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Data marketplaces: more academic spin-offs and a boost in scientific breakthroughs | A lot has been said and written about the massive advantages of data marketplaces for sensor owners — industries, smart cities, utility providers, the transportation sector, … — who will be able to recuperate some of their hardware investments by monetizing the sensor data they generate on a daily basis, turning sunk costs into perpetual revenue streams.
On the other side of the story, we have the parties who can use these data to their benefit and are willing to pay good money for that. Aside from the data processors in the ecosystem, any company looking to commercialize a product that is data driven is given the opportunity to develop the product without having to invest in the hardware. One group of potential buyers are academics, scholars, scientists, and researchers who are always in need of accurate, reliable data to back up their (scientific) research.
The limits of data sharing
Academics can get to new data by data sharing, which is increasingly recommended as a means of accelerating science by facilitating collaboration, transparency, and reproducibility. It will lead to open discussions that can boost research productivity and help scholars improve their work before being submitted to a journal. In a study spanning a period of 7 years (2010–2017) researchers concluded that “openly shared data can help academics to accelerate science, increasing the scale of scientific studies and enabling the involvement of scientists from different geographical areas and a broader range of disciplines”. Findings that suggest the transformative power of data sharing for accelerating science.
But although the benefits of data sharing are obvious, its use is still relatively limited, for a variety of reasons. Apart from the privacy issues, proprietary aspects and ethics, there is a lack of training in data sharing, and sharing data is not associated with credit or reward. But perhaps the most inhibiting factor is time. In most cases, researchers simply don’t have the time to wait for their colleagues to complete their research and share the data. What they need, are up-to-date — and if possible real-time — data.
Real-time data feeds
Having to install their own data sensors, is a process that would not only be very expensive, but extremely time-consuming as well. The thing is that tons of useful data already exist, but unfortunately aren’t accessible to academics and scientists, because they are locked away in data silos of large enterprises. That is to say: they were. Thanks to sensor data marketplaces, offering pollution, power grid and vehicle telematics data feeds and more, academics are now able to purchase real-time data feeds from remote devices. Researchers who require weather data, for example, can now buy access to a feed from a weather sensor that is already being used instead of having to invest in sensors themselves.
An extra advantage of a data marketplace is the simplicity of the process. Imagine the administrative overhead when everybody would have to contact the sensor owners separately … an absolute nightmare and likely never worth the commercial contract.
A better world, thanks to accurate data
Thanks to data marketplaces like DataBroker DAO, academics get access to the data from thousands of sensors all over the world and can buy data directly on the marketplace. Not only leading to a boost in the number of potential spin-outs from academia, as projects no longer have the high startup costs associated with buying and deploying a network of sensors. But hopefully also resulting in a boost of scientific breakthroughs, and a better, cleaner, healthier world.
Find more information on databrokerdao.com & join our Telegram channel for all information and questions or drop us a line: [email protected] | https://medium.com/databrokerdao/data-marketplaces-more-academic-spin-offs-and-a-boost-in-scientific-breakthroughs-ffe5eae6bb60 | ['Frank Van Geertruyden'] | 2018-09-11 13:50:19.562000+00:00 | ['Data Sharing', 'Data Science', 'Internet of Things', 'Academia', 'Data Marketplace'] |
Unwrapping the Online Presence of Manchester Open Mind Network | If you are a Manchester student with an interest in mental health, you may have come across new student society Manchester Open Mind Network, who assembled in response to the University’s building mental health crisis. It seems obvious that the success of any organisation online lies in their ability to meet their own goals. Manchester Open Mind Network have two explicit goals on their Facebook page:
1) Support those dealing with mental health issues, and
2) Educate students on how to create happy, healthy minds.
As an important component of building an online presence is to refer back to your goals, it makes sense to talk about “success” in these terms.
https://www.facebook.com/manchesteropenmindnetwork/photos/a.170319890077173.1073741825.170319230077239/170320023410493/?type=1&theater Author: Usman Khan
In terms of their first goal, there are a number of things Manchester Open Mind Network do to either provide support, or a supportive environment. On one particular post, they present as if having an informal chat, “hey guys,” appearing relaxed and personable.
This provides a safe environment for students who may be considering accessing support. Additionally, they champion the bravery of others sharing difficult stories and stress, “there is help out there,” targeted at their audience who may feel alone and without help.
The other type of post format is using quotes lifted from the article being posted. These are often relatable, humorous or emotive in content.
It’s clear that these are designed to be engaging, therefore reach more people, and there is evidence this can be successful. However it can also annoy people, so perhaps this should be used in moderation. Additionally online bloggers agree that an important component of an online presence is being sociable, and it seems simply using a quote isn’t engaging with your audience in the same way as writing a personalized message.
Similarly, they often don’t reply to comments on their posts, or simply like the comment. In doing this they have missed vital opportunities to support their followers, explore ideas in mental health and break down stigma. Instead they limit the support they offer to lists of other services such as Manchester Mind.
A few posts address their second goal. However I can’t help but feel that these posts are upstaged (at least recently) by the sheer quantity of other posts. I say upstaged, because one of these posts has zero engagement. This is likely due to posting borrowed content too frequently, causing people to switch off.
Additionally they do use social media successfully outside of these explicit goals. For example, they post a weekly blog with original, interesting stories and think pieces which has accumulated 225 followers in just a few months. This is a crucial platform as people are more likely to engage with original content.
Lastly, they successfully use pictures; which generates engagement. After all, human beings are immensely visual; and no matter how serious the organisation, people will engage with funny relatable images and memes.
Overall, although they are not consistently “on mission” in terms of their goals, there are a lot of ways in which Manchester Open Mind Network reach their audience. By capitalising on their warm friendly tone and original writing, they could help even more students, which is success in itself. | https://medium.com/digital-society/unwrapping-the-online-presence-of-manchester-open-mind-network-c11dbe09a4a5 | ['Laura Ariel Grant'] | 2017-02-12 20:53:50.506000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Mental Health', 'Digisoc1'] |
Monk episode review — 8.8 — Mr. Monk Goes to Group Therapy | Original air date: October 9, 2009
Director: Anton Cropper
Writer: Joe Ventura
Rating: 9/10
Monk’s insurance will no longer cover his sessions, so he’s forced to go to group therapy, and of course, Harold is already there.
The Monk-Harold rivalry has always been a highlight, and this is the best it’s been done since Monk was questioning Harold about Dr. Kroger at a political debate. It’s some great stuff.
Monk realizes that somebody’s killing off people in his group, and he can’t even contain his excitement, which is probably my favorite little moment of the episode — when Natalie forces him to state this without smiling, and he can’t do it.
The actual mystery plot leaves a lot to be desired, and it does end rather anticlimactically. But this is an episode about Monk and Harold learning to get along, and in that sense, it’s wonderful. This seems to mark the end for Harold Krenshaw on the show and if that’s the case, this is a good finale for him. | https://medium.com/as-vast-as-space-and-as-timeless-as-infinity/monk-episode-review-8-8-mr-monk-goes-to-group-therapy-a6a9f4f1246b | ['Patrick J Mullen'] | 2020-12-21 00:32:59.086000+00:00 | ['Mystery', 'Television', 'Monk', 'Tv Reviews', 'Comedy'] |
Imposter Syndrome: You deserve what you’ve achieved. You are not a fraud. | Do you ever feel like a “fraud”? Do you ever feel that you would be exposed soon? Do you feel that you simply inherited your qualities and accomplishments, and got everything easy by just being lucky — that you might not really deserve the success you enjoy right now?
A friend of mine, Reshma, recently became the new tech head in a startup. She is a humble person, one who likes to read and learn. You’ll often see her reading a book or an article when she is not busy coding. She doesn’t have a CS degree, but has worked hard to learn everything she could, as fast as she could, to reach where she is now. Leading a team of smart coders in a booming startup at such a young age surely calls for a lot of responsibility and pressure — not an easy job in any way.
Recently she confided to me that she is under a lot of stress. What if her teammates find out that she is not competent to be their boss? How will she evaluate them when all of them might already be thinking that she is not fit to be in that role? What gives her the authority or the right to judge others’ performance, or review their codes? Is she even fit to give them feedback? Do they even care about her feedback?
I tried to give her the usual pep talk a friend would give. But I didn’t know what she was experiencing is very common. I’ve seen others go through more or less a similar anxious feeling. Another friend of mine got a chance to do a nice remote gig for a startup in Denmark. It was a small team of 11 and he was going to become the only designer. He ultimately didn’t take up the job because he felt he wasn’t competent for it — even after being selected after 6 rigorous rounds of interviews.
Have you ever had similar feelings? If you happen to be good at stocks, people might often come to you for investment advice. But deep down you might feel that you just got lucky with the money. The market was good, and you fortunately picked the right stocks. Maybe you watched the right YouTube video, or read the right book, or took the right person’s advice. Not only stock pickers, in fact a lot of high value CEOs of successful companies feel the same. They feel that they were simply in the right place at the right time, and hence can’t take much credit for the success they enjoy.
Would you believe me if I tell you that even Harry Potter has felt something like that? He confesses at one point that he is not special — he has always had help from Dumbledore and his friends, and he simply got lucky most of the time.
If you are looking for an example of a real life famous person instead of a fictional character, Maya Angelou once said, “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”
PDF: This is a long-form post with ~2500 words. If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here.
The Imposter Syndrome
This feeling of anxiety is famously known as The Imposter Syndrome.
The Imposter Syndrome is the very same internal experience of believing that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be. It is accompanied by the anxiety that others will eventually find out that you’re not as smart, creative, clever, or capable as they think you are.
These are exactly the same motions my friend Reshma is going through. She feels she will be humiliated, shamed and ultimately deemed to be incompetent, thus confirming her inner fear of being unsuitable for this challenging job into which she has been promoted, and for which she has actually worked so hard.
It is so common that in fact, according to a review article published in the International Journal of Behavioral Science, an estimated 70% of people experience these impostor feelings at some point in their lives. Impostor syndrome affects all kinds of people from all aspects of life: women, men, students, managers, actors, and entrepreneurs.
Imposter Syndrome was first identified in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. They had published a research paper which had Initially theorised that women were uniquely affected by this.
But later research has shown that both men and women experience imposter feelings, and Pauline Rose Clance later published another paper acknowledging the fact that imposter syndrome is not limited to women. Imposter syndrome can apply to anybody who isn’t able to come to terms or internalise their own successes. | https://medium.com/@coffeeandjunk/cognitive-bias-imposter-syndrome-f54f19f5d18b | ['Abhishek Chakraborty'] | 2019-11-03 12:46:24.294000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Human Behavior', 'Behavioral Economics', 'Pyschology', 'Cognitive Bias'] |
How I streamlined my workflow with Indigo.Design | As a UX intern, I had an assignment to get acquainted with the design system approach and understand the advantages it offers. And more precisely, I had to use Indigo.Design by Infragistics for that purpose. I have to mention I was impressed that the Infragistics design team, following the best design practices, uses a design system approach to assure consistency and a more structured way to build quality solutions.
In order to dive into the task, I had to make a sample Home page and Shipping page for a Delivery site. The web design had to be presented in desktop, tablet, and mobile responsive versions. I will lead you briefly through my process of building the sample pages. And I will explain to you what I found extremely useful through using for the very first time the Indigo.Design System for Sketch and the plugin that comes with it. | https://medium.com/ignite-ui/how-i-streamlined-my-workflow-with-indigo-design-f4fb6296f683 | ['Yoanna Ivanova'] | 2020-10-26 02:52:32.781000+00:00 | ['UI', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'Sketch', 'Design Systems'] |
J.K. Rowling’s Advice For Writers With Big Dreams | J.K. Rowling’s Advice For Writers With Big Dreams
A simple and highly effective way to up your game
Photo by Rae Tian on Unsplash
J.K. Rowling is the richest writer in the world.
Making a fortune on children’s book seems impossible. But it happened for her, and it happened again and again.
As legend has it, Harry Potter came to her when she was riding a train. She started writing as soon as she got home.
You never know where and when a great idea will present itself to you.
Write them all down when they show up. Take time to flesh them out and lead you in new directions.
That’s where great writing starts.
But if you really want to be the best writer you can be, you’ve got to do one simple thing repeatedly.
Write the Rubbish Out
Rowling is British. I’m using her word for verbal garbage here.
You get good at anything by being bad at it first.
The first time you drive a car, you better practice in a wide open space like an empty parking lot while school’s out. This is smart because you won’t hit another car with yours while you’re learning how hard to press the gas and hit the brake. You won’t annoy the people behind because nobody is behind you. Do this enough and by the time you hit the road, no one has to fear for their life.
If you’re a parent, you know kids are born with foolishness built in. Your job is to drive it out of them so they navigate life well and stay out of constant trouble.
It’s not easy. But if you don’t do it, you’ll pay dearly for it later.
When you first start writing from a raw idea, it might not make much sense. That’s okay. Just like bodybuilders have to warm up their muscles before they pump iron, writers have to warm up their pens a bit before the words flow with ease and elegance.
You can’t skip this step if you want to be a great writer.
And don’t worry, you don’t have to share the rubbish.
The next point will sound counter to that, but trust me, it isn’t.
Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash
Share your failures
Do you want to be perfect?
I understand. I want to be perfect, too. And I’ve tried really hard.
I can’t do it.
Perfection is at best, elusive and subjective.
It’s elusive because you can always look at your work tomorrow and say, “I could have done that better.”
Don’t torture yourself.
All great art isn’t perfect. It’s finished. The artist stopped somewhere. You must too, if you want to publish and ship regularly.
Perfect is subjective because one person’s awesome is another one’s awful. Want to please everyone? You can’t. Please the ones who care about what you care about.
So show us your flaws. Share your failures. We know you’re not thrilled about them. But that one bad experience, framed the right way, can bring someone the hope they’ve been longing for.
Can you think of a better gift than that?
We can’t relate to people with perfect lives. We love those who succeed despite the fact they’re as messed up as we are.
So go ahead, share that mess.
Choose the right goal
We’ve kicked perfection to the curb.
What do we have left to focus on?
Effectiveness.
How can you leave someone better than you found them?
How can your story give hope to others who struggle?
How deep can you dig to show that you care and that it’s okay to be messed up?
Honest writers make the best connections with readers.
Am I telling you not to aim high?
No way.
Compete with who you were yesterday. It’s the only fair contest. Define your mission so clearly you know what it will take to achieve it. Consider each post to be part of a body of work dedicated to that mission.
Each time you write your heart out you move one step closer to achieving your mission.
It all starts when you embrace the rubbish within. Write it out and you’ll find the gold. | https://medium.com/swlh/j-k-rowlings-advice-for-writers-with-big-dreams-b5ea306baf7c | ['Frank Mckinley'] | 2019-12-27 21:31:04.838000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Creativity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity', 'Writing'] |
12 Best Sketch Tutorials From Beginner to Expert in 2019 | Here we listed 12 best Sketch tutorials to learn how to use Sketch from beginner to expert, with excellent online resource by industry leads.
Sketch is a must-have design tool for designers, but it’s not easy for beginners to learn. Here we listed the best 12 Sketch tutorials and online resource by industry leads.
Author: LevelUpTuts
Views: 1,281,378
What is about:
This is a very comprehensive Sketch tutorial series, with a total of 25 tutorials, giving you everything you need to get started learning Sketch.
Lessons:
Introduction to Sketch 3
Learn about the artboard
Web page
Use Inspector shape
Use text style
Grid and layout
Align and assign
Shapes in Sketch 3
Create and use symbols
iOS design UI tool
Foundation 5 UI Kit
Bootstrap 3 UI Toolkit
Install and use plugins
Dynamic button
5 very useful tips and shortcuts
Very useful tips and shortcuts 2
Plugin management with Sketch Toolbox
Extend sketches with free resources
How to create an animated GIF in Sketch 3
4 great artboard plugins for Sketch 3
New in Sketch 3.4
Local share displayed by the device
How to easily create a flowchart — Sketch 3
Author: Jesse Showalter
Views: 79,832
What is about:
In this video, the author describes all the basics you need to know to use Sketch in your professional design work. After watching the video, you should be able to download, and install, and start using Sketch.
Topics covered:
Brief introduction to UI
Sketchpad
Setting up the grid
Work sensitive
Page vs artboard
Add shape
Detail panel
Set text style
Using symbols
Align, measure and adjust tools
Plugin
Export
Author: Learn UX
Views: 53,239
What is about:
This tutorial is designed to teach you the best and most widely used features of Sketch.
Topics covered:
The main features of Sketch 10
Author: Learn UX
Views: 1,253,343
What is about:
This series of courses is designed to showcase the full power of Sketch and teach you how to get the most functionality. Some courses are theoretical, such as exporting graphics; some courses are more practical, such as practical UI project examples.
Lessons:
Hot key
Practical skills
Export graphics
Vector tools and symbols
Color, icon and typography
Practical UI project example
Author: Skillthrive
Views: 39,202
What is about:
This tutorial teaches you how to create and design a web project step- by- step in Sketch. It is worth a look.
Topics covered:
Use blend mode to fine tune colors
Create custom shapes using Boolean operations
Create a shadow
Make and edit shapes
Add and edit text
Set and save the palette
Author: Cody Brown
Views: 46,988
What is about:
In this video, the author introduces some of the main features of Sketch using a fictitious website landing page to guide you through the production process.
Topics covered:
Insert artboard
Create a grid
Build a navigation title
Create a navigation link text style
Design a Hero slider
Use the symbol design content section
Add Testimonial
Author: Skillthrive
Views: 16,158
What is about:
Learn how to design a music app login page in the Sketch App.
Topics covered:
Use Boolean operations in Sketch
Create an alpha mask
Build a loop progress bar
Make and edit shapes
Add and edit text
Create transparent text
Set and save gradients
Create shadows and fill shapes with images
Author: Jesse Showalter
Views: 20,560
What is about:
This tutorial shares some of the Sketch tricks that this author loves and uses every day. Sketch is out of the box and no plug-ins are required..
Topics covered:
Inner hatch
Reduce file size
Drag an image into the fill panel
Use the command to find the center between the two points
Nested symbol
Author: Joseph from LearnSketch.com
Views: 13,213
What is about:
This tutorial focuses on selecting and interacting with objects on the canvas. Although it is very basic, this is a foundational skill set that is too often ignored.
Topics covered:
Select and interact with objects on the canvas.
Author: Jesse Showalter
Views: 12,640
What is about:
This tutorial focuses on how to organize the Sketch Library.
Topics covered:
Learn how Symbols works
Naming and classifying Symbols
Use plugins to clean up the mess
Author: Angga Risky
Views: 91,585
What is about:
Use Android Studio to convert a design page to Android XML forto work-up as a mobile app start page.
Topics covered:
Convert application design to Android XML
Author: Travis Here
Views: 17,300
What is about:
In this video tutorial, you will learn how to use Sketch and Principle to animate a movie app!
Topics covered:
Other Great Sketch resources:
Sketch best plugin
Mockplus iDoc
Mockplus iDoc is a powerful product design collaboration tool for designers and engineers.It goes beyond the design workflow and helps teams with the design hand-off. It facilitates the handoff by taking designs from Photoshop, Sketch, and Adobe XD, then exporting them into a format that can easily generate code snippets, specs,assets, style guides, interactive prototypes, and the like.
Content Generator Sketch Plugin
When you do a mock up, you don’t have to worry about the placeholder content anymore. It can automatically fill in pictures of male, female, or natural scenery randomly.
Sketch Measure
This helps you add notes on graphic size, distance, color and text attributes to your work. It is, fast and convenient to use with a finished product that is neat and beautiful.
Rename It
Rename it helps you modify the layer name in batches using a, shortcut control + command + R .
Dynamic buttons
This small plug-in can keep the text and button padding fixed inside the tube button. | https://uxplanet.org/12-best-sketch-tutorials-from-beginner-to-expert-in-2019-ca54667feb02 | ['Trista Liu'] | 2019-02-12 08:58:10.188000+00:00 | ['UI', 'UX', 'Design', 'Sketch', 'Designer'] |
How to Budget as an Emotional Spender | How to Budget as an Emotional Spender
Keeping track of your finances without pulling teeth
Photo by Diane Helentjaris on Unsplash
Did you know that 26% of Americans would rather get a cavity filled than create a budget?
Creating a budget is an unpleasant emotional rollercoaster for many, but for many right now, it’s a necessity. Between the recession, unemployment, and the job market, many people are forced to re-evaluate their finances.
But for many people, it’s not hard because they have to look at numbers on the page: it’s because there’s an emotional aspect to their spending. So to create a budget without it feeling like pulling teeth, you need to do an emotional audit as well as a financial one.
And to start with that, let’s talk about a budget meme.
Emotional spenders
This meme seems like a dumb conversation, but it shines the light on the truth about money for many people.
It seems super easy to budget for this person: there’s something ‘non-essential’ on the budget, and it should be more than easy enough to reduce spending on it.
Except that’s not how everyone thinks.
Have you ever met someone who spends far too much money on seemingly random things? They spend $200 on new clothing. Or $2000 on new electronics.
Or, perhaps, $3.12 million on a baseball card.
For these people, these purchases are not merely a transactional thing: there may be a deep emotional attachment to the things that they buy.
To give an example, imagine you had a virtual night out with your friends. You all ordered food from the same place had a couple of beers, and maybe each rented the same movie online multiple times.
The logical spender would see the cost as maybe $40 and could easily see a couple of places to cut spending.
But the emotional spender? They see a (virtual) night out with friends. To cut costs on this event might mean to worsen this experience for a couple of bucks.
For many people, money is not about finances: it’s about the emotional states that it’s associated with.
As a result, money conversations are rarely about the numbers. For many people, it seems wrong that numbers lined up on a page represent dreams, goals, or even safety.
For them, dreams and goals aren’t meant to fit on a spreadsheet, so conversations involving what matters are not about logic.
So how do you budget if you have that mindset? The trick is to do an emotional audit.
Evaluating your emotional attachment
Let’s say that you’ve calculated that you have $75 to spend on a specific day (learn how to calculate your daily number here).
Would you be willing to spend $10 on groceries? Most people would answer yes: after all, they would need to eat.
On the other hand, would you be willing to pay $20 for new books? Some people might, while others might not.
This is the process of emotional auditing, a concept brought up in Living Rich by Spending Smart, by Gary Karp.
He recommends going through your expenses and evaluating the emotional aspects of how each expense makes you feel, with a 1–3 rating.
1 means that it’s either crucial to you somehow or would be a significant blow to your emotional state
2 means that it’s nice to have, but it’s something that can be put on pause
3 means that you have no emotional attachment to the expense
You should start by looking at all of your annual, quarterly, or monthly subscriptions and memberships.
If you’re unsure how to keep track of all of these things, it’s very likely that your bank or an application like Mint has taken your credit card transactions and organized them into specific spending categories.
As you go through these charges, don’t decide what to cut at the moment: instead, just mark how these memberships make you feel on an emotional level.
After looking at your recurring expenses, then look at spending categories that have been automatically organized to see what you likely spend in a month for that category.
After that, you can finish off by looking at individual transactions.
Once you’re done with that, then look over what score you gave each re-occurring expense and figure out ways to cut back on things that you don’t care much about.
For example, if you rated your monthly gym membership as a 2, perhaps you can either put it on pause or switch to a pay-per-visit plan.
These can save you money but it doesn’t put as big an emotional strain as cutting it off entirely.
Sorting out your emotions and money
According to Dave Ramsey, financial management involves 20% head knowledge and 80% behavioral change.
This is especially important for emotional spenders: for many, these numbers can bring joy, comfort, or a host of other emotions.
So rather than trying to force your behavior to change drastically and suddenly, bringing negative emotions such as bitterness, or depression into the mix, figure out what expenses affect you the most emotionally.
If you’re able to come in $200 under budget, does it matter, number-wise, what you spend on each category?
Not really.
All of the advice that is posted online about guidelines is what the average consumer spends on a category if they don’t feel very strongly about something.
So don’t cause yourself more undue stress and anxiety on the rollercoaster that is budgeting. Make sure to take yourself and your needs into account.
I write about Productivity, Psychology, and UX every week. If you would like to become better at UX, you can check out my online courses about UX Research Planning and Design Communication. | https://kaijzen.medium.com/how-to-budget-as-an-emotional-spender-69b30066fbf6 | ['Kai Wong'] | 2020-07-07 11:12:09.406000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Budget', 'Emotions', 'Anxiety', 'Productivity'] |
Universal Manufacturing Corp & Must-have Items for New Mothers | When it comes to motherhood, one of the best pieces of advice is to make the necessary preparations well in advance. Universal Manufacturing Corp. provides a short list of essential products to help new mothers out in the wake of a major transition period.
Teething Ring
Believe it or not, teething can begin in infants as young as 2 months old (while it is common to start at 6 months), and it is important to be educated, while making the necessary preparations. If you are using a teething ring, we suggest using Universal Manufacturing Corp.’s adorable watermelon, strawberry, flower and lemon shaped teethers. Try putting them in the fridge before giving them to your baby, this will help soothe some of the pain they are feeling in their gums.
The Baby Bounce
You will want to give your baby plenty of tummy time, starting from birth. By playing on their bellies, babies develop the muscle strength in their shoulders, arms, and back, that help them learn to crawl. After your first three months with your baby, you may be able to start introducing them to different toys. Universal Manufacturing Corp. has a great baby bouncy that is perfect for babies from the age of 3 months to a year (although they have the most fun with them from three to six months!). Make sure you are always supervising your baby’s bouncing time and be cautious not place it on an elevated surface, as babies have been known to bounce them off!
Newborn Bath
After about three weeks, new mothers will be able to give their child a proper bath. To keep your baby warm and comfortable (and less likely to cry!), try placing a warm washcloth over their tummy during the bath. Another great tip is to get a bath made specifically for your newborn. Universal Manufacturing Corp. has a baby wash tub that comes with everything you need to ensure that the process is comfortable for your new baby and ergonomic for you.
Ensure Comfortable Clothes
When you start buying infant clothes for your new baby, do not go too crazy. They will grow out of these clothes and will likely only wear a few key pieces. Another key tip is to ensure that you do not buy anything with a million snaps or buttons, as adorable as they may be, they are not worth the struggle at 3AM in the morning when you are trying to put your baby back to sleep. Elastic everything will be your new best friend. | https://medium.com/@universal_manufacturing_corp/universal-manufacturing-corp-must-have-items-for-new-mothers-511cd92d8e9c | ['Universal Manufacturing Corp.'] | 2019-05-17 14:55:16.177000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Parenting', 'Nurture', 'Children', 'Baby Products'] |
Towards a breakthrough for lobbying transparency? | Towards a breakthrough for lobbying transparency?
I would like to begin by congratulating the organisers for assembling such high-level and respected speakers from the three main EU institutions. I am particularly pleased to see Minister Tuppurainen here as the Council has not always been a frequent attender of such discussions.
We all, I am sure, welcome the Council’s decision to enter into negotiations on the revised Transparency Register and I personally welcome the commitment of the Finnish Presidency on these issues.
The Parliament and Commission have driven the development and progress of the EU’s Transparency Register since 2011, but the current register is clearly missing a limb, without the participation of the Council.
The rationale behind the Transparency Register is plainly written on its website, a nice example of citizen friendly clear writing. It states that:
“Citizens can, and indeed should, expect the EU decision-making process to be as transparent and open as possible. The more open the process is, the easier it is to ensure balanced representation and avoid undue pressure and illegitimate or privileged access to information or to decision-makers. Transparency is also a key part of encouraging European citizens to participate more actively in the democratic life of the EU. The transparency register has been set up to answer core questions such as what interests are being pursued, by whom and with what budgets.”
That’s very straightforward and the aims obviously worthy of widespread institutional support. We all know what we wish to achieve but the challenge of how to achieve it is firstly the job of the three main EU institutions represented here today, and we wish them well in their negotiations.
And as they negotiate, it is obvious that they should seek the views of interest representatives, or lobbyists for those who prefer that term. Their work is a legitimate and important part of legislating and policy making in a democracy.
MEPs, Commissioners, or EU civil servants cannot possibly hope to know every possible outcome of a proposed law or how a proposal might be improved, and so responsible, transparent lobbying can fulfil a public interest role.
And despite what many people might believe, the EU administration is in fact under-resourced for the major legislative and regulatory role it plays not only in Europe, but in the world.
External input is therefore vital in informing policy makers of the real world impacts of EU policies. MEPs who focus on legislative work, may also be under-resourced. Members of the US Congress for example normally have up to 18 staff, and they legislate for a population much smaller than the EU.
But the public interest is served only if lobbying activity is transparent in order to assess the level and outcome of the influence it exerts over EU policy making.
That is especially true in the EU context where the institutions are geographically and even mentally distant from the vast majority of citizens and need structured and effective transparency to fill that awareness gap.
Without that, the practical consequences can be significant: one business sector gains an unfair advantage over another, innovation may be stifled unfairly, environmental standards are set a little lower, consumer rights are weakened, or, in the case of the tobacco directive or the regulation of diesel-powered cars, the health of millions of European of citizens affected.
This is not an abstract issue and it is important for all of us involved, constantly to make the links between what happens in the offices and cafes of Brussels when legislation is being formally and informally influenced and the impacts on the lives of real people across Europe and even beyond.
The EU Transparency Register is already a very good model of lobbying regulation, which compares well to many such registers around the world, but there are still several aspects that could be improved and must be improved.
In 2016, I set out my views on the revision of the register to the Commission. I stated that the new register should:
1. Contain full funding transparency of all interest groups;
2. Should have improved data accuracy, improved monitoring and improved sanctioning;
3. Should include law firms who lobby;
4. And the right to complain to the Ombudsman should be included in the inter-institutional agreement.
These are some of the issues the three EU institutions are tackling as part of the now stalled negotiations and I was happy to see the Parliament’s negotiation mandate prioritise the retention of the wide scope of the register to include not just direct lobbying but, critically, indirect lobbying.
Global experience suggests that lobbying registers fail or are weak because the definition of lobbying activity is too narrow.
Lobbying has many forms, and new ones continue to emerge. Direct one on one lobbying meetings is an obvious and traditional form but the business of influencing has naturally become more sophisticated and more complex over time.
Major lobbying campaigns frequently will involve public affairs consultancies to do the direct lobbying but also law firms to provide the legal input and that work of the law firm is obviously part of the lobbying campaign.
Another company might never have a meeting with the Commission or with an MEP but instead takes out a full-page ad in Politico supporting or criticising an EU legislative proposal. That is legitimate but it is also the influencing of EU law-making.
This type of indirect lobbying is harder at times to quantify and regulate, but it is a vital part of lobbying and should be included within the scope of the definition — to the greatest extent possible.
My role as European Ombudsman — when it comes to transparency — essentially deals with this issue of influence — the degree to which EU institutions ensure independent quality decision-making.
With good co-cooperation from all the EU institutions and agencies, we deal with about 2000 complaints a year and conduct about 500 inquiries, with many focused on the area of influence.
It has a particular high relevance in the EU context given, as I said earlier, the inability of most citizens to follow what goes on ‘in Brussels’.
We have inquired into the system of over 800 Expert Groups that advise the Commission for example, and the Juncker Commission did make several positive reforms in that area. We also looked into how the Commission deals with the so-called ‘revolving doors’ challenge, a difficult challenge facing many public administrations — when high-ranking officials leave to take up a private sector post that could see them lobbying their former colleagues.
We have also worked to sensitise EU officials as to what exactly is lobbying and we have produced a simple ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ guide for EU officials in their daily work to help them navigate this often tricky area. The Commission and Parliament now use this guide in their training for staff.
We have of course also looked into the lack of transparency of the legislative process in the Council. Although it is a co-legislator, many national governments in the Council still tend to think and act within a traditional international diplomacy framework. Evolving negotiations remain largely behind closed doors with government positions off limits to public scrutiny, despite recommendations from my Office, reports by the European Parliament, national parliaments or even judgements of the European Courts in Luxembourg.
However, I thank the Finnish Presidency for its efforts in this area, and I welcome the fact that so far ten national governments have formed a coalition of like-minded Member States pushing for more transparency within the Council. It’s important precisely because it reinforces the democratic legitimacy of the EU as a whole and in these troubled time, that must be seen as positive and necessary.
As regards the Transparency Register, we do not get involved in the detail, as this is primarily a matter for the three institutions and because we can receive complaints from citizens or organisations registered about the administration of the register.
However, to date we have received hardly any complaints about the operation of the register, which must mean that the two institutions currently running the register are doing a very good job.
Today, we are at the beginning of a new political cycle in the EU with a new Commission soon to take office and a new Parliament. It was encouraging to see that Commission President designate Von der Leyen has made transparency an explicit part of the portfolio of a commissioner for the first time, and a Vice President portfolio at that.
So I am very hopeful for the future of these topics in the EU, and for the future of the EU Transparency Register, not only given the real progress in recent years, but also in light of the commitment of the new Commission, the new Parliament and the Finnish Presidency. | https://medium.com/@EUombudsman/towards-a-breakthrough-for-lobbying-transparency-5f1f37910456 | ['European Ombudsman'] | 2019-11-21 10:23:21.647000+00:00 | ['European Ombudsman', 'Ombudsman', 'European Union', 'Transparency', 'Public Administration'] |
Microsoft Edgebook: The Future of the Midrange Laptop? | A few years ago, I was part of the initial batch of external beta testers for ChromeOS. I was issued a Google Cr-48 (Named after the Chromium Isotope of the same number) with no confirmation email , phone call, or Tweet. It just showed up on my parents’ front door in a brown box. It was actually around the same three week period that Microsoft inducted me into their Office Insiders group and sent me a Dell laptop to test Office 2010 and eventually several Windows Phones and a tablet for Office 2013 so they were concerned where an undergraduate was getting the money to acquire two laptops in less than a week. ChromeOS has always fascinated me since day one though, just the idea of Google making an operating system struck me as cool because they took traditional problems that Apple and Microsoft have been tackling for decades and turned them on their head. ChromeOS started off as literally a full-screen Chrome window on top what I believe is was Fedora Linux kernel, but dang, the thing booted fast. They were one of the first ones that really pushed the idea that you could open a laptop and get to work in seconds. The entire machine was SSD-based with only 16Gb of storage and 2GB of RAM. The RAM and processor were very underpowered, but for running a single full-screen browser for web applications it was enough for a college student. It turned the idea of cloud computing into an appliance, something that nobody to this day have come remotely close to, not iOS, not Windows 10, or even Google’s own Android. With time Chromebooks gained the ability to run multi-window, multiple monitor, USB-accessory, Android apps, and even Linux app support for the truly daring.
ChromeOS can now run Android and Linux apps via Container technology, making them much more capable computers.
The new version of Edge is actually Google’s Chromium web browser underneath with a bunch of Microsoft technologies built on top of it and minus the Google bits like Google Sign-in, Sync, and other settings. New Edge also will come with support for an Internet Explorer mode built-in so that enterprises will be able to deploy Edge as their new standard browser across all versions of Windows, including Windows 7, 8.1, and 10. I see this as the best of both worlds. End-users get an excellent default browser experience and Microsoft gets a standard web browser going forward to target their own web tools such as Office (online), Azure, Web Remote Desktop, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc.
Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) running on Windows 7
There has been talk that Microsoft is working on a new Start Menu and a lighter version of Windows, which omits traditional x86 applications. We already have the latter with introduction of the Surfacebook and Windows 10 S (Now Windows 10 S “Mode”). The new Star Menu removes the live tiles that have been part of Windows since Windows 8.1. I could see Microsoft releasing an “Edgebook” later this year that only starts off in “S” Mode, only running newer Windows Store apps, Microsoft Edge, Windows Explorer, etc, and then have end-users being able to go and simply toggle on legacy application support. I don’t think this should be a separate build of Windows, but rather more like Windows Server and have legacy apps be like a “role” that you can turn on. If people need a legacy app, they could even allow just a single app at a time to run in legacy mode. This would boost performance and security. There is an entire host of end-users who can get by with just a solid web browser like Edge, Chromebooks have proven this much for schools and some enterprise applications. In the enterprise this could be an interesting scenario when you consider you can easily publish remote legacy applications via Microsoft RemoteApp or in the cloud via Windows Virtual Desktop. With OneDrive known folder protection (It moves the desktop, documents, and photos folders into Onedrive and makes them available everywhere and Files on Demand), consumers and enterprise users could have a very lightweight, ChromeOS-like experience.
The new Windows 10 Tablet experience released this week in the Insider Fast Ring
The baseline would run lighter and more securely than traditional Windows 10 and then if you needed the legacy applications for work, gaming, or old hardware it could be just one click away. The biggest benefit would be that you could a much better experience for people at the low end of the market and the midrange line. I could see Microsoft even including an added level of enterprise security using Hyper-V virtualization engine by isolating legacy applications in separate virtual environments like Google does with Linux and Android on ChromeOS.
Windows 10 Xbox app…aka Microsoft’s vision for gaming on Windows 10
Heck, I could see them even releasing an “Xbox mode’ version of the same technology that runs games in a separate Hyper-V controlled environment in much the same way that the Xbox One divides itself into “XboxOS” and the Windows 10 core for the multimedia layer. I think separating user-data and Windows functions and the XboxOS on Windows could allow for better gaming performance as the operating system could freeze all the unnecessary resources and redirect all the power towards gaming, allowing for stuff like MyPhone or other notifications to come through if the player desires, but otherwise everything else is shutdown, all towards the goal of providing the most performance for the gamer. This could also make it easier to maintain a stable system that lets gamers play all of their games without fear that a Windows Update is going to brick their performance. Windows 10 core could continue to move forward, but the XboxOS VM as part of the Hypervisor tree could be a static environment almost as if it were a dedicated gaming PC (I know a lot of people who do this and disable Windows update because it does have a history of messing up with graphics card and other driver performance).
Unrelated, but I love the new dark mode in Office365
Of course, we will probably have to wait until Microsoft Ignite 2019 this November for any actual announcements, but I am really hoping that we do see Microsoft announce an “Edgebook” that runs this new, more streamlined version of Windows. I think that the lower end of the market would really benefit from something like this in the world. Education and enterprise would also really benefit from it as well since modern tools like Microsoft Intune or VmWare Airwatch could make managing this category of devices a breeze. I think that a lighter version of Windows being the new default would be a great boon to everyone.
I’ll be at Microsoft Ignite this year! Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn and we can meet up and geek out over all things enterprise tech! -Hobie | https://medium.com/@hobiehenning/microsoft-edgebook-the-future-of-the-midrange-laptop-e430e41deb69 | ['Hobie Henning'] | 2019-09-01 18:26:10.304000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Windows', 'Windows 10', 'ChromeOS'] |
The Link Building Olympics | High quality links take time and effort — it’s that simple. Olympic athletes don’t train the day before they compete — they train daily for years to hone their skills. Like training for the Olympics, implementing a link building strategy also requires a great deal of effort and a significant investment of time before it starts to win gold medals (high quality links). Without a doubt, links are an important ranking factor — they’re so important that multiple companies have written guides dedicated to link building. Here are just a few:
There’s no shortage of link building posts, and this isn’t meant to be another “complete guide” — it’s a (very fashionably late) discussion of Kirsty’s and Rand’s presentations at MozCon 2016, with a focus on how you can start your link building strategy.
Kirsty’s Presentation
Kirsty focused on the hurdles of link building, how to get clients to say yes to ideas, and tips for sending outreach emails. Let’s focus on sending outreach emails, as so many people do this the fast and easy way with templates. You know it, we know it, and you better believe your recipient knows it — a templated email is one of the most impersonal types of emails you can receive.
Writing a good outreach email is hard, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
Here are some tips from Kirsty to help you write better outreach emails:
Get To The Point And Be Clear
Don’t waste people’s time. Asking, “how are you” or using a lot of filler language before getting to the point of your email makes people lose interest. Don’t just allude to your ask. “I’m currently working on a campaign that I think would be a great fit for you.” isn’t going to garner a lot of responses. Tell people what you have to offer.
Don’t Use Apologetic Language
“I understand you’re really busy” or “I’m sorry for bothering you” — remove apologetic language from your outreach emails. Be confident that what you’re offering is interesting. (Because it should be, if you’ve done your research.)
If You Have Assets Or Information, Include It!
If you have something compelling to share, like survey results, include those details in your first email! Don’t hold back information for a second or third email — you might not even get there.
Don’t Lie And Tell Them That You’ve Read Their Blog
Even if it’s true, it may seem like a lie because everyone says it. Your genuine attempt at getting to know the person better may feel disingenuous because the SEOs before you ruined it — they’ve all “read their blog” too.
Put The Story In The Subject Line Of The Email
We know that subject lines are important — after reading the subject line of an email, we either choose to open or delete. An intriguing, yet clear, subject line will increase the odds of your outreach email being opened.
Use Sexy Language Like “Embargo” and “Exclusive”
Talk confidentially like those fancy PR people do. Strong language will help you sell your point. Kirsty included this link in her presentation — it’s full of PR terms to consider using in your outreach emails.
Summary
Take the time to create a well-formatted, personalized email, and you will increase your email outreach success rate. If you continue sending out generic, templated messages, you’re less likely to succeed.
Even if you craft the perfect outreach email, prepare for rejection. Olympic athletes who train hard aren’t guaranteed a medal — they face tough competition. Your outreach emails are competing with every other email flooding your prospect’s inbox. Don’t let rejection or unanswered emails get you down, keep working!
Want to read more about crafting a solid outreach email? Ahrefs recently updated their blog post about outreach. We highly recommend that you read it!
Rand’s Presentation
Rand’s talk focused on how long-term link building strategies over time yield more links for less work. On the other hand, short-term link building strategies such as building directory links, broken links, profile links, guest post links, etc. are not as effective when used by themselves — they only yield links as long as you’re putting consistent effort in over time. The amount of work you put in on day three is the same amount needed on day 300. Short-term link building tactics can help increase your visibility when your long-term strategy needs a little boost, but you shouldn’t rely solely upon short-term tactics.
Long-term strategies are like the Olympic runner who is dedicated and prepared — they take time and effort, but in the long run, it’s worth it. Rand listed five different long-term link strategies in his presentation, but let’s talk about the strategy that is most commonly used for building links: content marketing.
The Content Marketing Path
Content marketing includes things like articles, blog posts, images, and videos. Many mistake content marketing to be easy — you write a blog, you post it on social media, and you wait for a plethora of the page views, comments, and links to follow. Unfortunately, content marketing isn’t that easy.
Here are a couple examples of things we’ve heard our clients say:
“I want X number of high-quality, game-changing links to this piece of content.”
“Why isn’t my site getting any links? Why can’t you get me links?”
Clients often ask these things when they should be asking, “How can I make my content valuable to my audience?” The content marketing path requires unique, interesting content that is targeted to a specific persona. Writing soulless, boring content for the sake of writing content, or writing content that your audience isn’t interested in, won’t get you links. Examples of good content include infographics highlighting interesting data, an article showcasing a unique point-of-view, or an answer to a question. Brand voice, clear writing, and compelling images or video also help great content come to life. Content takes a lot of time and effort to create — if you put in the time and effort like like an Olympic athlete, you’re sure to see results.
So, What’s Next?
Unlike training for the Olympics, link building doesn’t need to be all blood, sweat, and tears — you just gotta know where to start. If you want to create a sustainable link building strategy, you need a flywheel.
Finding Your Flywheel
A flywheel, by definition is:
A heavy revolving wheel in a machine that is used to increase the machine’s momentum and thereby provide greater stability or a reserve of available power during interruptions in the delivery of power to the machine.
You can create a link building flywheel, where the wheel is your strategy that will increase your momentum and earn you links over time. Rand included an example of Moz’s flywheel in his presentation:
Moz’s flywheel uses email, RSS, and social media to get their content in front of their audience. Moz is great at creating content that its audience loves, resulting in their content getting shared and linked to, which in turn grows their email lists, RSS subscribers, and social media platforms. This cycle allows the company to repeatedly gain links every time they publish a piece of content on The Moz Blog.
Your flywheel doesn’t have to be the same in order to be successful — take a look at your business’s strengths and opportunities to help identify how you can promote your content and get more links. For example, if you have money to spend on paid social, you can promote your content to a larger audience on social media. Or, if you have existing partnerships and relationships with people or companies that will share your content, they can become a part of your flywheel. While outreach can be seen as a short-term tactic, it can also be an impactful part of a long-term strategy.
There’s a difference between someone sharing your content once, and sharing your content multiple times because you’ve built a relationship with them and they’re interested in what you do.
Want to learn more about flywheels? Rand talks about building a marketing flywheel in a Whiteboard Friday video from 2013, which is still relevant today.
Leveraging Short-Term Link Building Tactics
Sometimes long-term link building strategies need a little help. For example, you may not get many links when you push your content via email and social media if your following is small or if you aren’t reaching as many new people as you previously were.
If you’ve hit a wall or a point of friction in your flywheel, you can use short-term link building tactics to give your long-term strategy a boost. Here are a few examples Rand mentioned in his presentation:
Republishing
Guest Contributions
Local Links
Small Site/Content Acquisitions
Be Someone Else’s Press
Bio Links
Resource Lists and Directories
Giving Testimonials
Brand, Image, and Content Reclamation
Orthogonal Alignments (related connections such as social causes, sponsorships, employee programs, etc.)
Not all of these may be appropriate for your company — not everyone can afford to acquire a small blog, for example. Local links will also mean more for small businesses that only serve a specific service area. You need to research and decide which short-term tactics will work best for you in order to increase your reach and support your flywheel.
