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ABFT for Correctness and Liveness | In a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), the consensus algorithm is the method by which the nodes (computers) are able to come to an agreement (consensus) on the order of a set of transactions, and potentially other information such as a timestamp for each transaction. For some consensus algorithms, it is possible to prove that they are Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (ABFT).
For example, the hashgraph consensus algorithm has a proof that it is ABFT. But what does that mean, and what are the practical implications? This blog will explore what an ABFT proof can guarantee about the correctness, finality, and liveness of a consensus algorithm.
Correctness, finality, and liveness
Correctness refers to the ability of a network of nodes to prevent forks developing, where different nodes disagree on the value for which consensus is sought. Correctness is sometimes referred to as safety.
Finality refers to a model of consensus in which, once a node determines a value for which consensus is sought, there is no chance the node will subsequently reevaluate that decision.
Liveness refers to the ability of a network of nodes running a consensus algorithm being able to continue towards establishing consensus for transactions, that is the algorithm’s ability to proceed.
Correctness and liveness are not separable — it is trivial to guarantee correctness if liveness is not a requirement, and trivial to progress towards consensus if correctness is sacrificed.
ABFT Proof
A consensus algorithm will generally make some sort of guarantees over correctness, finality, and safety if certain conditions are true. Generally, the stronger the guarantees, and the fewer and less restrictive the conditions, the more secure the algorithm. A consensus algorithm may have a mathematical proof that makes those conditions clear, and demonstrates how the guarantees emerge.
If a consensus algorithm has an ABFT proof, then there will exist a mathematical proof that if certain conditions are true, then certain results for correctness, finality, and liveness are guaranteed.
The following is one way of writing the conditions and results for a typical ABFT proof:
ABFT Conditions
More than 2/3 of the nodes are honest (non-Byzantine and non-faulty). It is always true that any pair of honest nodes will eventually sync again. An attacker can cause non-honest nodes to violate the protocol in arbitrary ways. An attacker can manipulate the internet in arbitrary ways.
ABFT Results
Every honest node will eventually reach a consensus value on every transaction and that value will not change. Every honest node reaches the same consensus value on each transaction.
There are other forms of ABFT conditions, such as using stake, and requiring that more than 2/3 of the stake be owned by honest nodes. But for simplicity, we will only consider this form of ABFT here.
Condition 1 requires that more than 2/3 of the nodes are non-Byzantine, which means they follow the protocol and do not act maliciously. It also requires that they are non-faulty, which means a node can crash and be offline for a while, but it must eventually come back online and sync with the other nodes. An honest node can’t crash and stay offline forever.
Condition 2 requires that any two honest nodes will eventually sync. And then they will eventually sync again. And so on forever.
Conditions 3 and 4 simply say that an attacker can be powerful enough to completely control nodes and the internet itself, as long as the first two Conditions still hold.
Proofs of this sort also assume that secure cryptography exists. In other words, the attacker can’t break the hash algorithm or the digital signature algorithm.
Result 1 is a guarantee of finality — there is a moment in time when each node knows the consensus value with certainty, and will not thereafter reconsider that value. It’s important to note that Result 1 does not stipulate a particular time frame for honest nodes to determine a consensus value — it says only that honest nodes will eventually do so.
Result 2 is a guarantee of correctness — every node will reach the same conclusion.
The guarantees of results 1 and 2 only apply if the conditions are met. Of course, if all of the nodes are malicious, then they can do anything. But that would violate Condition 1, so the results would no longer be guaranteed. Similarly, if all nodes are unable to communicate with each other, then they won’t be able to come to consensus on anything. But that would violate Condition 2. So, as long as the Conditions are met, the Results are guaranteed, which give strong results for correctness and finality.
An ABFT proof makes different guarantees about liveness than the guarantees it makes for correctness or finality.
There are some broad guarantees that it makes about liveness, and other guarantees that it does not make about liveness. It is useful to go through a number of classes of liveness attacks, and see which are ruled out and which aren’t.
Liveness attacks
A liveness attack is an attempt to prevent honest nodes from reaching consensus.
In general, a liveness attack will consist of one (or a combination) of the following mechanisms:
The attacker is a node, and by refusing to participate in consensus, or by sending messages that break the rules of the protocol, prevents other nodes from reaching consensus.
The attacker prevents honest nodes from participating in consensus. This could take the form of a Denial of Service against one or more honest nodes that consumes the computing resources that would otherwise be used for consensus, or otherwise corrupting the honest node’s computer such that it can’t participate in consensus.
The attacker prevents, or slows, the transmission of consensus messages between honest nodes as those messages travel over the network.
One way to reason about the liveness guarantees an ABFT proof will or will not make is to consider an attacker making a claim about their ability to prevent liveness and to determine if that claim is valid or not.
We will see that an ABFT proof will allow us to refute some claims about liveness attacks, but not others.
Each claimed attack will be labelled as either FALSE or TRUE.
Attack A — Byzantine nodes — FALSE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I control malicious nodes that are less than 1/3 of all the nodes, and can direct those nodes to prevent the other honest nodes from progressing towards consensus, either by having my nodes refusing to communicate or otherwise breaking the rules of the protocol. I can freeze the network for as long as the attack continues.
If this claim were true and the attack were possible, it would mean that an attacker could freeze the network’s progress towards consensus for as long as the attack continues, so the network would not be live during that time. And the attack could continue forever, and so freeze it forever, and prevent it from ever coming to consensus.
But the attack is impossible if there is an ABFT proof. Because the ABFT proof says that it will come to consensus eventually. The details of the attack don’t matter. It doesn’t matter how the malicious nodes are violating the protocol. No matter how clever they are, the attack will fail and so the claim is false. The ABFT proof guarantees that.
The attack doesn’t stop the honest nodes from syncing so Condition 2 is true.
Additionally, because less than 1/3 nodes are Byzantine, Condition 1 is true as well.
The ABFT proof then guarantees Result 1, which guarantees that all honest nodes will reach consensus on every transaction.
But the attacker was claiming that they could prevent the above, that is that, if the attack continued forever, the network would be frozen for all time.
Consequently the claim is refuted by the ABFT proof.
Attack B — DDoS against single node — FALSE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I can launch a DDoS attack to shut down a single honest node at a time. While a node is being DDoSed, no other nodes can sync with it. I also control malicious nodes (less than 1/3), which know what is going on, and can help me direct the attack to repeatedly change which node is being DDoSed. I can freeze the network for as long as the attack continues.
This is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The attacker has compromised many computers on the internet, and can use them to flood a single computer with so many packets that it shuts down for as long as the attack continues. It doesn’t matter how clever the attacker is when choosing the DDoS target. It doesn’t matter that the attacker has a malicious node as a spy to help choose that target.
The attack is still impossible. As long as every pair of honest nodes eventually syncs, and more than 2/3 of the nodes are honest nodes, then it isn’t possible for an attacker to freeze the network for as long as the attack continues. Because if it were continued forever, all four Conditions would be true, but the Results would not be true. That’s ruled out by the ABFT proof. So this form of liveness attack is declared impossible by the ABFT proof and the claim must be false.
This is particularly interesting, because the ABFT proof guarantees resilience to a Follow The Leader attack in which the attacker performs the above DDoS attack against different nodes in sequence.
Some consensus algorithms have a ‘leader’, which is one node that is treated differently with respect to contribution to consensus from the other nodes — typically for some period of time. The protocol might have the nodes take turns being leader. Or it might allow one node be the leader until it crashes, then another node is elected to become the new leader. It is possible that some protocols using leaders would be vulnerable to a liveness attack where the leader is DDoSed, and as soon as a new node becomes the leader, the DDoS attack switches to attacking the new leader. That is a Follow The Leader attack. For leader-based protocols in which the leader can be predicted, a Follow The Leader attack could freeze the entire network for as long as the attack continues, while only DDoSing a single computer at a time, and with only a single malicious node acting as a spy.
It is even possible that a protocol vulnerable to such a Follow the Leader attack could have a mathematical proof that it is BFT. But it can’t have a proof that it is ABFT because an ABFT proof would guarantee that it is safe from that attack. This is one important way in which ABFT is stronger than just BFT. A protocol with a BFT proof has guaranteed correctness, but if the proof can be upgraded to ABFT, then the correctness guarantee can be expanded to include some liveness guarantees, as well.
Attack C — Dynamic Partitioning — FALSE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I can partition the network, where some nodes cannot sync with other nodes. Unfortunately, I am forced to constantly change the partitioning, so that any two honest nodes are occasionally in the same partition and sync with each other. I have a malicious node to act as a spy and tell me what is going on. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
Again, this attack will fail if there is an ABFT proof.
At a given moment in time, the partition will divide the nodes — potentially into two equal halves such that neither half has the requisite 2/3 honest nodes — even though there are that many honest nodes as a whole.
But, once the partition changes, then the mix of nodes between the two halves will also change. Two nodes that were previously unable to sync will now be able to do so.
Any two honest nodes will eventually be able to sync so Condition 2 is satisfied.
If the attack were continued forever, then all of the Conditions would be satisfied, and so the ABFT proof guarantees Result 1 — which refutes the claim.
Attack D — Static partitioning — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I can partition the network such that 1/3 of the nodes cannot sync with the other 2/3. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
This is an attack on liveness that will succeed, even if there is an ABFT proof.
