ tend to make things worse for the women who are already worst off.” For anyone seeking to understand “what to do with the rapists” if we “get rid of the cops”, this essay is a fantastic explainer of the historical background and modern-day iterations of abolitionist thinking.
In the Australian context this debate is happening right now, and with huge consequences: most states and territories are on the path to criminalising coercive control as a way of responding to domestic and family abuse. Many voices from marginalised communities — in particular Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics and activists — argue that more police and more laws isn’t the way forward. Certain groups of women are particularly susceptible to gendered violence, and they are at risk due to poverty and racism as much as sexism, so more cops will mean more arrests, often of women, and the removal of people from their communities. In Australia it seems much easier to pass new laws making things illegal than it is to get the police to commit to anti-racism or anti-sexism training and reform programs. In a country of cashless debit cards, working towards fewer police and more holistic support systems — moving towards self-determination — is made all the more difficult by carceral political movements with “progressive” credentials. As Srinivasan warns, with ample historical examples, “Once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will mow down.”
Elsewhere in the carceral essay, she exhumes the age-old debate about sex work. There is a large contingent of feminists who believe that sex work is inherently anti-feminist. There is a wealth of evidence proving that criminalising the worker or client in any way, to any degree, makes it more dangerous for the sex workers themselves. Srinivasan suggests that in their desire to “punish men”, people who want to criminalise sex work end up punishing women, saying it comes down to “the choice between making life better for the women who sell sex now, and bringing into existence a world in which sex is no longer bought and sold”. Are we still limited to this dichotomy? A utopian vision not on offer here is one in which sex work is legal, safe and not particularly gendered. That would be a more interesting thought experiment: what do we know about men who do sex work, and is it safe and lucrative, and how do the feminist texts explain this? And do people want to “punish” women who purchase sex? If we have debunked the dumb idea that “men want sex more than women”, what does a future look like in which brothels are gender-neutral?
A sense that emerges gradually through The Right to Sex is that Srinivasan is reticent to make explicit recommendations. This is both its strength and its weakness. In an essay reviewing a book about “effective altruism” for the London Review of Books in 2015, Srinivasan wrote, “Philosophers may talk about justice or rights, but they don’t often try to reshape the world according to their ideals. Maybe that’s for the best.” The philosopher, in other words, is not necessarily an activist. Fair enough. Srinivasan is a phenomenal philosopher, but while she has written elsewhere about joining strikes for employment conditions, she appears more wary of stepping into the role of activist in the gender politics arena. It seemed a little jarring, though, when she cites Angela Davis’s abolitionist writings from 1971 when Davis was “in a Martin County jail awaiting trial on charges of helping to arm black activists”; Davis was both activist and philosopher. The opening lines of The Right to Sex are: “Feminism is not a philosophy, or a theory, or even a point of view. It is a political movement to transform the world beyond recognition.” Throughout these essays the author cites the manifestos and demands of various collectives and conferences through decades and across continents.
Perhaps there is a risk of being labelled didactic if an author-philosopher makes concrete suggestions for change, but Srinivasan’s essay “On Not Sleeping With Your Students” makes various compelling and clear arguments that would support a blanket ban on teacher–student sexual relations, then stops short of saying “they must be banned and this is how”. As a collection of essays this book is strong: entertaining, enraging, enlightening, all of it. The author is under no obligation to offer pragmatic solutions, but I wish she would.
What feels frustrating to both reader and author (Srinivasan comments on “how much was left unchanged” after the sexual revolution, for example) is the sheer volume of literature being released, year upon year, that promises to lead us to better understandings about the problems of sex and power, without seeming to make much of a difference to the way real, actual human beings out in the world live. So often I close the final page of a new release and think, Okay, so what do we do? We need to find the right words to name our problems, yes, and to imagine a utopia in order to take steps towards it, sure, but what are the steps?
Perhaps, then, the strength of work like this is the lighting of a fire in the belly, the continuation of a difficult and nuanced conversation that is too often subject to the bait and switch of corporate, white feminism. Srinivasan’s essays deepen our appreciation of the historical connection between anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal action. They also confirm much of what makes me uncomfortable about carceral responses to gendered and sexual violence, and remind me that “consent” is a great answer but not to every question. Perhaps, then, it’s up to us to start taking the steps. My explicit recommendation, for what it’s worth, is to begin by reading this book. | https://medium.com/the-monthly/if-the-conversation-is-only-about-consent-what-do-we-do-with-the-politics-of-desire-880060a703f | ['Schwartz Media'] | 2021-09-09 04:02:27.077000+00:00 | ['Desire', 'Incel', 'Consent', 'Sex Discrimination', 'Sex'] |
Livebook-driven development | What is Livebook?
Livebook is a notebook for writing Elixir and Markdown in an interactive way. We can evaluate Elixir code blocks and see the results immediately.
There are several methods to run Livebook, I choose the escript way.
> livebook server
[Livebook] Application running at > mix escript.install hex livebook> livebook server[Livebook] Application running at http://localhost:8080/?token=xxxxx
Livebook is running now! Just open it in a browser. Click the New Notebook button and start to write Elixir. With Elixir 1.12, you get the ability to run libraries after Mix.install/1 them.
How does Livebook benefit the development process?
Before Livebook, I write code in IEx, which is a REPL. It has some helpers to ease the way to explore code, but in my opinion, Livebook exceeds in two factors:
Code history
In fact, IEx can enable code history by setting export ERL_AFLAGS="-kernel shell_history enabled" in the shell profile file. You can also search the IEx code history with Ctrl-r and apply it. But as Livebook is essentially a notebook, you can see all texts and evaluation results without the need to set anything.
Visualization
Livebook has a clean UI. You can write documents in Markdown and evaluate Elixir code blocks. It is more continuous, you can review every step of your thought by scrolling the page.
How to develop in Livebook?
Use ogp as an example.
First, I explore the idea with code blocks.
Install library to parse HTML with Mix.install/1 .
Explore floki with Open Graph protocol.
The variables in a code block can be referenced by blocks below it.
As going deeper, a simple parser comes out.
Then I create an Elixir project and run the Livebook in the project.
Create an Elixir project with mix new ogp --module OpenGraph --sup .
. Save the Livebook file in the project.
Move the parser into the project and run Livebook in Mix standalone mode.
Connection timed out occurs, to resolve it, run Livebook with a short name: livebook server --sname notebook . See https://github.com/elixir-nx/livebook/issues/275 for detail.
Set up Mix standalone mode again successfully, uses the module from the ogp project.
Conclusion
Developing in Livebook is really delightful. It helps to explore the code and writing documents. Give it a try and you will love it!
PS: The Livebook file created in this story can be found here: https://gist.github.com/goofansu/650ef0e67277915ab36aa1acc0defe60 | https://medium.com/@goofansu/livebook-driven-development-50f82e66fbff | ['Yejun Su'] | 2021-08-06 14:56:35.350000+00:00 | ['Open Graph', 'Development', 'Livebook', 'Elixir'] |
Hey, Helaine Olen You are SPOT ON with your perspectives. | Hey, Helaine Olen You are SPOT ON with your perspectives. I’m actually writing to you from a Starbucks in Las Vegas. So those coffee naysayers can kiss my ass. LOL!
Frankly, I believe that many people are spending on those latte’s and mocha’s because it’s at least something that they can afford. But to your larger point, I agree that it's not realistic for one to think that they can achieve financial freedom by dropping their latte habit. The real problem for most is not SPENDING but EARNINGS.
I see so many people struggling these days to earn a meaningful living. Many young folks, in particular, who were tricked into drinking the “let’s go to college and rack up student loans” Kool-Aid, now find themselves working multiple gig jobs just to make ends meet.
Again, great article my friend. I’ll be sure to spread the word about it.
One last point: Would love to have you on our Money Monday podcast if you are so inclined to join us. It’s a show that sprouted from questions my co-host and I had about money and how it actually works in the world. We’d love to have you join us. So please reach out to us when you can. https://whatismoneyproject.com/ | https://medium.com/@whatismoney/hey-helaine-olen-you-are-spot-on-with-your-perspectives-902583acf306 | ['What Is Money'] | 2019-04-12 20:02:34.045000+00:00 | ['Starbucks', 'Financial Freedom', 'Personal Finance', 'Money', 'Debt'] |
Using what I learned at Google to make New Year resolutions | Using what I learned at Google to make New Year resolutions
I stink at making New Year resolutions in general. Probably like most of us, I start the year with high principles that rarely translate into established habits. Within a week or two of the new year, I’ve slipped back into patterns that I know are unhealthy.
It turns out that big companies don’t make New Year resolutions. In my day job as a product manager at Google, my team focuses relentlessly not just on making plans but evaluating and adjusting those plans. And it turns out that this part is at least as important as the original goals: the process of revisiting them and making course corrections along the way is critical to a good outcome.
Using OKRs for personal planning
At Google, we use the OKR process: we set a high-level Objective and break it down into several measurable Key Results that will help us determine whether we’re succeeding at our objectives. Objectives are memorable, often aspirational, and typically describe the “what”. Key results are easily measurable, tangible evidence of progress towards those objectives.
Many people have written about the OKR process, but there are some important characteristics that lend themselves well to personal planning:
OKRs are easily measurable . You should be able to look at your list and easily identify how you’re doing against your goals. At Google, we score key results on a ten-point scale between 0.0 to 1.0; but the most important thing is that you can honestly evaluate your progress.
. You should be able to look at your list and easily identify how you’re doing against your goals. At Google, we score key results on a ten-point scale between 0.0 to 1.0; but the most important thing is that you can honestly evaluate your progress. By design, OKRs are ambitious , describing a world that we want to realize. At Google, we’re deeply suspicious of a team that scores 1.0 across the board: they have probably not set lofty enough goals. The idea is to challenge yourself, not describe the status quo.
, describing a world that we want to realize. At Google, we’re deeply suspicious of a team that scores 1.0 across the board: they have probably not set lofty enough goals. The idea is to challenge yourself, not describe the status quo. OKRs require prioritization . The act of writing them down requires selection: what are you choosing not to invest in? For a personal list of habits or goals, the process of writing them down has the same winnowing effect.
. The act of writing them down requires selection: what are you choosing not to invest in? For a personal list of habits or goals, the process of writing them down has the same winnowing effect. OKRs require regular re-evaluation. At Google, our team does a monthly review where we score our KRs. The process often drives new realizations: “we said this was important, but we’ve made no new progress” or “this turns out to not be as important as we thought”. For personal goals, this is also useful. As you learn, you may choose different goals, and that’s fine.
My OKRs for 2021
Here are the OKRs that I’ve come up with so far. I share these not as a model or starting point for others, but rather for the accountability that comes with being public about them.
I’m aware of how extraordinary my privileges are in life compared to 99% of the world, both in what I have and what choices I’m able to make. You’re welcome to roast me for my decadence and my white middle-aged male priorities, but I’m trying to be open and vulnerable here, in the spirit of this article about daring to be yourself.
So, in 2021, I plan to:
1. Give more, spend less
Categorize every expense in Lunch Money .
(Knowing what I’m spending is the first step to choosing how I spend. I’m a big fan of this new personal finance tool, because it provides a high-level picture of your spending without being too heavy on process.)
(Knowing what I’m spending is the first step to choosing how I spend. I’m a big fan of this new personal finance tool, because it provides a high-level picture of your spending without being too heavy on process.) Give $X to non-profits .
(I’m redacting the amount, but I have a specific number in my head. As a family, we’re trying to focus our giving on organizations that are locally-led (for example, Hope for Life, a grassroots organization that focuses on homelessness in Rwanda) and/or driven by local needs (for example, DonorsChoose and GiveDirectly).
. (I’m redacting the amount, but I have a specific number in my head. As a family, we’re trying to focus our giving on organizations that are locally-led (for example, Hope for Life, a grassroots organization that focuses on homelessness in Rwanda) and/or driven by local needs (for example, DonorsChoose and GiveDirectly). Reduce discretionary spending on physical goods by 25%.
(I want to break out of the privileged, American habit of buying things as a leisure activity. This may not be lofty enough of a goal, but I want to better appreciate what I have rather than dreaming of things I don’t have.)
2. Be healthier
Drink a liter of water per day.
(Yes, you should drink much more than this in total. But specifically, I want to drink more water during the day.)
(Yes, you should drink much more than this in total. But specifically, I want to drink more water during the day.) Turn the bedside light off before midnight 6 out of 7 days.
(Trying to set a measurable but realistic goal here!)
(Trying to set a measurable but realistic goal here!) Bring no electronic gadget to bed.
(I’m sure this is a factor in my regularly waking up at 3am at present.)
(I’m sure this is a factor in my regularly waking up at 3am at present.) Exercise at least twice a week.
(Yes, Ring Fit Adventure counts!)
3. Sharpen the saw
Read 26 books in 2021 .
(That’s one every two weeks. The earlier KR of not bringing any gadgets to bed will greatly increase my chances of being successful here, I predict.)
. (That’s one every two weeks. The earlier KR of not bringing any gadgets to bed will greatly increase my chances of being successful here, I predict.) Complete one online MOOC course each quarter.
(There’s so much free learning out there on platforms like Coursera and edX, and I want to take advantage of it.)
(There’s so much free learning out there on platforms like Coursera and edX, and I want to take advantage of it.) Complete a new app or package with Flutter .
(This is an overlay with my day job, admittedly, but I rarely get the time to code during working hours, and I think using what my team builds is an important part of loving the job I have.)
(This is an overlay with my day job, admittedly, but I rarely get the time to code during working hours, and I think using what my team builds is an important part of loving the job I have.) Evaluate my OKRs each month, and share results quarterly.
(The accountability that comes from sharing my progress will both inspire me to do better and perhaps give others confidence from seeing my own imperfection.)
4. Create time for others
Dedicate at least one evening per week for my wife and I .
(Younger couples may chafe at the idea of planning romance, but it’s important that we find time for each other, for listening and investing in each others’ lives.)
. (Younger couples may chafe at the idea of planning romance, but it’s important that we find time for each other, for listening and investing in each others’ lives.) Dedicate at least one evening per week for my family.
(Again, this isn’t an upper limit, but a required habit, whether a family movie and games night or an outdoor activity.)
(Again, this isn’t an upper limit, but a required habit, whether a family movie and games night or an outdoor activity.) Join the board of a non-profit.
(I’ve recently stepped down from one organization that I’ve been working with, and I hope that I can support a non-profit not just in material wealth but in volunteering time and skills.)
(I’ve recently stepped down from one organization that I’ve been working with, and I hope that I can support a non-profit not just in material wealth but in volunteering time and skills.) Invest in others’ joy and success.
(This fails the ‘measurable’ test, at present. I may need to work on this.)
Have you had success in building new habits? I’m curious to hear from others’ feedback and learning. Regardless of your own experiences, I hope that you have a healthy, happy, 2021. | https://medium.com/@timsneath/using-what-i-learned-at-google-to-make-new-year-resolutions-1bc90435e194 | ['Tim Sneath'] | 2020-12-31 19:28:16.327000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Habits', 'Life Lessons', 'Resolutions', 'Google'] |
An Open Letter to White Hypocrisy in the Age Of Black Power | There’s an illusion of mandatory civil duty, to watch, to participate, by exercising the option to not inundate oneself in the media’s portrayal of ever-escalating hatred and division, it somehow means that you don’t care or you haven’t taken a side. The extremity of the “if you’re not for me, you’re against me” ideology — the very credo of polarization — perpetuates division under the guise of social justice.
It’s a no-brainer that Black Lives Matter, at least to anyone sensible from a decent home with a good head on their shoulders from a liberal and culturally diverse area code and voting district. We fight for what we believe in, but history is repeating itself now, as in 2016, we’re fighting in a way so dominated by emotionalism and a mob mentality, no matter how dirty we fight we feel completely vindicated regardless of who we hurt — because hey, we’re the good guys. And its precisely this civil intensity which got our president elected in the first place, the platitude “if you’re not outraged, then you’re part of the problem” prompted the kind of hostility which causes Trump supporters to double down on their stupidity. Trump supporters are more opposed to the slightest reek of a liberal idealogy than they are supporters of Trump’s ideas or politics. Rebellious to reason, they reject the progressive, tolerant morality that encourages the equal treatment of all, but not for its inherent value so much as the political side that this ideology lies on. If there were a “Freaky Friday” situation tomorrow, and progressive Democrats and centrists adopted all of the wacky things that Trump believes, and Trump took on a liberal viewpoint more consistent with a good looking future, then most liberals would still remain on their own side out of skepticism and the inability to take him at his word, and Trump’s existing supporters would remain with him out of sheer tribalism and loyalty, as the harbinger of hostility, who tells them precisely what to think.
Many of the people that I’m seeing sharing BLM posts obsessively are white people, white people who want to be known as people on the right side. It’s no coincidence that those who are trying to teach the unteachable the same lessons that they refused to learn every other time this has happened were the same people that were the first to receive participation trophies, where even the bare minimum of effort to no avail was rewarded and recognized. Sure “there’s no such thing as reverse racism”, anyone who says “All lives matter” deserves to be called out and promptly chastised, we all get it. Don’t they see it’s falling on deaf ears? But it doesn’t matter to them.
This overcompensation stemming from a place of white guilt has people trying so so hard to prove something to the rest of the world, to prove they aren’t racist. To share the same unoriginal post, tweet, picture, or video outlining the horrors of what’s going on in the world, to show the white instigators inciting violence in such a way that it bastardizes the whole movement. Every time you gladly share your outrage or share the strength of your position there will be self-congratulatory comments that remind you that you’re doing the right thing or there will be racist, ignorant, poorly educated, or simply naive people that will join the discussion that you can get high from putting them in their place, and if they won’t listen and stay in their place then you get your righteous kicks by unfriending them, blocking them, reporting them, or if you really want to be the king or queen of wokeness then you can publicly shame them, screenshot it, under the illusion that “that will show them” but it won’t. There’s a huge difference between feeling like you’re affecting real change in the world, and actually changing something. Only time will tell what comes of this, but your words and actions are only valuable based on an objective look at the results they bring.
Your latest tirade on social media made no actual utilitarian difference to the planet, or society as a whole, all it did was change the way you feel.
When I saw that New York had proposed legislation to make filing false police reports a hate crime, I thought, wow, that’s a great start. But it’s a small step in the right direction, a drop in the bucket, because our real issues as a country are in that huge space between California and New York that we cynically refer to as “flyover country”. It’s not enough that New York and Los Angeles pass progressive legislation, unless it becomes a federal law then there will continue to be this massive disparity between states that allow for such extreme racism to thrive.
We need to see buzzwords for what they are, phrases that spread virally across social media that are intended to polarize us, and instigate strong emotion. Phrases like “silence = consent” “white silence = white violence” “if you’re not for us, you’re against us” “if you’re not outraged, then you’re part of the problem” are catchy statements, they instigate strong emotion, they polarize us, making us feel completely vindicated in the knowledge that we’re on the right side of history, but these statements are based in reactive emotion, not in rational thought. People you don’t see sharing consistently on Facebook may be the ones actively petitioning their elected officials to amend recent budgetary proposals to increase police funding, they may be the ones actively protesting, or donating anonymously to the cause.
I’m not dismissing the movement, I’m simply calling out the hypocrisy and the total lack of authenticity so many of you are displaying. Your passionate outcries are the response to stimuli on a massive scale, a digital mob mentality. Suddenly companies around the country are sending out press releases, Instagram posts, disingenuous affectations to show everyone across both race and party lines, that they stand with Black Lives Matter. These are the same companies that have been hit with discrimination lawsuits for Equal Opportunity violations, these are companies that have participated in racially biased marketing practices, or aligned themselves with similarly scandalous companies in the past, who suddenly want to show how much they care, when in actuality they are just preemptively solving a PR nightmare.
Hypocrisy.
Yes, Black Lives Matter. Black men and women should never fear for their own life especially from those who have made a binding vow to “protect and serve” but if the outcries of how much you care were truly genuine then you would be talking about this year-round, every day of every year. Without detracting from the very real threat, the core mission of Black Lives Matter, remember that their lives matter in a multitude of other ways. I haven’t seen a friend of mine post about the deplorable food scarcity faced by many (mostly black) children in Louisiana, nor have I heard anyone speak out in protest about how FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) is a forced practice that many African women have to go through and guess what, it’s still legal in parts of this country, not just in the third world. This is a bandwagon effect on a massive scale, this is fairweather advocacy, this is the equivalent of someone who calls themself “Pro-Life” but would rather not have any kids then, god forbid, save one from the often corrupted and abusive foster system.
Please donate, please protest, please create and sign petitions, please call your local representative, please call and check on your friends now more than ever. But please be very watchful of polarizing language, zoom out and see the big picture, see the gray area, it’s not all black-and-white (some pun regrettably intended).
I’m not going to tell anyone how to live, I’m not offering a solution, just meekly, and reasonably pointing out the rational blind spots in a mostly emotional movement. I only urge my friends, followers, and readers to be careful that our words and actions don’t feed the need to split everyone into two camps. You can be quiet on social media, yet vocal elsewhere, or have meaningful one-on-one conversations and avoid being vocal on the group level, you can communicate with your policymakers, donate, or support black-owned businesses and do far more than the person stuck in a feedback loop of stimulus-response-reward-repeat on social media chasing a high of self-importance. Remember, doing something vs. feeling like you’re doing something are two different things.
If you find yourself laughing, playing outside with your dog, enjoying time with your friends, or basking in the beauty of a day with clear skies, don’t feel obligated to mire yourself in outrage or in sorrow. Just because you don’t grieve, fear, or feel on someone else’s timeline, doesn’t mean you don’t care at all. | https://medium.com/@robponkyo/an-open-letter-to-white-hypocrisy-in-the-age-of-black-power-91c0021ae873 | ['Robert L Page'] | 2020-06-03 21:50:41.982000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Progressive', 'First Post', 'Social Media', 'Polarization'] |
How to sync your local MySQL schema with Server schema Quickly | I have been using MySQL for many years. It is always a challenge to safely make changes to your production database schema during each release.
The Problem:
Normally what we used to do is to create an SQL script ready and during the release, we will run the SQL script. The issue is by doing this is during our busy development we may miss some columns & it will break our code :(
Solution:
The solution to this problem is to use any MySQL Sync tools like SQL Examiner, dbForge, etc. And most of the tools are PAID.
MySQL Scheman:
MySQL schema, a simple MySQL schema synchronization utility tool which is built in PHP and it is open source. This will create an UPDATE/ADD query automatically based on the schema difference in the database and schema file and it will update schema accordingly.
Installation:
If you use Composer, you can install MySQL Scheman with the following command: composer require smart-php/mysql-scheman
Or alternatively, include a dependency for MySQL Scheman in your composer.json file. For example
{
"require-dev": {
"smart-php/mysql-scheman": "dev-master"
}
}
Basic Usage:
The first step is to create a config file either in JSON or XML where you can put it to database configuration. Next, you can create a schema file and add your required table and field information.
config.xml
<config>
<hostname>127.0.0.1</hostname>
<username>root</username>
<password>mypassword</password>
<database>test</database>
<driver>pdo</driver>
</config>
myscheman.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<database name="shcool">
<table name="students">
<columns Field="id" Type="int(11)" Null="NO" Key="PRI" Default="" Extra="auto_increment" Comment=""/>
<columns Field="name" Type="varchar(255)" Null="NO" Key="" Default="" Extra="" Comment=""/>
</table>
<table name="teachers">
<columns Field="id" Type="int(11)" Null="NO" Key="PRI" Default="" Extra="auto_increment" Comment=""/>
<columns Field="name" Type="varchar(255)" Null="NO" Key="" Default="" Extra="" Comment=""/>
</table>
</database>
Sync
By running the sync command MySQL Shcheman will find the changes required in your server and create an SQL Query and it will execute. In the above example imagine if your database doesn't have table teachers. With sync, it will create a table in the database with fields mentioned in the schema file.
./vendor/bin/scheman --config config.xml --sync myscheman.xml
Reverse Engineering
For existing database structures MySQL Scheman supports reverse engineering of your current database schema. By using command export you can create myscheman.xml file with your existing database. | https://medium.com/@shabeer-ali-m/how-to-sync-your-local-mysql-schema-with-server-schema-quickly-87f0f5644305 | [] | 2020-11-23 06:39:26.491000+00:00 | ['MySQL', 'Database', 'Xml', 'PHP', 'Schema'] |
La selección de líderes debe ser mejorada. Un MOU con Gongmanse, la compañía de Edutech. | 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/realsatoshiclub/la-selecci%C3%B3n-de-l%C3%ADderes-debe-ser-mejorada-un-mou-con-gongmanse-la-compa%C3%B1%C3%ADa-de-edutech-be1f7e0f4c24 | [] | 2020-12-12 12:56:54.791000+00:00 | ['Governance', 'Blockchain', 'Updates', 'Education', 'Decentralization'] |
MongoDB Realm Sync Permissions Explained | I grew up in Paris France and went to French high-school there. There is a lot I loved about the culture, but one of the most frustrating aspects of French pedagogy was their inability to synthesize a complex subject down to something that was understandable. The term they used for anyone who succeeded in this task was called an oeuvre de vulgarisation — which literally translates to a masterpiece for the vulgar. In a my own attempt to explain MongoDB Sync Realm Permissions, I now present my own chef-d’œuvre de vulgarisation. I suspect that if you are reading this article, you probably have more than a vulgar interest in MongoDB Realm and SwiftUI collaborative programming.
In June 2020, MongoDB released a beta version of a new product called MongoDB Realm — a synchronized real-time database for mobile and web applications. This new product was the result of merging the Realm Cloud database with the MongoDB Atlas database. The Realm Cloud product was a client/cloud synchronizing database for developing collaborative applications on top of iOS and Android mobile devices. The Realm Cloud product has subsequently been discontinued.
MongoDB Realm is a backend as a service, whose closest competitor is perhaps Google Firebase. It allows mobile and web developers to easily build synchronizing applications on top of a scalable cloud database without having to understand the implementation details of the supporting server architecture. From a productivity point of view, it is a major time saver. As far as MongoDB is concerned, their business model is to license instances of MongoDB Atlas — the supporting backend database behind MongoDB Realm. I was a Firebase developer for two years before embracing Realm Cloud — now all my focus is on MongoDB Realm. The biggest advantage of MongoDB Realm is its offline-first approach to synchronization.
MongoDB Altas is an NOSQL database that is organized around objects in collections that conform to a specific schema. Realm adds another mapping on top of this structure using the concept of a partition key. In Realm, the developer must first define an application and its partition key. Typically, the partition key is called “_partition”, but can be named anything the developer choses. The only requirement is that once defined, it cannot be changed. The partition key must be defined as a property on a collection if the objects that belong to it are to be synchronized by the application. In most cases, the partition key type is a string. The value of a partition key specifies which Realm the synchronized object belongs to. From the application’s point of view, a Realm is a database container of sorts. In the old Realm Cloud product, a Realm was the top level database within a Realm Instance that supported the application. In MongoDB Realm, a Realm is a database subset whose objects and collections all share the same partition key value. The partition key value provides an isomorphic mapping between the two concepts. To access the objects with a Realm, the application must first open the Realm with a specific partition key value, as shown in the Swift code below.
The MongoDB Realm documentation explains well enough how to set up partitions for an application. Where it is lacking is with best practices for a partition strategy, specifically a range of concrete examples where partitions can be used to solve specific synchronization/collaboration problems. With the end goal of discovering these best practices, I gave myself the task of writing a simple multi-user chat program that segmented chat threads into separate partitions. I called this application: SimpleRealmChat. At Cosync, we are developing a number MongoDB Realm extensions to bridge the gap between the MongoDB Realm database and the needs of developers who use it. Over the next few months, we are going to release a chat module that can plugin to any MongoDB Realm application, and provide multi-user chat functionality with minimal effort on behalf of the developer.
The SimpleRealmChat application is ultra simple in its design. It allows a user to signup and/or login through a simple email/password authentication, and then presents a searchable list of all the users in the system. When the user of the iOS device clicks on a specific user, he/she is then presented a private chat thread with the selected user. The application is written in Swift, using SwiftUI, for iOS only. We are working on a React/Native version due out later this month.
Three views in SimpleRealmChat
When thinking about a implementing a simple chat program, what is the best way to design the Realm partition strategy? Clearly, each user would need their own private partition to write out data that is pertinent to the user. In our case, this private information is simply the user’s first and last name. As a convention, the partition key value for the user’s partition should be the user’s Realm user id. This partition should only be readable and writable by the user and no one else — this where UserPrivateData should be stored. Second, all users will need to read profile data for all the other users in the system. This partition called the shared partition; it should be readable by all users and only writable by the system user in backend functions. The shared partition is where we store the UserProfile objects. Lastly, each chat thread between two users should be stored in a separate partition that is only readable and writable by the users in the chat. If the system were to be hacked on the client side, it should not be possible for any other users to access the chat thread. By convention, the chat partition value for a chat thread should be a concatenation of the two user ids that can access thread
<userId 1>_<userId 2>
Where <userId 1> is lexicographically less than <userId 2>.
In summary there are three partition types used by our SimpleRealmChat application:
User partitions (value is “<userId>”)
Shared partition (value is “shared”)
Chat partitions (value is “<userId 1>_<userId 2>”)
Sync access rules for the user and shared partitions are easy enough to express using Realm’s JSON expression language. Expressing access rules for the chat partitions will involve enabling Custom User Data for the application.
The MongoDB Realm documentation provides a good explanation on how to Enable Custom User Data — a database collection used to store private information about each user. The SimpleRealmChat application will use the custom data collection to store a list of chat partition values for those partitions that a user can access. The key thing to remember when defining Custom User Data is to first create the database and the collection in Atlas before enabling Custom User Data for the Realm application. In our SimpleRealmChat application, we created a database called CustomUserDB and a collection called CustomUserData to support Custom User Data.
The last thing to remember is that in the Rules section: do not configure the CustomUserData collection by choosing a Permissions Template. If no rule exists for the namespace CustomUserDB.CustomUserData, the collection will not be writable from within the client application. This is what you want, so that no client can spoof the Custom Data and potentially violate security. This way, the Custom Data is readable by the client but no more than that. The backend server function updateChatPartitions will take care of writing to the Custom Data collection.
Realm provides a simple user interface within the Realm Application Portal to edit the Sync Rules for an application. In order to actually edit the Permissions, the developer must first terminate the Sync. Also, rules cannot be applied if the Development Mode is on, otherwise the default values of read and write being true will be selected. Sync access rules are only intended to be applied when the application goes into production mode and is released.
The Sync Rules language provided by MongoDB Realm is somewhat cryptic and relies heavily on macro expression variables. The language reminds me of days gone by programming XSLT stylesheets for XML data, or of my very early experience with JCL punch cards for the IBM 360 mainframe; writing PL/1 batch programs. A simple misspelled variable will lead to nothing working, with very little indication as to why. Another issue I discovered with sync rules is that what appears on the left and right side of the rule can affect whether it works or not, i.e. “%%partition” : “shared” is not the same thing as “shared”: “%%partition”. This can be extremely confusing to say the least. In other words, the left and right sides of a sync rule are not transposable.
The Read Sync rules for the SimpleRealmChat application should look like this:
The Write Sync rules should look like this:
The shared partition should only be readable by a user, not writable. A chat partition should only be readable/writable by a user if it is listed in the chatPartitions property of the custom user data collection. A user’s partition (which is the Realm user id) should be readable and writable by the user.
The “%%user.custom_data.chatPartitions”: “%%partition” statement will cause the Realm system to look up the user’s custom user data object in the CustomUserData collection (in the CustomUserDB database) and check the chatPartitions property, which contains an array of partition key values for the chat partitions that the user can access. The contents of the custom user data can be examined in Atlas or in Compass as shown below:
From a security perspective, it is important to remember that a user cannot access a chat partition, unless the chat partition value is listed in the chatPartitions property of their custom user data object. And since CustomUserDB is only readable by a client side application — writable by the server function code — it cannot be “spoofed” by a malicious client side application. Data is only protected if it is segregated, and this is something that MongoDB Realm does exceedingly well with its partition architecture and server side functions. Incidentally, this is something that Google’s Firebase product does not handle very well.
The server side function that adds a chat partition value for two users is called updateChatPartitions. This function is called by the client, but executes on the Realm server with server side privileges. Its two parameters are the two Realm user ids involved in the chat thread. Realm server side functions are possibly one of the most powerful features added to the MongoDB Realm system, and allow a developer to factor out code between iOS and Android implementations, but also allow sensitive code that needs server side permissions to be placed outside of the reach of client side code. In MongoDB Realm, server side functions are written in Javascript. The developer must select System as the authentication of choice for executing the updateChatPartitions function.
The source code to SimpleRealmChat is open source under the Apache 2 license. It is available for public download in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/Cosync/SimpleRealmChat.git.
This sample code will require a MongoDB account, where the developer will have to setup authentication and database triggers. All of the steps are outlined in the attached README.md file. The developer will also need the latest copy of Xcode to build the sample chat application for iOS.
The purpose of this exercise was to show how easy it is to use MongoDB Realm partitions to enforce strict read/write privileges on the shared data used by a collaborative program. This is both important from a security perspective as well as a scalability perspective. By isolating chat data into distinct partitions (or Realms), a multi-user chat program is far more scalable — and greatly limits the synchronization overhead required by the server. Clients will only synchronize chat data that they are directly participating in, and not all the chat data that occurs systemwide.
To all my fellow developers out there, enjoy your Realming. | https://medium.com/swlh/mongodb-realm-sync-permissions-explained-1a9a904f7a9a | ['Richard Krueger'] | 2020-12-26 20:12:40.263000+00:00 | ['Mongodb Realm', 'Swiftui', 'Firebase', 'Collaboration', 'Mongodb Atlas'] |
Five Things I Learned in 2020 — Building Impact | A few nights ago at dinner, my daughter asked, “What’s a train wreck?” My wife and I had used the expression earlier that day while describing our relief that 2020 was coming to a close.
When I explained the meaning of the phrase, she thought for a moment and said, “But it’s not bad, Daddy; you can things from a train wreck, like maybe drive the train slower!”
My precocious (and optimistic) eight-year-old was right, of course, and got me thinking…what lessons have learned in 2020?
I learned that no matter how savvy your plan is, you can neither fully predict the future, nor control the world around you.
This year reminded all of us that it’s more important to be grounded in a clear vision of the kind of impact you want to have than to adhere to a detailed plan that accounts for every contingency. The most effective philanthropists aren’t the ones who have figured everything out or the ones who stuck to their plans no matter what, they are the ones who are responding to the reality of the evolving world around them , learning from mistakes, and adjusting course along the way.
I learned just how dramatically a large-scale crisis widens existing equity gaps.
The recession that COVID-19 triggered has been the most unequal in modern U.S. history , with job losses overwhelmingly affecting low-wage, minority workers the most. Existing disparities in access to health care have led to higher susceptibility to the coronavirus, increasing the emotional toll of the pandemic on poor and vulnerable communities. Women lost ground in the fight for income equality when they disproportionately took on childcare duties and as they lost hours or got laid off in higher numbers than men . By and large the poorest schools have had the rockiest transition to the virtual learning environment, and the achievement gap is expected to widen . We cannot run from the very real inequities that exist in America nor should we try to. Forward-thinking philanthropists will seize the opportunity to re-imagine systems, collaborate across sectors, and innovate to chip away at those inequities in the course of recovery.
I learned to appreciate my kids in a whole different way.
It has not been easy to live as a family of five, including two working adults and three kids attending virtual school, in our narrow Philadelphia rowhome. But, I now know that my five-year-old fixes his own lunch with the zeal of a chef preparing a five-star meal, that my eight-year-old will cozy up next to me with a good book for hours on end while I chat away on conference calls, and that my attacks his math homework with the ferociousness of a bullfighter. These are not things I could have fully appreciated before. For all the challenges and complexity of running a business while homeschooling, I will be forever grateful for the new ways in which I’ve gotten to experience my children.
I learned that people driven to make change see calamity as motivation, not a deterrent.
Like all of us, the most effective change agents are mourning the human, economic and cultural toll of the pandemic, but they are also rolling up their sleeves . They don’t let injustice, economic devastation, and political mayhem stand in the way of their work. But, the work is hard and the risk of burnout is real. It’s important for change agents to manage their energy and perspective. Which brings me to my final takeaway from 2020…
I learned to play the guitar.
With some online lessons, a patient wife, and a lot of free time at night, I checked off a box that’s been on my bucket list for years. I don’t think there is a better way for me to feel present and at peace than while playing music sitting by the fire pit on my back patio.
It may not be wrong to call this year a train wreck; as a society, we will face extraordinary challenges , even as the pandemic wanes. Far too many have suffered pain and personal loss with still more to come. But our willingness to grow and to learn, even in the most difficult of times, is part of what sets effective change agents apart.
This holiday season, I extend both gratitude and a wish for peace, reflection, and a bountiful 2021 to all those fighting for a more just world. | https://medium.com/@buildingimpact/five-things-i-learned-in-2020-building-impact-7a92ff8e3d4e | ['Building Impact'] | 2020-12-21 18:28:17.513000+00:00 | ['Equity', 'Consulting', 'Philanthropy', 'New Year', 'Burnout'] |
How journaling daily changed my life | My daily commitment to doing this technique has really improved my mental health overall! I am way more positive and motivated to work hard towards my goals. The first week doing this was very hard but all worth it.
It just makes me personally so much happier and grateful with everything I already have. I would suggest just trying it out! Also please don’t expect immediate results. Everything will come, so be patient and do not give up. I believe in you and you should also believe in yourself please | https://medium.com/@helen_13198/how-journaling-daily-changed-my-life-8e68aa7acfb7 | ['Cherry Ѕυηƒlωωєя'] | 2020-12-19 11:23:09.743000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Scripting', 'Journal', 'Manifestation', 'Love'] |
The Ultimate Notion Template to Streamline Your Whole Life | Manage Your Life & Projects on a Single Dashboard
Once you sign up to Notion, you will find yourself editing and creating docs really fast. So I won’t dig into how to use the product. Let’s directly jump into the dashboard that manages your whole life.
I created this template after months of dealing with Notion and it’s the best landing page that I’ve ever built on Notion so far. Link to the template is at the bottom of this blog.
Notion Dashboard
First, the motivation! It is perfect to start the day with some motivation. There are some widgets at the top of the page like motivational quote, weather and life-bar. These widgets are not built into notion but you can use the Notion’s embed power and create those widgets on Indify.co and embed into Notion. Life-bar widget tells me that I’ve passed 36% of my life. Ouch, that hurts.
Let’s look at the other parts.
When you scroll down a little bit, you will see different tables and views. I use a slightly edited version of PARA method. For the ones who are not familiar with PARA method, it is the abbreviation of Project, Areas, Resources and Archives. In Projects table, you locate your time-bounded projects like 2021 house renovation project. The areas table consists the life-long responsibilities like, website management, personal development, personal finances. Resources are the bundle of the different sub-tables that we can refer to during our projects or tasks. Or they could be some notes not necessarily referred back to a project. And lastly Archives is the completed projects trash, to visit them later.
What my version has different than the PARA method, I’ve added a Tasks database to it. This tasks database is connected to projects database so that I can follow the tasks under a project. And each project is connected to an Area where I can manage my whole life with some connected dots. This gives a great opportunity to see every active project and task when you click on an Area! Look at this beauty!
But my whole life does not contain tasks and projects all the time. So I need some other databases like food recipies, daily journal, books to read and so on. The solution to them is to create a seperate table for each item under the Resources main database. This is how it looks like:
When you jump in to any database, it will be customized for its own purpose. Let’s say I want to record a hotel that I visited, that database has hotel type tag, hotels location map url, my rating properties. That way, I can easily recall my trips when I check this database later on.
Notion also gives you the ability to create document templates which I found extremely useful. For example, in my recipes database I have a generic recipe template which lists Ingredients and How to Cook line items. When you create a template and save it, you can easily re-use it on the same database over and over again. That’s how it looks;
Coming to an end now. This framework actually helping me to streamline my whole life, no matter what I’m working on, personal or professional. And I’m sure that the flexibility that Notion gives its users is a completely new experience in our digital lives.
To download this template please visit any of the links below;
Alternative 1:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/913263228/notion-all-in-one-life-project
Alternative 2:
https://gum.co/complete-notion-pack | https://medium.com/@aliilhamioztan/the-ultimate-notion-template-to-streamline-your-whole-life-5c326cc67ec4 | ['Ali İlhami Öztan'] | 2020-12-18 17:20:50.156000+00:00 | ['Notion Template', 'Planning', 'Productivity', 'Notion', 'Project Management'] |
Ikigai For Entrepreneurs | What if the rising generation of entrepreneurs were equipped with a personal compass that helped them translate individual purpose and professional skills into social impact, while also making a profit?
Ikigai For Entrepreneurs
Success is about more than money.
Move over rock stars, athletes, and A-list actors, we’ve got a new idol this season: Entrepreneurs. A very particular brand of them, too — not the bootstrapper or the small business builder, but the Unicorn with the multi-million dollar Series A. The big name investors. The billion dollar valuation. We glorify the startup life, buying into the hype that:
Raising a lot of investment money indicates success
Being acquired or going public are the best possible outcomes
Success primarily depends on your technical skills and experience
Your company will make it if you follow the steps of other entrepreneurs
You must choose between making money and making meaning
The best way to make an impact on the world is to be a Founder or CEO
And, sure, sometimes these are true. But like most careers, rather than imagining how the unlikely ideal scenario feels, you can ask whether you are willing to accept the far more likely downside of the role. In the case of entrepreneurship this includes uncomfortably high odds of failure, financial uncertainty, incredibly hard decisions (that impact other peoples’ lives), frequent isolation, unexpected loneliness, and long thankless hours. And while Benajmins may be the easiest indicator of success to measure, the startup metrics we rely on are often misleading. Valuations are anything but precise. Investment raised is a debt –the more you take, the less control you have over your business. And if you’re really successful in meeting your financial goals, you might get acqui-hired and spend several years at the kind of company you became an entrepreneur to avoid. Fun!
The endless listicles promising the ‘top ten keys to startup success” treat entrepreneurship as a science — a formula of activities, circumstances, and processes that can be duplicated, offering standard results. But while navigating the fundamentals of the business is necessary, it is not sufficient. Checklists of essential entrepreneurial ingredients ignore the very nature of entrepreneurship. They treat it like a class that can be aced instead of a dynamic situation that is constantly and unpredictably changing. Like answers are black and white instead of fifty shades of grey. As if the success of the business can happen in a vacuum, irrespective of the Founder (when in reality, it’s more like an unborn child, whose health is directly linked to that of its momtrepreneur).
We discount the importance of difficult to quantify elements like drive, passion, and motivation. We likewise undervalue the incredible meaning, purpose, and impact that can be had by running a business with a vision higher than the giant payoff. But what if the rising generation of entrepreneurs were equipped with a personal compass that helped them translate their individual purpose and professional skills into social impact, while also making a profit?
How could we make the business case for adding new (hard to measure and quantify) parameters to the equation? What happens when success means something different for each business? And achieving it requires more than money?