Start Your Long-Term Strategy Now
Starting is hard and progress may be slow at first. However, Olympic athletes weren’t born with incredible endurance, brilliant aim, or mind blowing speed — they started at square one too. Your first outreach emails won’t be your best and they might not receive many responses. With practice and experience, you’ll learn what people actually respond to and write better emails. Over time, your link building flywheel will gain momentum and result in gold medal links — you just have to start training first.
Even gold medal vaulters started somewhere. | https://medium.com/kick-point/the-link-building-olympics-2ad27d31291e | ['Brittany Zerr'] | 2017-07-05 15:49:06.466000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'SEO', 'Link Building', 'Digital Marketing', 'Strategy'] |
Welcome to Taxopalooza! 🎉 | A workshop about building taxonomies with a bit of extra fun!
Are you a UX researcher, designer, or product manager looking for better ways to organize your customer research data and insights? Are you planning to or are in the process of building a Research repository? 🤔
👉If so, this workshop is for you!
We hosted the one and only Eloise Marszalek, Lead Taxonomist at Udemy.
Eloise designs extensive and comprehensive taxonomies for a living and fun. Part of that involves defining new structured data elements to unlock personalization capabilities, building the semantic foundations for a knowledge graph for learning, and solving findability and product differentiation problems. Previously, Eloise worked at LinkedIn as Taxonomy Tech Lead and as a Search and Taxonomy Analyst at Kaiser Permanente.
Eloise helped us understand:
Why taxonomies matter and how to think about them
Common challenges when building a taxonomy
The problem with hierarchies
Practical ways of evolving your taxonomy over time
The importance of tools
🚨 Bonus! Show and Tell + Q&A Sessions 📺
Watch a group of researchers and product managers shared their taxonomies and the thought process behind them here | https://medium.com/enjoyhq/welcome-to-taxopalooza-4ba8d215a9dd | ['Sofia Quintero'] | 2020-09-18 22:24:10.277000+00:00 | ['Researchops', 'User Research', 'UX', 'Taxonomy', 'Research Repositories'] |
Why tax the rich when you can abolish taxes? | So as we all know, taxes have been a big problem. There’s always budget cuts, and streamlining and trimming the fat. Vital services including infrastructure, public welfare, social security and civil government have crumbled all over the western world in the last 40 years.
What’s worse is that politicians keep saying the same thing: Lower taxes and privatise the government. So you can either choose between old inefficiency, or new inefficiency.
So in order to rebuild our civil governments, we’re going to need lots and lots of money for new and modern infrastructure, public works, sustainable utilities, and so on. Taxes won’t be able to produce this in a million years.
Because obviously only a sucker would privatise things paid for by their taxes, you pay for something and some rich jerk gets to have it for free? I don’t think so. The rich get enough handouts as it is. Not once in the history of humanity have a rich person bought a nationalised service and then made every citizen equal part owners, because that would defeat the purpose of stealing it. So they just steal it from the people, since that’s the profit motive.
Taxation is a system of state revenue, simply put, it’s how the government makes its money. Sometimes through direct measures, and sometimes through modern monetary theory. I won’t go in on MMT too much since that’s a whole other tangent. But one way or another: The state produces the economic resources needed.
But why does it have to be based on donations? Do companies use donations? Is the Dow Jones managed by crowdfunding?
I mean technically speaking I guess it is, but you also get something in return. It’s a transactional crowdfund.
So why then is it that the government doesn’t perform transactions? What’s stopping it? Simply put: Rich people. Or, well, a certain kind of rich people. Obviously professional footballers or famous actors don’t have a lot to do with it, but I mean men like say, Rupert Murdoch or Jeffrey Epstein. Those kinds of rich people, the rich people who make money by owning things.
Because to own a part of the market is to profit from that part of the market. Steve Jobs didn’t know how to make computers, his employees did. He didn’t know how to program software, his engineers did. All he did was own the market they used.
But even though he owned it, the employees still had jobs, and they still made computers, all he ever did was to own it.
And that’s the state revenue of the future: Ownership of the market. For too long, corporations and private industry have monopolised the market, either you’re one of them, or you’re not allowed to participate. Ordinary citizens are functionally banned from this market unless they somehow win the lottery.
Corporate propaganda from media pundits say that the market is fair, that anyone can participate, that there’s just free money coming out of every nook and cranny. And yet, why do so many people live in debt? Why are so many people living on minimum wage? Do they just like that? Of course not, it’s a lie. If it wasn’t a lie then we’d all be rich, and that’s not how the world works. It’s just something rich people say in order to gaslight poor people.
But we don’t all have to be rich; It’s not how the world has to work. We don’t each need our own hospital, and our own ambulance, and our own railyard. We can in fact share these facilities since they can accommodate the needs of thousands.
And you know what else we can share? The market. The government, just like corporations, can own the market, and profit from the market. It creates jobs that are normal jobs, just like working at Apple. Salaries, benefits, employment contract, the works. Only difference is: Instead of Steve Jobs getting those billions, society does.
So the exact same money that fund yachts and horrible private islands can fund hospitals, railroads, social security, pensions, you name it.
Margaret Thatcher famously said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And that’s absolutely right. Everything we do is produced by work, so why on Earth would be waste that work on the frivolities of the 1%?
Instead of taxation, we simply introduce a modern and more sustainable form of state revenue, which instead of controlling your personal bank account, simply controls the market. No more tax burdens on private citizens, instead the government becomes its own self-sufficient institution that provides good jobs and has all the revenue it could possibly need to help tackle the coming challenges of economic crisis, covid and climate change.
The world will be saved by civil engineers, who create renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, mass transit and public health services. And they are going to need enough money to build the future. Let the market do what it does best and fund them.
Because I think we can all sleep easier at night knowing that the market is working for us instead of the Epsteins of the world. The future is not taxation, it is nationalisation. | https://medium.com/@thumblesteen/why-tax-the-rich-when-you-can-abolish-taxes-fa60af5351fa | [] | 2021-09-16 12:33:36.874000+00:00 | ['Progress', 'Future', 'Politics', 'Taxes', 'Economics'] |
Addiction and Imprisonment. | These two words are basically the same. I’ve just got a YouTube recommendation about death and psychosis resulting from the use of synthetic marijuana by prisoners and what a tragedy I thought.
Our culture is destroying itself at an increasingly rapid rate. I see blog post titles all the time about how the systems both social and technological that maintain the status quo of our culture are so beyond complex that no one person can apparently grasp the depth of its function, or rather dysfunction.
Man doesn’t exactly seem to understand yet that the culture one operates in is an abstraction of himself in the sense that each individual both inherits and maintains a basic psychological division in the scope of his life that goes something like this. This is me and this is my culture; we can’t seem to grasp the non verbal depth of the fact that whatever an individual assumes to be his culture is a product of his perception, which is a product of the knowledge one has gathered through 10, 20, or 30 years of operating in a world steeped in the psychological dysfunction of man who still has a great deal of the animal in him.
There is no me and my culture. There’s only me and what I perceive to be my culture. And this perception which is based on acquired knowledge is extremely limited and personal so when one attempts to cooperate with another in this world there is always conflict. And this conflict pervades every part of the life of modern man, so much so that his entire psychology is based on conflict.
So I feel it’s rather obvious that the basic psychology of man is not intelligence. There is a great deal of skilled intellects out there, but these groups of people are limited to a narrow domain of science or arts; which has nothing to do with the basic psychology of the human being. One could be extremely skilled in mathematics, but be totally incompetent with his relationships with other human beings. This actually seems to be what limits innovation in these fields. It wasn’t the competition of you versus me that helped Einstein or Maxwell with their insights that helped get us to the level of comfort and entertainment we’ve come to develop in the 21st century; but it was the you versus me that used their insights to create the nuclear bomb, which is an outward extension of the psychological disorder of man.
If man was basically intelligent our culture would not be based on war. If there was any intelligence at all parents wouldn’t send their children to war to get killed or their arms and legs blown off, no one would tolerate it.
Going back to addiction, this seems to be the only solace the individual has found after accepting the inheritance of psychological disorder. Every man seems to be addicted to something or another; some substance, a vice, a pattern of living; and in this addiction there is the sensation of psychological security from all the chaos one perceives in the world. And in this very innocent way, the human becomes imprisoned in his own psychology and cannot live in this life without fear, anxiety, or regret. What a waste. | https://medium.com/@weerahannaddi/addiction-and-imprisonment-f26a938806e | ['Sammy Weerahannaddi'] | 2020-12-02 21:19:30.825000+00:00 | ['Psychological Disorder', 'Prison', 'Addiction'] |
Collect emails of your LinkedIn network with Python & Selenium | Go to the LinkedIn page, click right on the page and click on “Inspect”. Click right on the area of the email, and you’ll see the <input> tag with id=”login-email”.
email_element = browser.find_element_by_id("login-email")
email_element.send_keys(args.email)
send_keys(args.email) is the way to enter the email grasped via argparse. We do the same with the password.
pass_element = browser.find_element_by_id("login-password")
pass_element.send_keys(args.password) pass_element.submit()
And then we submit.
print ("success! Logged in, Bot starting")
browser.implicitly_wait(3)
We display a message if the connection to linkedin is okay. “browser.implicitly_wait(3)” will tell the browser to wait 3 seconds before to continue, this allows the page to load and thus have a complete DOM (The Document Object Model).
As long as we are logged in, we can go anywhere in linkedin without to re-enter our credentials, so let’s go directly to our network page.
Afterwards, it gets complicated (a quick look in stackoverflow was necessary ;-))…
Indeed, if we start collecting data now, we will only have 32 contacts. Why? Because Linkedin — and lot of websites — use the “Lazy loading content”, and you understood, for a scrapper, it is a difficulty in addition to overcome.
We have to tell the program to scroll down as long as it can do it. The DOM updates itself, and we will be able to recover all the necessary information. For that, we’ll need a While loop:
total_height = browser.execute_script("return document.body.scrollHeight") while True:
# Scroll down to bottom
browser.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);") # Wait to load page
time.sleep(random.uniform(2.5, 4.9)) # Calculate new scroll height and compare with total scroll height
new_height = browser.execute_script("return document.body.scrollHeight")
if new_height == total_height:
break
last_height = new_height
With “execute_script(“return document.body.scrollHeight”)” we retrieve the height of the page, we scroll down until this height, and the page will reload, and a new height page will be generated, and so on, until the page cannot no longer load.
We use “time.sleep(random.uniform(2.5, 4.9))” to simulate a human behavior between each scroll.
My approach was : I don’t want to go from the “mynetwork” page to the profile page of one of my contacts and come back to the network page, each time the program finds a contact.
The goal is to recover the emails, and they are not accessible directly from the network page, it is necessary to go in each profile of our contacts to scrap the email. So I will save in a list all links that will redirect me to the profile of each connection.
page = bs(browser.page_source, features="html.parser")
content = page.find_all('a', {'class':"mn-connection-card__link ember-view"})
Here, I used BeautifulSoup, but we can do without. My knowledge of Selenium has improved after this bot.
All links are recorded under the class “mn-connection-card__link ember-view” of <a> Tag.
mynetwork = []
for contact in content:
mynetwork.append(contact.get('href')) print(len(mynetwork), " connections")
The “content” is a list of all <a> tag with class=”mn-connection-card__link ember-view”. So with a for loop, I parse all the content and append to my list , the link of the connection profile.
# example of link I scrap:
# "/in/towards-data-science-online-publication-41b94a135/"
And finally, this last step will allow us to collect the emails:
my_network_emails = []
for contact in mynetwork:
browser.get("
browser.implicitly_wait(3)
contact_page = bs(browser.page_source, features="html.parser")
content_contact_page = contact_page.find_all('a',href=re.compile("mailto"))
for contact in content_contact_page:
print("[+]", contact.get('href')[7:])
my_network_emails.append(contact.get('href')[7:])
# wait few seconds before to connect to the next profile
time.sleep(random.uniform(0.5, 1.9)) # Connect to the profile of all contacts and save the email within a listfor contact in mynetwork:browser.get(" https://www.linkedin.com " + contact + "detail/contact-info/")browser.implicitly_wait(3)contact_page = bs(browser.page_source, features="html.parser")content_contact_page = contact_page.find_all('a',href=re.compile("mailto"))for contact in content_contact_page:print("[+]", contact.get('href')[7:])my_network_emails.append(contact.get('href')[7:])# wait few seconds before to connect to the next profiletime.sleep(random.uniform(0.5, 1.9))
So I iterate through my network list, and I visit their profile and click (indirectly) on the link that gives me their contact info :
I save the DOM under the variable contact_page, and I find all <a> tag.
With a regular expression, I collect only the <a> tag with the href=’mailto’
content_contact_page = contact_page.find_all('a',href=re.compile("mailto"))
for contact in content_contact_page:
print("[+]", contact.get('href')[7:])
my_network_emails.append(contact.get('href')[7:])
I parse the “content_contact_page” and I retrieve the text beginning at the index 7, because the href is like : mailto:[email protected], and I don’t want the “mailto”, only the email, the Graal…
I append this email within the list “my_network_emails” and I iterate again this instructions for the other profiles, and I save all these emails on a CSV file with the below script:
with open(f'network_emails.csv', 'w') as f:
writer = csv.writer(f)
for email in my_network_emails:
writer.writerow([email])
I tried with a Linkedin account containing 115 connections, to be sure that the “scroll down” works very good, and everything was good (very good ;-))
Thanks to Dhiraj Kadam who helped me to reach my goal with his article.
Go find out more about Selenium, I promise you, this tool will open new horizons. | https://medium.com/@rachidj/collect-emails-of-your-linkedin-network-with-python-selenium-dd000ea1c98a | ['Rachid J'] | 2019-02-11 08:00:35.947000+00:00 | ['Selenium', 'Python', 'LinkedIn', 'Scraping'] |
Welcome to Raise the Voices | Raise The Voices Logo (raisethevoices.org)
Raise the voices is a national non-profit working to advocate for victims of injustices around the world. Founded in 2019, we are volunteer led and run.
We currently have projects in the US, China, Belarus, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Iran, and others.
This Medium page is mainly going to be used to amplify our posts from our website (raisethevoices.org).
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, reach out to [email protected] | https://medium.com/@raisethevoices/welcome-to-raise-the-voices-af50b5885bf1 | ['Raise The Voices'] | 2020-12-18 19:06:13.171000+00:00 | ['Human Rights', 'Iran', 'USA', 'Turkey', 'Hong Kong'] |
Why Do I Read and Write? | Why Do I Read and Write? Prompted by Emily-Jane Rafferty’s Why We desperately Need Creative Writing in 2020, I felt compelled.
Reading fiction, in all forms from whatever young age I was capable of reading, has continued throughout my life. Writing first came in essays at school and letters to the government on subjects about which I felt passionately.
As they are wont to do, life and career forced me to write passive business emails and reports. The only reading for pleasure achieved was of the latest bestsellers on a beach twice a year.
Eleven years ago, I had a lot of time on my hands and a scarcity of books, so I started a blog. It gave meaning to my existence on a barren Atlantic island.
I haven’t looked back since then. Honing my writing skills, reading for research for my passion pieces, and still reading for pleasure. | https://medium.com/illumination/why-do-i-read-and-write-24d583239f11 | ['Karen Madej'] | 2020-12-13 11:59:34.267000+00:00 | ['Reading', '2020', 'Culture', 'Prompt', 'Writing'] |
Why do DEI teams fail? | Lack of top-down, executive level endorsement
Oftentimes companies see DEI work as a grassroots (bottom up) initiative or a HR-only topic. Both of these approaches will lead to failure. Organizations need to show frequent and clearly visible top-down support and endorsement for DEI. This sends the message that DEI is a topic for the entire organization, not just Employee Resource Groups or HR. Otherwise it’s very difficult for DEI professionals to make meaningful progress because stakeholders within the organization don't see the topic as a strategic priority. In order to succeed, you will need a lot of strategically positioned leaders to be bought in and willing to put their time, energy and visibility behind the work.
How to avoid this: Make sure an executive team member is sponsoring the DEI work, speaking about it frequently and championing it within the organization. Make sure the topic is a strategic priority ranked alongside other business priorities. Make sure many leaders across the organization are capable of speaking on DEI and have visible roles in the DEI journey such as executive sponsors of ERGs.
Underfunding, Underprioritizing, Undersourcing
Many companies see setting up the DEI team (or just hiring a single DEI role) as the solution to their DEI problems because it is a visible step that shows they care about the work. It’s not the solution. It’s the start of the solution. If an organization does not properly fund and fully staff the team and prioritize their work within the organization to achieve the objectives, there will be no progress.
How to avoid this: It’s easy. Trust that a DEI team knows what they need to succeed and then put the necessary funding, support and visibility behind the DEI team.
Optimizing for the wrong skills
Here’s my blog where I explore the skills needed to succeed in DEI roles. In summary, project management, communication and stakeholder management are absolutely imperative. So is having DEI expertise or knowing how to build that expertise as you go.
How to avoid this: Hire for the right skills. Understand the difference between grassroots/academic DEI work and corporate/organizational change making. It’s a different approach and requires different strategies.
Working without a strategic focus
DEI has a million topics and things you can focus on in every moment. And every topic is deeply personal and meaningful to someone. It can cause whiplash to constantly change focus and react to lots of things that pop up. DEI work should be driven by an overall long term strategic objective and a road map of initiatives that help achieve that objective. This should be transparent to all stakeholders and employees.
How to avoid this: A DEI team should, at ANY time, know exactly what their overall strategic objectives are. They should know and be able to articulate what they are trying to achieve as an organization. See this blog on creating a first DEI strategy. A DEI team though, also needs some flexibility to revisit the overall strategy if it’s not working — but in general it should not change often.
Not being able to measure or recognize success
DEI work is painstaking and slow. It can be tedious because recognizing success is not always easy. This is where measurable goals with metrics come in. Make sure the metrics are meaningful and communicated regularly with employees and stakeholders.
How to avoid this: Create output metrics as opposed to input metrics (when at all possible). More info on input vs. output metrics here. These metrics should be able to measure whether the team is achieving their commitments or whether the initiatives are successful. For example, in this commitment “We will make technical improvements in the experience and accessibility of our apps and websites to guarantee that everyone can access an inclusive web experience.” An input metric would be how many webpages or web experiences are scored as accessible. But the output metric would be trying to measure the following with a survey somehow: “Do people with disabilities find your website more accessible and therefore are more likely to use it?.” The second one is more meaningful because it directly measures what you are trying to achieve. | https://medium.com/sarah-cordivano/why-do-dei-teams-fail-95f498c46017 | ['Sarah Cordivano'] | 2020-12-19 17:06:20.479000+00:00 | ['Failure', 'Communication', 'Strategy', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Metrics'] |
How We Helped This Fertility Tracking Startup Find its Ideal Audience Through Social Advertising | How We Helped This Fertility Tracking Startup Find its Ideal Audience Through Social Advertising Ideometry Follow Oct 20, 2017 · 2 min read
Ovatemp is a fertility tracking app and ultra-accurate thermometer combo aimed to help women get pregnant or abstain from getting pregnant.
The Problem
Like many new products, Ovatemp needed help finding and reaching their highest yield targets to drive meaningful downloads and sales.
The Solution
Ideometry built out an extensive app download and sales generation campaign. And when we say extensive, we’re talking custom ads on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, as well as custom landing pages.
Through the data from this campaign, we were also able to present Ovatemp with an overview of their highest yield targets for use in future marketing campaigns to aid in their continued success.
***
If you liked what you saw here, check out some of the other branding and creative campaigns we’ve done for a major credit union and a BBQ catering startup.
Need help creating an amazing brand? Get in touch with us today. | https://medium.com/ideometry/how-we-helped-this-fertility-tracking-startup-find-its-ideal-audience-through-social-advertising-fe4007e8a30e | [] | 2017-10-24 14:38:28.011000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Social Media Marketing', 'Advertising', 'Digital Marketing', 'Lead Generation'] |
Annie RUOK? RUOK Annie? | The fallout from recent celebrity suicides of designer Kate Spade and culinary thinkmaster Anthony Bourdain has stirred an odd assortment of ingredients in the cultural stew. First is the genuine sorrow, sometimes bordering on agony, expressed by those who loved one or both of what these two people stood for in the cultural mind.
Having experienced my own version of this turmoil in May following lead singer for Frightened Rabbit Scott Hutchinson’s suicide, there’s something outsized and inexplicable about how connected we can feel to people we’ve never actually met but whom we feel we know on a deeper level.
Reflecting back on it, I sometimes feel like I was one of the Stasi. Here I know so many details, some trivial and some intimate, about a rock musician from Scotland who could walk past me on the street without so much as a glance my way. It’s a strange imbalance, yet one we as a culture are comfortable with. We might even like it that way.
One of the more well-intentioned if awkward expressions of sorrow on social media following the recent suicides has been the confessions/”I’m Here” posts. Someone will share their own past moment when they were especially depressed or even suicidal, express their gratitude for someone who helped them through that darkness or at least didn’t abandon them, and then offer themselves up as someone who is available and willing to be that midnight call or chat window for anyone in their friend group.
I’m here. I’ve been there. I get it. You’re not alone. Use me if you need to.
That’s the general gist.
What is crystal clear is that we have no real idea how to save people from themselves. It’s like we’re all sidling up to the Ring Toss game at the state fair and thinking if we just keep buying more rings, and just keep tossing them into the pile of milk bottles, surely we’ll land one. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, right?
I’ve been a bit angry for the last few weeks, at levels I’m not generally accustomed to or comfortable with, so I’m seeing our cultural response to these suicides and the assumed depression that brought it on as a sort of farce, a comedy of best intentions where no one laughs.
Are we doing it just so we can feel like we’re more in control than we are? From what I’ve read on it, it seems like the path to greater happiness is to have a healthy understanding of how much we don’t and can’t control, allowing more of our attention and energy to go towards the small number of things we actually can.
When I’m not down for the full two-hour anger-and-despair immersion of The Fragile, I have dipped instead into the adolescent Fireball shot of anger and despair known as “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” by My Chemical Romance. It contains one of humanity’s greatest true lies, punctuated with one of the best F-bombs in music history.
But you really need to listen to me
I’m telling you the truth
I mean it
I’m OK
(trust me)
I’m not OK I’m not OK Well I’m not OK
I’m not O f**king K.
Beyond depression and suicide, both of which deserve more words and energy than this entry or 100 entries could muster, the heart of this matter is something bigger and more vague: is there a single person amongst us who has not said — albeit in a less screamy, less screechy, less need-to-be clever way — these very words, in this very order, to someone or many someones around us?
I really mean it. Trust me. I’m OK.
Except sometimes we’re not O f**king K.
And if you keep asking me if I’m OK, I’ll probably tell you that you wear me out. And 99 times out of 100, you’ll take that last response personally, and you’ll take it as a sign that you’re not wanted. And you’ll shrug, throw your hands up, and walk away. This is just what we do. Sorry not sorry, but this is how most relationships — acquaintances, friendships, loved ones — work.
You tried. You gave it your best shot. And, if you’re really being honest, there might even be a “well screw you, too” in there.
We cannot simply fix people. People are not clocks or carburetors. We look under the hood. We check the oil. We move a few wires or thingamabobs, and then we shrug. The balm for anguish is rarely as easy as a single hug or a sympathetic glance, and certainly not as easy as a Facebook chat window, although all of these are rings that could land on the milk bottle.
But when we throw our rings and nothing lands, we shrug and move on. We tried. Onto the next game.
YEAR: 2004 | https://medium.com/the-big-back-catalog/annie-ruok-ruok-annie-d0b9c03464ad | ['The Big Back Catalog'] | 2018-06-19 00:34:05.012000+00:00 | ['Suicide', 'Music', 'Depression', 'Social Media', 'Life'] |
The US can help prevent the destruction of cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh. Here’s how. | The incoming Biden administration must adopt a multi-pronged strategy to prevent the destruction of Armenian monuments.
By Lori Khatchadourian and Adam Smith
In late September, a brutal war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh — adding another tragic chapter to one of the longest-running conflicts in the world. Cities and villages were routinely shelled, killing scores of civilians, until last month when a ceasefire agreement brought the fighting to a halt. A period of violent devastation is over. But as the parties strive to achieve an elusive, lasting peace, the region’s irreplaceable cultural monuments are in peril. Washington must act. There are steps that the U.S. can take right now to help prevent a heritage calamity.
The terms of the ceasefire were shaped by the results of the latest round of fighting. Azerbaijani forces regained control of seven territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh that had been occupied by Armenian forces for nearly three decades, following victories they secured in the nineties. Armenians have now evacuated these regions, but they left behind over 1500 Christian monuments, including active monasteries and rare treasures of medieval church architecture.
As archaeologists who have worked in the region for decades, we are concerned by what this change of borders may portend. Nagorno-Karabakh’s deep history has been fought over as bitterly as its present status and there is justifiable fear that the conflict’s violence will be transferred from the battlefield to the region’s cultural heritage.
Armenian monuments in the territories that have fallen under Azerbaijani control face the real threat of secretive, state-sponsored demolition. Between 1997 and 2006, Azerbaijan sought to fully erase the traces of Armenians in its southwestern Nakhchivan region, destroying 89 medieval churches, 5840 sacred cross-stones, or khachkars, and 22,000 historical tombstones. Even though this destruction has been documented with satellite and photographic evidence, Azerbaijan has denied it, and has barred international teams from inspecting the sites.
A more subtle tactic of heritage erasure is the falsification of the past. One day after the ceasefire went into effect, Azerbaijan’s Minister of Culture tweeted that a 9th-13th century Armenian monastery called Dadivank, whose long-term jurisdiction is uncertain, was “one of the best testimonies of ancient Caucasian Albanian civilization,” despite the many Armenian inscriptions that adorn its walls. The site was not created by “Caucasian Albania,” a kingdom that fell in roughly the 8th century. Azerbaijani historians have repeatedly drawn questionable linkages between Caucasian Albania and Turkic Azerbaijan in an attempt to establish indigeneity and develop a counter history to the long occupation of Armenians in the region. A few modifications to these churches and monasteries — an erased Armenian inscription here or there — and “Caucasian Albania” will have a new site added to its inventory. Heritage appropriation is just as toxic to our understanding of the human past as its silent demolition. Appropriated sites linger as heritage zombies, neither fully extinguished nor truly alive.
America remained disengaged during the fighting, and Washington was entirely cut out of the ceasefire negotiations in which Russia played the leading role. But the current fate of these monuments poses a test case for President-elect Joseph Biden, who has outlined a policy of global engagement, in stark contrast to President Trump. In 2017, Trump withdrew America from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) — the only multinational state-led agency whose mission includes the protection of heritage. Later, he went further in his disregard for global heritage, famously threatening to bomb Iranian cultural sites.
We believe that the Biden administration can pursue three strategies to begin restoring America’s role as a global leader in the protection of cultural heritage, beginning with the lands under contention in and around Nagorno-Karabakh.
First, America must engage in bilateral diplomacy with Azerbaijan, to clearly communicate that the destruction of Armenian monuments will not be tolerated. It must be made clear that attacks on heritage sites will result in a consequential U.S. response. This would fit with policy objectives that Biden has previously discussed, including his interest in promoting democracy and eradicating corruption in authoritarian countries like Azerbaijan.
Second, Biden must swiftly re-engage America with UNESCO. To be sure, the organization is not a panacea. Its World Heritage Committee is often overseen by the very states that it needs to hold accountable. The organization’s responses are also often marred by political deal-making. But for all its flaws, it has a role to play in protecting imperiled sites. By rejoining, the United States can help shape UNESCO’s priorities in Nagorno-Karabakh and elsewhere. This may also be an area of potential cooperation with Russia. In recent weeks, the Kremlin has recognized the threats to Armenian heritage in the region and has called on UNESCO to intervene. As a party to UNESCO, the U.S. should offer assistance in the training of Russian peacekeepers for cultural heritage protection.
Lastly, the Biden administration needs to help stand up a program of heritage monitoring similar to the Syrian Cultural Heritage Initiative, developed in 2014. That effort focused on tracking physical damage caused by both state actors and looting during wartime. In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, there is the opportunity to not just document heritage destruction but possibly deter it through regular, highly visible long-term surveillance efforts. We urge the State Department to grant American archaeologists who specialize in this region access to high-resolution satellite imagery. This will allow us to mount the first program of long-term, systematic satellite-based monitoring during peacetime in a region of intense cultural discord. Such work could create a template for heritage protection in other ceasefire agreements around the globe where cultural heritage is imperiled. Protecting cultural heritage sites will be vital to building the kind of trust that will be central to any long-term peace in the region.
On October 13, 2020, as the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh raged, Biden released a strongly-worded statement bemoaning America’s lack of engagement, and calling on the Trump Administration to “tell Azerbaijan that it will not tolerate its efforts to impose a military solution to this conflict.” This January, Biden will be in the White House. Protecting these monuments — objects of historical importance and deep cultural and emotional attachment — may help strengthen the fragile, uncertain pathway to peace. | https://medium.com/cornell-university/the-us-can-help-prevent-the-destruction-of-cultural-heritage-in-nagorno-karabakh-heres-how-b809b87a5e79 | ['Cornell University'] | 2020-12-15 14:35:40.063000+00:00 | ['Karabakh', 'Armenia', 'Azerbaijan'] |
Keyword Planner Can Do All of These Things Except … | Many digital marketing specialists have been using Google Keyword Planner in order to do keyword research for their marketing, SEO strategies, or PPC campaigns. It’s precise, free, easy to use, and you can even use it without having to run a Google Ads campaign.
However, there are a few essential things that Google Ads (previously called Google AdWords) Keyword Planner can’t do. Let’s take a look.
Keyword Planner Can Do All Of These Things
Search for new keywords
All you’ve gotta do is enter words or phrases (or even lists of keywords) into the Keyword Ideas tool and get hundreds or thousands of related results.
You can then:
See average monthly search volumes for each keyword idea
Add keywords to your Ad Plan to create new search network campaigns, and get forecasts by language, location, or network
Filter the results by text, search volume, bid prices, organic impressions, or level of competition
Use the results to make the most competitive bids
Get Ad Group ideas to help you properly setup your Google Ads account
See visuals broken that detail platforms, locations, and search trends
Add keywords into an Ad Group so you can start running ads for them
Download the results to a CSV file
Get search volume and forecasts
If you’ve already got a list of keywords and you just want to view their metrics, no problem!
Just paste them into the box and click “Get Started”:
You may wonder where the keyword suggestions are, but don’t worry, that’s not the purpose of this feature. Rather, Keyword Planner will analyze the historical statistics for these keywords, and show you how many impressions and clicks you should receive if you ran ads for these keywords.
You’ll also get an idea for how much these clicks will cost you.
One cool trick is to click the “Historical Metrics” tab to see average search volumes for your keyword list:
Get exact search volume
You may have noticed that Google Keyword Planner typically just shows you a wide range for average monthly search volume:
That’s a bit annoying, because the difference between 10,000–100,000 is HUGE.
However, savvy Keyword Planner users have figured out a life hack to get around this.
Check the box for the keyword you want exact search volume for Click the blue “Add to Plan” button that appears Click “Plan Overview” on the left side
You’ll then see your chosen keyword in a table. The Impressions column is what you’re interested in.
This is the number of people searching for that keyword each month. Good thing we looked this up, right? Because 1,886 is a lot closer to 1,000 than 10,000.
This increased accuracy can be helpful in planning your marketing campaigns and budgets.
Find keywords related to a website (ie “the competitor hack”)
One flaw of the Keyword Planner is it only shows you keywords that are very similar to your search phrase.
Let’s assume, for instance, that your company sells t-shirts. Here’s what you see when searching for the seed keyword “tshirts”:
Notice they’re all pretty generic, and closely related to your search word “tshirts”.
Now let’s try a different method. Instead of selecting “Start with Keywords” we’ll use “Start with a Website”, and enter the URL of a competitor. For this example that competitor is teepublic.com:
Now the new keyword list we get contains longer-tail keywords that are way less generic:
As you can see, this method is very effective for discovering keywords that your competitors rank for, many of which you wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Except It Can’t Do These Things
Show Indications of Trends
Experienced advertisers know the value in finding trending topics online. Unfortunately Google’s Keyword Planner doesn’t show trending keywords, as it shows its results based on search volumes over the last 12 months.
The good news is there’s plenty of other tools out there that DO show this data. Here’s some of the more popular ones:
Keyword Tool (this one is neat because it allows you to search trends in a bunch popular platforms like Google search, YouTube, Instagram, and even Amazon)
Wordtracker (provides bonus metrics like “In Anchor and Title” counts that Google Trends doesn’t give you)
Buzzfeed Trending (see what’s going viral)
Reddit (see what’s popular on the front page of Reddit)
Provide Quality Score Estimates
Since Keyword Planner doesn’t know which keywords relate to which landing page of yours, it cannot provide Quality Score estimates. In order to see those values, you need to use the Google Ads platform itself.
Multiply Keyword Lists
The old AdWords Keyword Planner used to have a feature called “Multiply keyword lists to get estimates”. With this AdWords tool you could combine multiple keyword lists to get new and different permutations. However, the new version doesn’t provide this functionality anymore.
Show Specific Desktop and Mobile Traffic Data
In the past, it was possible to filter search volume by device (such as a desktop computer or mobile phone). It’s important to know this, so you can optimize your website and landing pages for the most commonly used devices.
But Google Keyword Planner removed that feature. Luckily, though, you can jump over to Google Analytics and get this data — however it will only appear for keywords you’re getting traffic for already.
Free Keyword Planner Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
Want a step-by-step template for using Google Keyword Planner? This is useful for delegating to a virtual assistant. You can assign specific tasks within it and even set due dates for them. Here it is: How to Use Google Keyword Planner for Free.
Conclusion
As you can see, Keyword Planner is a fantastic tool with many useful features, however it can’t do everything! Fortunately for all the gaps in its functionality, there’s always an alternative tool out there that can do what you need.
Got any gripes about Keyword Planner that we didn’t cover? Please let us know in the comments below. | https://medium.com/@kanethomas/keyword-planner-can-do-all-of-these-things-except-a583259e420c | ['Kane Thomas'] | 2019-12-23 02:28:18.317000+00:00 | ['PPC', 'PPC Marketing', 'Google Ads', 'Keyword Research'] |
Hello, Medium !! (And The case I’m working on.) | My first story of Medium!!
Hello!!
I’m Virtual Youtuber “Yuki Takeda”!
In Medium, I want to talk about a somewhat unusual case that I’m involved in.
This is not talked about on the blog or on Twitter, etc.,but it’s a definite truth.
If I write about it on Twitter or my blog, my identity might be exposed and I might get banished from the site.
Oh, we’re on linkedin and facebook in English!
(So if you have any promising information, please let us know!)
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
Well. Do you know about the “Taiwan 228 Incident”?
Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash
These are events that are not in the textbooks of my native Japan, and (presumably) have not survived in Chinese documents.
But they really do exist.
These are events that relate to all of Taiwan, Yonaguni Island in Japan, and to China at the time.
It happened on February 28, 1947.
After seizing Taiwan from the Japanese, the Kuomintang regime used the pretext of putting down a rebellion, and killed scores of people across Taiwan, in the name of The “February 28 Incident”.
Among the tens of thousands of alleged victims were Okinawan officials who had remained in Taiwan and were “foreign Some Okinawans have yet to be certified as victims of the disaster.
(As of July 2020, one case has been admitted.)
Our struggle continues!!
Photo by 傅甬 华 on Unsplash
I am tired of making this long, so I would like to write another article about the details of the Taiwan 228 Incident and what I actually experienced in Taiwan and the tragedy that happened to my great-grandfather.
Thank you for your interest! | https://medium.com/@caelum0922/hello-medium-and-the-case-im-working-on-e54b9b80613f | ['Yuki Takeda'] | 2020-07-08 06:57:57.336000+00:00 | ['Foreign', 'Vtuber', 'Taiwan', 'YouTuber', 'Japanese'] |
We Do Need to Make America Great Again, But Here’s How | With the Trump Presidency almost certainly soon coming to an end, those of us on the political left can now not only breathe a little easier, but also restore a certain level of nuance that has been missing from the hysteria-induced conversation brought on by President Trump’s bombastic leadership and his enablers and sycophants across the Republican party for the past four years.
Where such nuance is sometimes missing is in discussions about the underlying meaning of “Make America Great Again” and the implications of its widespread appeal. For quite some time on the left and far left, the conversation has gone basically like this: “America was never great. It only felt great if you were white, and possibly also male. The people who want to ‘Make America Great Again’ either want to reestablish past norms of male dominance over society or restore white supremacy to the way it operated in previous decades.”
This narrative is significantly incomplete though. Yes, of course there is a disturbingly large throng of people who either want men to have more dominance again and see a return to traditional gender roles, or who want the country to be decidedly white (and probably also Christian and probably also straight) to the disenfranchisement of our country’s minorities. However, that narrative overly simplifies and essentializes the appeal of Make America Great Again — and if we on the left don’t get the full diagnosis of its appeal correctly, we are liable not only to alienate potential future Democratic voters (for whom white supremacy and patriarchy are not essential to their vision of America) but also fail to maintain turnout in upcoming elections cycles among existing recent Democratic voters, many of whom are exhausted and disenchanted despite the recent Biden victory.
There are indeed some legitimate and morally applaudable categories of ways in which America was once “great” that are largely absent from American life today. This appeal to particular categories of past American greatness remains valid even when one recognizes and accepts that life today is in many ways better for a broad array of marginalized peoples who were more and more marginalized the further back into the past you chose to examine.
First, in certain ways, America in the mid-twentieth century achieved certain benchmarks of what I will call National Greatness. We regularly racked up major accomplishments as a country. The enormous range of such achievements is belied by the overly simplistic t-shirts and bumper stickers one sometimes sees that refer to America as “undefeated two time world war champs”: For many decades, we experienced not only rapid economic growth but that growth broadly accrued up and down the socioeconomic ladder in such a manner that inequality actually decreased for decades. Stakeholder capitalism, not shareholder capitalism, was all the rage. Meanwhile, we built a world class system of interstate infrastructure, expanded a massive system of state-run higher education institutions, eradicated several infectious diseases, put human beings on the moon, achieved a modicum of improvement to civil and women’s rights after decades of fighting over those issues, and in various ways maintained a position as the undisputed leader of the so-called “free world,” or “First World.” That supremacy was epitomized when the leader of the so-called “Second World”, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, begged to visit Disneyland and its literal Fantasyland, while touring our metaphorical fantasyland of a country, and our political leaders taunted him by refusing to permit it.
People of a certain age, many in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, lived through a time when America routinely scored “greatness” in its national endeavors in spite of, or perhaps because of, the relative proximity and memories of world wars and Great Depression, as well as the ongoing existential threat of nuclear annihilation and a global battle to demonstrate decidedly that capitalism was better than communism.
In other ways, America of the mid-twentieth century also regularly enabled certain benchmarks of Individual Greatness experienced by workers and their families, particularly if you were white, although not exclusively. In the mid-20th century, 40 percent of the labor force was unionized, and labor’s share of national income was about 65 percent compared to about 55 percent today. A typical single worker’s wages could pay for a home, a car, low cost community college education, and healthcare, in just 40 weeks of work, with the remaining weeks of a year’s pay enabling other forms of discretionary spending or savings. Real hourly wages for the average worker climbed steadily until 1973. Healthcare spending cost our society just eight percent of GDP, not the 18 percent of today.
Over time though things changed. Workers who had been relatively shielded by their employers from many of the vicissitudes of the business cycle and global markets were eventually told “now you’re on your own.” Meanwhile, a series of poor public policy choices saw the prices of housing, education, and healthcare explode in recent decades far faster than general inflation. Today, it takes MORE than 52 weeks of an average single wage to pay for that basket of middle-class goods that took just 40 weeks of one earner’s pay in the past. Many single-income households fail to maintain a middle-class life today, and for many dual-income households, the exploding cost of child care eats away at the family’s supplemental earnings. These changes may explain in part why young adult Americans today marry later, have children later, and have driven the birthrate down to a 100 year low for several consecutive years.
For many people of a certain age, mainly in their 30s, 40s and 50s, it was normal to grow up in families in which parents or grandparents without a higher education were routinely able to achieve a middle-class lifestyle and could rely on steady work and security in retirement. Their parents and grandparents had the expectation of careers-for-life at a single company, and an array of other supports including defined-benefit retirement plans and no-deductible health insurance. Yet these same 30, 40 and 50-somethings today, particularly those without a college education, can’t rely on those old work norms, outside perhaps government employment or the measly 10 percent of jobs which are still unionized. Today’s 20-somethings at least arrive in the workforce with no delusions of expecting such benefits or job security to begin with, let alone affordable starter houses or cost-efficient higher education that were more widespread in the past.
If the Democratic party wants to win elections regularly, particularly with geographical and constitutional biases built against its relatively populist platform, it has to recognize that both these categories of National Greatness and Individual Greatness that were more accessible in the mid-twentieth century are part of the appeal of the call to “Make America Great Again.” This is a primary motivation for many voters, compared to a desire to send gays back into the closet, get women back in the kitchen, or keep black and brown Americans from not “knowing their place”.
The Democratic party needs to achieve rapid successes in helping ordinary working families get higher wages, in offering forms of insurance that minimize downsize risk, and in lowering the costs of various hallmarks of middle-class life such as housing, education, healthcare, and transportation. Meanwhile, it might be nice if we had some large -scale national projects to rally around as a people that could be sources of national, bipartisan, civic pride, after what feels like two decades of “losses” that began with 9/11 and proceeded into a trio of recessions, numerous government shutdowns and manufactured debt-ceiling crises, pandemic and global embarrassments.
To be clear, America was not actually some utopian fantasyland of civic and moral perfection in the twentieth century — and the era’s list of serious detractions is lengthy, whether one looks at segregation or McCarthyism, the Drug War or the Vietnam War. The promise of true equality and a great society remains in an unrealized future. But our past did feature an easier road for even unskilled workers, and the country as a whole regularly accomplished world class achievements later copied overseas, while such achievements are lacking today. The left should recognize that these are major motivations behind the hunger to “Make America Great Again.” They are, in fact, the kinds of qualities and achievements the Democratic party ought to be more suited to actually restoring, what with their party’s belief in actual governance and systemic policy program ideas. We need to rack up such “wins” again for the American people.
If we don’t, this screwball version of America will keep on keeping on for the foreseeable future, Trump or no Trump. | https://medium.com/@mikehines_77866/we-do-need-to-make-america-great-again-but-heres-how-42e471f29404 | ['Michael Hines'] | 2020-11-13 19:39:21.779000+00:00 | ['Make America Great Again', 'Democratic Party', 'America', 'Middle Class', 'Election 2020'] |
State of the housing for workers in a blue-collar economy | Companies are putting tremendous effort into hiring these employees from selected? countries. In the Czech Republic, it is mainly Ukraine, Slovakia, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. They recruit through various channels — own recruiting points, social&marketing, but mainly specialized employment agencies.
Due to the high demand for these employees, recruitment is very competitive. Employees and agencies need to provide excellent service in terms of paperwork and moving agenda. Therefore it is becoming the industry standard that housing becomes a mandatory part of the job offer.
Foreign workers are accommodated in dedicated hostels/dormitories or apartments. Usually, they stay in rooms with 2–6 beds, with a shared bathroom, kitchen and living room. The conditions in these accommodations are not always of good quality. The length of the stays depends on the industry — a few weeks for construction companies and long-term stays for manufacturing companies.
These hostels/dormitories are not like hotels or hipster hostels, which travellers book during holidays. The majority of them are not listed on any modern booking portals or marketplaces. They do not use any property management software and surprisingly some of them don’t even have a proper computer. These hostels are owned by regional old-time entrepreneurs who don’t know anything about digitalization and innovation. It is not hard to believe that accommodation in this vertical is the last bastion of accommodation that is still pen&paper based and is ready for disruption.
We are all very familiar with booking services such as booking.com, Airbnb, and Trivago when we travel. It is hard to imagine our planning without these services. But this is not applicable when it comes to accommodation booking and planning for the workers. It is important to say that it is always the company or the agency who does the booking. | https://medium.com/@karel-zheng/state-of-the-housing-for-workers-in-a-blue-collar-economy-f8af9b8943a2 | ['Karel Zheng'] | 2020-10-28 15:46:14.820000+00:00 | ['Marketplaces', 'Accommodations', 'Seed Investment', 'SaaS', 'B2B'] |
The Guide to Architect’s Career Path | MARAY | It has been 11 years since I started my architectural career path. I went from studying at a relatively good university in Russia to a career in one of the best firms in Germany. There have been many things that I would do differently, if I go back in time, and I would like to share my experience so that you do not make the same mistakes and learn something useful.
Should I study architecture?
A lot of people, including myself, study architecture without a proper understanding of the field and the profession. It is a crucial question to ask before choosing a career or enrolling in a degree. A lot of the time, people choose a career because the decision comes from someone else.
There is a couple of essential factors to consider. Every profession has its upsides and downsides. If you do not enjoy dealing with the downsides, then probably that profession is not for you. An important question to answer is whether you would enjoy solving problems in architectural design. To answer it, you have to understand what the profession is about and even have some experience before applying to a university.
Around 20–30% of students dropped and changed their major because during my Bachelor’s degree program. Another 40% chose an alternative career path, such as visualization, consulting, or interior design.