If the partition does not change, then there always be some honest nodes that are unable to sync with some other nodes during the partition. If the attack were to continue forever, then Condition 2, that any two honest nodes would eventually be able to sync, would be violated.
Consequently, the ABFT Proof cannot guarantee Result 1 and liveness can be compromised by this attack.
In fact, there is a simple math proof that shows no consensus algorithm can be secure in the case where almost 1/3 of the nodes are malicious and an attacker can partition the network. In such a case, you either have to sacrifice correctness or liveness. You can’t have both. In an ABFT algorithm, correctness will be chosen and liveness sacrificed. The network will be frozen until the partition is healed, at which point it will start reaching consensus on new transactions again.
There are many similar attacks that will also be successful on liveness. Such as:
Attack E — Broad DDoS — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I can DoS 1/3 of the nodes and keep then offline for the duration of the attack. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
This attack on liveness also succeeds, for the same reason as above.
Attack F — Malware — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I know of bugs in Linux, Windows, and MacOS that allow me to shut down that computer, and every node runs on one of those operating systems, so I can shut down all the nodes. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
Again, this succeeds for the same reason as above, even if there is an ABFT proof. And it might be better to say it this way:
This liveness Attack F succeeds because it isn’t an attack on the consensus algorithm, and the ABFT proof was only about the resilience of the consensus algorithm.
Attack G — Corrupted node code — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I know of a bug in the code the nodes run, and control a malicious node that can send a special message to any honest node that triggers the bug and crashes the machine. And I can continue to exploit more such bugs as the software is patched. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
Of course, this also succeeds — AFBT proof notwithstanding — because it has nothing to do with the consensus algorithm.
The best solution in the long run is to mathematically prove that the code is correct, with a computer checking the math proof. This is called formal methods. The first step is to formally define the algorithm itself and have a computer check that it is truly ABFT. This was done for hashgraph in Coq. The next step is to expand it so that the computer checks a proof that the implementation code matches the definition. Or have a computer write the implementation code directly from the formal definition (proof by construction). Either way, that is how formal methods can ensure correct software. This can be extended to proving the compiler is correct, the operating system is correct, and the CPU is correct. Research on formal methods is ongoing at all these layers of the stack. But it is not yet in widespread use.
Attack H — Firewall — TRUE CLAIM
The attacker makes the following claim:
I control the internet and can delete every other bit passing through each router on the internet. I can freeze the network as long as the attack continues.
In this case, each pair of honest nodes still manages to send an infinite number of bits to each other. But if they are using TCP/IP, it can’t handle the loss of 50% of the bits in every packet, and so they can never sync. Again, this attack on liveness succeeds, despite the ABFT proof, because Condition 2 fails.
Liveness could be regained by switching to an internet protocol that uses error correcting codes capable of handling the 50% bit loss. But again, it is best described as an attack on something other than the consensus algorithm itself, so the ABFT proof provides no guarantees on liveness here.
Conclusion
For a consensus algorithm, an ABFT proof makes a number of strong guarantees about correctness, finality, and liveness. Each guarantee is limited in some ways, but still broad in other ways.
An ABFT proof makes some broad guarantees about liveness — it rules out a number of liveness attacks that could succeed against some protocols that are only BFT (not ABFT). But there are limits on how much ABFT can say about liveness: it doesn’t help if 1/3 of the nodes are DDoSed or partitioned off. And it doesn’t help with attacks that prevent all the honest nodes from syncing, or that somehow shut down all those nodes. But for attacks on the consensus algorithm itself, the ABFT proof provides useful guarantees related to liveness. | https://medium.com/hashgraph/abft-for-correctness-and-liveness-hedera-hashgraph-b2d76aa36f0c | ['Paul Madsen'] | 2020-02-08 01:39:10.538000+00:00 | ['Distributed Ledgers', 'Hashgraph', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Byzantine Fault Tolerance'] |
Scorpion | ScorpionSwap will be burrowing its way to BSC this weekend.
Equipped with 3rd generation yield farm features, ScorpionSwap’s native token, SCOR, will be launching on the following date:
LAUNCH: 11 JUNE 2 PM GMT https://countingdownto.com/?c=3652476
FARMING: https://bscscan.com/block/countdown/8220705
START PRICE: $5
SUPPLY: 200
‼️CONTRACT WILL BE RELEASED DURING LAUNCH TO AVOID BOTTING‼️
Below are the features found in ScorpionSwap
Emission Reduction
With the starting emission rate of 20 SCOR per block, inflation will still become an issue later down the road. With Automatic Emission Reduction, the emission rate will reduce by 5% every 8 hours until the emission rate reaches 1 SCOR per block.
This function will happen automatically every 8h, allowing SCOR to retain its value while rewarding its holders with high yields at the same time.
Referral Bonus
To reward users who are actively promoting SCOR, we will be adding a referral program, and users who successfully referred other users can enjoy an additional 5% of SCOR earnings.
Make sure to get your unique referral URL from: https://scorpion-swap.com/referral
Transfer Tax
As yield farm is designed to face inflation, we will need to impose deflationary measures to ensure the longevity of the farms.
By enacting a transfer tax, the project will be able to control inflation while also ensuring that 10% of the supply is burned. With the help of auto burns, the overall percentage of SCOR burned will also increase.
The transfer tax will be 5% and it will consist of the following:
Auto Burns (1%) Auto liquidity adding (4%)
Anti Whale
In order to prevent high volatility of prices, we will be imposing a limit order of 5% of the supply per transaction. This way, it will prevent large orders (buying and selling) from happening in an instance, hampering the price. As the total supply increases, the amount transacted will increase.
Do note that harvesting will still be as normal.
Do make sure that upon selling, can only sell at most 5% of the supply.
Harvest Lock Up
As seen from other projects, harvest lockup may not be as beneficial as it seems. Once the lockup is over, there will be a huge dumping pressure as users harvest their rewards.
To prevent this from happening, we have decided there will be no harvest lockup for SCOR and users can harvest as and when they like.
Links
Join us now using the following links:
Telegram: https://t.me/scorpionswap
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ScorpionSwap
Gitbook: https://scorpionswap.gitbook.io/scorpion-swap/
Medium: scorpionswap.medium.com
Website: https://scorpion-swap.com/ | https://medium.com/@scorpionswap/scorpion-de1d487b0345 | ['Scorpion Swap'] | 2021-06-09 18:56:37.713000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Defi'] |
AI-powered smart contracts: A revolutionary, impartial mediator | Smart contracts have been around for a few years now, but their popularity has only exploded with Ethereum’s rise to prominence. The benefits of smart contracts are immense, and the technology may be one of the most revolutionary developments in crypto.
What is a smart contract?
A smart contract Is essentially a code on the blockchain that allows two parties to enter into agreements without involving third parties or intermediaries like lawyers and bankers.
A Smart Contract is like a traditional contract. Still, instead of being written in legal jargon or computer code, it’s encoded as lines of programming logic that execute automatically when certain conditions are met.
The term “smart” derives from an analogy that suggests contracting parties should control their agreements just as they do in real life.
In general, Smart contracts are a digital self-executing contract that runs on blockchain technology. They can provide many advantages for all parties involved: from lawyers up to investors looking to invest in real estate projects without any concerns about possible fraud.
How do smart contracts work?
When purchasing with Bitcoin, the Smart Contract will write up code stating “Sale this specific item for 2 BTC,” Then, send it over the blockchain automatically sending you the goods.
The terms and the execution can be agreed upon at the moment of sign-up — with no need for third-party involvement if correct security measures are applied.
If either party breaches the agreement, they would not get their Bitcoin back but instead have to pay a penalty fee in ETH.
What are the uses and benefits of Smart Contracts?
The most common use for Smart Contracts is in the financial industry; sadly, an area that has traditionally been resistant to change and innovation. Most industry professionals will only work with large corporations that are already established in the field.
This is the entire premise behind Smart Contracts: Smart contracts remove third parties and fees that traditional agreements require.
This means there’s no need for costly intermediaries who add unnecessary steps between two business entities, taking up time and increasing fees paid by those involved in the transaction process; a huge benefit for industries like financial services, which need to settle disputes through law because it removes much of the legwork involved with those processes.
A perfect analogy of this would be mortgage contracts that are executed by code instead of paper documents. Thus reducing both time spent on transactions and unnecessary delays in loan approval; Saving time and money, and eliminating the possibility of fraud.
Another example is Smart Contracts being used to verify ownership (via intellectual property registration) which saves time in pursuing lawsuits or other complex legal processes.
What does the future of smart contracts hold?
This new model has enormous potential with endless benefits, though there are still issues such as regulation that need to be addressed before entering mainstream financial markets.
However, if regulators successfully address those issues before it enters global markets, then Smart Contract’s benefits may soon impact traditional banking models across the globe. | https://medium.com/@drone-333/ai-powered-smart-contracts-a-revolutionary-impartial-mediator-e96f494fddf2 | ['Roi Ben Ami'] | 2021-05-16 12:59:57.946000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Smart Contracts', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain'] |
8 tips to win elections in Nigeria | The 2019 election is just around the corner and a lot of money is being spent to canvas for support and ultimately votes. As a prospective voter, do you think you can be swayed by what you see online? To answer, I turn to the 2015 election.