Entrepreneurial Ikigai
In entrepreneurship, more so than in other employment scenarios, the personal and the professional are deeply connected. Before you can make an honest assessment of your professional strengths, weaknesses, talents, values, and passions, (or those of your startup) you should consider your personal strengths, weaknesses, talents, values, and passions. The same way that we look at the business’ strategy, mission, vision, core competencies, and competitive advantage, we can look at the entrepreneur’s differentiation, purpose, capabilities, passions, operating methods, and life experiences. What matters to you? What are you willing to fight for? What can you uniquely offer that others cannot? What do you innately understand? What are you bad at?
(The image above has been recreated a lot, so I’m unsure who to give photo credit to — happy to do so, though)
The modern Western interpretation of an old Eastern concept — Ikigai
There is a resurgence of the Japanese concept of Ikigai (loosely translates to “reason for being”). You’ve probably seen the image above, a ven diagram of overlap between what you are good at, what you love, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. It’s used as a tool for building a more purposeful life, specifically through meaningful work. If we think about entrepreneurship in terms of the four Ikigai elements, it has always been focused on what you can be paid for and what you are good at. Then social entrepreneurship came along and we added a third element — what the world needs. And of course, many founders have started businesses from their hobbies or passions, but that has never really been a prerequisite. But what if it was?
Moving from Entrepreneurship to Social Entrepreneurship to Ikigai Driven Social Entrepreneurship
What if the next generation of social entrepreneurs built businesses that were deeply connected to their personal Ikigai? What if the paradigm of entrepreneurship shifted such that every business was a combination of what we can be paid for, what we are good at, what the world needs, and what we love?
(To be clear, when I talk about what we love, I don’t just mean passions and hobbies. I mean the things we are willing to fight for, the problems we care enough about to solve, the things that matter most to us.)
While IRL there is no perfect equation of the four Ikigai elements (and depending on your priorities at the time, you may have to sacrifice some of one to allow for more of another), they can be used as a compass to bring things into balance. And it isn’t always “what the world needs” that is missing. When I launched my first business, Qualifyor, I wanted to change the way people prepared for and thought about work, to provide resources for young people to step outside the standard college to career path. My ego had bought into the idea that the best (only) way for me to drive significant change was as a Founder and CEO of a venture-backed firm. Almost three years into running the business, I felt the struggle of trying to balance profit with social impact (in Ikigai terms, what I could be paid for vs. what the world needs). Not to mention the realization that although the vision was a fit, the role was not (what I loved vs. what I was good at). Despite my best attempts at disruption, I had essentially re-created a school — something other people were probably naturally better at and happier doing than I was, given that I had left school to self teach my way to an early diploma at sixteen. My role completely squandered the unique parts of me, the things that only I brought to the table. And so as I thought about my next move, I focused on my Ikigai, (below are some of the things I discovered):
Good At: Design thinking, writing, problem solving, first principles reasoning
Paid For: Education/employment innovation, facilitation, coaching, speaking
Love: Self-organization, big ideas, challenging existing systems, reading
World Needs: Updated mindset about how and why we work and learn, entrepreneurs solving world’s biggest challenges, financial incentive to build things for the social good, self organization tools
Armed with this awareness, I began writing a book of unorthodox questions to help people build a purpose driven career by re-defining success at an individual level. And I started an innovation consultancy aligned with my Ikigai, to help change the way we look at the world by using first principles reasoning and design thinking to drive more than incremental change to our systems, companies, universities, and cities. It takes a lot longer to say than “Ed Tech CEO,” but these are the messy problems in the world that I am equipped, motivated, and paid to tackle. And this is the way I am best equipped to tackle them.
Being an entrepreneur can take many different shapes, so before you make the choice to start something, it is worth spending a minute determining the sort of thing you are best suited to start. Because differentiation doesn’t happen through conformity — it happens through embracing individuality. There is competitive advantage in running a business for which you are uniquely suited. Not only in terms of your work experience, but also in terms of your interests, skills, relationships, knowledge, motivation, and the legacy you want to leave. If we want to maximize our service to others, we should be spending the majority of our time doing the things that we care enough about to do regardless of whether we are being paid, the things that come naturally to us (of course it is rare to only have to do things we are good at and love, but those should be the bigger pieces of our time pie).
Consider the most influential moments and events you’ve experienced and what they have taught you. What they have instilled in you? These are not just talking points for an interview, but fundamental aspects of your character and drive. For some people, it can be a direct effect — someone you love was shot, so you became a gun control advocate, or you were raised by a single mother and now want fight for better social policies for families like yours, or perhaps you suffered under the burden of student loans and now work for an alternative education company. For others, it is a more abstract connection. You escaped bullying with comic books and great music, and you want to support creative industries. Or you watched a friend fight cancer and it motivated you to make the most of your health.
When sh*t really gets hard, it takes a lot more than money to iterate, adapt, and weather the storm. In a race where the majority of runners don’t cross the finish line, it helps to be working in service of something larger than yourself, that you care immensely about, and are singularly equipped to accomplish. It is time to stop viewing profit and impact as opposing sides of the startup spectrum — they are integrally intertwined. And the sooner we stop forcing entrepreneurs to choose between them, the faster we can shift the paradigm toward businesses making more than money (and make more money by doing so).
For more Ikigai related posts, follow me on Medium. For updates about my upcoming book and other Ikigai related content, subscribe on my website (scroll to the bottom of the page). I keep my pieces free, so more people have access to these resources. Your likes and shares would help in that mission.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +368,052 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here. | https://medium.com/swlh/ikigai-for-entrepreneurs-b100f6a00650 | ['Kacy Qua'] | 2019-06-06 11:40:48.599000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Business', 'Ikigai', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup'] |
Fixing the Domain/Default Pair Error on Flutter | Photo by Eugen Str on Unsplash
If you’re like me, you’ve been enjoying using Flutter to make some really great apps lately. One of the things about using such a cutting edge framework is that you’re bound to encounter some potentially weird issues…without knowing exactly how to fix it.
I just spent 4 hours on the domain/default pair issue. In your build log it looks like this:
It’s not clear what is going wrong here. Looking up further in the build log gives us some more idea.
Can you spot it? It’s the last line. For some reason, Flutter is trying to recursively add our assets folder into our build, which is making the build break with a totally unrelated and nonsensical error. This issue tracks the problem, with a wide array of potential fixed (like moving your assets folder elsewhere, checking if you have .env files in your project root), but none of them fixed it for me.
I hypothesised that this could be happening because of how I was including my assets. In my project, it looked like this:
assets:
- winkydude.json
- assets/avatars/
- phone.png
- logo.png
The problem was with the bolded line — I was including a folder and figuring Flutter could just bring everything from that folder in recursively. I changed it to this, where I explicitly called out every single file that was in that folder.
assets:
- winkydude.json
# - assets/avatars/
- phone.png
- logo.png
- assets/avatars/bike.json
- assets/avatars/coffeebiscuit.json
- assets/avatars/hearts.json
- assets/avatars/ice_cream.json
- assets/avatars/sheepcart.json
- assets/avatars/sheepcomputer.json
- assets/avatars/sheepoutrun.json
- assets/avatars/sheeprain.json
- assets/avatars/sheepswimming.json
And my build started working.
I don’t want to name every file in my assets directory
You probably should anyway, right? That way you get to see in your commits over time when specific files came and left your build. And you’re not just adding a bucket of files into your app.
As I come across more ways of fixing this issue, I’ll update this article.
I hope this helps you! Comment if it does (or if it doesn’t). And happy Fluttering!
https://www.twitter.com/FlutterComm | https://medium.com/flutter-community/fixing-the-domain-default-pair-error-on-flutter-34abf3c8de81 | ['Lew C'] | 2020-08-22 19:28:46.549000+00:00 | ['Flutter App Development', 'Android Development', 'Software Development', 'Flutter', 'Ios Development'] |
If nothing else, we are eating well! | Photo credit: Lara Kelly
“If nothing else, we are eating well!” — those were the words my wife commented the other day as we once again considered the past four preposterous months of this coronavirus pandemic. With stay home orders in effect and restaurants closed since March, many at home had to start fending for themselves in the kitchen. For me, as someone living with a severe inhalation food allergy to shellfish, eating out pre-pandemic had become a love hate-relationship: I love someone else cooking for me, but I sure hate the constant fear of being exposed to my allergen.
Luckily, I come from a long line of incredible Italian cooks — I still have the fondest memories of my straight-out-of-central-casting Italian grandmother standing by her stove for hours in her amazing orange and yellow 1970s decor kitchen, cooking up some of the best food I’ve ever eaten. Growing up with an aunt who also knows her way around a kitchen, and my mother who’s cooking rivals my grandmothers, and who now uses her superpower cooking skills as a personal cook for others, and often, luckily, me and my family — I’ve picked up a thing or two.
As my mom and aunt get older though, I often get asked when I am going to take over the reigns; in all honesty I am in no way near their level of cuisine perfection, though when time allowed in pre-pandemic days, I could hold my own in the kitchen and really did enjoy it. I also did start taking on some of the cooking responsibilities, but mostly for my in-laws (I make a mean Hanukkah dinner). Other than that though, with my very busy work, school, and volunteer schedule there really wasn’t enough hours in the day to even think about recipes and ingredients, let alone time to prep and cook them. Then COVID19 hit and time stretched into a new reality, allowing for more creativity, experimentation, and good old home cooking in the kitchen.
Over the course of the past four months I have been guided by three powerful female chefs who not only highlight good food but the good of humanity: Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation, Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, and Nadiya Hussain’s Time to Eat. I highly recommend checking them out!
Inspired, my wife and I began to expand our mealtime options. Not every recipe has been successful, but in all honesty, most have. I have attempted recipes that I never would have thought to in the past, and dedicated hours and days to others. Trying out ingredients that I hadn’t even known existed — and some times not even knowing where to buy them. In our home right now, I do most of the cooking and my wife does all of the grocery shopping. She therefore has gone on multiple scavenger hunts to different grocery stores trying to find certain ingredients that are not typically sold in your standard American grocery store, something that highlights the immense need to embrace other people and cultures!
So here is a list of recipes I’ve attempted, some of which I’ve mastered, some not so much, but I’ll keep trying:
Black Pepper Tofu & Green Beans
I’ve made this probably six times in the last four months and love it the same every…single…time. It is incredibly flavorful, so much so I generally end up sneaking down to the kitchen and eating the leftovers straight out of the container, standing in front of the fridge.
Falafel
It is hard to get our kid to eat anything other than pasta — she is not an adventurous eater outside of all things sushi — but she loves this falafel recipe, paired with the lemon rice and pickled onions below. I’ve made this 4 times in 4 months and will be making it again very soon if the kid has anything to say about it.
Lemon Rice
It’s…so…good and very easy to make.
Pickled Red Onion
I love all things pickled and have been playing around with different varieties including my go to for all meals, the pickled red onion. I literally put it on almost everything — tacos, sandwiches, falafel, salads, pasta, veggie burgers…etc..
Pickled Red Cabbage
These go great with black bean veggie burgers and rice (I generally forgo bread and just put a veggie burger over rice), add a little feta and arugula, and its a great lunchtime meal.
Spicy Pickled Radish
These go great with tacos!
Lemony Lentil and Rice with Caramelized Onions
This is another recipe I’ve made multiple times — however this one is a little more temperamental; it has always been good but some iterations have been better than others. My guess is that it depends on the brand of lentils used. This recipe is also a bit of a commitment as it takes a good two hours to make.
Classic Masala Dosa
I love dosas! They are by far one of my favorite foods. They take some major planning over a few days though. It is not a quick meal but totally worth it!
Pan BBQ Tofu
As a vegetarian home one of the things we consistently miss most is finger licking BBQ! This BBQ tofu recipe pared with the collard greens below hits the spot. I always throw another vegetable on the pan with the tofu as well — broccoli or zucchini. Bake up some cornbread (gluten free or regular) and you have a great meal.
Southern Style Collard Greens
We love us some collards in our house, so finding a vegetarian recipe that packed enough flavor was important. I like this recipe a lot but it needs some tang, so I add in my own secret ingredient, rice wine vinegar, and it is the perfect addition to these spicy tangy greens.
Cauliflower Hot Wings
My wife loves hot wings, and it is one of the foods she misses most since becoming a vegetarian. I made this recipe once and it was pretty tasty, though getting it crispy was not easy.
Easy Lo Mein
The kid loves Lo Mein so we make variations of this recipe, along with the Fried Rice recipe below a lot. I will thrown in whatever veggies we have in the kitchen that make sense and it always turns out scrumptious. Cook up some pre-made frozen veggie dumplings and its a perfect, quick meal.
Restaurant Style Fried Rice
Golden Syrup Oatmeal Cookies
I don’t bake much but I saw golden syrup used on Nadiya Hussain’s show and really wanted to try it. It is a British baking ingredient that I had never had the opportunity to try; let me tell you, having now tried it, I could drink that golden goodness straight from the bottle! In lieu of that though, these Oatmeal Cookies are perfection — and I never even liked oatmeal cookies, though I suppose if people baked them with golden syrup maybe I would have. Plus they were super quick and easy to make, and it was very easy to substitute gluten free oats and gluten free flour into the recipe.
Tahdig
Every one of the cooking shows I mentioned above featured Tahdig, a traditional crispy rice goodness dish. I could not wait to try it and it did not let me down. This is going to be a staple in our house moving forward.
Lebanese Chickpea Stew
I paired the Tahdig with this stew (not a traditional pairing I know), it was pretty good.
Sautéed Bok Choy with Chili Garlic Sauce
We love bok choy in our house; this recipe is like eating bok choy candy — it is so good.
Potato Cabbage Hash
The Irish girl in me is drawn to anything potato and cabbage, so of course I love this recipe. Add some hot sauce and its perfection.
Baked Mac n Cheese
The kid loves, loves, loves baked mac n cheese. I’ve made this for her a couple of times and it never fails to satiate. I generally end up making two different batches of this since I don’t eat cow’s milk cheese or gluten so I substitute gluten free pasta and gluten free bread crumbs, along with a goat’s milk cheese, and its good enough for me! Pair it with a can of stewed tomatoes and it’s perfect comfort food!
Caramelized Cabbage
As I mentioned above, I love all things cabbage but I did not like this recipe at all, which is a shame because it looks sooo good.
Greek Spaghetti Squash
I like spaghetti squash way more than anyone else in my house. This recipe was pretty good and easy to make.
Cheddar Pesto
I don’t eat cow’s milk and the kid is allergic to tree nuts, so I needed a pesto recipe where I could substitute parmesan — I have a nice goat’s milk cheddar I use — as well as remove the walnuts (though you could substitute sunflowers seeds). I didn’t love this recipe, it was a bit salty and oily. If I make it again I’ll really need to adjust the quantities.
Ziti
I am Italian after all, so making some good old fashioned gravy (according to my mother good Italians do not call it sauce, its gravy— fight amongst yourselves) to go along with any pasta dish is important. I used the “red sauce” recipe from this site and it was so much better than any red sauce I’ve had from a jar — though not nearly as good as my mom’s or grandmom’s gravy, but in lieu of that it will have to do! Combine it with the garlic bread recipe below and its magnifica!
Garlic Bread
There are a number of recipes on my pandemic cooking list that I have yet to make, and more get added everyday including:
Baked Cameroonian Jollof
Red Curry Noodle Bowl
*I have made this recipe in the past but not since the pandemic began. I make it without the steak and in my opinion it doesn’t need it at all. This is a hot, yummy bowl good for the soul!
Afghan Kidney Bean Curry
Buffalo Chickpea Taquitos
Egg Salad and White Bean
General Tsos Tofu
Sheet Pan Veggie Shawarma
Spicy Potato Lentil Soup with Kale
Sweet Potato Curry Chickpeas
Tofu Chow Fun
Zucchini Tomato and Rice Gratin
I am aware of, and grateful for, the privilege afforded me to have the time and resources to cook these meals. I am happy I can share them all with you virtually, but I can’t to resume sharing communal meals together again! Until then, bon appetit! | https://medium.com/@marionleary/if-nothing-else-we-are-eating-well-81b082d7a48d | ['Marion Leary'] | 2020-07-26 22:41:36.938000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Food', 'Cooking', 'Foodies', 'Coronavirus'] |
‘Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy’ by Gwyneth Cravens | ‘Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy’ by Gwyneth Cravens
Why Environmentalists Need to Rethink Nuclear Energy
Photo by Thomas Millot on Unsplash
As you are probably well aware, climate change is an existential threat to the future of human civilization. Yet, we shoot ourselves in the foot every day that we try and ignore the importance of nuclear energy to curb this disaster. The science and technology of nuclear fission has developed significantly since the days of the cold war, but misinformation and bad PR continues to hold back the full utilization of nuclear power in our clean energy portfolios.
Maybe this is all news to you, or maybe you watched the Bill Gates documentary and have a positive but surface-level understanding of the technology. Either way, Gwyneth Cravens’s book Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy should launch right to the top of your environmentally conscious reading list.
The book was written in 2007. So, there are times when characters talk about technologies that have seen noteworthy development since the original publication (particularly renewables, hydrogen fuel cells, and electric batteries to an extent). BUT, Power to Save the World is definitely still 99% relevant and 100% worth your time.
A Breakdown of the Book
Power to Save the World is split up into 6 parts with 21 chapters spread between each section. I’ll spend the rest of this blog post briefly exploring the individual focus of each part, but it’s just as important to understand how they work together — and nothing sums up the overall approach of this book like the very very small Marcus Aurelius quote included underneath the title of Part 1.
“Look always at the whole.” - Marcus Aurelius
Cravens set out to write a comprehensive book on nuclear energy, and she did not disappoint. Living up to the aforementioned quote, Cravens approaches “the whole” of nuclear energy in 2 important ways:
The practical context in which we are talking about nuclear energy (think: climate change, technological advancement, politics, the economy, etc.). The ENTIRE life cycle of nuclear energy and the uranium we use to power it.
Every single thing that remotely has to do with nuclear power gets dedicated focus in this book. The book starts with Uranium mines, and it ends with nuclear waste recycling and disposal.
Introduction: “Gwyneth’s Pilgrimage” by Richard Rhodes
It can be easy to ignore introductions like this and jump straight into “the actual book,” but Rhodes makes an interesting point that should frame your expectations if you’re considering buying this book.
“Gwyneth Cravens Evokes an old tradition in this very modern book: seeking understanding by going on a journey… She accumulates knowledge as she goes on, guided by her own Virgil, a steadfast scientist named Dr. Rip Anderson. She achieves greater understanding of the deep things of the world, as her predecessors did, and as they also did, she shares it generously.”
- Richard Rhodes
Before you get scared off by the idea of a book on nuclear energy, Power to Save the World is not some ridiculously dense collection of scientific essays for 1% of readers to enjoy. Instead, think of this as a modern environmentalist’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress or Dante’s Inferno (only this one is based on the real factual world of American energy).
Every time the book runs into dense scientific information, it gets presented in an easy to read dialogue mixed in between sections of Cravens’s own journalistic research and commentary.
Part 1: Origins
Survival/ Always Look at the Whole/ Ambrosia Lake
Like any good “Part 1”, this is where Cravens sets the stage for the rest of the book. Here, we are introduced to Rip (Cravens’s nuclear “Virgil”) and begin their journey touring around the country in a quest to understand nuclear energy (starting with step 1, mining uranium). However, Cravens makes sure to remind us of the big “Why?” behind nuclear energy. In the case of this book, it almost always comes back to climate change.
My Favorite Quote From This Section:
(Citing a quote from the American physicist, Alvin Weinberg) ‘Carbon dioxide poses a dilemma for the radical environmentalists. Since nuclear reactors emit almost no carbon dioxide, how can one be against nuclear energy if one is concerned about carbon dioxide? To my utter dismay, indeed disgust, this is exactly the position of some of the environmentalists. Their argument is that extreme conservation, and a shift to renewables — that is, solar energy — is the only environmentally correct approach to reducing carbon dioxide. When I point out to them that conservation might be feasible in industrialized countries, but that it is hardly a choice for India and China, they seem to ignore the point. Or when I argue that solar energy is hardly a choice at this time (2007), or even for the next century, my environmental critics simply disagree: spend on solar energy what has been spent on nuclear energy, and solar energy will be cheap. But we have yet to discover a technical breakthrough — the solar equivalent of fission — and unless we do, rejection of fission energy condemns the world to a future of very expensive energy. … And when I point out that France has reduced its carbon dioxide emission by a good 20% in the past decade by aggressive deployment of fission reactors, I am greeted by silence.’
- Chapter Title: Survival | https://medium.com/climate-conscious/power-to-save-the-world-the-truth-about-nuclear-energy-by-gwyneth-cravens-792d59183ed6 | ['Cameron Catanzano'] | 2020-12-03 13:02:48.867000+00:00 | ['Book Review', 'Climate Change', 'Sustainability', 'Science', 'Nuclear'] |
The Ice King: 2 The Kiss | The Ice King doesn’t speak, and I don’t ask; the questions are too many, too small: too trivial by comparison.
I feel my body tremble, not with fear, not with cold; with unfamiliarity? I look him in the eyes, and their glint reassures me: I want his power to be absolute, but benign.
As I take off my heavy boots and both pairs of socks, I expect the ice under my feet to sting or to burn me, but with my eyes on him still, and his gaze still steady on me, there is only the glow that expands from inside my spine.
I take a step towards him, and his presence feels no longer silent, it hums, or so my mind makes me believe; in truth he lies still and alert, and my breathing is no longer shallow: I want to melt into him, meld with him, and as I step closer, he sits up just enough to extend his hand and bring me into his orbit.
Now the colours, the touch, the sensations, the heat from within, the cold from without; this surface I lie on is as hard as polished marble, this skin that I breathe is softer than ermine, but his grip and his hold and his motion are firm; no longer can I tell what am I and what he, my focus is gone, the ice and The Ice King, the light and the scent are all one; I dissolve into it, into him, into the fire of him in me; into the ice that is no longer chill but a mould of clean edges that envelop us like multiple layers of soothing gauze, like everything ever imagined but more, and more real, like losing myself, my thought and my fear, like everything ever felt but not known, like owning the universe through being owned, desiring only being desired, like being The Ice King through being his, not wanting not pining not longing not hoping not dreading not doing not acting not willing not giving not taking not talking not buying not selling not looking forward and not thinking back, not imagining and not dreaming. Being and ceasing to be all at once in the now and forever.
The Now. The Forever. We breathe. We hold on to each other. I think I smile, but I can’t be sure. He tilts his head back and exhales. I feel his breath on my neck and bury my face in his shoulder. The light is orange and blue and a bit purple too, and we are embedded in the ice that feels now as if it had melted and made a pool of clear water that seems to flow warm, although this may just be the pulse in my temple and the beat of his heart and the protective embrace of his arm and the comfort, the comfort of him.
We lie thus for hours, or so it seems, as I drift in and out of awareness, and The Ice King is deep in my mind, quiet and quite majestic. I know I can’t stay here but nor can I leave. I bathe in the silence, but words are bubbling inside me. I want for nothing now, but I wonder how deep, how old, how immaterial is the ice. I lift my head to look at his face, in repose. His lips are not of this world. I hesitate. I pause. I cannot ask permission. I cannot resist. I kiss him. | https://medium.com/@edenbyfrei/the-ice-king-2-the-kiss-45f43bd4ac5e | ['Eden Frei'] | 2020-12-14 18:37:40.099000+00:00 | ['Sensuality', 'Power', 'Attraction', 'Fantasy', 'Poetic Prose'] |
How to Neutralize Gender Bias in Your Writing | Gender equality is a fundamental human right. In spite of this, women and girls suffer discrimination and violence in every part of the world. Unconscious bias forms an invisible barrier to equal opportunity. It affects those we care for most in life, our families, friends and colleagues.
As a writer, you have a choice to either enforce or neutralize gender bias through your work.
What is gender-neutral language and why is it important?
Language shapes our cultural and societal attitudes. Until the 1970s, the use of masculine pronouns in place of generic was the custom. Women’s movements were successful in challenging this sexist norm.
“A gender line… keeps women not on a pedestal, but in a cage .” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Today, many governments and schools use language that places women and men at the same level. This helps to reduce stigma and ensure that vulnerable people are not left behind.
Adopting a gender-sensitive lexicon is far easier than you may expect. Being mindful is the first step. If done right, gender-neutral text does not affect readability. It generally reads well, if not better, than antiquated or outmoded gendered text.
How does gender-neutral language work?
There are several ways to promote gender equality though language in a text. It’s as easy as 1, 2 & 3 below.
1) Use gender-neutral expressions
Avoid gender-specific nouns when making generic references to both men and women. For example, the words policeman and stewardess are gender-specific. The corresponding gender-neutral terms are police officer and flight attendant.
Here are a few more examples.
Replace men and mankind, with people , humanity , human beings , humankind , we , women and men etc
, , , , , etc Replace man-made disaster with human induced disaster .
. Replace congressman with legislator , congressional representative , or parliamentarian etc.
, , or etc. Replace chairman with chair , chairperson or head .
, or . Replace landlord, landlady with owner and so on.
2) Use inclusive language
The use of the generic masculine form to refer to both genders creates a gender bias.
Avoid > A good student knows that he should strive for excellence.
Prefer > A good student strives for excellence.
3) Use both feminine and masculine forms of words
Each professor should send his or her assistant to the conference.
Whoever she is. Wherever he lives. Every child deserves a childhood.
Note: A gender-neutral alternative to he or she is the singular they.
Bonus tips
Use the active voice to show empowerment of women. Avoid expressions that have a negative connotation.
Avoid > Carol had lunch with the girls at the office
Prefer > Carol had lunch with some colleagues at the office
Avoid stereotyping roles.
Avoid > The Conference participants and their wives are invited.
Prefer > The Conference participants and their spouses/partners/guests are invited.
Be the change!
Gender-neutral language is now the norm for progressive writers, journalists and thought-leaders. By rewiring our linguistic patterns we can create a more even playing field for all. So, if you would like to make a difference, please mind your language!
For comprehensive guidelines on gender-sensitive expression, see the UN Women gender-sensitive lexicon. | https://medium.com/mindset-matters/mind-your-language-25ab0f71a91d | ['Lucy King'] | 2019-02-01 11:36:22.215000+00:00 | ['Diversity', 'Language', 'Gender Equality', 'Women', 'Writing'] |
Crowdsourced Testing | Crowdsourced QA is an increasingly popular testing method. Leveraging a dispersed and often temporary workforce, companies can expedite testing more effectively. This makes for more financially sound and efficient testing.
What is crowdsourced testing?
Crowdsourced Testing consists of delegating software testing tasks to a community of expert quality assurance testers through an online platform.
It is quickly emerging as the most efficient way to streamline interactive software products and improve the quality of the web and software products published by developers.
Crowdsourced testing offers numerous advantages:
Flexibility: Given that our crowd encompasses testers in all timezones, there are always testers available, no matter the time of day. This comes in particularly handy when working late at night trying to meet a deadline.
Given that our crowd encompasses testers in all timezones, there are always testers available, no matter the time of day. This comes in particularly handy when working late at night trying to meet a deadline. Instantaneity: Unlike traditional software testing companies, Crowdsourced Testing services are available on short notice and allow you to get results in as little as a few hours.
Unlike traditional software testing companies, Crowdsourced Testing services are available on short notice and allow you to get results in as little as a few hours. Real-world multi-platform testing: When dealing with external users, your products are likely to be used on a much wider range of hardware and software combinations than those you have in-house. These include older browser versions, other operating systems, and different hardware devices. By working with a large crowd of testers, you ensure that your product is tested in various real-world situations and on a large variety of hardware and software combinations.
Who’s involved in crowdsource testing?
Crowdsource testing is in no way a challenger of in-house QA experts. Rather, crowd testers augment internal QA resources allowing managers to allocate resources in a more efficient way.
This provides the highest possible quality with the lowest possible investment. But it also requires QA teams to carefully consider how to deploy these resources for maximum efficiency.
Why crowdsourcing and software testing is a natural fit
Creativity is difficult to crowdsource or outsource. Can you crowdsource design? You can, but you might find it hard to find people who will convey your vision exactly as you would have liked. If you employ a talented designer or developer, you’re lucky; keep them on staff and keep them happy.
Creativity is more easily harvested within a company
The entire web or software development process can be called creative. From conception to market, products are constantly evolving and your staff makes creative decisions until the very end. However, the software testing process represents a key part of the creative interactive development process which is entirely rational. Software testing is about attention to detail and meticulousness.
Although quality assurance tests can be about judging the quality of an interactive product and making suggestions on how it can be improved, the unfortunate reality is that they are often conducted by rushed copywriters or project managers with very limited time at their disposal.
As a project manager, I would find myself too often in a situation where we would send an interactive project to a client, all the while suspecting that it contained bugs, and praying that he would not find them. We were under so much pressure to deliver that we didn’t have time to properly test it.
Programmers ran late, the team kept finding bugs, and we would finally ship the product several hours late without proper testing, hoping that our prayers would be heard.
Crowdsourced testing offers the advantage of enabling companies to conduct tests when it is most convenient for them, no matter the time or day of the week. This means that programmers can make a test request before they leave work and return to find a clear and concise list of bugs to fix in the morning. This can help you save an enormous amount of time and money!
There are many benefits of crowdsourced testing: It enables companies to work with professional testers in different environments, with a variety of languages, and who has access to various devices. Additionally, these testers can be scaled up or down at any time. Furthermore, because crowdsourced testers do not belong to an organization, they are generally unbiased.
However, with that came another challenge: How Crowdsourced Testing delivers excellent quality
Our solution is in a limited, elite group of freelance software testers who are passionate about what they do and equally passionate about doing it right.
At Crowdsourced Testing, we constantly review the work of every tester participating in our software testing projects to ensure great results. The more a tester gets involved in projects and the better his work, the more likely he is to be invited to test our clients’ projects.
You as a client only work with our community’s best testers. We do this so you won’t suffer through the pitfalls often associated with traditional crowdsourcing: poor results, incomplete bug descriptions, or language barriers!
Our mission is to help web and software developers deliver their projects on time and on budget by providing them with excellent quality assurance testing services at flexible hours. We’ve been testers for a long time. We understand your reality. We know how we can help you. Most importantly, we enjoy what we do, we care about a job well done and we’re easy to work with.
Crowdsourced QA testing works in various ways:
BYOD(Buy Your Own Device) or simulation: Testers either receive device emulators or virtual machines, or they utilize their own devices.
Testers either receive device emulators or virtual machines, or they utilize their own devices. Direct or indirect: Companies either work through the crowdsourced testing companies which act as a middleman, or they can go directly to individual testers to give directions and input.
Companies either work through the crowdsourced testing companies which act as a middleman, or they can go directly to individual testers to give directions and input. Types of testing: Crowdsourced testing ranges from exhaustive exploratory testing to very specific functional testing.
Pros and cons of crowd testing
With the ever-increasing demand for product quality coupled with a need to push to market quickly, QA mobile app testing is absolutely essential. Each application should be free of bugs and tested for ease of use and security.
Crowdsourced testing is a powerful approach that harnesses the power of crowd talent and wisdom. And when utilizing modern development practices of CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous delivery or continuous deployment), crowd testing scales better and is more flexible than other methods such as manual and automation testing.
But not all mobile app testing methods are equal. So before quality assurance managers spend resources on the latest testing trend, it’s important to understand what testing techniques will bring the best ROI.
Pros
Crowdtesting involves many individuals, often with better QA and a reduced cost. Other major advantages that ensure an application is ready for launch include:
Speed: The importance of developers getting timely and relevant bug information is crucial. With such a large, global number of people involved in the testing, crowdsourced testing leads to fast execution and better results.
The importance of developers getting timely and relevant bug information is crucial. With such a large, global number of people involved in the testing, crowdsourced testing leads to fast execution and better results. Efficiency: Crowd teams help some clients in time-varying bursts to manage peak workloads. This peak-demand testing strategy leads to the most efficient utilization of testing resources. Companies benefit from these burstable instances because they receive a high volume of QA resources for a short period of time only when necessary meaning they can manage day-to-day testing with fewer resources when necessary.
Crowd teams help some clients in time-varying bursts to manage peak workloads. This peak-demand testing strategy leads to the most efficient utilization of testing resources. Companies benefit from these burstable instances because they receive a high volume of QA resources for a short period of time only when necessary meaning they can manage day-to-day testing with fewer resources when necessary. Cost-effective: To reduce labor costs and dramatically improve efficiencies, today’s software development teams tap into on-demand crowdsourced QA services. It allows you to conduct testing without adding a permanent employee… and the salary, pension, and other costly benefits incurred. Costs are dramatically reduced by applying the time-varying resource provisioning of managed crowd testing.
To reduce labor costs and dramatically improve efficiencies, today’s software development teams tap into on-demand crowdsourced QA services. It allows you to conduct testing without adding a permanent employee… and the salary, pension, and other costly benefits incurred. Costs are dramatically reduced by applying the time-varying resource provisioning of managed crowd testing. Localized insights: Crowdtesting is great for testing localization projects. With access to diverse thoughts and variation in language… well beyond the traditional translation-based approach
Crowdtesting is great for testing localization projects. With access to diverse thoughts and variation in language… well beyond the traditional translation-based approach Usability testing capability: Through the power of crowdsourced testing, companies are able to determine quickly where their mobile application needs to be revised, updated, or fixed in order to avoid losing out on potential users. Crowdsourced testing delivers real users, on real devices, in their target markets.
Cons
While the pros of speed and flexibility of crowd testing are remarkable, some issues can arise if you haven’t created a concrete test plan or rely on unsupervised testers from a marketplace. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/crowdsourced-testing-631996f32b2d | [] | 2020-12-12 10:02:42.985000+00:00 | ['QA', 'Testing', 'Crowdsourced Testing', 'Crowdsourcing', 'Quality Assurance'] |
Stop and Look Around… | Life can get crazy; plans change, people change, thoughts change, you change. And it’s all happening at the same time. This life we live is so fluid and things change daily right before our eyes. Most people have heard the cliche, “stop and smell the roses.” While it has good intentions, I think this quote is a bit misleading and overused. There are some points in our lives where, whether we like it or not, there are no roses to smell. And that’s ok! I understand this idea may seem dark but bear with me. Don’t get me wrong, I agree that there are positive aspects that can come out of most situations. But at the same time, it’s important to be real with yourself. A quote that I think is a bit better worded comes from one of my favorite movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
While holding similar intentions as the quote previously mentioned, I believe that this one is more realistic. The quote simply suggests that one stops to look around, with no mention of smelling any roses. While there are some situations where stopping and “smelling the roses” might be the best choice, there are definitely some that require one to simply take a step back and observe. Take the situation for what it is. Don’t overanalyze it. Stop overthinking. Some things are beyond our control. And in these situations, it’s important be real with yourself and not give yourself a false sense of reality.
As a college student, it may seem that we’re always on the go. It’s a constant grind and hectic time for all of us. There is so much in our life that we have to balance: schoolwork, relationships, extracurriculars, jobs, sports, and career planning are a few that come to mind first. It’s so easy to get bogged down by our busy schedules that many people never take the time to reflect on what’s currently going on in their life. For the people that are able to do this, kudos to you. For the people who often need a reminder: this is for you.
Assess where you are in your life and where you want to be. It’s important to not tell yourself only what you want to hear, but be true and honest with yourself. Otherwise, there’s no point in doing it at all. Another important reminder is to do this without judging yourself. Wherever you are in your life, accept it for what it is, and make the decisions necessary to get to where you want to go.
While taking the time to reflect on your life, neutral thinking is an important concept to keep in mind. This is a different concept than most people are accustomed to as everyones been taught to “think positive” since a young age. This positive mindset can sometimes be misleading and give people a false sense of confidence or security. Neutral thinking isn’t positive or negative; it’s taking whatever event has happened to you without judgement and using this to make decisions on how you will act next. This mindset doesn’t involve any emotion. This is important as positive and negative thinking can result in a decision based solely on emotion, which doesn’t always allow one to make the decision that would best benefit them. For example, if someone receives a bad grade on an exam, they can respond in several ways. Negative thinking following a poor grade enables one to judge themselves which results in a constant cycle of negative thoughts. Positive thinking may result in one having a false sense of confidence, which puts the individual at jeopardy for future exams and assignments. Neutral thinking allows one to take the grade for what it is (because it’s not changing either way) and create a plan on how to fix it. Maybe this mindset doesn’t work for everyone, but I urge you to give it a try.
Without reflection, there can be no growth; life is all about growing and becoming the person you want to be. Every so often, take a break. See where you are in your life and where you want to be. This allows you to not only appreciate the current point of your life, but also allows you to pause and tweak things that need changing. No one can do this for you, so take it upon yourself and make it a priority. Your future self will thank you for it. | https://medium.com/@joedelollo/stop-and-look-around-ff7c7b48c936 | ['Joe Delollo'] | 2020-12-24 20:26:56.246000+00:00 | ['Growing Up', 'Adulting', 'Life Lessons'] |
What identity politics misses: It’s not an absolute | In the past month, I’ve been accused multiple times of not doing enough to recognize my privilege as a white cisgender straight male as if that’s the biggest sin one can commit.
Just because society has drastically shifted in the past few years does not mean it is accurate or beyond critical reproach.
Defining yourself by your gender, orientation and race is a school of thought. It’s not a law of physics. In fact, it’s a very very recent way of defining the world and you will find very little literature or even mentions of intersectionality, micro-aggression, white privilege, tone policing, etc in English speech as recently as 2012–2013.
I was talking to an anthropology professor who said she doesn’t teach POC in her classes and wants to vomit at the sound of that. I have a master’s in public policy, an undergraduate in geography, where I studied conflicts all over the world. It’s a massive oversimplification to say that all white people have been oppressing non-white people forever and that’s the long and short of it. Suicide rates are highest in those living in the former Soviet Union and the biggest genocide of the mid-90s was in what was then known as Yugoslavia. Slavery was practiced by most societies before it morphed into a uniquely terrible institution. Oppression and brutal civil wars happened on the African continent as well as among the Japanese, Chinese and Mongol empires. Read up on the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda or the abolitionist experiment that created the war-torn nation of Liberia. I am equally aware of the 1885 Berlin conference where Europe created a map that split up Africa in untenable ways and screwed those people over a million times, but things are complicated.
The idea of explaining the world through the lens of intersectionality where the “oppressed” can be placed in three tidy little boxes — women, LGBT, and POC — is at best an attractive over simplification. It frees people from having to think of complex policy situations and allows people to feel good about themselves without having to actually understand the world. It’s also a macroscopic measure that’s being used the wrong way to define good and bad, justice or injustice, poverty and wealth.
The costs are higher because those people who preach privilege and identity politics are out of touch with how the world works. If you believe people’s patterns of human activity and voting are based entirely in privilege, then you’re coming at those you wish to influence from a place of distance and alienation.
If you wish to help marginalized groups using that definition of marginalization, that’s amazing but there shouldn’t be such massive negative consequences for people who don’t subscribe to that school of thought. As far as I’m concerned, this way of looking at the world is a mistake and my heart doesn’t go out to people along that definition as it does people who are poor, immigrants (from any country), people afflicted by a natural disaster, or those bullied for their thoughts.
The justification but Groups A, B, and C have been bullied for centuries doesn’t satisfy me personally. What we should be concerned about is an accurate assessment of the degree to which these groups are oppressed in 2020 rather than a constant reckoning of and a balance that’s somewhat accurate instead. Otherwise you have atrocities like the decision in Oregon to over-award the black population in that state for Coronavirus relief. | https://medium.com/@orrinkonheim/what-identity-politics-miss-its-not-an-absolute-7c3ce2dad4a9 | ['Orrin Konheim'] | 2021-02-22 04:42:18.132000+00:00 | ['Cancel Culture', 'Wokeness', 'White Privilege'] |
EMAIL MARKETING | Email marketing is a method of marketing that can make new goods, promotions, and other services aware of the customers on your email list. In order to educate your customers on the importance of your brand or keep them involved between transactions, it can also be a smoother sale. Email marketing is a strong marketing channel, a form of direct marketing and digital marketing that uses email to promote the goods or services of your company. By incorporating it into your marketing automation activities, it will help make your consumers aware of your new products or offerings. eIt can also play a key role in lead generation, brand recognition, building relationships or keeping consumers engaged between transactions through various types of marketing emails. Some of the different types of email marketing are Welcome Emails, Email Newsletters, Dedicated emails, Sponsorship Emails, Transactional Emails etc.
SITUATION OF EMAIL MARKETING
As a matter of fact, email marketing campaigns have evolved to be more detailed in recent years. Businesses no longer rely exclusively on discounts and promotions. Content that really matters to their audience, shopping integration, re-engagement campaigns and more are what they emphasize now. In 2023, Statistica has estimated that there will be 4.3 billion email users. That means, for every $1 they spend on their email marketing campaign on an average note, a brand yields $44. (Thomas, 2020)
ADVANTAGES
A big advantage of email marketing is that it also offers higher rates of conversion than other marketing strategies. In reality, McKinsey estimates that an email’s average order value is at least 3x higher than social media posts’ average order value. Your company will drive further conversions through email marketing after creating a successful contact strategy. Your brand will inspire readers to take the next step in the purchase journey by creating well-written emails that conclude with a straightforward call-to-action, bringing them closer to conversion. In contrast to other conventional marketing strategies, such as direct mail and print media, email marketing is fairly inexpensive. Although you need to spend money on printing and advertising space for these conventional print marketing techniques, email marketing requires only a small investment in time and energy to create successful content. Email marketing also offers an attractive return on investment, in addition to relatively low operating costs | https://medium.com/@kodiatechnology/email-marketing-3b73c7eefb61 | ['Kodia Technology'] | 2020-12-23 16:05:00.243000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Email Marketing'] |
Returning Citizens | Somewhere in the hallowed halls of a college or university, inside the airy room of a semi-auditorium reeking of old books and the hint of stale coffee, a professor is shouting to his students in a rather stern and irritated voice, “Define your terms!”
He shouts again, “What do you mean by what you are saying? Tell us plainly.”
You can imagine students going into panic mode as they struggle to rummage through the thesaurus of their own minds, trying to find just the right word or phrase to define the term they are using.
You know, come to think of it, everyday people are the exact same way about the resilient group of citizens in our local communities, who despite major setbacks keep making substantial comebacks. They are Returning Citizens.
Faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, returning citizens just keep coming out better and rising up stronger, despite the state of Florida’s efforts to halt the use of their civil rights and hinder their participation in democracy. Still, as rightly defined, returning citizens keep up the fight by beating even the unfair odds set against them.
A returning citizen can be defined as a person who has been negatively impacted from, formerly convicted by, or previously incarcerated in the criminal justice system, and is returning to the community with a felony conviction.
Did you get that? Read it again.
Negatively impacted. Formerly convicted. Previously incarcerated. Returning from the deplorable conditions of incarceration.
Barrier. Barrier. Barrier. Hope.
The very fact that we deem these citizens to be “returning” only further proves and displays the hope that lies within each of us, and the yards of potential that resides in each of them.
I believe there are three things each member of society can do to not only acknowledge returning citizens, but do our part to empower them as well.
Recognize Returning Citizens
Remember those huge maps at the mall or the outlet store? Right square in the middle of it would be a big colored dot and the words above it would say, “You are here.” The dot is meant to be a demarcation to help customers navigate through the maze of stores to the actual place they’d like to be. We help returning citizens by acknowledging their existence, validating their return to the community, and supporting a healthy reintegration into society. Doing this says, “You are here. We see you. We acknowledge you as an equal member of the community.”