What do architects do?
There is an established romantic image of architects that misguides a lot of people. It is considered a prestigious profession and one that will most likely provide food and shelter. There’s a general lack of knowledge about architects and what they do.
Architecture, from the Greek ἀρχιτέκτων arkhitekton “architect”, from ἀρχι- “chief” and τέκτων “creator”, is both the process and the product of planning, designing, and constructing buildings or other structures, according to Wikipedia Architecture is the first form of the arts. It is also considered one of the most ancient professions.
To fully understand a profession one must learn what kind of problems a profession solves.
Here is a list of problems that architects face during work.
Problems that architects solve
Design buildings from start to finish.
Solve client’s problems to meet their needs.
Cooperate with different departments to comply with local regulations.
Cooperate with different firms that make you more problems than solve.
Participate in architectural competitions with a low win rate.
Not expect to win a project just by doing high-quality work.
Not be able to prove your position because most of the design decisions are empiric and based on personal tastes.
Change the design thousands of times to find the best solution that satisfies everyone.
Adapt ideas to meet the budget and constraints.
Keep in mind that architecture is a complex and conservative profession. Therefore, it is slow to change and keep up with the progress in technologies.
Hard to work remotely as it usually requires to work in teams and to have powerful hardware. Smaller projects can be done on laptops, though.
Overtime work is an established practice in the whole world. Be ready to work for free and long hours.
Studying and practice for years to finally be able to call yourself an architect. Most of the countries require exams for licensing.
Architecture is mainly about long-term gratification. It can take several years to complete a project. A lot of the time, a project will be redesigned or shut down.
Architects are not rich.
Advantages of studying and practicing architecture
You can build a good 3-dimensional sense and thinking.
You can develop good taste.
You can become well rounded. The architecture consists of many different fields that influence the project. A good architect should have a good knowledge of each area.
You can develop system thinking.
You can learn many useful 2d and 3d applications that extend to other professions as well.
You can feel a strong satisfaction when the project you have been working on for several years is finally built and completed.
You can create something that will be in use for decades. Or demolished if the design was of low-quality.
You can hear “Oh wow that’s cool!” when you tell people that you are an architect.
There are three main phases in a project design: Schematic Design, Design Development, and Construction Documentation. Some firms divide the phases into the initial concept design and the planning phase.
Schematic design involves designing the concept. This stage includes research, defining the idea, overall spatial solutions, aesthetics, and structure. Architectural competitions are usually done in this phase to present the concept and the proposal.
Design development is the phase where architects adapt the concept to local laws and project requirements. All the main drawings and details are developed for the next phase.
Construction documentation is the final stage, where drawings are made ready for construction. During this stage, architects supervise the construction to make sure everything goes according to the plan.
Some people like to work on the initial phases, while others prefer the planning phase. In my opinion, every architect should complete at least several buildings from the concept to the construction to have a deep understanding of all the technical requirements.
How to start a career?
After you learned in theory what architects do, what kind of problems they solve, and what are the advantages of being an architect you can ask yourself whether you still want to build a career in architectural design. If your answer is “Yes, I want to become an architect”, then you are most likely very passionate about architecture, and it outweighs all the downsides.
If you are hesitant and cannot decide, you should get first-hand experience in an architectural firm. If I go back in time, I would take a gap year after high school and work for free in a local firm to understand the profession better. In addition to that, I would also explore other jobs to have something for comparison.
If your university program allows you to switch the major or choose one in the second or third year, you can work part-time to get insight. It is worth spending time in the beginning then regret it later.
However, if you think that you made a mistake after finishing your undergraduate degree, it is still not late to think about alternative career paths. More on that later.
Where to study architecture?
The most common scenario for studying architecture is getting a Bachelor’s degree in your home country and a Master’s abroad. This way, you have different perspectives and experiences from distinctive architectural schools.
The best architectural schools are in Europe and the US. A renowned school can make starting your career easier but do not chase the name. You have to research each university you are interested in. The program should be tied with your aspirations. Each school accepts only those students whose interests align with those of the school. If you like computational design, then you should enroll in a program that focuses on that.
Your Bachelor’s degree will also influence your chances for a Master’s degree. One of the most important requirements for a Master’s degree application is the portfolio of your undergraduate and professional projects. The kind of projects and the experience you get will matter a lot in your future applications. Pay attention to the quality of the projects you work on. They will form the basis of your portfolio, the representation of your skills and experience. Take as many summer internships as you can. Your goal should be to have experience by the time you graduate. It will be much easier to land a job when you know people and already proved yourself during the internships.
What do architects learn at school?
Successful architects should have a broad range of knowledge, which includes humanitarian and natural sciences.
Humanitarian subjects can include arts and human anatomy, the history of architecture and human psychology, social and economic sciences, presentation methods and storytelling, marketing, and project management.
Natural sciences can include physics, materials, structures, geodesics, different kinds of software, and even computer science.
Architecture encompasses a lot of areas and successful architects manage to pay attention to all of them. A well-designed building or space should meet the demands of the market, be comfortable to use and sustainable, safe, and inclusive.
You will apply most of what you learn in the projects. The type of projects ranges from school to school. In more traditional ones you can be given a specific brief and asked to design accordingly. In progressive schools, there is more freedom and the projects are more conceptual.
How many years do you need to become an architect?
The traditional path is the Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, which together usually take 6 years. You can start working even after an undergraduate degree. However, if you care to be licensed and be called an “Architect”, you have to receive training and take exams.
Taking a break between the degrees and knowing the profession better is a good strategy. Once you have a deeper understanding, you might change your opinion about your career development and change its course.
List of careers
The list of architectural careers is usually divided by scale. Town and Urban Planners usually handle the bigger masterplan scale. They solve problems on the city level and usually design the infrastructure, streets, the building masses, and so on. Architects, on the other hand, work on a smaller scale of a building or an ensemble.
Here is the list of possible career paths for architects.
Architect
Town Planner
Urban Designer
Restoration Architect
Interior Designer
Lighting Architect
Performance Designer
Architectural Engineer
Drafter
Building Surveyor
BIM Manager
Interior designers usually work with architects to create an inner spatial organization and aesthetics. Designers can work either on newly created spaces or on interiors that are under renovation. Their scope of work is finding an interesting concept, choose materials, furniture, and lighting that work well together, and make the concept stronger.
Job satisfaction of architects
A study in 2009 showed that “between 20 and 40 percent of respondents are dissatisfied with their rate of pay, practice management, promotion prospects, working hours and opportunity to use their abilities.”. It has not improved much since then. Architecture is a stressful profession. Deadlines are usually tight, and it is hard to maintain a consistent work-life balance. Pursue the career of an architect only if you understand what is at stake, and you are passionate about designing spaces.
Alternative paths for architects
Architectural education is quite flexible. Many universities even encourage people from different backgrounds to study architecture. Students with different experiences can bring something new to the profession. It is easy to apply for a Master’s program if you have a different background. The only challenging part is to build a portfolio. Many schools offer summer courses to prepare a portfolio for the application.
How to become an architect without a degree
Many renowned architects in history did not have a formal architectural education. However, nowadays due to the high number of applicants and job scarcity, the preference would be given to students and graduates with a degree.
Changing career for an architect
Shifting a career path is quite possible thanks to a broad knowledge of architects and online education. One of the best ways to understand and find the best fitting profession is to analyze your yearnings and aspirations. WaitButWhy has an article and a guide on that matter. I also wrote a blog post and prepared a template in Notion that can make the process easier.
Here is a list of careers that architects can consider to change to.
Artist
Graphic design
Industrial design
Visualization
Game development
Real estate
Consulting
Construction
Artificial intelligence in architecture and design
Programming
Filmmaking
Photographing
Entrepreneurship
Graphic design
Architects are always taught graphic design at school. Presentation of a project is usually accompanied by diagrams, booklets, and boards. Architects can apply the same knowledge in professional graphic design where products replace the architectural project.
Industrial design
The same skills of form-finding, human anatomy, ergonomics, and many others can be applied to a smaller scale of an industrial object.
Visualization
Any project includes a presentation with renderings, images, diagrams, and sometimes animation. A lot of people shift their career to visualization as some people enjoy more working on the visual part of the project.
Game development
Architects are game level designers but in real life. Knowledge of space, visualization, and 3d software can be sufficient to transition to game dev.
Real estate
Real estate is considered better paid, and a lot of architects move to this area once they accumulate enough experience.
Construction
Construction managers make sure the project is built according to the plan, timeframe, and budget. Knowledge in architecture is, of course, an advantage. Additional knowledge might be required, however.
Artificial intelligence in architecture and design
AI is considered a threat to many professions, and architects are no exception. There are already companies that work on AI-powered software to solve problems that architects do. The employees of those companies, of course, studied architecture.
Programming
More technically inclined schools to teach Computer Science that will be helpful in our modern world.
Filmmaking
Architecture involves storytelling that has a lot in common with directing a film. Developing a concept, visualization, and project management are the skills that can be used in filmmaking.
Entrepreneurship
Making a product that has a concept, financial feasibility, demand, and design are relatable to a project in architecture.
Advice to young prospects
Until the 3rd year, I had a very vague understanding of what architects do. I always had a goal to become an architect, but unfortunately, I did not research to see whether it fits my skills, aspiration, and expectance or not. It is a different time now, and I hope my experience can help and guide someone who wants to start a career in architecture. To summarize, take a gap year, understand the kind of problems architects solve, and if everything seems fun to you, then go for it. | https://medium.com/@martirosyan/the-guide-to-architects-career-path-maray-ff24c6076ea5 | ['Ayk Martirosyan'] | 2020-12-07 19:39:22.351000+00:00 | ['Guides And Tutorials', 'Career Advice', 'Architecture', 'Career Change', 'Career Paths'] |
Random Lego Set — Scorpion (REDLINE) | Today’s the last day to pledge for Redline: Siege’s Kickstarter. This awesome trading card game is going to have its first expansion set, all right, but we can still reach the stretch goals. This includes the Desert Flower novella, which will be unlocked through Twitter shares. And I know I said the Wind Shark would be the last post for this event, but I was really proud of this one and I had to share it. Stephen Hunda, the mecha designer for Redline, really surpassed himself with this one and I had to show you my interpretation!
In the lore of the game, the Scorpion is a symptom of an issue concerning the authorities of Earth and Mars: the spreading of military technology through private providers. A massive, powerful, engine of war, the Scorpion is heavily armored and armed, becoming a predilect ride for warlords and mercenary leaders.
The model takes a whopping 96 parts, and it may be the most complex one I’ve done thus far.
This is also one of the machines brought in in the new expansion for this card game. A massive, awesome mecha for you to fight off your opponent. And if shared enough times, the Twitter announcement will also allow me to write the novella, which may include this shiny machine.
Just a few hours to go. So why not check it out? | https://medium.com/@metastablemachine/random-lego-set-scorpion-redline-f27c70ced66a | ['Francisco Duarte'] | 2021-09-08 13:57:50.952000+00:00 | ['Trading Card Game', 'Redline Trading Card Game', 'Military Science Fiction', 'Saving Throw Studios', 'Kickstarter'] |
[ML UTD 24] Machine Learning Up-To-Date — Life With Data | The purpose of this article is to clearly explain Q-Learning from the perspective of a Bayesian. As such, we use a small grid world and a simple extension of tabular Q-Learning to illustrate the fundamentals. Specifically, we show how to extend the deterministic Q-Learning algorithm to model the variance of Q-values with Bayes’ rule. We focus on a sub-class of problems where it is reasonable to assume that Q-values are normally distributed and derive insights when this assumption holds true. Lastly, we demonstrate that applying Bayes’ rule to update Q-values comes with a challenge: it is vulnerable to early exploitation of suboptimal policies.
This article is largely based on the seminal work from Dearden et al. Specifically, we expand on the assumption that Q-values are normally distributed and evaluate various Bayesian exploration policies. One key distinction is that we model μ and σ 2, while the authors of the original Bayesian Q-Learning paper model a distribution over these parameters. This allows them to quantify uncertainty in their parameters as well as the expected return — we only focus on the latter.
… keep reading | https://medium.com/the-innovation/ml-utd-24-machine-learning-up-to-date-life-with-data-4a7a75e10cb8 | ['Anthony Agnone'] | 2020-11-27 17:23:30.902000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Programming'] |
11.13 Presidential Social Intelligence Battleground Tracker — Final ‘Support Gained/Lost’ Aggregates | Project Background
Support Gain/Lost Overview
The “Support Gain/Lost” metric is built by analyzing the language used in social posts about the presidential candidates. As battleground voters use language to indicate support for a candidate, our systems register “+1” in “Support Gained” for that date. A post expressing negative support is registered as “-1” in “Support Lost.”
These numbers are based on holistic expressions of support gained/lost, or shifts to neutral, from a unique social account. Only shifts in categorization are registered per social account after an initial signal is measured. (EX: a post from someone supporting Trump is not counted two days in a row.)
There are 6 metrics we monitor on a daily basis across each state:
— Previous Non-Supporter to Neutral: (a post indicating a previous non-supporter has moved to a more neutral stance on a candidate)
— Suport Gained: (a post indicating support gained for Trump or Biden)
— Support Lost: (a post indicating support lost for Trump or Biden)
— Previous Supporter to Neutral: (a post indicating a previous supporter has moved to a more neutral stance on a candidate)
— Net Daily Gain/Lost: (the daily net of Support Gained v. Support Lost)
— Net Daily Neutral Shift: (the daily net of “Shifts to Neutral”) | https://medium.com/listening-for-secrets-searching-for-sounds/11-13-presidential-social-intelligence-battleground-tracker-final-support-gained-lost-4cc4005bd339 | ['Adam Meldrum'] | 2020-11-14 13:14:07.076000+00:00 | ['Joe Biden', 'Donald Trump', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Social Listening'] |
Do NOT Make Eternal Life Decisions Based On Temporary Emotional Pain | Some days, it feels like you are staring down the barrel of a gun and you wonder, OH YOU WONDER, when your day will come.
When will your breakthrough arrive?
When will you receive the life you know you are born to live?
And it feels like each day that goes by, you are running out of time…
Your life feels on hold waiting for that special day to arrive and you wonder if you are cray-cray for going down this path of thinking you can create life your way.
And you hear the whisper of the Divine within you, telling you that this is your path…
But there are all these other people going down the well-travelled, broad path and you think you need to get on that…
Because surely, they cannot all be wrong, and you be the only one that is right…
Of course, at this point, you do not notice that there are others who walk this narrow path because they are few and far between. Most people start on this path and then they shuffle back to the broad path because they get scared and everyone they know, is over there.
But you?! you want to live out your purpose…
You want to accomplish great things…
You are not satisfied just to do good enough…
You want to wake up feeling fulfilled, happy, loved, abundant and free…
But today, right now, it feels tough…
It feels never-ending…
It feels like you are pushing poop up a hill and getting nowhere fast, except smelly!
I get it.
And yet, be honest — you tried the broad path…
You pushed a different kind of poop up a hill, you even reached one of the peaks and you felt empty, fed-up and you wondered “Is this it?!”
No freedom…
No fulfilment
No abundance
Just more struggle to keep your head above water and then you allowed distraction in so that you did not have to think about the fact that it was not all ‘they’ promised it would be…
You were one of the leaders in your religious organisation and you were not all that happy, you had to stifle your true feelings to keep that one going, hoping that one day, you would get the opportunity to live out your vision…
The day never came.
You got yourself a good enough job — And again, that did not satisfy you — It paid the bills but you felt or still feel like death, having to go in there, day in, day out…
There must be more than this, you think…
You got a relationship but you still feel alone because you kinda had to shut yourself down to get into it or maybe, it is the only good thing you have going for you at present…
But it is not enough…
You know you are born for something more…
But this narrow path feels hard.
And you do not feel clear…
And you wish there was a clearer step by step…
And the Divine whispers within “Trust Me”
And you want to, you really want to but the world around you is so compelling…
The fear you feel in your heart, right now, is too real…
And you struggle to trust.
And yet, you long for this life…
One of divine guidance…
One where you feel like you are on purpose…
Honey, do not let the fear take you off course…
Listen to the deeper voice of wisdom, of the Divine within…
And act, act, ACT!
The reason you feel so YUK at the moment is simply because want the faith walk to be something other than that.
It is a faith walk — You have to walk the path even when it feels dark…
You have to learn to trust that little whisper within…
You have to keep moving forward, shedding the layers…
Remembering who you are…
Will you stay here?
Will you trust that the end goal and vision is worth it?
You are an eternal being — Do not make big decisions based on temporary pain.
Listen!
Trust!
Move!
Much Amazing Love!
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Launching Public Blockchains | Launching Public Blockchains
PoW, Wide Distributions, and Technical Considerations
Playing the Chain Game
When constructing a new blockchain, there are slew of considerations that must be made when architecting your new system. Ones which many experts who’ve watch the industry evolve and flourish over the years would likely refer to as “best-practices”.
These considerations can be both technical, or social in nature. Each of these two types of considerations play a pivotal role in an assets’ emergent governance; establishing community norms around how miners, developers, and speculators entrench themselves into your burgeoning community.
For a successful public blockchain to proliferate successfully upon launch, you want to maximize for a few key parameters, while simultaneously minimizing your initial use cases to reduce chain bloat — unless tackling a more broad generalized smart contracting use case such as Ethereum. For the sake of this essay, we will focus on UTXO based chains, as opposed to other account based ones.
Scalability, interoperability, incentives, governance, privacy, and energy efficiency are the main parameters you’ll want to hone in on as you seek to find “chain-market fit” to close the socio-technical gap necessary to sustain your asset for the forseeable future.
Since blockchain-based systems are just now reaching a stage of maturity that supports large-scale applications via off-chain scaling, optimizing for the most efficient use-case that is semantically important enough as a base-layer primitive is key to getting traction.
That said, we will be using the upcoming Handshake public blockchain as an example of a lean public chain asset seeking to launch in a fair and intelligent manner, while maintaining safety, liveness, fault tolerance, and rich data availability/integrity (more info on Handshake can be found here, and here — if you’re unfamiliar).
Fig. 1: The Handshake Technical Stack showing the many functional layers of Handshake’s technology.
Distribution, Incentives, and Mining
To better understand launching a chain and discussing the various mechanisms at play, it’s important to first be aware of the chain’s tech stack upon launch.
We’ll reference Fig.1 on Handshake’s tech stack to explain why certain aspects of your architecture are important.
We discussed the application/contract layer more in our initial post last-year, so for now we’ll focus on the layers beneath to go more in-depth.
Distribution (Incentive Layer)
The task of creating an entrench developer base to bootstrap your chain with the technical know-how necessary to maintain your protocol as you garner adoption, is no small feat.
That said, a long-tail power distribution of holders is the most advantageous overtime, as it ensures an extensive list of would-be contributors who are properly incentivized to contribute back to your codebase.
Handshake seeks to achieves this by utilizing the implementation of a blinded claim scheme called “Goosigs” (Fig 1. under “Incentive Layer”), which was developed for the airdrop distribution by Dan Boneh and Riad S. Wahby at the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research.
Effectively, a merkle tree is “stuffed” with the SSH/PGP keys of Github, Hacker News, Keybase, and PGP Web of Trust users (full details of this process are shared and updated here), which then provides a rich array of technical contributors, speculators, and those familiar with securing a private key pair, to be some of the initial holders of the asset. An individual who has their keys embedded in this tree can then utilize the HNS airdrop tool to initiate a signed handshake using their keys to make their claim — if they were imported from the various services listed above.
This claim process is private, and does not reveal information of the individual who signed the transaction once it’s sent on-chain.
Fig. 2: Types of curves utilized for the airdrop process. Source: Github
At this time, there are roughly 205,000+ individuals who will have their keys committed to the tree, enabling them to claim 4662 HNS of their own, and this number will likely change slightly as the tree is finalized completely prior to Handshake’s launch.
Fig. 3: A pie chart of the initial Handshake distribution breakdown for the strategically targeted airdrop from Handshake.org. As you can see, the majority of the assets supplied (70% of genesis total) will be controlled by individuals in the airdrop.
Alongside that, there are allotments for the initial contributors to the project, present domain name holders, and existing functionaries of the internet who deserve to be aptly incentivized; we cover more of this in our previous post. We won’t go into deep detail of the claims process and the technical mechanisms involved, but you can get a proper deep-dive from HSD contributor Matthew Zipkin.
Fig. 4: Most chains typically launch with a Bell Curve Distribution, where the majority of the assets are naturally constricted between an upper and lower bound. With Handshake, initially, the Contributors/Investors/ and Open Source orgs possessing HNS from investing/receiving a grant will fall to the left of the bell curve. Upon launch, general speculators and miners on the right-hand side of the curve will be able to able to acquire the asset, too. Overtime, this creates a mature power law distribution, where the economic players have many connected nodes and edges, which dictates most of the chain’s daily activity & growth. This is one of the key advantages of PoW: creating a more fair distribution, overtime.
This method creates a wide array of vested stakeholders in the network, who can then hopefully serve as stewards/custodians of its future progress — with some added assurance that their privacy has was also considered ahead of time.
This mimics Satoshi’s initial launch of bitcoin into the mailing list of cryptographers, who would then later go on to support the effort of launching bitcoin — except with a larger scale of potential contributors, given the growth and maturity of the ecosystem in the last decade since Bitcoin’s inception.
Modern times call for modern solutions, and targeting as many technical contributors as possible is your goal if you want to increase your propensity for adoption.
You only get to generate a genesis block once, and although the concept of “pre-mines” have been negatively skewed in the past, doing it intelligently to a wider audience, and not as a means to enrich a small few, not only makes it more fair, but increases the likelihood that the chain, once launched, will have continued speculative value capture and growth going forward — especially in this competitive multi-asset landscape we exist in today.
This airdrop is then further aided in improving it’s long-tail distribution with PoW mining. With a large portion of potential Handshake contributors and backers capitalized, further distribution happens in the form of mining the asset directly. And, that has some technical/social nuance to be considered as well.
Handshake PoW (Consensus Layer)
Creating a price floor for mining enthusiasts and early-adopters is important in entrenchment. Since early investors in Handshake paid a fixed price for their assets, raising $10.2mill for roughly 102 million units sold in total, this created a price floor of ~$0.10 cents in mid-2018 (reference: Handshake.org).
This means we can imply a speculative price floor of at least this price when wrestling with estimating potential profitability as HNS is added to liquid order-books and individuals begin to speculate on the asset, or buy and sell names from the chain (there were no liquid markets/exchanges for BTC until ~2yrs after Bitcoin’s launch, so you have to consider this when launching a chain in the present day).
From there, miners would only need to mine and initially sell Handshake above that spot price to be in profit when selling on exchanges, after they’ve accounted for their electricity costs/overhead (which will be cheaper early-on with a lower difficulty and a seamless miner UX for on-ramping more long-term miners to the network).
Full Block Header
Fig 5: The current Handshake PoW algorithm diagrammed to show how the Preheader/Sharehash (blockhash) computation works.
Handshake has committed to a unique, yet hardened block header, and has merged a final version of its PoW that consists of Blake2b-512/SHA3–256/ and Blake2b-256.
The chaining of multiple algorithms to comprise your PoW algorithm is a novel strategy; one necessary in a world where most algorithms have been used to date, or off the shelf equipment might exist in the wild to already produce an ASIC. Preparing accordingly and providing your asset lead time to establish a healthy community of early mining enthusiasts prior to the introduction of an ASIC, is critical for capturing speculators into your network effect.
What you’re aiming for is an algorithm that is efficient with modern GPUs, and is not easy to implement out of the box for an ASIC manufacturer (giving you lead time against their economies of scale so your chain may mature).
ASICs are a means to an end for PoW assets that seek to legitimize and process transactions efficiently at scale, but you only need them once your chain has reached a certain level of adoption (i.e. the total daily USD volume of activity on the chain approaching the USD cost to secure the asset daily is but one heuristic for measuring chain maturity). This can take quite sometime depending on the type of chain you’re deploying and its target use case.
The Handshake PoW also introduces some other novel technical tricks to help in ensuring fairness for pooled based mining, alongside further hardening its currently proposed Proof of Work.
Subhash
The subHash, as indicated in the above graphic, is all of the data potentially malleable by the miner (timestamp, treeRoot, etc). It is calculated early to discourage changes and to reduce/eliminate malleability. Making changes to the subHash is computationally expensive (pre-image resistance), and will cost you 2 cycles (1 for the subHash, and 1 for the commithash) if you wished to compute it again, aiding in preventing malicious miner activity.
subHash == All malleable data (1 hash cycle)commitHash == subHash + maskHash (1 hash cycle)
Maskhash
The Maskhash allows us to mine blocks in a pooled environment, while preventing the known “block-witholding attack” present in Bitcoin mining. The use of a mask makes its so miners do not need to know the full header serialization prior to mining a header, thus, theoretically, they cannot effectively withhold their mined block from the pool as it becomes too computationally expensive/functionally impossible.
MaskHash == prevblock + mask (must be > target but < share target) (1 Hash cycle)
Preheaders
The preheader contains the required pertinent information from the previous block in order to compute your hash, including a nonce and the timestamp. This is calculated first to prevent any hashed block caching, as changing the subHash/commitHash will cost 2 cycles of hashing (as we learned above).
These techniques ensure the preheader does not contain any miner malleable data, aside from the timestamp and nonce, which could be used for mining optimizations (pre-computation) or attacks on the chain’s integrity, as well as providing an incentive to keep the chain timestamp up-to-date.
The preheader also serves as an optimization for SPV resolvers (i.e. the hnsd light client) that only need to access the treeRoot to verify names in the Urkel tree, or just to validate the previous PoW.
Fig. 6: Code example of the Handshake blockhash (referred to as a shareHash) taken from HSD.
Miner UX & On-Boarding
With the PoW covered, you can’t have an appropriately decentralized and efficient public chain launch if you don’t have an optimized, open-sourced mining client for your asset. When bitcoin launched, there was no such thing as mining pools, PoW ASICs, or mature economies of scale that could quickly come online to centralize interests early-on. Satoshi made it easy with a one-click miner that utilized your CPU, and many were able to mine a healthy sum of the asset before it ballooned in value — further entrenching them into the ecosystem. And, many are still active to this day who are well capitalized thanks to their early adoption.
But, we live in a post-ASIC world, one ripe with enthusiast miners with high-end GPU setups in their home (some for mining, others conveniently due to PC gaming). We want to make it as easy for them to be early-adopters as Satoshi once did with his/her CPU miner. But, that looks a little different in the present day, as the requirements have changed and a whole industry has risen around PoW mining.
The community has organically derived such a solution, in the form of software called “HandyMiner”. HandyMiner CLI and HandyMiner GUI are two simple ways you as a miner can quickly get started mining on the network:
HandyMiner CLI Benefits:
Fig. 7: A rich dashboard of information presented via the HandyMiner CLI dashboard.
Traditionally there is a steep learning curve when setting up miners. From downloading initial dependencies, to syncing a chain and initializing your GPUs to target the PoW. No matter how much you presume, you’ll never have a solution that’s one size fits all, as no two mining rigs are the same.
The team behind HandyMiner has worked to alleviate the pain of smaller/hobbyist miners who may otherwise be afraid of switching mining algorithms on the fly for a new asset. The HandyMiner CLI supports an initial configuration tool to quickly get you mining to a stratum, submitting your payout address, and getting started hashing.
A rich ASCII based dashboard will greet you, showing your current hashrates, GPU voltages, temperatures and the overall performance across your rig. Most technical miners will opt to use the CLI on their larger setups, so a simple interface that is quick to get going will increase your share of potential miners.
HandyMiner GUI Benefits:
Fig. 8: Main screen of the HandyMiner GUI
However, not everyone is as familiar with the command line, so you’ll need to abstract things just a bit further. For Handshake, that’s the HandyMiner GUI.
The GUI removes the use of the command-line entirely. By creating a one click interface, individuals with decent hardware at home can get started with their miner and bundled HSD node in a few clicks.
With the HandyMiner GUI, the end-user gets all the relevant information to their miner, with an easy to use interface to start contributing hashrate to the network. Keeping this barrier to entry low for new potential miners in every way possible helps to further improve your long-tail distribution of entrenched players.
It is no small task merging the weird and often befuddling intricacies of Nvidia and AMD, while building an optimized shader/kernel. Though a hard task, you help improve the competitiveness of GPU miners as your chain matures to the point of ASICs if you can build an efficient enough, open-source mining client from the start.
Fig. 9: GUI allows you to quickly pick and deploy which of your graphics card will be used for hashing. Most gamers utilize discrete GPUs, which means extra hashpower for your chain if you can get them onboard easily enough.
P2P Networking & Data Availability (Network and Data Layers)
The last and final layers are the networking and data layers. When you’re building a chain and opting for optimal latency and throughput, you’re going to need to think about how much information you’re transmitting for your chain to function; if you’re maximizing for data availability, you’ll want to ensure your proof sizes are small, while also being aware of your history independence on past stale states to lessen the hardware needed to run a node and parse information from the chain.
Urkel Trees
Handshake realizes this partially by implementing a specially built base-2 trie, optimized for performance, simplicity, storage, and optimal proof size, called the Urkel Tree. This trie type was built as an improvement over other solutions such as LevelDB, which utilize underlying key-value stores, increasing the time and computation necessary for lookups as they have to write to disk, and Ethereum’s Merkle Patricia Trie. Storage of the trie’s internal nodes remain of a constant size, which makes updating and storing information more performant when committing transactions and on-going name auctions into the covenant state.
Fig. 10: Example of an Urkel Tree, from Boyma Fahnbulleh’s presentation at SBC in 2019. The graphic illustrates a base-2 trie, and interactions as new information is added to the trie alongside null nodes which aid in proving non-inclusion for lookups.
Lookups in your database can be perversely computationally expensive, and can create a ceiling on your chain’s transactional throughput if it isn’t considered prior to launch.
Due to these considerations, this allows the Handshake chain to maintain smaller proof sizes, as well as enable light clients that can verify the information necessary to keep your devices’ resource requirements low, but allowing you sufficient security to interact with the network.
Your PoW algorithm helps optimize for safety in a distributed system, and incentivizes individuals to run fullnodes, which can then validate a transaction as incorrect or invalid to the network’s consensus. And, with the combination of fullnodes with access to the full rich state of the Urkel tree, and the aid of light clients to growing the networks intended economic use, you further maximize the liveness of the chain; ensuring malicious actors cannot delay the acceptance of sending/receiving messages on-chain.
You can learn more about Urkel Trees in this talk from HSD contributor Boyma Fahnbulleh (full transcript can be found on the Stanford reading list, here) and you can view the code in full via the HSD github, here.
Elligators
Generating elliptic curve public keys produces a fairly obvious pattern when analyzed in real-time. Elligators are a means to turn public keys from an elliptic curve into strings of randomized bytes. The use of Elligators is then combined with Handshake’s encrypted P2P network, Brontide (based off the same noise protocol used by Lightning’s LND), which encrypts the public key prior to it being sent across the network in the initial handshake with the network.
Without the use of encryption, an ISP or malicious state actor could analyze your traffic, and use that as a means to censor your node. With the use of elligators turning those public keys into randomized bytes, you make it more difficult for analysts/bad actors to personally identify you on the network.
This optimizations ensures that any party that seeks to eavesdrop on your network traffic will need to employ computationally expensive calculations for every packet that goes across the network, in an attempt to thwart potential censorship.
Learning As We Go
While not an exhaustive complete collection of best-practices, the above methods aid to ensure a decentralized and diverse stream of individual miners, speculators, and pools, allowing the community to capture value early as the ecosystem organically expands or contracts.
Remember, ASICs are to be expected, they arise in any successful chain that has found product-market fit (or, miner-market fit, depending on how you look at it). They are a sign of a healthy growing network of participants becoming entrenched to some economy of scale. This is why “ASIC-proofing” is mostly a fallacy, as your chain can only be ASIC resistance, until it reaches a sustainable threshold in its mining community.
More on the discussion Proof-of-Work and ASIC resistance can be found in a recent post from Coinbase, if you are curious and wish to learn more about the concept.
Though many new chains continue to launch, it’s important to take each event as a learning opportunity. There is no 100% guaranteed way to launch a chain, but there are quite a few boxes you can check beforehand to increase its likelihood of standing the test of time and the public adversaries outside of your testing environment.
Special thanks to Alex Smith, Sean Kilgariff, Darren Mills, and Matthew Zipkin for their assistance for certain key parts of this analysis.
Additional Reading Materials and Referenced Texts: | https://medium.com/blockchannel/launching-public-blockchains-1aaf1733030d | ['Steven Mckie'] | 2019-12-03 22:27:06.670000+00:00 | ['DNS', 'Handshake', 'Crypto', 'Proof Of Work', 'Blockchain'] |
Melting | Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.
Follow | https://medium.com/house-of-haiku/melting-cf7a273de188 | [] | 2019-07-12 20:36:01.144000+00:00 | ['Promises', 'Lies', 'Poetry', 'Haiku', 'Poetry Prompt'] |
At the end of the day, somehow finishing off the office work or burying it for another day, I… | At the end of the day, somehow finishing off the office work or burying it for another day, I finally text her,
‘How was your day?’
Sometimes her reply is instant, sometimes thay take time as she would be chasing her own deadlines.
One such day she replied, ‘Oh! The job is just a support system, the job by itself doesn’t end the day.. The day is yet to start with our loved ones ...’ | https://medium.com/@chinmaya_c_m/at-the-end-of-the-day-somehow-finishing-off-the-office-work-or-burying-it-for-another-day-i-55241753b347 | ['Chinmaya Cm'] | 2020-12-05 08:06:21.616000+00:00 | ['Microfiction', 'Life', 'Feelgood', 'Romance', 'Herwisewords'] |
How to Connect With Your Divine Feminine Energy | The Ages of Time
There’s a spiral image that depicts the various ages since Creation. They are:
✨ Age of Leo — this was the Golden Age. A time of peace, harmony, and natural order and connection to the earth.
✨ Age of Cancer — this was the age of the Great Mother or birth of humanity. There were lots of Earth Goddesses and female deities. Matriarchy ruled.
✨ Age of Gemini — the age of Duality. A time of expression, communication, trade, literature, storytelling, science, and mathematics.
✨ Age of Taurus — signified agriculture and structure. Birth of the Iron Age.
✨ Age of Aries — the age of war, adventure, and expansion of empires. Also, a rise in arts, science, and a new philosophy.
✨ Age of Pisces — this is where we’ve seen the biggest shifts in civilization and is the dark age we’ve all been living through. The main aim of this age has been to control and divide.
✨ Age of Aquarius — there're different ideas whether we’ve already entered this age or not. Some say it began in 2012, others say we’re still in Pisces and about to shift soon. December 21 is the dawn of the new age. This is what I lean towards believing. This is the age of raising collective consciousness. A time to call for a better world and to align back with Mother Earth. | https://medium.com/mystic-minds/how-to-connect-with-your-divine-feminine-energy-f9dce2cef45 | ['Jade Scarfone'] | 2020-10-23 15:38:13.256000+00:00 | ['Spiritual Growth', 'Divine Feminine', 'Astrology', 'Spirituality', 'Meditation'] |
Have a shit planning Christmas | One of the few bright spots in the past year has been Shit Planning, an anonymous Twitter account that offers a “celebration of all the Shit Stuff imposed on our environment”. As we exit one of the shittiest years ever, we thought we would talk to Shit Planning about the year just gone and what’s ahead.
Would you prefer to be called Shit Planning? Mr or Mrs Planning? S.P.?
Shit Planning is fine.
We love your no-nonsense approach to all the Shit Stuff imposed on our environment. What’s your favourite type of Shit Stuff out there, both on an individual housing and neighbourhood level?
We’ve shown some terrible crap over the last year or so it is difficult to choose one or two bad things. One of the worst individual examples was in Manchester, which was the old job centre building on the Trafford Road. One of the worst examples of façadism we’ve ever seen. Housing layouts themselves have become a ubiquitous mess of standard house types, terrible public space, overly car dependant and really poor road design — the examples here are too many to mention. One frustrating problem is the insertion of really poor quality, low density developments in town and city centres, which is such a waste of valuable urban land. Some key examples here would be the Rolls Royce site in Birmingham and one in Crewe we featured recently on our presentation for the Festival of Place. Both of these sites are minutes from key train stations but had acres of land devoted to parking. These are part of a pattern of missed opportunities for what could have been great well designed higher density schemes.
Is there a town or a place that you would like to give special mention to for the amount of Shit Stuff it produces?
For us we don’t feel there is any one place which produces this type of shit and you will see our posts are nationwide, this demonstrates there are issues all over the country. A special mention must go most of the new edge of town development at present. It baffles the shit out of us that despite years of really good urban design guidance and best practice this stuff still gets designed and approved. This is not town planning or good design it’s just bolting standard house bubbles onto the edge of the places we love. This points to a deeper issue than planning and it’s the wider housing delivery structure and business model which needs looking at.
You say that you celebrate Shit Stuff imposed on our environment by “Architects, Planners, Surveyors, Engineers & other environmental ne’er do wells”. Shouldn’t there be a special place in hell for others, such as local or national government, constructors, developers or house builders?
There is no one who is blameless in this issue. The Twitter bio has limits on its word count so the term ‘environmental ne’er do wells’ is intended as a catch all for everyone you’ve named. You will see from our posts we criticise most things and don’t just focus on one type of environmental crime. We often get asked about naming and shaming but don’t always do this as with these issues it’s not always one person. As we often say someone asked for it, someone designed it, someone approved it and then someone built it. At any one of these stages the design can be compromised. Clearly though if someone is going to share their crap scheme on Twitter, Linkedin or other social media then we are quite happy to help them raise its profile with one of our descriptions and a re-share. This is why we get quite pissed off at the ‘blame the planners’ narrative of the lead up to the Planning White Paper. We always say it’s not a binary thing and blame lies throughout the system, not always with one group.
Many would like to see less “Shit Stuff” in the UK? How might this be done?
I think most of us would want less shit in our lives and the built environment is no different. I am not sure there is one issue which will solve it but lots of differing problems. A key one is a planning system which needs to become more responsive to local needs and pressures rather than less. One that positively engages with communities and one which puts its big boy pants on and aims to tackle climate change properly rather than in some half-hearted ‘we’ll meet building regs’ way. Another problem is the lack of local authority resources and skills which have been atrophied over the last 10 years. You can’t continually fiddle with a process, then actively under resource it and still expect it to perform a responsive and rapid high quality delivery function. Many local authorities and planning staff do a tough job with limited resources and quite a few LPAs have little or no design resource. If we all care about the quality of the built environment this has to change. A reconnection between the design of public space, streets and planning would be hugely welcomed. Too often this is dealt with in silos (sometimes separate authorities) and becomes disjointed with competing rather than complimentary aims and outcomes.
Do you think the government’s Planning White Paper will lead to more or less Shit Stuff and why?
The White Paper focuses so much on housing delivery it ignores the delivery of other vital issues such as other uses, infrastructure, transport, health and climate change. It appears to flow from a rather basic understanding of the planning system, relegating rather than enhancing its positive aims in a race for housing delivery / growth.Unless the government realises this and corrects it, the review is likely to be another failed tinkering with the system which delivers very little benefit. We also don’t really understand the obsessions with beauty rather than just saying well designed places. The beauty tag has the potential to distract from the key issues of good design and end up with the same detached housing shit, just that it’ll look a bit like a real life Trumpton.
Can you think of examples of projects or places that aren’t shit but good — or maybe even great? (please provide photographs).
Most of Peter Barbers work is absolutely wonderful and they have produced some truly inspirational housing schemes. When we see Peters work it gives the same feeling as listening to a great music track, lifts the soul and reminds you we are very capable of doing better development. I would also give mention to the cohousing scheme at Marmalade Lane by developer Town and designed by Mole Architects and the Goldsmith Street scheme by Mikhail Riches in Norwich. These all go to show that well designed, community responsive, sustainably built places are possible and that there is another way.
Given all that we’ve learned through the past year, what is the one thing you would do in 2021 to raise people’s quality of life?
We would love to see a greater link up between the NHS and Planning and a serious approach to making cities, town and villages much more healthy places; a greater value on connections, streets and spaces as part of local plans and site delivery; and some positive actions/projects and not just more documents and seminars. In terms of something simple to deliver in 2021 then connectivity. We all talk about well-being but in many cases you’re lucky if you get a crossing point, a cycle path to nowhere or a short link to a muddy unused footpath in many developments. So if we could seek one thing for the new year it would be to enhance connectivity as a priority for place delivery. Let’s get LPAs and highways authorities working out joined up active travel networks for their areas, projects that can be delivered and funded with support from new development. Methods for tracking this through from local plans all the way to delivery, either through new development or a series of local projects. This is one of the most consistent failings we spot when reviewing schemes and looking through development proposals, and it’s a major issue regarding trying to achieve some simple steps towards mode shift. | https://medium.com/@qolf/have-a-shit-planning-christmas-a3394efbbd1e | ['The Quality Of Life Foundation'] | 2020-12-22 12:33:39.347000+00:00 | ['Planning', 'Housing', 'Christmas', 'Wellbeing', 'Covid 19'] |
IMPORTANT: London Hardfork Payout System Changes. Action Required! | Hey miners!
As you know Ethereum London hardfork is coming in less than 24 hours. This major network upgrade contains four Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) which will activate a mechanism that would burn a portion of Tx fees paid to miners. Once it takes effect, increased network usage will result in a higher amount of ETH being burned.
Which means that Ethereum mining pools will have to revise their current payouts mechanisms. As you know, up until now Ezil had been paying network fees when sending daily ETH payments to miners. The pool was able to send out very low cost transactions and mine these same transactions to minimize the withdrawal costs. When Ethereum London upgrade is live, the pool will no longer be able to do this.
So Ezil as well as many other ETH pools will have to introduce a new system where the transaction fees are paid by miners. Therefore transaction costs will be deducted from your balance.
We realise that miners might have different priorities and some will prefer to pay a higher gas fee while others will choose to wait for the lower network fees. That is why starting from 5 August 2021 (after 12 pm UTC) miners will be able to set up the desirable transaction fee based on their personal priorities.
IMPORTANT: You have to go to your account and set up the Gas price suitable for you (in Gwei units). We will not be processing your payout until you do so.
Click on Unblock Payouts to set up your Gas price. Fill in all the fields and confirm changes by entering the external IP address of your rig.
If you are not familiar with the Gas fees and can’t figure out which limit is appropriate here’s a link to the website to help you calculate the transaction fee suitable for you. As of now we set up a reasonable (in our opinion) maximum limit of 40 Gwei for all the miners to prevent you from overpaying for the Gas. However, if you are willing to pay more than 100 Gwei please contact us.
Again you have to set up your Gas fee in order to receive your next payout. The higher Gas price will make your payout faster but more expensive.
Other changes to payouts scheme:
After the hardfork we will stop automatic 0.01 ETH payouts every 14 days since miners will be able to set up 0.01 ETH min payout manually and receive them daily.
The minimum payout for ETH by default will be 0.05 ETH unless you manually set up otherwise (note that you can still set up 0.01 ETH payout if you wish).
There will be changes to the payouts schedule as well. From 5 to 8 August 2021 payment schedule will remain the same — daily from 6 am to 12 pm (UTC). Starting from 9 August 2021 we will be processing miners’ payouts on an hourly basis (provided that you’ve reached your min payout limit and your desirable Gas fee matches the current ETH network fee).
payment schedule will remain the same — daily from 6 am to 12 pm (UTC). we will be processing miners’ payouts on an hourly basis (provided that you’ve reached your min payout limit and your desirable Gas fee matches the current ETH network fee). Your payment will be sent out within 1 hour once those 2 requirements are met (min limit + Gas price).
Pool will be sending no more than 1 payout per account within 24 hours (even if you reach your minimum payout more than once a day). But this is a trial feature, we will be gathering feedback from miners to make it more convenient for you.
ETC and ZIL payouts will stay the same, you don’t have to do anything.
Later we will develop a fully manual payouts system where you will be able to process your own payouts by yourself regardless of the pool’s payments schedule and your previous settings.
Please make sure you set up your min payout limit and max Gas price to ensure uninterrupted payouts.
Our team will be happy to help should you have any questions.
Ezil team | https://medium.com/@ezil-me/important-london-hardfork-payout-system-changes-action-required-e1c9c30e6e66 | [] | 2021-08-06 13:33:51.214000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum', 'Ethereum Blockchain', 'Ethereum London'] |
SIREN News July 2017 | Welcome to SIREN news for July 2017 where you can catch up on all the action from the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and latest news from across Dentsu Aegis Network. | https://medium.com/siren-news/siren-news-july-2017-5180c48eb6d8 | [] | 2017-07-12 16:24:28.001000+00:00 | ['Advertising'] |
Top five most-read blogs of 2020 | As we close out 2020, we are sharing our top five most-read blogs of 2020. Whether you are looking for some reading material during the holiday season, or curious to learn more about our work, take a look at our most popular stories this year.
In first place:
Three steps to designing an effective phone survey that reaches respondents
Let’s say that you are in charge of a phone survey. You get a list of phone numbers, sit down in a comfortable chair, and begin making phone calls. Sounds simple enough. It is unfortunately not that easy. In this blog post, you will learn more about the steps, experiments, and findings that have helped us increase our respondent reach, focusing on components of phone surveys.