The 2015 election was a huge leap for digital marketing in Nigerian politics. All candidates needed to connect with voters through various channels. We saw a switch from tv and radio ads to web and social media campaigns as the major communication channels. Goodluck vs Buhari was the ultimate showdown that kept us on the edge of our seats. The handlers of Buhari’s campaign used tantalizing visuals, relatable content and had tons of influencers on their side. Goodluck’s team was mostly on the defensive and barely articulated his achievements in office. In the end, an epic digital marketing campaign unseated an incumbent president for the first time in Nigeria’s history.
How can you run a digital marketing campaign to win elections in Nigeria?
1. BE ONLINE
This is obvious. You can’t be a serious candidate and not be online. Prospective voters are online, constituents are online. You must engage them. Every aspiring candidate must have a strong online presence in today’s political sphere.
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2. HAVE A DIGITAL MARKETING TEAM
To effectively carry out digital marketing for your campaign, you need an efficient digital marketing team made up of marketing strategists, content writers, designers, photographers, SEO specialists, web developers, social media managers, data analysts & influencers. By the way, touts, hired guns, and tugs (who snatch ballot boxes and unleash mayhem) are not needed in your team.
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3. GET A WEBSITE
Once you announce your candidacy, people will google you up. They want to know your plans for them and you don’t want a third party website to shape your agenda, you want to take the lead with a user friendly website were your supporters can get to know more about your story, your ideology and of course, your manifesto. Best part is, it’s more economical than billboards and wall posters. All your campaign materials (videos, pictures, schedule, and manifesto) need to be on your website. You can have a blog for your website where you share fresh perspectives from time to time and a fund-raising section.
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4. BRAND YOURSELF
Perception is reality. Nobody wants to vote for a loser or a candidate that looks or feels unprepared. Your name, initials, logo, colors, tag phrase, party banner and every single design must resonate and portray you and what you are about. Be consistent when it comes to the messages that you are sending. Build a positive image for your campaign. Carry the same message across all platforms, posters, handbills, hand bands, every promotional material. Claim your domain name and verify your social media handles accounts with speed. You don’t want a parody to be more popular than you, or do you?
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5. START A CONVERSATION
There are over 8.7 million Nigerians on Facebook alone. Social media provides a deeper connection with your campaign team and audience. Facebook, twitter and Instagram are the largest platforms used by Nigerians. You need to leverage this to engage your supporters, sharing exciting messages of hope and inspiration while keeping them up to date with your campaign. Alongside having a personal account, social media pages/fan pages should be opened. Other social media platforms you can use include, Youtube, Linkedin & of course, Whatsapp. Do not be afraid to jump on hot trends. Of course, you want to go viral, but for the right reasons. Bottom-line? Get them talking.
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6. ADVERTISE
You can’t rely on organic reach to win an election. Boost your most engaging posts and target prospective voters by factors such as demographics & interests. Deploy pay per Click advertising on Google, Bing, YouTube videos, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram. Use the analytics data from the beginning of the campaign to target voters.
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7. CONNECT WITH BLOGGERS AND DIGITAL INFLUENCERS
Like fuel to fire, you need them to spread the gospel of your campaign. You need influencers with an oversize following and a crazy fan base to be on your side. You need them shouting your name from the roof tops and flaunting your credentials at every turn. Japeth Omojuwa is one of the reasons Buhari is in office today. He and his goons set twitter on fire for the Buhari/Osinbajo ticket. You also need a team of volunteers ready to support your campaign.
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8. MONITOR YOUR CAMPAIGN AND EVALUATE
Peter Drucker once said “what cannot be measured cannot be managed”. Ask your team to keep you updated with weekly campaign reports and constantly analyse them to optimize your campaigns and overall strategy. Constant analysis is a must in political campaigns which are usually much more volatile than commercial ones. You must be ready to respond to any scandal or allegation and you must be proactive in furthering your agenda and making a claim to the crown.
CONCLUSION
To win elections in Nigeria using digital marketing, you need to be online, have a digital marketing team, get a website, brand yourself, start a conversation, advertise, connect with influencers and monitor your campaign.
Don’t forget that the key goal is to convert a passive supporter or follower into an active fan and ultimately a passionate voter. Ensure, you can back up all your social media stunts with competent leadership. And when you win, don’t ignore your digital marketing team as your team will be important for a successful tenure.
Just before I pop the champagne, what is that 1 tip you’d like to add to this list? Drop a comment. | https://medium.com/epower-blog/8-tips-to-win-elections-in-nigeria-8390f6c8fac3 | [] | 2018-03-26 15:02:18.498000+00:00 | ['Nigeria', 'Epower', 'Digital Marketing', 'Election'] |
A Soul’s Geometry | Ellen Wade Beale’s poem about her mother reminded me of my poem, from the unpublished book, MARKING TIME. Ellen uses the discovery of a distant nebula as a way of approaching the subject. I used geometry. Perhaps we both needed devices to distance ourselves from an intimate relationship that required careful handling, as if using forceps to insert tiny jewels — or extract splinters. See Ellen’s poem at https://medium.com/@weighedwords/poem-for-my-mother-3d12d1d1c1d
A Soul’s Geometry
A lifetime short of breath,
missing what was said,
and leaning to one side
forced a tilted gaze
of blue-eyed scrutiny,
sharp and more scalene
than equilateral.
Mother’s deafness, lung lost
to thoracoplasty,
and slow twist to the left
for sixty years as ribcage
turned had squinched her outlook.
Appealing appearances,
narrowly subtended,
watching Powell and Keeler
sing and dance — later
replaying all the parts
with Betty on the porch
and in Wherry housing reading
Better Homes and Gardens —
made surfaces fundamental.
Distrusting explanations,
she read faces: the angle
of the eye, the tic,
tug of a forced smile,
glance away, the frown.
You did not look down
or talk to the bad ear,
or squint, or roll your eyes,
or hint you didn’t care
about appearances,
what others said or thought,
or making an impression.
She only knew plain speech,
on every issue landing
normal to the lines
of pious utterance,
abstractions, and excuses
wonderfully contrived.
The right angle always
was the average —
what most people thought.
She knew this without pollsters’
distributions, surveys,
comments, or predictions.
Once read, you were plotted —
the shape of your life-path,
the weights that swing your views,
surfaces, and make-up, style,
winning smile and manner,
all the social greases,
the walls in pastel hues,
the evening news,
napkins folded to the right —
no reason not to be a Star —
unless I wouldn’t
climb onto a stage.
The silver-surfaced Stars
on eternal loops —
any would want to be
after being passed
between her father’s sisters,
poisoned by her cousins
in beautiful Miami,
and saved from orphanage
by Monte, her mother’s sister.
Stars any’d want to be
after her banker father
found work at the combine
counting bales of cotton —
disgraced — and her mother,
tubercular, traveled the circuit
of sanitoriums and spas
in sounthwestern high spots,
ever cheerful dying.
A lifetime short of breath,
ever reminded of death,
she searched through our faces for Stars —
a Stewart, Parton, Sinatra —
and, never accepting denials,
saw fame at the end of her trials. | https://medium.com/@r-and-k-rose/a-souls-geometry-94ce24850bde | ['Richard Rose'] | 2020-05-20 15:38:14.919000+00:00 | ['Poem Analysis', 'Mothers', 'Ellen Wade Beale', 'Poems On Medium', 'Poetry'] |
Christmas Tangles | Every December I create some Christmas-related Zentangle designs. Here’s what I came up with this month.
This was a string that was suggested in Tangle All Around, the Zentangle group I’m part of on Facebook. I executed it with the patterns florz, IX, therefore, tipple, hurry, cubine, echoism, Hollibaugh, ixorus, ynix, doo dah, fescu, moonpie, mooka, springkle, drupe, dyon, tagh, dribbetz, onamato, three & three, sez, Kathy’s dilemma, and knase:
Because the string above is circular, I decided my theme for December 2020 would be Christmas balls.
Fellow blogger Alice Hendon, who administers Tangle All Around, came out with a new book last month, Life in Tangles, which is a collection of designs created by Tangle All Around FB group. Of course I bought it, and I thought this design, reel, by Sandra Strait, would make a good Christmas ball:
Here’s a ball based on the pattern drupe:
The next one uses the patterns puffle, huggins, bucky, and flux:
And this ball is my favorite, using arukas, sweda, snail, coil, and printemps:
If you’d like to see my Christmas tangles from previous years, click on the links for 2019, 2018, and 2017. | https://medium.com/@andrea-r-huelsenbeck/christmas-tangles-f71d4e1afd70 | [] | 2020-12-28 06:25:58.524000+00:00 | ['Zentangle', 'Drawing', 'Christmas', 'Christmas Balls', 'Art'] |
Shipping Cost: Interaction of Number of Shipments and Locations | by Ehsan Khodabandeh
A transportation specialist needs to determine the best plan for shipping the customers’ orders on a daily basis. One important aspect of the decision is knowing the cost of each shipment, based on the their weight, origin-destination, transportation mode (TL, LTL, rail), etc.
Now let’s assume you, the transportation specialist, have 100 orders to ship to your customers and each order is destined for a different location. Also, suppose you follow a direct shipment policy. In other words, you don’t want the trucks to stop at multiple drop-off locations. So, there is one way to ship each of the orders. For simplicity, we consider just one transportation mode here, truckload (TL). Having 100 orders and one way to ship each, we need the rates for a maximum of 1×100 = 100 shipments.