Something as simple as the recognition of being there helps a returning citizen navigate through the maze of emotions and negative sentiments that may cause them to feel alone or that society doesn’t want them. When the truth is, not only does the community want them, but our neighborhoods need them. Because the lives of returning citizens are just as valuable to the growth and greater development of communities as anyone else, we need there contributions for the benefit of the common good.
Utilize Returning Citizens
From the best employees to diligent and vigilant tenants, returning citizens offer a usefulness and an ethic that is unique; unlike any other. People don’t often think about it, but they sure need to consider the fact that returning citizens bring a work ethic, an appreciation for life, a newfound commitment to social justice and civic engagement, and a deep desire to repair breaches and chasms they see in their families and communities. All of this is born out of the crucible of their own experiences. Prison changes people. Some for the better. Some for the worse.
Having a jury find you guilty is a traumatic experience some never quite get over.
A judge who could have locked you up, but gave you probation and a second chance can make people think twice about recidivating. An appreciation for life and freedom hits in a very different way for those who have been impacted by the criminal justice system. Because of this, employers benefit from hiring returning citizens. Why wouldn’t we hire them?
Apartment homes and other rental properties have a much better tenant in returning citizens because some of them know how it feels to sleep in a cell, and have the utmost convictions of never, ever having to do that again. They appreciate a roof over their heads that is all their own. Why wouldn’t we rent to them?
Simply put, returning citizens are some of the best employees. They’re great neighbors. And they have an appreciation for life that is infectious.
Maximize Returning Citizens
The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and its ally organizations understand how important it is to recognize the lives and contributions of returning citizens.
Members of the Coalition know how important it is to utilize the skills, talents, experiences of returning citizens in the workforce and to respect their humanity in fair and equitable housing. That is why the FRRC is working hard to maximize the positive impact of returning citizens in our communities by championing initiatives that make them whole.
When it comes to this work, I hear the chants coming down the street.
“ Let my people vote! Let my people rent! Let my people drive! Let my people work! Let my people live!”
From expanding the Fines and Fees Modification Program to pushing for the implementation of Second Chance Hiring Incentive Programs, the FRRC is maximizing the moment for returning citizens.
Well has it been said, “ Leaders start with ‘Why?’”
The ‘why’ of what FRRC does is simple: Recognize returning citizens. Utilize returning citizens. Maximize returning citizens.
Repeat. | https://medium.com/florida-rights-restoration-coalition/returning-citizens-f8ab8d6cca46 | ['Chasman Barnes'] | 2021-06-17 15:26:24.828000+00:00 | ['Prison Reform', 'Advocacy', 'Progressive', 'Voting Rights', 'Criminal Justice Reform'] |
You’re welcome, Franco. 😃 | Freelance writer and illustrator covering everything bar the kitchen sink. | https://medium.com/@singh.erin/youre-welcome-franco-456c6d9cb1c0 | ['Erin Singh'] | 2020-12-14 23:54:11.337000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Reader', 'Feedback', 'Scuzzbucket', 'Humor'] |
Towards Autonomous Vehicles 2021 | Vehicle Perception Technology
Perception is key to understanding the world. This section connects sensing and perception in automated driving systems. Based on its function, vehicle perception technology can be divided into two major categories:
Localization — locating the position of the vehicle on maps
locating the position of the vehicle on maps Recognition — object detection, target tracking, and motion estimation
AVs usually need to perform simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to operate in a dynamic environment. Localization is considered part of the perception module here, while planning and control are part of the decision module.
Vehicle perception technology can be categorized based on its sensing medium:
Perception via radio waves (GPS, radar)
(GPS, radar) Perception via sound waves (ultrasonic sensors)
(ultrasonic sensors) Perception via light (LiDAR, Camera)
Most AV Companies rely on HD Maps for navigation. Given this map, an AV could easily perceive the environment using its technologies. The vehicles will compare and update for any changes in the map as they drive.
“If we want to have autonomous cars everywhere, we have to have digital maps everywhere,” — Amnon Shashua, CEO of Mobileye (The New York Times 2017)
Real roads are dynamic; they can change drastically due to construction or natural disaster. Some companies like Tesla and Apple set a high ambition of using the ‘mapless’ motion planning system. They rely completely on vision.
GPS/IMU
Localization can be realized using GNSS, short for the global navigation satellite system. This is more commonly known as GPS, which is a type of GNSS. The update rate of GPS is about 10 Hz.
Additionally, IMU devices are also used in AVs to enable real-time vehicle positioning in maps. IMU devices operate at around 200 Hz, a much higher update rate than GPS.
Some techniques, such as tracking filters and Sequential Monte Carlo methods, can be used to combine sensor measurements from multiple sources.
We cannot rely solely on GPS/IMU for localization because GPS is not accurate enough.
Radar
Radio detection and ranging system (Radar) in AVs can detect the speed and range of objects nearby. Radars consist of a transmitter and a receiver. AV Radars (millimeter-wave radar) emit and receive radio waves in extremely high frequency to sense the environment.
Radars measure the range of objects and relative velocity through pulse compression and Doppler shift, respectively. Radars in AVs can be long, medium, or short-ranged. All three types can be used together in an AV.
Doppler effect | Image via Wikimedia Commons
The biggest advantage of radar is that it can operate in all weather conditions. In driving applications, radars typically operate in pulses, linear frequency-modulated continuous-wave, and frequency-shift keying.
Common practical challenges of radars are time synchronization, interface communication, optimal allocation of digital signal processing, and minimizing interference. AVs usually use radars for the obstacle avoidance task alongside ultrasonic sensors.
Ultrasonic Sensors
Ultrasonic sound navigation and ranging (Sonar) also emit waves and convert the reflected waves to electric signals similar to radar with a resonant frequency of around 48 Hz. It consists of an ultrasonic transducer and a receiver circuit.
Ultrasonic sensors can ‘see’ through objects, suitable for recognizing slow-moving targets. This sensor is unaffected by weather conditions, though a rapid temperature change will affect its accuracy.
The range of objects detected by ultrasonic sensors can be calculated by measuring the elapsed time interval between emission and reflection.
Long-range ultrasonic sensors can detect objects from up to 8 meters away. Most AVs use ultrasonic sensors for safe driving applications such as automatic parking and collision warning.
There exist methods to generate images from airborne ultrasonic waves. This is a relatively new research field in medical imaging and robotics. The information content of ultrasonic images is however still inferior to LiDAR or camera. Therefore, the process of generating images from sonar is not necessary.
LiDAR
Light detection and ranging systems (LiDAR) consists of laser scanners and laser receivers. LiDAR uses ultraviolet, visible, or infrared light in the form of a pulsed laser to image objects, with up to 150,000 pulses per second.
There are three types of LiDAR: time-of-flight, triangulating, and phase-ranging. The world’s highest resolution LiDAR is the Velodyne VLS-128. It has a range of 300 meters and can record up to 2.4–9.6 million data points per second.
LiDAR calculates the distance of detected objects by measuring the pulse interval between emission and reflection of the light scattered by targets.
LiDAR technology is notorious for being quite expensive, but it has been undergoing the most technological progress in recent years. Innovations in 2020 include microelectromechanical mirrors (MEMS) and solid-state LiDAR. Those LiDARs don’t have mechanical components, thus reducing the unit cost.
MIT Spinoff Building New Solid-State Lidar-on-a-Chip System (12/2020) | Image by MIT Lincoln Laboratory
AVs can use LiDAR technology to scan the environment and create 3D digital representations. This 3D-data is useful for both localization and motion tracking.
LiDAR-based localization often also uses particle filter techniques. The data collected by LiDAR fused with the GPS/IMU data in sensor fusion. This method can achieve real-time position accuracy of within 10 cm.
The performance of liDAR strongly depends on the good calibration of the device. This involves many variables, such as the choice of parametrization and data segmentation.
A point cloud image of a vehicle in an intersection, projected from Velodyne’s HDL-64E LiDAR | source
Camera
Most AVs rely heavily on camera devices. AVs usually mount eight 1080p cameras capturing images at 60 frames per second. With multiple cameras, you could see all directions. You could also project images into a 360-degree field of view in 3D-dimension.
One argues that the camera is superior to radar and lidar because it could capture the color, texture, and contour of objects. The challenge with cameras is that it depends heavily on weather conditions.
“Once you solve cameras for vision, autonomy is solved; if you don’t solve vision, it’s not solved… You can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras.” — Elon Musk, TED2017
Most researches limit AVs to urban areas, where AVs would make a bigger impact. Lane-keeping assist systems is now a well-researched topic in this field. [6]
Image-based perception algorithms can be either heuristic or data-driven. In recent years, deep learning techniques have proven superior to conventional computer vision techniques for object detection and tracking. We can segment and classify images using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN).
All current methods are relying on DCNN architectures, such as SPP-Net, ResNet-50, VGG-16, DarkNet-53. The open-source state-of-the-art for real-time object detection at the time of writing this is YOLOv4. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) such as the Long-short-term-memory (LSTM) are also powerful tools when working with images with temporal features (video).
In practice, AV companies combine different machine learning methods into complex hybrid forms when designing their pipelines. The object recognition framework used by AVs can generally be divided into two types:
Single-stage detection framework — a single network to predict object location and classify objects
— a single network to predict object location and classify objects Region proposal detection framework — uses two distinct stages, where the region of interest is predefined before classified by separate networks.
The current research trend for vehicle perception is 360° video/image processing algorithms. This is necessary for higher-level automation [6].
Meanwhile, the task of camera-based localization is a broad topic that also found its applications in robotics, virtual reality, and augmented reality. In AVs, vision-based localization normally uses visual odometry techniques [3].
The general pipeline for visual (image-based) odometry is as the following: 1) obtain disparity map by triangulation of stereo image pair, 2) matching salient features, 3) estimate depth for each point between successive frames, 4) comparing the features to estimate motion and current vehicle position. | https://pub.towardsai.net/towards-autonomous-vehicles-8224bb0bf18d | ['Stephen Adhisaputra'] | 2021-01-03 03:27:02.458000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'Autonomous Vehicles', 'Future', 'Self Driving Cars'] |
🚀Here are my best finds for a Tech Smart Boss this week — Issue #124 | New Videos from Tech Smart Boss
Have Your Slack Team Stand To Attention, With Standuply (Onboarding and Review) — www.youtube.com
If you watch our videos and listen to the Tech Smart Boss podcast, you know I’m a big fan of Slack. Just listen to Episode 54 ( https://be.smartboss.co/episo...
New Podcast from Tech Smart Boss
Episode 118: 8 Tips To Take Your Customer Support From Good To Great — soundcloud.com
Stream Episode 118: 8 Tips To Take Your Customer Support From Good To Great by Tech Smart Boss from desktop or your mobile device
Top Articles of the Week
What are Low-Code Platforms? How to Pick the Best Development for Your Business | Process Street | Checklist, Workflow and SOP Software — www.process.st
Low-code development platforms can help you build apps without the need for expensive software specialists or long, clunky development life-cycles. Get the lowdown on low-code here.
The best CRMs for small businesses: pros, cons, and what you need to know — PieSync — www.piesync.com
The best CRMs for small businesses: pros, cons, and what you need to know
How Can I Generate Traffic With $0 Marketing Budget? — Encharge — encharge.io
10 tactics to generate website traffic with $0 marketing budget, AND also generate revenue for your startup.
Why You Should Build Your Brand with Video — Wistia Blog — wistia.com
Here’s why playing it safe won’t get you noticed — and what building a brand with video really means.
Employee onboarding checklist — slite.com
Employee onboarding checklist How to onboard new hires and set them up for success.
Cool Tech of the Week
I’ve talked on YouTube in the past about how I’m a big fan of the browser, Opera. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised with the improvements to Firefox the past year.
This week we’re naming Firefox as our Cool Tech of the Week, not just for the quickness of their browsing experience but a new thing we came across this week, Firefox Send.
Sure there are lots of ways to send files safely, Dropbox, Google Drive, I personally use pCloud. But Firefox is now another good option and it’s just plain simple.
Just try it out for yourself and see, it my become your new favorite encrypted file sender.
Firefox Send — send.firefox.com
Encrypt and send files with a link that automatically expires to ensure your important documents don’t stay online forever.
That’s it for this edition
Feedback? Suggestions? Email me at [email protected] and please, please, please, share the newsletter and www.techsmartboss.com with anyone else you may think will like it! | https://medium.com/@techsmartboss/tech-smart-boss-issue-124-b276bb1ab4b5 | ['David Ferguson'] | 2019-03-17 01:06:06.554000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Marketing', 'Technology'] |
To the new mums, with love | Dear ‘I can do it all’ New Mumma
The phase you are in right now, is longer than it seems. Of course in a few years from now it may look like time flies, but now, at present, days will be long. Especially if you are in a set up where it’s just you, the spouse and the baby(ies).
You want to do it all, to be just the perfect mother you wanted to be. But it is already taking a toll on you and your health and may I add, your happiness.If you are in this phase, you may as well do yourself some favour by indulging a little.
1. ASK for help: Your baby cries when she needs something, you got to spell out when you need help, which areas would you need help in, as many times as required. No shame, no guilt.
Divide, delegate, take support. If you’d like to keep the baby close, have extra hands to take care of the house, in case you’d like to keep the kitchen to yourself, let someone help with the baby tasks.
2. 30 minutes to yourself: This could be a little ambitious, but please set aside as much time as you can for yourself. For nursing mothers this could truly be difficult especially if breast milk is the only food for babies’ initial months. But, you got to have sometime only with yourself doing anything you love doing. Read, listen to music, chat up with friends, go walk, anything that connects you remotely to your pre mom days, preferably step out of the house.
3. Reach out to fellow moms: It’s strange that we all have been through the same phase, even then we moms are far from getting together as a community. Network with fellow moms (the more like minded, the better) for queries you may have around vaccinations, diaper rashes, sleeping pattern, colour of poop, frequency of feeding et all.
4. Keep your loved ones’ close: Motherhood can be overwhelming with a kid wanting your attention almost every time, even the times when you’ve gone to pee. Many of us tend to isolate ourselves from the ones’ we were in touch with, for paucity of time or change in priorities. Make a list of two- three people who cheer you up, who can make you feel good about yourself — friends, family, acquaintance, colleague, anyone. Use them to give yourself that dose of happiness you need, frequently.
5. Recover yourself with the same love: Don’t forget the post delivery supplements, those are just as important. Catch up on the missed sleep, as and when you can. Easier said than done as you’d like to do so much more than sleep but darling, sleepless body will give in sooner than you imagine. So do wear that eye mask as and when you can.
6. A trusted caregiver: Again, your spouse ideally should be playing an equal role enabling you with time to rest enough. However, in case that’s not the arrangement, scout for an alternate care giver: another family member, a friend, nanny or a domestic help who could help you catch up with yourself. While there’s no standard formula, having another person look after your baby for a while may give you a little respite. Try!
Post Partum Depression is real, albeit it being misunderstood in most parts of the words. If you are struggling, know that there are many more who might be facing similar issues. You ain’t doing it wrong, you are possibly doing too much. Stretch a little and know that no-one’s born with a superwoman cape, we all learn through our journeys. | https://medium.com/@dashmeet-kaur/to-the-new-mums-with-love-72c029f0c7af | ['Dashmeet Kaur'] | 2020-05-06 15:47:29.415000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Kids', 'Moms'] |
Create a parameterized dataset for azure data factory pipeline | In this article, we will create a parameterized dataset for Azure SQL database for azure data factory pipeline. Here developer can create a connection for database and pass the table name while using the dataset in Azure pipeline based on requirement.
You should have Azure subscription. You should have already set up an Azure SQL database server. You should have SQL Server details, User id and password and access of it.
1. Go to dataset and click on 3 dots and select new dataset.
2. Select the service for which you want to create it. Here we are doing it for Azure SQL database. So, select Azure SQL Database and continue.
3. Give a name to dataset and select the linked service from drop down and click OK.
4. Go to parameter tab and create 2 parameters for schema name and table name.
5. Now in connection tab click on Edit button and it will give you an option to add dynamic content for the schema and table.
Click on add dynamic content and select the parameter we create in previous step
Perform the similar steps for table name as well.
Once it is done, click on preview data. It will ask you to provide the schema name and table name in parameter. After providing the input click on OK
If you can see the data from table then great. Parameterized Dataset has been created. Now you can call it your pipeline and provide the table name as you want.
Make sure you publish it at the end 😊 | https://medium.com/@usha-singh/create-a-parameterized-dataset-for-azure-data-factory-pipeline-bc2ce2d1d10 | ['Usha Singh'] | 2020-12-21 16:39:02.874000+00:00 | ['Dataset', 'Azure Data Factory', 'Azure'] |
The Untold Story of the Invention of the Printing Press | The Untold Story of the Invention of the Printing Press
Words weren’t always tame
Image courtesy of The British Library, modified from original.
Gray sky threatened rain, but Johannes Gutenberg was anything but gloomy.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and summoned Frederika Strout, his assistant for the past ten years, with the loudest shout he’d ever uttered. “Frederika. I did it! It works. Come!”
Johannes thought those were inauspicious words to herald the success of such a great invention, but he’d have time to immortalize the moment later.
“The hen’s laying eggs, Johannes. I’ll be there in a minute.” Frederika, a goldsmith by training and a tinkerer by choice, like her boss, also tended the chickens, pigs and sole cow.
“Hurry!”
Before Frederika had a chance to say, “The chicken will be done when the chicken’s done,” Johannes added, “I mean it!”
When Johannes was in a mood, there was no arguing with him. Frederika peeked up at the sky. A storm was brewing in the east and she hoped that she’d be back in time to retrieve the eggs before a fox found them.
Frederika was about to push open the door, but a gust of wind preempted her. The wind shoved her forward, and she barely managed not to crash into Johannes’ interminable project, his printing press.
Johannes’ house was his workshop and vice versa. The printing press occupied almost all of the cramped room. Behind it was a fireplace with a black iron pot, in which Johannes cooked the same lamb and carrot stew for nearly all his meals. To the left was a small, squat table with various tools, and a gold bracelet that he was making for the princess, which was a month overdue. To the right, was another table on which a handwritten book lay open.
Johannes furiously waved a small cloth net over the old book, capturing escaped words. Occasionally, he netted several words at once, but most of the time he could only catch individual ones. He apprehended aventure when it slowly fluttered above, but kynde and hastow escaped and flew through a gap in his wooden house.
Frederika hoisted up her skirt and retrieved the net that was strapped to her calf. She scooped anon and seyde together in one swoop. They struggled to free themselves, but she firmly reinserted them into The Canterbury Tales, squishing the words hard into the parchment, smoothing them down with her fingertips.
Johannes sighed. “Nevermind, Frederika. Nobody needs nets anymore.” Johannes dropped his net on the floor and extended his palm down, signalling Frederika to do the same. She released hers with fnorteth still inside. Fnorteth escaped through the same gap as kynde and hastow.
“Does it work, Johannes?”
“Yes!” He did a jig in place. “The printing press is a success. From this moment forward, words will be imprinted on the page with so much pressure that they can never escape.” He exhaled a long breath. “My printing press exerts a force equivalent to a one-ton boulder.”
Johannes gently squeezed Frederika’s hand. “Books will last forever.” | https://medium.com/parson-and-the-chanticleer/the-untold-story-of-the-invention-of-the-printing-press-8c67080c15b0 | ['Bill Adler'] | 2020-12-07 15:01:12.268000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'English Language', 'Fantasy', 'Fiction', 'Historical Fiction'] |
New action: Rate Change from Order | Hello superorder users and supporters! It’s been a while since we released something new, mostly updated system and even skipped announcements :)
Today we are announcing new action that a lot of our users have asked for.
Rate Change related to Orders
Now you can use changes of price related to your filled orders for your benefit. It allows some new ways to trade: pyramiding or easy trade targets for example. Here is how it works.
When you create your chain you select Rate Change action and select an order from which the action should calculate change.
In the following example we:
Perform Market Buy Using new Rate Change action wait for the price to go 10% up from our entry Perform Market Sell
Other changes | https://medium.com/superorder/new-action-rate-change-from-order-4d0d1ca5c820 | [] | 2018-06-27 09:26:17.468000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Product Updates', 'Cryptocurrency Investment'] |
Компонент из фрейма с иконкой | 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://designpub.ru/%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BD-%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B0-%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B8-e9ba0a695e2d | ['Андрей Насонов'] | 2020-12-25 14:41:52.993000+00:00 | ['Дизайн Системы', 'Дизайн', 'UX', 'Иконки', 'Design Systems'] |
When we’re together (Day 44) | Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
We have now two days of national holidays followed by a weekend, which means four days of mommy, daddy and baby time. We always look forward to these kinds of days. I love them because I know how hard my husband works and he deserves some free time, but also that means he gets more quality time with his fast-growing son.
It also means we can go on adventures or have special moments together that make us appreciate the home we created for our little family. They say home is where you are and that is completely right. My husband and I still have to work on creating a more permanent home for us as we’re renting the current apartment, but we managed to create a beautiful little nest for us.
We have chosen my home town Novo Mesto, for our permanent residence and I couldn’t be happier. Fortunately, my husband also likes his new home town. But if our life would take us anywhere else, I know we would be fine. Both my husband and I are really adaptable and children tend to get used to any setting you put them to. As long as we are together.
I can’t say what the future holds or where we’ll be in ten years’ time. I just know, we’ll get there as a family.
Motherhood in numbers: | https://medium.com/a-year-in-a-life/remembering-day-44-721f41da8a99 | ['Sara Tomsic'] | 2019-11-06 18:52:58.663000+00:00 | ['Newborn', 'Baby', 'Home', 'Motherhood', 'Family'] |
How NIST Helped Hero Pilot Jimmy Doolittle Fly | Jimmy Doolittle in the aircraft used for the first blind landing in 1929. Credit: National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (reprinted with permission)
Laura Ost, Public Affairs Specialist, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
As portrayed by movie star Spencer Tracy in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, pilot James (Jimmy) Doolittle led the 1942 air raid on Japan that lifted American spirits in early World War II, winning fame and the Medal of Honor. He eventually became a four-star general.
Long before Doolittle became a legend, the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), helped the young lieutenant achieve another feat of aircraft derring-do.
In the early years of aviation, flying was experimental and tricky, and often dangerous. Many flight instruments and navigational aids were developed, but in the late 1920s pilots still could not know their exact position in the air. They had to guess by looking outside the plane at landmarks and the ground, a potentially life-threatening challenge when landing. Pilots simply could not fly in fog.
Pilots somehow needed to get accurate 3D guidance to know their aircrafts’ height and distance from the airfield, line up with the runway, and descend gradually for a safe landing.
NIST’s contributions to the development of radio led to research on radio aids to air navigation. Among other innovations, NIST researchers designed runway beacons to transmit radio signals that could be picked up by a plane’s radiotelephone receiver. The system mapped out routes that a pilot could follow by looking at visual indicators in the cockpit.
NIST contributed this system to 1929 fog landing experiments arranged by the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics.
NIST’s radio range localizing beacon, to indicate runway direction, and marker beacon, to indicate longitudinal position along the runway approach, were installed at Mitchel Field in Garden City, Long Island, New York. The cockpit instrument display was a set of two metal reeds. When the plane was on course, the two reeds appeared to be the same length. When the plane was too far right or left, the reed on that side was longer, and the pilot would turn the plane toward the shorter reed.
Aircraft course indicators using two metal reeds, 1928. Inscription (left) reads: Longest reed shows side off course. Inscription (right) reads: Aircraft visual course indicator for directive radio beacon. Credit: NIST Digital Archives
On September 24, 1929, Lt. Doolittle of the U.S. Army Air Corps, sitting under a cockpit hood to prevent him from seeing outside the NY-2 Husky aircraft, performed a series of flights and landings, including several in heavy fog. A safety officer, hoodless in the plane’s forward cockpit, provided backup control.
This first “blind” takeoff, 15-minute flight around the airfield, and landing — all by instruments alone — is commemorated by an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Milestone plaque at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City.
“Doolittle’s successful blind flight and landing demonstrated that having and being able to use accurate and reliable instruments was the key to safe flying, under near-zero visibility conditions … contrary to the belief of many pilots at the time that being able to fly, ‘by the seat of my pants,’ was the more important skill,” the online citation states.
“Crucial to the success of the flight … was the radio range and marker beacon developed by the Bureau of Standards,” the citation notes. Additional technical details can be found in the milestone proposal.
Doolittle used then-standard cockpit instruments and several other, newer ones, including an artificial horizon display, a directional gyroscope, and an altimeter that could be corrected for changes in barometric pressure based on two-way radio communication with the ground.
The altimeter’s measurements of height above the ground were off by a probable 9 to 12 meters (30 to 40 feet), resulting in hard landings, according to a 1930 NIST paper.
“The lessons learned from these demonstrations were many,” NIST researchers wrote. “Perhaps the most important was that the problem of securing suitable indications of the true height above ground still required attention. The need for two-way communication with the ground in order to correct the altimeter to the proper barometric pressure seemed excessive. In addition, the absolute height could not be determined to the proper accuracy.”
Physicist Francis Dunmore operates a model illustrating the radio beacon system used in guiding aircraft, 1926. Credit: NIST Digital Archives
Doolittle’s demonstrations thus pointed to the need for another landing aid. In separate experiments, NIST researchers were working on a solution: a sloping radio beam, a sort of invisible ramp, to provide a more exact landing path. This transmitter radiated a directional signal pattern with an elongated horizontal lobe. The signals received in the aircraft were converted to an electric current indicator, which the pilot would try to keep at a fixed value while flying along the axis of the lobe or the line of maximum signal intensity. Audible signals indicated the plane’s approximate distance from the airfield.
There you have it: NIST’s radio beacon and receiving system to enable the blind landing of aircraft under conditions of no visibility. The system had three elements: a directive beacon, a marker beacon and, finally, a radio landing beam. More details are available in various books and other publications.
After a series of test flights, on September 5, 1931, Marshall Boggs, a U.S. Department of Commerce pilot, made the first “completely blind” landing in the history of aviation using only radio signals for guidance. This historic flight at the College Park, Maryland, airfield launched a new era in aviation. Later known as the instrument landing system, NIST’s radiobeacon scheme was the forerunner of today’s air traffic control. | https://nist.medium.com/how-nist-helped-hero-pilot-jimmy-doolittle-fly-5ef630581f2f | ['National Institute Of Standards'] | 2020-08-19 20:38:44.983000+00:00 | ['History Of Aviation', 'Aviation', 'History Of Technology'] |
Why we’re extending the main property draw | Since the beginning, we’ve been committed to doing life-changing things. We changed Lois Wright’s life in August 2019 with a cash prize of over £173,000, and with our customers’ help raised about £14,000 for our two homelessness charities. We’re really proud of that.
But this time around we want to make one of our customers a homeowner, Stamp Duty and legal fees paid, and that’s why we’re extending our competition to July 31.
In mid-December, we announced that we were about 12,000 entrants away from our 60,000 ticket threshold. We’re now tantalisingly close to our goal and that’s why we‘re going to extend our main property competition so that one of our customers can walk away with the jackpot prize, a £500,000 property they can call home.
We’re planning on guaranteeing the property as the prize in due course. However, while that’s not quite possible just yet, we’re really excited about what that will mean for our customers when the time’s right. Read on to learn more.
Are my tickets still valid?
Yes, any tickets bought for the main property competition are still valid.
When will the competition now close?
The new closure date is set for July 31 2020. However, we have the ability to bring our new draw date forward and aim to do so when we hit our target.
Will the weekly £1,000 cash-prizes continue?
Yes. We’ve found that they help us sell more tickets to the main draw while not impinging on our ability to maintain a growing fund for the property. It’s a win-win and we love sending our weekly congratulations messages to our winners!
What’s the chance you’ll ever guarantee the property?
Based on ticket sales growth, an engaged and growing customer base, and with less than 10,000 entrants now required, we’d say extremely high. We’re frustrated by having to extend the competition's deadline but we’re doing all that we can to bring forward the draw date. In fact, our new referral scheme could make all the difference. In fact, should just 25% of our customer-base refer a single friend each, we’d award the property tomorrow.
How does the new referral scheme work?
Spend a couple of seconds sharing your unique and trackable referral link from your account and we’ll give you 3 free entries for every friend that buys a ticket. And they’ll also get a free entry too.
You can refer as many people as you want and simply email or text your link to your contacts. Also, our new referral system allows you to track who’s activated their referrals and who needs a gentle reminder.
What? No apology?
Not quite. By way of apologising for the delay, we’ve awarded all account holders a free entry that is now available on their accounts to redeem. If that’s you, head here to redeem it.
I have more questions…
That’s totally understandable. We have live-chat available on site and our dedicated customer support team is ready and waiting for you — just head here and start a conversation by clicking the blue icon on the bottom right of the screen. You can also email [email protected]. One of our team will get back to you ASAP and they work 24/7. | https://medium.com/@rafflehouse/why-were-extending-the-main-property-draw-ed69ac903f8c | ['Raffle House'] | 2020-01-21 13:45:34.388000+00:00 | ['Property', 'Raffle House', 'Win A Home', 'Competition', 'London'] |
Community Reflections: the SDN New York Chapter and Me | SDN New York Chapter volunteers at their first annual service safari–hosted at a local zoo, September 2018
When I was asked to write about my personal experience with the SDN New York Chapter and why I keep coming back, I felt a lot of feels. This collective brings up passion, commitment, community, and so much love. I’ll try not to get too cheesy with you, but know that the people here are people who care.
My first real introduction to the Service Design community was in February 2016. I had just moved to NY the previous summer, and I was looking for some kind of friendly design community. I randomly signed up for the Global Service Jam, since the details said that no experience was required. Great. It ended up being an incredible weekend where I met lots of fascinating and fun people. I tried to stay in touch with the people from my team but it slowly fizzled out, though some of us have remained close friends.
The next year, I was committed to going back, but this time as a volunteer organizer. I didn’t feel confident enough to be a mentor yet, so I helped with other logistics (there’s a lot going on in the background to make these events happen!). I saw some of the same people as the previous year, and strengthened some of the relationships that had fizzled out. Again, I had an amazing time and loved this community of people I spent just 1 weekend out of the year with, and a few rare sightings at other events.
Natalie and me as mentors at the Global Service Jam in March 2018
The following year — you guessed it — I went back as a mentor! It felt like such an achievement, and I got so much support from the volunteer organizers. I really wouldn’t have been able to do it without them. There were so many awesome mentors that we had to co-mentor some teams, and that is when I was lucky to meet the amazing Natalie Kuhn. (If you’re reading this, you must know her since she’s one of the brains behind SDN NYC — I’m getting there.) Together, we led a super talented and creative team, and I felt an even stronger bond with this community. So did Natalie.
Now, if you know Natalie, you know that she’s someone who likes to take action, she’s a doer (almost to a fault). So a few weeks after the Jam, I got an email from Natalie saying she and Kathleen Chao — another mentor and amazing, action oriented individual— wanted to start a Service Design Meetup to keep the community alive throughout the year. Little did I know, these two women would spearhead this group and not only become great friends to me, but also true inspirations. Although there are plus or minus ten volunteer organizers (including myself) at any given time who offer to help, Natalie and Kathleen are our ringleaders.
These two are the kind of people who –
Volunteer to wake up early on a Sunday to test run an upcoming event
Coordinate and dress the SDN NYC volunteer team in safari gear to lead a group of eager Service Designers through a service safari at a local zoo
Think deeply about each step of an event experience–including props, space flow, positioning of volunteers, handwritten thank you notes, and group photos of those who made the event possible–to make sure each session is organized to a T and as best as they can make it for the community
Order bright red beanies with slices of pizza on them to help event participants identify mentors and volunteers for a rainy, pizza shop service safari–people had fun together assessing pizza services despite the weather!
Think many, many steps ahead of us in hopes of making sure everyone has a good time, learns something and/or even makes a new friend
Have organized over 35 events in the last two years, and have continued this effort with great consistency even during the pandemic
Natalie and Kathleen wrapping up their first event at a local bar in April 2018
Natalie and Kathleen introducing an event at Foursquare in January 2020; photo credit: Saad Khan
This is why I keep coming back, and why I’m so thankful for this community. Not only have I made great friends, I’ve made encouraging, supportive, and inspiring friends who have ultimately made me a better person. Each event is so interesting, inclusive, and thought-provoking, and I’ve learned so much over the years. So if you’re interested in growing yourself, I’d highly encourage checking us out (if you haven’t already) — events kickoff again in January 2021! We look forward to seeing you soon. | https://medium.com/sdn-new-york-chapter/what-the-service-design-collective-means-to-me-a09ad076f32 | ['Caroline Alix'] | 2020-12-08 14:15:25.075000+00:00 | ['New York City', 'Design', 'Service Design', 'Service Design Network', 'Community'] |
The Obesity Epidemic — Root Causes | I grew up in Toronto, Canada in the early 1970s. My younger self would have been utterly shocked that today, obesity has become a rising, unstoppable global phenomenon. At that time, there were serious Malthusian fears that the world’s population would soon eclipse the world’s food production and we would face mass starvation. The major environmental concern was global coolingdue to the reflection of sunlight off dust particles in the air triggering the dawn of a new Ice Age. I wonder if Time Magazine thought one of the 51 things we should do is to become a penguin…
Instead, some 50 years later, we find ourselves facing exactly the opposite problems. Global cooling has long ceased to be a serious concern, but global warming and melting polar ice caps dominate the news. Instead of global hunger and mass starvation, we face an obesity epidemic, unprecedented in human history.
There are many puzzling aspects to this obesity epidemic. First, what caused it? The fact that this epidemic is both global and relatively recent argues against an underlying genetic defect. Exercise as a leisure activity was largely unheard of in the 1970s. People just didn’t sweat with the oldies in that decade. The proliferation of gyms, running clubs, exercise studios and the like were a product of the 1980s. I would struggle with this question for many years. People ate white bread, ice cream and Oreo cookies in the 1970s. Whole wheat pasta and bread didn’t truly exist as foods real people ate. They were doing everything ‘wrong’ but yet there’s little obesity, as you can easily see if you were to look at old photographs from the 1970s.
Second, why were we powerless to stop this epidemic? Nobody wantedto be fat. All the best scientists, doctors and dieticians of the era were giving dietary advice to stay lean. For more than thirty years, doctors have recommended a low-fat, calorie-reduced diet as the treatment of choice for obesity. Yet the obesity epidemic accelerated. From 1985 to 2011, the prevalence of obesity in Canada has tripled, from 6 percent to 18 percent.1All the available evidence shows that people were trying to cut their calories, cut their fat and exercise more. But they weren’t losing weight. The only logical answer is that we didn’t understand the problem. Eating too much fat and too many calories wasn’t the problem, so cutting the fat and calories was not the solution. So, it all comes back to that first essential question. What causes weight gain?
In the 1990s, I graduated from the University of Toronto and the University of California, Los Angeles as a physician and kidney specialist. And I must confess that I did not have the slightest interest in the treatment of obesity. Not during medical school, residency, specialty training or even during practice. But it wasn’t just me. This was true for just about every physician trained in North America. Medical school taught us virtually nothing about nutrition, and even less about the treatment of obesity. There were hours and hours of lectures dedicated to the proper medications and surgery to prescribe. I was proficient in the use of hundreds of medications. I was proficient in the use of dialysis. I knew all about surgical treatments and indications. But I knew nothing about nutrition and even less about how to lose weight. This is despite the fact that the obesity epidemic was well established, and the epidemic of type 2 diabetes was following just behind, with all its health implications. Doctors just didn’t care about diet.
Weight loss was not a matter of looking good in a bikini for the summer swimming season. If only. The excess weight was largely responsible for development of type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, dramatically increasing the risk of heart attacks, stroke, cancer, kidney disease, blindness, amputations, and nerve damage, among other problems. This was not some peripheral topic of medicine. Obesity was at the very heart of everything, and I knew just about nothing.
I entered practice as a kidney specialist in early 2000s, and the most common cause of kidney failure, by far, was type 2 diabetes. I treated those patients exactly as I had been trained, the only way I knew how. With drugs like insulin and procedures like dialysis.
From experience, I knew that insulin would cause weight gain. Actually, everybody knew insulin caused weight gain. Patients were rightly concerned. “Doctor,” they say, “you’ve always told me to lose weight. But the insulin you gave me makes me gain so much weight. How is this helpful?” For a long time, I didn’t have a good answer for them, because the truth was it wasn’t helpful.
The problem was that my patients were just not getting healthier. I was simply holding their hand as they got worse and worse. I was doing everything I was taught, but it wasn’t doing any good. Gradually, it dawned on me what the problem was.
The root cause of the entire problem was the weight. Obesity caused metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes, which caused all the other problems. Yet everything I was taught, almost the entire system of modern medicine, with its pharmacopeia, with its nanotechnology, with all the genetic wizardry was focused myopically on the problems at the end.
Nobody was treating the root cause. If you treat the kidney disease, patients are still left with obesity, type 2 diabetes and every other complication. This was the way that I, and virtually every other doctor was trained to practice medicine. But it was not working. We needed to treat obesity.We were trying to treat the problems caused by obesity rather than obesity itself.
When people lost weight their type 2 diabetes would also reverse course. Treating the root cause is the only logical solution. If your car is leaking oil, the solution is not to buy more oil and mops to clean the spilled oil. The logical solution is to find the leak and fix it. As a medical profession, we were guilty of blindly ignoring the leak.
If you could treat the obesity at the beginning, then type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome could not develop. You could NOT develop diabetic kidney disease if you didn’t have diabetes. You couldn’t develop diabetic nerve damage if you didn’t’ have diabetes. It seems obvious in retrospect.
The problem was that I didn’t know how to treat the obesity. Despite having worked more than twenty years in medicine, I found that my own nutritional knowledge was rudimentary, at best. This sparked a decade long odyssey and eventually led me to establish the Intensive Dietary Management (IDM) program and the Toronto Metabolic Clinic.
In thinking seriously about the treatment of obesity, there was one singularly important question to understand. What causes weight gain? What is the root cause? The reason we never think about this crucial question is that we already think we know the answer. We think that eating too many calories causes obesity. If this were true, then the solution to weight loss is simple. Eat fewer calories.
But we’ve done that already. Ad nauseam. For the last 50 years, the only weight loss ever given out was to cut your calories and exercise more. This is the highly ineffective strategy called ‘Eat Less, Move More’. We’ve added calorie counts to food labels. We have calorie counting books. We have calorie counting apps. We have calorie counters on our exercise machines. We’ve done everything humanly possible to count calories so that we could cut them. Did it work? Did those pounds melt like a snowman in July? No. It sure sounds like it should work. But the empiric evidence, plain as a mole on the tip of your nose, is that it does notwork.
From a human physiology standpoint, the entire calorie story collapses like a house of cards. The body does not measure calories because it has no calorie sensors. The body does not respond to ‘calories’. There are no calorie receptors on cell surfaces. It has no ability to know how many calories you are or are not eating. If your body doesn’t count calories, why should you? Calories is purely a unit of energy borrowed from physics. The field of obesity medicine, desperate for some simple measure of food energy, completely ignored human physiology and turned to physics instead.
So, we got the saying ‘A calorie is a calorie’. But that’s not a question I can recall anybody ever asking. Instead, the question is ‘Are all calories of food energy equally fattening?’, to which the answer is an emphatic no. One hundred calories of kale salad is not as equally fattening as one hundred calories of candy. One hundred calories of beans is not equally as fattening as one hundred calories of white bread and jam. But for the last 50 years, we pretended they were equally fattening.
And so I started from the beginning. Unravelling the rotten tapestry of the Calories model to answer that all-important question of the underlying causes of weight gain was the reason I wrote The Obesity Code. Since then, in my Intensive Dietary Management program (www.IDMprogram.com)has treated thousands of patients over the last 5 years. I’ve wondered sometimes about why such a simple concept about using free dietary measures like fasting to treat dietary diseases runs into such obstacles. Here is the traditional medical system.
Here is how the modern medical system fares if people could use diet to control their own health and destiny. Reversing type 2 diabetes, as I explored in The Diabetes Code, is really very simple, and does not involve using expensive medicines or surgeries. | https://medium.com/@drjasonfung/the-obesity-epidemic-root-causes-da6924da9794 | ['Dr. Jason Fung'] | 2018-09-12 19:44:50.881000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Health', 'Wellness', 'Diabetes', 'Weight Loss Tips'] |
Transaction confirmed: Tenderly beta now open to public | I must admit: the title took me longer to think of than the rest of this article, but I digress before even starting. Welcome, to the copywriting playground of mine that is the Tenderly blog (I’m a developer, this is hard, please send help).
Tenderly beta now live!
I cannot be more happy to announce that the Tenderly beta is now open to everyone! Head on over to https://tenderly.co/, click on Start Monitoring, and in less than 5 minutes you can start tracking your Smart Contracts in real-time!
Once you have your account all set up, create a project and push your contracts to it. It’s effortless, and the project creation wizard takes you through it.
If you want to poke around the dashboard, without pushing your contracts, you can add any verified contract from Etherscan. A good example is the MakerDAO OasisDex contract which can be found at the address: 0x39755357759ce0d7f32dc8dc45414cca409ae24e. Again, create a project, select the import Verified Contract option, enter the address, and voila: Contract added and ready to monitor!
Right now error tracking is generally available, with alerting coming up next.
Below you can see an example stack trace for a failed transaction: | https://medium.com/tenderly/transaction-confirmed-tenderly-beta-now-open-to-public-348a85f3fe23 | ['Bogdan Habic'] | 2020-05-19 10:47:00.214000+00:00 | ['Solidity', 'Debugging', 'Smart Contracts', 'Ethereum', 'Monitoring'] |
Contagion in the Collective Subconscious Should be Your Real Fear | Whether it’s family members whose past includes the holocaust, an attack or terror campaign, being near the World Trade Center, near genocide in Rwanda, or any other any traumatic event…
Generational trauma is real.
Rachel Yehuda is the Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She’s discovered that “epigenetic changes biologically prepare us to cope with the traumas that our parents experienced.” This is a double-edged sword that (mainly) can hurt us.
Here’s how, “In an August 2015 study published in Biological Psychiatry, Yehuda and her team at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital demonstrated that gene changes could be transmitted from parents to children.”
Specifically, she’s found that children of mothers with PTSD are three times more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than children in her control groups. Also, children of survivors are three to four times more likely to struggle with depression and anxiety or engage more in substance abuse, when either parent suffered from PTSD.
Your family’s genes and collective consciousness is with you whether you like it or not. The challenging part is getting the most accurate information you can. You’re not just walking through a graveyard looking for ghosts, you’re walking through a minefield of emotions. Be careful, but don’t be too afraid to chart a safe course and then explore.
For those familiar with PTSD and intergenerational trauma, William Faulkner’s cautions ring true…
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Until you put the bad parts of the past to rest with therapy and medicine. 😉
Tomorrow we’ll talk about looking for cycles of traumas from the past in our own lives.