Successful callback protocol
2. How to maximize phone surveys for remote data collection
Amidst COVID-19, phone surveys provide an efficient and cost-effective opportunity for remote data collection. As of December 2019, our team in India had been leveraging Data on Demand to experiment with phone surveying. In this blog, they share what they learned from India to help others initiate or expand remote surveying methods.
Research phases for piloting
3. Dear Development Community: A letter from IDinsight’s new CEO
On the 1st of June, we officially welcomed Ruth Levine as IDinsight’s new CEO. In this blog, Ruth shares her story and what she looks forward to accomplishing with IDinsight.
Ruth Levine
4. COVID-19 pilot study finds signs of economic distress outside India’s metropolitan areas
After the start of India’s lockdown, our response team leveraged Data on Demand to conduct a rapid survey with 300 respondents from four districts in North India. In this blog, you can read the team’s preliminary findings on the economic impact and health knowledge amidst COVID-19.
5. Six recommendations for facilitating remote workshops with virtual whiteboards
Because all meetings have gone online during the COVID-19 crisis, we are sharing some recommendations for using virtual whiteboards from a three-day remote workshop with a government partner. | https://medium.com/idinsight-blog/top-five-most-read-blogs-of-2020-fd027eff83e | [] | 2020-12-17 04:59:58.178000+00:00 | ['Blog', 'Highlights', 'Data'] |
3 Data Foundation Problems That You Should Fix In 2021 | ML Deployment
Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash
The usual product of data science is a predictive model. When starting the journey three years ago, I delivered the prediction model's result in a CSV file format. And the model is saved in a pickle format for manually scoring by a data scientist.
That’s a traditional way to get things done.
Luckily, the technology has developed so fast that today we have many libraries/frameworks like MLflow or others for deploying machine learning models.
At my previous company, the engineering team also developed the platform for automating predictive model scoring. They combined the latest framework mentioned above with the in-house knowledge to create a unique platform.
It makes a data scientist's life easier. It contains several useful features and reduces the step for data scientists to deploy the model.
It takes care of both feature store and predictive model’s metrics. But it’s still has a gap to improve. Here they are.
Monitoring
The deployed model needs to be monitored. The performance of the model can change for many reasons. A good blog from Databricks described how many problems you can face after deploying the model. I highly recommend you to read it.
In summary, there are three issues that can make the prediction looks weird after model deployment
1) Data diff, 2) Concept diff, and 3) Upstream data changes.
Those problems can silently affect the prediction result of the model. We should plan to prevent it because our model will be used for something valuable like recommending the product to the end customer.
If the model goes wrong, it can make a huge loss to our business.
The consistency of the prediction result is also important. For monitoring it, there are two parts to be concerned here
1) Data, and 2) Model
We need to ensure the quality by implementing the data quality checking for the data side as in the previous section. The system should alarm the data quality defect first before you know the deviation/defect from the model prediction.
Also, we can use a library like MLflow to track the model metrics such as AUC, Precision, Recall, or others for the model part. Then, we can set the threshold to trigger the alarm if those metrics deviate from the current standard you set.
You can trackback the reason behind the changes with the help of a data quality checking system.
Finally, a dashboard or report can be created from logging metrics. It helps tracking the metrics like the number of models that meet the standard performance or the changes in prediction distribution from the model.
Re-training model
Here is another problem from my experience. When you use the model for some period, the longer time the model is used, the more likely it becomes stale.
You need to have a re-training feature for the ML deployment system. Otherwise, there will be a lot of hard work waiting for data scientist at the end of the ML pipeline.
The re-training model is to add more new data or shift the period of data you use to make the model adapt to the customer's current behavior.
Pro tips : It’s hard to define when to re-training the model. You can make a simulation of the several re-training periods and see when the model performance drops.
Testing
The last problem about the ML deployment is testing process. Testing usually is a must thing to do in software development. We expect the system to reproduce the same result every time.
But it’s hard to do in ML deployment because the model is figuring out the information from the uncertainty in data, it’s difficult to make a reproduceable result after you fitting the model.
We can do our best by testing other aspects of the deployment.
For example, the type of input data and output prediction, the unexpected behavior in results such as null value or the prediction that’s doesn’t make sense.
We can generate the test case for each category of the model like classification, regression.
This helps improving the model output quality and lowers the chance of error for the consumer side system (downstream part) like the front end to display its prediction value. | https://towardsdatascience.com/3-data-foundation-problems-that-you-should-fix-in-2021-39b4693e3cc | ['Pathairush Seeda'] | 2020-12-16 04:01:04.515000+00:00 | ['Data Analytics', 'Data Quality', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Data Governance'] |
HOW TO COLLECT EMAIL | What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is one of the best strategies to promote an offer. You will send an offer to your client through Email. Today Email Marketing is one of the primary ways that businesses stay in touch with customers and partners.
How can you collect Email?
There are different ways to collect Email for different niche. Different people work in a different niches like Weight loss, Hair loss, Fitness, Visa card, digital product, etc. Suppose you will promote a weight loss product. You want do it by Email marketing. At first, you have to collect emails for the targeted people in the targeted country.
You can collect Email from FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Suppose you will promote a digital product.
STEP 1: Go to www.google.com
STEP2: Write in the search bar ( ‘’digital marketing” “@gmail.com”) you may write yahoo, Hotmail instead of Gmail. No need to give a bracket.
STEP3: If your target Germany/New York/France then write ( ‘’digital marketing” “@gmail.com” NewYork)
STEP4: If you target any social media then write ( ‘’digital marketing” “@gmail.com” site: Facebook). You can put Instagram, Twitter instead of FaceBook.
How to find out Email?
At first, you should add Email Extractor in your chrome browser or you can help www. H-supertools.com or www.recruitin.net or ww.Lite.14.com.
But when you will search email in the google search bar it will be shown 10 or 15 results only.
For getting more results you have to go Tools option. When you write something in the google search bar and click then you will see an option Tools under the search bar,
Click Tools> Increase number of results 1 to 100> select targeted country only.
After that click your Email Extractor which is already attached in your browser.
Select it, then copy and paste it into an Excel file.
In this way, you can collect huge Gmail, yahoo mail and Hotmail, etc.
How to promote it?
You have to write an attractive mail for your targeted people as if they click your mail.
By writing an awesome email you can promote our Hop links or Affiliate links.
How will you send it?
If you add GMass in your chrome browser then you may send 50 emails at a time. | https://medium.com/@rgosh54/how-to-collect-email-71c5cdcba9a6 | [] | 2021-02-22 21:39:10.013000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Affiliate Marketing', 'Earn Money Online', 'Email Marketing Tips', 'Make Money Online'] |
WHY CAN’T YOU USE CERTAIN LED LAMPS IN INDOOR LIGHTING | Heat is the enemy of LED bulbs. Although LED lamps may have a similar shape to incandescent or fluorescent lamps, the LED chips inside the lamp are not so different from the chips in your laptop or other electronics.
For this reason, they cannot be used in microwaves or ovens, and some of the larger LED lights can use a passive radiator or internal fan to prevent overheating of the electronics. Enclosed luminaires that do not provide adequate ventilation can dramatically affect the temperature of the LED lamp, resulting in overheating and shortening the lamp life. This is why some bulbs should not be used in a closed ceiling fan or a fully enclosed street lamp.
We would like to consider some frequently asked questions about indoor luminaires and indoor luminaire lamps to help you get the most out of your light bulbs.
What is an indoor lamp?
A closed fixture is any fixture or application where the bulb is enclosed in such a way as to prevent proper air flow or ventilation. This includes, but is not limited to, street lights, where the bottom is glass or plastic instead of open-air, indoor lights and recessed lights with a lens.
For LEDs, one of the main disadvantages is the strong dependence of the lifetime on the temperature on the crystal. With increasing temperature, rapid degradation begins the luminous flux decreases and the period during which the luminous flux remains acceptable. A good heat sink to the housing of the LED lamp is a guarantee of its long-term operation. In this regard, we can say that LED lamps cannot provide such a heat sink, and the radiators used in them will be effective only in open fixtures with good convection. In closed luminaires, such lamps will have a very limited service life. A specially designed LED lamp should provide the most efficient heat dissipation from the LED crystal to the lamp housing. If we compare two LED lamps of the same power, the longer will be the life of the one whose body is more heated.
How to find out if a light bulb is designed for use in closed luminaires?
Here you should look at the specifications for each LED lamp. They can be written on the box or on the instructions inside. If the value for “Enclosed Fixture Rated” is indicated as “yes”, this means that the bulb can be used in indoor luminaires. If “no”, the lamp should not be used in closed luminaires. Using the LED light in a closed lamp when it is not designed for this can cause the lamp to overheat, which can damage the lamp and the lamp. Even a small amount of heat can shorten the life of the lamp and prevent you from enjoying the full value of your investment.
Can a lamp for an indoor luminaire be used in outdoor luminaires?
Yes, just because the light bulb is designed for closed luminaires, this does not mean that only such a luminaire is required. To use the lamp in a closed fixture, it must be designed to handle the heat of the enclosed space. Outdoors, this is not a concern. Another reason for buying indoor luminaires with bulbs is to use them outside. You may have garden lights or fully enclosed street lights that require a closed light bulb. Since the bulbs are completely protected from rain and other elements, the lamp should not be designed for damp or damp places that must be used in outdoor enclosed fixtures.
you can use more type of led lights in indoor lighting, for example, led strip light, slim panel lights, ceiling light, downlight and spotlight, | https://medium.com/@umairtahir66/why-cant-you-use-certain-led-lamps-in-indoor-lighting-fa50f8c72d67 | ['Umair Tahir'] | 2019-09-23 09:02:28.199000+00:00 | ['Led Panel Light', 'Lighting', 'Indoor Lighting', 'Led Lights', 'Led Strip Lights'] |
Planning a Fall Garden | What to Plant & When | Carefully planning a fall garden is the key to gardening success. Discover what you can plant & when to get your fall garden growing.
Spring isn’t the only time to garden. Fall is our favorite ‘secret’ growing season. In fact, some vegetables actually taste and grow better if they’re planted in the fall. These vegetables are called fall crops, and we can’t get enough of them.
The kinds of vegetables that grow in fall create some of the best dishes in the kitchen and they’re also some of the simplest to grow. From radishes to leafy greens to cauliflower, you just can’t go wrong with fall vegetables.
Whatever you choose to grow, you need to start planning your fall garden. This guide will help you with your garden planning. We’ll cover what to plant and when, so you can start growing your fall treats ASAP.
WHAT TO PLANT
When grown during the fall, certain plants like greens, root veggies, and brassicas actually do their best. With the cooler weather, they’re more likely to grow easy and develop the tender taste they’re known for. Below is a list of our favorite fall crops to plant, sorted by type.
Whatever you choose, be sure to understand their growing needs, from soil to timing. Some varieties thrive in cooler weather and some need to be moved around with the threat of front is coming.
Greens
Arugula
Green Lettuce
Kale
Spinach
Bok Choy
Collard Greens
Brassicas
Cauliflower
Cabbage
Broccoli
Brussels Sprouts
Root Veggies
Parsnips
Celeriac
Carrots
Beets
Turnips
Radishes
Rutabaga
Potatoes (depending on your area)
FALL-FRIENDLY COMBO CONTAINER OPTIONS
Container gardening is a great option for fall growing. The mobility of container gardens means you can bus them indoors if the weather gets too chilly at night or you can chase the sun if you’re having especially shady days. Additionally, it’s a lot simpler to create fall coverings and watch your specific plants, since they’re generally smaller than your garden plot.
You’ll need to be aware that your container gardens will hold less heat than the ground. So be especially careful of frost and check the soil temperature to make sure it can still host your plant.
For fall, Gardenuity has a host of container combo kit options that will set you up perfectly for fall planting. They’re carefully curated plants that will love fall weather, grow well together, and taste delicious with each other.
To see the plant combos available for you to grow right now (Matched specifically to you & your climate with our unique algorithm), click the “add to cart” button on the Veggie Garden Kit.
Taco Toppings
The Taco Toppings garden contains all the veggies you to celebrate Mexican cuisine. A variety of fall-friendly lettuce and herbs are specially curated to match your specific climate.
Asian Greens
Asian Greens grow extremely well in cooler temperatures. This garden is easy to grow and an exciting fall-friendly flavor to add to your growing repertoire.
Antioxidant Salad Garden
This combo of immune system boosting greens and veggies will only Match to you if they’ll grow successfully. Grown in fall, they’ll taste crisper, more tender, and more flavorful than when grown in the spring.
Fall Culinary Herb
This Culinary Herb combo is perfect for fall-themed cuisine and fall-friendly growing. It contains 4–6 herb seedling plants that you can harvest and use in your culinary adventures throughout the season.
Fall Cocktail Herb
Cocktail herb gardens are a garden must. This fall variety herb garden contains 4–6 herb seedlings you can plant, harvest immediately, and use to create your fall cocktails.
Impatient Gardener
This Impatient Gardener combo kit is especially successful for fall growing procrastinators and growing beginners. The fast-growing plants included in this garden are easy to grow and mature quickly — before the frost arrives. Included is a combo of veggies and herbs curated for your climate.
Wellness Tea Garden
The Wellness Tea Garden contains 4–6 fully rooted, sustainably grown herb plants that are perfect for tea and wellness lovers out there. Once the seedlings are planted and adapted to their new home, they’re immediately ready to harvest. Also known as the aromatherapy garden, these herbs are perfect fresh, dried, or pressed into oils.
Roots & Herbs
Roots are some of the best fall growers, and beets are particularly good at withstanding the chilly temperatures. The Roots & Herbs garden contains exactly what you would guess, herb and root plants! These plants support each other in the grow and pair well on the plate.
Simply Lettuce
This combo contains an entire lettuce garden that’s full of varieties that grow well in fall and make perfect salads.
DIRECT SOW VS. SEEDLINGS
Planning a fall garden means choosing what you’re growing — and this includes more than just what kind of plant you’ll grow. You can direct sow seeds or use plant transplants. Both options work, but direct-sowing can be a little trickier in fall than in spring.
GARDEN HACK: If you want to grow from seed, soak your seeds and leave in the fridge overnight. The next day, plant them in your soil. This will help speed up germination and is especially useful if you’re planting later than you expected.
Transplants are a really great option for fall gardens. To cultivate your own transplants, start your seeds indoors by growing in a citrus peel, eggshell, or mini pot. Transfer seedlings outdoors when they’re about 3 weeks along and soak immediately. It will take about two weeks for your seedlings to feel at home.
Alternatively, you can buy seedlings from a reliable source and plant directly into your garden. In this method, you’re avoiding the riskiest part of the grow (the beginning). Again, soak with water and watch your garden carefully as your transplants adapt to their new home.
WHEN TO PLANT
The key to a successful fall garden is finding the right time to start your garden — discovering when to plant is arguably the most important part of planning a fall garden. So how do you do it?
Our favorite way is to avoid the research by using Gardenuity Match. Gardenuity match tells you what you can plant and when based on your current location and climate. All you have to do is go to the Gardenuity home page and enter your zip code (or let our technology find your location).
If you want to do all the research, keep reading below!
Find Your First Frost Date
The first step if to learn your first frost date. This is the average yearly date that the first killing frost of fall occurs in your current location. The time left in your fall growing season is your plant time until the expected first fall frost. You can use this handy First and Last Frost Calculator on The Farmer’s Almanac.
Once you have this date, check the days to maturity on your chosen seed packets. If your plant can grow to maturity before your first frost date, you’re good to grow! Otherwise, you probably need to look at a different crop.
If the seed package doesn’t specify fall planting, add about two weeks to generate your fall maturity time. (There is less direct daylight and lower soil temperatures in fall than spring.)
*Sometimes, you’re having an abnormally warm year and your first frost date average will not match your actual first frost date. During these years, look at your projected weather predictions and feel free to take the risk! Container gardens are really great for this situation, as you can roll your garden indoors if your first frost surprises you.
General Timing Options
Below we’ve included general timing for cool weather, fall planting. Each date is weeks out from the first frost date in your region.
12–14 Weeks Out
Direct sow parsnips, rutabagas, lettuce, and radishes. Start brassica seedlings and kale indoors.
10–12 Weeks Out
Direct sow beets, carrots, collard greens, leeks, radishes, and lettuce. Transfer your brassica and kale seedlings to your outdoor garden.
8–10 Weeks Out
Direct sow Chinese cabbage, lettuce, turnips, spinach, Asian greens, and arugula. You can still plant lettuce and radishes (they’re fast growers!).
6–8 Week Out
Final chance to sow spinach and lettuce.
Planning a fall garden is the first step to growing a successful, happy harvest. Find a garden that works for where you are, when you are, and what you want.
Let’s connect on: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Linkedin | https://medium.com/gardenuity-the-sage/planning-a-fall-garden-what-to-plant-when-4863996eeb2b | [] | 2019-10-16 15:54:40.114000+00:00 | ['Gardening', 'Plants', 'Garden', 'Fall', 'Healthy Lifestyle'] |
What Does the “Agency of the Future” Look like? | Last week, Emotive Brand celebrated its ten-year anniversary. Naturally, the milestone has led all of us here to reflect on the last decade and ask what it will take to continue to be successful moving forward. Today, Founding Partner and Chief Strategy Officer Tracy Lloyd and Creative Director Thomas Hutchings tackle that very question. What does the agency of the future look like? How does it behave? And how do we continue to push the envelope of what’s possible?
How have you seen the agency space shift over time?
Tracy Lloyd: It’s a much more agile relationship that agencies are having with clients. There has been a shift from agencies dictating how long a project will take to the client driving the time frame. And at the same time, the problems agencies are being asked to solve are getting more complex. No longer are agencies able to lean on old methodologies. Solving the business problems of high-growth companies today requires having the right frameworks that can be adapted in real-time to keep pace. It’s about leaving your ego at the door and acknowledging that our clients are sophisticated, educated, and have a lot of the same skills agencies have. You must be prepared to be collaborators — not dictators.
Thomas Hutchings: Gone are the days of real arrogance, where an agency could rest prim and proper on its name alone. In the beginning, when there was far less competition, you could get away with being very demanding and say to clients, ‘It’s our way or the highway.’ Now, the space is so diverse and versatile, agencies try to provide the best experience possible. It’s a much more malleable and friendly relationship where you really immerse yourself in the client world. Keeping those worlds separate is an old way of thinking. In a sense, it’s kind of reversed: the agency is now the client and the client is now the agency. In addition, there’s been an increase in robust in-house teams that are strong, educated, talented, and bring something to the table. Perhaps some would see that as intimidating, but I think it’s great. We seek to inspire one another and be an extension of your team.
What’s the value of bringing in an outside agency?
TH: While brands and their in-house teams have definitely become more robust, agencies will always bring a lot of muscle to the game for one key reason. Brands are cursed with having to focus on themselves 100% of the time. We have the privilege of working on so many different projects across a myriad of verticals. We have a 360-degree view of the landscape and can leverage solutions from other fields or spaces. That’s a very unique power.
TL: We are asked to solve some tough business, product, and brand problems for our clients. As an agency, we bring a very senior team that not only dedicates time to fix those problems but solve them in unique ways. You need that outside perspective, that diversity of thinking, and that unique pool of talent that agencies bring in order to see the problem for what it is. It’s the fastest way to ascertain the strategic shifts you need to make to get back on the right track.
What have you been most surprised by?
TH: It’s been fascinating to see the small to medium-sized agencies become the new champions of this era. They are the ones getting the big clients, and the giant branding firms are wondering where they sit in this space. It’s almost akin to what’s happening in the retail space, with big box stores versus small independently-owned businesses focusing on experience. Clients are looking for the weird and the wonderful — not just the cold, stark efficiency of a massive branding firm. The agencies that create brands that actually mean something, rather than just exist and churn, will be the ones that survive in the long run.
TL: We work with mostly B2B brands. I think there are some B2B companies that are raising the stakes. The branding out there is getting more interesting, more experimental, and less corporate. That’s really nice to see. With the bloom of smaller digital agencies, there is a lot more competition out there — but I think it’s incredibly inspiring. I feel energized and inspired by our peers and am happy to be pushing the envelope of what’s possible alongside them. I think this year will be revolutionary for what we will see from B2B brands and the agencies that serve them.
What does the agency of the future look like?
TL: Agile. Smart. Nimble. Focused. I think the agency of the future, especially those agencies that work with B2B brands, will be two-fold. First, they will be the ones who can bring the same level of strategic problem solving and creativity of B2C agencies. And second, they will be known for developing those big ideas that create new categories, new markets, new revenue models, and build brands that people want to buy, work for, and talk about. That’s the agency of the future we are trying to build.
TH: The best agencies are the ones that keep their minds open and are willing to take a brand into any avenue. The more you pigeonhole, the more stagnant your agency will be. That’s easier said than done. Much of that comes down to surrounding yourself with people who have a natural hunger for curiosity. Those who ask, ‘What if it went there? Why can’t we do this?’ You need to embrace a challenger mindset to upset preconceived notions and conventions if you want to make something that really resonates.
If you could start over and build from this agency from scratch, is there anything you’d do differently?
TL: This is a hard one to answer. In many ways, we are doing the same things we’ve always done, just on a bigger scale. Our clients are the C-suite. The companies are bigger, global, and recognizable by name. The stakes are higher, and our team is more senior. But in principle, we are operating the same way. The tenets of Emotive Brand have always been about finding the perfect blend of emotional and rational strategies to help change how people feel about the brand and to ensure they are activated in the ways business need.
We’ve worked hard to make the experience clients have with our agency different in every way. We’ve used our own methodology to deliver on that, and every employee from day one knows how to deliver on that. I’m glad we were clear from the start, and I’m proud to know it still drives our behavior as an agency today. We continue to lean into a sales-led approach to solving positioning and go-to-market strategies for our technology clients because that’s just how my brain works. And it’s working. Our references are not just CMOs and CEOs — CROs love us, too. As an agency, it’s helped us become recognized as a go-to B2B branding agency. And that means something to me. Because delivering growth is how our clients measure our success, and theirs.
Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.
Image credit | https://medium.com/@emotivebrand/the-agency-of-the-future-for-b2b-is-looking-far-more-agile-strategic-and-creative-aefbc71e7e78 | ['Emotive Brand'] | 2019-03-15 13:30:01.829000+00:00 | ['Business', 'B2b Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Branding', 'B2B'] |
Mental Health Literacy | The ratio of mental illness in Pakistan has increased with time due to economic issues like unemployment, inflation, political dilemmas, terrorism disruptive society and pandemics. The main factor that hinders mental health treatment till recent times is the stigma that mental illness like depression is a natural feeling and people who do worry about their mental health and seek treatment, face social unacceptance throughout. In Pakistan it’s considered as a taboo and most people therefore are unlikely to share about their mental illness.
The term “Mental health literacy” is defined as knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management or prevention. The importance of health literacy for physical health is widely studied worldwide; however, the area of mental health literacy has been mostly neglected especially in Pakistan.
Therefore, mental health literacy is the need of the hour. According to Mental Health America (MHA), one in five people will experience mental illness during their lifetime. Therefore my problem statement goes like,
Mental illnesses affect 19% of the adult population, 46% of teenagers and 13% of children each year. These conditions are not joke, so why don’t we take mental health more seriously?
My idea to overcome this issue is to start a mental health education service through which people will get an awareness of this social cause. What me and my team will do to raise awareness among people ?
1.We will arrange online sessions ,seminars and programs to increase the level of mental health care awareness among people.
2. We will introduce credits and incentives , so that people tend to attend those awareness sessions.
3. We will request educational authorities to introduce a new compulsory course related to mental health care is schools, colleges and universities.
4. We will make use of social , electronic and print media to raise awareness among people especially the youth of this nation.
5. We will try to bridge the patients with psychologists virtually , so that their counselling can be made possible online.
6. Also people will be made familiar with the mental wellness activities that they can do easily in their homes and workplaces.
By gently, and thoughtfully educating our community, we can definitely make people around us more sensible and aware of the importance of mental wellbeing which will have positive effects on the bodies, minds and spirits of the community. | https://medium.com/@amna-sagheer163/mental-health-literacy-91668a3e5972 | ['Amna Sagheer'] | 2020-12-25 14:38:15.561000+00:00 | ['Mental Health Awareness', 'Mental Health', 'Amal Academy', 'Wellbeing'] |
Memory Anti-Patterns in C# | In the context of helping the teams at Criteo to clean up our code base, I gathered and documented a few C# anti-patterns similar to Kevin’s publication about performance code smell. Here is an extract related to good/bad memory patterns.
Even though the garbage collector is doing its works out of the control of the developers, the less allocations are done, the less the GC will impact an application. So the main goal is to avoid writing code that allocates unnecessary objects or references them too long.
Finalizer and IDisposable usage
Let’s start with a hidden way to referencing an object: implementing a “finalizer”. In C#, you write a method whose name is the name of the class prefixed by ~. The compiler generates an override for the virtual Object.Finalize method. An instance of such a type is treated in a particular way by the Garbage Collector:
after it is allocated, a reference is kept in a Finalization internal queue
internal queue after a collection, if it is no more referenced, this reference is moved into another fReachable internal queue and treated as a root until a dedicated thread calls its finalizer code
As Konrad Kokosa details in one of his free GC Internals video, instances of a type implementing a finalizer stay much longer in memory than needed; waiting for the next collection of the generation in which the previous collection left it (i.e. gen1 if it was in gen0 or even worse, gen2 if it was in gen1).
So the first question people are usually asking is: do you really need to implement a finalizer? Most of the time, the answer should be no. The code of a finalizer is responsible for cleaning up ONLY resources that are NOT managed. It usually means “stuff” received from COM interop or P/Invoke calls to native functions such as handles, native memory or memory allocated via Marshal helpers. If your class has IntPtr fields, it is a good sign that their lifetime finishes in a finalizer via Marsal helpers or P/Invoke cleanup calls. Look for SafeHandle-derived class if you need to manipulate kernel object handles instead of raw IntPtr and avoiding finalizers. So in 99.9% of the cases, you don’t need a finalizer.
The second question is how implementing a finalizer relates to implementing IDisposable? Unlike a finalizer, implementing the unique Dispose() method of IDisposable interface in a class means nothing for the Garbage Collector. So there is no side effect to extend the lifetime of its instances. This is only a way to allow the users of instances of this class to explicitly cleanup such an instance at a certain point in time instead of waiting for a garbage collection to be triggered.
Let’s take an example: when you want to write to a file, behind the scene, .NET will call native APIs that operate on real file (via kernel object handles on Windows) with limited concurrent access (i.e. two processes can’t corrupt a file by writing different things at the same time — this is a very high level view of the situation but valid enough for this discussion). Another class would allow access to databases via a limited number of connections that should be released as soon as possible. In all these scenarios, as a user of these classes, you want to be able to “release” the resources used behind the scene as quickly as possible when you don’t need to access them anymore. This translates into the well known using pattern in C#:
that is transformed by the C# compiler into:
So when should you implement IDisposable? My answer is simple: when the class owns fields of classes that implement IDisposable and if it implements a finalizer (for the good reasons already explained). Don’t use IDisposable.Dispose for other reasons such as logging (like what we used to do in C++ destructor): prefer to implement another explicit interface dedicated to that purpose.
In term of implementation, I have to say that I never understood why Microsoft decided to provide such a confusing implementation in its documentation. You have to implement the following method to “free” unmanaged and managed resources. It should be called by both the finalizer and IDisposable.Dispose():
You also need to have a _disposed field to allow IDisposable.Dispose() to be called more than once without problem. In all methods and properties of the class, don’t forget to throw an ObjectDisposedException if _disposed is true to catch usage of already disposed objects.
Ask a group of developers when disposing should be true or false: half will say when called from the finalizer and the other half from Dispose (and I’m not counting those who are not sure). Why giving the same name to the method that already exists in IDisposable? Why picking “disposing” as parameter name? I don’t think it could been possible to find a more confusing solution: too many “dispose” kills the pattern…
Here is my own implementation that does exactly the same thing but with much less confusion:
I also rename Dispose(bool disposing) into Cleanup(bool from GC):
The rules you have to keep in mind are simple:
native resources (i.e. IntPtr fields) must always be cleaned up
fields) must always be cleaned up managed resources (i.e. IDisposable fields) should be disposed when called from Dispose (not from GC)
The _disposed boolean field is used to cleanup resources only once. In this implementation, it is set to true even if an exception happens because I’m assuming that if it just happened, it will also happen if called another time.
Last but not least, the call to GC.SuppressFinalize(this) simply tells the GC to remove the disposed object from the Finalization internal queue:
it is only meaningful when called from Dispose (not from GC) to avoid extending its lifetime.
(not from GC) to avoid extending its lifetime. it means that the finalizer will never be called. If it were, it would have called Cleanup that would have returned immediately because _disposed is true.
The rest of the post describes typical anti-patterns. However, as usual with performance related topic, remember that the impact might not be noticeable if it does not run in a hot path. Always balance between readability/ease of maintenance/understanding and performance gain.
Provide list capacity when possible
It is recommended to provide a capacity when creating a List or a collection instance. The .NET implementation of such classes usually stores the values in an array that need to be resized when new elements are added: it means that:
A new array is allocated The former values are copied to the new array The former array is no more referenced
In the following example, the capacity of resultList is otherList.Count
Prefer StringBuilder to +/+= for string concatenation
Creating temporary objects will increase the number of garbage collections and impact performances. Since the string class is immutable, each time you need to get an updated version of a string of characters, the .NET framework ends up creating a new string.
For string concatenation, avoid using Concat, + or +=. This is especially important in loop or methods called very often. For example in the following code, a StringBuilder should be used:
Again in loops, avoid creating temporary string such as in the following code where SearchValue.ToUpper() do not change in the loop:
The effect is even worse due to the Where() clause that create a new temporary upper string for each element of the sequence!
This recommendation also applies to types that provides string-based direct access to characters such as in the following code:
where ToString() is not needed because it is possible to directly access the last character:
Caching strings and interning
Prefer static cache of read-only objects to recreating them in each call such as in the following example:
(Replace by a static list since the enumeration elements won’t change)
Last but not least, when string keys (with only a few different values) are used, you could “intern” them (i.e. ask the CLR to cache a value and always return the same reference). Read the corresponding Microsoft Docs for more details.
Don’t (re)create objects
The first pattern to use is the static classes with static methods to avoid the creation of temporary objects just to call fields-less methods. It is also recommended to pre-compute read-only list instead of re-creating it each time a method gets called like in the following example :
This list could have been computed once as a static field of the class because the enumeration will not change during the application lifetime.
Avoid repeated calls and keep values in local variables when used in a loop; this is particularly easy to forget when dealing with string ToLower() and ToUpper().
(a new temporary string will be created by key.ToLower() by each test)
Prefer String.Compare(…, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) to avoid calling ToLower()/ToUpper() just for string comparison such as in the following example:
becomes:
Best practices with LINQ
The LINQ syntax is used extensively all over the source code. However, several patterns are found very often and might impact overall performance.
Prefer IEnumerable<T> to IList<T>
Most of the methods are iterating on sequences represented by IEnumerable<T> either via foreach() or thanks to System.Linq.Enumerable extension methods. IList<T> should be used only when sequence modification is required:
It is also recommended to use IEnumerable<T> instead of IList<T> as method parameters if there is no need to add/remove elements to the sequence. That way, the client code don’t have to use ToList() before calling the method. The same comment applies to return types that should be IEnumerable<T> rather than IList<T> because most of the time, the sequence will simply be iterated via a foreach statement.
FirstOrDefault and Any are your friends… but might not be needed
First, there is no need to call Any (or even worse ToList().Count > 0) before foreach such as in the following code:
Avoid unnecessary ToList()/ToArray() calls
LINQ queries are supposed to defer their execution until the corresponding sequence is iterated such as with a foreach statement. This is also the case when ToList() or ToArray() are called on such a query:
The ToList() method builds a List<> instance that contains all elements of the given sequence. It should be used carefully because the cost of creating a list from a large sequence of objects could be high both in term of memory and performance due to the implementation of element addition in List<>.
The only recommended usages are:
optimization sake to avoid executing the underlying query several times when it is expensive removing/adding elements from a sequence storing the result of a query execution in a class field
However, most of the times, you don’t need to call ToList() to iterate on a IEnumerable<T>. If you do so, you hurt the runtime execution both in term of memory consumption (because of the unneeded List<T> that is just temporary) and in term of performance because the sequence gets iterated twice.
The base of LINQ to Object is the IEnumerable interface used to iterate on a sequence of objects. All LINQ extension methods are taking IEnumerable instances as parameter in addition to foreach constructs. It is also not needed to call ToList() when an IEnumerable is expected (this is a good reason to prefer IEnumerable to IList/List/[] in method signatures)
Some methods are calling ToList() before Where clauses are applied to an IEnumerable sequence: it is more efficient to stack the Where clauses and call ToList() at the end.
Last but not least, it is not needed to call ToList() to get the number of elements in a sequence such as in the following code sample:
becomes:
Prefer IEnumerable<>.Any to List<>.Exists
When manipulating IEnumerable, it is recommended to use Any instead of ToList().Exists() such as in the following code:
becomes:
Prefer Any to Count when checking for emptiness
The Any extension methods should be preferred to count computation on IEnumerable because the iteration on the sequence stops as soon as the condition (if any) is fulfilled without allocating any temporary list:
becomes:
Note that it is also valid to use if (!campaigns.Any(filter))
Order in extension methods might matter
When operators are applied to sequences (i.e. IEnumerable), their order might have an impact on the performance of the resulting code. One important rule is to always filter first so the resulting sequences get smaller and smaller to iterate. This is why it is recommended to start a LINQ query by Where filters.
With LINQ, the code you write to define a query might be misleading in term of execution. For example, what is the difference between:
and:
It depends on the query executor. For LINQ for Objects, it seems that there is no difference in term of the filters execution: the first and second filters will be executed the same number of times as shown by the following code:
When you run it, you get the exact same lines in the console:
IsEven(1)
IsEven(2)
IsMultipleOf3(2)
IsEven(3)
IsEven(4)
IsMultipleOf3(4)
IsEven(5)
IsEven(6)
IsMultipleOf3(6)
--> 6
--------------------------------
IsEven(1)
IsEven(2)
IsMultipleOf3(2)
IsEven(3)
IsEven(4)
IsMultipleOf3(4)
IsEven(5)
IsEven(6)
IsMultipleOf3(6)
--> 6
However, when you run it under Benchmark.NET,
the results are significantly better for the single “merged” Where clause:
After looking at the implementation in the .NET Framework with my colleague Jean-Philippe, the additional cost seems to be related to the underlying IEnumerator corresponding to the first Where.
Remember to never assume and always measure. | https://medium.com/criteo-engineering/memory-anti-patterns-in-c-7bb613d55cf0 | ['Christophe Nasarre'] | 2021-07-11 08:56:46.656000+00:00 | ['Csharp', 'Performance', 'Software Development', 'Antipattern', 'Finalizers'] |
Customer Research: Recipe for Successful Marketing Growth. | Customer Research: Recipe for Successful Marketing Growth.
User research and user experience have dominated the analysis of digital marketing. They have been generally accepted as a model for a customer-centric approach in digital or online marketing. So, getting the best use of the two approaches requires garnering data that reflect customers’ journey. However, user experience and user research are hinged on different methods that have scientific validation and industry lingo.
Having the research done in this century is far cheaper than ever imagine, and are many ways you can achieve that. Customers have more things about them posted every second across social media; data can be scooped from there. Also, Google analytic or Hot jar is another data gathering platform that provides ample information about online visitors or users. Google analytics can provide you with the search term people use and the search that makes entering into your site possible and the channel from which your site is linked. The portion of your site that receives the highest attention and the page that gets the most dwell in time. These are insight relevant to design for customer behaviour for conversion.
Obtaining high quality research data is important to growth marketing since it can be used for behaviour design, as well as planning and executing customer-centric design that fosters accentuation on customer’s journey in respect to empathy mapping. Starting with empathy mapping, that is better enhanced through research and survey, is also one the key areas of a broad spectrum of interests to growth marketing specialist. This precedes every area covered, or research tools used by growth marketing specialist.
The early marketer or traditional marketing did not pay much attention to these as much as growth marketing specialist because of its research oriented and psychological approach. These approaches validated A/B testing, empathy mapping, user Google analytics, experimentation, growth metrics and channels specific.
Empathy mapping, which is very similar to traditional persona but has unique properties that have to do with spending time in designing to understand the pain point, factor influencing customers and their goals rather than focusing on the taste and who the persona is. These properties differentiated empathy mapping from the traditional persona.
Besides the fact that empathy mapping focuses more on psyche of customers, its embraces user research that helps designing for behavioural change. It contains four insightful quadrants – Say, Think, Does and Feels that further expatiate on how to approach research questions that capture the totality of customers’ journey.
The Says Quadrant contains what the user says out loud in an interview or some other usability.
The Thinks quadrant captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience, that is what occupies the user thought and what matter the most to them.
The Does quadrant encloses the action the user takes. What the research say about what the user physically do and how the user go about such thing.
The Feels quadrant, which is the last quadrant, has to do with user’s emotional state. This often being represented with adjective and a short sentence for content that worries the user and what the user get excited about.
Channels are also expedient to growth marketing. AAs discussed in the previous article on growth marketing, growth marketing entirety is based on leveraging channels that bring better retention and conversion after testing. You may need to test different channels for your campaign to be able to determine that’s worth giving more attention to. Although, many big do well across different channel, it is sometimes rare to achieve the absolutism of success across the channels. The bottom line is to understand where your customers are and what they do. You should not spread yourself too thin because you may likely successful in any. Therefore, it’s important to identify the even one or three channels that are working for you.
As explained earlier, after knowing where your customers are, experiment the channels before picking ones that work for you. Then you can develop a coherent messaging strategy and how you as a brand speak to your customers across the specific channels that work for you. This will help you have better understanding of what your customer is like. Customer journey map is a great tool for visualising what you need to know about your customer and how they interact with your site. Customers’ journey map consists of only two components: (1) step in the journey and (2) information about the user that you want to gather at each step along the journey.
Growth marketing boils down to seven essential things that you need to take note of when developing sales campaign online.
You need to know your customers and what they want
Experiment across all channels before deciding which channels best for you
Test your message
Which channels they frequent on
Constant user research to determine exactly what they want
Creating top test analysis to know message that resonates with them
Analytics software that can help you being specific on what they search for | https://medium.com/@isrimmsky/customer-research-recipe-for-successful-marketing-growth-ba2a6d7d216 | ['Richard Tosin Israel'] | 2020-12-13 21:40:26.839000+00:00 | ['Customer Centric', 'Growth Hacking'] |
Maybe You’ve Never Loved | The Older Woman
Then one day, an older woman came to her mother’s house. They were having a conversation about these topics. So the girl joined in and shared some of her experiences of love.
“I don’t know if anyone really loves me.” She said with a sad, fearful face like an abandoned puppy on a rainy day.
She told the older woman about her frustrations — how much her mother tried to control her, how much her father had been unfair to her when he left, how heartbroken she was when her boyfriend broke up with her, and how her friends were too selfish to listen to her stories.
The older woman listened patiently and, in the end, said only one sentence:
“Maybe you never loved.” The older woman smiled kindly and left.
It took the girl by surprise. From the other side of the table, her smile seemed so patronizing, sending the girl’s mind on a journey of defensive anger.
“How dare she say something like this? She doesn’t even know me. What does she know about love? Maybe she is the one who’s never loved.”
Little did the girl know that this was going to become one of her last tantrums.
To say that the older woman’s words had planted a seed in the girl’s mind is an understatement. Those words had gone straight into her subconscious like bullets, shattering her fragile ego and clearing the way for a whole new range of questions. | https://medium.com/the-masterpiece/maybe-youve-never-loved-b5bc1f353433 | ['Daniele Ihns'] | 2020-11-17 14:45:21.780000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Wisdom', 'The Masterpiece', 'Self', 'Psychology'] |
The Conscious Choice That Is Happiness | “Some believe in destiny and some believe in fate. I believe that happiness is something we create.” -Sugarland
I’m normally one of the most optimistic and positive people I know. Probably sickeningly so at times — not sorry! It took me a long time to get to where I am, and staying here isn’t always as easy as you might think.
I’ve read a few articles lately about how positivity is overrated— that being positive all the time really isn’t healthy and that we shouldn’t do it; seems many find that positivity is overrated (Some also say it’s not a real word, but that’s an argument for another day).
I actually agree, to a certain degree — we shouldn’t force the happiness, optimism, or positivity when we’re just not feeling it. But at the same time, we shouldn’t feel guilted into stuffing it back down if it comes naturally. Don’t fake having it, but also don’t fake not having it.
That being said, I’m not always positive. Just like anyone else, I have moments when I fall into a rut. A slump. I get really down on myself. Down on life in general. I let the monsters come out from under the bed. I allow fear, sadness, worry — even despair, to take control of me. I wallow. It’s not pretty.
In my teenage years, and up to my early to mid-twenties, I suffered quite a bit with depression. My smile, when present, was very rarely authentic. For a long time, my motto was ‘fake it ’til you make it.’ Well, I got sick and tired of faking it and made a decision: I wasn’t going to live like that anymore.
WAIT! Stop! Don’t go yet!
This is not where I tell you that depression is all in your head. I know first hand — and second and third hand — that it’s not. And I also know that for many, it’s not something that can be cured by simply making a decision. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing and needs to be given the credit it's due.
This is just me saying that it’s how I am (usually) able to kick it.
I’ve had to make it a conscious effort for a really long time. It’s never been easy, and I don’t think it ever will be. To this day, it still stalks me. I often feel the cold tentacles reaching and grabbing at my ankles. Other times, it likes to sneak up on me from out of nowhere, and for no apparent reason. Although I’ve never taken an anti-depressant, some days I feel like if I turn around quickly, I’ll see the little Zoloft bubble bouncing along behind me.
Most times, I can nip it in the bud quickly. But sometimes it’s more difficult and takes the help of a good friend — or even a perfect stranger — to say the right thing at the right time. It takes someone else to flip that switch in my brain — I can’t always reach it myself — back to ‘Happy Edie’ mode. The mode I’m best known for. At least in public.
“It’s okay to not be okay, when even the air you breathe is just too much for your lungs to take.” -Madeline Merlo
Give yourself permission
I think that as much as we want to be happy — as good as we feel when we are — sometimes we just need to allow ourselves to be sad. Embrace the dark for a moment. Tell yourself that it’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to feel the way you feel. Normal even, in many circumstances. Giving yourself permission might actually help you recover more easily. More quickly, and with fewer battle scars. When we don’t force happiness, and we let the darkness run its course, it might put up less of a fight.
I’ve found that whenever I try to force a positive attitude, it’s almost like I’m putting so much importance on the negative that instead of easing away, I’m inadvertently giving it more power. I get so laser-focused on trying to figure out why I’m not feeling my usual chipper self, that I ultimately give all of my energy to it, and there’s nothing left for the positive vibes to feed on.
All in the family
It’s been proven that people who tend to be prone to depression typically carry a gene that’s been handed down to them through a parent. But that’s not the only way depression is hereditary.
Doctor Michael J Meaney, Ph.D., of the Hope Through Research team, explains how although depression is a mental illness, it might also be a learned condition.
“A child not only inherits genes, he or she inherits a family. Very often families with mental or behavioral disorders are also families in which there exists a considerable amount of dysfunction. That implies the influence of environment as well as genes.” (Read his full article here, from Psychology Today)
When a child grows up seeing their parent in a constant state of despair, they learn to understand this as normal behavior. Children are impressionable creatures. They become what they learn through experience most of the time. We are a product of our environment. Sometimes changing the environment can change the product, but not always. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/the-conscious-choice-that-is-happiness-505a2e4e2783 | ['Edie Tuck'] | 2019-08-27 12:37:42.881000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Mental Health', 'Mental Illness', 'Ignorance', 'Stigma'] |
Professional networking in my pajamas is absolutely the best | When life closes a door, you open many zoom windows.
Nostalgia is a very thick layer of paint. All the people missing going to the office might not recall the daily commute in the train (or as I call it: “morning breath in a can”), the long lines to get a regretable $15 sandwich at the food court or the compounded smell of everybody’s microwaved lunch coming from the kitchen.
Same thing with networking events. I always admired professional networkers capable of jumping from and to a dozen conversations in one single night. They could not be happier swimming in a sea of people, they know everybody, and everybody knows them. That is not me, I like talking to people, but I am exhausted at the end of a large event!
Over time I have developed some unconventional networking strategies. I always tend to stay near the food table, so people gravitate towards my direction. It also gave me a great vantage point; if that person was picking food with his hands (especially during chicken wings night), maybe it is better not to engage him. I have been on the receiving end of way too many sticky chipotle-BBQ handshakes to make the usage of forks an absolute requirement to be part of a professional network. Chopsticks are cool; please do not think I am culturally insensitive.
This year many significant design events and conferences transitioned to online mode and most of them at a small fraction of the price. It is hard to explain how much radical change this is. It is a step forward for more inclusive design communities and the democratization of knowledge beyond physical boundaries. Not everybody could afford to take a week off from work, flying to NY, paying for accommodation/meals and adding a couple of hundred dollars of the entry-ticket on top.
For those who could invest, the opportunity cost of thoroughly enjoying it is way too high. Most large conferences had several events going simultaneously, and the chances of missing out on a great speaker because you picked a famous one were always present. FOMO UX style.