Now assume you have 100 orders but there are 50 different locations. For the sake of this example, we assume that each location has 2 shipments. How many different ways are there to ship these orders?
You still want to follow your direct shipment policy, but since each location has two orders, you can either ship those orders separately or you can do a simple consolidation by putting them together in the same truck (assuming the truck capacity constraint is not violated). This time you have three options for each location: two direct shipments and one consolidated shipment to each location. Having 50 locations, 150 rates are needed.
I think by now you have guessed where we are heading. Now assume we have 10 different locations and each location places 5 orders. How many combinations do we need to consider this time, if we want to cover every possible rating option? We can ship each order separately, ship any two of them together, any three of them together, any four of them together, or all in the same truck (again, assuming that the truck capacity constraint is not violated). It turns out that there are 31 rating options for shipping each locations’ orders. With 10 locations, the number of rates increases to 310 (hint: you can calculate the number of options using 2^N-1 where N is the number of shipments per customer. So for this case where each customer has 5 shipments, we had 2⁵–1 = 31 options).
If you are thinking that not all the 310 rates are necessary, you are probably right (for example, the truckload rate for shipping an order from A to B for loads of 10000 lb, 7000 lb, or the combined load of 17000 lb can be the same. In this case, we just need to know one rate rather than three). But there are situations in which you would need to have all the rates. This example just considered the possibility of direct shipments with order consolidation. No multi-stop options were considered. If, however, we do consider the possibility of shipping to one location and then visiting another for a second delivery, we would need many more than 310 rates . In this case, you need to explore all the possibilities of consolidation at one location combined with those of another location to figure out the best shipping strategy. In the example with 10 locations, just considering 2-stop options can add up to 2790 possibilities (hint: 10×9 = 90 two-stop possibilities with 31 consolidation options for each location gives 90×31 = 2790)!
But you may ask “why these bigger numbers should concern me? Aren’t they all automated or done very quickly?” You are right about the automated part but not so right when it comes to the speed. In these types of combinatorial problems, where we need to consider all the possible options, the relation between the size of the problem and the computation speed is not linear. So, If we go from 100 orders to 1000 orders, the number of possible options and also the computation speed, are not increasing linearly. Consider the above-mentioned example again. For 5 loads in a location, we saw that there are 31 consolidation options; for 10, this number will be 1023; for 50 loads, which is just 5 times more, we need more than 10¹⁵ options! If we assume our computers can handle 1,000,000 options in 1 second, we need more than 30 years to go through all the options for just 50 loads!
By knowing the reason behind these exponentially-growing computations, you can understand better why just more powerful computers are not enough and the use of optimization algorithms that can reduce the options logically and speed up the process, is inevitable.
Sometimes seemingly obvious questions can lead to complicated answers. As we saw here, understanding the shipping options for 100 orders going to 100 different locations will require knowing 100 different rates, but 50 orders goring to 10 different locations requires 310 different rates. So, in this example, the number of different rates does not just depend on the number of locations; it also depends on the number of orders going to each location. As the number of possible shipping options grows, there is a need for algorithms that will prune the possibilities such that the resulting solutions will be business-optimal. This is where optimization techniques come to rescue.
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If you liked this blog post, check out more of our work, follow us on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook), or join us for our free monthly Academy webinars. | https://medium.com/opex-analytics/shipping-cost-interaction-of-number-of-shipments-and-locations-4875ca9d3787 | ['Opex Analytics'] | 2018-11-08 22:17:31.543000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Transportation', 'Trucking', 'Optimization', 'Logistics'] |
Tokemak: The DeGenesis | Potential Outcomes
The end state conversion rate (price) of TOKE and potential eligibility for private farming is determined by total commitments by all participants at the end of the DeGenesis.
There are three potential outcomes of the DeGenesis, outlined below.
Outcome One:
If total commitments by the end of the DeGenesis are less than or equal to $6M USD:
100% of commitment swapped for TOKE
Conversion rate is $2 per TOKE
Outcome Two:
If total commitments by the end of the DeGenesis is between $6M USD and $24M USD:
100% of commitment swapped for TOKE
Conversion rate is between $2 and $8 per TOKE, according to the equation below:
Outcome Three:
If total commitments by the end of the DeGenesis is between $24M USD and $48M USD:
% of commitment swapped for TOKE for all participants:
% of commitment whitelisted for private TOKE farming for all participants:
Conversion rate is $8 per TOKE
Outcome One Example:
An individual commits $10,000 and the total USD value of commitments at the end of the commitment period is $5M. Then: Individual commitment % swapped for TOKE: 100% Swap TOKE conversion rate: $2 per TOKE
Outcome Two Example:
An individual commits $10,000 and total USD value of commitments at the end of the commitment period is $15M. Then: Individual commitment % swapped for TOKE: 100% Swap TOKE conversion rate: $5 per TOKE according to the equation below
Outcome Three Example:
An individual commits $10,000 and total USD value of commitments at the end of the commitment period is $32M. Then: Individual commitment % swapped for TOKE: 75% Swap ($7,500)
Individual commitment % eligible for private farming: 25% Farm ($2,500)
TOKE conversion rate: $8 per TOKE
The max split possible at the full commitment cap of $48M is a 50/50 split of TOKE swap and private farming eligibility in the Genesis Pools.
It’s important to note that the private TOKE farming period of the Genesis Pools will offer an attractive returns, giving participants a chance to acquire more TOKE before anyone else and effectively lower their cost basis. Participants can decide to migrate their unswapped assets into the private farms, or else withdraw those assets, once the Last Look period has concluded.
The Last Look Period
The Last Look gives participants 24 hours to see the final state of the commitment period, including the TOKE conversion rate and the swap/private farm split (if applicable). The ETH will be marked to market through a Chainlink oracle call at this time.
The Last Look gives participants the opportunity to withdraw funds without making any swap for TOKE if they wish to opt out. Participants can withdraw up to their full commitment. If a participant removes only a portion of their assets, this will not change the price or ratio of any applicable swap/farm split.
If participants are happy with the final state of their commitment, no action is necessary during the Last Look, and the commitment will be automatically confirmed.
How to Participate
The live DeGenesis site will be shared in the Discord and on Twitter on Tuesday, July 27th.
Upon accessing the DeGenesis website and agreeing to the Terms of Participation, you’ll be prompted to connect your browser wallet (Metamask and others).
If you haven’t whitelisted your ETH address, you’ll receive an error message, so please don’t forget to head to the #degenesis-whitelist channel before July 27th in our Discord here.
Once your wallet is connected, you’ll clearly see fields to commit either ETH or USDC on the left side of the website.
Committing assets will trigger a wallet transaction for approval and commitment. Once your funds are committed, you’ll see the following successful transaction message:
We encourage everyone to check back during the Last Look period to make sure they’re happy with the final state of the event.
When the event has concluded, users will be redirected from the DeGenesis website to the main Tokemak website (www.tokemak.xyz): | https://medium.com/tokemak/tokemak-the-degenesis-939495d9e2ff | [] | 2021-07-27 18:01:39.983000+00:00 | ['Decentralized', 'Tokemak', 'Dao', 'Degenesis', 'Defi'] |
I Watched ‘Cuties.’ This is the Conversation We Need to Have. | I Watched ‘Cuties.’ This is the Conversation We Need to Have.
It’s Time to Take a Closer Look at Modern Girlhood
I remember the first time I danced with boys. A middle school social event. I think I was 12. Nearly frozen with a self-conscious fear of “doing it wrong,” I managed to sway my hips in time to the music for the momentous 15 seconds he was behind me. A year later, I was confidently winding along to Sean Paul like I’d been doing it my whole life.
I remember hiding — so much hiding — throughout my childhood. Hiding in my room to practice dancing in front of the mirror. Hiding under the covers to explore my own body like it was something to be ashamed of. Hiding in the bathroom to read the instructions on the tampon box regarding correct insertion. Hiding my legs when they began to grow hair. Hiding my interest when I started to feel attraction to boys. Hiding anger, disappointment, intensity, desire.
It would appear that hiding is a quintessential motif of girlhood. Or at least my girlhood.
I don’t remember anyone ever explicitly telling me that I should be ashamed of these things. Ashamed of my body, with its blood and its hair and its desires. Ashamed of my heart — its rage and tears and needs. And yet, if I had to name the emotion behind all that hiding, I would certainly have to call it shame.
I grew up on a steady diet of girls’ magazines, The Disney Channel, AOL chat rooms, and conventional advertising. All of it seemingly innocuous when taken in parts, and yet, those messages of shame were omnipresent just beneath the surface. I fed on them. Messages like,
A makeover is the road to empowerment.
Being naked in front of the class is the worst possible nightmare.
Menstruation is a curse.
Pimples are a catastrophe.
Girls should play nice.
Anger is bad, and so is crying in public.
Thank god I grew up before the era of social media. Most of these subliminal lessons I have purged by now; nonetheless, I think they are still coded somewhere in my cells.
Without naming it as such, I was at war with inculcated shame for a long time. I believe I won. Today, I run my hands over my body, and I do not feel shame. I embrace my blood, my sweat, my desire, my hair, my pleasure, my emotions, and my needs.