– Chad Grills, Mission Founder and CEO | https://medium.com/the-mission/contagion-in-the-collective-subconscious-should-be-your-real-fear-6fcff152bca4 | [] | 2020-03-11 23:58:39.331000+00:00 | ['PTSD', 'Marketing', 'Mental Health', 'Podcast', 'Branding'] |
A little Wanton | Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
From the distance, her feathered cloak resembled the snow. Her wolf eyes dove deeply, always inspecting, always attentive. She was far from everyone, she was unlikely to be disturbed in her walk.
She found the frozen stream and removed the sleet. She saw her red cedar face on the polished surface. Her full lips smiled but her obsidian eyes and the black dots on top of her cheekbones had an ominous glow.
She touched her friend, the stream, with both of her hands. She had been called a few days ago. She was usually prompt but this time was different, something in her deep end was reticent so she took her time and hesitantly moved towards the reckoning. Even now that she remembered how she loved her friend and the secrets they together touched, she felt that pang in her stomach, that tightness surrounded her shoulders.
The river awoke in her belly as she exhaled. Her sex and mind were possessed, inhabited by a gently wrathful force. With her eyes wide shut, she saw herself stripped off her jewels and her white coat. She then was covered with a dark cloak. Her hair, bound. Her hands, bound. Her feed, bound. A substance similar to amaranth powder was fiercely dabbed on her face. She resisted, she wrestled; to the stream, she said ‘NO!’.
The stream instructed and she obeyed, she scratched the icy surface and licked its fingers.
Inside her, the light of the frozen water illuminated the scene and showed the road.
Water, sea, a strange land. Men with hair of the colour of corn were surrounding her. ‘Them!’, she asserted.
Her hand instinctively sought her pouch. As she fiddled with the tobacco leaves she froze. The electricity coming from the touch let her know more of the plan. Part of the trick, part of the story, the push, the fire. A few tears trickled down her face. Was it really true? Was she really being asked to carry such a message?
Far away. Far from her stream and her snow. Never to be seen again by them, by her land. Nevermore. | https://bernadette.life/a-little-wanton-21eea7cade80 | [] | 2020-12-25 01:34:31.172000+00:00 | ['Witch', 'Water', 'Ritual', 'Storytelling', 'Magic'] |
Potential for Police Oversight Board in Wilmington — — Who will Oversee the Board? | Potential for Police Oversight Board in Wilmington — — Who will Oversee the Board?
Above is a link to the Zoom meeting when the oridinance was first introduced.
By D. Marque Hall 11/27/2020 @ 12PM
Above D. Marque Hall at Wilmington City Council in 2019
We must all be thankful for the shared effort of co-laboring for civil rights for the most vulnerable that we’ve seen and been a part of this year. We exercised our First Amendment rights by assembling and protesting and using our shared freedom of speech to petition the government for change.
This righteous fire kept getting indignant gas poured onto it everytime another innocent Black man or woman was murdered by a current or former member of law enforcement. www.Change.org/FirethePig
Last week it was announced in Wilmington that a Police Oversight Board would be sponsored by Wilmington City Council and paid for by community tax dollars. The budget has not been prepared. We were told by the ordinance chief sponsor Chris Johnson that it would be done by 2022 and that is certainly not soon enough. The link to the November 19, 2020 meeting is the first link at the top of this article.
This board would be responsible for receiving and investigating police misconduct complaints against Wilmington police officers. It would be made up of 9 members — — not necessarily from the public — — — I’ll get back to that later. This board would not have any proverbial or literal “teeth”. It will ultimately hit a wall called the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights which I am going to share with you here.
https://delcode.delaware.gov/title11/c092/
“(12) All records compiled as a result of any investigation subject to the provisions of this chapter and/or a contractual disciplinary grievance procedure shall be and remain confidential and shall not be released to the public.”
As you can see the police have 12 amendments — — and the 12th is hefty and takes away all transparency from any case against any hateful or inept officer whether they be a rapist, a murderer or some other kind of predator protected by a badge.
“That would prohibit such a board from questioning officers and restricts access to police disciplinary records”, Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki said in a Delaware Online article about how he feels about this “Oversight” board.
He’s not going to veto it. He works closely with Chris Johnson. They are partners in crime, along with the FOP and the department.
Their greatest weapon against the public who they’re supposed to protect is the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights to spell it out. It’s been used for defense purposes by the police union for decades. Officers who have shot and killed men continue to serve after they’ve committed murder and then they shoot again. Once they have a taste for blood it’s impossible to stop them… Why would they stop when they weren’t held accountable the first time?
I mentioned rape: abuse of power by police is no different than a sick and toxic parent or other family member who you are supposed to trust that continues to penetrate you over and over again.
Sandra Bland
Ezell Ford
Mike Brown
Tamir Rice
Breyonna Taylor
George Floyd
Walter Wallace Jr.
This is a thimble of water out of the ocean of Black men and women murdered by the police.
And then in Wilmington
Jeremy McDole (Unarmed)
And the armed but mentally unstable Ricardo Hylton in 2019 that I spoke about in the video linked above.
Dock Worker and Entrepreneur Ricardo Hylton was born in Jamaica but gunned down on 27th and Washington Street on August 30th, 2019 by two white Wilmington PD officers who have never been identified.
(May they all rest in peace)
All of us activists are ready for change.
Many are saying, “Disarm the police”
Some are even saying, “Defund the police”
Still others are saying “Abolish the police”.
But all this ordinance from this police attorney who claimed to be a Civil Rights Attorney and then failed to fight for a defendant here in Wilmington who he then charged for a job he did not do is seeking is greater transparency and stricter “Oversight” of the police citywide.
The board would be given City Council subpoena power for witnesses. The board would have it’s own budget for attorneys and private investigators paid for with tax-payer dollars. The budget has not been made up or approved which is why the amendment to hold all this off until 2022 was made by Chis Johnson- the police attorney- turned City Councilman Public Safety Board Vice-chair- turned TURN-COAT during the meeting had on November 19, 2020.
Every City Council person currently serving (the new Council has not yet taken their oath and seat) signed off on the Community Police Transparency Committee for a variety of reasons but there was a general theme of their reasons why they said, “YES”.
The one “no” vote came from Ciro Adams who has touted himself as a Trump supporting Republican, an Anti-Black Lives Matter and Anti-Black Woman and Anti-LGBTQ and Pro-Police ACTIVIST on council. He spoke at length defending Law and Order and stated that, “There is No ‘Pamdemic’ of Police Brutality in this nation” — — I don’t know what a “Pam-demic” is either… but he got all RED and basically screamed BLUE LIVES MATTER!
He used these words to describe his opinion on this ordinance:
“Overreaching,
unnecessary and
emotionally driven from hyped-up distorted instances of police killings around the nation.”
He won’t be coming back to City Council — — — — — — — Our community voted him out this November- thank God.
We voted in a former police officer turned genuine “Good Guy”.
There is something to be thankful for this Holiday season!
On another note- Zanthia Oliver will be back to represent the 3 district. She stated that she was voting yes because she gets 33 complaints against the police a week from her constituents who live on the Eastside, Northside and Riverside areas of the city.
Adams said there were only 33 complaints against police made last year.
Linda Gray said she was voting yes so the public would have access to arrest reports and so that they could provide info like whether or not officers made racial slurs. She is former law enforcement and she knows people don’t always get their property back.
She wants the community to, “Feel more confident in the police”, she wants to “Ease fear” and “This is a NEW DAY!”
— That new day is too far into the future is what she said after Chris Johnson made the amendment to push this out until 2022.
Michelle Harlee who is very shrewd and diplomatic said she gets calls all the time too. She is a Co-sponsor of this bill and she said, “This is designed to give the community a voice”.
— -“I think it’s always better to wait too long than to go too soon” is what she said when the amendment pushing this back to 2022 was made by Turncoat Johnson.
Loretta Walsh who is a longtime FOP candidate and one of the last truly Blue-Blood members left on council, “Doesn’t want this to give the community a false sense of hope” because the Police officers Bill of Rights is going to eat this thing up.
— — She agreed with the sponsor for extending it until 2022.
Sam Guy who Loretta Walsh threatened bodily harm to at a Council meeting via Zoom in October basically said that some problems can’t be overcome since he established a citizen review board in 1998.
Some of Sam Guy’s gripes were that
The Mayor and his office does not need to be involved. Registered voters should not be the only people eligible to be on the board- doesn’t think that’s necessary.
And to waiting until 2022 for the board he said, “…. too long a wait. Will lose momentum”.
He said that the community should create a board based off of how the Police Officer’s Bill of Right is structured currently.
We should not wait to see what the General Assembly does in Dover months down the road.
Chris Johnson said this board would be established through and by council, “No later than January 1st, 2022”. He said, “It’s going to take at least 9 months to a year” because of “Guidelines and training”, seeing what the General assembly does, the budget that has not been worked out and the Turncoat said that he was, “Trying to Do It the Right Way”.
He doesn’t want to upset anyone in Dover/Members of the FOP or the establishment in general remain the truths unsaid.
Sixth District City Councilwoman Yolanda McCoy who is also going back for her second term after being triumphant against multiple challengers with considerable community support behind them said July would be a better target date.
Now as far as the boards makeup:
9 seats
1 coming from the mayor’s office
3 coming from City Council
5 coming from specific groups including the ACLU, the state branch of the NAACP, the Wilmington HOPE Commission, the Latin American Community Center and the local clergy.
In other words the Turncoat knows exactly who he wants to put on this board. The candidates already have a platform that they aren’t doing anything with to make a difference when it comes to what really matters.
“The appointed members should have legal, civil rights or law enforcement experience”, according to the bill.
Johnson said he is satisfied with the board’s composition, saying it represents “pretty comprehensive community groups.”
He does not know the community suffering under the pressure of the department’s foot. He knows people in government and in the community service building- not people in the community and in the prisons unless he helped to put them there and to keep them there.
“The new board may put the city in conflict with it’s police union”. The community is already in conflict with the city about this everytime an officer goes rouge or truly goes by “the code” if you know anything about the history of the police here or “The Delaware Way”. Politicians need to start representing the people. The Faternal Order of Police whose president, Greg Ciotti said during Council last week that the union will “Reserve all rights to challenge” could not be reached for comment — — — — — — — — — -
like I REALLY tried to reach out to talk to him anyway!
Tonight will be a VERY SPECIAL FREEDOM FRIDAY!
NOT ONLY IS THIS BLACK FRIDAY BUT IT’S NATIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE DAY!
Some traditions such as the celebration of Rebel traitors who divided this nation and conquistadors who discovered people here and vanquished them must end!
Also what must end is POLICE BRUTALITY!
On the otherside of the same coin, the minimizing of people for the rest of their lives for simple mistakes and crimes of circumstance they sometimes weren’t even guilty of especially poor people of color must end! WHITE SUPREMACY AND PATRIARCHY MUST END!
TONIGHT we’re going to hear from a Black man who served this nation proudly in the military, got in trouble for telling someone where to go and get drugs, served his time but still didn’t know that he could vote here in Delaware until 2 weeks ago- He completed his sentence a few decades ago.
Unfortunately he was not able to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris but he has a surprise for us tonight!
#KEEPUPTHEGOODFIGHT
#FELONFOCUSED
#VOTERREGISTRATION
Topic: Virtual Voter Registration Focusing on People Branded as Felons
Time: Friday, 10PM
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/95043791730...
Meeting ID: 950 4379 1730
Passcode: 9RcdE5 | https://medium.com/@weareallremarkable/potential-for-police-oversight-board-in-wilmington-who-will-oversee-the-board-ea67398a0897 | ['D. Marque Hall'] | 2020-11-27 17:11:25.626000+00:00 | ['Police Brutality', 'Politics', 'Wilmington', 'Police Reform', 'Police'] |
Unsealed Revelations. | #7. The Truth is out there, Wait — Its right here
Hidden knowledge.
The important thing that you need to
understand is that dark forces have been
able to use sacred books like the bible
to deceive the world and dictate
man’s history.
So as you read through, Please don’t get tricked.
You may think you know the whole story,
but odds are you have been misled by
the dark forces that now run this world.
Don’t let dark forces keep you from
reading this because what I am going
to reveal will teach you how to manifest
the things you want most in life.
You should be living the dream
rather than living with loss!
Sacred knowledge Awaits
Please help — I need your insight & feedback.
These post are from a book I’m writing, so I
need to know if this is helpful, is it
understandable and or share your insight!!!
I will make additional post weekly.
so please check back
#positivevibes #positivity #postmystickpics #pr0ject_soul #prayers #prelovedmakeup #prelovedzara #pressforprogress #pretty #projecthappiness #prosperity #psychiclovespells #pubglover #pubgmindonesia #pueblomagico #pueblosmagicos #pullovers #puppy #puppylove #purehappiness #puremagic #pursuitofhappiness #p̶e̶a̶c̶e̶m̶i̶n̶u̶s̶o̶n̶e̶ #quarantine #queenofhearts #quest_4_magic #quoteoftheday #quotes #quotesoflove #realismomagico #rebelheart #redkenlove | https://medium.com/divine-revelation/unsealed-revelations-159d4dae16e8 | ['Shiloh Cyrus'] | 2020-12-19 13:01:06.147000+00:00 | ['Fake News', 'God', 'Truth', 'Daily Blog', 'Conspiracy Theories'] |
How to Reprimand Employees Without Destroying Their Self-Esteem | How to Reprimand Employees Without Destroying Their Self-Esteem
Constructive criticism is coaching. Destructive criticism is punishment.
Credit: Wikimedia Creative Commons license
Managers aren’t in popularity contests. Giving employee reprimands certainly doesn’t make them popular. But they are a necessary part of the job.
All employees inevitably make mistakes on the job, some serious and some not so serious. The serious ones require a reprimand to ensure they don’t happen again or at least reduce the odds of a repeat. Their job performance and the performance of the entire operating unit are at stake if the problem keeps happening.
Good leaders and managers learn how to reprimand an employee while protecting the employee’s self-esteem. The self-esteem element is critical to a good reprimand because a reprimand is a form of criticism. For many people, any kind of criticism, constructive or not, is personal.
Effective employee reprimands focus on the behavior, problem or issue and not on the person. They also are:
Timely
Factual
Objective
Private
Bad reprimands focus on the person and potentially damage self-esteem. They may create fear and job insecurity in the employee. They are demotivating and demoralizing. Multiple bad reprimands inflame a cover-your-ass version of office politics and encourage employees to leave the company for psychologically safer environments.
A bad reprimand often includes the word “you”:
You missed an important deadline.
Your estimates were wrong.
What were you thinking?
Why did you do that?
You made a big mistake.
You f — -ed up.
Think of a good reprimand as constructive criticism and a bad reprimand as destructive criticism. Constructive criticism is coaching. Destructive criticism is punishment.
Timely: Take Action and Do It Soon
One of the worst managers I have known wouldn’t reprimand employees at all. She would simply let her grievances — even when based on bad information — build up until one day she would abruptly fire the employee with little warning. In her mind, it was the employee’s responsibility to figure out what he or she did wrong and never do it again.
Delaying a reprimand means the risk of a blindsiding conversation. If the problem happens on a Friday, a manager who waits to take action on a Monday (or later) will leave both the manager and employee potentially upset about it through the weekend and start the week with bad news.
There is one exception to timely action: If the problem triggers emotions, the manager and employee should wait until those emotions subside.
A quick anecdote
OK, I admit I made another big mistake one time as a young middle manager. My then boss lost her temper and screamed at me so loudly that the entire office heard her, even behind closed doors. Yes, I deserved a reprimand. But her frequent hot temper was destructive and created fear in everyone. She should have waited until she calmed down. “Timely action” doesn’t mean managers should do it immediately if they are furious.
Factual: Begin With Good Information
Effective leaders and managers seek accurate information about what caused the problem before they meet with the employee.
Credit: Pixabay Creative Commons license
Does the employee have a serious personal problem? Did a security breach impact company data or server performance? Was a deadline unrealistic or an important piece of equipment not operating at full capacity? Did the employee act on bad information?
Getting useful facts about what went wrong also may require the manager to have a degree of empathy and compassion. For example, personal problems may distract an employee and lead to more mistakes on the job.
“Compassion in the workplace matters because it provides employees with that extra amount of strength they need to perform, whether it’s overcoming personal problems, trouble at home, or job-specific challenges.” — William F. Baker and Michael O’Malley, “Leading With Kindness”
Objective: Focus on the Problem, Not the Person
Behavior and performance are the two dominant and standards by which a manager should evaluate an employee.
In a constructive reprimand, the manager should consider:
Using plural pronouns such as “us” and “we” as much as possible to lower emotions and avoid making the discussion personal.
Beginning with a neutral, non-threatening statement such as, “I would like us to talk through what happened and see if we can figure out how to keep it from happening again”.
Giving a brief review of the facts.
Asking the employee if she or he agrees with the facts.
Asking the employee for solutions.
Finding common agreement.
Pausing the process if it gets emotional and reminding the employee that the discussion is about solving the problem and not about blaming the employee.
Ending the meeting with words of confidence in the employee.
See More on Leaders and Managers: Career advice for people in charge.
Private: Praise But Don’t Criticize in Public
The worst manager I have known would often reprimand employees in front of other employees. He even would mock employees in group meetings. Not surprisingly, he created an environment full of fear and job insecurity.
Managers should praise in public and reprimand only in private. Doing it in private protects the employee’s self-esteem and avoids public embarrassment and even humiliation.
Any manager or potential manager who is a victim of a bad reprimand will find it a useful experience in learning what not to do when it is their turn to give one. Instead of doing it the wrong way, they can learn from that painful experience how to treat employees with respect, even when those employees make a big mistake.
Solving the problem is much better in the long run than punishing the employee. | https://medium.com/leading-and-managing/how-to-reprimand-employees-without-destroying-their-self-esteem-cc741ca62111 | ['Scott S. Bateman'] | 2020-01-14 14:18:16.004000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Management', 'Human Resources', 'Leadership'] |
New Strain of Coronavirus — Here’s All You Need to Know | On 14th December 2020, a new strain of Coronavirus was found in the United Kingdom (UK), which appears to be more contagious than the existing COVID-19 virus. SARS-CoV-2 variant is allegedly 70% more contagious. In the past week, COVID-19 case rates nearly doubled in the UK and 60% of the new infections attributed to the new variant of SARS-CoV-2.
The new strain of the virus is named VUI-202012/01. The question is, from where did this new strain come from? The answer is mutation.
What is mutation?
Mutation might sound like a very rare thing that might happen to a species very rarely, but it is actually very common in nature. Mutations are happening in all living organisms, all the time. Mutation is one of the key factors of evolution. Without mutation, there will be no evolution. It happens in humans, plants, animals and even viruses. Without mutation, we human’s wouldn’t have existed. So what is a mutation?
It’s basically a mistake in the genes occurring while copying the genetic code. Any change in the DNA sequence is called a mutation.
Why does mutation happen?
There are mainly two reasons for mutation.
Environmental reasons: Any major changes in the environment may cause mutation. Climate change is one of them. Mutations may also occur due to nuclear radiation. Even UV rays from the sun may cause mutation in our cells. And it’s not a thing you would want. So doctors often recommend using sunscreen while being out in the sun for a long time. Reproduction: Mutations often happen during reproduction. Often the cells make a mistake while copying the DNA. Sometimes, these mistakes turn out to be helpful for the organism. Like this, mutations happen all the time. Now, let’s see an example. Suppose, there was a mistake in copying genes while a new plant was being reproduced. The new plant’s flowers appeared to be more colourful and vibrant than the original species. This is a major mutation for the plant. This new plant with more vibrant flowers will attract bees more easily and will have a major advantage in reproduction over the original species. So, because of natural selection, in future, all of the plants of that species will have more vibrant and colourful flowers. This is how mutation helps in natural selection and evolution.
Almost every species in the world went through mutation and evolved through time. But most of the time, certain mutations aren’t helpful for the species or some even become disadvantages for the species. So, those mutations don’t last long.
During reproduction, RNA viruses tend to have more mutations than DNA viruses. Genetic specialists claimed that SARS-CoV-2 is already having one to two mutations per month, globally. So, it is actually a pretty common thing. But the majority of these mutations are useless.
This new mutation has made some major changes in the virus. It is being theorized that the mutation occurred in a person with very low immunity. The person’s low immunity gave the virus a breeding ground and a perfect place to mutate.
What’s new in this mutation?
According to experts, the recent mutation in the virus caused some changes in the proteins of the spikes of the virus. That made the virus more capable of binding with the human cells and made it more infectious. According to BBC’s report, this new strain is 70% more infectious than the existing SARS-CoV-2 virus.
According to a report of BBC, One mutation called N501Y alters the most important part of the spike, known as the “receptor-binding domain”. Also, an initial analysis of the new variant has been published and identifies 17 potentially important alterations. According to the same report of the BBC, another mutation — a H69/V70 deletion, in which a small part of the spike is removed — has emerged several times before, including famously in infected mink.
Is it deadlier?
The question remains, is the new strain deadlier? As released on www.gov.uk, the chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty said,
“There is no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines and treatments although urgent work is underway to confirm this.”
History showed us that whenever viruses mutated, they became more infectious but less deadly. Often, highly infectious viruses are less deadly.
Will the vaccines work?
The British Prime Minister told the press that there was no evidence suggesting that Covid-19 vaccines were less effective against the new variant. France and Germany’s health ministers also said that the vaccines will be as effective for the new strain of coronavirus as is for the previous strain. But some scientists are sceptical. Professor Ravi Gupta at the University of Cambridge told the BBC news,
“It is rapidly increasing, that’s what’s worried government, we are worried, most scientists are worried.”
He also said that,
“This virus is potentially on a pathway for vaccine escape, it has taken the first couple of steps towards that.”
Vaccine escape occurs when a virus changes so much that it dodges the full effect of the vaccine and continues to infect people.
Because of reasons like this, several countries around the world have taken strong actions to stop the spread of this mutated coronavirus. Another mutation is found in South Africa too. The worldwide economy was starting to grow again after a long time, but this new mutation of Coronavirus is being a big obstacle.
Worldwide Impacts:
The new strain of SARS-CoV-2 left the world more anxious than before. Several countries suspended all flights from the UK. South Korea, Philippines and Japan became the latest countries to suspend all flights from the UK. After that, several other countries, including India suspended all flights from the United Kingdom. Japan has said that it will ban all non-Japanese people from coming to Japan from UK. So far, more than 40 countries have suspended flights from the UK.
Uk has imposed stricter lockdown to save millions from the new variant. Christmas will not be festive this year in the United Kingdom. With shops closed down, the country is experiencing potential fatal blow to its economics.
Not only the UK, but the whole world is also suffering from the fear of VUI 202012/01. The anxiety is increasing day by day. Vaccines are said to be effective on this mutated virus, but only time will tell. | https://medium.com/illumination/new-strain-of-coronavirus-and-its-worldwide-impacts-831d4bea8460 | ['Samrat Dutta'] | 2020-12-24 19:28:54.763000+00:00 | ['Biology', 'UK', 'Covid 19', 'Science', 'Mutation'] |
Challenges for lawyers in a post-COVID world | The Covid-19 pandemic presented huge challenges to people all around the world. Almost all of the world is in lockdown and only the necessary services are available. It also has presented many challenges for lawyers. Surely, after the pandemic ends a lot of things will change.
The financial difficulties and economy collapsing we faced will be and taken care of post Covid. The world will have so many financial crisis and the goal will be to focus on getting the economy to step up again.
The global aspect has taken a huge blow because of the coronavirus pandemic. Countries across the world will have to revise and revisit the political and financial aspects of their policies. In the post-COVID time, we will have more reformed policies to work with.
Challenges faced by lawyers
Social and economy
In a post-Covid, unpredictable world, the lawyers in the law firms will have to face various social and economical changes caused by the pandemic.
The Covid19 after-effects are not only going to leave an impact on the function of the Bars and Benches but also on the mediocre lawyers, the in-house counsels, the secretarial and auditing professionals, the law students, the junior advocates, small law firms, the not so wealthy clients, the court workers in and out of the premises; all in all everyone who is even slightly related to the law profession.
Read Also — Challenges of the Legal Profession and Business World
The practice area of the lawyers; the sectors such as the labor and employment have had a hard time during the Covid pandemic. The carrying out of such cases will be concentrated on very different situations in even more difficult sectors; like transport, travel and healthcare.
Every law firm has a different outlook on the opinion for the client type, the sectors and the practices that they have to do.
Digitalization
Post Covid-19, digitization is taking over and thus electronic contracts are also increasing and making their way in the economy. E-Contracts are agreements you can make in an electronic form through a software system different to the traditional contracts documented on paper and signed using the ink.
There are various types of E-contracts that are entered through emails and other similar platforms which is receiving recognition.
Read Also — Challenges for Individual Lawyers To Face In 2020
Digital signatures is introduced so that the contracts can be signed digitally and rules of social distancing will not be broken. The government is also taking initiatives to open online portals for the payment of stamp duties for such contracts.
The clients and overview
On going forward, it seems necessary for lawyers to get your newly adopted insights on the new technologies; because it is not likely that your clients will want to go back to the things being done in the traditional ways.
New health and safety rules are going to change the business done in the traditional ways. Hence, the traditional way of maintaining the law firm may become financially difficult. Whatever it is, your firm has to do it in a client-centric way.
Read Also — What are the biggest challenges facing corporate law firms today?
The shift in the paradigm of the courts is a proof that the courts can efficiently take care and expertise to act without any given limit at any hour of need.
“This is an inflection point for the legal profession in India. Till now, the mindset was one of resistance to change, or at best, incremental change. The situation caused by Covid–19 has put forward challenges that can be best countered with wholesome changes; by the adoption of online courts with limited or no hearing but based on brief written submissions. ” CS Vaidhyanath, Senior Advocate
On the plus side, the pandemic has made its way in forcing our age-old legal practice to go digital quicker, which shall hopefully continue even post the pandemic.
Read Also — Benefits of using a Virtual Office for Legal Startups in India
Are you ready for the future?
Working on your skills to improve employ ability and adapting to the changing work environment brought on by the coronavirus. Your changes are not only practical.
Your law firm management technique is going to increasingly influence the attitudes and the ethical points of your potential future employees, demonstrating role suitability between employee experience and capabilities, and your firm values; which will put pressure on you to make good on your promises to sustainable development among other things; to attract the best talent. | https://medium.com/@legodesk/challenges-for-lawyers-in-a-post-covid-world-6560a005b27c | ['Legodesk', 'Legal Practice Management Software'] | 2021-07-15 11:39:30.450000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Legal', 'Legodesk', 'Lawyers'] |
How To Spot a Potential RUG — Clear signs something is sketchy | How To Spot a Potential RUG — Clear signs something is sketchy
Disclaimer: This article is quite lengthy. Get yourself a coffee, get rid of distractions, and make sure you read it carefully.
Rugs… too many in just a short period of time.
Well, people got experience from other blockchains and came on BSC for quick cash as it should’ve been expected.
The number of rugs has slowed down a bit in the last couple of days, but is it over? No, and rugs will never stop appearing.
But can we learn how to spot sketchy aspects of a project?
Yes! And that’s what we’re going to be discussing today.
I will try to explain in great detail the points I made clear in the tweet above, along with others that I deem necessary.
Okay, I’m taking too long, here is a table of contents:
Short list of what I look for
When it comes to a new project I have a list in mind of what I should look for. I’ll first give you the list here and then we can discuss each one in particular.
Careless and rushed developers
Overall appearance
Social Media Management and Appearance
Social Media Proof
Intrusive marketing
Contracts
Keep in mind that those are just potential red flags that should alarm you, but that doesn’t mean the project is 100% safe or a scam. I'll explain the point above in the " The most important thing " part.
Careless and rushed developers
This will be the first red flag I’m going to be discussing today.
Rushed projects
Rushed projects appear overnight and in less than 12 hours (most of the time) they have:
A website done
The farms live
Thousands of followers
An airdrop/giveaway with somehow thousands of likes/retweets
I also notice that the domains are registered just hours before launch, a major red flag for me, since it obviously takes more time to prepare a great project, but it only takes a few hours to fork an existing one.
How to check when a domain was registered
This one is easy.
Example of domain registration date.
Just go to whois.domaintools.com, paste the link in the search bar, and then scroll down to “dates” to check how old a domain is.
Careless developers
Here we’ll have to check the contracts.
Most often than not fly-by projects don’t even edit their forked contracts properly, leaving clues that the project is rushed and the developers are careless.
Example of a careless and rushed developer.
The example above is taken from the infamous WineSwap rug-pull, where the MasterChef contract wasn’t even fully edited and the developers left in the main names of the Sushi functions.
A major red flag for me.
Overall appearance
Maybe the first thing that comes to mind to most people is to check contracts, but I like to do that as the last task.
Why?
Checking how the overall website looks gives me an idea about how much the developers have actually worked on the project before release.
Here I can even decide if it is worth investing in the project or not.
I tend to take a brief look around the website, mainly checking for:
Overall UX/UI
Information/Links to information
Uniqueness (yeah, I know, I’m cherry-picking at this point)
What I consider red flags when it comes to the overall design of a website
Let’s take this random project I found on Twitter as an example.
A brief look at phoinikas.finance
I’ve found this project on Twitter after I was tagged by CryptoDeus in a post related to it, where he makes clear his concerns about it and warns people it might not be that safe to enter.
I’ll be honest with you, after checking out the website I feel the need to wash my hands…
Here are some immediate red flags I see:
The website is just a rushed fork of SushiSwap.
fork of SushiSwap. The whole design seems to be made in a few minutes, without even trying to make it look good.
There is no link to their MasterContract anywhere in sight.
The “Lending” and “Insurance” buttons only display a “coming soon” message, without any info about them anywhere.
A quick check on their Medium (which is linked at the bottom of the page) even confirms that the project is rushed, no story ever being written on their account.
I’m not even gonna talk about the logo which is a pure joke.
This must be a joke.
I’ll rate the website appearance 1/10.
It isn’t mainly about it looking bad, but more about the fact that it is clearly rushed, and when you rush something you’re clearly only looking for the end-goal, ignoring the path along the way.
Not a good sign in my book.
Social Media Management and Appearance
In this step, we’ll take a look at how social media is handled by the team.
Because I like to be extra-careful and cherry-pick the projects I join I’ll also take a look at the overall appearance.
What I’m looking for:
Medium-high social media activity.
A flood of information about the project.
Great appearance (not a necessity, but a nice thing to see).
Let’s compare one of the first tweets of PancakeSwap to the first tweets of “Phoinikas”.
One of the first tweets of PancakeSwap.
You can see:
Great branding.
Clear information.
Hashtags for organic reach.
A link to their first-ever Medium article that gives lots of information about the project.
Overall a nice tweet. I like it.
Now let’s take a look at the first tweets of “Phoinikas”.
The first two tweets of Phoinikas.
You can see:
Awful branding using only images found on the first page of Google Images (that are 300x300 pixels I might as well add).
Absolutely no information about the project.
No link to a Medium article explaining what the project is all about.
An airdrop of their token which at that time had absolutely no use-case and not even a website.
Inconsistency and small grammatical errors (again, I’m cherry-picking, I’m aware of that).
Horrible tweets.
Also, the airdrop (at least for me) is kinda sketchy. Trying to market the project even before it is released.
Airdrops are a common thing projects do, especially new ones. But for me it can be a red flag. I'd like to encourage you to form your own opinion about everything. You have to decide what is a red flag for you and what isn't.
I also took a look around their Telegram group.
Tons of questions that were not responded to, some people were even asking “when rug?” and people that sent their wallet addresses (for the airdrop) were being banned.
I’ll rate the social media management and appearance 1/10.
Social Media Proof — Fake or real?
Here comes my favorite thing, social media proof.
When it comes to a new project I can forgive the not-so-appealing website appearance and maybe try to not be too harsh on the social media management, but I’ll never forgive fake social media proof (fake likes, fake followers, fake Telegram members, etc).
Buying Twitter followers and Telegram members is extremely cheap, especially if you buy directly from providers and not from resellers (Not gonna teach you how, don’t even ask. Never buy fake social proof, it only hurts your growth).
The prices from the providers.
As you can see, you can buy 5,000 Twitter followers and 5,000 Telegram members for a whopping $20.30 USD.
Never fall into the trap of fake social proof.
How to spot fake social proof.
Let’s first learn how a fake Twitter account (a bot) looks like.
Disclaimer: The ones below are the usual bots you'll see and in terms of fake accounts sellers rate them as "low-quality". There are other types of fake accounts that entirely copy one's social media profile, only changing the username. Those are rated "high-quality" and harder to spot.
How to spot fake Twitter followers
Fake accounts are easy to spot, especially the really cheap ones as stated in the disclaimer above.
Examples of fake accounts.
The cheap accounts are clearly bot accounts and easy to spot on their own, look for:
Non-custom names (having the same name as their username).
A lot of numbers for uniqueness.
No description, info.
No photo, fake photo of another person (usually women), or photos of random objects.
Their tweets are nonsensical or they just retweet random things (you can even find the past clients while checking out a bot’s account).
How to spot fake Telegram members
Fake Telegram members are also semi-easy to spot.
Example of fake Telegram accounts.
As you can see there is a similarity here:
Many numbers in the username
Clearly fake photos
Trying to impersonate women (usually)
Let’s also see an example from WineSwap’s Telegram group.
Example from WineSwap Telegram group.
These are higher quality.
In the example above you can see that after mass-joining the fake accounts only typed “hi” and “hello”, clearly not natural.
But, what makes spotting fake social media proof extremely easy is checking the followers list as a whole.
It is easier to see batches of fake accounts rather than trying to pick them individually.
Let me show you.
Let’s take a look at Phoinikas.Finance’s social media.
Seems like they have 1,796 Twitter followers and 1,841 Telegram members.
Okay, it doesn’t seem like much, does it? Well, it kinda is if you ask me, but not as much to raise immediate red flags.
WineSwap raised so many red flags at first because in their first day they had over 5,000 followers on Twitter and over 5,000 Telegram members.
But, let’s check them as a whole, should we?
First, Twitter!
Let’s take a quick look at the accounts that follow Phoinikas.Finance on Twitter.
Accounts that follow that project.
Okay… well, I think that’s obvious enough and doesn’t need to be explained.
Let’s check who liked their posts, those must be real people!
Accounts that liked their posts.
Okay… there is still hope on their Telegram!
Secondly, Telegram!
Please be real people…
The members on their Telegram group.
I think I just lost faith in humanity at this point.
I need to do something real quick…
I’ll be right back.
I’m back, had to wash my hands a second time.
It is extremely obvious that the project bought fake Twitter followers, likes, and Telegram members.
Also, you can see a discrepancy when it comes to the engagement on their Twitter posts.
Post #1 has: 1 comment, 4 retweets, and 19 likes.
1 comment, 4 retweets, and 19 likes. Post #2 has : 2 comments, 12 retweets, and 35 likes.
: 2 comments, 12 retweets, and 35 likes. Post #3 has: 2,300 comments, 2,600 retweets, and 2,300 likes.
2,300 comments, 2,600 retweets, and 2,300 likes. Post #4 has: 3 comments, 5 retweets, and 21 likes.
There is a clear discrepancy between the engagement the giveaway had and their other posts. Yes, a giveaway is supposed to get more engagement, but not that much.
Tip: If a random project that's one or two days old already has thousands of followers it should immediately be a red flag for you and you should start looking into it.
Anyway, at this point, I think it is clear that the above project bought some fake stuff to make it look more legitimate.
Let’s move on to other things you should look for. | https://medium.com/@letmeape/how-to-spot-a-potential-rug-clear-signs-something-is-sketchy-169fb84c7084 | [] | 2020-11-17 12:35:38.574000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Defi'] |
Exploring the Amazon | How Jeff Bezos and I became besties over the years
The author waiting with a friend while her daughter browses on Black Friday 2012. Photo by Ella Numera Dos.
So many of us are troubled these days. Covid; divisive politics; racial inequality, and the floundering economy have all roiled the fabric of the American tapestry. Nine months (depending on who’s counting) into this Corona Catastrophe, we stay at home. Some of us (me) haven’t seen loved ones (Ella Numera Dos) since the start of this thing. We all carry a heavy burden.
All of us, I suppose, except Jeff Bezos.
Bezos, as you know, is the richest man in the United States. I didn’t look it up, but it seems like he might be the richest man in the universe. Bezos owns Amazon. And Amazon owns me.
It started years ago, when all Amazon was interested in doing was putting my local booksellers out of business. Moker and I lived in a house possessed of a rather large basement. In fact, when we finally downsized before our move Down South, the chore we hated to tackle — but which was holding us back — was sorting through our substantial collection of authors and deciding who had to go.
Moker owns most of Ian Fleming’s pantheon of 007 novels. And Dan Jenkins’s hysterical sports musings. I love Barbara Kingsolver; Amy Tan; Julia Alvarez, but also Truman Capote and Larry McMurtry. When I first started combing the shelves for books to give away I did notice an easy call — I owned two copies of Gone with the Wind. No, I don’t know why, but I threw the paperback on the “give away” pile.
When we partnered up in 1979, Moker and I both had a nasty habit. Instead of going to the library, we two voracious readers preferred purchasing books. Some folks have a giant TV dominating their living space. Our tiny garden apartment in Fort Worth was graced with more 4- and 5-tier bookshelves than any other kind of furniture. It looked like some kind of faux-intellectual jungle, a shrine to the written word. In fact, when faced with the choice of buying a dining room table early in our relationship or buying a place to store our books, we picked the shelving. And this was before IKEA, so you know we were investing more in our personal library than in anything else.
When Bezos brought his bookselling online he sucked me, at least, into his scheme right away. I bought books from Amazon and sold other books on their site as well. You’d be surprised how many people on the Interwebs are interested in Robert Caro’s multi-volume LBJ biography. Or a signed copy of Dream City, the definitive story of D.C.’s self-proclaimed “Mayor for Life,” Marion Barry. And who woulda thunk that all of Moker’s substantial collection of novels from his B.A. in English Degree from the University of Wisconsin would sell for far more than a pretty penny?
Cleo on her favorite perch in our house. The new place has an abundance of bookshelves, even though we’ve tried to pare down our collection. The Beatles pillow, forefront, is part of our “popular culture” collection, another passion. Notice Tricky Dick to the right of the couch? Long story. Photo c/o the author’s archives.
I’d list them on Amazon; Moker would mail them on his lunch hour (I taught eight hours a day, so there was no running errands for moi), and Amazon would plunk a dollar — or two, or twelve, and in one case, close to $200 — I don’t recall the book, but it must’ve been a rare enough find — in my bank account. Moker used to joke that he was getting the raw end of this deal — after all, while I bought the mailing envelopes, he paid for the postage. There was some truth to that, although we share funds in this marriage, so I never really figured out what he was complaining about.
Of course, all good things must end, and my two years as a bookseller did just that. I got tired of “buyer’s remorse”. Someone in Snohomish, Washington, say, would purchase a 1969 edition of A Tale of Two Cities, which I had advertised as “slightly worn, barely read; some wear from sitting on a shelf for decades.” The buyer would click on the button to acquire the book. His payment would be transferred to my account, with my buddy Bezos, of course, taking his cut first. I would package the book for shipment, and Moker would take it down to the post office on his lunch break. But sometimes things didn’t go so smoothly. After sending Charles Dickens off to his new home on the other side of the country, I’d get an angry message on my Amazon account. “I’m so desapointed! Books’ in trribl cnditon!! I want my mony beckk!!!” Being the decent egg that I am, I would digitally reimburse the dissatisfied customer. And he wouldn’t send my book back. Ever.
This happened a least two dozen times during my financial partnership with Amazon. I got tired of the complaints; I got tired of those who were either too lazy or too dishonest to send me back my property; and I got even more exhausted by those self-same jerks who didn’t know how to spell to save their lives.
So I quit the book biz — the selling part, at least — and my basement bookshelves began to expand yet again. Then Bezos branched out. I was beyond hooked.
In 1998, Amazon expanded into music and DVD sales; in ’99, Bezos added home improvement and other gift items to the mix; in 2000, third-party sellers — like my basement book biz — went online with Amazon; and from 2001 to today, this consumer behemoth kept expanding into the Amazon we now know, sometimes love, and love to hate. I’m even considering ordering the groceries for Christmas dinner online — from Jeff, of course, because he now owns Whole Foods, too.
With the advent of Prime, streaming and original content, Jeff had us right where he wanted us. And, for the most part, I was there for almost every single innovation he sent down the pike. Because he’s in the food biz now, I ordered two three-pound bags of Hershey’s Kisses a few weeks ago. I’ll be streaming the latest episode of Borat sometime soon. That’s how whacked-out my relationship with Jeff Bezos has become.
I guess I should explain — I’m really not a shopaholic. Even though I lived within three miles of one of the largest malls on the East Coast for more than 20 years, I hardly ever went, except to drop off and pick up kids. Getting me to a mall — or even into a discount apparel emporium like T.J. Maxx — is like pulling the proverbial teeth. I don’t like to look. Even in my slender days, I hated the concept of trying something on that could have been showcased on more than one stranger’s body. I sure as shootin’ can’t stand the thought of Black Friday, even though I have been spotted at the mall at midnight on Thanksgiving night, but only because someone else (I have two kids) was spending my money. And because malls these days have “living room areas,” with comfy chairs and couches tied together with tasteful coffee and end tables, and nice rugs. A place to take a load off. For folks just like me.
I guess on a couple of occasions I decided that it wasn’t worth it to fight the holiday crowds. If I was going to drop kids off at the mall after eating too much turkey and trimmings, I was going to stay and walk off all that excess weight. And then sit down, put my feet up and read the book I’d just acquired at Barnes & Noble. So, yes — you’ve heard of those moms who give their credit card to the child and say, “Get the hell outta here”? Guilty as charged.
But my main man Jeff took all the anxiety, the wear, the tear out of shopping. I sometimes order clothing (beyond sweatpants) online. If the item doesn’t fit, I send it back. But you’d be surprised how many nice tops, and even an occasional swimsuit, fits just fine. And I didn’t have to leave my living room to pick any of it up. Well, except when I go out to the mailbox, or scoop up my packages from the front stoop.
Over the years, I’ve ordered a cacophony of creature comforts. And during the pandemic, I’ve upped my online Amazon game. Recently, I noticed the phone charger cord in my car was frayed. I was waiting while Ella Numera Una dashed into a home improvement store, so I ordered a new cord. That same day, I craved the aforementioned Hershey’s treat. A couple of clicks, and I received Kisses upon Kisses a couple of days later. But I’ve also ordered necessary and utilitarian items from Amazon: a newfangled thermometer and a pack of AAA batteries to run it; a shower caddy to replace the one in the master bath that had seen better days; a book for a friend’s birthday; king-sized sheets; home decor for my kitchen, and kitty litter for my, well, cat.
Some of you will probably say that if I got out more, I could acquire these items in the brick-and-mortar marketplace. Indeed I could. But didn’t you hear? There’s a virus out there. I’d rather curl up with the kitty and let my fingers do the walking, as the old Yellow Pages ads used to say.
The “good old days” often featured a frenzied trip to the mall, with at least one kid in tow. I took this photo with my new cellphone in 2013. I try to be less “artsy” these days. Oh, and notice the rug and the plant? I was sitting in one of those “comfy” areas designed for people just like me. Photo c/o the author’s archives.