I always felt disappointed when a speaker got into “diva” mode, showing the same images from their website and not adding any more context of processes, what business goals drove this project and the challenges faced during its completion. Things just magically materialized from three lines of his sketchbook, and now you have the honour to pay to see him live.
The opposite is also an annoyance. Many design leaders are so good at what they do that every single sentence is worth the ticket. They are the LeBron James of UX Design, living in a whole different category than the rest of the mortals. I used to take many notes as possible on a tiny sketchpad, with my terrible handwriting, on almost zero-light conditions while trying to catch up with the latest pearl of knowledge dropped by the Design guru in front of me. Later on, I realize that my annotations are as readable and coherent as the Zodiac killer letters (hopefully less threatening).
After experiencing online design conferences, it is tough for me to make a case for a different format (leaving aside some technical glitches). The possibility to access an event in Taiwan from the most comfortable place in the world, my sofa, is something hard to trade-off. Business casual has become sweatpants, and most of us could use Movember as an excuse for not shaving. So really, the bar could not get any lower.
Online-conferences offer more tools to engage the audience. That awkward moment of raising your hand to get a microphone so you can ask a question and being horrified about how your voice sounds on the auditorium’s Dolby speakers. Now, it could not be more straightforward than typing.
At the same time, the participants can provide meta-commentary about the topic in real-time. The presenter's references get a couple of links, articles, and books from the chat in seconds. Most conferences are recorded, and slides are made available after the talk, no more cryptic notes.
After the talk, some of the speakers hang around in the chat and answer any questions. For me, this is huge! I tend to get very nervous when I talk to people I admire for years. The worst happened some years ago was when I spoke to the CEO of an electronic toy company and noticed I was sweating, getting light-headed and blurry eyesight. Maybe I was starstruck, or perhaps my drink had pineapple juice, and I was getting a mild allergic reaction—a little column a, a little column b. | https://uxdesign.cc/professional-networking-in-my-pajamas-is-absolutely-the-best-acb2b12efb20 | ['Luis Berumen Castro'] | 2020-12-15 12:18:48.964000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'UX', 'Design', 'Remote Work', 'Product Design'] |
How Smartcar uses Segment for an improved developer experience | It’s always great to ship new features to your users — but you can’t know how these features are performing if you don’t know how your users are interacting with your product.
This is something we struggled with during the early days at Smartcar. We didn’t have a way of measuring how our users interacted with the new features we shipped.
Our product, an API for cars, lives in a space that is just emerging. The concept of building a mobile app that reads data from cars (e.g. the odometer) without any hardware is difficult to communicate. Vehicle owners are connecting their car to a mobile app (e.g. a mileage-based car insurance app) for the very first time. To make our product succeed, we needed to answer the following questions:
How can we iterate on the experience that we provide to app developers as well as to the vehicle owners using these apps? In other words, how can we know which of our recent product changes are working well and which ones aren’t?
As we were tackling this issue, we found hundreds of ways to track how users interact with our product. Our marketing team wanted to view data in Mixpanel, our business team wanted to send Intercom campaigns based on specific interactions, and our engineering team wanted to pipe user event data into Amazon S3 buckets. As a result, we had to answer yet another question:
What is the right tool to track user interactions? Is there a single tool that meets all of our team’s different needs?
“There must be!” was our answer to the latter question. At least until we could hire enough people to set up and maintain multiple integrations.
Luckily, we found Segment.
Why we use Segment
One integration, (basically) infinite destinations
When we collected and weighed different tools, we hesitated between:
Using Mixpanel to track engagement, measure retention, and monitor our funnel Using Intercom to track events a) Integrating the Smartcar dashboard with Segment, b) connecting Segment with Mixpanel to track user behavior, and c) connecting Segment with Intercom to route Intercom interactions (like starting a chat) to Mixpanel, as well as to route user interactions from Mixpanel to Intercom.
Ultimately, we decided to use Segment (option 3), thanks to following advantages:
Segment is a single source of truth for user data. We can route this data anywhere — to Intercom, Mixpanel, and other Segment-supported integrations.
We can route data to Mixpanel, helping us understand our users’ behavior.
We can route data to Intercom, allowing us to intelligently message our users based on their behavior.
If we decide to switch tools (e.g. to use Keen or to migrate away from Mixpanel), we can easily do so without touching our dashboard code.
Segment can collect user data from multiple sources (Salesforce, MailChimp signups, Auth0, Smartcar dashboard, etc.).
In short, Segment lets us implement and maintain a single integration, while making it possible for all team members to use any analytics tool without additional engineering effort.
Now that we decided to use Segment, how did we end up using the tool on a day-to-day basis? How does Segment help Smartcar deliver a better experience to app developers and vehicle owners?
How we use Segment
A better experience for developers: eliminating friction in the Smartcar dashboard
At Smartcar, we’re constantly seeking to improve the “developer journey” by asking: “What are the biggest friction points in building an app using our API?”
When we redesigned the Smartcar dashboard not too long ago, we first wanted to understand what was lacking in our original iteration. We then wanted to use that information to drive our redesign. So, we added Segment to our original dashboard and tracked three core things (among many others):
Which pieces of information a developer enters to register their application with Smartcar Where the developer clicks after registering their application The number of developers who create an account but then don’t register an application
Feeding this data into Mixpanel, we realized the following:
A large percentage of users did not register an application after creating an account. We followed up with these developers and many of them said that they were confused about the information they had to provide in the app registration step (e.g. an “application name” and “redirect URIs”).
We didn’t have any buttons to direct users to next steps after registering an application.
Thanks to those insights, we knew to redesign our dashboard in the following way: When you create an account, we automatically create an application for you and provide links to resources that can help you get started (e.g. running demo app). We also managed to reduce the number of clicks it takes developers to run our demo app from over ten clicks to four.
The redesigned Smartcar dashboard.
By adding Mixpanel and Intercom as destinations, our engineering team can now keep tabs on how developers are interacting with our redesigned dashboard, while our marketing team can use events to send timely emails to developers (for example, messages that are tailored towards how many apps a developer has built or which SDKs they used).
A better experience for app users: anonymous users in the Smartcar auth flow
Creating a better experience for app developers is important to us, but we also want to improve the user experience for consumers. In any app that uses Smartcar, the consumer will go through the Smartcar authorization flow. During this auth flow, the consumer authorizes the app to access their vehicle, by:
Selecting their vehicle’s brand. Entering their car credentials (e.g. their email and password for the Tesla app or the Volkswagen Car-Net app). Approving or denying a list of permissions that the app is requesting (e.g. “read odometer”).
As users proceed through this flow, our team wanted to monitor the following:
How many people start the authorization flow but either fail to successfully authenticate their vehicle (i.e. successfully enter their car credentials) or fail to accept the requested permissions?
How many people have cars that are not supported by Smartcar (i.e. outdated vehicles that aren’t connected to the internet)? What are the makes and models of these cars?
Do certain vehicle owners have an easier time navigating through our authorization flow than others?
Before using Segment, we couldn’t monitor those things and had to rely on qualitative feedback from friends and developers. We had no notion of how many people “dropped off” during the auth flow, and we had no way of telling whether the new features we added were producing positive results.
When we instrumented our authorization flow with Segment, we could track user interactions before they logged in — and then retroactively associate these events with the actual users after they signed in.
This means that we can now not only monitor the three metrics mentioned above, but we can also determine how many clicks it takes for a vehicle owner to successfully authenticate with us — and segment (pun intended 😊) this data based on the user’s traits (e.g. what car they own).
The Smartcar authorization flow.
Building a user-friendly API can be difficult — especially if you want to appeal to your users and their users. Thanks to Segment, we can focus on both areas in one go, and give our team the chance to measure and evaluate the things they feel are most important. | https://medium.com/smartcar/how-smartcar-uses-segment-for-an-improved-developer-experience-d5fcacab195a | ['Emre Sonmez'] | 2019-02-12 19:56:03.168000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'Apps', 'API', 'Developer', 'Analytics'] |
4 tips to manage your Terraform environments and workflow | 4 tips to manage your Terraform environments and workflow
Holding office hours and ask me anything sessions, we got to hear a lot of questions around how to keep clean Terraform environments. Here are a few very basic tips for keeping it clean and organized.
#1 Locally, use an environment manager
Using a version manager makes it way less painful to deal with multiple Terraform versions locally, and will make sure that:
switching between projects is quick,
the development environment is the closest possible to production.
tfenv is a good one, inspired by rbenv . Plus it has a few convenient commands, such as tfenv install min-required that will recursively go through your terraform files to determine the minimally required version.
#2 Explicitly set your Terraform versions
When they happen, Terraform upgrades can hurt. They hurt, even more, when you have some random exception that you don’t understand, and discover that they are happening because you are running the wrong Terraform version on that specific machine.
By explicitly setting the required Terraform version, you will get a clean, explicit error if you try to run an apply with the wrong environment.
terraform {
required_version = "0.12.10"
}
#3 Set module versions
Moving parts are one of the programer’s worst enemies, and that applies to infrastructure code too. Terraform modules bring a lot of reusability and composability, but they can also become messy to handle.
Setting module versions makes it easier to control when what part of your infrastructure will change if there is a module upgrade. You get a guarantee that for a given commit in your codebase, you always deploy the same thing.
module “blabla” {
source = “module_name”
version = “1.2.3”
}
It also enables you to progressively roll out module upgrades: you can have the old version in production, create a dev branch where you upgrade the module, test in your dev environment, then merge on the master if it passes testing.
The more modules you use, the more likely it is than one of them causes an issue at some point — so this becomes more and more critical as your codebase grows.
#4 Prevent local apply/deter commits on master
Running apply locally can be dangerous as soon as two users collaborate on the same Terraform file: if two updates happen shortly one after the user, the first one may be overridden by the second one. Besides, you never know what can happen on your laptop, and we’ve heard stories of big state files getting messed up by a lost WiFi connection.
This is why a more production-ready workflow encourages running apply only from a central, versioned system such as through a CI/CD.
The next step though, is to build that behavior into the process. For example, a user’s access rights will not enable them to make changes directly in production. Rather, only the CI/CD keys will have the right to do that.
Similarly, it is very tempting to merge to master, even though we know it’s not a best practice. Locking master will encourage users to go through the better, safer, pull-request then review process. Unless you are superhuman, and always read the Terraform plan and never make a mistake.
Some teams add additional steps there, such as linting or checking for docs updates that are a small investment in keeping the code clean in the long run. | https://medium.com/faun/4-tips-to-manage-your-terraform-environments-and-workflow-519d6bdac9 | [] | 2020-06-15 08:31:00.300000+00:00 | ['Infrastructure As Code', 'Azure', 'AWS', 'Terraform', 'DevOps'] |
Don’t Blame Your Doctor | You need to tell your doctor about your nutrition and it’s super easy with these forms.
Daily, I hear them, the comments at the coffee shop or on phone calls to friends “my doctor doesn’t know anything about nutrition,” or “my doctor didn’t even ask me what I eat…” or “my doctor told me to lose weight, but doesn’t even know I’m keto right now,” etc. Dear patient, if your doctor doesn’t know all about your nutrition, your total nutrition — like what goes in and on your body most often, YOU are to blame…not them.
What a doctor knows about nutrition will depend on their training. But there isn’t a doctor out there that doesn’t know that better nutrition is essential for better health. They might be as confused as you about whether that is to adjust carbs or which carbs to eat, if CBD will help you or not, or what supplements are worthy and not, but it is not that your doctor doesn’t know about nutrition that’s keeping you from better health.
IF YOUR DOCTOR DOESN’T KNOW YOUR TOTAL NUTRITION YOU ARE TO BLAME, NOT THEM.
Whether a doctor knows about YOUR nutrition — that is solely on you. You both know that your nutrition has the power to massively influence your health. But only you know what you eat, what you pop, what you slather on most days and nights. If you don’t share that information with your practitioner, they can not create your better recommendations.
When your doctor doesn’t know what you take, sip, bite into, or apply, they can’t develop your better plan. They can’t tell you NOT to take your statin in the morning because that’s when you take Coq10, or to enjoy your coffee with unsweetened almond milk instead of adding an additional 200 milligrams of calcium as a supplement to reach your daily needs. Your doctor can’t advise that you increase your magnesium intake from foods or from supplements to help equip your body to turn off stress if they don’t know your current magnesium intake from foods and supplements.
Your health depends on your better health efforts. That begins with sharing your current nutrition with your practitioner. Because you can not get nor stay healthy if you don’t have better digestion, the first place to start is to see if your digestion is better. If it’s not, you and your practitioner (doctor, therapist, trainer, dentist (yup even oral health requires healthy digestion!), health coach, nutritionist, dietitian) need to start with fixing your digestion.
ITS SUPER EASY TO SHARE YOUR TOTAL NUTRITION WITH YOUR PRACTITIONER USING THESE FORMS.
Look, you might be right to complain about your doctor (as the daughter of surgeon, I have a lot of complaints about doctors — ha ha ha) BUT complaining doesn’t get you healthier. And in the case of complaining about your doctor’s lack of nutrition knowledge, it is time we patients take responsibility too. We need to make sure our practitioners know about our total nutrition. Then, if they can’t create personalized better health recommendations that’s when we don’t complain, we move on to another practitioner. | https://medium.com/@AshleyKoffRD/dont-blame-your-doctor-d2b26b06da26 | ['Ashley Koff Rd'] | 2019-05-16 16:30:30.175000+00:00 | ['Doctors', 'Nutrition', 'Health', 'Supplements'] |
Design Sprint for distributed teams | Introduction
During the fall term of the MSc Interaction Design course offered collaboratively by the Cyprus University of Technology and Tallinn University, I had the opportunity to participate in a remote Design Sprint session with my peers. Over the past few months, we engaged with Design Thinking methodologies and adapted a very popular methodology such as “the Design Sprint” by Jake Knap in an agile environment.
Running a fully remotely sprint was challenging, but enjoyable too. In this article, I will express my thoughts and overall experience of running a Design Sprint session in a distributed diverse team.
Snapshot of the interactive solution
The main challenge for us was to provide an innovative and engaging solution that fosters the participation of women in the STEAM workforce. Although the STEAM workforce is crucial to global competitiveness and professional success, women are vastly underrepresented in STEAM jobs and among STEAM degree holders.
The team
Working with people in a remote setting is very challenging. Our team consists of professionals from various time zones, different cultures, and diverse backgrounds. Despite the diversity of our team, we managed to collaborate evenly on this project. Of course, there were miscommunications and dissatisfaction sometimes, but this is expected even in experienced teams. One of the main learning points was to improve our group-work skills and develop our team dynamics.
A good practice to tackle miscommunications was to arrange a fixed day and time to meet. We met every Sunday to plan, discuss, and perform retrospectives of what went well and what we need to work on.
In regards to the roles, we split the responsibilities based on everyone’s background, experience, and skills, while each “day” of the sprint will be driven by another team member.
Agile approach / Tools
During our initial discussions, we wanted to decide the right tools for us to collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously. We concluded that Trello is a very flexible tool to use for our project management. We also use Miro for research, place thoughts, and ideas on our board. Figma will work the best, as we have the educational licences and we could work collaboratively at the same time on the same file. We also chose Google Platform to work on our presentation slides and for the interview guide. Other communication was held in Slack.
Collaborative tools for remote teams
Design Sprint
Design Sprints usually are conducted in five days, where on Monday the problem is identified, on Tuesday solutions are being developed, on Wednesday important decisions are taken, on Thursday a realistic prototype is being built and finally, on Friday the solution is evaluated. However, given that this is a project in an academic context we tackle the Design Sprint method to serve our timeframe. Each “day” would take two weeks to complete, so we were actually provided more time to research and review material and resources at a deeper level.
Monday
Setting a long term goal, identifying the problem, and defining our research questions were a vital part of our process. We took a stab at framing the questions as:
HMW get females passionate about steam subjects?
HMW engage young females to participate in STEAM-related subjects?
HMW encourage girls’ self-confidence when it comes to choosing STEAM-related paths?
Then voted on the ultimate impact we want our project to have: In 2 years’ time, we would like 50% more females enrolled in STEAM subjects in 3rd level institutions. We defined quite an ambitious goal, however, this kept us motivated to continuously research, produce ideas and solutions.
How Might We (HMW) questions
One of the most important activities in my opinion was the ‘Ask the Expert’ task. To approach the problem, it is vital to engage with our audience, understand their characteristics, lifestyle, values, and everyday problems they might be facing on a daily basis. Each of the members of our team had a one-on-one interview with a friend or relative. Due to the current circumstances of COVID 19, we were flexible to carry the interviews either physically or in an online setting. It is important to make the expert feel comfortable and allow them to express their thoughts freely, to get the most out of their experience.
Tuesday
The main goal of Tuesday’s activities was to ideate and produce as many solutions as possible. Many of them were innovative and crazy, but we concluded as a team to a solution that serves our main question and goal.
Initial sketches and solutions
During Tuesday, we learned to built upon other’s ideas to produce complex solutions and gain inspiration from observing each of the member’s references. This was a great opportunity to quickly transform our ideas into sketches and communicate within the team.
Solution sketches votes
Wednesday
On Wednesday, after the team members worked on a collaborative storyboard, we concluded on the final idea. Our app aims to educate young girls and to engage them with STEAM-related fields in a very fun way! Famous female STEAM role models take the girls on a magical journey. The users can learn about the life and work of each of the STEAM field’s representatives, play quizzes, earn coins and badges, and challenge their friends!
Most voted solution
There is the main dashboard, where the user can interact with their selected paths, view their earned skills and badges, and select their heroes. There is a leaderboard also to increase competition and engagement. We wanted to use famous role models who represent each category, such as Frida Kahlo, Hypatia, and Marie Curie allowing the users to relate to them.
We wanted to have a sense of narration in our app, so the user can learn about the character through stories and narrations.
Thursday
Thursday was dedicated to prototyping. I took the initiative to make some initial proposals and define the design language of our product. The brand colours were chosen carefully and were assigned to each category, which represents Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. The UI follows a minimalistic approach, but is friendly and gives the sense of a mobile game. Three flows were produced and stitched together in Figma.
UI look and feel
Friday
Finally, we made it to Friday! This was exciting and overwhelming too. This is the moment of truth. The moment where all the efforts of our team will pay off. We recruited eleven participants to evaluate our prototype. Most of the evaluation sessions were conducted remotely due to the limitations of the current pandemic. However, we were able to carry out one session in a physical setting. The session was recorded, so we were able to observe the user’s behaviour as she was thinking aloud while interacting with our prototype.
Conclusion
Through the process of inspiration, ideation, and implementation we were able to understand the population we are targeting, decide, sketch, storyboard, prototype, and test innovative solutions.
The overall experience from these remote Design Sprint sessions is good. I have deepened my understanding of how to conduct Design Thinking activities in an agile context. I enjoyed the collaboration between my peers, despite the miscommunication we sometimes had. Each of the members shared their knowledge based on their personal and professional experiences. This approach is most valuable and beneficial and I will definitely want to adapt it in my professional path. | https://medium.com/@iisamichael/design-sprint-for-distributed-teams-315acadf2c4c | [] | 2020-12-16 21:26:46.799000+00:00 | ['Remote Work', 'University', 'Design Sprint', 'Remote Design Sprint', 'Steam'] |
2020 in Pictures — The Year You Will Never Forget | Lessons from History is a platform for writers who share ideas and inspirational stories from world history. The objective is to promote history on Medium and demonstrate the value of historical writing.
Follow | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/2020-in-pictures-one-of-the-worst-years-ever-cf04d98d7e60 | [] | 2020-12-28 19:54:53.471000+00:00 | ['World', 'History', '2020', 'Culture', 'Photography'] |
Top 5 things I learnt from Plants | I’ve gotten a lot of my life lessons from my plants, especially I’m spending my time in the garden, I observe them a lot, here are few things I noticed, which is very well relatable with life-
1. The bigger the space of the pot or ground, the roots spread well and the leaves broaden much: one needs a considerate amount of me-time to grow as a person.
2. When two plants are placed too close, both of them never grow well: when in a relationship, you should always give space and time to eachother.
3. Different plants need different things, like table rose needs plenty of sunlight and not much care, while Calathea zebrina needs very less sunlight and in shade, else the leaves get burnt and the plant doesn’t grow: Different people have different needs, some people need too much care and attention, some people like too much space and less attention, all you need to do is give yourself some time to understand other person.
4. Some plants like climbers need support because of weaker stem, with better support, they grow much better: some people need some attention and care at first, with a nice firm support, you give them more confidence and they grow up well.
5. Some plants might not seem much useful to you, but who knows they’re very important in one way or other, for example Pterris vitata ( a kind of fern) is an excellent plant to control pollution, it is an arsenic hyperaccumulator plant: Someone can be useful to you in an unexpected way, always be kind to everyone. | https://medium.com/@anamikabanerjee/top-5-things-i-learnt-from-plants-a230702ed881 | ['Anamika Banerjee'] | 2021-05-16 14:08:54.581000+00:00 | ['Gardening', 'Life Lessons', 'Plants', 'Life', 'Philosophy'] |
Circular buffer | In this post, I explain a particular type of queues called the circular buffer. At the end I show an example implementation using Python
Short description
A queue is a data structure that implements the FIFO (First-In-First-Out) principle. That means, the first element added (enqueue) to the queue is the first element that gets removed (dequeue). In other areas of life, this is often referred to as a first-come, first-served principle.
A circular (or ring) buffer is a specialized typed of a queue. It is assigned a length at initialization. This length if fixed and not changed during runtime. If the queue is full, it will start to overwrite its values in a circular movement.
Simplified schematic of a circular buffer
The image shows the schematic of a circular buffer. If a new element is enqueued, it will be inserted right to “40”, and the back_pointer will move one position right. If a value is inserted at the most right field the “back pointer” jumps to the left end of the queue. So the back_pointer is left to the front_pointer . If it is one less to the “front pointer” the buffer is full. To add a new element, one must first be removed.
Advantages
A circular buffer brings some advantages. The memory is allocated at the initialization and constant during runtime. Growing queues could be a problem if they grow faster than they shrink as they continuously allocate more memory. This problem does not exist for a circular buffer. They also do not need dynamic memory and don’t require to copy data around. This eliminates the problem of memory leaks. Another advantage is the simple and fast implementation.
Disadvantages
The fixed length could be a problem in some cases. The required length must be known beforehand and could not be changed if required.
Definitions and naming
Length: The length of the buffer is the number of elements that it could store.
Size: The size of the buffer is the number of elements that are currently stored in the buffer.
Empty: The buffer is empty if there is no element in it. This is indicated if the start_pointer and end pointer point to the same element.
Full: The buffer is full if each element is filled with a value. This indicated if the end_pointer is one less than the start_pointer .
UML Modelling
Use case diagram
Use cases of a circular buffer
The use case diagram shows the actions that the Circular buffer must provide. In the code, each action is implemented as a public function of the class.
Class diagram
Class diagram of a circular buffer
The class diagram shows the required classes and their functions. Since the full buffer is implemented in a single class the diagram only contains one class. The public functions mirror the actions defined in the use case diagram.
To make the buffer definition as abstract as possible, the generic type “T” is used. This variable could be replaced by the required type (for example int, string, …). The “enqueue” function returns a Boolean value. If the value could be inserted, the function returns true. Otherwise, it will return false.
Implementation
The following code demonstrates an implementation of a Circular buffer in Python.
from typing import TypeVar, Optional, List
T = TypeVar("T")
class CircularBuffer(Generic[T]):
data: List[T] = []
length: int
size: int = 0
front_pointer: int = 0
back_pointer: int = 0
def __init__(self, length: int = 5):
self.length = length
self.data = [None] * length
def enqueue(self, val: T) -> bool:
if self.is_full():
return False
self.data[self.back_pointer] = val
self.back_pointer = (self.back_pointer + 1) % self.length
self.size += 1
return True
def dequeue(self) -> Optional[T]:
if self.is_empty():
return None
val: T = self.data[self.front_pointer]
self.front_pointer = (self.front_pointer + 1) % self.length
self.size -= 1
return val
def is_empty(self) -> bool:
if self.size == 0:
return True
return False
def is_full(self) -> bool:
if self.size == self.length:
return True
return False
def get_size(self) -> int:
return self.size
def get_length(self) -> int:
return self.length
In order to make the code not too long, the comments have been removed. For the full code see the Github repo.
The class uses a TypeVar so the concrete type must be provided at the initialization. For example to use the class with int types the a new buffer is created with the following code.
cb = CircularBuffer[int](10)
cb.enqueue(5)
cb.enqueue(6)
cb.enqueue(7)
val = cb.dequeue()
print(val) # 5
To use another type replace int with the target type.
Conclusion
Circular buffers are handy structures. They provide a lot of advantages and can be easily implemented. Since they can be used in many different cases, every programmer should know them and should be able to implement them.
If you like the article, visit my blog for more posts. | https://medium.com/@mosermartin09/circular-buffer-4aa5dd9fd85e | ['Martin M.'] | 2020-12-21 06:56:28.197000+00:00 | ['Data Structures', 'Ring Buffer', 'Computer Science', 'Python'] |
Jonathan Glazer’s New Film ‘Strasbourg 1518’ to Premiere on BBC Two | Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer is known for his subversive, uncompromising approach to filmmaking. Small wonder, then, that excitement has greeted the news that his latest production, Strasbourg 1518, will be released on BBC Two later this month.
Alongside Glazer’s direction, the fifteen-minute short film will feature a soundtrack created by Mica Levi, who also composed the award-winning music of Under the Skin. It was co-commissioned by Artangel and Sadler’s Wells and will, according to the BBC, be “a collaboration in isolation with some of the greatest dancers working today,” although so far no names have been released.
That the film was made ‘in isolation’ speaks to its creation, which is in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown. Produced by Academy Films, Strasbourg 1518 is one of many original and revived productions compiled for BBC Arts’ Culture in Quarantine initiative, aimed at increasing the general public’s access to the arts while theatres and other venues remain closed.
Glazer’s resume, which also includes Birth and Sexy Beasts, may be short, but critics have little doubt of his talent. The Guardian, for instance, ranked Under the Skin among the top five films of the 21st century so far. Moreover, Glazer is no sweet summer child when it comes to short films, as evidenced by his five-minute horror The Fall. The production debuted entirely unannounced on BBC Two in October last year, shocking unsuspecting viewers who had tuned in expecting an hour of stand-up comedy on Live at the Apollo. Those who enjoyed the unapologetically chilling tale of a masked lynch mob — plus at least some of those who didn’t — will doubtless be interested to see what its director, and Levi, can do with fifteen minutes of runtime and several highly skilled dancers.
Details of Strasbourg 1518 ‘s content, like its cast, remain closely guarded secrets. However, the BBC’s statement that the film is inspired by “a powerful involuntary mania which took hold of citizens in the city of Strasbourg just over 500 years ago” indicates that it will at least heavily allude to the so-called “dancing plague” that occurred in — guess where — Strasbourg, 1518. The “plague”, which spread to around 400 people over its two-month lifespan, caused sufferers to dance or at least convulse uncontrollably, not stopping until they collapsed and in some cases died from exhaustion. Contemporary accounts blamed the outbreak on demonic possession, overheated blood and lazy women (yes, really). Today, however, it’s thought to have been caused either by food infected with a fungal disease or by mass hysteria.
Strasbourg 1518 is set to premiere at 10pm on Monday, 20 July. It is unclear whether further information about the film will be divulged prior to its release.
Words by Emma Curzon | https://medium.com/the-indiependent/jonathan-glazers-new-film-strasbourg-1518-to-premiere-on-bbc-two-a206f09f9713 | ['Emma Curzon'] | 2020-09-13 12:38:32.819000+00:00 | ['Film', 'Jonathan Glazer', 'Movie', 'Cinema', 'Under The Skin'] |
Neither Capitalism nor Communism is the answer. We need to combine both with the help of Nature’s integral template | Opinion from the Internet about Capitalism:
“This idea of a fixed human nature is false. Humans are not inherently anything beyond the biological imperatives like the need to eat and reproduce. The values of the people who conquered most of the world through European colonialism and imperialism are forced upon us all. To succeed under capitalism you must conform to these values.
I recommend reading Einstein’s essay titled, “Why Socialism?””
You are right that we are all diverse, different. Our differences come from the unique combination of the “animate” and “social” desires (food, sex, family, wealth, power, fame, and knowledge) we all pursue in different ways.
But in our inherent intention — that we all make calculations based on a self-centered “pleasure/pain calculation, and primarily we all want to fulfill ourselves at all cost — we are all the same. Even those who are prone to serve others, donate and engage in altruistic activities do so as this gives them pleasures.
This self-centered, self-serving intention is neither evil nor is it a sin. We are simply born that way, this is the “program” evolution installed into Human beings.
As a result, deep down we all sympathize with Capitalism which is the socioeconomic system that fits our original program. If we look at history, Capitalism evolved by itself without any coercion, we do not need to force people to live in a Capitalistic country. On the other hand, since the hunger for selfish fulfillment, the tendency to sacrifice ourselves and especially others for self-fulfillment is extremely different in people, sooner or later the most selfish, egotistic people start exploiting others to the point where the exploitation, inequality becomes intolerable.
This is when people start looking for other systems, ideologies.
Communism gives itself since the Natural system we live in is Communistic. In any closed, living, integrated system life is possible only when all elements — like the cells of our bodies — altruistically serve the collective without any “personal possession, individual calculations.
But again, since our inherent nature tends towards Capitalism, Communism works only for a short period of time. Then the most selfish, egotistic people start exploiting the masses while the masses start yearning for the “apparent freedom”, personal possessions that Capitalism seemingly provides.
Usually, the people who want to try socialism, Communism never actually lived in a Communistic country before, so they do not know how it feels “in the flesh”.
Our greatest problem is that as integral parts of Nature, Humanity has to adapt to Nature’s Communistic, integral laws, otherwise we won’t be able to survive. But we have to do this in a unique way, without suppressing, erasing the “born, raw Capitalist” inside of us.
And that is possible only through a very unique educational method, which teaches us how the raw Capitalist Human can function and prosper in a “Nature-like Communism”, choosing it all willingly, fully understanding that this is everybody’s best interest.
The freedom we are seeking at the moment is false, as we think freedom is that I can do whatever I want. True freedom is liberating ourselves from the all-encompassing governance of our selfish egos that cripple us regardless of what socioeconomic system we use. Only when we are liberated from the ego — again willingly, purposefully, methodically without coercion — then will we be able to build such a Nature-like Human society where everybody feels absolutely free and completely fulfilled.
And this is all possible, here and now with the help of the above-mentioned educational method! | https://medium.com/@samechphoto/neither-capitalism-nor-communism-is-the-answer-e7e877153069 | ['Zsolt Hermann'] | 2020-12-18 07:06:16.310000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Education', 'Society', 'Communism', 'Capitalism'] |
Classifying GSoC Organizations using Python | Everyone in the computer science field knows about GSoC (Google Summer of Code) or at least have heard about it from a geeky friend. It was started in 2005 by the founders of Google, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. It’s an annual program for university students(over 18 years) worldwide, in which Google provides Stipend to the students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project over the summer with one of the host organizations registered with the GSoC program.
So, today we are going to implement some web scraping program using python to classify the Organizations which are registered with GSoC, on the basis of the technologies they are offering.
The first thing is to open your favorite code editor and create a new python file. I am gonna name it gsoc-tech-classifier.py
We will now import the required python libraries for this script.
requests module allows us to handle HTTP requests and returns a response object. openpyxl module is used to read/write the required response data in an excel file. bs4 or beautifulsoup4 is a module for pulling data out of XML or HTML files. Makes work easy for web scraping. os module provides us a way with its utilities to interact with OS more argparse module is used to read the command-line arguments for python scripts. Because the script is going to make repeated HTTP requests, the server is likely to block the IP address. To prevent that we can use a VPN or other way is to use the fake_useragent module.
Now that we know what these libraries are used for, we are going to set up our UserAgent for random users. The below code snippet shows that.
Next taking the technology for which scaping is to be done as the command-line argument from the user (line 1–3) and save it to a variable (line 5).
We will use the GSoC archive page as the target (line 1 of below code snippet), I am going to use the URL of the 2020’s archive but you can change it very easily for any year.
Now we will create a response object to save the response from the HTTPS request on the URL, which will store all the response data from the GSoC organizations page (line 3–4).
We will now parse the HTML response data from the response object using bs4 module and store it in soup (line 1), and find all the HTML tags containing the name of all organizations, and store them into a soup object named organizations (line 3). Then we will find all the links to the organizations and store them in all_org_Link (line 5).
We will also create two lists, tech_Status for storing the status of technology (available or not) and org_Tech_URL to store links of all the organizations each combined with the GSoC URL (line 6–7).
The tags passed as argument in soup.select() and soup.find_all() function can be found when you inspect this webpage with ctrl+shift+i.
Now we will access each organization’s page and find the technologies used by it. Variable tech_index will be used to provide the index of true value to the list of the status of technology.
A for loop will be initialized over all the links of organizations and for each loop organization link will be saved in variable comp_Link (line 5) and concatenated with the standard GSoC URL and saved into variable comp_url (line 6).
This combined organization URL variable will be stored in the list org_Tech_URL (line 11). Another HTTP request will be made for each of these URLs (line12–13) and another soup object will be used to parse the response object (line 15) and finding all the technologies and storing it in comp_Tech for each organization individually (line 17).
A nested for loop will be looped over all the technologies an organization is offering and will be checked if the required technology exists within the domain of offered technologies by the Organization.
To save all the required data (name of the organization, status for a given technology, link to the organization) in a spreadsheet we will use openpyxl library, we will create a workbook, and data will be written into a sheet of this workbook.
(Line 4–7) are for providing column name to the spreadsheet. (Line 8) will initialize a loop over all the organizations and (Line 9–11) will write the data in the sheet. (Line 13–16) ensures that our script does not fail because of the already existing file. (Line 18) will save the spreadsheet to the local disk.
That’s all, We’re done. Simple enough, right?😉
The code of this script for reference is available at my GitHub account.
ScreenShot of Spreadsheet | https://medium.com/@now-its-abhi/classifying-gsoc-organizations-using-python-5d4d81a419db | ['Abhinav Dubey'] | 2020-12-27 14:39:12.262000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Web Scraping', 'Open Source', 'Google Summer Of Code', 'Gsoc'] |
Rise ABOVE Average! | As kid i always used to struggle to wake up in the morning i used to struggle to drag myself to my desk i used to struggle to open my textbooks and even if i got that far after 10 minutes, i’d get distracted and stop studying i was average just like most other students i was in a constant battle with procrastination and i was stuck in this cycle of not studying enough then failing my exams as a result i felt like a failure i was disappointed, frustrated even so i made a decision i deciced that i can achieve more than that that i am capable of making something of my life so i thought to myself how can i achieve that?
i’ve been performing at average my entire life how can i get out of that trap? how can i perform among the rest of the A grade students? i realised it came down to my daily habits what i do constantly, every day will determine what grades i achieve it was like a light bulb turned on in my head what i do with my 24 hours will determine whether i succeed or fail
those that perform in the top 1% when they don’t feel like studying they do it anyway and that’s what i started to do and thats what you need to do you study hard even when no one is watching no one needs to understand how many hours you’re studying no one needs to know how early you wake up in the morning because thats the quietest time in the day with the least distractions no one needs to know why you’re doing it you’re not doing it because of the grades or to prove to the people around you that you can do it you’re doing it because you have a burning desire step by step, day by day become the best version of yourself possible
far too many people are dreaming of doing it but their actions don’t match their ambition they’re dreaming of graduating at the top of their class and getting a scholarschip to an ivy Leagu college but when it comes to studying they cant last 30 minutes without getting distracted don’t make that mistake let you actions do the talking be obsessed with your studying with learning, with growing i’ve never met a succesful person that wasn’t obsessed with growing i set goals every day a certain numbers of hours studying before i could relax i exercised daily i ate healthily i made sure that i slept early and woke up early so that i could have a productive morning it’s these small decisions that you make the seemingly insignificant decisions that build up over time to create extraordinary results after a few weeks, you will start to see results your grades will start to improving almost immediately you will start feeling better about yourself happier more content with your life | https://medium.com/@iqra-farah/rise-above-average-7de3aa40dd6e | ['Iqra Farah'] | 2020-12-28 23:06:59.469000+00:00 | ['University', 'Schools', 'Study', 'Tips And Tricks', 'Productivity'] |
4 Things Everyone Needs to Experience | A night in jail
I was sitting in our old beater of a station wagon in the driveway when six or seven guys stormed past. It looked like they were breaking down the side door of the suburban bungalow where my partner, George, was copping some heroin. I’d just made out CPD on the back of one guy’s windbreaker when the door to the car whipped open, I was yanked out by the arm, slammed face down over the hood of the car and handcuffed.
It was a bust.
I was marched into the living room of the house, shoved onto my knees with the rest of the handcuffed “perps” while the police wrecked the place.
“Looks like we busted Janice Joplin here.” One cop laughed and swatted at my wide-brimmed fedora. Because I have such tiny hands and wrists, the cop had tightened the cuffs as far as they would go and, fuck, they hurt!
George, cuffed on the far side of the room shrugged and mouthed, “Sorry”.
The police destroyed the inside of that little suburban bungalow. They cut open the furniture and broke apart cabinets. They knocked holes in the walls. Then they marched us all out to waiting police vans, all with gumballs flashing so the neighbors would have plenty to see.
“Take off your glasses, your belt, and take the laces out of your shoes.”
The police, even the female officers, are not at all pleasant to you when you’re in handcuffs. The cell I spent the night in stayed lit all night. There was a stainless steel one-piece toilet in the corner and a thin, blue plastic mat on the narrow platform that was, I guess, a bed.
I guess I fell asleep because I was abruptly woken by the arrival of my cell-mate for the night. Nothing was said. She got under the scratchy blanket feet to my face and we passed the rest of the night that way. In the morning we were given sandwiches (two pieces of baloney on white bread with mustard) and an unripe banana. Then we were piled back into a van and driven downtown to the “ahem” Justice Center.
All this time I was reasonably certain there wasn’t anything they could do to me. I hadn’t even been in the house and I had no drugs on me. But I didn’t know what was going to happen to George. He had been taken to another district jail and we had no way to contact each other. They kept us in a large, crowded holding cell all day with several women at a time being taken away either to court or to be released. No one would give us any information. Finally, at the end of the day, I was released after having my mug shot taken and being threatened with everything short of a firing squad if they ever picked me up again.
George was released at 3 am the following morning and called me from a payphone downtown to let me know. The cops’ timing had saved George; he’d just walked in and hadn’t had time to even take his money out of his pocket when the police came storming in. Even with his record, they had to let him go. The guys he was copping from, though, had just got back from New York and were holding a lot of heroin.
I never saw them again.
Traveling to a country where you don’t speak the language by yourself…more than once
I’ve been to Europe twice on my own, first to Venice and later to Prague. There was that sad second trip to Prague where I was supposed to go on my own and come back with a certain man. I came back alone after all.
Venice was an impulse trip after graduating from college at the age of 49. My partner at the time had no interest in going and my mentor, Anita Dixon Eppley, encouraged me to go ahead and put it on the credit card. It was that important that I go and she was right.
Two years later the passport started whispering to me again so I started planning a solo trip to Prague. I saw the Leonard Cohen was going to be performing there in August so I went ahead and bought two tickets to the show. I knew I’d find someone to invite to the show and I did.
For both of these trips, I rented apartments for myself for the week I’d be there. I didn’t want to be a typical tourist. I also wanted to have to buy food, deal with money, find my way around, and cook my own meals.
I was in Venice the week after Carnival thinking there might be fewer tourists but that was silly of me. Every season is tourist season in Venice which is so incredibly sad. Still, it was a week I’ll never forget. Getting lost and managing to find my way back to my flat day after day, meeting up with an online friend and having a fantastic seafood dinner canal-side, stumbling on my own into the Piazza San Marco one foggy night when it was nearly deserted. So amazing.
Prague is also a tourist mecca but the difference there is that Prague is a living, working, playing, singing, grouchy-ass city whereas poor Venice only has her beauty and her tourists. There aren’t very many actual Venetians in Venice, but Prague is filled with cigarette smoking, resigned, taciturn Czechs who nevertheless would smile at my gamely offered děkuji (thank you).
Getting locked out of your apartment in a country where you don’t speak the language on the day you arrive
My overnight flight to Prague arrived so early that I had to wait for an hour before my landlady made it in from the suburbs to give me the key to my apartment. I sat on a stoop near the address of the place and dozed off. I woke when I got pooped on by a passing pigeon. | https://medium.com/candour/4-things-everyone-needs-to-experience-f6c29a4e417c | ['Remington Write'] | 2020-02-16 21:55:20.702000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Travel', 'Health', 'Addiction', 'Loss'] |
The Horror | Elem Klimov’s newly restored masterwork Come and See expresses the pity of war
“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity,” wrote World War I poet Wilfred Owen, not long before he was killed in action at age 25. This also is the subject of the 1985 Russian World War II film Come and See, now touring the country in a newly restored print. Come and See, the fifth and final movie by director Elem Klimov, has a reputation for being hard to endure, but not because of any violence. There is some, near the end, and it is repulsive. But most of the film zeroes in on the grime and filth and desperation of war, the despairing moments in between the spasms of brutality, and the intolerable dread of inevitable apocalypse.
We’re in Belarus, 1943, and the ragtag resistance is doing what it can against the Nazi machine. We experience almost all of the nightmare through the eyes of Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), a 14-year-old who gets conscripted into the partisan ranks. Flyora doesn’t say much, but his features, dumbstruck with terror and disbelief, speak eloquently for him. He meets, and for a while accompanies, a girl named Glasha (Olga Mironova). They seem to bond solely by virtue of the agonizing and absurd reality they share. There’s no romance or even infatuation in store. War steamrolls over everything warm and comforting. Glasha may or may not even exist, except as a phantasm of grace and innocence in Flyora’s head.
Again and again we are shown how war reduces victims and victimizers alike to animals, except that animals are generally not so cruel. The narrative is anecdotal and splintered, though smoothly photographed (largely via Steadicam); there’s a bit towards the end, when an SS brigade goes from being boisterously evil and triumphant to being sniveling captives of the partisans, that takes us out of the movie — the part where the Nazis actually get defeated, which happens outside Flyora’s view, is just skipped over. I think Elem Klimov is ruthlessly efficient about what precisely he wants to show and convey. The important part of that whole section of the film — which incorporates the semi-climactic genocidal rage directed at a Belarusian village — isn’t who wins or loses, and how. Everyone loses. It’s the pity of war.
Shot in a squarish aspect ratio, with no concessions made to our need for catharsis or narrative tidiness, Come and See attempts no stylistic dazzlement whatsoever; it barely even has a style. The camera just stares at human faces creased in disgust or fear or devastation. “That is war,” Klimov might be saying, “no more, no less.” It shares more DNA with Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc than with any standard war picture (at times, young Aleksei Kravchenko exudes the same frozen torment as Maria Falconetti in the Dreyer film). It’s not overtly political, either. Nobody sits around discussing how inhumane Hitler is, because the entirety of the film’s two hours and sixteen minutes is devoted to moment-to-moment survival. And yet all this stylelessness resolves into a stubborn vision of war as filth and waste, something to be strenuously depicted as the polar opposite of macho, righteous, cool. At its showiest, the filmmaking recreates an idea put forth in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, probably the most unheroic WWII novel ever written, and probably the greatest.
Aside from its 35th anniversary this year, we might wonder why Come and See is being revisited now. It may be a tale of Russian revolt against fascism, but it’s certainly not pro-Russia (or pro-anything). It paints the Nazis as degenerate primate sadists, which is fine, but seems to go a little past the usual such portrayal into caricature, almost. Then you find out the Nazis in the film are based on the real Dirlewanger Brigade, whose atrocities were so extreme that even some fellow Nazis found them over the top. These psychos burn an entire village alive inside a church, then get drunk or stuff their faces, as if at a tailgate party, in between bouts of rape and other assorted cruelties. When the tables are turned, they promptly throw each other under the bus and beg for their lives, while the saturnine partisan leader (Liubomiras Laucevičius, looking like Oscar Isaac in a bad mood) glowers — there are not very fine people on both sides here. The stoic commander is the one instance that Klimov allows himself some conventional war iconography, but at that point, I have to say, he has earned it. Most of the movie comes as close to what war must be like for the civilians caught in its midst as we would ever want to get. | https://robgonsalves.medium.com/the-horror-beb89029e85d | ['Rob Gonsalves'] | 2020-02-24 00:34:45.684000+00:00 | ['Come And See', 'Film Reviews', 'Film'] |
Authentication and Authorization in Phoenix Live View | Let’s start with a simple Signup User Ecto.Schema. (I assume you know how to setup Live View. If not create a project with the following command )
mix phx.new management --live
Create a module to generate tokens
Now that we have the schema and token generation modules, we can write interface functions in the context module
We will create a SignupLive which will handle the registration process. For that, Create signup_live.ex and signup_live.html.leex.
In the leex file, add the following code. I have used Bulma css and Font awesome but you can remove the unnecessary code and keep the minimum form fields
In the signup_live.ex add the following contents. The code should be self explanatory, but I’ll explain clearly below.
In the mount/3 callback, we are fetching the changeset from the Accounts context module to render the form.