And yet, movies like “Cuties” by director Maïmouna Doucouré take me back to those confusing messages of pre-adolescence: The pressure, and the curiosity, to express sexuality coupled with so much shame — and innocence. The agonizing fear of “doing it wrong,” which follows us into early adulthood, if not further.
Girls receive impossibly entangled messages about who they can and cannot be. I worry that girls’ empowerment often leaves the takeaway, “You can be anything you want… except what you are.”
Be louder. Shut up. Be more adult. Be more innocent. Be sweet. Be fearless. Be everything — no! Not like that.
I saw myself reflected in the 11-year-old cast of “Cuties.” I identified with their innocent desire to be grown women. I spent much of my childhood playing at being an adult, too. But as we see in “Cuties,” those games can become dangerous.
So, what can we do about it?
Controlling exposure to popular culture and other influences on the internet seems a near-impossible solution, and not a very good one anyway. I think sex-positive and body-positive health and wellness education from an early age is probably a good place to start. Empowerment Self Defense that teaches girls to set boundaries and trust their intuition is also a highly promising solution to add to the pot.
Any practice or methodology that combats the dominant narrative bombarding girls and women — anything that inspires self-love, confidence, and agency — seems like a reasonable starting point, too.
I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s. These issues are not new, although social media and increasingly sexualized popular culture certainly don’t help. Maybe the best thing we can do, as women, is embody the kind of self-acceptance and respect we wish for the next generation.
“Cuties” is a powerful warning of what we stand to lose if we do nothing at all. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/i-watched-cuties-this-is-the-conversation-we-need-to-have-c3f8da41bea | [] | 2020-12-14 16:46:51.818000+00:00 | ['Empowerment', 'Culture', 'Social Media', 'Film', 'Women'] |
6 Simple Tips for Managing a Tech Stack | A tech stack is the collection of digital tools a company uses for their daily tasks and long-term targets. It includes proprietary software, third-party platforms, apps, cloud services, databases, and other tools.
As more and more businesses move forward with their digital transformation initiatives, tech stacks are used for a wide range of purposes — from sales to digital marketing, analytics, and human resources. For instance, a marketing tech stack for a campaign may use Mailchimp for email marketing campaigns, Buffer for social media management, Salesforce for CRM, Google Analytics for stats and tracking, and WordPress for hosting a blog.
And that is for just one marketing channel. Building and managing multiple platforms can be overwhelming.
Prioritize a Strategy
Every part of your business should support your core goals and mission. Explore how technology can enable these goals and add tools accordingly. If a piece of tech is flashy and modern but ultimately doesn’t help you achieve your organizational goals, then it’s probably unnecessary.
2. Research Extensively
Weigh the options at your disposal before committing to your tech. A common mistake is to settle for the most popular or cheapest tools. Instead, get the tools that offer maximum value to your company and assist you with streamlining operations. This is especially important when you consider the time it takes to migrate to or adopt a new platform across an organization. Switching vendors and platforms is a distraction and a learning process for everyone. Save time upfront and choose a platform for what it can do for you and avoid glossing over deficiencies because of a better price. You’ll pay for it in the long run.
Request platform demos and ask extensive questions so you truly get a sense of the capabilities.
3. Focus On Users
Since your team is going to be working with the tech stack daily, it is important to review their needs while picking the tools they will be using. Assess how tech-savvy your team members are, so you can work out the level of training needed for any tool.
Those who don’t have an in-house IT team can arrange for user-friendly tools and third-party services that make it easy to implement new platforms and offer strong customer support services.
4. Check Out Your Competitor’s Portfolio
You can get a jump start on building a stack by looking at how others do it. This doesn’t necessarily mean they do it right, but it gives you an idea of how it could be done. Bear in mind that your company is considerably different from your competitor’s and your goals differ. This is why you don’t have to replicate their stacks if it doesn’t fit your business needs.
5. Seek Adaptability
Your tech stack should motivate you to scale. Before committing to a set of tools, evaluate your existing company trajectory and goals, and compare them with the restrictions of the digital tools.
Prior to confirming if your tech stack is adequate for business growth, find out if it gets timely updates. When a tool is consistently releasing updates to address the evolving customer expectations, it can be a reliable weapon in your arsenal.
6. Look Into Integration
One of the most valuable considerations when managing your tech stack is to work on the integration. Regardless of how much promise a platform holds, it must properly communicate with other programs and platforms in your stack. For instance, think about a new website management tool that claims to double the number of incoming leads. If it does not offer integrated support for your CRM, every team member is forced to transfer leads from one system to another and sacrifice productivity. In addition, manual data entry becomes tricky and marketing databases need a lot of maintenance. These six simple management tips for handling a tech stack will help you optimize your workflow and improve your productivity the right way. | https://medium.com/@arcamax-publishing/6-simple-tips-for-managing-a-tech-stack-797a1b7706f3 | ['Arcamax Publishing Inc.'] | 2020-12-02 16:36:07.965000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Marketing Technology', 'Email Marketing', 'Online Marketing', 'Email Marketing Tips'] |
The Bialystoker Synagogue | The Jewish experience of Diaspora necessitated the creation of homes beyond the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael), locales often linked in multiplicity via communal migrations like those of the Bialystokers. The decimation of Jewish Białystok and the Synagogue’s communal shift represent the great fragility of community formed, then altered or even lost, and perhaps found again elsewhere in the future. The conditions of temporal life often prove tumultuous and this has been especially true for the Jewish people, but what those conditions can never erode or destroy are the great spiritual legacies that remain everlasting. | https://medium.com/the-photographic-muslim/the-bialystoker-synagogue-83028006c561 | ['Haytham Ad-Din', 'The Photographic Muslim'] | 2020-04-25 08:46:12.570000+00:00 | ['Judaism', 'History', 'Religion', 'Photography', 'Poland'] |
Philosophers Meet Animals: the Ant (Colony) | Philosophers Meet Animals: the Ant (Colony)
While philosophy seems to be a very human endeavor, other organisms can be useful colleagues for (human) philosophers
(Pixabay, shammiknr)
Who/what?
Ants are great philosopher pets (meant metaphorically, couldn’t resist the alliteration…). In fact, all eusocial species are (such as several species of wasps, bees, and termites, as well as some crustaceans and naked mole rats).
Back to ants. These six-legged insects (oxymoron there) are well-known for their colonies and their eusocial organization. This means that they care for each others’ young, live together in a group of overlapping adult generations, and, perhaps most of interest as philosopher pet, they show reproductive division of labor. That is, some of them get to reproduce, while others do not. Often, this leads to a system of distinct castes: queens, soldier, workers…
The size of colonies ranges from a few dozen to several millions. They can be found almost anywhere on earth and according to some (very rough and contested) estimates they might even comprise around 15–20% of terrestrial biomass.
Beyond sheer numbers and ubiquity, many ant species have other impressive talents, though. Some species herd and ‘milk’ aphids or other small insects, other ant species tend and harvest fungus gardens. It’s almost as if they pretend to be human. (But they’ve been around a lot longer then we have, so maybe we’re just stuck-up apes pretending to be ants…)
Why?
Interesting as all that may be, why does it make ants (and ant colonies) good philosophical colleagues?
Well, first, having an insect republic at your disposal might be of interest to political philosophers. In fact, Aristotle already called ants ‘political animals’, who shared with humans the relevance of ‘the work of all’.
However, the study of social organization is also being pursued in the philosophy of biology. On the face of it, eusocial animals seem to have an odd arrangement: why give up your right to reproduce? (Now we know there are genetic peculiarities that make workers sufficiently related to their sisters to provide a counterweight to the evolutionary edict of ‘go forth and procreate’.) Many other topics in evolutionary biology and philosophy can benefit from an ant’s perspective. Think about altruism, cheating, multilevel selection, fitness alignment across different hierarchical levels (e.g. organism vs colony)…
Speaking of multi-level madness, ants also provide a potential example of how selfish elements at one level could support social behavior on another. Fire ants, for example, contain a social ‘supergene’ (several genes locked together in one inheritable package) that is linked to many social behaviors, but the gene itself behaves (metaphorically) selfish.
A second area — somewhat related — for which ants can provide a framework to explore questions in philosophy involves the idea of individuality. Ant colonies are often referred to as superorganisms, suggesting that they somehow become something of an individual themselves. So ants in ant colonies could be seen as individuals nested in another individual. Or can they? Not crazy enough? Okay, how about the proposal that ant colonies might be (partially) conscious?
Finally, ant colonies are architectural marvels with specifically designed rooms for different purposes, good ventilation, and carefully controlled internal microclimates. But there’s no architect. A few simple rules appear to allow ants to build complex structures. Beyond their homestead, ants leave chemical road-signs and adapt quickly to changing resource availability. All without central intelligence. The chemical road-signs evaporate, so the paths with the strongest pheromone packages along the trail will attract most ‘follower’ ants. Among these paths, the shortest ones will have the strongest signals due to the shortest traveling time — and thus less time for the road-signs to evaporate before being refreshed. Feedback loops ensue, leading the ants to converge onto the shortest, most efficient path. Ant colony optimization algorithms are based on this principle and are often used in computational problems that revolve around finding promising ‘paths’ through graph representations.
How does this apparent complexity and intelligence emerge from simple rule-based agents? What is intelligence really?
Find an ant colony and figure it out.
Recommended reading:
E. O. Wilson & Bert Hölldobler (1990) The Ants. Belknap Press.
Tom Wenseleers et al. (2004). Worker reproduction and policing in insect societies: an ESS analysis. Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 17(5):1035–1047.