I do sometimes miss the “good old days,” when the kids were younger, and they wanted to shop. Years ago, Moker bought a red convertible, which I drove on occasion. And occasionally, I’d take the kids to the mall, or pick them up on a Saturday afternoon. Top down, tunes up. I was returning from a pick-up run one spring day, with three middle-schoolers in the car. I’ll never forget the convo as we cruised down the hill into our suburban burg.
Lisa: “Guess what, Mrs. N. Guess what?!?”
Ella Numera Una (riding shotgun, turning around to shush her friend): “Shut up, Lisa!”
Lisa: “Guess whaaaaaaaattttt!?!?!?!?!”
Me: “What?”
Lisa: “Guess who bought a thong?!? And it wasn’t me — it was…” Una threw her a look that — well, for a 13-year-old, probably could kill.
I didn’t have to guess. I knew. And I’m glad that was just a phase. But I know if she wanted to, Ella Numera Una could buy her underwear from Jeff Bezos. Because I do. Jeff Bezos and I are that close. | https://medium.com/swlh/exploring-the-amazon-d35d5b329bf2 | ['Brooke Ramey Nelson'] | 2020-12-21 18:02:22.510000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Shopping', 'Digital Life', 'Jeff Bezos', 'Amazon'] |
Configuring the service: Vault+Pydantic | Settings classes
DBSetting — database connection
To create the settings class, we must use VaultKVSettings as the base class.
As you can see, config data for the database connection is quite simple. This class will by default look at the secret superapp/dev/db, as we specified in the Config class. At first glance these are simple pydantic.Field, but they all have an extra argument vault_secret_key — it is needed when the key in the secret does not match the name (alias) of the pydantic field in our class, if vault_secret_key is not specified, the provider will search for the key by the field alias.
For example, in our superapp, it is assumed that the superapp/dev/db secret has the “password” and “username” keys, but we want the latter to be placed in the “user” field for convenience and brevity.
Let’s put the following data in the above secret:
{
"host": "testhost",
"password": "testpassword",
"port": "1234",
"username": "testuser"
}
Now, if we run this code, we will get our secret from vault with our DBSettings class:
KafkaSettings — connection to brokers
In this case, let’s imagine that there is one kafka instance for different environments of our service, so the secret is stored along the path superapp/common/kafka:
Note: You can also set secret_path or/and mount_point at the field level so that the provider requests specific values from different secrets (if required). Here is a quote with prioritization of the secret path and mount point from the documentation:
Secret path prioritization:
1. vault_secret_path (Field arg)
2. default_secret_path (Config class field)
3. secret_path (provider initialization optional arg) Mount point prioritization:
1. vault_mount_point (Field arg)
2. default_mount_point (Config class field)
3. mount_point (provider initialization optional arg)
{
"auth_data": "{\"password\": \"testpassword\", \"username\": \"testuser\"}",
"auth_mechanism": "SASL_PLAINTEXT",
"brokers": "kafka://test"
}
Or
{
"auth_data":
{
"password": "testpassword",
"username": "testuser"
},
"brokers": "kafka://test",
"auth_mechanism": "SASL_PLAINTEXT"
}
Note: VaultKVSettings can understand both json and Dict itself.
As a result, this class of settings will be able to collect data from the secret like this:
{
"auth_data":
{
"password": "testpassword",
"username": "testuser"
},
"brokers": "kafka://test",
"auth_mechanism": "SASL_PLAINTEXT"
}
FaustSettings — global configure faust and individual agents
Secret superapp/dev/faust:
{
"agent_concurrency": "5",
"app_name": "superapp-workers",
"partitions_count": "10"
}
If our secret is written as indicated above, then individual agents will take information about the number of partitions in their topics and concurrency from the default fields.
{
"agents": None,
"app_name": "superapp-workers",
"default_concurrency": 5,
"default_partitions_count": 10
}
However, with the help of the AgentConfig model, we can set individual values for a specific agent. For example, if we have agent X with 5 partitions and concurrency 2, then we can change our secret so that information about this agent is in the “agents” field.
Secret superapp/dev/faust:
{
"agent_concurrency": "5",
"agents_specification": {
"X": {
"concurrency": "2",
"partitions": "5"
}
},
"app_name": "superapp-workers",
"partitions_count": "10"
}
If we initialize our settings now, we will receive, in addition to the default fields, also the configuration for a specific agent:
{
"agents":
{
"X":
{
"concurrency": 2,
"partitions": 5
}
},
"app_name": "superapp-workers",
"default_concurrency": 5,
"default_partitions_count": 10
}
Combine the settings classes into a single configuration model
To make our configs even more convenient to use, let’s combine all our settings classes into one model by applying the default_factory:
Now, let’s go to the main.py file and test the collection of complete configuration data for our application:
We get the output of application configuration:
db=DBSettings(user='testuser', password='testpassword', host='testhost', port=1234)
faust=FaustSettings(app_name='superapp-workers', default_partitions_count=10, default_concurrency=5, agents={'X': AgentConfig(partitions=5, concurrency=2)})
kafka=KafkaSettings(auth_mechanism='SASL_PLAINTEXT', brokers='kafka://test', auth_data={'password': 'testpassword', 'username': 'testuser'}) {
"db":
{
"host": "testhost",
"password": "testpassword",
"port": 1234,
"user": "testuser"
},
"faust":
{
"agents":
{
"X":
{
"concurrency": 2,
"partitions": 5
}
},
"app_name": "superapp-workers",
"default_concurrency": 5,
"default_partitions_count": 10
},
"kafka":
{
"auth_data":
{
"password": "testpassword",
"username": "testuser"
},
"brokers": "kafka://test",
"auth_mechanism": "SASL_PLAINTEXT"
}
}
Happiness, joy, delight! | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/configuring-the-service-using-vault-and-pydantic-ad66bd8dfeac | ['Alexander Lavrov'] | 2020-12-17 16:10:55.081000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Config', 'Kafka', 'Configuration Management', 'Vault'] |
It’s Okay To Have Just One! | I have two sisters and two brothers and although my parents divorced and sisters one side, brothers other, it’s still a lot of planning. You go to this, I’ll go to that. Sorry can’t take you now have to take your sister out. It was a hustle and bustle life with lots of noise, and sometimes very quiet.
They say having one child will make them lonely or bored, but what about when there are a lot of kids to the point where no one can go to your back to school night or dance recital. It wasn’t easy especially as the forever middle child, so when my husband and I made our decision to have one, I can’t begin to tell you how many people decided to voice their opinion as if my ovaries where theirs and the oh you will see, you’ll change your mind only painted red in my mind after they kept saying it.
Stop telling women that they will change their mind or things change!
Anyone ever stop to think maybe it took years to get pregnant and finally you are successful. Or my favorite, he’s only a month!!! Back off!! Why do we feel the need to step so close in, popping personal bubbles and give unwanted opinions. Becoming a parent is hard as it is and coming from a large family I’m okay with one. No, he will not be lonely because I love him so much that he will get to experience whatever he wants and I can offer that because he is only one child. No, he will not become a brat because he’s spoiled. He’s spoiled with love, education, social skills and new adventures. And no, I’m his mother not you, so I’ll tell you he doesn’t NEED a sister or brother!
It’s okay to have just one. It’s okay to work full time outside the home or work full time as a stay at home mom with one kiddo. Mother or father, it’s not easy. We want them to be the best that they can and be able to watch them throw the first pitch at a game, leap at their dance recital, or have their drum solo at their first concert. So as parents that was also equally important to us. We want to be there for his every adventure as a team. We want to cheer him on for the rest of his life so he knows he is doing the best he can. We want this and again, it’s okay to have one.
Some only children say that they wished they had a sibling and hey, I wish for a million bucks but wasn’t dealt those cards. Decisions are made for reasons and young parents, old parents or new parents, let THEM feel confident about their decisions. So you didn’t get a sibling, but you got things that maybe you wouldn’t get if there were more children in the house. I didn’t get a millions bucks, but I sure as heck got a beautiful life and I’ll take that over anything. | https://thequeenbuzz.com/its-okay-to-have-just-one-6baa52ce69c0 | ['Deana Elwood', 'Head Bee'] | 2019-08-16 01:49:56.575000+00:00 | ['Moms', 'Dads', 'Parents', 'Parenting', 'Only Child'] |
offers and discounts on electronic appliances | People always get attracted towards a shop that has a notice board saying “Sale, Offers, Discounts and Free”. This happens due to the normal human behavior of getting things at lesser rates than they are normally available for. If someone goes to the market and they are getting the same things at two stores, but the price at one store is less than the other, the chances of buying the product with lesser price tag is more. No one would like to buy something at very high rates when there are deals and offers going on for the same product at other stores.
For this reason, the websites providing such kinds of services has increased to a large number in the past years. They can easily provide appliances and other products at very low prices and with amazing discounts and offers . This will let the user have more freedom of buying goods at cheap prices. In addition, the appliances and brands available on these sites are in great variety and can provide you with different options for selecting the most appropriate appliance for yourself. There are many people who wish to purchase some expensive appliances from the market, but the price tag often sets them back.
Due to this reason, many people have now started shifting towards buying appliances from online sites. These sites also feature used appliances, which are available for affordable prices. Some of them are very rarely used and look as new. All the appliances on site are fully tested for true working conditions and price evaluation. Most of the time, we see that an appliance outlet store will provide you with discounts and offers only in the time of festival season. However, an online store will let you have access to new offers and schemes round the clock.
They are able to make this happen because they have low operational costs and can have much more profit margin than the local store dealers. This in turn helps them to provide new offers and discounts to customers, which lures them into buying the product from their site. Although, these tactics help them in gaining high incomes, still they are profitable for customers as well. All such types of stores have warehouses and contacts with cargo service providers for delivering goods. They also need to build their reputation and this is the reason that they provide excellent service with every purchase.
Avail the best buy appliances through these stores and get them delivered right at your doorstep. It provides comfort of shopping at home. You can browse through millions of products and also book them simultaneously. After selecting your choices from the list, you can just checkout and provide the address for delivering all the stuff. All your ordered stuff will get delivered at your home without any charges and the products will be discounted as well. These sites have very strict policies regarding the quality and standards of their products, and hence, you will always get the best deal with them. | https://medium.com/@praffulgoel36/offers-and-discounts-on-electronic-appliances-fce16916eea7 | ['Prafful Goel'] | 2019-05-09 10:05:45.057000+00:00 | ['Online', 'Discounts', 'Offers', 'Nearby', 'Deals'] |
Twas the Night Before 2020 Christmas | ’Twas the night before Christmas, when through all their houses,
Families were clicking on Zoom with their mouses.
The gifts had been shipped USPS with care,
Since none of the givers could go anywhere.
The children preparing to sleep in home beds,
Were dreaming of Grandma and Grampa’s instead,
And I on the west coast, a cat in my lap,
Could not risk the danger of crossing the map.
For out in the world was a troublesome matter;
Ignoring it made one as mad as a hatter.
While some chose behavior both careless and brash,
We distanced and masked and threw plans in the trash.
We chat as the light of computer-screen glow
Gives the luster of death like we’re all in The Crow.
But still it’s delight when those faces appear,
Of friends and the family we hold the most dear.
We’d hoped isolation would be over quick,
But that was a dream given President Dick.
More rapid than eagles incompetence came
As he treated a war like a confidence game.
Not Fauci! Not Redfield! Not Azar or Birx!
No voices of reason could stop all the jerks!
From the Michigan plots to the Mexican wall,
They dashed around, stood their ground, jackasses all!
As toddlers that bite, kick, and cream at the sky,
When faced with an obstacle, “Freedom!” they cry.
So, stuck in the house, all the rest of us stew,
Making quarantine toys out of paper and glue.
As the rates of infection go up through the roof,
We master the art of the sourdough proof,
A drink in our hand, and minds far from sound,
Our waistlines grow closer and closer to round.
We’re dressed all in sweats, forever barefoot,
And our shower routine has long since gone kaput.
The house is a mess — why put anything back?
It’s not the free time but the will that I lack.
Our eyes — how they’ve wrinkled! Blood pressure — how scary!
Who knew that they body could get quite so hairy?
We’ve given up knitting, failed learning to sew.
We’ve taken to eating outside in the snow.
On work calls we desperately grin through our teeth
To hide the depression a-boil underneath.
At night we curl up with our friends on the telly,
And cheer when a Goonie escapes a Fratelli.
But tonight, we put strife on the shelf with the elf.
I will laugh and relax and feel more like myself.
Through the glory of tech we’ll unite the homestead;
No longer alone, be with family instead.
We will speak not a word before images jerk
Our mouths into smiles, Christmas magic at work.
As happiness spreads from our eyes to our toes
The distance between us will mentally close.
And while most of this year has been sharp as a thistle,
Think on this thought and rejoice with a whistle:
The year 2020 is soon out of sight.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ZOOM A GOOD NIGHT! | https://medium.com/@full-frontal-nerdity/twas-the-night-before-2020-christmas-ddde650c9979 | ['K.S. Wiswell'] | 2020-12-24 20:18:15.018000+00:00 | ['2020', 'Quarantine', 'Parody', 'Christmas', 'Family'] |
Predicting Heart Disease With a Neural Network | Predicting Heart Disease With a Neural Network
Predict the probability of getting heart disease with a Python neural network
Photo by Kendal on Unsplash
In these times of coronavirus, many hospitals are short-staffed and in dire straits. A lack of staff causes many problems. Not all patients can be treated, doctors are excessively tired and risk not taking appropriate precautions. Once a doctor gets sick, staff reductions accelerate, and so on.
This leads us to consider the importance of technology in the medical field. One of the most promising branches of technology today is artificial intelligence (AI). Today, we’re going to talk about implementing artificial neural networks in the field of medicine. More specifically, we will create a neural network that predicts the probability of having heart disease.
Disclaimer: If you look at my previous work, you will see that this not the first time I have written about AI for medical purposes. I want to be clear that this is not a scientifically rigorous study — it’s just a way of implementing AI to solve real-world problems.
Having said that, let’s start! | https://medium.com/better-programming/predicting-heart-disease-with-a-neural-network-a48d2ce59bc5 | ['Tommaso De Ponti'] | 2020-04-24 16:17:59.096000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'AI', 'Neural Networks', 'Python', 'Machine Learning'] |
Broctagon’s Annual Company Retreat 2019: Bangkok, Thailand | Nothing spells teamwork better than a common objective on a ‘war zone’. The Broctaon family, joined by the big bosses, took the chance to bond out of the confines of an office, and excel outside of the work environment.
Relive the Retro Night
The annual themed dinner featured a ‘Retro Night’ where key appointment holders, and our partners from our Thailand office joined in the fun. Everyone dressed to the seventies and brought out their vintage flair to participate in the lively mood.
CEO Don Guo gives an opening speech to recap the past year and its tremendous positive growth.
CEO of Broctagon Fintech Group, Don Guo, held an opening speech outlining the many milestones that the company has achieved in the past year, thanking the employees and partners for helping us reach new heights.
This year marked our ten years in the fintech industry, and we celebrated the opening of our Singapore headquarters in the heart of the financial district. During this year, Broctagon has launched many new products such as a CRM 2.0 for brokers, Blockchain-in-a-Box, and NEXUS 2.0. Nexus 2.0 is a liquidity aggregation engine that channels price feeds from top global exchanges with smart order routing.
Top 3 finalists posing for the Best-Dressed category (Men). CTO Ted Quek (middle) won Best-Dressed.
The event also featured a best-dressed competition where everyone went all out to immerse themselves in the exciting retro atmosphere, including a photobooth and games segment where they got to learn more about the company and their fellow co-workers. Consensus decided that the Best-Dressed award for the male category went to CTO Ted Quek, who exuded the company passion in his retro getup and showed that no matter what we do, we go all out to do it well. | https://medium.com/broctagongroup/broctagons-annual-company-retreat-2019-bangkok-thailand-2bc8f545b516 | ['Broctagon Fintech Group'] | 2020-01-14 07:30:15.473000+00:00 | ['Events', 'Fintech', 'Retreat', 'Company', 'Bonding'] |
23. What is Meconium Aspiration Syndrome? | Day 23 of me researching so you won’t have to :)
Meconium Aspiration Syndrome is respiratory distress in a newborn who aspirated meconium into the lungs around the time of birth. This occurs when the baby is stressed (i.e. infection or low oxygen levels) and gasps while it is still in the womb or soon after delivery. While gasping, the baby may breath in amniotic fluid that contains meconium (a dark green fecal material within the intestines prior to birth)
Some common causes of fetal stress:
- Postterm pregnancy (overdue baby, >40 weeks)
- difficult or long labor
- mother with certain health issues (i.e. hypertension or diabetes)
- an infection
Symptoms:
- cyanosis (blue skin discoloration)
- Hypotension (lbp)
- limpness
- breathing problems
Treatments:
This syndrome should be treated immediately.
If a baby aspirated little amounts of meconium, the doctors would place a tube into the newborn’s trachea to suction the stained amniotic fluid. This suction would continue until no meconium is seen in the removed material.
In the case the newborn is still having trouble breathing, the doctor would use a bag and mask to help them breathe and get oxygen to inflate their lungs. | https://medium.com/@lavizoec/23-what-is-meconium-aspiration-syndrome-ed5c0a18b1e3 | ['Lavinia Contreras'] | 2021-06-02 12:30:19.023000+00:00 | ['Newborn', 'Poop', 'Breath', 'Baby'] |
I shop therefore we are | We spent the last four months being told that the most important thing was to vote yet we vote all the time. We can make about 50,000 decisions a day — many of them related to what we buy, and what we watch, read and share online. All the companies we choose to support with our resources and attention shape the world we live in.
As we end this year and for 2021, let’s resolve to use this economic voting power for good to bankroll companies and organizations that live their principles and treat workers and respect the environment.
Espoused theories versus theories in practice
In the early 1990s, Harvard Professor Chris Argyris helped us distinguish between espoused theory and theory-in-use, and understand how we justify our actions and prevent ourselves from evolving. Espoused theories are how we profess to want to act (ethically, sustainably); theories-in use reflect how we behave in practice.
Many of the conversations we have to resolve these tensions are with ourselves. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, we all resolved to get off Facebook. None of us really did.
Today, as Covid exacerbates inequality and forces us to confront how our most essential workers are treated, we have the opportunity to change the next few years simply through our choices. Let’s take it this time.
Words are not values
Half a century ago, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez called for us to value those we now explicitly call essential. That everyone’s labor — sanitation workers, grocers, delivery drivers, teachers, nursing assistants — is essential for our society to survive.
Throughout the pandemic, many companies, from retailers to tech giants, glorified their frontline workers as “heroes” with sentimental social media postings, thanking them for their heroic bravery. But in the meantime, they also rolled back some policies designed to keep those “heroes” safe during this pandemic, such as the hazard pay, even though coronavirus deaths are reaching records highs, and have limited benefits and their ability to organize.
For example, a million front-line health care workers, risking their lives to treat our relatives in hospitals full of Covid-19, lack their own health coverage. The median pay for a nursing assistant is $14.25 an hour. Forty-seven percent of nursing, psychiatric and home health aides aren’t offered a single day of paid sick leave. The pain is extreme when we don’t even have a single day off to see our parents in their final days. How can we pretend that our rank in a company should determine whether we have time to grieve the loss of a spouse or a child?
We saw many companies and universities enable employees to take Juneteenth as a day off to “reflect on racial justice.” Great idea. But there was one big issue: for the large majority of frontline workers, taking a day off is not an option. They are working in fulfillment operations, packing, and delivering products to millions of consumers. “What does a black shirt do for anybody in terms of social justice?” said a retailer’s contract driver. Better pay, she added, it would do far more, namely “would cut down the pre-existing condition that is poverty.”
Being our word
During this holiday shopping season, and as we set New Year’s Resolutions, we face a longer-term question. Do we want to drive further inequity in our society and continue to shop and browse as usual? Or do we want to seize this moment to promote socioeconomic and racial equity for all? As we may care for our “fair trade” coffee, we may also care about looking more closely to which companies that truly reward all their workers.
It is on us. It is our economic and moral vote. We need to be honest with ourselves and ask whether we want to continue to shop according to a consumption habit that for decades furthered our society’s inequities, or whether we want to emerge from this crisis with a society which recognizes the infinite value of each human person — regardless of job title.
Below are a few ideas and resources to help you reflect on your values and goals as a conscious consumer — not just of goods and services that we pay for but of “free” ones such as social media. These are just a start. And of course the best source of information are employees themselves. Please let us and others know what you learn.
Authors: Carin-Isabel Knoop and Bahia El Oddi
Photo credit: Ellen Feldman * [email protected] * www.ellenfeldman.net * www.WeWhoMarch.org
How to make your consumption votes count | https://medium.com/@carinisabelknoop/i-shop-therefore-we-are-985edfc69432 | ['Carin-Isabel Knoop'] | 2020-12-23 17:16:12.791000+00:00 | ['Values', 'Shopping', 'Equity', 'Ethics', 'Changemaker'] |
Sleep Meditation for Insomnia | Tonight’s sleep meditation will help melt away your insomnia and fall asleep.
Surrender to the soft blue energy of sleep tonight,
As the insomnia melts away,
And peaceful rest covers you.
So Let’s Begin…
RELAX INTO THE STILLNESS SLEEP MEDITATION SCRIPT
Allow yourself to settle,
Snuggling into your favorite sleeping position,
And close your eyes.
Take a deep breath in, letting your body expand with fresh air,
And exhale, allowing your body to melt deeper into comfort.
It’s time to rest, beautiful.
There’s nowhere you need to be, nothing you need to do.
So come with me into dreamland.
PAUSE…
Feel the heaviness of your eyes.
Feel your cheeks soften,
Dropping your tongue from the roof of your mouth as your jaw releases.
Let your shoulders soften and lower,
Let your arms feel heavy,
Your fingers melt.
Feel your chest rising and falling as you breathe in just a little longer, and exhale just a little more.
Relax your stomach,
Let your legs let go and get heavier with relaxation.
Let your feet release.
And feel the cool air on your nose as you breathe in,
And the warm air on your nose as you breathe out.
Breathe,
Just breathe.
LONG PAUSE…
Now imagine that there’s a soft, blue energy floating above you.
Like a soothing cloud of mist, this soft blue energy hovers above you.
You feel safe and calm, so you invite it in.
Now imagine that soft, blue energy pouring over your head slowly.
You immediately feel it soften you, relax you, nourish you…release you.
Feel the soft, blue energy on your head, relaxing your face, your shoulders, your chest.
Melting your arms, fingers, stomach, hips, thighs, legs and toes.
Imagine the soft, blue energy is now at your feet, patiently waiting.
As you breathe in, let your breath search for any areas of unrest, any thoughts or discomforts that may be keeping you awake.
Let every inhale help you find them within your body.
LONG PAUSE…
And now imagine that with every breath out,
you release them all to the soft, blue energy at your feet.
Breathing those thoughts or discomforts down to your feet and out of your body.
And watch as the soft, blue energy absorbs them all.
Breathe in,
Breathe out.
Breathe in,
Breathe out.
LONG PAUSE…
Take one more look inside and release all that unrest on your outbreath.
LONG PAUSE…
Feel the heaviness of your body.
Feel the lightness of your mind.
And notice the deep, relaxed comfort you feel.
LONG PAUSE…
Now see that soft, blue cloud of energy at your feet.
You can see all your thoughts and feelings of unrest swirling inside of it.
They’re not yours to hold onto anymore.
And every time you breathe out,
You notice the soft, blue energy dissolve away.
Bit by bit.
Every time you exhale.
A bit more disappears.
Until you look down and see…nothing.
Notice the relief you feel.
Notice the lightness.
Notice the freedom.
Breathe with ease, my love,
You are free to fall asleep.
So let your body relax,
And surrender into the arms of the night.
Sweet Dreams, Beautiful. | https://medium.com/@katiekrimitsos/sleep-meditation-for-insomnia-93a26f535412 | ['Katie Krimitsos'] | 2021-06-17 21:00:39.762000+00:00 | ['Sleep', 'Stress And Anxiety', 'Rest'] |
Reviewing the Snoo | Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own
What is the Snoo?
The Snoo is a smart sleeper bassinet designed by Harvey Karp’s Happiest Baby company. It combines three of the 5 S’s — safe swaddling, gentle swinging, and a white noise shushing sound — to replicate the calming sensations of the womb. It guarantees a good night’s sleep for you and your baby.
I first read about the Snoo in Harvey Karp’s book, “ Happiest Baby on the Block,” and instantly was intrigued and in awe of such a product.
However, to shop and buy a Snoo it will run you $1, 395. To rent it costs $129 a month. Is there a price on sleep?
Should I Get One?
I hemmed and hawed over whether I should get one, but I decided to wait to see how my son slept with the 5 S’s on their own. The Snoo was too costly for me to justify splurging on a sleeping device if my son already slept well.
My son ended up sleeping well with the 5 S’s and advice from sleep expert Cara Dumaplin of TakingCaraBabies. Although in a moment of weakness, I almost purchased the rent option in the middle of the night after two sleepless nights with my son. He ended up sleeping well the next night and pretty much from there on out.
What Other People Say?
I ended up having a friend find one for half price on Facebook Market Place, and she purchased it for her baby.
She loves it and says it definitely provides her family with the extra sleep they need.
Her son LOVES the gentle rocking motion!
The swaddles have holes for the arms if your baby doesn’t want his arms pinned down in the swaddle, and the swaddles keep the babies on their backs, for a good night of safe sleeping.
She definitely recommends this product to all parents. The science behind it is proven, and when a baby and the parents get sleep, everyone is happier.
She gives it 8/10 stars.
Lauren Barrett
My name is Lauren, and I was born in New Jersey, grew up in West Virginia, went to college in Pennsylvania, and now live and work in North Carolina. I’m a high school teacher of the deaf and hard-of-hearing by day, a cross country coach by the afternoon, a writer by night, and a full time mom to an amazing toddler. I love my faith, running, watching baseball, chocolate, scrapbooking, pretending I would actually do well on the Amazing Race, re-watching The Office, listening to Bobby Bones, and helping out all moms.
https://linktr.ee/LaurenBarrettWrites | https://medium.com/@laurenbarrettwrites/reviewing-the-snoo-b1c78496482b | [] | 2020-10-26 14:54:14.941000+00:00 | ['Baby Products', 'Parenting', 'Baby', 'Baby Sleep', 'Parenting Advice'] |
4 Productivity tips for freelancers who need help staying on track | 4 Productivity tips for freelancers who need help staying on track
It’s not always easy to stay on track especially when you’re your own boss and work from home. Here are great productivity tips to help. Darryl Kelly Follow Mar 8 · 3 min read
The life of a freelancer is one of the most flexible working environments that there is. And while that can be incredibly satisfying, it can also hold its own set of challenges like productivity.
When you’ve got the freedom to create your own schedule, ensuring that you stay motivated and productive can be challenging. If you’ve been struggling with productivity, we’re here to provide you with some productivity tips that will help you get back to producing high-quality work at a decent level.
1. Have a schedule
As a freelancer, you get to set your own schedule, and it can be easy to work whenever you feel like it. But, if you don’t take the time to create a schedule for yourself, you’ll find that you find reasons to put off your work.
When you set a schedule, you should set aside a block of time to focus on getting your freelance work complete. After this time is up, you’re free to do anything else that you’d like to do with your day.
This alleviates you from facing any missed deadlines or filling your entire day with work as if you’re in a regular corporate office.
2. Continue to educate yourself
Whether you’re a beginner or have been at this freelance thing for years, you must continue to educate yourself on your craft. For, example if your a freelancer that focuses on building websites, it would be useful for you to continue studying the varying types of coding.
Not only does this keep you up-to-date on current coding practices, but you’re also able to broaden your skillset and be able to take higher-paying jobs.
3. Take a break
There are going to be times when you’re driven to work for hours on end. And while you’re going to complete a higher amount of work, the quality of your work may begin to slip. This is because although you wish to continue working, your brain and body are telling you they need a break.
Ensuring that you stick to regular breaks will give you the time you need to move around and refresh yourself before getting back to work.
4. Know when you’re productive
Some people are productive early in the morning with a cup of coffee in hand, and others are more productive after the sun goes down. One of the best work productivity tips we have is to know yourself.
Knowing what time of day is the best for you will ensure that you make the most of your peak production times.
Productivity tips 101: Getting back on track
When it comes to being a freelancer, there are tons of productivity tips available. Tips that include working when you’re the most productive and taking the time to give yourself breaks in between your work schedule.
If you’re looking to learn more about a freelancer’s life or get started on your freelance journey, visit Hecticapp.com. | https://medium.com/hectic/4-productivity-tips-for-freelancers-who-need-help-staying-on-track-79bf91081433 | ['Darryl Kelly'] | 2021-03-08 18:32:52.221000+00:00 | ['Freelancer', 'Productivity', 'Freelancing', 'Freelance Tips', 'Freelance'] |
Christmas Through A Knothole | A Covid Parable
Photo courtesy of Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash
A favorite holiday book from my childhood was a tall, thin, battered hardbound volume entitled The Tall Book of Christmas, which featured whimsical drawings and Christmas-themed stories you wouldn’t read anywhere else, like the one about the mean giant who loved Limburger cheese and ruined Christmas by stealing everyone’s stockings until a young boy taught him how to be kind, or the one about the grandmother who needed extra money because her cupboards were bare, and so knitted edible mittens for sale, to the delight of every child who received a pair. The stories had a magical realism to them — the boy had to turn his nose upside down in order to visit the giant, for example, because the smell of Limburger cheese was too repugnant to him otherwise — and a quaint, old-timey feel. I loved them all, even the overtly religious ones.
By far my favorite story, though, was one called Christmas Through A Knothole, which starred an old man called Old Hans, who was loved by the village children for the intricate wooden toys he would carve for all of them at Christmas. One year, Old Hans ran afoul of the authorities for something benign like hunting on the King’s lands, and his punishment was a month in jail. The town children felt so badly for Hans, who would miss out on the Christmas festivities, and also for themselves — none of them would receive any handmade toys. The story is set in some bygone day when children were happy to receive an orange or a pencil eraser for Christmas, not in today’s modern, tech-saturated, holiday-buy-a-thon world, but as a child living in in cash-strapped family in the decade of conspicuous consumption that was the 80s, I could relate to their plight. Being an excessively compassionate child, my heart also went out to Old Hans. In the clink at Christmas! Sad. Christmas was all about community, and food, and family — being alone at Christmas, especially as an old man, seemed too horrible to consider.
With the signature pluck of all small children, though, the kids in the story found a work around. The wooden jail had a knothole in one of the walls, which the children would use to peer through when visiting Hans. He was in good spirits just to have them visit and chat through the knothole, but the kids weren’t content to leave it there. Enlisting the help of their parents, they baked long thin loaves of bread, rolled meats and cheeses and pastries into long tubes, and passed all the tasty vittles through the knothole to Hans on Christmas. It wasn’t the typical holiday meal, but much better than the jail fare, and Hans was thrilled. In an O. Henry-esque twist, Hans passed back out of the knothole the animals he’d been busily carving during his captivity, which, by necessity, were even smaller and more intricate than any he’d made before. The children were delighted, and Christmas was not ruined; in fact, maybe it was made even more special and memorable because of the creativity required by challenging circumstances.
It has occurred to me over the last month or so, as nearly everyone I know has canceled, modified, and truncated their holiday plans, that this is what the holidays have the potential to be this year. With pluck and ingenuity and acceptance of the circumstances, we can find a way to make a holiday in which we cannot be together, where the view is more through a knothole (or a zoom screen) than panoramic, where the meal may look different and the isolation may feel constraining, with our collective good cheer, love, and desire to create something positive from difficulties. I’ve been impressed by the ability, in the oldsters in my life, to replace disappointment with cheerful courage in the face of reduced holidays — not seeing children and grandchildren, not being able to travel. By themselves in their retirement location, my folks are doing the right thing and staying put. “This is the first Christmas we’ve spent at home since we retired,” my mom remarked, when her daughters implored her to cancel their plans to travel to see us for Christmas, “I guess we better go get a tree!” Adopting a can-do attitude when things don’t go your way seems to be a dying art in these days of people squawking about the importance of their freedoms over the health and safety of others, but my parents are masters of it.
Yes, it’s more fun to have your big gatherings, for family to travel from all over, to get 15 or 20 people around your table, than it is to pass the holidays with just 3 or 4. It’s been so long, and we’ve been with these same people, the members of our immediate household or quarantine pod, for so long. It’s natural to want to see extended family — we are tiiiiiiiiired of this heaping plate of the same old shit that coronavirus (and its mismanagement by doubters and poor leadership) keeps handing us. That’s fair, and I feel it too. But, are we taking time to acknowledge the beauty in the small group, the specialness of the 3 or 4? Having just a handful of people in your life whose company you can share, even in reduced circumstances, is a gift. It’s a gift to not be sick, to have the power to help keep others from getting sick, to have a table at all, much less food to put on it. This life, even in reduced circumstances, is a gift.
Isotoners and Dearfoams do not a Christmas make, and neither does a large crowd of brightly dressed folks jockeying for position near the eggnog. The feelings of love, of giving, of gratitude, and of goodwill toward our fellow creatures is what makes the holidays feel transcendent. ‘Goodwill to men’ — it’s such a trite expression we rarely stop to ponder what it means, but if we do, it will be so much easier to face with positivity that the right thing to do this year is obvious and clear: stay home, stay in small groups of just your immediately family and friend pod — look at Christmas through a knothole this year. Do it for your fellow men and women, because goodwill is more important than the tablescape, using the good plates, and getting the Instagram photos. You can handle it, and maybe it will even be a special experience because of the very hardship of it.
And while you’re holed up not attending church, or cookie decorating parties, or Yankee swaps, watch the movie Scrooged. Really. It has Bill Murray, it’s the best ever spin on the classic Scrooge tale, and if you don’t cry at the rendition of Put a Little Love In Your Heart at the end of the movie, then you are a cyborg and we cannot be friends. Maybe it’s a worse-than-usual holiday season, and we can’t travel to see family, and they can’t travel to see us, but, as the saying goes, we can do what we can with what we have where we are. We can get more graceful about letting things be different. We can let go of needing it to be a certain way so that we can find a way to enjoy things as they are. It’s true of 2020, but also of life generally. If we lessen the death grip of our expectations, we can enjoy the ride a little bit more. In my family growing up, we had our share of tensions and traumas, and holidays were no exception. One thing I look back on fondly, though, is my mother’s tendency, always accidental, to burn the rolls, more or less every Christmas. A talented cook, she would have spent all day not just prepping and cooking, but riding herd on the kids, making sure we vacuumed and polished the silver and got cleaned up and dressed in time to greet our arriving relatives. Straddling the divide between hostess and chef, my mother would inevitably forget the rolls in the oven, and would pull them a minute or two too late, swearing under her breath. Although she made herself mad with the mistake, it became a joke over the years, something she could laugh about, even in the moment. “Oh good, mom burned the rolls! Now we can relax and enjoy Christmas.” Besides, the tops were almost always edible.
So this year, I’m working to enjoy the burned rolls, and I welcome you to join me. Let’s embrace the suck of the Covid holiday and teach our kids — and ourselves — a little something about resilience in less than optimal times. And for extra credit points, if you can find some small way to do something for your fellow man or woman, you’ll feel better and you’ll have my admiration.
There are so many people struggling right now — if you have even a little to spare, consider a cash donation to a worthy charity. I’ll plug my favorite local charity here, Youth On Their Own, which helps homeless teens finish high school with the support most kids can normally rely on from their parents. If your parents are incarcerated, deceased, addicted, or otherwise unwilling or unable to support you, the prospects for graduating high school become slim, and the likelihood of landing on your feet in adulthood without a high school diploma maybe even even slimmer. Suport YOTO here https://yoto.org/ or donate to your own favorite charity. Nothing lightens a burden like remembering that others have a heavier one.
Happy holidays, everyone, and here’s a tiny, intricate, hand carved wooden animal, passed through the knothole of the internet, from me to you. | https://medium.com/@meadenik/christmas-through-a-knothole-d22f3e11709 | ['Nicole Meade Jensen'] | 2020-12-23 17:24:18.876000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Christmas', 'Resilience', 'Holidays', 'Family'] |
7 Questions Every Designer should always ask from the Client! | Originally posted on Creative Gaga
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
After completing my MBA, I joined an advertising agency where I fell in love with the whole concept of designing communication. For two months, I used to sit next to my graphic designer friends and play around with colors, fonts, and copy; it was so much fun. After a few months, I noticed a pattern; the creative team created five options for one poster and multiple feedback every day. It wasn’t fun anymore.
Being client-facing, I felt responsible for my friends in the creative team, creating multiple options, and spending drunken nights in the office (Working!). It came to the point that I learned how to make the ‘logo bigger’ myself, export PDF, and send it to the client myself. (Kidding!)
I thought it’s not me; it’s the client. They are indecisive and cribbed about them with the creative team to gain sympathy and get the work done. But I knew I was in trouble when it happened to us again.
That’s when I decided to seek help and gathered my creative team to brainstorm ways to increase efficiency and get the design right in the first go. We discovered the problem wasn’t that the client was indecisive, but we didn’t know the client and the business much.
Why was that happening? Every meeting with the client, we tried to please the client by filling the awkward silences with something while we should have heard the client instead. We were not asking the right questions to solve the business problem with the design.
When you start talking, you have taken away your client’s chance to think about what you have said. You stop them from digesting the design you carefully created, and you start sounding like that annoying pushy salesperson that no one likes. Instead, you can get inside your client’s head, so you know what they really want — and let them do the talking.
You can become a trusted advisor in the business process, and you use your client’s own words to give them what they want.
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” ― Voltaire
Listing down the questions that we decided to ask every client before getting onto a design phase, use these questions for your next campaign brief or freelance project to save time and become that trusted advisor to your clients.
1. What are your long-term and short-term business goals?
This question does two things. First, it gives you a roadmap to follow to help you provide for your customer’s immediate needs. When you can help make your customer’s short-term goals a reality, you become a partner in their success. Second, beginning to understand their long-term goals establishes you as a partner for the long haul. You stop being just a person trying to achieve a one-time sale, and you build a relationship that helps you to become a trusted confidant. | https://medium.com/@kaushik-divyam/7-questions-every-designer-should-always-ask-from-the-client-89dd4b13cd53 | [] | 2021-01-08 14:54:12.063000+00:00 | ['Designe', 'Business', 'Freelance'] |
A Toddler Thing: One of the most sought after sustainable Baby Essentials Brands in India! | A Toddler Thing: One of the most sought after sustainable Baby Essentials Brands in India! Tamanna Sharma Jul 9·3 min read
A Toddler Thing is a well-known homegrown brand run by young parents, striving to create a sustainable lifestyle for the parents and their little ones in India. We began in December 2017 with Cloth Diapers; the aim was to make the eco-friendly alternative to disposable diapers easily accessible to the moms in the south and eventually pan-India.
However, like most small businesses, our sights were set for higher goals. We wanted to help parents opt for sustainable living for their little ones, from the time of their birth.
With much research, experimenting with fabric and materials to create high quality and utility products, trying them out on our own bubs, we became a Sustainable Baby Essentials brand. Today, A Toddler Thing caters to the needs of little ones from the age of 0 (newborns) to the age of 2+. Of course, we couldn’t have got to where we did without the feedback, encouragement and most importantly, trust from the community of mommies we were lucky to build over the last 3 years.
This journey itself has been quite an experience but our toughest learning hit us in March 2020, as it did for most small businesses. The uncertainty about whether our business would take off again, to whether our customers would need us, the fear was real. Add to it, all the staff and tailors who depend on us for their sustenance. It was a nightmare, but we couldn’t let them down.
Team ATT couldn’t sit idle. We began ideating our new products and remembered that we weren’t just selling products, but experiences too. Our offerings also include engaging our community on social media and we amped it up a lot more! Eventually, it was our customers who saved us. Lucky for us, they helped us bounce back once the first wave eased down.
So, when the second wave hit us, the team was better prepared. While several uncertainties remained, we decided to get productive and use the time to concentrate on content development strategies. Which paid off, our engagement on Instagram has been great! After much deliberation, we also figured that our time would be best put to use by doing things we’d put off because we were busy, and ta-da! We started work with our new website and launched it too, quite recently.
Our resilience has been tested time and again and we’ve just learned to pick ourselves up and keep moving forward. Like most other small businesses, we’ve held on and we will continue to do so. Customers are our priority and we will continue to deliver the best of products and experiences, whatever this journey throws at us.
I have linked the website and their social media handle so that you can keep yourself updated on the latest offerings. | https://medium.com/@stamanna/a-toddler-thing-one-of-the-most-sought-after-sustainable-baby-essentials-brands-in-india-4cac0bf21252 | ['Tamanna Sharma'] | 2021-07-09 15:45:41.402000+00:00 | ['A Toddler Thing', 'Startup', 'Baby Essentials', 'Baby Care', 'Baby Products'] |
Bitcoin Whitepaper (Bahasa Indonesia) | We are a community focusing on cryptocurrency analysis (fundamental & technical analysis) that also empower blockchain projects to be able to raise their funds
Follow | https://medium.com/cryptowatchasia/bitcoin-whitepaper-bahasa-indonesia-36331482c471 | ['Christopher Tahir'] | 2018-10-08 15:09:17.803000+00:00 | ['Bahasa Indonesia', 'Bitcoin', 'Whitepaper', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
Not the Time for Fear: A Letter To My Fellow Christians | My fellow Christians,
This past year has been a whirlwind. COVID-19, social unrest, cries for justice (both right and wrong), and intense political polarization have culminated in a cocktail of anger, confusion, and despair. Watching the President leave office with a bang of pitiful narcissism and delusion which has sparked one of the saddest riots in our nation’s history, set against the backdrop of another soon-to-be President whose platform casts serious doubts about the future of free speech, religious liberty, and the rights of the unborn — it is easy to feel that hope has been lost in all directions.
Like many of you, I have been moved to tears at the state of our nation. Even more than that, the state of Western civilization as a whole is painfully bleak. Secularism has wrought hopelessness and moral bankruptcy to our nations, just as we knew it would. God has been replaced by the State, or perhaps worse, the individual. Sexual “liberation” has led to the breakdown of the family unit, causing the very idea of “family” (as it has been understood throughout human history) to become oppressive.
The threat of the Equality Act — which President-elect Biden has sworn to pass within 100 days of his inauguration — leaves us wondering how Christians will be able to continue operating in the workforce as our convictions essentially become outlawed. Furthermore, increased social media censorship begs the question, How long it will be until we are silenced on all public platforms, or unable to sell our books and resources on sites such as Amazon?
And to make matters even worse, many of us haven’t even been able to consistently meet with our local churches due to COVID restrictions. For too many congregations, certain laws make it impossible to safely gather without fear of fines or jail time (particularly in Europe, the UK, and Canada). Online “gatherings” are tolerable, but they aren’t church.
Churches watched as our governments labeled us as “non-essential” (which is as much of a blasphemy to Christ as anything else). Now we’re left wondering: If they can successfully shut us down for this, what else will they use to shut us down? How long until “homophobia” or “patriarchal views of gender” are labeled “public health crises” and our gatherings are banned until we capitulate to the progressives?
So where does this leave us? The inclination is toward hopelessness and exhaustion.