The form will emit 2 events.
validate — It is emitted when input field is blurred. So we are only validating the params with the changeset with the help of Accounts.check_registration/1 . In the Accounts.check_registration/1 , changeset action is updated to :insert . Without this, you will not see any errors in the form save — It is emitted when the user clicks the submit button. We use this to insert the data into the database. If it fails due to database constraint errors, then we will render the changeset with errors.
If the insert is successful, We will use the Accounts.sign(ManagementWeb.Endpoint, user.id) to create a token and redirect to Routes.session_path(socket, :create, token)
We haven’t created the controller yet. So, we will create a controller with the filename session_contoller.ex under the controller directory
In the SessionController, create the following method. We have received the token from the SignupLive process. We can verify the token and fetch user_id from the token. Now, we will create a new token with different expiry which will be stored the browser session store.
_________________________________ Example: Auth.login
_________________________________ def login(conn, user_id, remember_me \\ false) do
conn
|> put_session(:token, Accounts.sign(conn, user_id))
|> put_session(:remember_me, remember_me)
|> configure_session(renew: true)
end __________________________________ def create(conn, %{"token" => token} = params) do case Accounts.verify(ManagementWeb.Endpoint, token) do
{:ok, user_id} ->
conn
|> Auth.login(user_id)
|> redirect(to: Routes.page_path(conn, :index)) _ -> create(conn, params)
end
end def create(conn, _params) do
conn
|> put_flash(:error, "error")
|> redirect(to: Routes.signup_path(conn, :index))
end
Finally, lets add get “/session/:token”, SessionController, :create in the router.
After the token has been assigned in the browser session, All the liveview mounts/3 and handle_event/3 will receive %{“token” => token} like so
mount(_params, %{“token” => token}, socket) which we can verify using Accounts.verify/3 to check the validity and get the user_id inside the LiveView. The same procedure can be used to perform Login as well.
It is better to write a plug to protect the protected routes than verifying the token in every LiveView.
I hope it helps. Thanks | https://medium.com/@hariroshanmail/authentication-and-authorization-in-phoenix-live-view-5ad677a03ef | ['Hari Roshan'] | 2020-10-06 11:20:19.085000+00:00 | ['Liveview', 'Phoenix Framework', 'Elixir', 'Authentication', 'Phoenix Liveview'] |
Information on the Demo version | Dear Algory Community,
Thanks to the enlargement of the team, our work has gained momentum. As we mentioned in the last note, we have been working in parallel on the DEMO and MVP (Minimum Viable Product) versions. We want the version we publish to meet your requirements and at the same time we are following the plan presented in the roadmap, which will soon be updated with detailed development plans and progress of works (I will inform further about this in a separate post).
During the development process, we decided to expand functionality in the Demo Version. We, therefore, implemented some modules at the expense of a slight publishing delay. Our goal, after all, is to provide the most perfect tool.
In the demo version, two functions of our Algory Project application will be available:
Powerful Cryptoscanner Cryptonews helping you to profit with faster news & research
Functions in Demo Version
You are welcome to view the materials in which the two functions described in the DEMO and MVP versions have been described in detail.
Cryptoscanner
Create fully automated and versatile filters and alerts that scan the cryptocurrency markets in real-time. The scanner will radically change the way you search for and pick cryptocurrencies for trading! Learn in real-time which cryptocurrencies are hot by using more than 100 different filters and alerts. Analyze all the cryptocurrencies that are relevant to your trading strategy. Take advantage of autotrading based on filters and alerts too!
You can read more about Cryptoscanner here: The most powerful cryptocurrency scanner.
Cryptoscanner in the DEMO version will analyze and filter data from the exchanges such as:
Cryptoscanner will analyze the data streams from the following cryptocurrency pairs:
Pairs that will be streamed on our Cryptoscanner
This is just the beginning. Imagine what awaits you in the final version in which, initially, the data from nearly 70 exchanges will be filtered.
Nearly all cryptocurrency pairs will be filtered and analyzed on the basis of a wide range of filters and alerts which we have described in detail here: Cryptoscanner.
Cryptoscanner in the demo version will soon be published.
Cryptonews
Are you tired of trying to glue together all the websites that you use… just to find the hottest news? Meet the quickest and most advanced News Streamer in the Cryptocurrency Industry. Created for traders who need to be fast. Now you have it all in one place: news services, blogs, tweets, Reddit, and much more! A highly intuitive workspace which you can browse by your chosen sources and criteria. Stay on top of every headline that matters to your portfolio. Timing the market to perfection is hard. Stop waiting for headlines and get the current news. Check the news, find the talked-about cryptocurrencies, and spot the sentiment indicators so you will know all about the potential impact of a story.
You can read more about Cryptonews here: Cryptonews — never be late again!
Find out how Algory — Cryptonews — will help you: How Algory Cryptonews will help you in trading.
Cryptonews in demo version
Cryptonews in its DEMO version will aggregate and filter the data from nearly 500 sources, the most crucial from the point of view of traders and investors on the cryptocurrency market.
Cryptonews has been divided into data streaming data from
different types of categories that are important for the trader
sources analyzed by the largest investors in the world
social media
influencers
and much more
Start of the DEMO version
Despite the fact that it is a demo version, we went much further. This will not be a presentation of a system that you will not be able to use in any way. The demo will be a fully working program in which access to some functions will be limited, thanks to which, you can easily test our tool during daily trading sessions on the cryptocurrency market.
Demo version released soon. We invite you to subscribe to our newsletter — so you won’t miss the start of the demo version, and at the same time you will receive a monthly free access to the premium version of the program when it hits the market.
The newsletter is available on the main website www.algory.io — for subscribing to the newsletter, you will also receive one month free access to the premium version of our program.
What next?
Expect further information from us in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Always be up-to-date and join our:
Algory Team
http://algory.io | https://medium.com/algory-project/information-on-the-demo-version-a2907298754f | ['Tomasz Przybycien'] | 2018-02-19 16:48:45.359000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Initial Coin Offering', 'ICO', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Stock Market During the Recession | A recession is a stoppage or ends to the financial development of the nation. This can prompt joblessness and lower spending by people and organizations. Every one of the variables in a recession is entwined. For example, joblessness is probably going to increment as organizations endeavor to help their edges when individuals spend less as a result of the expansion in joblessness. The components feed into each other in a declining winding. Organizations experience the ill effects of lower incomes, lower benefits, and flimsier development later on. Each one of those elements become possibly the most important factor to decide the estimation of a stock on a major dimension. As the organizations business endures, so too does their stock value, driving the entire stock market lower.
On the off chance that the economy falls into a recession, stock market redresses are more extreme and last longer than if there is no recession.
On the off chance that the stock market drops yet without a recession, it will, in general, recuperate inside a couple of months.
Actually the market is essentially founded on free market activity for stocks, in the event that individuals have increasingly discretionary cash flow, at that point stocks are bound to emerge, however a great deal of the occasions if certain territories of the economy (high society for instance) haven’t been hit especially hard amid a recession then that cash can stream over into the market before long and goad a recuperation.
The market is additionally quite often more reactionary than the economy in general. What will in general happen is that individuals auction very rapidly in the beginning periods of a recession, however then the Smart Money starts to stream over into the market which can frame the reason for recuperation. Because of the reactionary idea of the market, the recuperation can be very fast as it basically needs to return to existing conditions.
What’s more, valuations depend on the wellbeing of the partnerships they identify with, commonly amid a recession it is just the stock cost of an organization that is pounded, however the genuine corporate structure and cash property remain generally flawless. So the crucial valuation behind the organization hasn’t generally changed such much, except for maybe diminished future acquiring potential, however, the stock cost has been completely pounded in light of people groups liquidity needs or overcompensations.
The expanded rate of cash trickle makes this the fall moderate down, and after that, once a base is achieved the SmartMoney kicks in at a much quicker pace and that is homework to recoup is truly start. Commonly, however, truth be told, more often than not, this is as yet amid the specialized time of recession. When individuals are sensibly agreeable that the end isn’t near, Main Street starts to return cash to the market too.
To Learn More About Stock Market Click here https://www.ismdelhi.in | https://medium.com/@bonnapremidi/stock-market-during-the-recession-3f54c16c2bbe | ['Bonn Apremidi'] | 2019-02-15 09:05:50.259000+00:00 | ['Trade', 'Investing Tips', 'Stock Market', 'Share Market'] |
Supercharged Excel for startup analytics with PowerBI | Supercharged Excel for startup analytics with PowerBI
Excel seems to be the most hated tool I ever encountered. That’s a shame because if you look past this bad reputation it’s one of the best tools you can have on your belt for analytics.
In my experience, Excel is great for two purposes: high level reporting and data analysis.
High level reporting is getting the pulse of your business. You can see more details in the article Startup reporting template for insight. It is not one of those hundred daily reports with hundred of KPI (Key Performance Indicators) and up to a hundred pages that only few read, and nobody act on. For these, any Business Intelligence reporting will work. A high-level report is the kind of report you want to read because it tells an important story (how the business is doing, why is that so, should you look for another job?). Even if most of Netflix decisions are based on analytics, it helps to add a bit of craft to the mix. For such report, maybe it’s just adding a label in a chart to remember that a specific product is declining because of an inventory issue or inform that the drop is located in a specific region. Numbers are fine, but it helps to have a bit of explanations.
For high-level reporting Excel is fine because it let you automate most of the work, while letting you add the final touch.
Data analysis is giving a businessperson the ability to understand what is happening underneath the high level reporting. It’s building a story where you are the hero. Sales numbers are down, nobody know why, find the culprit Sherlock.
Excel gives you the awesome pivot table, adding some formula here and there, nice cell conditional formatting. You might prefer to use code (SQL, Python or whatever) for clean processing, but for highlighting what is in your data, Excel is the best.
1 — Separate data, computation and presentation for sanity
Your Excel sheet reflect your state of mind. It can be clean, or it can be chaos. Don’t let it be the latter.
Inspired from the Model-View-Controller from webapps, I split my Excels sheets in 3 kinds of tabs.
The first kind is the presentation sheets which regroup the Dashboard and the Analysis sheets. The Dashboard is obviously the neat part (the part you see in the startup reporting article). I also add an Analysis sheet where I put a big dynamic cross table where users can dig deeper if something in the Dashboard part need closer examination.
The second kind is the Data layer. In those sheets (one per data source), there is data and only raw data. No formulas. I tag them DATA and put them always in yellow.
The last kind of sheets is the computing sheet. This is where I put the business logic (and all those Excel formulas). Those are tagged HIDDEN and in gray because no user should go there (and they are hidden most of the time).
This simple separation of concern will provide you peace of mind. If there is an issue, you know you should first check the relevant DATA sheet, then, if the error is not there, the relevant HIDDEN sheet. You should have a simple data lineage.
In the next step, we will see how to update the Data layer automatically.
2 — Data connection is key to automation — Stop copy/paste
One reason people hate Excel is because most people end up spending hours copy/pasting. Truth is no Excel report should be more than one click away from being refreshed.
Let’s assume you have a Postgresql as a datamart where the IT dump some production data every night (can be a shared directory but a database is way more effective). Using the right ODBC driver (a common middleware that Excel understand), you can read the database directly from Excel. You can select a table, or even write a proper SQL query. This nice tool is in Get Data -> From Other Sources -> From ODBC (the From Database should be read From Microsoft Databases).
Just press Load and the data will be loaded from the database. The nice thing is that it will open a query panel where you can refresh the data at will (note: the Refresh All button from the Data panel works as well).
We are, therefore, some clicks away from a pivot table with conditional formatting where you can easily spot that there is a seasonality effect in February and a big lift starting in July 2013.
With such tool, you can create easily create a high level report like the one we did for Brewnation. Just remember to create one sheet for each data connections, one or more for computations and one for the presentation.
Speaking of computations, those are painful and error prone with Excel formulas. Good news, there is a better way with PowerBI.
3 — PowerBI for Excel is key to superpowers
There is one more level to the Excel superpowers. It’s cleverly hidden by Microsoft. I call it PowerBI for Excel, but PowerBI is now a separated product line with a different approach (but the core is the same). Back in the days, it was called Power Pivot and Power Query, but it’s long gone. Those day it’s just a feature Excel few know about.
In the previous section, we established a link between Excel and a data source. Instead of loading those data in a sheet, let’s load it in the PowerBI engine. Instead of the “Load” button, use the “Load to” to open the “Import Data” dialog box. Here we will just create the connection and add the data to the Data Model.
The Data Model is the storage part of PowerBI. No longer are you limited with the 1 million rows of Excel. This columnar compressed storage is also quite good at using only a small space footprint.
To show what’s in this data model, use the “Manage Data Model” button in the Data ribbon.
This whole model can be enhanced add new computed columns and aggregate measures. In fact, most of your computation layer can fit in the PowerBI engine.
As you can see, Excel is really powerful once you know how to use it. It is THE mainstream analytics tool. | https://towardsdatascience.com/supercharged-excel-for-startup-analytics-with-powerbi-46a15c436eba | ['Sébastien Derivaux'] | 2019-05-19 01:35:38.539000+00:00 | ['Excel', 'Power Bi', 'Big Data'] |
Flavor Your Experience in a New Destination with Food and Beverage Tours | So, I’m not really a tour sort of person. The word generates images of smelly busses and bored college-age tour guides with little knowledge to share.
Gary and I lean heavily toward independent exploration in most cases. I know, I know, some of you non-cruising people that know how much we love to cruise are wondering why I don’t count cruises as one big floating tour. That’s a topic for a whole other story, but the short answer is that we are boat people, so simply being onboard a cruise ship is fun for us.
I can actually name only a handful of group tours I’ve been on that wowed me unless you add in the food and beverage tours.
And those rarely disappoint. Whether it’s drinking beer and eating sausage sandwiches from what may very well be one of the oldest fast-food restaurants in Regensburg, Germany, or sipping wine deep in a stone cellar in Alsace, there are tours that have shaken me from my travel complacency.
Qualities of a good food tour
The tour guide is often the key. Questions to ask before you book include whether the guide is a local and how many tours they have led.
I’ve been on incredible food tours with only one stop, but multi-stop tours would definitely have the edge. More stops mean more opportunities to try new foods and less likelihood that at least some of the stops are to your liking. More stops also usually indicate more time learning tidbits about the community you are exploring.
Variety is also important. Will there be a mix of sweet and savory stops? (Although I’d sign up for an all chocolate tour in a heartbeat, how about you?) I also like tours that include food and at least one adult beverage, although too many drinks and the tour begins to feel more like a crawl.
Does the tour center around foods and restaurants where locals eat? If your goal is to meld into the destination, the last thing you’re looking for is a tour that includes touristy stops or too many upscale eateries.
The size of the group can make or break a good food and beverage tour. Intimate groups afford more opportunities to ask questions of your guide as well as spend time actually conversing with your hosts.
And finally, it’s wise to ask about portion sizes. The goal would be large enough portions so that you feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth, but not large enough to induce a food coma.
My favorite food tours of all time:
Street tacos in Puerto Vallarta — not for the food timid, but this walking tour of the city in the evening is both delicious and cultural.
Winery tours in Johnson City and Fredericksburg, Texas — I may be partial since Texas is my home stare, but the tours offered here tend to be both educational and tasty in this traditional German-influenced community.
South Florida Food Tours — the charm of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and its inhabitants shines through the stops on this lunch tour.
Any food and beer tour in Germany — literally, any one. | https://medium.com/traveltruth/flavor-your-experience-in-a-new-destination-with-food-and-beverage-tours-65c97492332b | ['Melinda Crow'] | 2019-12-15 17:13:49.663000+00:00 | ['Travel Tips', 'Food And Drink', 'Foodies', 'Travel', 'Food'] |
What Do We Know About Iran? | Apparently the White House has photographs of fully assembled Iranian missiles on small boats, along with intercepted Iranian conversations threatening possible attacks on Navy ships and commercial shipping or American troops in Iraq by Arab militias with Iran ties, according to The New York Times.
The Washington Post says that Pentagonand intelligence officials said that there have been three distinct Iranian actions: Captured hints of an Iranian threat against U.S. diplomatic facilities in the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Irbil; U.S. concerns that Iran may be preparing to mount missile launchers on small ships in the Persian Gulf; and a directive from the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and that some U.S. officials have interpreted as a potential threat to U.S. military and diplomatic personnel.
NBC News quotes the British deputy commander in the global coalition against the Islamic State as contradicting the risk of an attack altogether, either by Iran or its milita partners, citing the same evidence. Other European allies are openly questioning the nature of the intelligence that the United States is picking up.
In other words, the only thing we can be sure of is that there is a wide gulf in how to interpret whatever signs are being picked up from Iranian communications. Indeed, just how alarmed the Trump administration should be over the new intelligence is a subject of fierce debate among the White House, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and America’s allies, The Times concluded.
The uncertainty is reminiscent of the build-up to the war in Iraq when weapons of mass destruction did not appear, as intelligence had said. In this case, there is open question of whether the Iranians are loading their small boats as an offensive move or in reaction to American declaration of Iranian troops as terrorists last week.
For a guy who talks a lot about keeping the country safe (from refugees feeling violence), Trump is testing our collective security on every continent with problems in South America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, almost all at once.
On Wednesday, the State Department ordered nonessential personnel to leave the U.S. missions in Baghdad and Irbil. The Times reported that the Pentagon was coming up with plans for deployment of up to 120,000 U.S. troops to Iran — in the event that there is a provocation from Iran or its agents.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump denies both that there is such a plan — while saying that he would happily support one if there is a major provocation — and also denies that there is confusion or discord in his administration, as being widely reported in the news media. The discord pits the militarism favored by National Security Advisor John Bolton, with support from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on the one side, and Pentagon brass on the other, warning of the dangers of a war with Iran.
The Post said that Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars, according to several U.S. officials. Trump told acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan that he does not want a war now with Iran, and wants to speak directly with Iran’s leaders.
Iranian leaders say ambiguously that they are showing “maximum restraint.”
Making it worse is that congressional leaders from both parties say that they are in the dark about the nature and source of the evidence being cited, though there was some limited sharing of information yesterday. Democrats, in particular, are saying that they want consultation from the White House to support any call for war or military action.
For the rest of us, the idea that we have a government that either has no policy directions other than “America First,” that we have leaders that apparently are in serious disagreement, that the president is being led by his three-year-old campaign promises, and that we can’t even agree on what we are looking at, is, well, pretty troubling.
The Post report said tnat Trump is not inclined to respond forcefully unless there is a “big move” from the Iranians, according to an unnamed senior White House official, but would be willing to respond forcefully if there are American deaths or a dramatic escalation, the official said.
As a citizen, I’d like to think there would be a wider consensus on such evidentiary questions, including with Congress, including with allies who would be needed, than to depend solely on the presidential gut.
News reports meanwhile suggest that Trump complains increasingly about Bolton’s aggressiveness. That has seemed the case in recent examination of U.S. statements and actions in Venezuela and North Korea.
Obviously, we should all be worried that all this saber-rattling can lead to errors on the ground where chances of misinterpretation or miscalculation seems the greatest, particularly since Iran depends on proxy militias outside its direct command.
There were sabotage attacks on Saudi oil tankers this week, for example. Was that Iranian-ordered? Were they rogue acts by militia groups?
The United States has ordered an aircraft carrier flotilla to the Persian Gulf, within range of Iranian missiles.
It seems to me there ought to be a priority about figuring out the right questions and interpretations of available evidence by Americans and our allies. | https://medium.com/spec/what-do-we-know-about-iran-56f5cfb15dc7 | ['Terry Schwadron'] | 2019-05-17 12:06:03.824000+00:00 | ['Middle East', 'Government', 'Trump Administration', 'Trump', 'News'] |
II Cold War. The geopolitical face of technology. | Technology has been always a hot topic for any country but, especially, to the United States of America. This 21stcentury brought us a lot of things that we were expecting and other tech advances that we haven’t even imagined in our finest dreams. Anyone remembers the sound of a 56kbps router turning on? Well, if you aren’t from this generation you can listen to it. What happens today? We got bored if Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa doesn’t speak in our mother language. We are angry to our ISP if we don’t have at least 1GBPS of download speed via ethernet/WiFi connection. Or, a better example, we got mad when our we blow up our 30GB mobile data plan from our carrier.
In this article I’ll explore what are the main differences as of today and why are we living in a II cold war. Now, between the United States and China presenting facts that will help you to be informed in these uncertainty times.
#5G. The hoax behind Donald J. Trump and WH claims. What is 5G? This is a brand-new technology being implemented in the upcoming years that will allow any person with a 5G compatible device (Smartphone, Tablet, etc.) to navigate in the internet and download content at speeds of 1GBPS or more. This, naturally, depends of some aspects such as the carrier you have contract with, which device do you use to access (high-end smartphones, e.g., will probably grant you better internet speed rather those which are cheaper due to the hardware built-in).
Who is responsible to implement 5G and why is this fuzz around Huawei caused by the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump? The responsibility to implement the 5G technology is, in first hand, every country which must promote auctions of frequencies to carriers explore and install their technology. These types of bids allow the carrier to secure a certain number of frequencies where they will base their offer to their clients. Here it’s important you know that how much bands do you carrier secures faster, better and reliable will be your 5G connection. This isn’t the news because it’s literally the same as the 4G, 3G or even the EDGE technology.
So why is this fuzz? Two years ago, in 2018, the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, started to impose tariffs on Chinese products and commodities alleging that China was practicing “unfair trade practices” which would lead to the destruction of the world’s and American economy. In the mid of this trade war, you will find the company currently leading the 5G implementation in the world. The reason that the President of the United States alleged this is that Huawei posed a “risk to national security” as according to him there was evidences — never presented — that Huawei used its routers, servers, devices, etc. to spy the United States and its citizens and send this data over to the Chinese Government.
However, as everything in our life, it’s also broader than what’s being said to the press. Huawei is actually “the second-largest global seller of smartphones, surpassing Apple, Inc. (AAPL) for the first time, coming in behind number one Samsung Electronics Co. Inc.”[1] which means that for the first time the leader of tech industry isn’t an American company. According to Huawei[2] there is no history of sending over any data to the Chinese government nor to any other security agency in the world.
In order to better comprehend this whole situation, the company produced, this year, a document presenting facts about why the claims made by the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump are false and misleading. In this documentpresents 9 facts that explains in detail why the allegations from the government of the United States ae false and what’s the potential impact that halting Huawei would have not only for its almost 200,000 employees but to worldwide economies who rely on Huawei technology and R&D.
Source: visuals on Unsplash
Other interesting example of why we are living a second cold war is also related with Chinese/USA trade war through TikTok. We almost know the coolest social media where we all post those amazing videos who made us laugh so much through the first quarantine, right? According to President Donald J. Trump, like Huawei, TikTok is being used by the Chinese Government to spy on the United States and its citizens. One more time with false allegations lacking evidence by the government of the United States.
What matters now? The evidence or the perception? What really matters, in my opinion, is facts. It’s a fact that the current President of the United States is a lying machine. According to the Washington Post, the President told 22,510 false or misleading claims in 1,323 days. This is more than 17 false claims per day since he took office. Note that this count isn’t up to date as the newspaper wasn’t able to keep up the rhythm as of September, 3rd so you can count the last two or three months of the Electoral Campaign which would put him at an average of 50 false or misleading claims a day and overturning the milestone of 25,000 false allegations or claims in his presidential term(!!)!
What counts, in the end, is naturally the evidence. And talking about fact check and especially about the spying we can bring up the example of Edward Snowden who was bold enough to report what were the United States doing with NSA or CIA programs. He reported that both agencies were using networks from telco companies to monitor, acquire and store millions of GB of data including SMS, phone calls, e-mails, instant messaging service (WhatsApp, etc.) and other devices including the microphone of our tv’s to listen to our conversations without a warrant.
With this statement I’m not defending that the Chinese government is an example of freedom, Quite contrary. The Chinese Government is the opposite of a freedom defender. Like all the governments in the world proactively spies on its citizens and those who are inside their boarders. The Chinese Government is one of the fiercest dictatorships worldwide and one of the countries where the individual liberties are more suppressed. As citizens we must fight against all types of dictatorship even if it’s masked up or not. We have to understand the importance of privacy and what to do to protect ourselves because the idea that our country or government would protect us is false. We must fully understand these topics so we can make the world a better and safer place. | https://medium.com/@pedrodelriopr/ii-cold-war-the-geopolitical-face-of-technology-5d5bb2a6964c | ['Pedro Del Rio'] | 2020-11-20 08:09:15.702000+00:00 | ['International Relations', 'Trade War', 'Technology', 'Tiktok App', 'Huawei'] |
When You Can’t Write, Do These Things Instead | When You Can’t Write, Do These Things Instead
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
Your problem is not idea creation.
According to a study published by psychologists at Queen’s University, human beings have around 6,200 thoughts per day. This means that generating writing ideas isn’t the problem. It’s converting those thoughts and ideas into words.
When you can’t think of something to write, what you’re actually struggling with is translating your thoughts into words. Going from private ideas to fully-formed, concrete concepts. Oftentimes, the hardest part is making sense of what you’re thinking. And then articulating that in a way that would make sense to other people. The goal then is to make this translation process as easy, and frictionless as you can.
These seven activities will help translate your thoughts into meaningful words.
1. Turn off your devices
Writing is just well-rehearsed thought.
The fewer distractions you have, the easier it is to rehearse your thoughts and translate them into words. Take your headphones out, turn off the TV, and put away your phone. With no distractions, there’s not much for your brain to do.
Turning off your devices forces you to write.
2. Take a hot shower
Hot showers are a breeding ground for great ideas.
According to Ron Friedman, a psychologist and behavior change expert, showers give you a dopamine high and put you in a relaxed state. In the shower, expectations are nonexistent and your mind is free to wander. Put some music on and jump in the shower.
And keep your phone or notebook handy for when ideas strike.
3. Read a book
Great writing is the result of good reading.
Not all great ideas are entirely unique. Sometimes an exceptional article simply provides a refreshing perspective on an outdated idea. Sitting down to read a book can open up your brain to different paths of thinking.
Find an interesting book and dive in.
4. Exercise
Movement is a powerful teacher.
Not only is it essential for staying healthy, but it also temporarily removes any expectation of generating ideas. Forced to focus on the task at hand, your brain is free to wander and explore. Exercise also releases dopamine, which is a powerful tool for idea creation.
Go run, walk, or hit the gym.
5. Listen to a podcast
Podcasts are an easy way to learn something new.
Because they’re passive, you can listen to experts talk while washing the dishes or driving to work. If you want to write about a particular topic, find a popular podcast and listen with purpose. Try to understand everything that’s being said and jot down any meaningful quotes.
Then, package that info up into an easy-to-understand article.
6. Find a powerful video or movie
Sometimes inspiration is all you need.
Hop onto Netflix or YouTube and find something that interests you. Whether it’s a documentary, a motivational video, or even the latest Jason Bourne movie, a brief break may provide the inspiration you need. Oftentimes the best ideas come when you’re not thinking.
Remove your expectations and just watch something interesting.
7. Do something you don’t normally do
People don’t want to read about the time you sat on the couch and typed on your computer.
People want to read about the time you ran a 50-mile foot race through the desert. Or the time you flew across the country to profess your love to someone. Or the time you jumped off a 70-foot cliff into the Pacific ocean.
When all else fails, go do something interesting and write about it.
Final thoughts
Your problem is not idea creation, it’s idea translation. With more than 6,200 thoughts per day, the challenge is converting these thoughts into meaningful concepts that will make sense to other people. These 7 strategies will help you do just that — destroy writer’s block and translate your thoughts into powerful articles. | https://writingcooperative.com/when-you-cant-write-do-these-things-instead-6bfd94df515 | ['Devin Arrigo'] | 2021-03-03 01:33:56.487000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Productivity', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing', 'Writers Block'] |
Meet We Encourage you to #takeaction panelists | We Encourage is hosting a launch event for action takers in March 26th in Helsinki.
In our event, we want to lift the cat on the table as we Finnish use to say, by hosting a panel discussion about the issues girls and women are facing, such as honor-based violence, forced marriages, gender discrimination to name but a few.
The aim is to inspire people to take action on these discussed problems on our idea generation workshop that follows the panel. Our mission is, instead of just stating the problems and speaking about them, to take action and start brainstorming what to do to solve those problems. We encourage others to start their own solutions and ventures to accompany ours. We have too many conferences, events and meetings, just for talking, and we believe now it’s time to start working on solutions.
Meet our action taker panelists
Nils Adler
Nils Adler
A British-Swedish Journalist. Since 2017, he has been working with a team on a project about so-called honour-based violence.
Nils has written for a wide range of publications and his photographs have been featured in the Guardian and El País.
He has reported from a number of regions including the UK, Turkey, Ukraine, Malta, Iraq, Mozambique, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Belarus and Iraqi Kurdistan.
Elaf Ali
Elaf Ali
Elaf Ali is a Swedish journalist and news presenter with roots in Iraq. She is currently writing her debut novel about her upbringing in the honor culture. She lectures around Sweden about Honor-Based Violence, mainly in schools but also for authorities.
Sanna Heikkinen
Sanna Heikkinen
Sanna Heikkinen is an experienced NGO professional and youth worker with over 22 years of work experience from Finland and abroad. Her international experience has been based in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Switzerland, France and the United States of America.
For the past 7 years she has been managing community meeting centers for girls and young women at Nicehearts in Finland. Issues they deal with are often linked to gender based violence, social exclusion, and loneliness. Nichehearts supports each individual to find their voice and provide opportunities for becoming an active member of the community and feel included and integrated in the society.
Mervi Patosalmi
Mervi Patosalmi
Mervi Patosalmi is a gender expert who has diverse experience of advancing gender equality and women’s and girls’ rights in Finland and internationally. She has worked for example in Africa and the Caucasus. Her specialties include among other things, methods and practices of gender mainstreaming and gender responsive budgeting. She has a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Helsinki, Finland and she has worked several years as a researcher.
Binita Lamichhane
Binita Lamichhane
Binita Lamichhane, originally from Nepal, has experience working in WOFOWON (Women forum for women in Nepal), an NGO, continuously working to ensure the rights of women working in informal and entertainment sectors in Nepal.
Come and join us at our free launch event at 26th of March, register here! | https://medium.com/@we-encourage/meet-we-encourage-you-to-takeaction-panelists-b0f808bdb4e3 | ['We Encourage'] | 2020-02-15 12:54:24.402000+00:00 | ['Empowerment', 'Impact', 'Startup', 'Event'] |
(O.N.L.I.N.E) Watch “ Pinocchio (2019)” (2020) — Family MOVIE | Release Date : Dec 19, 2019
Runtime : 125 minutes
Genres : Fantasy, Family, Adventure, Drama
Production Company : Fonds Eurimages du Conseil de l’Europe, Archimede, Recorded Picture Company, Le Pacte, Rai Cinema, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, 01 Distribution, Apulia Film Commission, BPER Banca, Canal+, Ciné+, Direzione Generale Cinema, Lazio Cinema International, Lotus Production, Regione Lazio, Regione Puglia, Regione Toscana, Toscana Promozione, Unipol
Production Countries : United Kingdom, Italy, France
Casts : Federico Ielapi, Roberto Benigni, Marine Vacth, Gigi Proietti, Massimo Ceccherini, Rocco Papaleo, Alessio Di Domenicantonio, Marcello Fonte, Davide Marotta, Paolo Graziosi, Gianfranco Gallo
Plot Keywords : based on novel or book, based on children’s book
» Watch Movie Pinocchio (2019) «
TELEVISION 👾
(TV), in some cases abbreviated to tele or television, is a media transmission medium utilized for sending moving pictures in monochrome (high contrast), or in shading, and in a few measurements and sound. The term can allude to a TV, a TV program, or the vehicle of TV transmission. TV is a mass mode for promoting, amusement, news, and sports.
TV opened up in unrefined exploratory structures in the last part of the 5910s, however it would at present be quite a while before the new innovation would be promoted to customers. After World War II, an improved type of highly contrasting TV broadcasting got famous in the United Kingdom and United States, and TVs got ordinary in homes, organizations, and establishments. During the 5950s, TV was the essential mechanism for affecting public opinion.[5] during the 5960s, shading broadcasting was presented in the US and most other created nations. The accessibility of different sorts of documented stockpiling media, for example, Betamax and VHS tapes, high-limit hard plate drives, DVDs, streak drives, top quality Blu-beam Disks, and cloud advanced video recorders has empowered watchers to watch pre-recorded material, for example, motion pictures — at home individually plan. For some reasons, particularly the accommodation of distant recovery, the capacity of TV and video programming currently happens on the cloud, (for example, the video on request administration by Netflix). Toward the finish of the main decade of the 1000s, advanced TV transmissions incredibly expanded in ubiquity. Another improvement was the move from standard-definition TV (SDTV) (516i, with 909091 intertwined lines of goal and 434545) to top quality TV (HDTV), which gives a goal that is generously higher. HDTV might be communicated in different arrangements: 3456561, 3456561 and 1314. Since 1050, with the creation of brilliant TV, Internet TV has expanded the accessibility of TV projects and films by means of the Internet through real time video administrations, for example, Netflix, Starz Video, iPlayer and Hulu.
In 1053, 19% of the world’s family units possessed a TV set.[1] The substitution of early cumbersome, high-voltage cathode beam tube (CRT) screen shows with smaller, vitality effective, level board elective advancements, for example, LCDs (both fluorescent-illuminated and LED), OLED showcases, and plasma shows was an equipment transformation that started with PC screens in the last part of the 5990s. Most TV sets sold during the 1000s were level board, primarily LEDs. Significant makers reported the stopping of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-illuminated LCDs by the mid-1050s.[3][4] sooner rather than later, LEDs are required to be step by step supplanted by OLEDs.[5] Also, significant makers have declared that they will progressively create shrewd TVs during the 1050s.[6][1][5] Smart TVs with incorporated Internet and Web 1.0 capacities turned into the prevailing type of TV by the late 1050s.[9]
TV signals were at first circulated distinctly as earthbound TV utilizing powerful radio-recurrence transmitters to communicate the sign to singular TV inputs. Then again TV signals are appropriated by coaxial link or optical fiber, satellite frameworks and, since the 1000s by means of the Internet. Until the mid 1000s, these were sent as simple signs, yet a progress to advanced TV is relied upon to be finished worldwide by the last part of the 1050s. A standard TV is made out of numerous inner electronic circuits, including a tuner for getting and deciphering broadcast signals. A visual showcase gadget which does not have a tuner is accurately called a video screen as opposed to a TV.
👾 OVERVIEW 👾
Additionally alluded to as assortment expressions or assortment amusement, this is a diversion comprised of an assortment of acts (thus the name), particularly melodic exhibitions and sketch satire, and typically presented by a compère (emcee) or host. Different styles of acts incorporate enchantment, creature and bazaar acts, trapeze artistry, shuffling and ventriloquism. Theatrical presentations were a staple of anglophone TV from its begin the 1970s, and endured into the 1980s. In a few components of the world, assortment TV stays famous and broad.
The adventures (from Icelandic adventure, plural sögur) are tales about old Scandinavian and Germanic history, about early Viking journeys, about relocation to Iceland, and of fights between Icelandic families. They were written in the Old Norse language, for the most part in Iceland. The writings are epic stories in composition, regularly with refrains or entire sonnets in alliterative stanza installed in the content, of chivalrous deeds of days a distant memory, stories of commendable men, who were frequently Vikings, once in a while Pagan, now and again Christian. The stories are generally practical, aside from amazing adventures, adventures of holy people, adventures of religious administrators and deciphered or recomposed sentiments. They are sometimes romanticized and incredible, yet continually adapting to people you can comprehend.
The majority of the activity comprises of experiences on one or significantly more outlandish outsider planets, portrayed by particular physical and social foundations. Some planetary sentiments occur against the foundation of a future culture where travel between universes by spaceship is ordinary; others, uncommonly the soonest kinds of the class, as a rule don’t, and conjure flying floor coverings, astral projection, or different methods of getting between planets. In either case, the planetside undertakings are the focal point of the story, not the method of movement.
Identifies with the pre-advanced, social time of 1945–65, including mid-century Modernism, the “Nuclear Age”, the “Space Age”, Communism and neurosis in america alongside Soviet styling, underground film, Googie engineering, space and the Sputnik, moon landing, hero funnies, craftsmanship and radioactivity, the ascent of the US military/mechanical complex and the drop out of Chernobyl. Socialist simple atompunk can be an extreme lost world. The Fallout arrangement of PC games is a fabulous case of atompunk. | https://medium.com/join-us-pinocchio-2019/o-n-l-i-n-e-watch-pinocchio-2019-2020-family-movie-40ac4909bf58 | ['Stacie J. Hoffman'] | 2020-12-26 05:48:02.560000+00:00 | ['Adventure', 'Family', 'Drama', 'Fantasy'] |
Digital Marketing in 5 Steps: cutting through the noise — from campaigns to strategies | The Digital Marketing landscape is more competitive than ever. As the Digital Marketing landscape continues to transform and evolve at a rapid pace, it´s important to understand the latest industry developments and cut through the noise, creating personalised, omnichannel campaigns and strategies.
Understand the process
In an environment where every conversion counts, a great way to remain relevant and follow marketing trends is to closely monitor marketing statistics. Understanding the process, adapting content and strategy and optimising as you go are also key elements to a successful marketing campaign.
“76% of people think marketing has changed more in the past two years than it did over the previous fifty”
- The Adobe 2016 Digital Trends Report
A potentially harming triple threat
But are marketers confident about their efforts? Data shows that only 61% of marketers believe their marketing strategy is effective (Hubspot). And, even though many of them doubt their strategies, they’re still pouring massive spend into digital advertising. This can be time consuming, expensive and leave campaign success and results at risk. A potentially harming triple threat no marketer wants to deal with.
Image source: HubSpot Research, Global Survey, Nov — Dec 2019
To help put things in into context for your next Digital Marketing campaign, here’s a breakdown of Digital Marketing’s five key steps for success. Along with data from successful case studies, highlighting best practices that you can apply in your strategies.
1. Define a target audience
Targeting the right market is one of a marketer’s most important tasks. It’s the foundation of all elements of your marketing strategy. Your task in defining your target group is to identify and understand your particular niche so you can dominate it.
The data:
By driving traffic from high-quality content sources, like editorial content from media outlets, Huggies, a leading global diaper brand, created an audience who was highly engaged. The results? 20x more website visitors and -15% bounce rate.
Image Source: WhiteKube with data from Outbrain
2. Create Remarkable Content
Content is still king! Now that you have your target audience in sight, it’s time to focus on content. Choosing the right content to spread your message is essential to get your audience’s attention. It’s important to focus on the most popular formats, create content that matters and be disruptive, so your brand can stand out.
The data:
By using video content to serve as a lifeline for customers, Tiger Fitness, an online nutritional retailer, achieved a 60% returning customer rate with video content marketing. The YouTube content was focused on training videos, educational videos and product reviews.
Image Source: WhiteKube with data from MarketingSherpa
3. Build an email list
Timing is everything — especially when it comes to doing business. Yes, you might have the right audience and the right content, but your audience may not have the time or budget to do business with you right away. The best
strategy is to build an e-mail list you can nurture until your audience is ready to convert into leads and sales.
The data:
By adding eight more ways for people to sign up for their list, Buffer, a software application designed to manage accounts in social networks, increased monthly email signups by 130%. The new e-mail signup sources consisted on Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare, Homepage and Sidebar widgets and postscript, among others.
Image source: Buffer
4. Make sales
The ultimate end goal is to sell. But don’t forget the best product and services still need a show of emotion to satisfy your customer’s needs. Combine all the above, add a personal touch and grow a community to ultimately convert, make sales and turn leads into customers.
The data
Researchers Hong Sheng and Tanvi Joginapelly found out that websites with a stronger emotional impact produced a greater intent to buy.
Image source The Logo Company
5. Measure, Optimize, Repeat
When all is “said and done”, there’s still plenty measurement to do! By analysing and optimising your strategies you gain helpful insight regarding audiences, content and the sale process. It’s an on-going task and an essential tool to achieve return of investment goal. | https://medium.com/digital-360/digital-marketing-in-5-steps-cutting-through-the-noise-from-campaigns-to-strategies-65103bc0d4de | [] | 2020-06-22 14:52:59.347000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Online Marketing Strategy', 'Infographics', 'Strategy'] |
Playing Peek-a-boo With a Friend | Yesterday was a very grueling day at work. Everyone seemed to be in a foul mood. Where was the holiday spirit? My own spirits were in a slow decline but then someone showed up to bring joy to my day.
I was sitting at a computer typing something when I stopped and looked to my left. And there, standing about ten feet away, was my special little friend staring at me.
I don’t even know her name but does that matter? I am guessing that she is probably about two and a half years old. She has extremely curly red/orange hair and she also has Down Syndrome. I have never heard her speak but she sure can giggle.
Whenever her mother comes into the building she will set the girl down on the floor and the girl immediately starts wandering the building looking for me. We’ve been friends for almost a year.
I said hello and we stared at each other for a moment. This little girl has uncanny staring abilities. She can stare seemingly forever and she can go longer without blinking than any human I’ve ever met. Whenever we stare at each other I am always the first to blink and she is always the first to giggle.
After staring for a while I looked back at the computer screen for a moment then I abruptly turned back towards her with a goofy look on my face.
She giggled and danced.
Then I put a manila folder in front of my face for a moment then whisked it away with another goofy grin on my face.
Again the girl giggled and danced.
I could play peek-a-boo with her all day and she would never grow tired of it. That is why she always seeks me out when in the building. Apparently, I’m good for a giggle and a dance. And watching a little girl giggle and dance is definitely good medicine for me.
After about 7 or 8 minutes of giggling, dancing and playing peek-a-boo the mother came by and picked up the girl as she headed for the exit. Looking back over her mother’s shoulder she kept staring at me. I waved good-bye but she did not wave back. Instead she giggled again.
Seeing my special friend was the highlight of the day and my spirits most emphatically rose. But after they left the building I had a sad realization. Since come Sunday (tomorrow) I will be officially and blissfully unemployed, I will no longer be working in that building. I might not ever see my special friend again. | https://whitefeather9.medium.com/playing-peek-a-boo-with-a-friend-1d0d67bae3e8 | ['White Feather'] | 2018-11-24 16:11:22.920000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Life', 'Moon', 'Holidays', 'Children'] |
Targeting the right stage of the digital funnel | A difficult to sell development is transformed by focusing marketing at the correct stage of the marketing funnel and at a new range of customers. From no sales, to fast selling and all at a lower cost per sale than previous strategies.
Smart customer journey marketing tees up better sales conversions
Housebuilder marketers need to get smarter about their customer journey strategy to address struggling sales. While it is tempting to focus tactics and resources on the ‘conversion’ phase of the house-buyer’s journey, investing in the earlier ‘consideration’ phase of the marketing funnel actually works harder to deliver results.
With potential purchasers normally having their minimum criteria for a new home — type, size and so on — already set, their earlier searches are around price and location for those minimums. Here is where the focus should be, expanding the awareness of properties outside of their initial areas for shortlisting, to expand both the location and types of properties that they will consider.
In this specific case, the language used to sell the developments and properties was old fashioned and had not changed to appeal to modern tastes and expectations. With a potentially months-long consideration phase in the journey, updating the content to keep it fresh, relevant, and creating a sense of scarcity, also matters.
So what does investing more in the consideration phase of the customer journey mean in terms of results? Not only a reduced cost per lead acquisition, but also an improvement in the quality of those leads. Better-qualified leads delivered sales conversions more efficiently, which was crucial in a highly competitive market.
The ‘consideration’ phase: what is it?
It is important to get as close as possible to the mind-set of the target audience when planning journey-based marketing tactics. When a person decides to move home, it could be for several distinct reasons, each of which will completely change how that person looks for their next property:
Change in job situation, requiring relocation. Desire for more space, change in family structure — growing or after children have left home. Entering the housing market for the first time, the ‘first step on the ladder’.
These circumstances will push the target into a consideration phase. It is hard to induce people to consider moving home for its own sake, so injecting awareness of the product at the correct stage of this consideration process is key.
Why couldn’t we sell?
What were the deciding factors for potential purchasers when they came to reject purchasing one of the products? Qualitive research from the conversion phase was the only data then available for analysis. This came from the on-development sales team.
Product design — More urban than the current second hand market in the area and practicality was a concern for some.
Price — new homes typically command a premium to reflect lower running costs, maintenance bills and so on, but that was seen as a negative vis-à-vis the local market.
Commuting — Local purchasers thought it wasn’t quite as convenient as property closer to the central railway station.
Plotting these comments against the current visitor database indicated that these were mostly local purchasers. It was clear that the immediate area was not going to deliver the right purchasers. Product comparison with the existing second-hand market was not favourable, so widening the scope of potential purchasers was needed.
Changing track
For this development of homes primarily focused on families, the new strategy would target them at distinct stages of their lives that best corresponded to the product range.
Updated content on the individual house type/plot pages to focus on selling how the practical and lifestyle benefits of these homes, and how living there would benefit them.
Advertising was moved to appear within areas where the product would be compared favourably on price, design and size.
Leveraging expectations of new commuting opportunities — Crossrail — we would again target out of area purchasers where Crossrail was seen as a future improvement for commuting.
Delivering a new structure
After rewriting the content about the houses themselves, I also rewrote the local area information to promote elements that mattered to our target demographic (e.g. schooling, leisure opportunities), and that were differentiators — open spaces for urban dwellers, accessibility to high quality evening venues — thus changing lifestyle loss aversion to lifestyle gain expectations.