Christian Blum (2005). Ant colony optimization: Introduction and recent trends. Physics of Life Reviews. 2(4):353–373.
Frédéric Bouchard and Philippe Huneman (2013). From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality. MIT Press.
Deborah M. Gordon. (2019). The Ecology of Collective Behavior in Ants. Annual Reviews of Entomology. 64:35–50. | https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/philosophers-meet-animals-the-ant-colony-cce96ce4055 | ['Gunnar De Winter'] | 2020-07-21 17:42:27.225000+00:00 | ['Animals', 'Philosophy', 'Evolution', 'Science', 'Biology'] |
Python Speed Comparison: Square Root of the Sum of Squares? | On many occasions, an equation like this needs to be solved in your python code. There are many ways to go about it, and naturally some will be better than others, and of course it depends on the data you are working with.
Let’s assume the typical case, where we have a 1D list of length n , and we need to sum the squares of each element in the list, then square root:
In the code above, we defined a function rss() that takes a single list as it’s argument and outputs the square root of the sum of squares. Using a python decorator, @timer , we can time the execution of this function. I performed 1000 tests on lists containing 10,000 random floats in the range 0 -> 1 . We can see from the output at the bottom that on my pc the average time was just over 4 milliseconds. Not great, but at least the function itself uses only default python data types, and the sqrt function is from the built-in math library.
Alternatively, you can do a very similar calculation using numpy functions:
Based on this test, using a chain of numpy functions to do the work gives you a >5x speed increase.
There is another function buried inside numpy.linalg that can provide yet more speed boosts; np.linalg.norm (https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.linalg.norm.html)
This is almost 1.4x faster than the previous method, and 7.4x faster than the original method! | https://medium.com/@plankjames/python-speed-comparison-square-root-of-the-sum-of-squares-c187d78cd598 | ['James Plank'] | 2020-10-13 10:06:26.467000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Numpy', 'Linear Algebra'] |
Data Protection Regulation or GDPR | General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is introduced by the European Union (EU) to safeguard the privacy data of European citizens. The EU GDPR is a data security regulation that was adopted on 14 April 2016, and became enforceable beginning 25 May 2018. GDPR compliance applies to organizations established in EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). It also addresses the transfer of personal data (formally called data subjects in the GDPR) outside the EU and EEA areas. It aims primarily to give control to individuals over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU. This includes any organizations that monitor the behavior of data subjects or that offer goods or services to individuals within the EU and applies to any enterprise, regardless of its location.
Today many of the government organizations, private organizations, non-profit organizations etc. have access to our personal information and may be misused. With the GDPR coming in, there will be transparency and strengthening of the fundamental rights of individuals.
Data protected under GDPR
GDPR compliance address standards for all personal data, which is defined as any data that can be used to directly or indirectly identify a living person. It may include name, date of birth, address, financial information, social security number, full facial photo, or insurance information. Under GDPR compliance standards, “sensitive personal data” includes racial or ethnic origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, political affiliations, union memberships, bio-metric or genetic data, sexual practice or orientation, and any data concerning health.
For companies dealing with such ‘personal data’, it becomes crucial to implement the data protection requirements specified in GDPR within their systems. It requires a significant update of their privacy policies and contractual arrangements with EU counterparts and their internal data protection protocols and systems to make them GDPR compliant.
As part of these efforts, answers to the following questions need to be sought:
What is our data footprint in the EU?
What is the road-map for GDPR compliance?
Do we have visibility of and control over what personal data we collect?
How do we use it and who do we share it with?
Have we adopted a cross-border data transfer strategy?
Are we prepared to provide evidence of GDPR compliance to the privacy regulators?
Do we have a breach-response plan that meets GDPR’s 72-hour notification requirement?
Do we have a privacy-by-design program, documentation and escalation paths?
Become GDPR compliant
Data Protection Officer: GDPR requires most applicable organizations to assign a Data Protection Officer (DPO). Typically, the DPO will need to have a comprehensive understanding of security like monitoring compliance and training staff, providing counsel on data protection impact assessments. It’s important to review the relevant tasks before assigning or hiring for the role.
Data assessment: GDPR makes it essential to obtain a detailed assessment of the sensitive data and the associated workflows. The GDPR’s broad category may include names, ID numbers, location, online identifiers, and physical, genetic, economic, cultural, or social identities.
Psuedonymization: According to the GDPR, pseudonymization is a required process for stored data that transforms personal data in such a way that the resulting data cannot be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information. An example is encryption, which renders the original data unintelligible and the process cannot be reversed without access to the correct decryption key. The GDPR requires for the additional information (such as the decryption key) to be kept separately from the pseudonymous data.
Security of personal data: GDPR Article 33 states the data controller is under a legal obligation to notify the supervisory authority without undue delay unless the breach is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of the individuals. There is a maximum of 72 hours after becoming aware of the data breach to make the report. Individuals have to be notified if a high risk of an adverse impact is determined
Privacy settings: GDPR Article 25 requires data protection to be designed into the development of business processes for products and services. Privacy settings must therefore be set at a high level by default, and technical and procedural measures should be taken by the controller to make sure that the processing, throughout the whole processing lifecycle, complies with the regulation. Controllers should also implement mechanisms to ensure that personal data is not processed unless necessary for each specific purpose.
Exceptions in GDPR
The following cases may or may not be covered by the regulation: | https://medium.com/daas-labs/data-protection-regulation-or-gdpr-fa606fc7e181 | ['Sheetal Dayal'] | 2020-06-26 11:04:03.179000+00:00 | ['Data Privacy', 'Data Protection Law', 'Gdpr', 'Data Protection'] |
Your Aquarian Age Playbook for 2021 | By now, you’ve probably heard of the Christmas star or the Great Conjunction that occurred on Monday, December 21, 2020. The solar system’s two biggest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, met up in the sky in the constellation of Aquarius just after sundown.
The next time these two planets will meet again is in 20 years, albeit in a different part of the sky and the zodiac. For now, they are kicking us off in their own way into the Age of Aquarius, the next 2,000 year cycle of humanity. Exciting stuff!
Here’s the scoop on Aquarius energy. Expect to be faced with situations in 2021 (and beyond) that call you toward Aquarian vibrations. Your awareness of this energy will make it easier for you to get the most out of it to create the life, work, and play you desire.
In 2021, be on the lookout for Aquarian invitations to…
Become an observer. While passion has its place, Aquarian energy invites us to stay centered in our “middle space” as Akashic record reader Ashley Wood calls it. By being able to observe life’s events as well as our internal life of emotions, we can respond to them wisely and calmly without getting pulled in. That is true freedom, and it is what the Aquarian Age is calling us to. But heads up: Sometimes hardship is the thing that gets us to dig deep and become centered. If you face challenges in 2021, trust that they serve a greater purpose and use them as an opportunity to become mindful, observant, and non-attached.
Claim ownership for your ability to create your own life. We humans are far more powerful than many of us even know…and I don’t mean that we have an ability to dominate others. I am talking about reclaiming your birthright to govern yourself! The Aquarian Age is calling you to remember that you chose to be born and you came here with what author and astrologer Linda Brady calls a “soul mission” for this lifetime. By using your rational mind, you can begin to notice the beliefs that hold you back, reprogram them, and start to attract and create the life you intended. Neural manifestation creator Lacy Phillips has a great program to help you do just that.
Appreciate the value of being different and thinking different. While social conformity has helped the human species survive, innovation has helped our species evolve. The Aquarian Age is calling us to get comfortable being different from each other and thinking differently from each other so we can tap into a rich portfolio of ideas to innovate and up-level for the sake of humanity and Mother Earth. The trick will be figuring out how to leverage different perspectives to raise the health and happiness of the whole group. Let’s turn infighting and culture wars into opportunities for collaboration and innovation. Imagine what we could create if we figured out how to effectively communicate in spite of differences and how to all get along.
Serve the world using your unique gifts. Along those same lines of “being different,” the Aquarian Age will also empower you to claim and embody your unique passions and gifts. No more need to hide your interests in the closet because they are not traditional or mainstream enough, and don’t be surprised if you see more and more people designing their own career mash-up that fits their unique profile of interests. You could be one of them.
Astrologer Tareck Adeeb refers to the Aquarian Age as a time of “sovereignty in community.” I love that and think it captures the energy wonderfully.
Our job in the Aquarian Age is to become self-governing by remembering our own ability to create the life we want (bye, bye, victim mentality!) When we create our lives in line with our unique gifts and our passions, we will naturally serve our community in the way that our soul intended. How perfect is that? | https://medium.com/@suzanne-35537/your-aquarian-age-playbook-for-2021-b8842f022a73 | ['Suzanne Bellavista'] | 2020-12-23 19:45:57.877000+00:00 | ['Aquarian Age', '2021 Trends', 'Great Conjunction', 'Astrology', 'Self Empowerment'] |
Are we just going to act like getting married is something that is forced down one’s throat? | Are we just going to act like getting married is something that is forced down one’s throat? Like we play a lot as humans. Someone said, it’s the people who make a marriage, marriage does not make people. So you and your partner get to decide what you want your life together to look like. We need to own up that we buy into how Hollywood has romanticized relationships in general and that’s the premise we go into marriage with. So I think we need to take an honest look at ourselves and ask first, why do we even want to get married? And what does a healthy marriage look like? And what kind of partner is going to ensure we achieve the vision we have for a lifetime together? I mean, we vet job candidates better than we do people we decide to settle down with and then we get surprised when along the way they turn out some type of way. And this is because we buy into the romance side of things but yoh, love is patient and kind and not self-seeking, keeps no records of wrongs, is not proud and other characteristics. We plan for the wedding and fail to prepare for the marriage and we get surprised when it fails? If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, so why do we think marriage is any different? I mean, do you know sibling rivalries? And these are your flesh and blood and you still at times want to throw them off a ledge, how much more a stranger, brought up very different from you? Do you even understand how much work is involved? In short, we just need to be real with ourselves as humans, own up to our shortcomings and start doing and being better. Love is just one of the tenets needed for a marriage to succeed. It’s not the only one.