But now is not the time for fear. Now is the time for confidence. We are not the Church cowering, we are the Church militant. We do not stand behind men and women in Washington who will “protect our freedoms,” nor do we look to Presidents to “save our nation.” We stand behind our great older Brother — the King and Ruler of all governments and civilizations — Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, the Creator of the entire universe (Col. 1:16), the One who sustains all things by the word of His power (Heb. 1:3), the One who does all that He pleases without approval from anyone (Ps. 115:3), the One before whom mountains melt like wax (Micah 1:4).
Jesus Christ is God’s answer to the nations that rage against Him. He is the final word from God to all who would oppress His people and undermine His rule. Allow me to replace a few words in the first few verses of Psalm 2 to illustrate its application today (bold words are mine):
Why do the political mobs rage
and the politicians plot in vain?
The Presidents of the earth set themselves,
and the governments take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”
Do you see those words?
It’s amazing that the first two lines make up a question. It’s as if David is saying, “How foolish are these people that they rage and plot against the Living God?” As the rulers of this world join together against the Lord, His Son, and His people, seeking to break free from His law and design for human flourishing, God responds not with worry. Instead, He is moved to laughter.
The futile efforts of Congress, the EU, the UN, or any other conglomeration of world powers to threaten God’s kingdom is a premise so absurd that even the Almighty cannot hold back laughter.
Christ is not threatened by the legislation of pagans. Was He threatened by Rome? The Saracens? The Communists? The Nazis? Take one look at China right now and discover how futile their strivings to stay the growth of the Church are. Every effort by pagans to defy Christ has led not to the dissolution of the Church, but the expansion of it. Kings who tried to prevent their people from hearing the gospel eventually saw their kingdoms conquered by it. Governments who are the most serious about suppressing Christianity are also the most susceptible to it.
Christ will not be threatened or intimidated by anyone. The harder the nations rage, the harder He laughs. The more they plot, the more He points them back to Himself as the King of kings and the Lord of lords.
There has never been a time when Christ did not have the utmost certainty that His plans would come to fruition. How can He be afraid of men when they are as dust before Him?
So as the people of God, what are we supposed to feel?
Confidence.
Psalm 2 goes on:
I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me,
“You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”
God has given all the nations of the earth to Christ. At this very moment, He is in the process of bringing the nations under His sovereign rule. The “rod of iron” He will use to break them doesn’t refer to any violent or military powers, but to His Word. The Word of God is the most powerful force in the universe. And it is with His Word that Jesus will bring the nations under subjugation to Him.
Look at Revelation 19:11–16 (emphasis mine):
Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.
With such great love does He strike down the nations! How loving it is to dismantle all the wicked plans that are set against Him. The plans of pagan governments lead to suffering for their people — just turn on the news and watch that truth play out in real time. Christ’s plans to conquer the nations leads to flourishing, equity, justice, and joy for all. There was once a time when the civilizations of the West knew this. We have forgotten it, and now we suffer.
But Christ is building His Church nonetheless. The gospel is exploding in Africa and South America. China is trembling at the rate of gospel expansion within its borders. I even have confidence that all the turmoil in the United States right now is priming our people to fall in love with Christ all over again.
Christian, we aren’t on the wrong side of history. How can we be when our Lord is the author of history?
You may feel tempted to give up or give in. “Maybe,” you think, “if we just give up this certain belief or this certain conviction, things will improve for us.” Don’t buy the lie. Don’t ever compromise the Word of God for the sake of appeasing those who hate Him. Stand firm on His Word, for it is with His Word that He brings the nations under His rule! Don’t be afraid to share the gospel, because sharing the gospel is our greatest protest against the powers of darkness. Don’t be afraid to suffer, because suffering is what builds your faith and makes Christ shine even brighter through you.
And don’t be afraid to die, because it is very hard to control those who aren’t afraid of death.
There is a world of people out there who don’t have the hope we have. They don’t know the joy and peace that Christ gives. They don’t know the sweetness of trusting in Jesus as their Savior. And they won’t know until we tell them. We cannot be intimidated into silence.
Great powers have risen against us before. Plagues have swept through our lands. Heretics have been in our midst. The powers of Hell have been set against us from the outset. But triumphing over all these things is a bloodied cross, an empty tomb, and a reigning Christ. Be confident.
Turn off the TV, get off social media, open your Bible, and conquer your community with the gospel. Devote yourself to your church. Love and serve your neighbors. Read, pray, and sing with your family. Love your spouse. Obey the Lord.
There may be a storm gathering around us, but we have built our houses upon the Rock. We will not be moved by the futile schemes of godless men. On the contrary, we will bring the nations to their knees — not out of fear — but out of reverence to the one true and living God: Jesus Christ.
Yours in love and confidence,
Jordan Raybon | https://medium.com/@jordanraybon/not-the-time-for-fear-a-letter-to-my-fellow-christians-59d59edcda6d | ['Jordan Raybon'] | 2021-01-14 09:17:32.300000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Christian Leadership', 'Confidence', 'Chrsitian', 'Christian Living'] |
Futures Contracts and the Future of Exchanges: How New Technology Creates New Opportunities | Early cryptocurrency exchanges sought ways to emulate the traditional exchanges, perhaps as a means to bring familiarity to a budding and mysterious asset class. However, this has often stifled innovation despite the virtually unlimited potential offered by the cryptocurrencies’ underlying technology. More recently what is emerging is a new generation of exchanges offering tools to transact new world assets.
Developments like CME and CBOE, that list futures contracts on Bitcoin, and traditional asset managers working to bring Bitcoin ETFs to investors (most recently Van Eck) don’t show any signs of slowing down, but they are still trying to shape the future of digital assets through a decades-old lens. This is all about to change.
Centralized Versus Decentralized
Prior to the past decade, all exchanges were mostly centralized and largely operated out of one physical location. Today, trading floors are waning, replaced by technology that prioritizes speed and streamlines the user experience. Examples include the Shanghai Futures Exchange, CME Group, and the New York Stock Exchange. These venues have centralized servers and route all orders through one point of entry to the central limit order book.
Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken have adopted a similar model when looking to create an exchange for cryptocurrencies, likely because they wanted people to feel comfortable trading these assets. These centralized exchanges (CEX), now all electronic with servers located in a central location, allow for global trading provided that one passes the registration process and KYC/AML checks.
When considering trading on a CEX, it is important to remember that your coins are held (custodied) by the exchange; your private keys are not in your possession because all transactions are recorded on the central order book located on their servers. If the exchange is hacked (like what happened with Coincheck), shutdown by a government entity, or if it just goes offline, you could potentially lose all your coins. The only time the blockchain is involved is when you withdraw these coins from the exchange and resume physical ownership.
Given these pain points, many traders are beginning to look towards decentralized exchanges (DEX) including IDEX and CryptoBridge. DEXs are available to anyone connected to the Internet and, since they use a public distributed ledger to record all transactions and maintain custody, you retain control of all your private keys.
By having no single point of entry, DEXs are far more secure and less prone to smash and grab hacks that steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto assets. Your funds cannot be seized by regulators and they will not be lost even if the servers go offline. Security is dependent on your wallets and where you store your private keys.
This all sounds great, right? Well, there’s a catch. The main attraction to trading on a DEX is also it’s biggest drawback: all transactions are recorded on the blockchain. Because of this, the same fees paid (ETH GAS) for any other ETH transactions also need to be paid on the exchange — for every single trade.
Costs vary, but they can add up if you make several trades per day, and some traders end up chipping their profits away. Here is one way this could play out: 10 trades earn you 0.01 ETH, but you spent .009 ETH for ETH GAS on each one. Instead of earning .10 ETH as you would on a CEX, you’ve spent 90% of your profits on ETH GAS and are left with only .01 ETH. Far less than optimal, and this does not even account for rising GAS costs in the event public blockchains begin to hit Transaction Per Second (TPS) limits.
Hybrid Exchanges: The Best of Both Worlds
Gripes about this model have led to the creation of Hybrid Exchanges (HEX) such as EverMarkets (EMX) and Eidoo.
EMX is a global futures exchange that will offer futures contracts on both digital and real world assets, ranging from commodities to crypto indexes, with plans to eventually include fixed income and other derivatives products. Upon initiating a trade on EMX, the exchange plans to hold funds in escrow wallets controlled by the smart contracts stored on the blockchain. Under this mechanism, funds would then be delivered to the recipient based on the price of futures contracts at time of exiting a trade on the exchange. Ultimately, these smart contracts would also prevent unauthorized access to funds and should make it harder for hackers to steal them.
Also, since EMX employs batch auctions instead of a central limit order book, they can provide fair access to virtually anyone around the world. This is because in the EMX model, no matter how big or how fast one is, everyone pays the same price. This eliminates speed advantages high frequency traders normally enjoy and lets institutions and retail traders compete at the same level.
Eidoo has a similar structure that focuses on trading cryptocurrencies instead of futures contracts. The exchange holds funds in smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain that prevents access to them until the trades are settled. In order to alleviate blockchain flooding, Eidoo plans to use an off-chain order book and server to create a familiar front-end experience similar to a centralized order book while recording trades in batch transactions. Trades are only written to the blockchain when they are matched and executed.
Both of these venues are able to use code and smart contracts to replace a number of functions currently carried out by intermediaries (disintermediation). This leads to significantly cheaper and faster transactions with nearly real-time settlements.
The Path Forward
The advent of futures contracts completely changed traditional markets, and this transformation is now starting to be felt in the crypto markets as well. Being able to trade both cryptocurrencies and crypto futures on the blockchain is creating more trading and risk management opportunities with each passing day. .
The one major obstacle to rapid adoption, though, is the organization of a clearing house; the single most important part of any orderly futures market. Smart contracts can potentially handle a lot of the functions of a clearing house, and may eventually replace them. EMX and others are investigating bringing aspects of a clearing house onto the blockchain, but it’ll take more engineering and legal work to bring all the aspects of a traditional clearing house to the cryptocurrency space.
The real innovation, for now, is that a decentralized or hybrid exchange has a global footprint and can offer access to assets previously restricted to specific markets or regions. Looking to trade West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures from Asia and Hang Seng Index futures from Europe, from one app with all the efficiency benefits of cross-margining? There’s a HEX for that. The engineering, regulatory and legal work enabling these innovations has the potential to be truly revolutionary.
Conclusion
Financial exchanges have played and will continue to play a vital role in the global economy, and as technological walls continue to crumble and regulations are updated in-response, trading venues will need to keep innovating to stay ahead of the curve. All global traders stand to benefit from the access, efficiency, and fairness that these next-generation exchanges have the opportunity to provide. For now, CEXs and DEXs will fight to keep their market position; but HEXs appear best positioned to provide fair, universal market access with lower costs and faster settlement times.
About the author:
Kirill Shilov — Founder of Geekforge.io and Howtotoken.com. Interviewing the top 10,000 worldwide experts who reveal the biggest issues on the way to technological singularity. Join my #10kqachallenge: GeekForge Formula. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/futures-contracts-and-the-future-of-exchanges-how-new-technology-creates-new-opportunities-b143ef6c0c7b | ['Kirill Shilov'] | 2019-01-17 10:03:40.705000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Software Development', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
So you want to hide your API keys securely? | Frequently when working with APIs, you’re going to be provided with a unique token or key that allows you to access the data provided by that API endpoint. Sometimes, to access this endpoint you will also need to provide your credit card information. This makes the need for hiding your token or key even more important, if you upload that key to your GitHub a bad actor can find it, access it and use it to run up your bill. We want to prevent that from happening at all costs, so we should invest in a bit of security.
We are going to create a .env file and add it to our .gitignore file so it’s never tracked in git.
In our .env we will declare and customize our environment variables. This is where we will place our API keys and tokens. See the example below, think of the environment variable as a key value pair, your key will be an alias that you will use throughout your code to securely reference the value of your token.
To access our keys we will need to install the dotenv module from npm, this module tells the server to load anything that’s in a .env file to an environment variable.
At the topmost file of your application most likely your index.js where you initialize express you’re going to want to require the dotenv module.
Once that’s done you can now access any tokens or keys that you’ve placed in your .env file through process.env .
After much research, I found that the most secure way to make your request to the API endpoint you want to use is from your own server routes. This can be done by making an Axios HTTP request inside your route. Once you’ve got the skeleton of your route set up create variables to hold your keys.
Then you want to configure your request to include the key, the url, and any additional requirements (the host, params, querys, etc.)
Then you can test your routes in your browser or using postman.
Once you’ve confirmed that your request is successful, you can access that data on your client side with an Axios request to your newly created express route from your redux store, react component, etc. Use that data to make your page responsive, dynamic, interactive, whatever you wish.
When I was ready to deploy my app I used Heroku. Heroku has a feature called config vars that allows you to store your environment variables securely to move your app from development to production. Copy your key value pairs from your .env file to the config vars section of your settings. | https://medium.com/@jaznycdev/so-you-want-to-hide-your-api-keys-securely-e38eabb9ce54 | ['Jasmine Hatcher'] | 2020-12-17 22:42:34.154000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Security', 'API', 'Axios', 'Expressjs'] |
What 4 Years Of Programming Taught Me About Writing Typed JavaScript | What 4 Years Of Programming Taught Me About Writing Typed JavaScript
Untyped JavaScript, TypeScript, Flow, and PropTypes: Which one should you use?
Photo by Kevin Canlas on Unsplash
Types of types
Mostly, statically typed languages are criticized for restricting developers. On the other hand, they’re loved for bringing early information about errors, documenting components (such as modules, methods, etc.), and now other more advanced functionalities such as auto-completion.
A preliminary study from 2009¹ on untyped languages gives us some reference on exactly those pros and cons. Today, another type of language is also widely used: dynamically typed languages.
A dynamically typed language is different from its counterpart by bringing types but at runtime. This way, you can have far more freedom than strongly typed languages while keeping their advantages.
From our list, we have a single dynamically typed language: TypeScript. And that’s not completely exact, TS could also be called a soft typed language, that is between a dynamically and statically typed language. As this is not today’s subject, curious readers can have a look at the following article:
Why am I saying there is only one? Of course, JavaScript is considered untyped (or weakly typed), while PropTypes is a package allowing type-checking at runtime.
Flow is … neither. In practice, it looks a lot like TypeScript, and both are often compared. Inside your IDE and CLI, they are similar but their engines differ: TypeScript is a language while Flow is called a “static type checker”.
In Flow, you write “annotations” to set types. At compile time, those annotations must be removed, which creates JavaScript files without any superset.
It has been an argument in favor of Flow: performance. Both solutions have almost the same functionalities, but Flow removes any overhead that TypeScript has, once compiled.
My experience
I started my career in the JavaScript & front-end world in 2016 with Angular2 (and TypeScript).
Before this front-end project, I mainly worked on C#, Java, and a bit of Vanilla JavaScript. I hated it. To me, vanilla JavaScript had no structure, type, object-oriented concepts, it was HELL.
With more experience, practice with Angular2 (shipped with TypeScript) and then React, I almost started to enjoy it. That’s when I seriously considered a way to type JavaScript: I used TypeScript for a short time (which I didn’t master at the time) but I was back to untyped JavaScript with React.
React with untyped JavaScript was working not-so-bad but I felt like a piece was missing:
After a few weeks on a React project, code could easily get messy and difficult to understand, even more for newcomers.
We needed a lot of time to read a piece of code.
The number of errors after build was too high.
Among the practices needed to avoid these problems, my experience told me typed JavaScript was the top priority. After some research: here I was, looking at TypeScript, Flow, and PropTypes.
PropsTypes allowed me to type check my props but that was not enough. What about types outside of my React components? Can I validate that my app is type-safe as part of my CI pipeline? Can I validate it as a commit hook?
Well, You can find some ways to validate types during your tests² and use it outside of component³ but PropTypes was not designed with that in mind. It was intended to give you information in real-time (at runtime).
As I was not convinced by PropTypes, I was left with two choices: TypeScript and Flow. Functionality-wise they looked the same, with some good point on Flow side:
No overhead meant better performance.
Backed by Facebook, as well as React.
Those were enough to make a difference and that’s why I started using Flow with React.
Flow
Around 2 years. That’s the time I’ve been using Flow and only Flow. It worked with React / React Native like a charm, boosted our team productivity, was a great tool as part of our CI pipeline, and generally helped us deliver.
And then, we hit a wall. Once our projects started getting bigger, flow server struggled to start, was getting slower and slower. At some point we were simply unable to run it, our CI running time and its cost skyrocketed.
Unfortunately, at the same time, I started getting into other projects. Among them: an embedded project with Arduino using johnny-five⁴. That’s when I realized the second weakness of Flow: its community support.
That’s how typing systems in JavaScript works: you write your module with one solution and write an independent type definition for the other. TypeScript had a lot of support, I think that even today, the number of libraries without support that I used is less than 10.
Flow was different: during the time I used it in the React ecosystem, there were a few libraries without support but I could still work without it. Outside of this ecosystem, support was a mess, I was unable to find even one library working with Flow. I found solutions to transform TypeScript definitions to Flow but in the end, it didn’t work.
At some point, I wondered if I would really have to use TypeScript, even for React / RN projects. How inconsistent is that: using a technology backed by a company such as Facebook, and replacing its typing system with one from Microsoft? Moreover, support for TypeScript in React must be a mess, right?
TypeScript
I (re)discovered a whole new world.
After, getting back to TypeScript on side projects with Johnny-Five or React, I couldn’t believe how I loved it.
Not only my performance and library support problems disappeared, but I got to love its syntax. Since 2016 and a lot of updates, I could not find anything to reproach TypeScript for.
React / React Native support was perfect, with the whole ecosystem such as eslint with prettier, jest, etc.
My next move was simple: As I previously wrote templates/boilerplates for my team using Flow, they were quickly replaced with the equivalent in TypeScript. Since then, we’ve only been using TypeScript.
Flow was great for a long time, its performance and support problems got the best of him while TypeScript later evolved to be amazing: my choice was simple.
Conclusion
If you were to ask me what to chose between untyped JavaScript, PropTypes, Flow, and TypeScript for your project: I would tell you the following:
Untyped JavaScript can be a good choice if you work on a project for less than a week, throw it after, and don’t wish to learn any type solution.
PropTypes is a great tool if, for any reason, you cannot use Flow or TypeScript but is not enough for a big project.
Flow was great, since then I did not try it again, but would not bet on it.
TypeScript is a great solution, in my own opinion the best out there and required for any JavaScript project with high stakes.
Regarding using a typing library I experienced some objections, that I would like to answer here.
Loss of performance: today’s solutions are great and the infinitely small loss of performance you could sustain would be balanced by the structure that typed code brings.
Lack of knowledge in TypeScript / Flow: if your project has high stakes and you don’t want to use typed JavaScript because your developers don’t know it, the project is bound to fail. Change your team or train them, that’s the only way.
Loss of time: I’ll quote Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship⁵ from Robert C. Martin⁶: “Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading vs. writing is well over 10:1.” If one thing, typed JavaScript will help you read code, thus increasing your productivity rather than decreasing it.
If you have a different opinion about typed JavaScript or experience with Flow, feel free to contact me so I can link yours.
Thanks for reading.
TL;DR
TypeScript. | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/what-4-years-of-programming-taught-me-about-writing-typed-javascript-2bac38b45f79 | ['Teddy Morin'] | 2020-12-04 17:41:19.730000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software Development', 'JavaScript', 'Typescript', 'React'] |
No snowmen in Islam? | It snows in norther Saudi Arabia and as such, people decided they wanted to build snow camels in a tribute to the local culture. One citizen in the Province of Tarif used his creativity to create a camel with colors of local teams. Another guy decided to make a traditional ghitra and agal to cover the head of the snowman he created. The problem is that a religious scholar just said that building snowmen or snow creatures was not acceptable in Islam.
This fatwa by Mohammad Saleh Al Minjed believes that building snowmen or any replica of an animal, even for fun, is unacceptable. He believes that only lifeless things and inanimate objects can be imitated. The fatwa was circulated on social networks which resulted in a wide debate among Gulf nationals. People on the one side believe it is a weird imitation of Westerners, while others think a fatwa on the subject is ridiculous. | https://medium.com/ramel-media/no-snowmen-in-islam-6501717990a5 | ['Afeef Nessouli'] | 2016-08-26 20:46:40.506000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Saudi Arabia', 'Culture', 'Law', 'Religion'] |
NEM Regional Queensland Wrap Up | It seems like years have passed since NEM was first introduced to Regional Queensland but it was just over 6 months ago. It all started with the NEM ANZ partnership with TravelbyBit and the Town of Agnes Water — 1770 to launch Australia’s first crypto town. Visits by the likes of BBC Travel, CoinSpice.io, The Crypto Lark and everyday crypto travellers has kept NEM at the forefront of global media watching the growth of cryptocurrency adoption in Australia. Today NEM is synonymous with Central Queensland culminating with the Gladstone Region ICT Network and Startup Gladstone joining the NEM ANZ Ecosystem in December 2018.
It has been a busy year for Queensland as we take a look back at some of the major events that have happened which include: | https://medium.com/nem-anz/nem-regional-queensland-wrap-up-161f9bb26352 | ['Nem Australia', 'New Zealand', 'Official Editor'] | 2018-12-21 00:58:56.274000+00:00 | ['Spotlight', 'Nem', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
Getting Java and Jenkins Working on Linux on Mainframe | In a previous story, we have learned about Linux on IBM's mainframe (System z) and how you can get free access to an IBM LinuxONE machine on real mainframe hardware.
This story is about using Java on such a machine so we can get Java applications such as Jenkins running well on this system.
Installing Java on LinuxONE
Let’s try if there is Java already installed:
[linux1@plape ~]$ java
-bash: java: command not found
No, it is not. IBM recommends using Java builds from https://adoptopenjdk.net/. It is a project that IBM sponsors and IBM provides commercial support for these Java runtimes at https://www.ibm.com/cloud/support-for-runtimes.
When you open https://adoptopenjdk.net/, you need to click on the Other platform button and choose the s390x architecture.
Available JVM versions and types
What type of JVM should you choose? HotSpot or OpenJ9? IBM invests in the Eclipse OpenJ9 project and its benefits are described at https://developer.ibm.com/blogs/openjdk-with-eclipse-openj9-no-worries-just-improvements/.
When you download the HotSpot version for s390x it runs only in interpreted mode, so the OpenJ9 is a clear choice. Let’s install it!
Copy the link at the AdoptOpenJDK.net web page and download the package using curl:
Unpack it:
tar -xf OpenJDK8U-jdk_s390x_linux_openj9_8u242b08_openj9-0.18.1.tar.gz
It creates a new directory jdk8u242-b08 .
Move it to the /opt:
sudo mv jdk8u242-b08 /opt/
sudo chmod -R a+r /opt/jdk8u242-b08
Add it to the path:
export PATH=/opt/jdk8u242-b08/bin:$PATH
And check if it works:
[linux1@plape ~]$ java -version
openjdk version "1.8.0_242"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_242-b08)
Eclipse OpenJ9 VM (build openj9-0.18.1, JRE 1.8.0 Linux s390x-64-Bit Compressed References 20200122_505 (JIT enabled, AOT enabled)
OpenJ9 - 51a5857d2
OMR - 7a1b0239a
JCL - 8cf8a30581 based on jdk8u242-b08)
Benchmarks
We will use the Renaissance Suite (https://renaissance.dev) to have some understanding of the performance of this system. Renaissance is a suite of JVM benchmarks. We will use only one: finagle-http.
Let’s download the .jar file:
And run the tests:
java -jar renaissance-gpl-0.10.0.jar finagle-http --csv jdk8u242-b08-openj9.csv
The average time all tests (except for the one) is 1613 ms. Is it good or not? The result on my Mac with 2.3 GHz Intel Core i9 was 11357 ms. This makes this LinuxONE system quite a decent system for Java!
The HotSpot JVM for s390x runs in interpreted mode and it makes it about 50x slower than OpenJ9 in this benchmark.
The package java-1.8.0-openjdk.s390x : OpenJDK Runtime Environment 8 that you can install using the RedHat package manager installs the slower HotSpot JVM. It is better to install the OpenJ9 JVM using the steps above.
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source automation server, Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.
When paired with Zowe CLI it can be used to automate tasks even on z/OS.
We will follow the steps described in Installing Jenkins on Red Hat distributions.
Add the Jenkins repository to the yum repos, and install Jenkins from here.
sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jenkins.repo http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins.repo sudo rpm --import https://jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins-ci.org.key sudo yum install jenkins
The Jenkins package does not know where you Java is so you need to modify the Jenkins configuration parameters:
sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/jenkins
Add the path to the java executable to the JENKINS_JAVA_CMD parameter:
## Type: string
## Default: ""
## ServiceRestart: jenkins
#
# Java executable to run Jenkins
# When left empty, we'll try to find the suitable Java.
#
JENKINS_JAVA_CMD="/opt/jdk8u242-b08/bin/java"
Next step is to open port 8080 at the firewall:
sudo su firewall-cmd --permanent --new-service=jenkins firewall-cmd --permanent --service=jenkins --set-short="Jenkins Service Ports" firewall-cmd --permanent --service=jenkins --set-description="Jenkins service firewalld port exceptions" firewall-cmd --permanent --service=jenkins --add-port=8080/tcp firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=jenkins firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=http --permanent firewall-cmd --reload exit
You need to install another package to make possible for Jenkins to start:
sudo yum install fontconfig
Then you can start the Jenkins service:
sudo service jenkins restart
Starting jenkins (via systemctl): [ OK ]
Then you can open the URL: http://your-linux-one-ip-address:8080/ and complete the Jenkins installation.
Initial Jenkins web page to complete the installation
If you want to learn more about Jenkins installation, see this documentation: https://jenkins.io/doc/book/installing/#setup-wizard.
Summary
We have learned what is a good JVM for Linux on mainframe and have installed Jenkins to the LinuxONE system.
You can automate a lot of things with Jenkins. If you are interested in learning how you can automate processes on z/OS from another platform, learn about Zowe CLI.
Zowe CLI is using Node.js and we will cover how to get Node.js installed on the mainframe, both Linux and z/OS, in the future! | https://levelup.gitconnected.com/getting-java-and-jenkins-working-on-linux-on-mainframe-d2a8736f2469 | ['Petr Plavjaník'] | 2020-02-07 17:21:38.088000+00:00 | ['Jenkins', 'Linux', 'Mainframe', 'Zowe', 'Java'] |
Contribute Your Dark Side to The LighterSide | Contribute Your Dark Side to The LighterSide
Do’s and donuts for submitting a piece to the LighterSide
This is going to be short and it’s going to be to the point. Yes, you guessed it, a listicle of Submission Rules. Break them and thou shalt not pass begin. If you’re wondering why this piece appears here rather than in the Publication, ask Medium or read this by way of explanation.
Keep it cleanish. We understand sometimes potty humour is called for, but there’s a thin line. Try not to cross it, dangle a toe over it or try to peer over the top. In short, steer clear of the line. Keep it tidyish. No messy formatting, links or excessive ‘bigging it up’ of your writing prowess or your wife’s Avon catalogue. We don’t mind a little shameless trumpet blowing in the footer if it’s kept to a minimum of twelve pages. Check your spilling. Nothing annoys us more than incorrectly spilt words. Send us a piece littered with misspilt words and you will instantly and unceremoniously be excommunicated. Any topic, and we do mean any topic that you feel funny about is fine with us. Nothing is taboo. It doesn’t mean we’ll accept the piece, but we will read it, possibly laugh, and then get back to you. Don’t leave your keyboard. We are now also accepting less funny pieces, bordering on doom and gloom on the topics you can see displayed in the menu above. Don’t send us anything off topic. We will reply with an email virus. Don’t piss off the neighbours. Personally we couldn’t give a hoot, but Medium is kind of fussy about this. Anything construed to cause more than normal levels of offence (good luck figuring that one out) will be passed to Grinch, our resident pooch, binned and then set ablaze. Literally, it’s how we recycle. It’s a Filipino thing. We won’t edit or fiddle with your scribbling. You own it, lock stock and barrel and to be blunt, we’re not sure anyone would want to plagiarise it anyway. Your tags are a different story and we ask that you only select four before submitting a piece. We will add the other one if we feel there is scope and after consulting with you. We don’t require that all your submissions be virginal. We do accept previously published work, just be clear about where it was published and that you are in fact legal owner of said materials. Transcripts from SNL are not acceptable. Pictures are great. Big bright eye catching ones. If we think you’re good at writing but suck at picking images, we may suggest an alternative. If you don’t like our suggestion then you are free to take what was probably a below par piece anyway and try and get it published elsewhere. Good luck with that. This publication is about humour. It is not a platform for vertically challenged individuals, not radical leftist propaganda or hobbits trying to raise awareness for foot epilators. Okay, maybe the hobbits have a shot. If it’s not funny, it’s not getting published unless of course we absolutely love it. Send us an email with a link to your draft on Medium. Please don’t send us any additional info, just that. The piece will tell its own tale and we’ll get in touch as soon as we’re sober. For near sighted individuals that cannot locate the little envelope, the email address is [email protected] Now I know why Moses stopped at ten, this is knackering. I’m sure you still have questions. Hell, we all do.
Happy writing and remember to smile. Somewhere in your office or home or bedroom, a camera is watching. We know, we’ve seen the streams.
Regards from Rob and Duncan at the LighterSide. | https://medium.com/lighterside/contribute-your-dark-side-to-the-lightside-68899b1aa8e4 | ['Robert Turner'] | 2020-01-07 11:33:59.374000+00:00 | ['Submission', 'Lighterside', 'Rules', 'Submission Guidelines'] |
Bitcoin and pollution — the definitive answer | Someone is wrong on the internet (source)
The problem
Bitcoins are created out of thin air from a computing process called “mining”, a term inspired by how precious metals are extracted from Earth’s crust. In reality, this “mining” is a computationally intensive task with an artificial level of difficulty, required to reach consensus on which “block” in the blockchain gets validated next (on average every 10 minutes). It’s also called Proof-of-Work.
The same computing process also validates ~4 transactions per second, or ~300,000 per day, or ~110M transactions per year (source).
This network of Bitcoin nodes currently consumes ~77 TWh per year (source). This leads to many (mostly negative) comments about Bitcoin’s environmental footprint, such as these:
Bitcoin consumes annually the electricity output of a small country. (source)
Most bitcoin mining is using energy at the source that was uneconomical to use for other purposes, because of the loss experienced in transporting the energy to economic centers. (source)
(On the news of Tesla’s purchase of US$1.5B worth of bitcoins) Legitimizing Bitcoin more than offsets the environmental benefits of electric vehicles. (source)
Bitcoin uses as much electricity as Chile and a single transaction has the same carbon footprint as ~700,000 Visa transactions. (source)
So, what’s going on?
Does Bitcoin pollute?
Yes, Bitcoin does pollute. The Bitcoin network consumes as much electric energy as Chile (but represents only a fraction of other pollutants, so it does NOT “pollute as much as Chile”).
China ranks #1 in the world at 7,225 TWh/year.
The United States consumes ~3,989 TWh of electricity per year.
My home country, Italy, is at 297 TWh/year.
Chile? 75 TWh/year, slightly less than the Bitcoin network. (source)
Yes but… Is that mostly renewable energy?
Hard to say, but… Not really. Here’s why.
Most Bitcoin mining is done in China, with equipment that runs 24/7 (you want to amortize the high capital costs of buying ASICs to mine bitcoins).
The only renewable energy that could also run 24/7 is hydroelectric — and that’s not even always true. Otherwise, your next best option for cheap energy in China is… Coal, which is particularly bad for the environment.
Indeed there are regions in China where there’s abundance of hydroelectric power, and I’d assume that most Bitcoin mining operations try to be there; but in essence only 39% of global Bitcoin mining uses renewables (source), and therefore, 61% of Bitcoin mining does NOT use renewable energy.
Is the VISA network way more efficient than Bitcoin?
One Bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as 700,000 transactions on the VISA or Mastercard network. That’s quite correct.
But it would be much more fair to compare the amount of money settled (source), in which case:
VISA handles US$30B/day
Mastercard handles US$11B/day
Bitcoin handles US$10B/day
So, no, VISA is not more efficient than Bitcoin. VISA is simply a completely different thing. In fact…
Bitcoin is still mostly a store of value
Bitcoin is not used to buy a cappuccino for the equivalent of $4. It is NOT used to buy stuff. At all. Bitcoin is mostly used as a store of value (and I’d add: mostly for speculative reasons, at least until now).
We know the energy required to run Bitcoin’s network: 77 TWh/year. The average cost paid by miners is US$0.046/kWh, which means that the Bitcoin network costs US$3.5B per year on energy alone (source). 61% of it is powered by non-renewable energy, equal to 47 TWh/year, or ~US$2B.
Currently, 328,500 BTC are mined per year, with an existing total supply of ~18,623,000 (source). At the current price (Feb 10th, 2021) of $46,000 per bitcoin, ~US$15B worth of bitcoin are mined per year.
It is much better, in my view, to compare Bitcoin to another store of value that the world is already using: Gold.
Bitcoin vs Gold in terms of pollution
AISC (median all-in sustaining costs) mining gold cost is at US$923 per ounce. For us in civilized, modern, 21st century countries where the SI is in use, that means US$923 per 28.35 grams, or US$32,557 per kilogram. You can sell a kilogram of gold for ~US$58,000. Most of the gold mined is used as a store of value. A small fraction of it has real use (jewelry, electronics, etc).
There are ~190,000 tons of gold stored somewhere in the world. Each year, ~3,000 tons of gold are mined (source).
The cost of mining gold each year is therefore US$97.6B.
The cost of storing gold is much harder to calculate; I’m going to use a simple approximation here, and say that it equates to 10% of its mining costs.
It’s pretty clear by now that, looking just at costs (without getting into the detail of the actual type of pollution), mining gold is ~50 times more expensive than mining bitcoins AND running the bitcoin network. Bitcoin pollutes far, far less than gold.
mining gold is ~50 times more expensive than mining bitcoins
It’s even harder to compare the type of pollution created by mining gold versus mining bitcoin. What’s easy to do is to simply state that mining gold is MUCH WORSE than mining bitcoins. Mining gold is an environmental disaster. Poisoned waters, solid waste, endangered communities, and so on.
Producing gold for one wedding ring alone generates 20 tons of waste.
Bitcoin pollutes far, far less than gold.
If we consider the hypothesis that Bitcoin (current market cap: ~US$800B) might one day replace Gold (current market cap: ~US$10,600B — source) as store of value, the environmental effect of this switch would be a significant reduction in total pollution.
The end of pollution: From Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS)
Last, but not least, it is reasonable to expect that the Bitcoin network will manage to transition to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, within at most a few years.
For the non-nerds reading this, it means that instead of requiring complicated calculations to prove that a certain block in the blockchain is confirmed (and therefore, consuming a lot of energy), you need to “stake” your existing assets, therefore consuming much less energy compared to the current “Proof-of-Work” consensus mechanism.
Conclusions
Next time you read of hear someone complaining about Bitcoin’s pollution, point them to this blog post. If they have a wedding ring, tell them what that means for the environment.
But wait, there’s more.
I hope that in a few years Bitcoin will have fully replaced gold as the global reserve. I hope that Gold will fall in value, so much that mining gold becomes anti-economical. The result will be a cleaner, greener world, and a much more flexible store of value.
Hope, unfortunately, is almost always never enough. This innocent, naïve dream of Bitcoin replacing Gold needs to face the reality of our complex financial system, our complex global politics, and so on.
This is still a remote hypothesis, for many reasons. I would give it a <10% chance of happening by the end of year 2030 (~10 years from now).
And let’s not pretend that Bitcoin HODLers are tree huggers; as I wrote earlier in this post, the vast majority of Bitcoin transactions are simply speculation.
We are driven by greed, not by green.
But still, we can be hopeful: our planet would be really lucky if, for once, green is an unintended consequence of our true nature.
Final note: I explicitly decided NOT to talk about the environmental impact of having a global currency like the US dollar. It’s a huge topic and I don’t feel prepared to dissect it properly. | https://medium.com/@simon/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitive-answer-a010b0826f2a | ['Simone Brunozzi'] | 2021-02-11 12:10:37.797000+00:00 | ['Gold', 'Bitcoin', 'Crypto'] |
↗Up There↗ | I want to be up there.
But I don’t want to be down here. I want to be up there. Up there, there where I want to be.
But I don’t want to be down, down where I am. I want to be up there. There up where I want.
But down here want I don’t—down here where I am. I want to be up there, there where up I want.
But not here where I am: down. Not here, no. I want to be up there. Up! There is where.
But not here. Not where I am. I want to be up there. To be, to be where I want.
But not here, not down, not down where I am. I want to be up there. I do, I do want to be.
But not where down I am. Not here I don’t. I do want to be up there. I do, I really do.
But not here, not down here. Here I don’t. I do want to be, and I do want up, and there.
But down I don’t. Not down. Not here. I want to be up there. I want—I know I want.
But here? No, no, no! Not here I don’t. I want to be up there. Up is where I want.
But how can I be up there, if down is not where I am? | https://medium.com/cadernos-da-teimosia/up-there-a3793c12555d | ['Henrique Capeleiro Maia'] | 2017-02-18 03:20:35.226000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Not Where I Am', 'Poesia'] |
Lessons and Recollections Inspired by The Expendables | I was about 6, and my sister was 8 when my mama took us to a mining town to live. My stepfather was a miner, and my mama ran a small shop selling groceries, clothes, jewelry, and other knick-knacks to the other miners’ wives. I remember the village being bone-dry, a tiny community in the middle of nowhere where people spoke a funny-sounding language totally different from what I had first spoken. However, you quickly acquire the dialect when you’re at that age; you naturally become fluent in no time. I remember my sister being my mama’s translator on the rare trips to the municipality center about two hours away from us.
There wasn’t much in the town. There were no parks, malls, movie theaters, or playgrounds. There were no big buildings aside from the bunkhouse where the unmarried miners were housed. Including my mama’s, there were exactly four stores—two of those sold cooked food and alcoholic beverages for the drink-loving miners. On the weekends, those places were full of merry men.
Later in the day or early in the morning, a few of them could be found sleeping under a tree or at the side of the road. On weekdays it was quiet as if the weekend merriment and shenanigans didn’t occur.
I was seven when my mama decided I had to go to school. She thought I was one of those special kids because I rarely spoke. I guess she wanted me to have a normal childhood with my sister and other kids there. And yet, the school was far. My sister, our friends, and I had to walk on unpaved, dusty roads about twenty-five kilometers every day to get to our classes.
Although I was allergic to textbooks and was rarely in class, I recall enjoying those long and yet exciting excursions.
We had so much fun taking the back roads and scaring ourselves with tales of ghosts or murder and mayhem in the village. We would sometimes stop by a cool spot to eat snacks or leftovers from our packed lunches. We were happy gallivanting in the barren hills, the murky rivers, or the lush woods along the way. I never heard anyone in the group complaining about the distance and the lack of transportation.
On non-school days, we were in the forest climbing trees looking for wild berries and passion fruit or running around chasing birds and dragonflies. We also liked climbing up rocky hills to get to the tailings pond and dam, where we would throw rocks to see who could do it the farthest.
We didn’t care about the danger signs all over those places. There was nobody to send us away. Those climbs usually ended in rivers where we swam and messed around in the water until our skins turned purple and wrinkly.
We didn’t fear snakes or leeches, even though the grown-ups warned us of huge pythons and cobras living in the area. We often saw boa constrictors on the way to school. If they weren’t lifeless from being run over by loading-trucks, they were just quietly slithering away.
Sometimes we set out to earn a few dimes. Armed with tweezers, we’d storm the bunkhouse to pluck gray hair from older people’s heads. One of my first friends was a grandpa who had stacks of Free Press and Readers’ Digest in his room. I couldn’t read until I was 10, and even if I could then, I wouldn’t be able to comprehend politics or sociology. Nevertheless, I liked looking at pictures.
While scanning the pages of those magazines, he was patient enough to introduce Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Rwandan Genocide, Martial Law, The Berlin Wall, The Taliban, Dolly the Sheep, Nelson Mandela, and other famous figures and events in the world during those years.
At night time, when the moon shone brightly, illuminating the neighborhood, we’d go out and play hide and seek, Chinese garter, or tag you’re it. Bored from playing those games, we’d hunt down those green slimy, croaking animals. I wonder now why tracking down bullfrogs and imitating their sound was a source of entertainment.
If there was a funeral, my sister and I could be seen selling boiled eggs, cigarettes, mints, or cut-up fruit to the men playing cards and the women singing gospel hymns to comfort the grieving family. I was younger, so I only had to carry some of the merchandise while my older sister took care of the bills and change.
Our pals were there too, running around and getting pinched by their moms or scolded by their dads or other funeral-goers. The kids used to challenge each other’s courage by touching the dead person’s face. The winner could gloat for days. My sister always won, and I was always disinterested in corpses. Ironically, we had some of the most fun moments at times of grief. | https://medium.com/free-thinkr/lessons-and-recollections-inspired-by-the-expendables-6475592b9cec | ['Jasmin El-I'] | 2020-12-05 16:37:22.349000+00:00 | ['Childhood', 'Action Movies', 'The Expendables', 'Childhood Memories', 'Thanksgiving'] |
EDA | Police Incidents in Minneapolis | Mapping Incidents with Leaflet
If you haven’t used leaflet , I strongly suggest trying it on your project! One of the amazing features that leaflet offer is to build an interactive map. As you may notice from the below picture, just a few lines of codes will create the map that automatically aggregates the data for you to check at a different level.
# Plot on map by leaflet
incident_selected %>% leaflet() %>%
addProviderTiles(providers$Stamen.TonerLite) %>%
addMarkers(label = incident_selected$description,
clusterOptions = markerClusterOptions(),
lng = incident_selected$centerLong, lat = incident_selected$centerLat,
popup = paste("<b>","Neighborhood:","</b>",
incident_selected$neighborhood,"<br>",
"<b>","Address:","</b>",
incident_selected$publicaddress,"<br>",
"<b>","Time:","</b>",
incident_selected$reportedDateTime)) %>%
addMiniMap(toggleDisplay = TRUE,tiles = providers$Stamen.TonerLite)
CLICK HERE to view the interactive map from Rpub
CLICK HERE to view the interactive map from Rpub
The Trend of Police Incidents (2020~)
Some of you might remember the incident that occurred in May 2020. Yes. It was the murder of Goerge Floyd that provoked the nationwide demonstration and memorial ceremony. Initially, the protest was conducted in a peaceful manner but later turned into vandalism.
Let’s see what impact that the incident brought in terms of the number of police incidents.