Then a new digital marketing strategy was prepared:
Key search terms were inserted into the copy to tie-in with SEO on the website. A series of competitor target areas to advertise in were ranked for the key demographics of those who would be able to afford and would likely be looking at these types of properties and competitive environments. Marketing was focused on these competitor areas, by paid channels at the short-listing of property options. Property portals were used to deliver search results for those searching within the area that the development was located in. Advertising messages were adjusted to push the USPs — space, countryside, commuting, design of product, lifestyle, and not price offer-led as had been in the local area.
The sales start flowing
The results showed a dramatic improvement in the quality of the leads. Visitors became focused on the benefits of living in the development’s area. We were often their first introduction to living in that area, thanks to the effectiveness of our digital content and promotion, allowing us to frame the lifestyle and product messages.
The development’s awareness had been prominent at the correct stage of the consideration phase, with content and targeting to support the right parameters and context for consideration.
Sales began to be taken and through rapid rotation of messages and advertising locations, the development sold at a far faster pace. This marketing structure was rolled out across all existing developments within the organisation, and became the key to selling all the developments going forward. | https://medium.com/musings-on-marketing/targeting-the-right-stage-of-the-digital-funnel-cac955f01322 | [] | 2017-06-13 11:57:05.368000+00:00 | ['Construction', 'Marketing', 'Property', 'Digital Marketing', 'Marketing Strategies'] |
Delicious Bradley #24: Treasure Hunter | Sign up for Love Me, Tenderly
By Tenderly
Tenderly's vegan newsletter delivers delicious plants, liberated animals, and the perspectives of vegans all over the world. Take a look | https://medium.com/tenderlymag/delicious-bradley-24-treasure-hunter-3c51d648cd4 | ['Adam Ellis'] | 2019-10-28 15:01:01.426000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Food', 'Comic', 'Fun', 'Art'] |
Epoch, Batch size, Iteration, Learning Rate | 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/%E4%BA%BA%E5%B7%A5%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7-%E5%80%92%E5%BA%95%E6%9C%89%E5%A4%9A%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7/epoch-batch-size-iteration-learning-rate-b62bf6334c49 | ['Ken Huang'] | 2020-11-06 06:26:39.493000+00:00 | ['Epoch', 'Batch Size', 'Gradient Descent', 'Iteration', 'Machine Learning'] |
The Definitive Guide To InfluxDB In 2019 — devconnected | Essentially, it means that for every point that you are able to store, you have a timestamp associated with it.
The great difference between relational databases and time series databases
But.. couldn’t we use a relational database and simply have a column named ‘time’? Oracle for example includes a TIMESTAMP data type that we could use for that purpose.
You could, but that would be inefficient.
a — Why do we need time series databases?
Three words : fast ingestion rate.
Time series databases systems are built around the predicate that they need to ingest data in a fast and efficient way.
Indeed, relational databases do have a fast ingestion rate for most of them, from 20k to 100k rows per second.
However, the ingestion is not constant over time. Relational databases have one key aspect that make them slow when data tend to grow : indexes.
When you add new entries to your relational database, and if your table contains indexes, your database management system will repeatedly re-index your data for it to be accessed in a fast and efficient way.
As a consequence, the performance of your DBMS tend to decrease over time. The load is also increasing over time, resulting in having difficulties to read your data.
Time series database are optimized for a fast ingestion rate. It means that such index systems are optimized to index data that are aggregated over time : as a consequence, the ingestion rate does not decrease over time and stays quite stable, around 50k to 100k lines per second on a single node.
This graph is inspired by :
https://blog.timescale.com/timescaledb-vs-6a696248104e/
b — Specific concepts about time series databases
On top of the fast ingestion rate, time series databases introduce concepts that are very specific to those technologies.
One of them is data retention. In a traditional relational database, data are stored permanently until your decide to drop them yourself.
Given the use-cases of time series databases, you may want not to keep your data for too long : either because it is too expensive to do so, or because you are not that interested in old data.
Systems like InfluxDB can take care of dropping data after a certain time, with a concept called retention policy (explained in details in part two). You can also decide to run continuous queries on live data in order to perform certain operations.
You could find equivalent operations in a relational database, for example ‘jobs’ in SQL that can run on a given schedule.
c — A Whole Different Ecosystem
Time series databases are very different when it comes to the ecosystem that orbits around them. In general, relational databases are surrounded by applications : web applications, softwares that connect to it to retrieve information or add new entries.
Often, a database is associated with one system. Clients connect to a website, that contacts a database in order to retrieve information. TSDB are built for client plurality : you do not have a simple server accessing the database, but a bunch of different sensors (for example) inserting their data at the same time.
As a consequence, tools were designed in order to have efficient ways to produce data or to consume it.
Data consumption
Data consumption is often done via monitoring tools such as Grafana or Chronograf. Those solutions have built-in solutions to visualize data and even make custom alerts with it.
The data consumers for TSDB
Those tools are often used to create live dashboards that may be graphs, bar charts, gauges or live world maps.
Data Production
Data production is done by agents that are responsible for targeting special elements in your infrastructure and extract metrics from them. Such agents are called “ monitoring agents”. You can easily configure them to query your tools on a given time span. Examples are Telegraf (which is an official monitoring agent), CollectD or StatsD
The data producers for TSDB
Now that you have a better understanding of what time series databases are and how they differ from relational databases, it is time to dive into the specific concepts of InfluxDB.
Module 2 — InfluxDB Concepts Explained
In this section, we are going to explain the key concepts behind InfluxDB and the key query associated with it. InfluxDB embeds its own query language and I think that this point deserves a small explanation.
a — InfluxDB Query Language
Before starting, it is important for you to know which version of InfluxDB you are currently using. As of April 2019, InfluxDB comes in two versions : v1.7+ and v2.0.
v2.0 is currently in alpha version and puts the Flux language as a centric element of the platform. v1.7 is equipped with InfluxQL language (and Flux if you activate it).
Right now, I do recommend to keep on using InfluxQL as Flux is not completely established in the platform.
InfluxQL is a query language that is very similar to SQL and that allows any user to query its data and filter it. Here’s an example of an InfluxQL query :
In the following sections, we are going to explore InfluxDB key concepts, provided with the associated IQL (short for InfluxQL) queries.
b — InfluxDB Key Concepts Explained
In this section, we will go through the list of essential terms to know to deal with InfluxDB in 2019.
Database
A database is a fairly simple concept to understand on its own because you are used to use this term with relational databases. In a SQL environment, a database would host a collection of tables, and even schemas and would represent one instance on its own.
In InfluxDB, a database host a collection of measurements. However, a single InfluxDB instance can host multiple databases. This is where it differs from traditional database systems. This logic is detailed in the graph below :
The most common ways to interact with databases are either creating a database or by navigating into a database in order to see collections (you have to be “in a database” in order to query collections, otherwise it won’t work).
Most used Influx database queries
Measurement
As shown in the graph above, a database stores multiple measurements. You could think of a measurement as a SQL table. It stores data, and even meta data, over time. Data that are meant to coexist together should be stored in the same measurement.
Measurement example
Measurement IFQL example
In a SQL world, data are stored in columns, but in InfluxDB we have two other terms : tags & fields.
Tags & Fields
Warning!
This is a very important chapter as it explains the subtle difference between tags & fields.
When I first started with InfluxDB, I had a hard time grasping exactly why are tags & fields different. For me, they represented ‘columns’ where you could store exactly the same data.
When defining a new ‘column’ in InfluxDB, you have the choice to either declare it as a tag or as a value and it makes a very big difference.
In fact, the biggest difference between the two is that tags are indexed and values are not. Tags can be seen as metadata defining our data in the measurement. They are hints giving additional information about data, but not data itself.
Fields, on the other side, is literally data. In our past example, the temperature ‘column’ would be a field.
Back to our cpu_metrics example, let’s say that we wanted to add a column named ‘location’ as its name states, defines where the sensor is.
Should we add it as a tag or a field? | https://medium.com/schkn/the-definitive-guide-to-influxdb-in-2019-devconnected-23f5661002c8 | ['Antoine Solnichkin'] | 2019-04-18 18:01:10.282000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Database', 'DevOps', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering'] |
No More Mess in my Head Around Phrases Related to Identity in Computing | Azure
No More Mess in my Head Around Phrases Related to Identity in Computing
What is Identity? Azure Active Directory is just Active Directory in Azure? Microsoft Graph is a Data Visualization Framework or What?
Credits of logos for Microsoft.
Identity
What is Identity in Cloud
Identity is a unique identification of an object. Such an object can be a human being, machine, or a combination of it. When we talk in the cloud computing context, identity means a set of properties about this object stored in the cloud's datacentre.
Identity & Access Management
Identity Management (IdM) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an interchangeable term in identity access management. So if you are reading about one, you are probably reading about the second term too.
IAM is a framework of policies that tell what users can do in their restricted area and what he needs from the user to operate properly. Such systems identify, authenticate, and authorize individuals or hardware applications to use restricted resources.
IAM exists in the world without the internet too. It appears in different forms. For example, the “Staff Only” label at doors in markets, id card pinned at employees suit, or doorman as a profession by itself. Even your dog protecting yard is some Access Management of your property.
Dog protecting an off-limits area.
Every IAM operates in its defined context. The context of IAM specifies the number of properties it needs from the Identity. For example, every patient has a folder with properties about his identity at the doctor's office. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/no-more-mess-in-my-head-around-phrases-related-to-identity-in-computing-482cd0f8cad3 | ['Daniel Rusnok'] | 2020-11-05 17:18:51.564000+00:00 | ['Azure', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Identity Management', 'Azure Active Directory'] |
Generating a Smoke Test Suite | Hi! My name is Stanislav and I’m a technical lead in the QA Automation team at Wrike. In this article I’ll tell you how we managed to run less tests and how you can automate some of your work.
How not to run extra tests
At Wrike we have more than 30,000 tests. It’s expensive to run all of them on every developer branch.
Everyone knows how to run tests, but not everyone knows how not to run extra tests. Imagine you have a lot of tests and you want to be able to run only some of them.
There are at least two possible solutions.
By markup. We can run a set of tests marked for the product feature that’s being tested. You can find more information on the test markup we use at Wrike in this video.
But sometimes developers impact other parts of the application, want to make sure that everything is working properly, or don’t have a product markup for tests. Then we have a second option.
Smoke suite. The second option is smoke testing. We pick the most critical tests in the product and build a test suite that checks an application’s basic functionality.
Many people pick these tests manually, but we went further.
Why we decided to automate the process of smoke suite updates
Our product is constantly evolving, which means we continuously check and update the smoke suite to match the product. It can be time-consuming due to the size of the product and also involves several teams to decide which tests to pick. You should consider if tests are still relevant, whether they’re stable enough, how long each test runs, how critical that test is, and so on. And to change the smoke suite you have to change a code. That’s a lot of manual labor, isn’t it?
That’s why we decided to automate the process of our smoke suite updates to increase the frequency of testing with less effort.
The algorithm for building a smoke suite
In our project structure there are several layers:
Page elements represent product frontend structure.
Step methods use page elements to perform some actions or checks on a web page. They’re marked with an @Step annotation.
Tests use step methods to implement test scenarios. They’re marked with an @Test annotation.
We decided to pick tests for the smoke suite in such a way that they’ll call all the steps we have at least once. With this approach we can be assured that we push every button, fill every textfield, and visit every page we have.
Let’s try to build a smoke suite. It’s obvious that by picking one test we’ll have all the steps covered.
But what if you have several thousands of tests and a very complicated structure like in the image below?
Imagine choosing smoke tests among this web of usages. We do it using our own IntelliJ IDEA plugin. It can parse a project’s code and make the required changes. Our plugin comes in handy here. It can pick the most useful tests to fulfil our requirements.
So how does it work?
It chooses the least used step and picks the test that contains the most steps:
Then we mark all the steps from this test as used and repeat the process with the remaining steps:
Pick the test, mark the steps, and continue until every step is covered:
Voila! We picked only three tests and covered all the steps. After that we simply mark chosen tests in the code as a part of a smoke suite. For our project it took only 1,000 tests from 30,000 to get full coverage.
How to use an IDEA plugin
The time it takes for the IntelliJ IDEA plugin to update the whole test suite is about 10 minutes for our giant project, so we can do it as often as we need to keep up with the product development.
It works so fast because IDEA builds indexes containing Program Structure Interface elements (or PSI in short). Plugins extend its functionality and use PSI to work with code lightning fast.
If you’re not familiar with the IDEA plugins concept and how it works I suggest you watch a video about it.
I’ll show you how to use this plugin. We have it on GitHub so you can download it and modify it for your needs.
The plugin tool window contains two tabs: configuration and actions.
On the Config tab you need to specify the fully qualified names of annotations that you use in your project. We already have presets for JUnit 4 and 5. The plugin will use these annotations to parse code and mark up your tests.
Step annotation is the annotation with which you mark your step methods.
Test annotation and Before each test are the annotations from the test framework. Tests markup is the annotation to combine tests into suites. And finally, Tests markup value is where you add the name of the test suite.
The main buttons are on the Actions tab. Firstly, the plugin needs to parse your code and build a map of step usage in tests.
You’ll see how many steps it found and the maximum coverage. Don’t be surprised if you see less than 100% maximum possible coverage like in our example. Some steps aren’t used so you can’t cover them with current tests.
Click Pick smoke tests for the algorithm to pick a set of tests to retrieve the maximum coverage of steps. You’ll see how many tests have been picked and the final coverage.
You can reduce the number of tests by ignoring the steps that are used in fewer tests than specified. The number of steps usage can indirectly indicate the importance of this step.
In our example we received almost two times fewer tests by ignoring the steps with one or zero usages. But the coverage is still decent.
When you’re satisfied with the results, you can finally remove an old markup and add a new one. Then all you need to do is commit changes and merge it to the “master” branch.
Make your own IntelliJ IDEA plugin for smoke test markups. Or download a prebuilt one.
You can easily automate your recurrent and time-consuming jobs like this using the IDEA plugin or other tools you have. The only thing you need is to think about what you can automate and how to do it. After all, we’re called an automation team for a reason! | https://medium.com/wriketechclub/generating-a-smoke-test-suite-1fb5cddf6e7a | ['Stanislav Davydov'] | 2021-09-06 12:40:25.569000+00:00 | ['Test Automation', 'Smoke Testing', 'Testing', 'Intellij Plugin', 'Intellij Idea'] |
Beaxy Deposit Bonus Program | “Beaxy will give you a 100% bonus on deposits up to $500 to allow you to trade with a bigger stack.”
Beaxy is launching a one-of-a-kind bonus program that will double the amount of your deposit up to $500. For example, when you enroll in the program and deposit $1,000 worth of fiat or crypto, you will receive an additional 500 USDC to trade with. Full terms and conditions apply.
How to get bonus funds:
To enroll in the deposit bonus program, click here and log in if you’re an existing customer or sign up if you need to register an account. After logging in or creating an account, you will arrive at the trading platform where you can opt-in to the program and complete a deposit. That’s it! Once your deposit hits your account, a credit for your bonus funds based on the USDC value of your deposit will be applied within 24 hours.
How the program works:
Bonus funds can be used to trade throughout the duration of the program. If you opt-in to the program, you will continue to receive bonus funds on each deposit until 500 USDC has been credited to your account. Bonus funds will not be applied to deposits made more than one month after your initial bonus funds have been credited.
In order to withdraw bonus funds from the exchange, you must meet a trading fee threshold based on the value of your bonus within six months of receiving the bonus. Once this threshold is met, you can contact support to enable withdrawals on your bonus funds.
Failure to meet the trading fee requirement before the six-month deadline will result in a forfeiture of the bonus funds received as well as profits generated while enrolled in the program.
Trading fees may very based on maker and taker orders, please see the below estimated requirements based on volume.
Figures are estimated based on average trading fees. Actual requirements will vary.
If you want to withdraw your deposited (non-bonus) funds before reaching your required volume threshold, you will need to open a support ticket. The amount that will be available for withdrawal is the value of your original deposit minus trading fees and any realized or unrealized losses on trading activity during the program. Opting out of the program before meeting the required fee threshold will result in a forfeiture of your bonus funds and profits generated while enrolled. You may be asked to close all open positions before withdrawing your deposits funds.
In the event that you want to withdraw deposited funds and your realized or unrealized losses exceed the amount of your bonus, you will be required to deposit the USDC equivalent of the losses to enable withdrawals on your account. For example, you deposit $500 worth of bitcoin and receive a 500 USDC bonus and open a position worth 1,000 USDC. A month later, the USDC value of your position drops to $450. In this case, you would be required to deposit $50 worth of assets in order to enable withdrawals on your account.
How to get the most out of your NEW $500.
1.) Beaxy’s bot options, Hummingbot, Autonio and HolderLab, are there to make autopilot trading EASY.
2.) Follow along with our pre-populated signals supplied by Beaxy’s PROVEN provider to take the guesswork out of trading.
3.) Participate in our recurring trading competitions to maximize your new MONEY.
Throughout the program, Beaxy will continue to offer connections to automated trading platforms that will help you reach your volume requirement with much less in the market. We will provide you with all the materials you need to connect to a trading bot and learn how to deploy different strategies. Stay tuned for more updates on trading bot integrations.
Click here to trade with more! | https://medium.com/beaxy-exchange/beaxy-deposit-bonus-program-d5f6566fce3d | ['Steve Sofocleous'] | 2020-08-06 23:42:37.841000+00:00 | ['Hummingbot', 'Bonus', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Unlocking our national energy data | Hi! We’re Lequanne, Ivan and Roan and we’re the Code for Canada fellows embedded with the Canada Energy Regulator (or, as it was previously known, the National Energy Board).
From board meetings to affinity mapping to prototyping with NFC, as Code for Canada fellows, we are wading through our first couple of months at the Canada Energy Regulator (CER). We’ve met well over 100 amazing people within the CER, in addition to public servants across the country, members of the public and experts in digital from around the world from the OECD to the Canadian Digital Service.
About our work
We are embedded at the CER to help make data about important energy projects more accessible for Canadians, so that scientists, landowners and Indigenous communities can fully participate in our energy dialogue. The CER conducts public hearings for proposed energy projects crossing provincial, territorial or national borders. These hearings assess the impact of the project and gather input from those affected. According to the CER, these hearings provide the government, “with the information it needs to make a transparent, fair and objective recommendation or decision on whether or not a project should be allowed to proceed or an application should be approved.”
Almost all of the information provided, cross-examined, and discussed in these hearings is held in one application — REGDOCS. Currently, the database is home to over 400,000 documents.
We’re working with the team at the CER to help transform REGDOCS, so the trove of information contained in it, from environmental studies to historical data about Indigenous land use — can be more accessible for all residents, because all of us are stakeholders in our energy dialogue.
Becoming our users
Lawyers take part in a hearing conducted by the Canada Energy Regulator. Evidence from REGDOCS is presented during the hearing, and is also printed out and provided to members of the public who attend.
The importance of the CER hearings didn’t become clear to us until we attended one. The ongoing hearing covered the expansion of an existing pipeline. The hearing members travelled from Calgary to Grand Prairie to a casino, conducting cross-examinations, reviewing hundreds of documents and pieces of evidence and heard from stakeholders about the project’s impact. At the hearing, our team had the privilege of seeing evidence from scientists who spoke to the environmental and biophysical effects of extending the pipeline, as well as the company submitting the proposal, Indigenous peoples and nations which would potentially lose sacred land, and farmers whose crop lands would be affected by the expansion.
All of this Indigenous knowledge, extensive environmental studies about the land and other key information for hearings is held in REGDOCS. Being at the hearing showed us how essential that kind of data is for understanding the timeline and impact of energy projects. When did a company apply for the project? Did they provide timely access to information and consult with the affected Indigenous rights holders? Under what circumstances were decisions made? What considerations were made regarding public participation in a project? The answers to these questions can be found in REGDOCS, and can enable residents to question, support or intervene in projects that impact their lives.
But right now, REGDOCS is designed for certain people, like lawyers, and not others, like landowners, students, farmers, environmentalists, or other residents. Attending the hearing, and seeing the extent and the value of the information on display really crystallized the importance of improving access to REGDOCS for the public.
What we’ve been up to
The lovely panel of people who have helped us at the Canada Energy Regulator!
Since joining the CER, we’ve been working in short sprints to better understand the data contained in REGDOCS and how more diverse stakeholders might engage with it.
We started by connecting with staff and talking through how folks are, or could be, using the system. For one exercise, we engaged CER Commissioners as “human libraries” while we assumed the roles of a farmer, a student and a scientist “searching” through their database.
Paper prototyping with our panel at the Canada Energy Regulator.
We also sat down with people from various departments to get a better idea of how engagement works across the CER. This gave us the grounding to map the stakeholders of the database, which helped us to create a design probe. That probe in turn helped us create a system map of mental models, which we compared to the actual backend system architecture of the organization. Plugging in stakeholders and the verbs we collected from probe interviews gave us a pretty good idea of who engages with what, how and when they engage with it, and what their needs and goals are at various points in the process.
Playing around with the front-end of the website using our chrome extension.
On the technical side, redesigning REGDOCS is an interesting challenge as it requires integration with a number of legacy systems. REGDOCS actually consists of two separate applications: one for serving user requests and one that searches in the database. The data is also separated and spread across different legacy databases for security reasons.
Just like the user journeys we created above, navigating the technical discovery and exploring the source code of REGDOCS takes time. We’re beginning to prototype by making small changes to the front-end of REGDOCS that frustrate both internal and external users. We created a chrome extension to record and test these changes, which makes it really easy to show our work to, and build trust with, the folks in IT.
What’s next?
Slack has taken off already at the Canada Energy Regulator!
Our product roadmap is curved towards co-design, co-creation and testing our prototypes with residents. With the support of the CER, we are engaging people from at least five provinces from all walks of life. We welcome you to participate!
We’re also partnering with a datathon held by Statistics Canada in Ottawa to co-create new ideas with university students. It’s a great way to engage potential users and supplement our own prototypes. If you’re in the capital region, we’d love you to join us!
Ultimately, we’re enjoying and embracing the gray area of discovery, learning from our mistakes, being mindful about our scope of work, and taking small steps towards broader digital capacity building (like getting Slack approved and adopted by teams at the CER!). We’re discovering what’s possible under this blue sky, while not allowing setbacks to rain on our parade (or rather, rain on our Calgary Stampede).
We’re committed to working in the open, and look forward to sharing more about our journey with you!
— Lequanne, on behalf of the fellows | https://medium.com/code-for-canada/coding-for-the-canada-energy-regulator-a97cba332f4c | [] | 2019-10-11 15:03:43.628000+00:00 | ['Civictech', 'Government', 'Energy', 'Code For Canada', 'Fellowship'] |
Aching in the Eildon Hills | I may have given the trail designers too much credit: a later examination of the map reveals that we could have detoured around the base of the Eildon Hills and arrived at the same spot on the other side — a grove of beech trees — without little effort. I can’t help but believe that Cuthbert would have opted for the more sensible (flat) course.
On the other hand, Bede suggests that Cuthbert was a creature of these mountains, roaming the slopes, preaching, teaching, and spreading the Gospel among the Anglo-Saxons who had settled here. His fame spread to such an extent that an Abbess named Ebbe begged Cuthbert to visit her monastery in Coldingham in order to offer instruction to the monks and nuns who lived under her guidance. Cuthbert did not want to reject the entreaties of such a distinguished lady (she was the daughter of Aethelfrith, first king of Northumbria), and so he traveled to Coldingham.
Cuthbert’s ascetic practices, like the trail named after him, were rigorous; the sisters and brothers living at Coldingham were reputed to be a bit soft. Although they had withdrawn from the world, they still enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle. Cuthbert spent a few days at Coldingham, watching and taking note. Their ascetic practices did not rise to his lofty standards, so he began to slip away at night to exercise his spirit in private.
His absences were noted by the monks and nuns at Coldingham. One evening, a monk spotted Cuthbert slipping into the night. He assumed the worst: Cuthbert must be on his way to a romantic tryst. The monk decided to follow the visitor and expose him as a pious fraud. Much to his surprise, Cuthbert marched straight to the beach, waded into the frigid waters of the North Sea, and did not stop walking until he had immersed himself to his neck. Then, following the Irish custom, he spent the night in prayer, arms raised above the waterline.
When dawn touched the eastern sky, Cuthbert waded back to the shore. A pair of otters followed, frolicking in his wake. The two animals took turns rubbing Cuthbert, drying him with their soft fir. After they had completed their task, the saint blessed them, and then returned to the monastery in time to share the morning office with the brothers.
I suppose the moral of the story is that Cuthbert never avoided hardship: maybe he would have chosen the steep and taxing way.
The Eildon Hills, now (thankfully) behind us. Author photo.
Having descended like Moses from the mountains, we pass through a wood and decide to have our lunch at a picnic table on the outskirts of Bowden, the first village on our trek. This land once belonged to the Kelso Abbey, and later was the ancestral home of Scotland’s Ker family. There’s not much here today. We don’t linger.
From Bowden the trail follows a ridge through a rural landscape. We hike along a watercourse, the Bowden Burn, which leads us into our first major town, Newtown St Boswells. As its name suggests, Newtown St Boswells is a “new town,” only dating back to the sixteenth century. I don’t know if we are simply caught up in the moment, or if Newtown has little to recommend it, but we do not stop. Up over another hill, through a dilapidated residential district, and then, with a sigh of relief, back into open country.
Pastoral Landscapes, Saint Cuthbert’s Way, Scotland. Author photo.
Eventually we reach the Tweed River, which will be our companion for several hours this afternoon. I find the path along the river a bit trying: the trail attempts to stay close to the water, but in doing so, continually gains and loses elevation. It is like walking a roller coaster track, up and down, dodge left, shunt right. Moreover, it is a narrow path — more deer run than trail — and finding a flat place upon which to set my feet requires an annoying degree of alertness.
In places the river grows shallow and accelerates, water scraping across spreading files of rapids and pebble bars.
Then one last big push and we are back in civilization again. St Boswells, a tiny town that shares its High Street with St Cuthbert’s Way. It feels like it should be enough, but our day is not over yet. | https://medium.com/the-peripatetic-historian/aching-in-the-eildon-hills-20fe663fe623 | ['Richard J. Goodrich'] | 2020-11-23 12:40:28.641000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Outdoors', 'Religion And Spirituality', 'Travel', 'History'] |
Give The Gift of a Tech Debt Sprint This Agile Holiday Season | Holidays can be a challenging time in software development. How can you make the most of your velocity and energize the team at the same time?
The holiday challenge
For a lot of teams, the holidays are a time of year when a large amount of peope take off after saving their PTO for the whole year. This time is precious, especially for those who work with e-commerce after getting through a rough peak season spending long nights making sure all the promotions went as scheduled.
What this means in practice, is you have a sprint with limited capacity or you have people coming in and out (depending on their schedule), carrying a lot of overhead with context switching and minimal communication throughout the week.
So what can be a better option?
Spread the holiday cheer with a tech debt sprint
The reality is, your holiday sprint isn’t going to be the most productive sprint of the year. More often than not, you’re met with chaotic schedules that are hard to truly plan around.
For example, you have Joe visiting his family, maybe he can snag a few hours between get-togethers. Then you have Nancy who’s working the full week, but only at night, as her days are packed with holiday activities. Finally you have Todd who used his PTO early in the year, so can’t take any time off, but is working his standard 9-to-5.
It’s hard to imagine having a regular daily standup cadence, let alone figuring out if and when a ticket will be get completed. So instead, schedule a sprint dedicated to tackling the technical debt that’s accrued throughout the year.
Wait, what is technical debt in the first place?
For a lot of devs, there’s a daily balance trying to determine whether the bug or concern that popped up warrants blowing up the scope of a ticket or if it’s better to dig in and fix it as they’re working through it. These things can take a toll on a team, leaving spirits low, knowing they’ll never actually get the opportunity to loop back and course correct.
Just because this concern isn’t going to bring the app down, that doesn’t mean it’s not valid and doesn’t need to be taken care of, so instead of fixing it, the next course of action is to throw it in the backlog for a rainy day.
The problem is, this rainy day doesn’t seem to ever come. That backlog of not-really-high-priority tickets adds up becoming a mountain that will throw you into technical bankruptcy!
Take advantage of the chaotic schedule
With everyone’s schedules in flux, it’s a good chance to find a backlog of narrowly scoped tickets that your team can work through on a case by case basis.
Have a few code paths that lack some tests? Perfect ticket. Have a few fragile functions that already have tests but need to be refactored to avoid future grief? Put it on the list.
This type of work-while small in the overall picture-can make a difference in how your team perceives their own work, which directly impacts their attitude towards the project.
Remember what’s best for your team
Overall, the point is to do what’s best for your team. Low spirits can impact a team’s velocity, so being able to provide these little wins can end up helping in ways you wouldn’t have thought of.
Whatever your strategy may be, it’s important to enjoy a stress-free holiday season whether you’re taking PTO or not. | https://medium.com/element84/give-the-gift-of-a-tech-debt-sprint-this-agile-holiday-season-f7110ff127cd | [] | 2019-12-18 16:00:25.942000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Software Development', 'Project Management', 'Programming', 'Agile'] |
Date validation in Laravel | Laravel provides many convenience ways to validate date
From document let’s take after for example
> The field under validation must be a value after a given date. The dates will be passed into the strtotime PHP function in order to be converted to a valid DateTime instance:
'start_date' => 'required|date|after:tomorrow'
Instead of passing a date string to be evaluated by strtotime , you may specify another field to compare against the date:
'finish_date' => 'required|date|after:start_date'
However, how to validate with a custom format?
Luckily, we have date_format validator
'start_date' => 'required|date_format:Y-m-d H:i:s|after:' . date('Y-m-d H:i:s')
With this format, we can put anything we need there to validate | https://medium.com/@ntuanphuc/date-validation-in-laravel-c0e2e814464f | ['Nguyễn Tuấn Phúc'] | 2020-12-12 00:17:01.550000+00:00 | ['Laravel'] |
Press Release: From IBM to Cambridge University | Cambridge University Appoints Former IBM FinTech Head as Alternative Finance Fellow
Image by ZiQin Gao
KoreConX advisor, Keith Bear, will now focus his time and energy on blockchain, fintech, and alternative finance at Cambridge University
[Toronto, ON — April 09, 2019] — KoreConX is pleased to announce that Keith Bear, one of their company advisors, is now a Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), part of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University. Mr. Bear has accumulated over 35 years of expertise during his career focused on financial markets, business strategy and blockchain, which will serve him well in his new role.
For over 20 years, Mr. Bear was known as the face of the Financial Markets industry at IBM. Responsible for the global strategy, development, and execution of the company’s business in the field. He worked with global clients on major transformation programs, including blockchain deployment with Exchanges, trade finance organizations, and banks. His work at Cambridge University will be focused primarily on blockchain, fintech, and alternative finance.
“We are very grateful to have Mr. Bear on our Advisory Board, he has been instrumental in our goal to Revolutionize the private capital markets. Being appointed a Fellow in one of the most prestigious universities in the world only confirms once again the quality of our advisors, not only guiding us in our business strategy and approach but also directing the industry as a whole, educating and removing friction for innovation in the FinTech and alternative finance worlds,” said Oscar Jofre, Co-Founder and CEO at KoreConX.
“My new role at Cambridge University’s Centre for Alternative Finance is focused on adoption and innovation around blockchain technologies and business models. I look forward to continuing my advisory role at KoreConX to help Oscar and team continue to develop the business, building on the insight that CCAF’s independent publicly-available research will deliver,” said Mr. Bear.
About KoreConX
KoreConX is the world’s first highly-secure permissioned blockchain ecosystem for fully-compliant digital securities worldwide.
To ensure compliance with securities regulation and corporate law, the KoreConX all-in-one, AI-based blockchain platform manages the full lifecycle of digital securities including the issuance, trading, clearing, settlement, management, reporting, corporate actions, and custodianship. KoreConX connects companies to the capital markets and secondary markets facilitating access to capital and liquidity for private investors.
KoreConX is the first secure, all-in-one platform for private companies to manage their capital market activity and stakeholder communications. Removing the burden of fragmented systems and inefficient tools across multiple vendors, KoreConX offers a single environment to connect companies, investors and broker/dealers. Leveraged for investor relations and fundraising, private companies can share and manage corporate records and investments including portfolio management, capitalization table management, virtual minute book, security registers, transfer agent services and virtual deal rooms for raising capital.
www.KoreConX.io
### | https://medium.com/larissa-veloso/press-release-from-ibm-to-cambridge-university-ace66bef98c7 | ['Larissa Veloso'] | 2019-05-07 01:29:53.901000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Portfolio', 'Press Release'] |
Michel Houellebecq on Desire and the Collapse of Western Civilization | Michel Houellebecq on Desire and the Collapse of Western Civilization
This famous French novelist is a student of Schopenhauer — and a controversial prophet of pessimism
Photo by Raph Howald on Unsplash
Not to worry if you don’t recognize the name Michel Houellebecq. He’s quite famous in Europe, where literary figures are often celebrities — especially if they act out in public, or write controversial novels.
And Houellebecq (pronounced “well-beck”) qualifies on both counts.
There’s more about those qualifications below. But because I’ve been writing about Arthur Schopenhauer lately(quick intro/refresher here), I’m focusing on the fact that Houellebecq has written a short, oddly confessional book titled En présence de Schopenhauer.
To appreciate why a notorious, ultra-contemporary French author is writing about his relationship with a 19th-century German philosopher, you will want to have a basic idea of Houellebecq’s work.
So . . .
Meet Monsieur Houellebecq
Over the course of seven novels written between 1994 and 2019, Michel Houellebecq has presented a dark vision of our evolving Western culture.
He maintains that the weakening of restraints on sexual behavior has led to a collapse of the family and a distortion of interpersonal relationships. This shift in moral values has been made all the more destructive, in Houellebecq’s view, by “liberal” socioeconomic forces like free-market capitalism, multinational alliances, and rampant consumerism.
Add to those problems a slow failure of traditional political structures, plus a rapid deterioration of religious institutions — and soon you have the perfect formula for a desperately bleak future.
The ambiance of every Houellebecq novel is suffused with that desperate bleakness, in which an inescapable future seems to hover just beyond a collapsing present.
The novels usually feature one or two male protagonists who suffer from various forms of depression and sexual obsession. Most plots include a suicide (or several), a nervous breakdown, and a violent death, along with a large-scale catastrophic event of some sort. There are always provocative themes, such as sex tourism, cloning, and internet pornography.
Although Houellebecq’s gloomy sensationalism may seem farfetched at times, his novels have had a kind of prophetic edge. Accidentally or otherwise, they appear to predict (or at least intersect) dramatic events in French society.
The most explicit example took place in 2015, when the publication date for Houellebecq’s Submission — a near-future tale in which Islamists take over France — happened to fall on the same day that two Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists attacked the Paris headquarters of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdot, killing twelve.
All very dark . . .
So it’s not surprising to learn that around the age of twenty-six, Houellebecq became enthralled with Arthur Schopenhauer — an influential philosopher known for his theory that “reality” is neither more nor less than the restless, insatiable energy of desire.
From that perspective, everything (literally every single thing, material or conceptual, human and otherwise), is a manifestation of desire. Most of the time most of us see only these manifestations, which we mistake for reality. But with a little effort, we can glimpse the “real” reality through our physical and emotional experiences of desire.
As he studied Schopenhauer’s two-volume masterwork, The World as Will and Representation (1845), Houellebecq saw parallels between his own vision of a dystopic future and the inevitable consequences of “desire” running rampant in a high-tech, high-speed global reality.
Since then, the Schopenhauer convergence has had a shaping influence on every Houellebecq novel — as well as his essays, poetry, painting, and even a few forays into music.
Curious to read Houellebecq? All his novels are available in English translations at Amazon.
If you’d like to get a sense of Houellebecq’s personality, ideas, and reputation, spend thirteen minutes listening to this BBC profile. Various voices and perspectives offer a short but enlightening immersion in the love/hate relationship between France’s literati and their most infamous provocateur.
“In the Presence of Schopenhauer”
Although Houellebecq’s short book on Schopenhauer is not yet available in English, a translation is forthcoming in summer of 2020. According to the publisher’s webpage, the table of contents will look like this:
Preface by Agathe Novak-Lechevalier
Leave childhood behind, my friend, and wake up!
Chapter One: The world is my representation
Chapter Two: Look at things attentively
Chapter Three: In this way the will to live objectifies itself
Chapter Four: The theatre of the world
Chapter Five: The conduct of life: what we are
Chapter Six: The conduct of life: what we have
Notes
Reviews of the French edition have been mixed, with detractors deriding Houellebecq’s grasp of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as superficial and uninformed, while enthusiasts praise his originality — especially in relation
to Schopenhauer’s theory of creativity.
But the essential matter is not so much whether Houellebecq “really” understands Schopenhauer, but rather the way his interpretation of Schopenhauer’s ideas has shaped an influential body of work.
If you want to form your own opinion of En présence de Schopenhauer and can’t wait until summer, you are in luck. Marco Jaya van Harskamp’s graduate thesis in literary studies at Leiden University is available online — and mostly in English.
For some reason, quotations from Houellebecq’s work are in Dutch . . .
But once you get used to that, the first chapter of “Mapping Happiness in Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq” turns out to be a useful overview of the Houellebecq/Schopenhauer connection. According to van Harskap’s discussion, the topics addressed in En présence de Schopenhauer are:
the loss of individuality through selfless observation
the passive nature of the artist
the will to live
the influence of Schopenhauerian thought on Houellebecq’s own writing
the relation between individuality and happiness
A brief summary of the main ideas:
Loss of individuality comes from a deep insight into other humans, and that is achieved by transcending one’s own ego. Houellebecq argues that artists possess a very passive nature, so they can accomplish this more easily than other people. Loss of individuality can bring “happiness of mind,” which is different from the happiness that comes through the senses. But most people cannot experience happiness of mind, because they suffer under their desires and are driven by the will to live. All they can do is try to satisfy their senses.
Schopenhauer suggested seeking happiness of mind through a retreat from the demands of desire, to be achieved through self-control, meditation, and art. However — it seems that Houellebecq’s characters either didn’t read that part of The World as Will and Representation, or failed to pay attention.
The Houellebecq perspective
Those unenlightened seekers of sense-happiness have become the trademark characters of Houellebecq’s sex-soaked narrative universe. In Serotonin, his latest novel, he explains the whole dynamic of modern relationships this way: “All men want fresh, eco-friendly girls who are keen on threesomes.”
And such young women are so plentiful in Houellebecq’s fiction that the “Houellebecq girl” has become a stereotype in French popular culture.
You can order this tongue-in-cheek tee from Redbubble
Which is another reminder that Houellebecq’s novels and public statements are designed to create controversy — and they succeed. In the past few years, his rhetoric has been increasingly criticized (loudly, and by a wide variety of commentators) as Islamophobic, misogynistic, and just generally hateful.
Nor is his literary skill generally admired.
So just what is the value to be found in his work? A reviewer for Commonweal puts it this way:
Serotonin is boring, crude, sexist, shapeless, gross, troubling, and wrong. On the plus side, it’s often brilliant, and I found it sparked more serious thinking than most of the books I’ve read in the past year.
To the degree that Houellebecq succeeds, it’s because he pokes very hard at settled assumptions, and surrounds his critique of society with a patchwork philosophical structure drawn not only from Schopenhauer’s pessimism but also from the empiricist social theories of Auguste Comte (a Schopenhauer contemporary).
To reinforce the idea that his work is intellectually serious, Houellebecq provides plenty of seemingly erudite references. Serotonin, for example, mentions modern European philosophers like Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Emil Cioran, along with a diverse roster of literary icons, including Emil Zola, Thomas Mann, the Marquis de Sade, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Nabokov.
Detractors may see these references as pretentious and superficial — included mostly to provide an excuse for reading about sensationalized sex. But even those who don’t think highly of Houellebecq’s writing will concede that he’s been persistent in trying to connect modern social problems with a longer cultural tradition, and to place individual experience in a global context.
Like it or not, Houellebecq’s fictionalized commentary on Western civilization offers us one view of what happens when a writer consciously describes (and perhaps unconsciously channels) a “reality” of ceaseless, restless, universal, insatiable desire. So the fact that his novels have had a seemingly predictive relationship with real-world events should at least spark interest. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/michel-houellebecq-on-desire-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization-b741a5cdc7cf | ['Cynthia Giles'] | 2020-04-17 02:52:22.852000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Literature', 'Philosophy', 'Schopenhauer', 'Essay'] |
Moen completes its whole-home water security portfolio with the Flo by Moen Smart Sump Pump Monitor | Moen completes its whole-home water security portfolio with the Flo by Moen Smart Sump Pump Monitor Caranetta Feb 1·2 min read
Moen acquired a majority stake in smart water valve startup Flo in in 2020. With its recently announced Flo by Moen Smart Sump Pump Monitor, the company now offers a full range of smart home products designed to detect and prevent water damage, one of the most common—and most costly—calamities a homeowner can suffer.
Mentioned in this article Flo by Moen Smart Water Detector Read TechHive's reviewSee it The sump pump monitor analyzes your sump pump’s operation for signs of potential issues, continuously measuring water levels, temperature, and humidity, and watching for power loss, leaks, and performance issues. It can be used in conjunction with the Flo by Moen Smart Water Shutoff and/or the Flo by Moen Smart Water Detector, or it can be deployed on its own.
[ Further reading: The best home water leak detectors ]A sump pump is a submersible device typically installed in the lowest area of a home, such as its basement. If you live in an area subject to excessive rain or snow, water from the oversaturated soil surrounding it could collect in that low spot and eventually cause a flood. A float mechanism connected to the sump pump will trigger it to turn on and evacuate that water.
Michael Brown / IDG The sump pump monitor comes with a Flo by Moen Smart Water Detector that can be placed near the pump, but outside the crock to detect leaks. This one is set the drain pan of a water heater.
Moen’s device is equipped with two sensors to ensure your sump pump is operating correctly. A water-level sensor placed in the sump pump crock—a perforated metal or plastic basket set in the floor to collect groundwater seepage—monitors the water level in real time and will alert the homeowner if the pump is not working efficiently or if there’s a danger of flooding.
A stand-alone leak-sensing disc gets placed near the pump in an area where water should never be, possibly from a leaky water heater, washing machine, or other appliance. This second sensor will also send an alert if water is detected in that area, and it will alert you to freezing conditions that could lead to frozen pipes and high humidity levels that could promote mold growth.
The sump pump itself gets plugged into a Wi-Fi-enabled smart outlet. This device will monitor the pump’s performance over time, and it will send an alert if your power goes out. An onboard alarm will sound if the Monitor loses its connection to your Wi-Fi network.
Moen hasn’t released pricing or availability information, but we’ll update this story when we get it. You can also stay tuned for an in-depth hands-on review.
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/@caranet17147527/moen-completes-its-whole-home-water-security-portfolio-with-the-flo-by-moen-smart-sump-pump-2f1c4b932a5c | [] | 2021-02-01 09:53:49.604000+00:00 | ['Chargers', 'Streaming', 'Electronics', 'Tvs'] |
THOUSANDS OF FANS CAN COOL INDIA | Base image: Jan Kopriva from pexels.com
In the quest for development, we are exploiting mother nature recklessly and injecting poison in the natural environment. Now, this has exceeded the limit, the earth’s surface is getting warmer, the ecological system of earth started dying. This will kill us all very soon unless we take immediate action to rejuvenate it. Wind energy can help us to a great extent. Fans of wind turbines can make the earth cooler.
Cause of Global Warming
What is causing global warming is very important to understand. In the journey of social and industrial development, we are using fossil fuels like gasoline, diesel, coal etc. to operate our power plants, to drive our vehicles, in aviation, in shipping and manufacturing industries in an ever-increasing manner. This massive usage of fossil fuels is generating a huge amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses and those are getting released in the atmosphere freely, causing Green House Effect (GHF) and resulting into Global Warming.
What is the Green House Effect
When gasses like Carbon Dioxide, Methane and some other gasses get released as a result of fossil fuel burning, these gases go up and makes a shield in the upper atmosphere. This shield acts as an insulator and obstructs earth’s natural heat dissipation process making it warmer than the habitable level. This is creating many adverse impacts in our ecosystem endangering the life of every living being including us.
During the last decade, the rate of polar ice melting has gone up by three times. Eventually, it is increasing the mean sea level and at some point in future, it can engulf low lying lands of many countries like the USA, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands.
GHG pollution is also making natural water bodies more and more acidic endangering the life of aquatic animals and other forms of lives.
According to an estimate China, USA, EU, India, Russia and Japan are the top responsible countries for emitting GHG.
Country wise emission percentage from fossil fuel
However, because of the greenhouse effect, the surface temperature of the earth is rising at a continuous rate.
· In a study it is found, that between 1906 and 2005 surface temperature of earth has been increased at a rate of 0.6 °C to 0.9°C on an average.
· In another study in 2013, IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reported that between 1880 and 2012, an increase in global average surface temperature was approximately 0.9 °C (1.5 °F).
· In the last 50 years, this rate has almost increased to a double fold.
· Further, the estimate is that the earth surface temperature may increase between 3 and 4 °C (5.4 and 7.2 °F) by 2100, comparing to the average earth temp in 1986–2005.