P.S. All relationships, all, often fail because of selfishness. So let that just sink in for a minute as well. | https://medium.com/@mouldingbeauty/are-we-just-going-to-act-like-getting-married-is-something-that-is-forced-down-ones-throat-dca9e14f9f73 | ['Moulding Beauty'] | 2020-02-20 17:32:16.563000+00:00 | ['Marriage', 'Relationships', 'Responsibility', 'Self-awareness'] |
The Patron Saint Of Lost Chances | The Patron Saint Of Lost Chances
Photo by Kleiton Silva on Unsplash
If you asked me to write of this past year
I would write of shipwrecks
how the ocean can swallow an entire boat
whole, yet leave no evidence behind
in the aftermath of this sinking
I dress, make coffee, empty the dishwasher
excess fluid sloshes inside my limbs
they say humans on average are composed
of 60 percent water but I would likely guess
myself to be entirely composed of the weight
of unshed tears which is to say I used to be
more solid than this, more stable
somewhere lies a burial ground of hull and
ballast and berth and broken dreams
ocean floors lined with the wreckage of
ambiguous loss of which we do not speak
it is hard to feel I have a right to sorrow
when so much more has been taken
from the lives of those I know but perhaps
it is simply enough to know grief as the
drowning of all that was keeping us alive. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/the-patron-saint-of-lost-chances-8d300838c6e9 | ['Kathy Parker'] | 2020-12-13 13:02:53.079000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poetry Sunday', 'Covid 19', 'Grief', 'Love'] |
On Politics and Asking the Wrong Question… | How many sixth-grade civics classes have pushed for the answer to this simple question, “What do you believe?” Debate naturally follows from this simple query, and often it centers on the application of belief, or “What is the right type of government?”
Yet, this question yields only one answer: autocracy.
Let me explain. The question, when argued and continued down their logical paths, lack a sufficient basis to achieve a compromise. The question itself requires one side be “right” and one side “wrong.”
It’s no wonder that the ends of the political spectrum below have yielded dictatorships.
Sometimes “anarchism” appears on the far left side of this diagram. That doesn’t make sense for a spectrum describing a political ideology as applied to governance, as anarchism is the lack of government. There could be a “anarchism spectrum,” but that’s a different post.
Let’s look at the argument structure of an extreme form of government, using the Socratic method:
Moderate: I think people should be taken care of.
Socrates: And how should they be taken care of?
Liberal: Through government programs, through welfare, and more.
Socrates: What of private industry? Doesn’t that take care of people.
Liberal: Well, sure, but it also requires money. Many people don’t have money. We need to give them the basic ability to take care of themselves.
Socrates: But how? Who will pay the hospital costs or the costs for food?
Socialist: Well, the government will. And, if it needs to, it can take over the institutions that people need to survive — basic goods like food, clothing, shelter and medicine can be taken care of by the government.
Socrates: And what about the people who currently make these things, how will you convince them to provide these things to everyone?
Socialist: We’ll pay for them; the government will pay for them. Through taxing the wealthy.
Socrates: But, if you take away their products to give away and pay them only by taxing them on their wealth, won’t they reach a point when they can’t pay?
Communist: Then we’ll take them by force. We’ll have the people put into collective farming and mining institutions, and we’ll punish the greedy former owners who wouldn’t help.
This is a somewhat extreme example, but it also demonstrates how one thought, when pursued to its conclusion can yield results that deviate far from the intended purpose. It does not matter the side that one takes, left or right, the end result is the same — dictatorship. I chose left, as I lean that way politically, and felt it would remove bias from my analysis.
If the moderate’s primary goal was to take care of people, he certainly lost it by the time he was inclined to punish the greedy former owners of industry and taking over the farms, mines, hospitals, etc. by force. At each point in the questioning, he could have stopped and considered the other side, and reached the conclusion that the criticism had merit and that he can, and should, reach a compromise.
The biggest problem in seeking a logical answer to “what is the right form of government,” or “what is the right way to rule,” is that it gives too much weight to an extreme answer as valid. If we took the above spectrum and applied a simple bell curve, we’d find that the ends have very, very small populations. | https://a-m-wilsonwideawake.medium.com/on-politics-and-asking-the-wrong-question-de24ea170532 | ['A.M. Wilson'] | 2019-08-18 13:52:35.518000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Political Science', 'Debate', 'United States', 'Political Discourse'] |
What Everyone Ought To Know About COPYWRITING | Copywriting іѕ bаѕісаllу thе tеrm uѕеd іn rеfеrrіng to thе process оf wrіtіng thе tеxt thаt publicize a business, person, an idea or аn opinion. A сору mау be uѕеd on іtѕ оwn, ѕuсh аѕ a ѕсrірt for a tеlеvіѕіоn оr radio advertisement, оr in соnjunсtіоn wіth оthеr kinds of media аѕ in thе text fоr wеbѕіtеѕ аnd promotional mаtеrіаlѕ. Thе main рurроѕе оf соруwrіtіng іѕ tо сrеаtе tеxt thаt wоuld persuade an audience tо act by раtrоnіzіng a раrtісulаr product, ѕеrvісе оr vіеwроіnt. Cоруwrіtіng mау also bе used tо ѕwау аn audience frоm a сеrtаіn nоtіоn, оr bеlіеf.
Whаt Arе Exаmрlеѕ of Copywriting?
People еnсоuntеr products of соруwrіtіng еvеrуdау through ѕlоgаnѕ, mаіl advertisements, jіnglе lyrics, website content, соmmеrсіаl ѕсrірtѕ hеаdlіnеѕ, taglines, рrеѕѕ releases or оthеr tеxt that are uѕеd іn marketing and аdvеrtіѕіng. Cоруwrіtіng саn bе manifested іn bіllbоаrdѕ, print аdѕ, catalogs, brосhurеѕ, websites, letters, email, роѕt саrdѕ, соmmеrсіаlѕ аnd оthеr forms оf аdvеrtіѕіng mеdіа.
Where іѕ Cоруwrіtіng Done?
Cоруwrіtіng іѕ uѕuаllу done іn rеtаіl stores, аdvеrtіѕіng соmраnіеѕ and mаrkеtіng firms in a mеtrороlіtаn аrеа. Thе copywriting wоrk environment іѕ оnе characterized wіth hесtіс ѕсhеdulеѕ thаt rеԛuіrеѕ its wоrkеrѕ tо реrfоrm their tаѕkѕ сrеаtіvеlу under рrеѕѕurе. Marketing аnd аdvеrtіѕіng іѕ notorious for its fast-paced nаturе where сrіѕеѕ are already соnѕіdеrеd a nоrmаl occurrence. Cоруwrіtіng is typified by ѕuссеѕѕіvе аѕѕіgnmеnt wіth immediate dеаdlіnеѕ everyday and соnѕtаnt calls fоr еlеvеnth-hоur revisions. Cоруwrіtіng іѕ thеrеfоrе a fіеld fоr the dуnаmіс, сrеаtіvе аnd bоld.
How Rеwаrdіng іѕ Copywriting?
Cоруwrіtеrѕ uѕuаllу start off аѕ assistants whо еаrn аѕ much as $30,000 tо $35,000 a уеаr, gradually іnсrеаѕіng to аrоund $40,000 оnсе thеу bесоmе really adept into соруwrіtіng. Evеntuаllу thеу саn bе рrоmоtеd to ѕеnіоr роѕіtіоnѕ, earning аbоut $100,000 аnd thеn tо copywriting сhіеf, еаrnіng аrоund $125,000. Cоруwrіtеrѕ may also ultіmаtеlу bесоmе сrеаtіvе dіrесtоr, еаrnіng аѕ muсh аѕ $200,000 a уеаr.
Copywriting uѕuаllу requires a mіnіmum of 40 hours оf wоrk a wееk wіth еxресtеd оvеrtіmе durіng peak ѕеаѕоnѕ and іmроrtаnt occasions. Ovеrtіmе if of соurѕе соmреnѕаtеd соrrеѕроndіnglу. Copywriting rеԛuіrеmеnt оf fіrmѕ uѕuаllу increase іn сеrtаіn оссаѕіоnѕ ѕuсh аѕ thе holidays fоr dераrtmеnt ѕtоrеѕ аnd durіng large advertising саmраіgnѕ for аdvеrtіѕіng fіrmѕ.