# Summarise by date and plot summarised_incident_selected <- incident_selected %>%
filter(reportedDate != "2021/05") %>%
group_by(reportedDate) %>%
summarise(num_case = n()) # Plot using ggplot ggplot(summarised_incident_selected, aes(reportedDate, num_case, group=1))+
geom_col(fill='red')+expand_limits(y = 0)+ theme_tufte()+
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 60, hjust = 1, vjust = 0.5))+
xlab("") + ylab("")+
annotate("point", x = '2020/05', y = 2000, colour = "blue", size=3,shape=8) +
annotate("text", x = '2020/05', y = 2000, label = "Death of G.F", colour = "blue", vjust = -1)
The annotation shows the death of George Floyd in May 2020
Apparently, total police incidents surged after May 2020 until the end of the year
Top 10 Neighborhood with the Most Incidents
Well then, which part of Minneapolis has had the most police incidents? In other words, which neighborhood would be the most dangerous places to visit?
top_10_neighbor <- incident_selected %>%
group_by(neighborhood) %>%
count(sort=TRUE) %>% ungroup() %>%
top_n(10) %>% mutate(neighborhood = fct_reorder(neighborhood,n))
ggplot(top_10_neighbor, aes(n,neighborhood)) +
geom_point(size = 12) +
geom_segment(aes(xend = 30, yend = neighborhood), size = 2) +
geom_text(aes(label = round(n,1)), color = "white", size = 4) +
#scale_x_continuous("", expand = c(0,0), limits = c(30,90), position = "top") +
scale_color_gradientn(colors = palette) +
theme(axis.line.y = element_blank(),
axis.ticks.y = element_blank(),
axis.text = element_text(color="black"),
axis.title = element_blank(),
legend.position = "none") | https://towardsdatascience.com/police-incidents-trend-in-mn-76d8057703d0 | ['Brandon Park'] | 2021-07-09 12:12:38.735000+00:00 | ['Eda', 'Minneapolis', 'George Floyd', 'Carlson Msba'] |
Complicating Happiness | Complicating Happiness
The value of complicating emotional states
The World Happiness Report, Stefan Sagmeister’s works on the topic of happiness, creative consultancy Lippincott’s tips for ‘Designing Happiness’, and others have done work around how to make people happy. Experiences and states of mind like smiles, laughter, escape, choice, meditation, drugs, and surprise are typically used to quantitatively measure and induce happiness. Yet, these conceptions lack a kind of depth that could really get at some of the messier, more complex mechanisms that contribute to a person’s happiness.
The following snapshots are a few continued explorations of how we might understand the complexity behind an emotional state–for instance, happiness.
Happiness: Resilience in the Face of Disaster
Happiness: Cross-generational Coping
Happiness: Satire for Maintaining Skepticism
How might we find new ways to make sense of happiness in places we might not typically expect and make sense of it and how it’s meaningful?
Happiness: Resilience in the Face of Disaster
In Japan, the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster devastated Fukushima. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) reports, “Buried in the coverage of last year’s Great East Japan Earthquake is a success story of which the world should not lose sight, because it tells us much about how we manage risk in the twenty-first century. It is the story of how the Japanese people, through centuries of memory and shared experience, have built up their resilience to natural disasters. Indeed, as the sea reared up to ravage the country’s coast on March 11, 2011, more than 90% of the population in the affected areas had already fled to safety.” In analysis of the fourth World Happiness Report, Sewell Chan, international news editor for the New York Times notes, “trust and ‘social capital’ are so high in Japan that scholars found, to their surprise, that happiness actually increased in Fukushima, which was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, because an outpouring of generosity and cooperation contributed to the community’s resilience and rebuilding.” The Japanese government and residents worked to fight Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)’s cover-ups, mishandling of the crisis, and a difficult decision to stay where they’ve relocated or to move back to their hometown despite risks of exposure to radiation.
Happiness: Cross-generational Coping
Hip-hop is an American genre historically and deeply rooted in passion and resistance against socio-economic injustice and for struggles for freedom. But recently, old school hip-hop heads have been baffled by a new genre of hip-hop–Bubblegum Trap. Artists like D.R.A.M, Lil Yachty, and Kyle have taken hip-hop and black culture and have carved a new space for themselves. They make happy hip-hop.
D.R.A.M. and his dog, Idnit. Credit: “How hip-hop’s D.R.A.M. went from working at Best Buy to performing at Coachella,” Los Angeles Times
While most radio hosts and serious old schoolers are baffled, some horrified, by this phenomenon, there’s a logic to it once you take it seriously.
If we step back from Bubblegum Trap for a moment and look at the history of music, we see the expressions of jazz, blues, and hip hop in all its forms are directly linked to oppression and violence throughout American history. As James Baldwin puts it in The Fire Next Time, “This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged…Only people who have been ‘down the line,’ as the song puts it, know what this music is about… Ain’t we, ain’t we, going to make it all right? Well, if we don’t today, we will tomorrow night.”
If we think of this history and lineage in the same way we think of our families across generations we can start to make sense of this new kind of expression of freedom, optimism, and happiness. Within any family unit, parents and children painstakingly and endlessly toil in the face of adversity, illness, and emotional trauma passed down from generation to generation–all in the hopes that their children won’t inherit or have to experience the same struggle. While we all still live with socio-economic injustices, these new artists are symbolically expressing the concept of freedom and happiness in a new way.
Happiness: Satire for Maintaining Skepticism
Families and friends watch late-night talk shows to unwind from a long day. It’s a dose of laughter and news to end the evening. But there’s more to these shows than this. Vox’s Carlos Maza points out, “Comedians are playing a big part in how we talk about politics. If you look past the jokes and side gags, comedians are doing a really good job of covering Trump. Sometimes better than serious news networks.”
Sophia McClennen, Associate Director of School of International Affairs at Penn State tells us, “The news media feels like it needs to take it seriously in order to be taken seriously.” Many of the topics covered by late-night hosts remains serious, yet the sharp attitude of critique and satire helps us to stay skeptical of what we see and hear. | https://medium.com/matter-mind-studio/complicating-happiness-e9792e73c1c1 | ['Myriam D. Diatta'] | 2018-09-28 08:51:35.428000+00:00 | ['Research', 'Design Thinking', 'Hip Hop', 'Happiness', 'Design Process'] |
The Four Types of Writing | The Four Types of Writing
Each one serves its own purpose
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
There are four types of writing as an author. Expository, persuasive, narrative, and descriptive. Each piece of writing includes one or all of these.
Expository
Writing from an author to inform or teach the reader something. You will find this type of writing in articles like this one you are reading. The language and style are meant to explain something to the reader. For this article I am explaining the four types of writing.
Textbooks and how to articles will utilize expository in their wording. Even the recipes you use are a type of expository writing as the recipe tells you how to complete it. Newspapers are another example of this type of writing as the writer wants to inform the reader of the daily events taking place in their world.
Persuasive
Writing from an author to voice their opinion to persuade the reader. Persuasive pieces are most commonly found in speeches, scientific studies, medical journals and even political campaigns.
The term persuade means to convince someone else to agree with the argument set forth in the piece. Scientific studies and medical journals good concrete examples but this type of writing can be seen in advertisements, book reviews, editorials and brochures.
Narrative
Where an author tells a story, fact or fiction, to the reader. This type of writing is also called storytelling as it has a main character, there is a conflict the main character is workingout and an ending that resolves the conflict. With everything in the middle called the plot.
Fiction is considered narrative as it tells the story of the main character as they work through their conflict trying to find the resolution. Non fiction can be considered narrative as well because, even though the story is not made up, there is still a main character, conflict and plot.
Descriptive
A type of expository which uses visual descriptions to tell the reader a story. Usually includes scenery, emotions and actions in a way that will resonate with the reader, allowing them to visualize the story in their mind as they are reading. It’s primary purpose is to describe a person, place or thing.
This type of writing can be used in the other types of writings, as it pertains to painting a virtual picture for the reader. It is used in both fiction and non fiction. A good, clear attention is required to write in a way that interacts the five senses, sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.
Final thoughts
Storytelling, whether expository, persuasive, narrative or descriptive, is the formation of words written in a way to elicite excitement from the reader. All of these can be combined or used separately to convey a message. | https://medium.com/the-writers-bookcase/the-four-types-of-writing-8c3c0ffaef85 | ['Tammi Brownlee'] | 2019-12-12 20:28:07.038000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Productivity', 'Advice', 'Inspiration', 'Writing'] |
Gem | pixabay.com
The gem
is a gift
of energy.
The ruby,
the sapphire,
the diamond
reflect to us
what we could be
when have
the bravery
to mine them.
© Jacqueline Ann 2020 | https://medium.com/crescent-moon/gem-622317688272 | ['Jackie Ann'] | 2020-12-06 19:27:17.975000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Spirituality', 'Poetry', 'Spiritual Growth', 'Poems On Medium'] |
Why you should adapt onion architecture in your C# applications | Introduction
The Onion Architecture term was coined by Jeffrey Palermo in 2008. This architecture provides a better way to build applications for better testability, maintainability, and dependability on the infrastructures like databases and services. This architecture’s main aim is to address the challenges faced with 3-tier architecture or n-tier architecture and to provide a solution for common problems, like coupling and separation of concerns. There are two types of coupling — tight coupling and loose coupling.
Tight Coupling
When a class is dependent on a concrete dependency, it is said to be tightly coupled to that class. A tightly coupled object is dependent on another object; that means changing one object in a tightly coupled application, often requires changes to a number of other objects. It is not difficult when an application is small but in an enterprise-level application, it is too difficult to make the changes.
Loose Coupling
It means two objects are independent and an object can use another object without being dependent on it. It is a design goal that seeks to reduce the interdependencies among components of a system with the goal of reducing the risk that changes in one component will require changes in any other component.
The Onion Architecture
The idea of the Onion Architecture is to place the Domain and Services Layers at the center of your application. And externalize the Presentation and Infrastructure.
Onion Architecture Layers
This architecture relies heavily on the Dependency Inversion Principle. The UI communicates to business logic through interfaces. It has four main layers, as shown in figure 1.
Domain Layer Repository/Data Layer Service Layer Presentation/UI (Web/Unit Test) Layer
Figure 1
These layers are towards to center. The center part is the Domain entities that represent the business and behavior objects. These layers can vary but the domain entities layer is always part of the center. The other layer defines more behavior of an object. Let’s see each layer one by one.
Domain Layer
It is the center part of the architecture. It holds all application domain objects. If an application is developed with the ORM entity framework then this layer holds POCO classes (Code First) or Edmx (Database First) with entities. These domain entities don’t have any dependencies.
Repository Layer
The layer is intended to create an abstraction layer between the Domain entities layer and the Business Logic layer of an application. It is a data access pattern that prompts a more loosely coupled approach to data access. We create a generic repository, which queries the data source for the data, maps the data from the data source to a business entity, and persists changes in the business entity to the data source.
Service Layer
The layer holds interfaces which are used to communicate between the UI layer and repository layer. It holds business logic for an entity so it’s called the business logic layer as well.
UI Layer
It’s the most external layer. It could be the web application, Web API, or Unit Test project. This layer has an implementation of the Dependency Inversion Principle so that the application builds a loosely coupled application. It communicates to the internal layer via interfaces.
Advantages of Onion Architecture
There are several advantages of the Onion Architecture, as listed below.
It provides better maintainability as all the codes depend on layers or the center. It provides better testability as the unit test can be created for separate layers without an effect of other modules of the application. It develops a loosely coupled application as the outer layer of the application always communicates with the inner layer via interfaces. Any concrete implantation would be provided to the application at run time Domain entities are core and center part. It can have access to both the database and UI layers. The internal layers never depend on the external layer. The code that may have changed should be part of an external layer.
Why Onion Architecture
There are several traditional architectures, like 3-tier architecture and n-tier architecture, all having their own pros and cons. All these traditional architectures have some fundamental issues, such as — tight coupling and separation of concerns. The Model-View-Controller is the most commonly used web application architecture, these days. It solves the problem of separation of concern as there is a separation between UI, business logic, and data access logic. The View is used to design the user interface. The Model is used to pass the data between View and Controller on which the business logic performs any operations. The Controller is used to handle the web request by action methods and returns View accordingly. Hence, it solves the problem of separation of concern while the Controller is still used to database access logic. In essence, MVC solves the separation of concern issue but the tight coupling issue still remains.
On the other hand, Onion Architecture addresses both the separation of concern and tight coupling issues. The overall philosophy of the Onion Architecture is to keep the business logic, data access logic, and model in the middle of the application and push the dependencies as far outward as possible means all coupling towards to center.
Conclusion
Onion Architecture builds on the Ports & Adapters Architecture to add some internal organisation to the business logic of the application based on a few Domain Driven Design concepts. | https://medium.com/@benyusouf/why-you-should-adapt-onion-architecture-in-your-c-applications-f12c5283791f | ['Abdullahi Yusuf'] | 2020-12-13 01:11:33.626000+00:00 | ['Dot Net Framework', 'Mvc Frameworks', 'Onionarchitecture', 'C Sharp Programming'] |
(Closed) Expression of Interest: Flight Ops Team | Swoop Aero was founded to bring autonomous air transport to everyday life by revolutionising access to on-demand healthcare for everyone, everywhere.
To do this, we’ve brought together a team of eternally optimistic and resourceful doers to tackle these seemingly insurmountable problems and get it done.
We’ve worked hard over the last 12 months and successfully deployed the first inbound/ outbound airborne logistics service in the world, the first in Central Africa, raised venture capital to continue our rapid growth, were recognised as a joint winner of the New York Times Good Tech Awards 2018, and named as the AUVSI Humanitarian Excellence award winner for 2019.
We are looking for highly talented individuals for some once in a lifetime opportunities; you’ll love to be challenged, and have the strong the ability to lead and influence a team.
About the Role:
The Flight operations team are responsible for daily operations from a Swoop Aero hub. This includes checks and aircraft preparation, flight execution, recovery, and responsibility for knowledge transfer when working alongside international team members. The Ops team are the boots on the ground, everywhere we work.
You can also expect opportunities to work abroad in a South East Asian or African region, working with a local and Australian team to kick off flight operations and build local Swoop Aero capacity in the region for enduring operations. So far, we are operating in DRC and Vanuatu.
About you:
You love to be challenged, work quickly to solve complex problems, and have a strong attention to detail. You are comfortable being hands on in hot, humid and cold outdoor environments, and cooperating with diverse groups of people, including those with language barriers, to get the job done.
This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, so we have a few specific requirements:
Exposure to aviation, engineering or medical fields;
A relevant Bachelor’s degree/ diploma; and
Fluent in spoken and written English
The ideal candidate has a Remote Pilots Licence or Flight experience (RPL/PPL/CPL), and a STEM Degree.
Finally
At Swoop Aero, we are moving more than just medical supplies. We’re moving the needle on positive health outcomes, more efficient use of energy and a better world. We welcome people from all backgrounds who are seeking to have an impact, so come and join us and take this opportunity to leave your mark on the world.
The Process
If you fit the description, are passionate about changing people’s lives, and are willing to learn everything it takes to excel at this job, we’d love to hear from you.
Follow this link to submit an application | https://medium.com/@swoop_aero/expression-of-interest-flight-ops-team-e5ecc7b4210b | ['Swoop Aero'] | 2019-09-26 01:13:26.362000+00:00 | ['Drones', 'Startup', 'Jobs', 'Tech', 'Careers'] |
Wolfenstein Youngblood CD Key Serial Free Download | Here ends your search for Wolfenstein Youngblood CD Key Serial, because we are giving away thousands of Xbox One, PS4, Switch and Steam key to all our visitors. In order to download it, you have to navigate to the website referred here. You cannot get anything by reading this article alone. Because A to Z information is available only at the website. Remind you that, there are limited Wolfenstein youngblood CD Key Serial available, therefore make sure to download the code as soon as possible. We don’t need to tell you how much demand Wolfenstein Youngblood has. First, navigate to the beneath given website to download the game.
Download the Wolfenstein Youngblood CD Key Serial from https://bit.ly/2KZu502
We found that there are many people still wandering for Wolfenstein Youngblood skidrow crack on torrents. Never go behind that, because that will only result in a loss rather than gain. These cracks, PS4, Xbox ISO files listed in the torrents like the pirate bay is used by hackers for the hacking purpose only. Maybe that crack works, but you will be under the hacker control too. Why do you need to fall such trap when you can get the Wolfenstein Youngblood steam key from here. You can also download Wolfenstein youngblood switch key code from the blog which can be activated on Nintendo switch. A detailed tutorial on code key activation is given on the blog. Learn the instruction for activating the Wolfenstein youngblood easily on Xbox one,ps4, PC and Nintendo switch. If you have any questions to ask, feel free to message our team. | https://medium.com/@barryanair/wolfenstein-youngblood-cd-key-serial-free-download-bd72457521f3 | [] | 2019-08-22 17:23:54.659000+00:00 | ['Serial', 'Cd Key', 'Wolfenstein Youngblood', 'Free', 'Download'] |
Build the control center for your life with Noteplan 3 | Build the control center for your life with Noteplan 3
How to build a productivity system that is central to your life but still simple around this new version of Noteplan. Didier varlot Nov 23, 2020·6 min read
Who I am.
I am a freelance consultant, expert in theory of constraints, a methodology of continuous improvement and problem-solving. I am also a project manager with a long experience of large project recovery (people call me when things go wrong, and I help them get their project back on tracks) and an industrial quality adviser.
This means that I manage several projects for different clients daily in addition to my personal projects and try to fit my personal life inside the big picture. I manage at any moment about 25 projects, most of them are small and takes a few days and a few are long-term ones.
I cannot do all this scheduling and managing in my head, I need a system to support my activities.
This system must run and synchronize smoothly on all my devices: mac, iPhone and iPad.
My past relationship with productivity apps
As far as I remember, I was always searching for the system that will help me manage my activity. I used things 3, todoist, Omnifocus, asana, trello, reminders, good task, tick tick, 2do, To-do. I was taking a chance with all the new productivity apps that was released and I can put my hand on.
In addition, I used agenda, bear, Ulysses (I still use it to write articles) and scrivener (I stopped using it recently, I replaced it with Ulysses) for my note-taking activity.
The lockdown forced most of us to think about our organization, even if I was used to working from home for the last seven years.
Recently, I decided to simplify my digital life and rationalize it. I had to design a better productivity system for my activity.
My needs
I began by creating a list of mandatory criteria that my system must fulfill.
Simplicity. The system shall include as few apps as possible while still filling all the functionalities.
Journaling for keeping track of information and progress on the projects I follow.
Quick access to my information, so a search function is a must-have;
The use of keywords seems obvious to categorize the notes and help find them later.
I manage projects for clients and family, so I need to be able to refer to people.
I adopted recently the PARA method of organizing my data, so the app shall be compatible with this method for organizing information.
My information needs to be safe and perennial, so I must be sure that the format of my information will not become obsolete. This means that my information shall not be stored in a proprietary format. I need it stored in an “open” format and the obvious one is text files. I adopted markdown during the last year, so it was an obvious choice.
The format of storing the information should allow me to access from different apps if possible.
I was conscious that this was ambitious, but I didn’t want any more compromise to simplicity and reduced number of apps.
Search for the ultimate solution
I reviewed all the options that came to my mind and retained mainly some that I used before:
Things 3 is wonderful. It works well with spark email app. But it is not possible to reuse the notes outside it, and storing lots of comments on a project is tedious and difficult to consult or search.
Agenda is not supporting markdown and the notes are stored in a proprietary format. Therefore, it was a no-go. I want to store notes for projects but also for references, and Agenda is not designed for this. A note shall be assigned to a project so you have to create fake projects to attach the references to them.
And then I received the announcement of the beta test of Noteplan 3.
I used Noteplan 1 and Noteplan 2 in the past, and I was pleased with it, but I let some influencers on the web influence me (this is what they do best) and I convinced myself to test other apps.
I decided to give a new chance to Noteplan with the version 3.
The main objective was to get a task/project management app that gives me the flexibility to add notes to task and projects to register the progress.
Love at first sight
Well, in fact, not really, but nearly.
Adopting an application to be the control tower of your organization needs you to understand first what the philosophy underlying it is, and what will be your philosophy using it. An application is a framework and you need to be sure that your organization will fit inside it.
Noteplan 3 offers calendar notes (linked to a date) and non-calendar notes. It has the flexibility to link any note to other information (internal or external to Noteplan), and offer backlinks.
The first task was to figure out how to organize my information inside this framework.
First, I created a set of folders:
I am using the PARA (Project/Area/Resource/Archives) method of storing information. I created a folder for each one of these categories. Later I suppress the dedicated Archive folder to use the archive function.
In the project folder, I created one note for each project that I am working on.
I also created two subfolders: one for projects “on hold” and one for supporting documents.
I store in the supporting document the notes that are related to the projects (minutes of meeting, call reports, progress notes). Each of these notes is linked to the project note.
I organize the project’s main note as follows:
The title of the note is the name of the project with some emoji encoding some clue of whom the client is and the time frame of the project.
The first section of the project note is including some metadata about the project, links to other relevant notes and links to external information.
If I want to link to a file, it is stored either in Dropbox or keep-it and I add the link to it.
Then I create a section called timeline. This section records the events, and tasks to be done.
When the task needs to be scheduled, it will appear in the daily task with a link to the project note.
If I have any deadline, I add a bullet point in the timeline with a link to the calendar note of the date.
In the daily calendar notes, I organize the tasks by categories/project and add the mention “at xx:xx am to xx:xx pm” to have the corresponding time block appearing in the calendar.
Below the tasks, I record all the necessary information during the day (meeting, notes, thoughts on projects, progress notes).
If a piece of information relates to a project, then I link it to the project master note.
I use @mention notation to refer to people I met or spoke to.
I use keywords for priority or classification of some information.
This is how Noteplan 3 appear on Big Sur
Where am I now?
It required some work and some efforts to get used to this new organization, but it is worth. Using Noteplan is not difficult and in no time you get up to date with all the functionalities.
Now, Noteplan is one of the few apps that remain open the whole day on my computer and that has the honor to be in the dock of my iPhone and iPad.
I erased several other applications from my computer and devices. I now have a better view on the projects I manage for my clients or for me.
In a few weeks, Noteplan became the heart of my information management system and brought me the simplicity I was looking for.
I used Obsidian to create a PKM (personal knowledge management), but the lack of a mobile application convinced me that it was not so suitable, so I transferred my information into Noteplan.
I also started a limited zettelkasten system, and a CRM (customer relationship management) all in Noteplan. Future articles will explain how I set up Noteplan for these uses.
Noteplan is not the perfect application. It is still lacking some functionalities, but the developer (Eduard Metzler) is working hard to bring the necessary improvements. He is very responsive and always listens to his users. This also contributed to my decision to give my trust to Noteplan.
Noteplan will be available from November 24 on the app stores for MacOs and IOS | https://medium.com/@dvarlot/build-the-control-center-for-your-life-with-noteplan-3-4da77ed37634 | ['Didier Varlot'] | 2020-11-23 19:45:32.025000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Notes', 'Organization', 'Projects', 'Life'] |
Notifications: A Reason To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning | Notifications: A Reason To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning
You’re missing the best part of Medium if you don’t read them.
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
I’d been on Medium a while before I figured out Notifications. Because I lug around a massive guilt complex thanks to my Catholic upbringing, I was sure the number next to my photo meant Ev Williams was sending me messages that I was doing everything wrong and probably breaking Medium. Would I please stop?
One day, I rustled up the courage to actually click on the little bell and read a message from a reader. OMFG. Someone actually liked one of my articles. How did I not know they could do this, you know, let me know, and that I could, you know, read their comment?
Simple. I didn’t read the instructions.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Anyway, since I discovered the true meaning of life and that it is my notifications every morning, I have a reason to go on. In these days of uncertainty and lunkheads who go about maskless, that’s yuge.
So, for you who don’t understand the bell next to your profile pic, let me explain. It is the sad way this monolith that is Medium has come up with to let us communicate with each other. A tapping on the walls to see if anyone is listening if you will.
I know, you’d think someone with the smarts of Ev Williams would figure out a way for Medium members to send each other messages the way other social media platforms do. But you know, maybe he’s not familiar with Twitter! (It’s supposed to be a joke!)
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Anyway, when we want to write to one another, we leave a comment on one of our articles, then the Medium masterminds raps on our wall or tinkles our bell, and the numbers next to our photo accumulate until we read the notifications and the counting starts anew.
As far as I know, the notifications remain in our feed forever. So perhaps I could scroll down, if I had forever and a day to waste, and read those early messages I missed before I figured out they didn’t mean I was in trouble with Medium.
But I digress, as little old ladies are wont to do. This isn’t a manual on how to get Medium to work (first plug it in, then take part A…). You’ll find that elsewhere.
I want to tell you the reason I fly to my computer each morning to read my notifications. It’s the people, people.
Through Notifications, I discover if anyone is reading my articles, but also if anyone is moved enough to make a comment. Often, a few of my faithful followers will read and say hello, which always warms my heart. But then I might also get nice surprise from someone new sending a message out of the blue via the comments.
Who is this person? I click on their profile to find out. Sometimes, it’s a writer who’s been on Medium for years with a loyal following and a long list of wonderful articles. As I wonder how they found me, I do my gratitude dance that they did. Well, I don’t really dance anymore. Old knees. But in my mind, I’m jigging my head off that someone out in the wilds of cyberspace is reaching out to me.
Oh, and speaking of digressing, which I was a while ago. That bit about flying to my computer in the morning? Metaphor alert. I’m not flying anywhere these days, bunky, and neither should you or soon there won’t be enough vaccine in the known universe to keep up with all the cases, what with all the anti-vaxxers and scared vaxxers. Don’t get me started.
Where was I? My point here, actually, is to give a shout out to some wonderful writers I’ve discovered through my Notifications. It’s the easiest way to discover friends on Medium that I know of, and I answer every message sent to me.
Also, if you want to make your day, start leaving comments on the articles you read and see what pops up in your Notifications, that is if you don’t have an overflowing of goodness already.
Here are a few favorite writers who showed up in mine recently.
Brad roderic
As yet, Brad doesn’t have any articles yet to recommend. I discovered him this morning because he left a comment on my piece about why I didn’t finish NaNo.
His note left me a bit breathless with admiration for him. I’ll summarize here: Brad is 75 and high risk for catching the virus. So he went into lockdown in March, which explains why he didn’t do NaNo in November. I was puzzled at that until in the next line he explained that he began his NaNo at Easter. Hold on. Since then, he has completed seven novels and umpteen short stories. He is in the process of editing them to publish on Kindle.
From now on, when I start to carp about having to give up the gym or regular haircuts, I’m going to remember Brad giving the metaphorical finger to the virus and not letting it get in the way of him rocking his life.
I hope Brad will write to us all when he starts publishing so we can join Team Brad and rocket his books to the bestseller list.
Natalie Frank, Ph.D.
Natalie Frank was one of the first people I discovered on Medium, and I followed her like a stalker. She seemed to write about anything and everything. Thanks to her generous nature, I also learned a great deal about how to navigate Medium.
I commented on many of her articles on topics ranging from science fiction, poetry, psychology, fiction, and personal essays. However, months passed before she showed up in my Notifications. I felt as though I’d won the lottery. Natalie noticed me!!!
Since then, we have found ourselves in several Facebook groups for Medium writers, and it was through that connection that I discovered her posts about contracting the virus and her subsequent hospitalization.
If I didn’t think she was a boss before, her account of writing a poem during her delirium and then reading that amazing powm sealed the deal for me.
If you don’t know Natalie’s work, I highly recommend you check out this charming, engaging polymath whose heart is as big as her brain.
Sowmya Sridhar
One joy of Notifications is the announcement that someone has mentioned you in an article. The other day I clicked one such message from Sowmya. Her name was unknown to me, but I began to read her piece about Joe Biden, connecting his presidency to the idea that we’re never too old to…fill in the blanks.
It’s a subject near and dear to me, being 81 and all. To my surprise, the author had referred to me further down. While I was flattered, the line that had me flat on my back––again, Metaphor Alert. If I get down on the floor these days, I need a team of paramedics to get me to my feet again. Back to the awesome Sowmya.
This articulate, wise writer is a 16-year-old high school student from, hmmm could be Florida, could be India, could be Bulkarn (my fake town in my Irish novels). I can’t find it on her About page.
Wherever she lives, reading her perspective on life gave me hope for a future I’ll never live long enough to see. A sixteen-year-old reading an octogenarian and commenting on a prescription for living your best life. That should rightly take some of us old fogies down a peg, those of us who think we know it all.
She has a number of articles and edits a publication on mindfulness. Dismiss young people as frivolous purveyors of cacophonous music designed to make grownups tear their hair out at your peril.
Sowmya has it going on. She’s only 16. Imagine what she’ll be like at 17.
Estacious(Charles White)
When I get a notice that Estacious, aka Charles White, clapped or commented on an article, I feel like I’ve won a gold star or moved to the head of the class. Teachers have a way of doing that to me.
I first discovered his writing in a Facebook group and took notice of all the writers who said beautiful things about his articles. We join these groups to learn and get support for our writing. Often, we hear the same things about our pieces. Good job. Nicely done.
But then comments about a particular writer stand out, and you realize the group is talking about someone who resides at the moral center of Medium.
We have many, lucky for us, and Estacious stands tall among them.
He writes about politics, the pandemic, the racial divide in America, family, writing, and his experience of being alive at this time in the cycle of life.
I could say his gravitas comes from his 23 years as a teacher. Or perhaps he became a teacher because of his seriousness of purpose. I don’t know him well enough to give you an answer. I just know that when I read his work, I am enriched, humbled, and enlightened. | https://medium.com/reading-rhombus/notifications-a-reason-to-get-out-of-bed-in-the-morning-59f8564b5ebb | ['Helen Cassidy Page'] | 2020-12-01 00:23:54.893000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Reading Rhombus', 'Self', 'Writing', 'Reading'] |
AI Bias, Decision Bubbles, Death, and Generations | For a supposed ‘more than monthly’ publication, this is actually the first time that I’ve managed to send two editions out in the same month since October last year. Mind you, I’ve only managed to do that by keeping it down to six stories. I’ve not had much time to read recently as I started a new job three weeks ago and my commute is much shorter; I used to read four or five articles a day, and I’m barely managing that a week at the moment. Plenty to catch up on.
My new job’s working in a technical innovation role. Innovation’s often confused (or conflated) with novelty, but sometimes it’s just about combining familiar ideas in an unfamiliar way. David Sax put it well:
True innovation isn’t just some magic carnival of invention. It is a continuing process of gradual improvement and assessment. Often that actually means adopting ideas and tools that already exist but make sense in a new context, or even returning to methods that worked in the past.
Onto the links! There are some crackers this month — including two bests.
The Best
Notes on AI Bias, Benedict Evans.
A seriously clever and clear explanation of bias in machine learning systems — and it’s probably not what you think (if you think of it at all).
A washing machine is much better than a human at washing clothes, but if you put dishes in a washing machine instead of clothes and press start, it will wash them. They’ll even get clean. But this won’t be the result you were looking for, and it won’t be because the system is biased against dishes. A washing machine doesn’t know what clothes or dishes are — it’s just a piece of automation, and it is not conceptually very different from any previous wave of automation.
The Filter Bubble is Actually a Decision Bubble, Thomas Baekdal.
People don’t suffer from a lack of exposure to alternative viewpoints, they suffer from excessive exposure to ‘balanced’ viewpoints.
By constantly exposing people to alternative viewpoints, you are teaching the public not to trust anything. Because every single time they read about a fact from one news source, [they will be presented] with an ‘alternative fact’ (for the sake of balance) from another news source. You are telling people that information and facts are a matter of viewpoints, and that there are always alternative facts to be had. It’s the worst thing you can possibly do.
NB: This really annoys me; I wrote about it in How a Google Maps Update Leads to the Promotion of Fringe Views.
Death and the Internet
The Complexity of Grieving in the Digital Age, Debra Bassett.
How messages stored on our phones and other devices take on new significance when the sender dies. I love this term: “the socially active dead”. After my sister died I always got a little welcome/unwelcome shock when I saw her profile photo in the top scores of Candy Crush.
The dead are no longer hidden away, they are carried with us on our digital devices in the form of voicemails, WhatsApp messages, texts and photographs. But these social networks and messaging services were designed for people to stay in touch with the living. Using them to talk with the dead is blurring the distinction between the social lives of the living and those of the “socially active dead.”
The Body Pullers of Syria, Kenneth Rosen.
A difficult read, this: how teams of volunteers in Syria locate graves of civilians and ISIS fighters. Every time I read someone from the privileged Western commentariat talk about ‘burning social media to the ground’ I want to show them stories like this, where social networks enable critical use cases we’ve never been forced to consider.
The team uses Google Maps or Google Earth and satellite images to begin to map potential [grave] locations. Once an area is marked as a potential site, the teams use Facebook and WhatsApp to crowdsource more information. They post messages saying they have “opened” (the term of choice) a new mass grave and give its location.
Generations Online
Old, Online, And Fed On Lies: How An Aging Population Will Reshape The Internet, Craig Silverman.
People aged over 65 make up increasingly large sector of the British and American population, and as they move online they’re largely moving to Facebook. This is a problem as they’re the least digitally literate demographic — and the most politically active.
Since the 2016 election, funding for digital literacy programs has skyrocketed. But they primarily focus on younger demographics, even as the next presidential election grows closer. This means the very people who struggle the most with digital information and technology risk being left to fend for themselves in an environment where they’re being targeted and exploited precisely because of their vulnerabilities.
Why Are People Starting to Purge All of Their Instagram Photos?, Hussein Kesvani.
The generation that’s grown up on social media use it quite differently from the generations which had it appear in their lives. How many of the fears we have about teens and social media are down to us projecting our own experiences? | https://medium.com/the-thoughtful-net/ai-bias-decision-bubbles-death-and-generations-41d81483e764 | ['Peter Gasston'] | 2019-04-24 22:43:40.147000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Death', 'Ageing Population'] |
Looking for Consistency across Beliefs and Choices | Be it reaching the airport on time, or completion of that critical project, or even getting those stupid nods of approval from friends, we are somehow evolutionarily wired to feel secure when we seem to be in control of things.
Want to check the veracity of this claim? Please observe your physiological response when your Uber driver chooses to cancel your ride to the airport when you are already running late. An unexpected event, irrespective of its magnitude, often manages to catch you off the guard. And the last thing you want in your life is to find yourself at the edge of some unknown cliff.
Last evening while coming back from the dental clinic, we were stuck in a traffic jam (definitely not an ideal time to get into an argument with my partner). On second thought, is there a perfect time? If you think there is one, please let me know, because, in our eight years of togetherness, every single argument seemed to have cropped up at the most inappropriate moment. Well, that’s a separate topic for a full-length post.
We have a six-year-old excuser-in- chief who specializes in the art of weaving stories after assessing our vulnerabilities. She has made us believe that brushing her pearly for more than a minute will lead to vomiting, so any resistance on her part is nothing but a reflexive response and should not be interpreted as non-compliance. It’s been a while since she started complaining of toothache which could no longer be ignored. In a way, late evening visit to the dental clinic was something imposed on us due to this unavoidable urgency.
While we were stuck in traffic when coming back after getting multiple cavities of our storyteller filled by the dentist, I was wondering if this unwarranted situation could have been avoided, had I taken the matter more seriously into my own hands. Given the fact that I did opt out from taking the complete responsibility of getting our storyteller’s pearlies clean on a daily basis, therefore, I couldn’t blame anyone. I had no choice but to accept it as if it was always meant to be (a more comfortable option compared to self-blame). | https://piyush2911.medium.com/looking-for-consistency-across-beliefs-and-choices-9d8156494c3f | ['Piyush Kamal'] | 2019-05-30 08:11:25.380000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Lifestyle', 'Self', 'Self Improvement', 'Life'] |
Lady Gaga has a poo and the details will shock you | Lady Gaga has a poo and the details will shock you
The well known lady Gaga is considered to be one of the wealthiest people alive so when she defied all odds and had a poo many people were shocked
During an interview lady Gaga told our crew “Get the fuck out of my fucking bathroom you fucking pervert”
Will this one incident lead to other celebrity’s to doing the same | https://medium.com/@matt614d/lady-gaga-has-a-poo-and-the-details-will-shock-you-1c16d3cc50c5 | ['The Lemon'] | 2020-12-14 13:07:37.176000+00:00 | ['Lady Gaga', 'Celebrity', 'Shocking'] |
NextGen One Month In: Has it Launched If You Can’t Find It? | So I’ve been using the PlayStation5 for more than a month now and, in the meantime, Microsoft launched the Xbox Series S|X globally with Sony following suit a few days later. These powerful new systems made a lot of promises and managed to keep many of them — you were not really expecting them to keep each and every one of those, right? — hence the positive impressions posted by developers, journalists, influencers and consumers alike. The PS5 and the Xbox Series X offer great value for money, with the discless version of the former and Xbox Series S trailing behind in that regard but offering that all-important lower price point of entry.
Now that the dust has started to settle, though, a number of things are becoming apparent. One: the power of the PlayStation brand remains much stronger than that of the Xbox regardless of hardware. The PS5 is already in the hands of almost 2.5 million people (both versions accounted for) whereas the two new Xbox models put together have barely surpassed the 1.5 million mark so far, despite launching a week earlier. Sony’s well-rounded launch line-up of games might have had something to do with that, but the very first consumers getting consoles are usually people who have made up their minds about which one they’d rather have a long, long time ago so… yeah.
Word on the street is that the cheaper Xbox Series S did not perform as well as its more capable, more expensive brother did — or indeed as Redmond would have liked. (Image credit: Microsoft)
Two: despite both Sony’s and Microsoft’s push for digital distribution of games with devices tied to their respective digital stores, most of these early adopters clearly prefer to have more options available to them and/or still think in a more traditional way. Not only has the Xbox Series X outsold the $200/€200 cheaper, smaller Xbox Series S, but it did so by a wide margin. The difference in processing power between the two models surely played a part here, but what most probably tipped the scales was the limited storage of the latter model (and the quite costly upgrade to that storage).
Same story with the PS5: despite its “full” edition being $100/€100 pricier than the Digital Edition, and despite the two models being identical save for the optical drive, the former moved more units than the latter did. There’s even the impression that, had there been more “full” PS5 units available, many people would have gone for those instead of the Digital Edition.
The Xbox Series X and the PS5 cost $499/€499 but they are nowhere to be found in retail or e-tail across the globe, suggesting that they’d both moved a lot more units if that was not the case. (Image credit: Microsoft)
Which leads us to number three: both the PS5 and Xbox Series launch was a huge success and a grand failure at the same time. A huge success because, well, both Sony and Microsoft sold all the consoles they made available. Every last one. Commercially speaking, that’s what all manufacturers strive for. A grand failure too, though, because they would have sold many more — probably a lot more than 4 million between them — had there been enough of them available in stores or online.
It is now clear that the pre-order schemes of both companies did not work well enough and that scalpers were better prepared than ever to take advantage of a bad situation in order to make a profit. What is less clear is whether just blaming the pandemic for all this — manufacturing problems, unusually high demand — is inevitable… or just convenient. Sure, many consoles in recent history sold out at first, and millions more people in recent months sit in front of their TVs due to lockdowns worldwide. But was better handling of the PS5 and Xbox Series launches always out of the question?
nVidia and AMD gave a lot of PC gamers grief in the exact same way Sony and Microsoft did with the new PlayStation and Xbox: the new GeForce and Radeon cards are just as difficult to find. (Image credit: nVidia)
Judging from what happened during the same time with nVidia and AMD — both launched new series of PC graphics cards in such pitiful numbers that demand for them is not expected to be met earlier than Q2 2021 — it seems that yes, it was. It was almost certainly out of the question. A “normal” launch of a new PlayStation or Xbox was never possible in 2020 (whatever “normal” means these days) regardless of their specs, price or game line-ups.
What is more, with their availability not improving any time soon — Sony and Microsoft have suggested that the consoles they’ll be manufacturing in the coming months won’t be enough to satisfy the demand that’s already there — one can’t shake the feeling that launching a new PlayStation and Xbox during a pandemic may not have been the smartest thing to do after all.
Sony and Microsoft will beg to differ, surely, but November felt more like a preview of 2021 than a full-blown console launch. What this means in the long term remains to be seen. (Image credit: Sony)
So this was as much an impressive launch as it was a botched one. One could even wonder whether we actually had a next-generation home entertainment system launch or just a small-scale preview of it, as it is still practically impossible to get the new PlayStation or Xbox in physical stores or online. Has a product actually launched if hardly anyone can buy it? For months?
It’s debatable, to say the least — and it will be interesting to see whether the frustration consumers feel these past few weeks because of this situation has already affected or will affect how the PS5 and the Xbox Series fare in the long run. Quite interesting indeed. | https://medium.com/road-to-nextgen-2020/nextgen-one-month-in-has-it-launched-if-you-cant-find-it-f6253212bab7 | ['Kostas Farkonas'] | 2020-12-10 08:01:11.808000+00:00 | ['Home Entertainment', 'Gaming', 'PlayStation', 'Xbox', 'Videogames'] |
Classes & Objects in Ruby | Ruby is an awesome Object-Oriented programming language which allows us to use many of data types. Like integer, string, float, or boolean.
But not all things in the world can be represented by just a string or a number. A lot of things are much more complicated such as a book, a machine, a tree, or even a person. So this is one of the reasons why Ruby is cool, that we can create our own data types.
That means I can create my own data type which can represent a book or a computer. Literally anything I want, I can create my own data types. And it’s called Class. A Class is simply a data type that I can define. And Class in Ruby can be created with keyword class
So let’s say I want to create a person, and here is what a person looks like in my program:
So a person must have a name, age and gender. So this is like a blueprint or a template for a person. Now that I just told Ruby what a person is, let’s create a specific person in our program. And this is called object. An Object is simply an instance of a Class. So in this case I will create a person object:
So basically I just created a specific person in my program, and that person is based on a class name Person. And like I defined in that class, a person will have a name, age and gender. So now I can say that:
In this way I just set all the attributes for that person. And I literally mean it:
I just printed all the attributes of the person object that I created, like name or gender or age. And Classes can have methods beside attributes. So in this case, a person can have personal acts right ? So I will define a method called speak in the Person class:
Now I will create another person to test out this method:
As we can see, I just created a person who is Sasha and let her speak.
So in the end, we can create a class, create instances of that class called objects,and we can refer to them directly. And that’s how classes and objects work, they allow you to create your own data types in Ruby.
And one cool thing in Ruby is that almost everything in Ruby is a object, but we can talk about this in other articles ;) | https://medium.com/@depressionkyle/classes-objects-in-ruby-cc053d831420 | ['Kyle Le'] | 2020-12-04 10:18:40.249000+00:00 | ['Class', 'Ruby', 'Ruby on Rails', 'Object Oriented', 'Oop'] |
Thom Yorke | Did you have any trepidation about embarking on the Atoms For Peace project?
That was the real head-masher. During the first day of rehearsals it was clear that everyone had really done their homework. So when I got there with Nigel, we just started up and it was just there for the taking, it was fucking mental. It was really the first time I’d played properly with another band, ever, since I was like, 16. No kidding, it was a headfuck. I was buzzing for weeks. It was all informed by what I’d done on my own on a laptop, which I just thought was really wild.
You have such a diverse back catalogue now. would you ever go back through your Radiohead archives and remix it all?
I could do, yeah. I love remixing because you can take something people already identify with and claim it for something else. You can actually spend your whole life going back and sampling yourself — but that would be a bit like masturbation.
“I can’t say I love the idea of a banker liking our music, or David Cameron. But who cares? As long as he doesn’t use it for his election campaigns, I don’t care. I’d sue the living shit out of him if he did” – Thom Yorke
Does the fact that your music attracts everyone from teenagers and middle-aged dads to bankers and prime ministers annoy or delight you?