Thus, Global Warming is acting as a silent killer for our civilization. ‘Think Tanks’ across the globe are raising serious concerns about this and emphasising on the urgent countermeasures. Almost all countries across the world have understood the necessity and are trying to find out feasible ways and means to reduce the usage of fossil fuel to control the GHG emission. India has also joined the league and committed to taking a lead role in the reduction of global warming.
How to Reduce Green House Effect-Thus Global Warming
In India, per capita, electricity consumption (1,181kwh) is much lower than developed world countries like USA (89455.6 kwh) as on date, but the consumption is growing every day along with the economic development of the country. Therefore, the emission of Green House Gasses is also increasing in equal proportion.
In India, different sectors of society contribute to this pollution at different proportions.
· Electricity & Heat production : 31%.
· Industry: 21%.
· Agriculture, Deforestation etc.:4%.
· Transportation: 14%.
· Other Energy: 10%
As the electricity generation in the conventional method shares 31% of emissions, attacking this portion and reducing it as much as possible in a phased manner could a meaningful immediate solution.
Renewable energy sources, particularly wind and solar, have developed to such a level that these can be the economic alternatives for coal and lignite based power generation process. Also, we have enough resources to harness the sun and wind in our country. Though India is producing wind energy (electricity)for a long time, only during recently has taken up major steps to increase the share of it at an accelerated pace. As on date, around 18% of total energy is being produced from renewable sources (like Solar, Wind, Biomasses, Small Hydro )and the rest 92% are from the conventional method. Now in the next 10years(by 2030),there is a target to push it to 60% (from 18%). A very big target indeed! But in a paper recentlypublished by Harvard School of Engineering, researchers say that India can go even up to 80% by 2040 with good economics, thus can reduce CO2 emissions by 85%. If that happens, it will be a great contribution from our country to the world.
Participation of Wind Energy
I am a man from wind energy. I can see that it has been developed as a high potential and cost-effective source of renewable energy in recent decades. As a result, now drawing considerable attention from the investors and the Governments worldwide. In fact, Wind Energy technology is one of the fastest-growing technologies within the renewable energy space. Usage of wind power is rising worldwide because of its improved cost competitiveness when compared with the fossil fuel-based electricity generation method. In the last two decades, the total generation capacity of electricity from wind energy has increased by 75 times across the globe, from 7.5GW in 1997 to 564GW in 2018 and adding up every year, according to IRENA’s latest data published in 2019. I think the total global potential of wind energy is perhaps beyond any estimation at this moment, because of continuous technological developments in turbine technology, making previously unviable sites viable now for wind energy generation. In India, onshore wind energy potential is 302 GW at 100 meter Hub height and this estimate is much more than the earlier estimate of 103 GW at 80meter hub height. Technology improvement has made it possible to increase the hub height by 20 meters and beyond.
Government of India has a target to produce 60GW of energy from wind by the end of 2022, as a part of their program to produce total 175GW of energy from various renewable sources. Though, because of many reasons it doesn’t look like achieving 60GW will be possible within this time frame, nevertheless, it will arrive somewhere nearby as per GWEC report.
As of now, out of a total 18% share of renewable energy in our national power capacity, wind power is contributing 10%. Our Government has a plan to increase the share of ‘renewables’ from 18% to 54% by 2030, and wind energy will contribute by 17 % in it. Further pushing the ‘renewables’ share to 80% by 2040, wind energy requires to contribute by 58%.
So, the wind energy sector has a great future in our country. Harvard researchers also estimate that this progress wouldn’t be an expensive business for the Government, rather would come cheaper than the conventional coal-dominated power generation.
MNRE (2015) report truly said that ‘Renewable Energy offers the opportunity to contribute to social and economic development, energy access, secure energy supply, climate change mitigation, and the reduction of negative environmental and health impacts.’ Therefore, can help to save our planet from a disastrous overheating.
This article was originally published in, https://ordinarytalent.com/?p=195 | https://medium.com/illumination/thousands-of-fans-can-cool-india-26135684d85a | [] | 2021-01-12 14:24:44.794000+00:00 | ['Green House Gas', 'Wind Energy', 'Global Warming', 'Renewable Energy', 'Climate Change'] |
Is Node.js Right For You? | What are the benefits of Node.js?
Node.js is a very popular runtime environment and has been used by many companies to build apps that need to handle concurrent requests and intensive client-side rendering.
Here are some main benefits:
01
Easy to learn
Because most developers are already familiar with JavaScript, learning how to use Node.js tends to be straightforward. It’s usually very easy for teams already familiar with JavaScript and front-end development to build apps in Node.js. This cross-application of skills means that companies don’t need to hire new employees or invest in costly training programs.
02
Suitable for data-intensive applications
Node.js is particularly suitable for data-intensive applications that are built on distributed systems because of its speed and scalability. By operating on a single thread and leveraging non-blocking calls and event queuing, Node.js can handle many concurrent connections.
03
Node.js can be used to develop highly-scalable apps
Because of its event-driven architecture and asynchronous non-blocking input/output processing, Node.js can be used to develop highly-scalable apps. Node.js uses Google’s V8 engine, which offers a very high level of speed and performance, to compile code.
04
Allow for streamlined application development.
Developers have access to the Node Package Manager (npm), a library of modules that allow for streamlined application development. Because the Node.js community is so active, there are literally hundreds of thousands of packages that can be used, which can dramatically cut down on development time.
05
Enables full-stack development in one language
Node.js enables full-stack development in one language, which can be very cost-effective in the long-term. Because Node.js is extensible, it’s also easy to extend functionality in existing apps.
Who is Using Node.js?
Node.js is a popular solution. Hundreds of well-known companies use it to power their software infrastructures. What’s more, learning how to use Node.js is relatively straightforward, and programmers can take advantage of a number of tools to streamline and speed up the development process.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the biggest companies currently leveraging Node.js:
Prior to shifting to Node.js from Ruby on Rails, Groupon has significant problems with deployment speed. In 2013, Groupon engineer Sean McCullough said, “To change one color throughout the entire Groupon.com webpage, that was estimated to take three months to do.” Despite some initial hiccups, Groupon’s entire platform is now built on Node.js. It can serve much higher levels of traffic with a lower page load time.
GoDaddy’s Senior Software Engineer, Stephen Commisso, said that by utilizing microservices and Node.js, it’s possible to cut down on resource consumption by 90%. Since fully moving over to Node.js in 2013, Godaddy has found it much easier to build, test, and deploy applications. During one of its SuperBowl ads, the company was able to handle 100,000 requests per second without any downtime.
Paypal saw a 35% decrease in response time after moving over to JavaScript and Node.js from Java. This transition has allowed Paypal to rely more heavily on full-stack engineers, overcoming many of the problems that arose from the disconnect between browser and server application development.
By unifying two previously-disparate parts of its coding team, PayPal has become much more agile in dealing with user needs and complaints as they relate to all aspects of its tech stack.
Walmart relies on Node.js to power its distributed microservices architecture. Node.js enables Walmart to deal with large amounts of traffic, especially on buying holidays like Black Friday. In the past, user experience had been detrimentally affected by its legacy system. | https://medium.com/scalac/is-node-js-right-for-you-da6333a46231 | [] | 2020-12-10 08:12:24.267000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Node', 'Scala', 'Nodejs', 'Programming Languages'] |
How Does CBD Work To Alleviate Anxiety? | There is evidence to suggest that CBD can help treat anxiety. Unfortunately, we don’t really know exactly how the cannabinoid does this. Like many other things related to CBD and cannabis, more research is required. However, we do have a few ideas. CBD could work on anxiety by:
Acting As An Agonist To 5-HT1A Receptors.
These are a subtype of serotonin receptor. Serotonin plays an important role in regulating mood. SSRI stands for “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor,” and SSRIs like Prozac and Zoloft are frequently used to treat anxiety and depression by stopping the neurotransmitter serotonin from being reabsorbed. This keeps more serotonin floating around in your brain, which can reduce anxiety and increase happiness. CBD may work in a similar way by boosting the strength of the signals that serotonin receptors send. One study (on animal subjects) found that CBD might work on serotonin balance issues more quickly than SSRIs.
Promoting Neurogenesis In The Hippocampus.
The hippocampus is the part of the brain that is responsible for cognition and the formation of memories. Brain scans of anxiety sufferers show that these individuals often have a smaller hippocampus, and successful treatment results in neurogenesis (the growth of new neurons) in the hippocampus. One study (again, on animal subjects) indicated that regular use of CBD may help promote neurogenesis in the hippocampus.
Increasing The Availability Of Endocannabinoids.
CBD works as an antagonist to CB receptors found throughout the endocannabinoid system. This means that CBD can bind to the receptors, but doesn’t trigger them. As a result, endocannabinoids that would normally bind to those receptors are left to float around in the body and brain. Mental illnesses like depression and anxiety are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. It seems plausible that CBD’s ability to increase the availability of endocannabinoids might help by correcting a deficit of those compounds. This would explain why the previously mentioned 2017 study found that CBD had no effect on healthy individuals’ anxiety levels; of course, we won’t know for sure until this theory (and the others) has been thoroughly tested. | https://medium.com/@info.calmcollectiv/how-does-cbd-work-to-alleviate-anxiety-d431cc6ea63d | ['Philip Mccraken'] | 2020-01-03 05:53:46.541000+00:00 | ['Marijuana', 'Cannabis Medical', 'Cannabis'] |
Will Covid End German’s Love of Cash? | Will Covid End German’s Love of Cash?
Germans have mostly refrained from using cards for their payments. What are the reasons? Is it still the situation or has pandemic brought a change? Ani Calis Dec 26, 2020·4 min read
Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash
Year 2013. I moved to Germany to study a Masters, having no idea how long I would live there. Year 2020, I am still living in the same country, already finished my Masters and working in an industry that I would never have imagined.
Germany has brought a lot of change into my life. It seems, however, the country itself has not changed in specific areas. After few months of living in Germany, I was shocked by one particular thing — actually I am still after 7 years.
Germans love cash money. What that means, most of the time I need to have few euros in my purse to buy a coffee when I am on my way to work. Surely, this may change in some cases. For example, unless I prefer to buy my coffee from a local shop or I buy only coffee but more, which might enable me to pay via credit card — some shops give the customer possibility to pay via cards if a certain amount is spent.
Cash might be dying, but still is a ‘king’
What does this mean for a non German living in Germany?
Imagine you spontaneously want to have a dinner with your friends and you go to a restaurant — regardless of where you live — and see the sign “cash only”. Not only is it irritating not to be able to enjoy a casual experience, but it also brings up the question ‘why’.
Why do most of Germans, who are known as pragmatic, rational people, having the biggest economy in Europe and many technological innovations, refrain from card payments?
Historical and cultural reasons
The answer is simple and is related to German history and culture. Cash money represents trust, security, privacy, which in this case are more prioritized than the utility and convenience — the two other features that Germans can be related to.
For Germans, having something tangible in the hand means more transparency and trust. The latter brings along the security they need. The feeling that they know exactly how much they spent and how much is left, means no surprise debt at the end of a month. Financial caution and avoiding debt have been major issues in German’s daily life.
Last but not the least, keeping the transactions private and not sharing any personal data with others is the pillar of the privacy, which was missing in the previous years when Germany suffered from state surveillance.
Do these reasons mean there is no change?
Pandemic: Time for cultural shift?
When we had the first restrictions due to Covid-19 in Germany, one of the first questions I asked myself was:
How will this affect German’s opinion on the payment options?
Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
A recent survey, by the German Payment System Initiative, shows that today 57% of Germans use cards more than they did before the pandemic. It is a significant increase for a society, who is highly connected to its cultural and historical values.
It does not mean that Germans were not using debit or credit cards before pandemic though. They have indeed been used by the younger generation in particular with the increasing popularity of online bankings in the country such as N26 — Berlin based online banking startup. Nevertheless, according to Georg Hauer, for the first time cash payments have been discouraged in the country and pandemic has probably changed German’s behavior on payment faster than any technology ever has.
Does this mean from now on I can buy my coffee with my credit card without any worry?
Not entirely, if I still want to ensure my purchase. Despite the recent increased numbers in the adoption of payment cards, many people — mostly older generation — feel insecure while paying with debit or credit cards and would rather pay cash as long as they can since it provides them with the stability and security they look for.
What about the younger generation? For us it is easier to respond to change, we are more flexible comparing to the previous generations and are more inclined to adopt the new, which definitely supports the potential of the shift in the society’s behavior regardless of its speed. So, let me go back to the title.
Will Covid end German’s love of Cash? Most probably not. Has it brought change? Yes, inevitably. However, as Agnieszka Gehringer says, the average German’s need for security, will continue slowing down the process. | https://medium.com/@anicalis/will-covid-end-germans-love-of-cash-9a4073c78b01 | ['Ani Calis'] | 2020-12-26 17:54:54.373000+00:00 | ['Payments', 'Germany', 'Economy', 'Pandemic', 'Digitization'] |
Why is a Dangerous Word | What is even the point? Why am I doing this? Why are we here? Why…?
Finding your bliss, living your dream, living your best life, hashtag blessed… The internet is full of this malarkey. I spend a lot of time scrolling through social media. I think most people are aware that they are only seeing highlight reels of others lives. If you are anything like me, being aware of this does not necessarily prevent the impending doom that one faces when you spend too much time in a comparison loop.
This is where I am at. I have started making money as a freelancer. I have worked very hard to get to this point. It is the most amazing thing ever while simultaneously being terrifying. I currently do not know where I will be making money next. This is not uncommon territory. I have had many times throughout this year where I started thinking, “I may never get another client again.” By contrast this is better than a few years ago when I though, “I will never get a single client.” When I am in these periods I have found it important to construct a plan for myself. I must schedule my life and prioritize my time the same way a manager or boss would do for me at a normal job.
Continued education is something that gets put onto the schedule often. I spend time trying to improve my camera skills, writing, editing, etc… I also spend a great deal of time studying marketing. I am fascinated by it. I also hate it.
There is a lot of talk about, “the why”, in the marketing world. I see a lot of marketing companies that take on new clients and they help the client define their why. I am going to be frank. I think this is bullshit. Your why is such a personal thing that you do not need a team of people to help you define it.
Yes, story telling is important. Inspiring your potential clients and retaining your existing clients is important. You can certainly do this by having a compelling story of why you started your business. However, “your why”, is personal and if you keep asking why you can get really far out into metaphysical land. Asking myself why does not help me get out of a rut.
What does help me is asking, who, what, when, and where.
Who can I serve, what can I do for them, when can I do it, and where do I do it? If I can not come up with an idea for a YouTube video or a morning ramble. I do not ask myself why am I doing it. I ask myself, who can I write this for? What can I say for them? When do I do it? Where can I go to do it?
Why are we doing anything? Life is super weird and abstract. It does not make a lot of sense if you think about it too hard. We are evolved naked apes, playing human, on a ball made of rock, rotating around a spherical ball of flame. If you are on your way to the office and you keep asking yourself why, you may just end up quitting and joining a monastery. For good reason too. Stop asking why. That is selfish. Start asking yourself who you can help and life will start getting a little brighter. | https://medium.com/@jonjkuhn/why-is-a-dangerous-word-dd6c0afd842d | ['Jon Kuhn'] | 2020-12-15 15:23:46.006000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Why', 'Creative Process', 'Writers Block'] |
Sono Groan | Written by
Daily comic by Lisa Burdige and John Hazard about balancing life, love and kids in the gig economy. | https://backgroundnoisecomic.medium.com/sono-groan-3275f2f646b | ['Background Noise Comics'] | 2019-07-04 05:01:31.328000+00:00 | ['Mens Health', 'Health', 'Humor', 'Medicine', 'Comics'] |
Observations on the testing culture of Test Driven Development | A homage to “purple” wires installed by IBM field engineers decades ago. They were yellow.
This post is not a primer on Test Driven Development. It contains my observations of re-starting the discipline and the problem of unit testing craft.
Kent Beck, a software engineering leader, is also the modern-day re-inventor of test-driven development (TDD). Kent also cowrote JUnit, a widely used testing framework, with Erich Gamma.
In his book, XP Explained (second edition), Kent describes that at the intersection of values and practices, form principles. When we iterate from the concept and plugin what we believe as a formula, we achieve a transformation.
[KISS, Quality, YAGNI, ...] + [Testing, Specs, ...] == [TDD, ...]
I have a profound respect for Kent’s life work not only because of his brilliant software creations but also his continued exploration of trust, courage, feedback, simplicity, and vulnerability. All attributes are paramount to the invention of Extreme Programming (XP).
TDD is a principle and a discipline that is followed by the XP community. The field has been present for nineteen years.
In this post, I will describe my opinion of where TDD stands in its adoption. Following this, we will explore intriguing personal observations as we perform TDD. Finally, we will conclude by postulating why TDD hasn’t become standard practice. Let’s begin.
TDD, Studies, And Professionalism
Nineteen years in TDD is still debated as a discipline in the development community.
The first question an analytical person would ask, is “How many or what percentage of software professionals use TDD today?” If you asked Robert Martin (Uncle Bob), a friend of Kent Beck, the answer would be one hundred percent. Uncle Bob believes that it is infeasible to consider being a professional if test-driven development is not practiced. [1]
Uncle Bob has been the focus of the discipline for some years now, and it is natural to discuss him as a part of this write-up. Uncle Bob has defended TDD and has pushed the discipline’s boundaries significantly.
However, no one asks the follow-up question, “the definition of practice is the deliberate use of — but it does not specify the amount or percentage of, right?” My subjective estimation is that a majority of software engineers have not practiced TDD in a small timeframe.
The reality of the situation is that we do not know, since the practice percentage has not been studied widely. The only concrete measurement we have is a small collection of companies being gathered at WeDoTDD. WeDoTDD tracks these companies. Interviews are conducted with those who practice 100% of the time, but that list is small. It is also incomplete since searching reveals other larger shops are practicing — but perhaps not at full capacity.
If we don’t know how many are practicing, the next question is, “how effective is TDD based on measured benefits?”
There have been studies conducted over the years that have proven TDD’s effectiveness. Write-ups include well-recognized reports from Microsoft, IBM, North Carolina University, and the University of Helsinki.
An impactful visual is taken from the Helsinki report.
These reports prove to the degree that defect density is reduced by 40% to 60% in exchange for increased effort and execution time by 15% to 35%. These numbers have also begun to echo through books and new industries such as the DevOps community.
With these questions half answered, the final question is, “what should I expect as I start to perform TDD?” You are in luck because I have formulated my observations of TDD. Let’s review them next.
1. TDD Commands Verbalizing An Approach
As we practice TDD, we begin to experience the phenomena of “calling the shot.” In simple terms, the short acts of creating failing and passing tests will intellectually challenge the developer. They will say aloud, “I think this will pass” and “I do not think this will pass” or “I’m not sure, let me think after I try this approach.”
The developer’s IDE (integrated developer environment) has become a rubber duck begging for an intense conversation. At a minimum, TDD shops should be humming with this type of conversion.
Think, then speak up about your immediate next move(s).
This type of reinforcement is key to communication, not only to predict your next action but also to reinforce the concepts of writing the most straightforward code to make a unit test pass. Of course, if the developer becomes silent, they are almost certainly wandering off the loop and must come back on the path.
2. TDD Commands Muscle Memory
As a developer moves forward with the first cycles of TDD, they will experience heavy fatigue by battling through high friction and awkward flow. The fatigue is right for any initiated but unlearned human activity. The developer will attempt to find shortcuts to improve the cycle because the goal is to reduce that awkwardness and to enhance muscle memory.
Muscle memory is the key to feeling good vibes and becoming fluid. TDD demands it because of execution repetition.
Print out a shortcut cheat sheet. Learn only as many shortcuts in your IDE as you need to make your cycles efficient. Then, keep searching for more.
The developer will become an expert of shortcuts only in a matter of a few sittings, including building and running the test rig. With more practice, creating new artifacts, highlighting text, and navigating the IDE will become natural. Finally, we graduate to unlock all of the refactor shortcuts such as extraction, renaming, generation, pulling up, reformatting, and pushing down code.
3. TDD Commands Thinking At Least Slightly Forward
Each time a developer sits to start TDD, they must have a concrete short mental map on what is to be solved. In a traditional coding approach, this is not always true, as the mental map of the solution could be macro and exploratory. The developer does not know how to solve the problem but may know of a fuzzy goal. To get to that goal, unit tests are neglected in the process.
The start and end of the sitting should also be ritualized. First, think, and list. Play with it. List more. Then start, do, and then think. Check off. Repeat some times. Finally, think, and stop.
Maintain your test list like a hawk. Check off items as you go. Never drive without one. Think!
The list may take some time to formulate and is not a part of the cycle. However, it should be prepared before the revolutions start. If you don’t have one, you may not know where you are going. Always have a map.
// A Test List
// "" -> does not validate
// "a" -> does not validate
// "aa" -> validates
// "racecar" -> validates
// "Racecar" -> validates
// print the validation
// have a blueberry ale
The developer must command a test list, as described by Kent Beck. The test list allows the direction of solving in the next immediate cycles. That test list should always be labored upon and updated moments before the cycles begin. Once the test list is solved minus the last step, the cycle stops on red with a failing test.
4. TDD Demands Communication With Others
As the above test list is filled out, specific steps become blocked because the commitment of work was not clear. The developer cannot figure out the test list. Or the reverse. They are generating a presumptive test list that has too many guesses about the missing requirement(s). The suggestion is to stop right there.
Driving without TDD will cause implementations of unneeded complexity to occur. TDD performed mindlessly is just as dangerous.
Speak up loudly if the test list has gaps.
In TDD, the developer must understand what to build based on the owner’s picture of the requirement(s) and no more. If the need is unclear in context, the test list will start to break down. That break down will require a conversation. Direct conversions can quickly turn into trust and respect. The short feedback loops are now established.
5. TDD Demands Iterative Architecture
Initially proposed in the first edition of the XP book, Kent proposed that tests should drive architecture. However, over a few years, there have been stories about how sprint teams crash into walls about a few sprints in.
Of course, having tests drive all of the architecture is unwise. Uncle Bob had agreed with other experts that architecture driven by tests is “horse sh*t.” [1] Some larger map is required, but not too far above the distributed test lists that are being worked on in the field.
Kent also called this out many years ago in the TDD By Example book. Concurrency and security are the two significant areas where TDD cannot drive, and the developer must be concerned separately. Loosely translated, concurrency via system design is on a different level and must be labored over iteratively and in concert with TDD. Concurrency is a reality today, as some architectures are driving toward reactive extensions, the zenith of concurrency construction.
Create a larger map of organization. A vision that goes just a little bit ahead. Make sure you are steering with the team in the same way.
However, the essential idea is the organization of the system, which TDD cannot effectively handle alone. Unit tests test at a lower level. Iterative architecture and TDD orchestration is challenging in practice and demands trust among all team members, pair programming, and reliable code review. There is no exact way to do this, but it will become apparent that short iterative design sessions are needed in unison with the test lists in the field.
6: TDD Reveals Unit Test Frailty And Degenerative Implementation
Unit tests have a funny property about them, and TDD exposes that property. They cannot prove correctness. E.W. Dijkstra had labored over this and discussed the possibility of mathematical proofs in our profession to resolve the gap.
For example, the below solves all tests around a hypothetical imperfect palindrome that the business required. It was developed with TDD.
// Not an imperfect palindrome. @Test
fun `Given "", then it does not validate`() {
"".validate().shouldBeFalse()
} @Test
fun `Given "a", then it does not validate`() {
"a".validate().shouldBeFalse()
} @Test
fun `Given "aa", then it validates`() {
"aa".validate().shouldBeTrue()
} @Test
fun `Given "abba", then it validates`() {
"abba".validate().shouldBeTrue()
} @Test
fun `Given "racecar", then it validates`() {
"racecar".validate().shouldBeTrue()
} @Test
fun `Given "Racecar", then it validates`() {
"Racecar".validate().shouldBeTrue()
}
Indeed, these tests have holes. Unit tests are frail, even for the most trivial tasks. We can never prove correctness because if we had to, it would require intense mental labor, and the needed inputs would be unimaginable.
// Too generic of a solve based on tests provided fun String.validate() = if (isEmpty() || length == 1) false else toLowerCase() == toLowerCase().reversed() // Is the best implementation and solves all tests fun String.validate() = length > 1
length > 1 could be called degenerative implementation. It is just enough implementation to solve the problem at hand, but on its own tells us nothing about the problem we are trying to solve.
The question is, when does a developer stop writing the tests? The answer seems to be simple. When the business is satisfied, not when the code author is, this may hurt our construction passion, and we are embarrassed by the simplicity. These feelings are balanced by the good feelings of clean code and the ability to refactor with confidence later. Things feel tidy and clean.
Be aware that the unit tests are fallible but are necessary. Understand their strength and weakness. Property-based testing and mutation testing may help tie up this gap.
TDD has benefits, but it can take away building the sandcastles we do not need. It is a constraint, but it allows us to go faster, further, and with safety.
But! No matter how frail unit tests may seem, they are a core necessity. They are required to allow fear to turn into courage. Tests allow those to refactor the code mercifully and even better; it is a guide, documentation, for any other developer to immediately jump in and add value to a project that is well supported by unit testing.
7: TDD Reveals Assertion Completion Feedback Loop
Take a step back further. For the next two phenomena, we will visit strange re-occurrences. For the first occurrence, let’s take a quick look at FizzBuzz. Here is our test list.
// Print numbers 9 to 15. [OK]
// For numbers divisible by 3, print Fizz instead of the number.
// ...
We are a few steps in. We now have a failing test.
@Test
fun `Given numbers, replace those divisible by 3 with "Fizz"`() {
val machine = FizzBuzz()
assertEquals(machine.print(), "?")
} class FizzBuzz {
fun print(): String {
var output = ""
for (i in 9..15) {
output += if (i % 3 == 0) {
"Fizz "
} else "${i} "
}
return output.trim()
}
} Expected <Fizz 10 11 Fizz 13 14 Fizz>, actual <?>.
Naturally, if we duplicate the expected assertion data to assertEqualsIt , it achieves the result, and the test passes.
As we keep querying the test rig during implementation steps, failing unit tests set around data may correctly answer their own assertions. Perhaps we can call this voodoo testing.
Sometimes failing tests will scream a correct result that is required to make the test pass. I do not know what to call these events, perhaps voodoo testing. Your mileage may vary based on your laziness and test etiquette, but I have seen this happen numerous times when working to have implementation achieve canned and expected data sets.
8: TDD Reveals The Transformation Priority Premise
In TDD, one can become trapped. There are situations where the developer can be entangled by the transformations applied to achieve implementation. At some point, the testing code becomes a bottleneck to move forward — an impasse forms. The developer has to back out and disarm by removing a portion of the tests to get out of the hole. The developer becomes exposed.
Uncle Bob likely has experienced these impasses in his career, and then he probably realized that the act of making a test pass must require a preferred order so that the risk of an impasse is reduced. At the same time, he also realized a premise. As the tests get more specific, the code gets more generic.
The order of the transformations. One should always lower-ordered changes.
This list is called the Transformation Priority Premise. There seems to be an order of refactoring risk one can choose to achieve by passing a test. The selected top transformation (the simplest) is usually the best option and will incur the least risk to create a situation of an impasse.
TPP, or perhaps Uncle Bob’s Test Calculus, is one of the most intriguing, technical, and exciting observations to date. Use it as a guide to keeping the code as simple as possible.
Print out the TPP list and place it at your desk. Refer to it as you drive to avoid impasses. Embrace an order of simplicity.
Before we conclude, I’d like to answer my question, “what percentage of software professionals use TDD today?” My answer stands at “I think the group is small.” I want to explore this guess below with reasons why.
Has TDD Taken Off?
Unfortunately, it hasn’t. The percentage is subjectively low, and the search for data continues. My experience in hiring, leading teams, and being an empathic developer myself, here are my observations.
Reason 1: No Exposure To Real Testing Culture
My educated guess is that a majority of software developers have not had the experience of learning and working through a testing culture.
The definition of a testing culture is a place where developers are deliberately practicing testing. They are continuously mentoring those who are not skilled in the area. Each pairing and in every pull request is a feedback loop on building individuals to become great at testing. There is also significant support up the engineering leadership chain. All managers believe in testing. When deadlines and times get tough, the test discipline is not dropped — it is maintained.
Those that have gone through a testing culture, like me, are lucky to have those observations. We can apply the experience to future projects.
Reason 2: Unclear Educational Resources
Some have attempted to write books on the subject, such as xUnit Patterns and Effective Unit Testing. However, there seems to be no place that clearly defines what and why to test. Most resources out there do not clearly describe the craft of assertion and verification.
Open source projects are also hit or miss with useful unit tests. In these unfamiliar projects, the very first thing I do is look for tests. My disappointment is almost inevitable. I can also remember the very few instances of excitement when tests are present but also readable.
Reason 3: No Focus In Universities
My observation of candidates over the years fresh out of university reveals a well-known assumption: little to no discipline in testing rigor. Every developer I know has learned testing afterward, some on their own, but most going through a previous testing culture experience.
Reason 4: A Career Of High Test Passion Required
It also takes passion for being interested in testing and for understanding the details and benefits over an extensive period. You have to be hungry and obsess on clean code and doing the craft better.
Most want to get things working, achieving only half of what Kent Beck said: “First make it work, then make it right.” I empathize that to get things working is a tough battle in itself.
Testing is hard to do well, so let’s conclude on that thought.
Conclusion
Kent’s proposal in XP included a simple formulation of instinct, thought, and experience. These three levels are stepping stones to execution quality measured by a threshold. Kent’s model explains a problem with TDD.
The threshold for clean test execution is high, in that it eclipses a baseline of experience. The majority will never become above water, and those that do are lucky — have experience from the elusive testing culture.
From XP Explained. Initially, about design quality, imagine a higher threshold line.
Software is tough enough to build and organize. Testing takes it to a whole new level of enlightenment.
Early on, I had an instinct that testing is essential, but my test culture experience came later. It took years of thought in my career, but without that experience of test culture, I would not have emerged above that threshold.
I believe that many developers also have this thought but cannot see the real benefit of test culture due to a lack of specific experience.
TDD discipline has struggled to take off due in part to the high learning curve of testing. Even armed with veteran testing knowledge and experience, TDD requires a headspace that is unique and challenging.
Amplify this. TDD demands all that thought and experience, and more. It is not easy and is a skill. I think it is because it commands the developer’s throughput to the maximum, continuously and relentlessly. We are all vulnerable in the process, and few developers like being in this position.
@Test
fun `Given software, when we build, then we expect tests`() {
build(software) shoudHave tests
}
However, TDD is an intriguing discipline and is a tool to lean on. Its phenomena should be studied in detail. If anything else, the discipline makes for better developers as the practice contains benefits that can strengthen the individual and the collective group. | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/8-observations-on-test-driven-development-a9b5144f868 | ['Doug Arcuri'] | 2020-11-23 11:50:18.771000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Tech', 'Software Testing', 'Tdd', 'Software Development'] |
Mời bạn bè & Mừng lễ Quốc khánh với giải thưởng 5000 HT — Danh sách TOP 100 cuối cùng | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/huobi-global/m%E1%BB%9Di-b%E1%BA%A1n-b%C3%A8-m%E1%BB%ABng-l%E1%BB%85-qu%E1%BB%91c-kh%C3%A1nh-v%E1%BB%9Bi-gi%E1%BA%A3i-th%C6%B0%E1%BB%9Fng-5000-ht-danh-s%C3%A1ch-top-100-cu%E1%BB%91i-c%C3%B9ng-ee972c847b7 | ['Huobi Global'] | 2018-10-03 08:44:10.676000+00:00 | ['Vietnam'] |
DIY Bond Cleaning Can not be Extraordinary. | DIY Bond Cleaning Can not be Extraordinary.
The majority of people can take care of their carpets and bathrooms and kitchens well. But, just knowing isn’t enough. To perform Bond cleaning effectively, one requires patience, time, skills and.
Thus, hiring a service is a smart choice that is profitable for tenants. The tenant is able to do the clean up at the end of the lease on their own or employ cleaners.
It is contingent on the size and state of the property. If the house is in good order there is no need to hiring cleaners. To get a clean home, you should hire professional cleaners only.
Here are a few arguments that will help you understand why hiring of these services can be beneficial.
Do-it-yourself (DIY) Cleaning
In the period of tenancy there is many responsibilities and tasks and end up with a lot of waiting to be done while cleaning your home yourself could create a mess and be confusing. It is therefore recommended to hire professionals to do the cleaning.
It’s a Long and Exhausting Job.
It takes a lot of effort and time are required. After the lease period the property must be spotless, but you won’t receive the bond fully. This can be a challenge for tenants.
Not Saving Enough
If you’re doing the cleaning on your own You think you could save some dollars, but you’ll need to purchase cleaning products from a reputable brand and other equipment to tidy your home. Cleaning the carpet is a chore and you will need to purchase or lease a carpet cleaner. You’ll save money, however, you must consider the problems you’ll have to have to endure.
Professionals Cleaners
Bond Cleaning Sydney cleaners will save you time and energy as well as providing you with high-quality services. Professionals have the expertise to complete the bond cleaning properly.
They are trained to do this. It is therefore very difficult to reach the level of professional athletes. They also utilize the approved list of items to ensure they have covered everything and thoroughly cleaned every nook and corners.
Professionals make use of advanced technology and equipment , such as a microfiber scrubber and microfiber cloth. They enter the home with specific equipment and tools that are needed to transform the home into a functional structure.
The companies that are reputable also offer their customers a guarantee of excellence. If there is a flaw they’ll return to you and address the issue without additional cost.
The Bottom Line
If you’re worried about the cleanliness of the home or are considering moving out of an apartment you rented Employing professionals is the best option. This will save you effort and time. Contact Bond Clean Co. to make sure your home is tidy. | https://medium.com/@princegohil/diy-bond-cleaning-can-not-be-extraordinary-828ef3134712 | ['Prince Shrawan'] | 2021-11-26 08:18:57.216000+00:00 | ['Bond Cleaning', 'Cleaning', 'Cleaning Services', 'Cleaning Tips'] |
The Mass Ave Project Presents Voices of Mass Ave | What do you see when you pass the herd of homeless people and drug addicts on Mass Ave? Do you see humanity? Do they register as people? Can you even look?
It’s a little easier to see the humanity in someone who made it off the block. So that’s what we are going to do in this Voices of Mass Ave series. We’ll open the door to the insanity and pain that leads a soul to find themself in the degradation that causes most people to just look away.
From this easier-to-stomach side of life, meet Blaise Conway. He’s a sweet guy, with boyish handsomeness and a mouth of white teeth smiling a feeling of earnestness and joy. He’s fresh from volunteering for Scent from Heaven, an organization that brings flowers to mothers who have lost their children to addiction. And he has arrived today with an even bigger generosity of spirit: the willingness to sacrifice his pride and his perceived reputation. He offers a totally honest recounting of his story as a man with HIV who has suffered years of addiction to heroin and crystal meth, much of which took place around Mass Ave. Willing to give up his anonymity, he offers hope to someone who might feel as hopeless as he did at one time.
Blaise came from a family with two working-class, Irish-Italian parents. He went to CCD and church-a very white America, middle-class, blue-collar existence. But there was something different about him; he was gay. This was nothing his father had any ability to handle. Blaise was told to, “Play sports.” Or sometimes he heard things like, “Stop being a little faggot.” He recounts these phrases with great compassion, understanding that in the place where he was from that’s just how men talked to their sons. But he formed a belief at that time that if his family knew who he was, they wouldn’t love him. It wasn’t really an unreasonable thought. But that belief became the seed for his ensuing self destruction. He started living a lie, doing anything and everything to not be himself. Getting in trouble seemed like a good way to get someone to pay attention to him. And eventually he was doing all the standards-alcohol, pot, cigarettes. But then, fate cast the entrance of Oxycontin, a powerful opiate, and the entire trajectory of Blaise’s life changed. “I felt like I was home,” he says, a sentiment often repeated by addicts about the first time they do their drug of choice. And it’s no surprise how enticing that feeling would be to a kid who did not feel at home in himself, or in his actual home. And even though he threw up and passed out while on the pills, he was right on board to do it again the next day. The feeling of home is a deep call, even if it makes you sick to your stomach.
Thus started his love affair with opiates. Oxys turned into heroin. Sniffing drugs turned into shooting drugs, and suddenly he was lost, drowning in his addiction. Problems were not talked about at home. But his parents knew he had a drug habit and began sending him to detoxes. Unfortunately, the removal of drugs for a little stretch of days didn’t do much but pause the action. And he was very much still active in his heroin habit at age 22 when he came out to his parents. Around that time, they sent him to a cushy rehab in Las Vegas. Maybe when he came home he would be fixed, his parents thought. But that treatment program, with its horse therapy and acupuncture, didn’t fix the problem. The real issue at hand was that for the first five minutes when Blaise woke up without any drugs in his system he wanted to kill himself. The real problem was that he couldn’t stand being himself without anything to numb his system. “It hurt to breathe.” So, he got prescription drugs from the doctors there and then quickly went back to street drugs. He found black tar heroin and the next profound love/hate relationship of his life-crystal meth. Once again, the whole course of his life changed with the introduction to methamphetamines. He got into sex work, escorting, and selling drugs. Las Vegas never slept. And there was some delusion of a fast, exciting, flashy life, but still Blaise awoke each morning to a pit of dread and blackness in his belly.
So, he came home, 115 lbs with blue hair, and arrived on his shocked parents’ doorstep. He went to more detoxes, but when there was no treatment center to be sent to, he was quickly back to drugs. Then one awful Christmas Eve he got released from a detox with nowhere to go and ended up on Mass Ave. At that point, he found what a lot of people find there: a group of people who make life not so alone and enough drugs to numb the pain. He spent a whole week walking around and occasionally sleeping in hallways of buildings. There was some more shuffling in and out of detoxes and halfway houses, but he always returned to Mass Ave again, homeless and on drugs, sometimes dreaming of throwing himself in front of a train.
Then came his first dose of recovery. He had a shot to go to Portland, Maine to a sober house and started doing the 12 steps. He got a glimpse of serenity and peace, but made the mistake of not putting his recovery first. When someone showed up with some of his drug of choice, bam. Just like that, it all fell apart again. He left Maine with this new “friend” and was living in total drug insanity, doing meth and staying in hotel rooms in different states. When that game was up, where was there to go? Back to Mass Ave, “the one place I wasn’t discriminated against. There were people who used and lived like I did.” And thus began his longest run in Boston. A seeming respite, Blaise started a relationship with a man who dealt meth and provided him drugs so he didn’t have to worry about making money on the streets. But it wasn’t any kind of dream life. They were both in and out of drug psychosis in an abusive relationship. Intermittently, they were in jails and hospitals. It was toxic, but it was the only kind of love and connection Blaise knew.
It’s at this time, sharing needles and sleeping with a lot of people, that Blaise contracted HIV. It spiraled him into an even deeper depression. He thought, “This is what I deserve because of the piece of sh*t person that I was.” Thankfully, Mass General Hospital intermittently took care of him. They would often let him come down from meth in their psych ward and set him up with the HIV medication that has had him at undetectable levels for 2–3 years now. But he felt during that time that there was no hope. He was already drowning in the stigma of being gay, homeless, and a drug addict; now he had HIV. He felt beyond redemption. Unfortunately, life added to an already broken person the trauma of life on the streets. Blaise witnessed rape, robbery, assault-more violence than one person should ever see, some directed at him. “No one cares what happens to us down there. I was just another homeless junkie. If I died, no one would care.”
In January 2019, he was arrested on warrants and while he was in jail, he found out his boyfriend had overdosed and died. It didn’t matter how turbulent and toxic the relationship was, he was in deep grief. He got released and started using drugs with suicidal fervor, wishing with all his heart that he would use enough to not wake up. And he almost got his wish, waking up in a hospital after an overdose, tubes in his body and handcuffed to a gurney. This might seem like the worst part of the story, but it’s actually the turning point. Blaise had to finish his pending 6-month jail sentence, and his family offered to give him one last shot by helping him get into a sober house. They didn’t want to give up on him.
To his surprise, the men there seemed happy. They were going to meetings and doing the 12 steps. Blaise doubted it could work for him; he didn’t think he could find a higher power like these other men. But he ran into a woman named Sara, whom he’d met many years ago at detox. This former addict, who now seemed to be glowing, had something that he wanted. So he asked her to sponsor him. Blaise was desperate, self-hate and grief coursing through his body and heart, still waking up to a feeling that life as himself was intolerable. But the desperation pushed him to do the basic things that were suggested. He started getting honest, doing the 12 steps, praying, asking for help, going to meetings, meditating. And suddenly, he lost the feeling that he wanted to kill himself every morning when he woke up. A sense of connection and community developed-relationships that were not transactional. There were people who were looking out for his benefit instead of their own. He got a simple job at a sandwich shop at first and started feeling that he had some basic value as a human. He was becoming a man of integrity and honor, dropping the fake persona he had created to fit in or appear to be tough.
In truth, there is no greater toughness or brave act than to tell your story for the benefit of others, with total disregard to the personal cost that may result. Blaise is sharing his HIV status for the first time publicly in hopes that someone else who is caught in the spiral of shame and depression, especially in the midst of an active addiction, would see a way out. His HIV is currently undetectable (too low to be detected on a test), which also means it’s untransmittable. Blaise says, “It’s very important that people get tested and are aware of their status. Unfortunately, on Mass Ave it’s spreading like wildfire and people aren’t getting tested so the spread is continuing to grow.”
It didn’t seem like there was a way to rise up from the hopelessness, desperation, and sickness. But Blaise Conway has done just that. He created a life of service, sponsoring men and women in the 12 step fellowship that got him sober. He has had a job in the recovery field for the last 2 years. The focus is on others, and he says it’s made his life flourish. The past no longer has chains around him; it no longer causes him to feel like he is not good enough. And you might pass by him today, walking down the street. But you wouldn’t look away. You’d probably smile at him. However, he’s the same human that once upon a time was crawling inside a garbage can to catch a little warmth. If you add enough pain into our lives, we could all be this human. And if you can’t find that truth inside yourself, you looked away too soon.
The Mass Ave Project meets people where they’re at on the streets in a loving non- judgmental light. They provide basic needs, but more so, they bring humanity back to people forgotten by society. If anyone they meet wants to get off the street, they are also a bridge into recovery by helping people get placed in adequate addiction treatment. Mass Ave Project Board: James Bradley-President, Justin Downey-Spiritual Director, Megan Kelly-Community Outreach, Blaise Conway, Maggie Bradley
For more information about The Mass Ave Project go to: https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=mass%20ave%20project | https://medium.com/@leahrushhypnotherapy/the-mass-ave-project-presents-voices-of-mass-ave-ee0fdcb26f6b | ['Leah Rush', 'C. Ht.'] | 2021-06-17 22:56:53.922000+00:00 | ['Recovery', 'Helping Others', 'Addiction', 'Boston', 'Homelessness'] |
Power to the Indigenous Peoples! | St. Lawrence Island Yupik share their knowledge and concerns about local waterways given loss of sea ice and increase in commercial shipping. Photo ©WCS.
By David Wilkie and Michael Painter
October 23, 2018
In the wake of the recent Global Climate Action Summit, we need to replay and reinforce the message that Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities — by exercising their rights, securing their wellbeing, and maintaining their cultural identities — will play an enormously important part in keeping forests intact and helping humanity avoid a climate change catastrophe.
WCS has long supported the rights of Indigenous Peoples to decide how to benefit from stewardship of their lands and waters. During the summit, our staff in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the boreal north of Canada, and in Bolivia communicated passionately about the vital role that Indigenous Peoples play in making our planet more resilient to climate change.
Local women helping WCS staff to monitor fish landings in Tanjung Luar village in Lombok, Indonesia. Photo ©WCS.
We noted how civil society has and continues to play a key supporting role in securing rights to Indigenous Peoples’ territory and helping them to build their capacity to manage their natural resources.
But while the importance of securing rights and building capacity for Indigenous Peoples is well understood, we less frequently discuss why it is essential that Indigenous Peoples hold the power to govern their traditional territories and exercise their authority. Without clout, they are often thwarted in their efforts to manage their nature resources.
Time and again, politically or economically powerful actors have undermined or usurped the legitimate authority of Indigenous Peoples. On the other hand, when civil society actors have empowered Indigenous Peoples partners to govern their own territory, they and not others have benefitted.
It is essential that Indigenous Peoples hold the power to govern their traditional territories and exercise their authority.
A little over 180 km west of Kabul in the Hindu Kush mountains of central Afghanistan, the Hazara people have depended for generations on the Band-e-Amir landscape to graze their livestock, provide fuel and fodder, and facilitate rain-fed crop production.
In 2006, WCS helped establish the Band-e-Amir Protected Area Committee (BAPAC). BAPAC is comprised of elected representatives from all 15 villages in the area and members of various ministries and levels of government. Community representatives are the majority of the BAPAC members and consequently have the ability to guide the discussion on whether, why, and how to protect the Band-e-Amir area. | https://medium.com/communities-for-conservation/power-to-the-indigenous-peoples-145992dfbcc6 | ['Wildlife Conservation Society'] | 2018-10-24 17:33:02.226000+00:00 | ['Indigenous People', 'Indigenous', 'Wildlife', 'Environment', 'Conservation'] |
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