I can’t say I love the idea of a banker liking our music, or David Cameron. I can’t believe he’d like King of Limbs much. But I also equally think, who cares? As long as he doesn’t use it for his election campaigns, I don’t care. I’d sue the living shit out of him if he did. I’m now getting this thing where a cute 18-year-old girl will come up to me and she’ll say, ‘Aww man, will you sign this for my mum?’ She turned me onto your music when I was tiny.’ And I’d be like ‘Ohhh, fuck’s sake!’ That spins me out on a number of levels. I’ve got two generations now.
You wrote The Eraser’s ‘Harrowdown Hill’ about the suicide of biological-warfare expert David Kelly. Do any of your new songs have a political agenda?
The David Kelly thing was very much an exception. I thought it was just so horribly English, so fucked up. I get obsessed and that often ends up in lyrics. Politics is not a fun thing to write about. Now it’s too fucking dark. I went to the Copenhagen summit (on climate change), and that permanently flipped my lid, because the whole thing was so wrong. Obama stormed straight past me after the meeting he had with China, and it was just horrible. It sort of spun me out permanently to be honest.
But shouldn’t that have provoked you to write something?
Yes, but when you’re presented with that level of stupidity, it kind of blows your mind. Which sounds terrible, because I don’t want to be the person that goes, ‘We’re all fucked,’ because I don’t think we are. I’m trying to convince myself not to care. It’s like this phrase I keep seeing around — ‘I couldn’t care less, it’s such a mess.’
Are you sick of people saying that you only write and sing miserable songs?
It used to piss me off and then I thought, ‘Well, people hear something in my voice and respond to it, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ You could say the same thing about Scott Walker. Recently it’s not as heavy, it’s a lot lighter, because I’m more into rhythm and the fact that it dances through the track rather than grabbing you and being the centre of attention. Sometimes I don’t want it to be. Sometimes I just want it cruising through the rhythm.
Do you ever feel caged in by your voice?
Absolutely. Maybe not as much now, but certainly it can be quite frustrating. I’ve done enough stuff now that it’s not such an issue — at some point you’ve got to say, ‘This tone is me, there’s no getting round it.’ Now, in a way, having that signature is licence to do more. It’s kind of liberating to say, ‘Well, that’s my instrument, and that’s a very clear limitation right there.’ But what’s nice is you can make a really complicated piece of music and then just put a simple line through it and suddenly you don’t see any of the complications there at all.
What about your image? Have you become more or less confident about your looks over the years?
I’m never confident about how I look, but I’m always into being shocking and visually interesting. It comes down to whether I’m comfortable or not. It takes me a long time to get my head around that. I was deeply uncomfortable with the ‘Lotus Flower’ video. I did the whole thing, it was such a crack, and then they showed me the rushes the next day and I was like, ‘This ain’t going out.’ It was like paparazzi footage of me naked or something. It was fucked up. But if it’s a risk that’s probably a good thing.
“I was deeply uncomfortable with the ‘Lotus Flower’ video. I did the whole thing, it was such a crack, and then they showed me the rushes the next day and I was like, ‘This ain’t going out.’ It was like paparazzi footage of me naked or something. It was fucked up. But if it’s a risk that’s probably a good thing.” — Thom Yorke
Are you surprised that ‘Lotus Flower’ has now been watched over 20 million times on YouTube?
It’s a massive kick. That’s what everybody wants. If it’s something you’ve worked at and it goes over the edge like that then that’s great. If you do a few duffers it puts you off for a while.
Which are the duffers?
Oh, I couldn’t possibly say… (laughs)
Which is your favourite?
‘Karma Police’ is still my favourite, because when I watch it or see clips it just reminds me how much of a laugh I had shooting that. It was brilliant. Especially because I’m totally wasted in it.
What were you doing?
All sorts. (laughs)
Do you think your videos and your reluctance to do much press have built up this mythology around you? Do you encourage the mythmaking?
No, I think it just extends to whatever you’re doing next, to see if you can bend people’s heads out of shape. It’s the old art student in me really. If you’re going to do something you should at least shock or mess with their expectations — not that it’s necessarily art.
When you were last on the cover of Dazed you talked about not recognising your reflection. Was that true?
I really didn’t. It was quite scary. It’s hard to explain. It was all part of this weird catatonic headspace I was in. I can’t do a lot of photographs because I become too aware of that projected image and I can’t handle it. It sounds really precious but that’s just what I know and how I know it is.
“I was so driven for so long, like a fucking animal, and then I woke up one day and someone had given me a little gold plate for OK Computer and I couldn’t deal with it for ages”
You also admitted that you had always wanted to become famous. Seventeen years later, have your feelings changed?
I guess it depends what you’ve become famous for. Fame for fame’s sake, or for working your nuts off at what you do. Also when I was a kid, I always assumed that it was going to answer something — fill a gap. And it does the absolute opposite. It happens with everybody. I was so driven for so long, like a fucking animal, and then I woke up one day and someone had given me a little gold plate for OK Computer and I couldn’t deal with it for ages. I moved down to Cornwall, went out to the cliffs and drew in a sketchbook, day in, day out. I was allowed to play the piano and that was it, because that was all we had in the house. I did that for a few months and I started to tune back into why I’d started doing it. That’s how I remember it anyway. I remember having nothing in the house, except a Yamaha grand piano. Classic. And the first thing I wrote was ‘Everything in Its Right Place’.
Do you have much recollection of what life was like before you became famous?
I’m now painfully aware that I’ve been doing this for longer than I haven’t. Which is pretty fucking mental. Am I aware of how it was before that? I think so. I mean, we did sign our deal when I was 22, so for my whole 20s and 30s I was working. I don’t even remember it. It’s quite weird.
How well do you think you’ve aged?
My favourite quote of Tom Waits is, ‘I wish to age disgracefully.’ And I’m doing that, that’s me. I’m probably easier to deal with but I wish to remain disgraceful, if at all possible. (laughs)
Why do you think you have been portrayed as such a mercurial character over the years?
I’m not as volatile as I used to be, which is good ’cos I’d have burned out if I was. I can still be a nightmare though.
There’s a quote that I thought would be a good way to finish. It’s from your friend Stanley Donwood talking about his artwork series Lost Angeles, from which the cover for Amok is taken: ‘There is no future, there is only the present… no one seems to care much about the present.’ What do you care most about right now?
The present. Trying to stay in the present because that’s how to not get ill. Don’t overthink. Let it go.
Originally published at www.dazeddigital.com on February 12, 2013. | https://medium.com/tim-noakes/splitting-atoms-with-thom-yorke-c67fe2fbc631 | ['Tim Noakes'] | 2017-06-11 21:05:13.632000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Thom Yorke', 'Radiohead'] |
Liberate Religious Oppression | by Mark Maxey
Marxism is not about atheism, Chairman Gus Hall was famous for saying, “Our quarrel is with capitalism, not God.” Karl Marx was absolute in opposing oppression and not religion. However, a true Marxist is about the worker and their rights. Religion should not necessarily be a focal point in our struggles, but to each to their own. But my focus is on the oppression. Oppression keeps us struggling for our rights/dignity which keeps us from working for a more loving peaceful existence.
Each culture has their own creation mythology. The Judeo-Christian beliefs are those of the tribe Israel. Yet the oldest known culture are the Sumerians which pre-dates Jewish cosmology by thousands of years. Within the Sumerian cosmology are a flood, savior born, death, and resurrection. The Jewish retelling of this mythos does not negate it’s possible truth but yet presents itself to their own cosmos.
Fr. Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk who spoke of the perennial wisdom. This perspective in modern spirituality which views each of the world’s religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine have grown. Fr. Bede lived amongst Hindus in India and developed a synergy of Catholic and Hindu rites and spirituality. His approach was a social paradox that embraced different cultures to live communally in peace and democratic manner. Which is to say, very Marxist.
The Basic Principles of Marxism — Critique Sociale Marxism is a way of thinking critically, but it is not a “system”: “I have never established a ‘Here are the basic principles of Marxism: socialist systemFor the transformation of society, Marxism considers that a revolutionary process that will lead to a society based on cooperation and the free distribution of goods and provision of services is necessary. ‘“, Karl Marx wrote in his “Notes on Adolph Wagner’s As a result, while they participate in the day-to-day class struggle of the workers, Marxists work on behalf of a reorganization of society that will put an end to this class division. Lehrbuch der politician ÖkonomieThese principles, or some of them, could very well be embraced by other political and social tendencies: if this is the case, then so much the better! Marxism does not attempt to isolate itself, quite the contrary: the goal is to contribute to the constitution of a movement of all of the society for the creation of “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Karl Marx, Critique Sociale March 12, 2009 The Communist Manifesto). Consider the source of the idea that socialism can never work “ (1880). Marxism is the analysis of the development of the world as it is, a method that must forge an intimate connection between practice and theory.
“The emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves.” This is principle is inherent to real Marxism, which implies democracy and self-emancipation; it also means that democracy is the indispensable foundation for a new society (called socialism or communism). This society, liberated from the diverse forms of domination, will have to be freely constructed by its members.
Internationalism, which is simultaneously the recognition of the common interests of the workers of the entire world and of the need to struggle on a world scale, and of the goal of abolishing nations in the transition to a human world community.
The knowledge and analysis of History (the materialist conception of history).
The recognition of the existence of social classes that divide men and women into distinct segments of the population; the recognition of the profound inequalities and injustices that separate these classes; and the recognition that as long as society is divided into classes, there will be conflicts between these classes (the class struggle).
That said, let’s embrace this thought. For these ideals to be realized the Marxist communists need to join hand in hand with other like minded leftists grassroots organizations. The Marxist followers alone can’t realize these goals by themselves. The current progressive organizations (Occupy, Black Lives Matter, AIM, Our Revolution, Sen. Bernie Sanders, etc…) have so much more in common. Joining together helps all of the humankind to eventually live in these Marxists parameters.
Now, hear me out, the other organizations need to also do their part in weeding out from society the neoliberalism and religious fanaticism that leads to oppression. It was oppression that Marx was against, not God. If the true nature of spiritualism, as in the perennial vein, then this nature by the natural order is nonoppressive. What is oppressive in religion is legalistic rhetoric which is called ideology. Ideology is ideas, and true Marxism is not about ideas but rather realistic.
Opponents of socialism, who also go back through the ages, say it can’t work. Additionally, they say that socialism is unfair or undemocratic. It is neither, but you can see why a capitalist would say that.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did not waste a lot of words trying to describe the heavenly benefits of a future socialist society. They published a list of some likely features that included the idea that the main factories and instruments of production would be owned and run democratically by the people.
Any religious thought that is oppressive is not the true nature of God if one so believes in God. Using religion to disqualify Marxist goals nullifies Marx’s goals. Oppression at any level denies the true freedom that an individual inherently has. So in a sense, fundamentalism is an oppressive tool to rule over a person instead of bringing out the proletariat qualities in a person.
In Conclusion, part of the struggle we face is relieving the oppression before us. That is realistic. We must keep struggling together. We must speak out when we see oppression of any type. Religion is a choice, but oppression of any kind is not a choice. Our goal is in liberating the oppressed. | https://medium.com/okemah-free-press/liberate-religious-oppression-2bcf2f8e9085 | [] | 2019-10-09 22:09:25.576000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Politics', 'Marxism'] |
The 5 Mistakes That Are Stopping You From Crushing The Social Media Game | You’ve realized the immense potential of social media for your product and have decided to go for it. Months pass by and you’re stuck only with a few hundred followers, who are your friends who follow your page. You then figure out you need to run Ads and you don’t mind investing some money, hoping that this will gain some fans. Who could become potential customers. But what happens is months pass by and more or less you’re at the same stage since you started. If that sounds like your story then today is the last time you’re gonna hear it. So step by step let’s analyse what could go wrong. You could have one or many of these but go through the entire list.
1.You Don’t Have A Social Media Strategy At All
You’re wrong if you’re wondering what could a social media strategy be for sites used by teens to share memes. Brands of 2017 are using effective strategies to tap their potential online. They’re not only building their audience but also converting them into customers.
In simple words a social media strategy is all about knowing your audience really well and engaging them through the content they wish to see
So incase you’re wondering how to build a social media strategy, you need to take note of all points I mention. By the end of this article I can guarantee you that you can build one by yourself. You can even hire someone from fiverr for as low as $10
2.You Don’t Know Your Target Audience
A target audience is narrowing down your type of customers into a final category. Where at the end you'll be with a group of individuals who'll buy your product without any hesitation.
- If you sell tea, your target audience is working adults who have a lot of stress which is a problem you are solving.
-If you are an online tutorials, your target audience is students, but what kind of students? Students who have bad grades because they will need your tutorials
Defining a target audience will help you in making more compelling content as you’ll know whom to perform for. Also it will provide you clarity in many other fields like finding the right influencers, making video ads and so on.
How To Find Your Target Audience?
Know what problem your product is solving. Narrow down an age group to which it’s the most relevant. Further narrow down the group to a specific set of individuals who would definitely use your product or buy something from you if it was given at the right price. There isn’t any formula, just keep eliminating and repeating the process until you find a good target audience that is beneficial for your business or product.
3. You Don’t Have A Content Plan
A content plan is deciding what kind of photos and videos will your page post? What theme will they follow? How do they look? Who are they aimed it? and many other metrics that give you clarity about what to post and when to post.
How To Build A Content Plan?
You need to know your target audience. This is important because you will alter your content as per the audience likes. I’ve explained in the second step how to build one. Your content plan should be 95% generic content and 5% of your products. Have you ever seen Reebok or Nike talking about their products how well they’re built or the details? No Right? Instead they focus to build motivational sports type content and place their product at the end. This works because it’s relevant to their target audience, the sports people You need to learn how to associate your product with some other content that your audience loves because the harsh reality of life is everyone hates ads! People will start buying your product because of the content you impress them with. You can’t keep pasting links of your amazon page everyday. Now what good content means that it’s well written or designed or produced, it should be something that people would like to share with their friends. The key to social media growth is creating stuff that people want to share with their friends and family Good Content becomes great content when posted at the right time. A joke about Christmas would work the best on 25th December as compared to the other days. So you need to figure out the right timings when your audience is most active (Check Analytics! duh) and keep in mind the trends and practices of your platform.
This step is really simple but still if you have a problem you can take help from fiverr. Also I keep suggesting fiverr because it’s cheaper than hiring a social media executive who will eat up your money.
4. Looks
This is the digital world and looks matter here. You cannot look like a 15 year old teenager who posts tumblr GIFs. You need to look like a professional brand. Good looks ensure quality, guarantee trust, provide a unique identity for your brand and so on. Why do you think Apple Google And Samsung spend so much on looks and feels ? So in what parameters do you need good looks when it comes to social media?
Your Logos and Headers — These set the initial imprint in anyone’s mind when the visit your page for the first time, so make sure your facebook cover, twitter header, instagram display picture all look dope. Your Content — This also needs to look unique because from an aspect that is what will make you unique from others. Another aspect could be good looking content conveys the message easily and people remember it for a long time
The way of producing great looking content is easy, hire a graphic designer or get stuff done from a freelance person who will keep your social media slick! Obviously you could do it yourself too!
5. Collaborations With Influencers
It just means you’re paying a douchebag to post about you because his followers are your target audience.
How To Find Influencers
There are a few websites you could pay to get the list but it’s actually more simpler doing it manually. Just go to your personal account and search for keywords relevant to you. Next thing, influencers could be anywhere, facebook, twitter, instagram or even YouTube. You need to spend an hour just digging up, the people who appear first are the one’s you need to grab. Communication — This is a skill you will have to develop, the meaning is you can’t just send a message to someone “Hey! Can you share this” obviously why would he? You’ll have to show him what he could benefit from it or offer money.
So the more you collaborate people, the more diverse audience you will have which is good for your business.
Conclusions
It’s all connected, you need to show your target audience great content through influencers to gain followers or get leads. It’s a tough process. It will not start happening in a single day, many people won’t agree to share your stuff, your first few logos will suck . But you need to keep hustling the right direction.
So whatever you read today was a fraction of what digital marketing is all about! I’d highly recommend you learn the nuances of it as it’s gonna benefit you in a lot of ways. If it’s not your area of interest but you still want to reap the fruits, hire me on fiverr and i’ll make a killer strategy for as low as $10 | https://medium.com/digital-dominators/the-5-mistakes-that-are-stopping-you-from-crushing-the-social-media-game-9ded9a63ac86 | ['Yash Bhardwaj'] | 2017-05-18 20:01:26.906000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing Tips', 'Mistakes', 'Strategy', 'Digital Marketing', 'Social Media'] |
Global Monitoring Infrastructure for Polkadot and Kusama | Running validator infrastructure is a lot of responsibility.
Node runners need to ensure the availability, security, and redundancy of their nodes, and have backup plans of backup plans to make sure validating services run without issue. This story will look at the architecture CertHum has built for the global monitoring of CertHum validator nodes.
A robust monitoring infrastructure is essential for the delivery of validating services. With a best of breed monitoring setup you can:
Keep track of compute, storage and network resources, and get ahead of potential resource constraints
Monitor and report on validator chain functions
Alert and notify when there is an issue, helping to avoid potential slashing penalties and loss of nominators
If you are setting up your own monitoring infrastructure, and haven’t done so yet, check out the fantastic bLd Nodes’ guide which has great step by step instructions on installing and configuring Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana. We’ve used some of their alerting rules in our own implementation.
Centralized Monitoring Architecture
CertHum uses two different hosting providers in different regions for the delivery of Polkadot and Kusama validator nodes. One provider is used to run production services, and the second is used as warm standby with fully synched chains. The warm standby is ready for immediate failover by updating the validator session keys on their respective chains, but they have scaled down resources that are still suitable enough for authoring blocks. To provide a neutral witness for both hosting providers, CertHum runs centralized monitoring out of Microsoft Azure.
Azure’s hyperscale cloud services are some of the best in the world, and can be relied on for consistent delivery when compared to smaller cloud and VPS providers. A single Azure VM is multi-purposed to run Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana. The following diagram depicts this architecture.
CertHum Global Monitoring Infrastructure
There are a few points on the above diagram that are worth noting:
Source-IP filtering is used to block connectivity to the Prometheus scraping ports — allowing access only from the CertHum monitoring server
SSH tunneling and source-IP filtering is used for connectivity between CertHum networks and the Azure VM for access to the Grafana, Alertmanager, and Prometheus GUIs
Frequent backups of the Azure VM to geo-redundant storage (GRS) ensures the VM can be recovered to an entirely different region, if needed
Having a monitoring infrastructure is great, but if you aren’t notified when there is a problem then you are not taking advantage of one of the most important reasons for standing that infrastructure up in the first place.
To solve for the notification piece, you can see on the bottom left of the diagram that CertHum has implemented PagerDuty for alerting.
PagerDuty is a SaaS offering that provides email, SMS, and phone call notifications of monitoring alerts generated from Alertmanager (and also has a lot of other great features). If a CertHum validator node drops the number of peers below a certain threshold, or if a node goes offline, or if any of the other rules which are configured in Alertmanager are breached, we are immediately notified.
This architecture gives us the confidence that we are providing the Polkadot and Kusama communities with validator nodes that they can feel safe in nominating. This should also provide other node runners with ideas on how they can deploy their own centralized monitoring infrastructure.
There are some improvements which can be made to our design and we are in the process of putting them in place, but we would love to hear your ideas for a better architected design. Feedback is always welcome! | https://medium.com/certhum/global-monitoring-infrastructure-for-polkadot-and-kusama-ccd06a05ee9b | ['Jim Farley'] | 2021-04-26 00:51:03.486000+00:00 | ['Monitoring', 'Prometheus', 'Polkadot Network', 'Blockchain', 'Kusama Network'] |
5 Great Facebook Groups for Medium Writers | 5 Great Facebook Groups for Medium Writers
Join them to grow your Medium earnings.
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
It was only after writing for a few weeks on Medium that I discovered all the great Facebook-communities where Medium writers gather to support each other. I decided to join a few and was blown away by the level of activity and the helpful attitude.
I would encourage everyone writing on Medium to join a few groups like this.
Not only is it a great way to promote your work and get feedback from other writers. It’s also a great place to ask all your Medium-related questions, whether they relate to the partner program, getting curated or how to be featured in Medium publications.
Just make sure to read the rules for each group before you start interacting. They differ quite a lot, and if you don’t follow them, you risk getting thrown out.
Below are the 5 groups I’m active in at the moment, and they’re all great in different ways.
1. Medium Writers and Bloggers
This is one of my personal favourites, and where I hang out the most. It’s very easy-going, and you’re allowed to post your own work. Everyone is super supportive, and the members represent a wide variety of different genres of writing.
2. Medium Writing
This group is excellent for anyone trying to figure out how to best leverage Medium and turn it into an income stream. It’s hosted by the Medium Blogging Guide (a must-follow for Medium writers) and administered by Medium expert Casey Botticello. Definitely worth joining!
3. Medium Writers Lounge
This is another lovely group where you can ask questions and get useful information and tips on how to maximize your time on Medium. You’re allowed to share your own stories on daily content sharing threads.
4. Medium Dreamers
Here you can share your own stories in the Daily Share Threads, and if the topic of your story is about helping other writers succeed, you’re allowed to make a specific post about it as well. Great community and atmosphere.
5. Medium Mastery
This group is also very friendly and helpful. Here you can share your work in daily share thread, and big wins kan be shared in the thread Win of the Week on Fridays. Don’t try making your own posts; they will be deleted.
Those are the five groups I’ve tried so far. Maybe we’ll meet in one of them!
Are you interested in other ways to grow your audience and maximize your Medium earnings? Check out this article about how to use automation on Twitter to get more followers and grow your Medium income! | https://medium.com/an-idea/5-great-facebook-groups-for-medium-writers-a41f277b105a | ['Nina Quist'] | 2020-10-30 15:37:24.471000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Social Media', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Facebook', 'Writing'] |
Updated swap announcement | Dear community members we have some good news. In order to make the swap process more efficient and to give you all a chance to stake your Vites, we would like to start the swap process immediatly!
We will swap manually, due to the fact that the Vites chain is at risk. An earlier chain that was finished before we announced the swap had been hacked. For this reason, we had to start all over with the development.
In order to swap, make sure that you have downloaded the new wallet.
MacOs is currently not supported (update about this soon). This announcement only applies to Windows- and Linux users!
Waves platform will support the swap. The address of your new wallet needs to be included as an attachment when sending the transfer to the Vites swap address. To complete the manual swap process, follow the video tutorial step-by-step. VERY IMPORTANT!!
If people do not add attachments like outlined in the tutorial, your Vites will be returned.
More good news! In about 1 week, the new coin can be traded on Stocks.Exchange. More info about listing will follow!
Swap wallet Waves address: 3PHnK1i3UvhptESZMC7e2jYPz3Pgnet4Bc4 Send your Vites ONLY to this address.
The wallets can be downloaded from our website: https://www.vites.io/#wallets
In order to promote a fresh start among the Vites community, we have created a new Telegram channel: www.t.me/VitesOfficial
Please join the new official Telegram!
*The deadline for the swap is 30th of September 2018. Please note that the absence of the Mac wallet does not change anything at the end date of the swap. The Mac wallet is still under development and there are enough interim alternatives to store your Vites in the meanwhile.
We kindly ask our community to start staking in order to make the chain safe and more efficient!
Author: Daniyal
Image: Shof | https://medium.com/vitesecosystem/updated-swap-announcement-bf94d36da21e | [] | 2018-09-10 16:55:41.344000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Btc', 'Blockchain'] |
[BLOG] A successful business using BI-tool and the TEMCO App | Continuing from the last article, let’s find out where did Mr. Smith’s box has gone to.
So, where is the missing box?
After finding out that the consumers trust the reliability of the ‘Cold-Away’, Mr. Smith has ordered 100 boxes of the capsules. So, the owner of the ‘Cold-Away’ goes into production right away. Mr. Smith has been waiting for the best product only receives 99 boxes instead of 100. However, even before receiving a call for the missing box, Mr. Kim knows that only the 99 boxes of the product had been received. How did Mr. Kim find out that only 99 had been received at the pharmacy before even receiving a call from the pharmacy?
Finding out the distribution process through the TEMCO App:
TEMCO App was the answer to Mr. Kim. TEMCO App uploads distribution process in real time; he used 2 distributors to transfer the ‘Cold-Away’, and there had been a problem during the delivery process. The distributor ‘A’ delivered the products right away to Mr. Smith’s pharmacy, but the other company, distributor ‘B’ made a stop at another pharmacy and wrongly delivered one of the Mr.Smith’s boxes. If Mr. Kim views the distribution process through the regular delivery application, he may not have found out where the problem happened. However, TEMCO App verifies not only the weight, delivery and proper temperature for the product(s) in real time, so Mr. Kim was able to use the TEMCO App to find out where the mishap in the distribution process happened.
Mr. Kim, with a relief, “thank goodness, it would have been terrible to lose the box”, and he sends another box of the capsules to Mr. Smith’s pharmacy. As he is preparing to send the box, Mr. Kim uploads the product data to the TEMCO App, using TEMCO tokens. Without the TEMCO App, Mr. Kim would not have found out why one of the boxes were not sent to Mr. Smith.
Mr. Kim and Mr. Smith business insight: The BI-tool:
Mr. Smith, worrying about why one of the boxes have not arrived at his pharmacy, checks the TEMCO App to find out the entire supply chain process. With Mr. Kim’s reaction to mediate the situation, the missing box is delivered to Mr. Smith’s pharmacy. Mr. Kim and Mr. Smith smoothly finish the transaction.
Also, the ‘Cold-Away’ capsules had been sold out quickly, so Mr. Smith was very amused about the situation. At this time, no one was returning, unlike the “Flu-Away”. It was because the information regarding the product was viewed transparently and the products were delivered with the right temperature, proper storage, and delivery process, through the TEMCO App for all participants of the supply chain network.
Through TEMCO’s BI-tool, Mr. Smith found out that the main consumers of the medicine were 30 to 40 years old woman, so Mr. Smith is looking to find ways to appeal to this group of demographics. Mr. Smith, through the BI-tool, finds out that this age group of women appreciates the ingredients of the medicine, so he orders 30 boxes of the ‘Ginseng-Power’, flu and cold medicine. As Mr. Smith utilizes the TEMCO’s BI-tool, the popularity spread through the local community that Mr. Smith sells very reliable products. Mr. Smith decides to continue to subscribe to the use of TEMCO’s BI-tool, feeling satisfied. “TEMCO App! It is amazing!”. This month as well, Mr. Smith and Mr. Kim pay the monthly fee for the use of TEMCO’s BI-tool. Because of TEMCO’s BI-tool, Mr. Kim’s factory and Mr. Smith’s pharmacy continue to grow every day.
TEMCO’s BI-tool can be utilized in other areas than the industry that Mr. Kim and Mr., Smith is involved in.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more exciting news and announcements from TEMCO! | https://medium.com/temcolabs/a-successful-business-using-bi-tool-and-the-temco-app-fbbdf2dd15a2 | [] | 2019-04-19 10:22:33.242000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blog', 'Blockchain', 'Supply Chain'] |
Divers Find Over 40 Cars Underwater In Tennessee | For quite some time we’ve followed the YouTube channel Adventures with Purpose as the team has pulled all kinds of interesting cars from rivers and other bodies of water. Often, the aim of these events is to clean up waterways, which is a good cause, but occasionally the submerged cars yield something more sinister, like a dead body. And while some of the areas the team has visited contained several cars, their trip to the Nashville, Tennessee area is the highest yield we’ve seen yet at over 40 cars pulled from the water.
Check out these 6 classic cars found at the bottom of a river!
image credit: YouTube
That’s an insane number of vehicles to even find underwater and pulling them all out is a monumental effort. As you might imagine, they didn’t do all that work by themselves. Adventures with Purpose is a small outfit and they always get the help of local vehicle recovery companies, but this time it was different. City officials offered their resources in the effort, showing that the influence of this YouTube channel has grown significantly.
The group held a livestream event on YouTube to show off all the vehicles they pulled out of the water in Tennessee. They were all sitting in a nice row under a cover, almost like the remnants of a crashed plane collected and sorted in a hanger. Among the cars recovered was Jeep YJ, probably one of the most collectable and desirable of the bunch.
image credit: YouTube
Some people might still be excited by other cars found underwater, but even in excellent shape and not rusty, water-damaged, and with parts missing they’d still fetch incredibly little on the market. Among them is the regrettable final-generation Pontiac LeMans, which was just a badge-engineered Daewoo. There’s also a ninth-gen Ford Thunderbird and a late-model Ford Focus. At least one of the cars was only the chassis, everything else likely having deteriorated after sitting underwater for so long. Sadly, there’s no Mach 1 Mustang in the bunch, but considering the condition of these cars maybe that’s not a bad thing.
While no bodies were found in any of the vehicles, that doesn’t mean none were used to commit crimes or were crime scenes at one point. An obvious explanation for why someone would drive a car into a body of water is to commit insurance fraud or hide a vehicle police are looking for because it was used to commit a violent crime. Nashville investigators will have to sort through that now.
The team stayed in Nashville, instead of moving on to another area. They were hot on the trail of a missing person’s case involving a man named Bill Simmons, who disappeared on June 15, 2020. After some gumshoe work, they concluded that he and his car might be in the Cumberland River and they were correct. Submerged near a boat launch, the strong current made the recovery difficult, but after several hours they were able to retrieve the vehicle and the man inside. Now his family finally has some answers as well as a new set of questions.
It’s undeniably fascinating watching cars be pulled out of a body of water, similar to that fascination of seeing a barn find discovered. Just like we’ve seen in other areas this team has explored, the potential reasons for driving cars into rivers, lakes, etc. can be varied. Whatever the reason for dumping the cars, the different waterways of Nashville are now a little cleaner, thanks to Adventures with Purpose. | https://medium.com/motorious/divers-find-over-40-cars-underwater-in-tennessee-6782b7f474e0 | ['Sam Maven'] | 2021-04-25 20:15:03.801000+00:00 | ['American', 'Classic', 'Asian', 'Features', 'Europe'] |
NumPy Illustrated: The Visual Guide to NumPy | 2. Matrices, the 2D Arrays
There used to be a dedicated matrix class in NumPy, but it is deprecated now, so I’ll use the words matrix and 2D array interchangeably.
Matrix initialization syntax is similar to that of vectors:
Double parentheses are necessary here because the second positional parameter is reserved for the (optional) dtype (which also accepts integers).
Random matrix generation is also similar to that of vectors:
Two-dimensional indexing syntax is more convenient than that of nested lists:
The “view” sign means that no copying is actually done when slicing an array. When the array is modified, the changes are reflected in the slice as well.
The axis argument
In many operations (e.g., sum ) you need to tell NumPy if you want to operate across rows or columns. To have a universal notation that works for an arbitrary number of dimensions, NumPy introduces a notion of axis: The value of the axis argument is, as a matter of fact, the number of the index in question: The first index is axis=0 , the second one is axis=1 , and so on. So in 2D axis=0 is column-wise and axis=1 means row-wise.
Matrix arithmetic
In addition to ordinary operators (like +,-,*,/,// and **) which work element-wise, there’s a @ operator that calculates a matrix product:
As a generalization of broadcasting from scalar that we’ve seen already in the first part, NumPy allows mixed operations between a vector and a matrix, and even between two vectors:
Note that in the last example it is a symmetric per-element multiplication. To calculate the outer product using an asymmetric linear algebra matrix multiplication the order of the operands should be reversed:
Row vectors and column vectors
As seen from the example above, in the 2D context, the row and column vectors are treated differently. This contrasts with the usual NumPy practice of having one type of 1D arrays wherever possible (e.g., a[:,j] — the j-th column of a 2D array a — is a 1D array). By default 1D arrays are treated as row vectors in 2D operations, so when multiplying a matrix by a row vector, you can use either shape (n,) or (1, n) — the result will be the same. If you need a column vector, there are a couple of ways to cook it from a 1D array, but surprisingly transpose is not one of them:
Two operations that are capable of making a 2D column vector out of a 1D array are reshaping and indexing with newaxis :
Here the -1 argument tells reshape to calculate one of the dimension sizes automatically and None in the square brackets serves as a shortcut for np.newaxis , which adds an empty axis at the designated place.
So, there’s a total of three types of vectors in NumPy: 1D arrays, 2D row vectors, and 2D column vectors. Here’s a diagram of explicit conversions between those:
By the rules of broadcasting, 1D arrays are implicitly interpreted as 2D row vectors, so it is generally not necessary to convert between those two — thus the corresponding area is shaded.
Matrix manipulations
There are two main functions for joining the arrays:
Those two work fine with stacking matrices only or vectors only, but when it comes to mixed stacking of 1D arrays and matrices, only the vstack works as expected: The hstack generates a dimensions-mismatch error because as described above, the 1D array is interpreted as a row vector, not a column vector. The workaround is either to convert it to a row vector or to use a specialized column_stack function which does it automatically:
The inverse of stacking is splitting:
Matrix replication can be done in two ways: tile acts like copy-pasting and repeat like collated printing:
Specific columns and rows can be delete d like that:
The inverse operation is insert :
The append function, just like hstack , is unable to automatically transpose 1D arrays, so once again, either the vector needs to be reshaped or a dimension added, or column_stack needs to be used instead:
Actually, if all you need to do is add constant values to the border(s) of the array, the (slightly overcomplicated) pad function should suffice:
Meshgrids
The broadcasting rules make it simpler to work with meshgrids. Suppose, you need the following matrix (but of a very large size):
Two obvious approaches are slow, as they use Python loops. The MATLAB way of dealing with such problems is to create a meshgrid:
The meshgrid function accepts an arbitrary set of indices, mgrid — just slices and indices can only generate the complete index ranges. fromfunction calls the provided function just once, with the I and J argument as described above.
But actually, there is a better way to do it in NumPy. There’s no need to spend memory on the whole I and J matrices (even though meshgrid is smart enough to only store references to the original vectors if possible). It is sufficient to store only vectors of the correct shape, and the broadcasting rules take care of the rest:
Without the indexing=’ij’ argument, meshgrid will change the order of the arguments: J, I= np.meshgrid(j, i) — it is an ‘xy’ mode, useful for visualizing 3D plots (see the example from the docs).
Aside from initializing functions over a two- or three-dimensional grid, the meshes can be useful for indexing arrays:
Works with sparse meshgrids, too
Matrix statistics
Just like sum , all the other stats functions ( min/max , argmin/argmax , mean/median/percentile , std/var ) accept the axis parameter and act accordingly:
np.amin is just an alias of np.min to avoid shadowing the Python min when you write ' from numpy import *'
The argmin and argmax functions in 2D and above have an annoyance of returning the flattened index (of the first instance of the min and max value). To convert it to two coordinates, an unravel_index function is required:
The quantifiers all and any are also aware of the axis argument:
Matrix sorting
As helpful as the axis argument is for the functions listed above, it is as unhelpful for the 2D sorting:
It is just not what you would usually want from sorting a matrix or a spreadsheet: axis is in no way a replacement for the key argument. But luckily, NumPy has several helper functions which allow sorting by a column — or by several columns, if required:
1. a[a[:,0].argsort()] sorts the array by the first column:
Here argsort returns an array of indices of the original array after sorting.
This trick can be repeated, but care must be taken so that the next sort does not mess up the results of the previous one:
a = a[a[:,2].argsort()]
a = a[a[:,1].argsort(kind='stable')]
a = a[a[:,0].argsort(kind='stable')]
2. There’s a helper function lexsort which sorts in the way described above by all available columns, but it always performs row-wise, and the order of rows to be sorted is inverted (i.e., from bottom to top) so its usage is a bit contrived, e.g.
– a[np.lexsort(np.flipud(a[2,5].T))] sorts by column 2 first and then (where the values in column 2 are equal) by column 5.
– a[np.lexsort(np.flipud(a.T))] sorts by all columns in left-to-right order.
Here flipud flips the matrix in the up-down direction (to be precise, in the axis=0 direction, same as a[::-1,...] , where three dots mean “all other dimensions’”— so it’s all of a sudden flipud , not fliplr , that flips the 1D arrays).
3. There also is an order argument to sort , but it is neither fast nor easy to use if you start with an ordinary (unstructured) array. | https://medium.com/better-programming/numpy-illustrated-the-visual-guide-to-numpy-3b1d4976de1d | ['Lev Maximov'] | 2020-12-28 12:29:25.255000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Python', 'Numpy', 'Numpy Array', 'Data Science'] |
Implement a Networking Layer Using Combine in Swift 5 | Implement a Networking Layer Using Combine in Swift 5
A flexible solution to copy and paste into your new app
Photo by Thom Bradley on Unsplash
In this article, we will learn how to architect and create an efficient and easy to use networking layer by leveraging Combine publishers, Codable, CustomStringConvertible protocol, and a custom Endpoint struct.
At the end of the tutorial, you will have a ready-to-use implementation that you can easily copy and paste in your app and expand it the way you want.
The full source code is available at the bottom of the article. | https://medium.com/better-programming/implement-a-networking-layer-using-combine-in-swift-5-8a83e3ac9bae | ['Zafar Ivaev'] | 2020-08-22 08:37:52.962000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Swift', 'iOS', 'Mobile', 'Xcode'] |
Linda Murray Bullard of LSMB Business Solutions: “5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience” | Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
In 2013 after losing my 26-year career at a health insurance company, I was inspired to write my autobiography, “The Well Ran Dry: Memoirs of a Motherless Child,” and placed it in the US Library of Congress, I ran out of things to do. I did a local book circuit and tried to go national, but it wasn’t time. To supplement my income, I opened LSMB Business Solutions as a part time business I worked at night and on weekends.
In 2015, I joined Steve Harvey’s School of Business Acceleration to learn how to do business well from a group of masters. After four years of studying with various people my connection to him introduced me too, I was ready to move on.
For the past seven years, LSMB Business Solutions has been slowly, but steadily growing as a part time business. In October 2019, I was laid off again. This time I decided to jump all in growing my business. I have saw the lack of knowledge among small business owners and so I used my business to help reverse entrepreneurs who are struggling due to a lack of knowledge. I teach startups and existing businesses how to understand and firm up the foundations of their businesses using online courses, workshops, breakout sessions and keynote speeches.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
The funniest mistake I have made so far has been, due to my own naivete, to believe people will pay for my services after they see the value I provide. That lesson cost me almost $4,000. Over time, after being burned a few times I have learned to be just like the big box businesses. It is important to get my payment upfront and before the service. This is the best way for me to do business. I provide a satisfaction guarantee and haven’t had to return any payments, so far.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
I have had several people to assist me with getting where I am today. When I first started, I was hired by an agency who taught me an overview of business. Then, I was hired by a partner of the Small Business Administration to teach evening business classes. From there, I’ve had multiple people send me referrals and recommend me for different speaking engagements. The list of people who have helped me is probably as long as I am tall. A previous supervisor at that company where I had worked once said to me after a promotion, “If you ever see a turtle sitting on a fence pole, know that he did not get there by himself.” And that is exactly what has happened for me repeatedly. Since starting on this journey, there has been a multitude of people who have supported and helped me. If I started to name them, I would forget someone’s name.
Thank you for that. Let’s now pivot to the main focus of our interview. This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?
Customer service builds relationships. In order to scale a small business, understanding the customers who have spent their money with previously are just as, if not more than, important as new customers. They are a warm audience who have already agreed to enter a business relationship with the business. If the business does not blow it, they will become your greatest advertisements. Referrals are the rewards businesses receive for a job well done. The more existing customers we can satisfy, the less we will need to spend on marketing.
We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we have had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?
Most businesses just want to “sell something.” It is because of that attitude they miss out on building the long-term relationships after the initial sale. Most new businesses are all about the “one and done” relationship where they spend a great deal of money on marketing to new people, not realizing the heaps of money they are leaving on the table by not nurturing relationships with the customers they already have.
Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?
Even before CoVid-19, we were in a relationship marketing era. However, now that everyone is online, it is imperative for businesses to stand outside the fray. Customer service has always been the add-on the big businesses relied on. I can remember the countless meetings I’ve participated in at that large health insurance company discussing customer service issues and how to resolve them. With everyone fighting for the same online dollars, it is literally sink or swim. Every business owner is hoping they have the winning touch that allows the to survive after CoVid-19.
Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?
I was trying to decide what would be the best hours to offer my recent online business class. There are already some classes available and I did not want to duplicate them. A lady on LinkedIn said she wanted to attend a class, but she worked during the day. I told her if she can commit to attending, I would create an evening class, so she could get the knowledge she needed to start her business. She has been with me for eight weeks now and is always singing my praises because I offered an evening class she can attend. She realizes that was not my initial plan and she is grateful.
Did that Wow! experience have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?
She is my best advertisement. She posts her gratitude on LinkedIn and tells me how much she is singing my praises to others. Our class ends in a couple of weeks, but I am her business coach as she and her business partner move to open their new business.
Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a founder or CEO should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.
Giving a customer the “WOW” effect is certainly not easy when you are trying to stand out and get their attention when you are standing among a pack of industry leaders. However, when you understand what experiences you would like your customers to experience during their entire customer journey, you can use these five tips to build a brand that is customer centric.
1) Look at customer touchpoints along the customer value chain to add personable moments (how can you infuse your customer’s favorite color or flower in your communication to them?). Listening to them, and then showing that you heard them, goes a long way in building a good long-lasting relationship.
2) Consider adding opportunities for your customers to have an emotional connection with you and your company (i.e., sending thank you notes or a gift to your high-end customers, holding their hands as they navigate through your product or service, going over and above the normal expectation).
3) Be as energizing after the sale as you were before the sale. Keep the same energy you used to attach your customers after the sale. Be just as engaging and attentive.
4) Help your customers to optimize their experiences while using your product/services by holding their hands to get the best experiences when dealing with complex instructions. Study how you can make them fit your product or services into their lives like it was made just for them.
5) Continue to build the relationship after the sale. Long lasting relationships are how you get referrals. Referrals are the rewards of a job well done.
Most businesses WOW the customers to get their attention for the sale, but few continue to build the relationship after the sale. Applying these tips will ensure you WOW your customers every time.
Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?
Send thank you cards, flowers, free merchandise, and gifts. Customers like receiving thoughtful gifts and surprises. If money is running short, consider emailing them a 30 second personalized video from you or your representative telling them how glad you are they chose you. There are apps that can assist with this. The goal is to make them feel special. Remember whatever you invest in building the relationship will multiply and provide returns in referrals.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I would love to encourage small business owners to become educated on the business side of their businesses so they can stop losing money and closing prematurely. Take a class, watch business videos on Vimeo and/or YouTube, read business books by thought leaders in their industries. All of these things will empower the business owners to make strong business decisions and help them to build their business acumen. This movement would be called “Mind Your Business.”
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Find me on Facebook at http://facebook.com/LSMBBusinessSolutions
Or, on Instagram http://instagram.com/LSMBBusinessSolutions
Or, LinkedIn http://LinkedIn.com/n/lindamurraybullardspeaks | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/linda-murray-bullard-of-lsmb-business-solutions-llc-be-as-energizing-after-the-sale-as-you-were-818671488d36 | ['Alexandra Spirer'] | 2020-12-10 03:02:36.748000+00:00 | ['Customer Experience', 'Entrepreneur', 'Public Speaking', 'Customer Service'] |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.