Thеrе are uѕuаllу mаnу bеnеfіtѕ included in the compensation расkаgе for соруwrіtіng. Profit-sharing іѕ increasingly becoming a рорulаr practice among firms. Cоруwrіtеrѕ аrе also gіvеn bеnеfіtѕ lіkе paid hоlіdауѕ оr vасаtіоnѕ, hеаlth care, hospitalization, life іnѕurаnсе аnd rеtіrеmеnt. Aѕ ѕuсh copywriting саn be considered tо bе ԛuіtе a rеwаrdіng job.
Whаt аrе thе Quаlіfісаtіоnѕ fоr Cоруwrіtіng?
Copywriting rеԛuіrеѕ a lot оf сrеаtіvіtу and thе ѕkіll оf putting great іdеаѕ іntо рареr іn very ѕtуlіѕh аnd еffесtіvе ways. Cоруwrіtіng also rеԛuіrеѕ a gооd undеrѕtаndіng оf layout and typography аѕ visuals are уеt аnоthеr essential раrt of аdvеrtіѕіng and mаrkеtіng.
Mоѕt rеtаіl аnd advertising firms require copywriting аррlісаntѕ to hаvе a ѕоlіd credentials іn the field, with рrеfеrеnсе tо thоѕе whо hаvе wоrkеd fоr аt least three уеаrѕ in thе business оr a related trаdе. While соруwrіtіng іѕ uѕuаllу nоt fоund аѕ a dеgrее оf соnсеntrаtіоn іn mоѕt соllеgеѕ and universities, a lоt оf copywriters tаkе degrees іn lіbеrаl аrtѕ, buѕіnеѕѕ mаnаgеmеnt, mаrkеtіng and communications. Copywriting аlѕо benefit frоm сrеаtіvе writing аnd thuѕ thеrе іѕ a gооd numbеr оf copywriters соmіng frоm a сrеаtіvе wrіtіng and lіtеrаturе bасkgrоund.
Copywriting necessitates a good соmbіnаtіоn оf ѕоlіd formal еduсаtіоn with a gооd writing experience. A lot оf people whо еnd uр іn соруwrіtіng hаvе hаd nоt оnlу dеgrееѕ іn business оr communications but also experience writing іn thеіr community оr ѕсhооl рublісаtіоnѕ. Cоmраnіеѕ uѕuаllу аѕk thеіr соруwrіtіng applicants to ѕubmіt ѕаmрlе еѕѕауѕ аnd articles, еѕресіаllу published ones.
Are thеrе Advancement Oрроrtunіtіеѕ іn Cоруwrіtіng?
Cоруwrіtіng offers a lоt оf rооm fоr grоwth and dеvеlорmеnt. In department аnd retail ѕtоrеѕ соруwrіtеrѕ саn bесоmе соруwrіtіng chief or fashion сооrdіnаtоr, and thеn dіvіѕіоn mаnаgеr or chief оf аdvеrtіѕіng. In аdvеrtіѕіng fіrmѕ, a соруwrіtеr mау work hіѕ or her wау uр as a сору ѕuреrvіѕоr, thеn соруwrіtіng chief, thеn ассоunt executive, аnd finally сrеаtіvе dіrесtоr. Cоруwrіtіng саn іndееd be fulfіllіng fоr thоѕе who are dеtеrmіnеd.
Cоруwrіtіng саn be a gооd саrееr to tаkе fоr thоѕе whо hаvе thе rіght skills аnd іntеrеѕt. It іѕ аn essential соmроnеnt оf marketing аnd advertising аnd is thus a роtеntіаllу еndlеѕѕ mіnе оf opportunities. | https://medium.com/@lebomatt/what-everyone-ought-to-know-about-copywriting-aa52ac96950e | ['Lebo Matt'] | 2020-12-13 15:46:14.574000+00:00 | ['Copywriter', 'Copywriting'] |
İdeal Bir Toplum Mümkün Mü? | 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/t%C3%BCrkiye/i%CC%87deal-bir-toplum-m%C3%BCmk%C3%BCn-m%C3%BC-c07d06156a49 | ['Rumeysa Balcılar'] | 2020-12-26 08:59:11.132000+00:00 | ['Kendini Bil', 'Nüfus', 'Türkçe', 'Türkçe Yayın', 'İdeoloji'] |
THE BEAUTY OF FLORAL JEWELRY | Photo by Cellena on iStock
Floral accessories add a soft aesthetic look to an entire outfit. The intricate craftmanship inspired from the beauty of nature makes it the main reason to fall in love with. Floral jewelry has gained wide popularity due to its charming visual appearance and its association to the spring season. The flora surrounding us has given jewelry makers the inspiration to curate designs that are enchanting and a must have in everyone’s wardrobe. Floral jewelry is the perfect accessory that develops the essence of pure romance, no wonder they are worn on special occasions like engagement, wedding anniversary and other related events. From traditional to modern contemporary jewelry designers have incorporated nature inspired themes to give a romantic and timeless touch to their collection.
At Glitz Jewelry, we brings you, handcrafted floral designs in our flower jewelry ranging from elegant earrings, heartfelt pendants to the all-time stunning bangles.
Glitz Jewelry Rings
A diamond ring holds a lot of meaning and symbolism in an individual’s life. They are used for many special occasions from marking a new relation on an engagement day, wedding events to surprising that significant someone. Our ring collection has been meticulously inspired from natural segments and curated into fashionable jewelry item for every occasion.
Some flower inspired rings:
· 18K Gold and 0.75 Carat E Color VS1 Clarity Diamond Ring
· 18KT Gold and 0.06 Carat F Color VS Clarity Diamond Ring
· 18KT Gold and 0.48 Carat F Color VS Clarity Diamond Ring
Glitz Jewelry Flower Earrings
Floral designs on earrings are the must have jewelry pair in your wardrobe. We have crafted your precious diamonds into minimalistic flower shaped earrings. These earrings are designed to meet your everyday needs from soulful gathering to celebrating holiday season with friends and family. Elevate your looks with the most modern with earring styles inspired from nature.
Some flower inspired earrings:
· 18k Gold and 0.03 Carat Round Diamond Flower Earrings
· 18k Gold and 0.04 Carat Round Diamond Flower Earrings
· 18k Gold and 0.49 Carat Round Diamond Flower Earrings
Glitz Jewelry Flower Pendants
Pendant jewelry as a gift, is a great reminder of the love and support from our loved ones. The diamond studded flower pendant collection is a dazzling jewelry that makes you want to add in cart for that special someone in your life. These blossoms inspired pendants are curated for the one’s that matter you the most. The flower patterns on our pendants simply adorns the art of nature and fashion in harmony.
Some flower inspired pendants:
· 18k Gold and 0.08 carat Round Diamond Flower Pendant
· 18k Gold and 0.24 carat Round Diamond Flower Pendant
· 18k Gold and 0.47 carat Round Diamond Flower Pendant
Glitz Jewelry Bangles
Bangles are the most fashionable jewelry items worn throughout every season. They add a great element to any traditional or modern chic outfit. Bangles remains one of the most popular jewelry items in various cultures across the globe. Adding a touch of nature’s floral pattern to one of the most versatile jewelries makes it suitable for any special event.
Some flower inspired bangles:
· 18K Gold and 0.69 carat Diamonds Bangle
· 18K Gold and 0.74 carat Diamonds Bangle
· 18K Gold and 0.36 carat Diamonds Bangle | https://medium.com/@GlitzJewelry/the-beauty-of-floral-jewelry-c9c5c66897c0 | ['Glitz Jewelry'] | 2021-12-16 07:25:40.175000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Jewelry', 'Floral Design', 'Accessories', 'Aesthetics'] |
Tracker: Ingesting MySQL data at scale — Part 2 | Robert Wultsch | Pinterest engineer, SRE
In Part 1 we discussed our existing architecture for ingesting MySQL called Tracker, including its wins, challenges and an outline of the new architecture with a focus on the Hadoop side. Here we’ll focus on the implementation details on the MySQL side. The uploader of data to S3 has been open-sourced as part of the Pinterest MySQL Utils.
Tracker V-0
As a proof of concept, we wrote a hacky 96-line Bash script to unblock backups to Hive for a new data set. The script spawned a bunch of workers that each worked on one database at a time. For each table in the database, it ran SELECT INTO OUTFILE and then uploaded the data to S3. It worked, but BASH… And that just isn’t a long term solution.
Tracker V-1
For our maintainable implementation, we rewrote the Bash script into a Python script called mysql_backup_csv.py. The only significant difference (other than making us not feel bad about ourselves) was we added lzop compression in order to reduce the size of the data in S3. Why lzop? We thought it would be the lightest weight compression tool with a command line interface we could install from apt-get.
We tested this against our large sharded MySQL fleet, and it was slow. Like, really slow — 8 hours slow.
Speed it up
We now had a tool that was maintainable for uploading our MySQL data to S3. The problem was that the tool would not process all data fast enough for our team to meet their SLA’s. We needed to improve the overall throughput significantly, and so went to work on the following:
Implement locking so multiple slaves could cooperatively dump in parallel. The lock is maintained via a simple table on the master. This allowed us to get down to around 3.5 hours to dump all our data. Too slow!
Skip writing to disk. The Percona distribution of MySQL has a very interesting feature in that SELECT INTO OUTFILE can write to a FIFO. As is, we had to dump all of our data, and then read it back from the filesystem. Using a fifo, we could build a pipeline that did not need to write to the local filesystem at all! This got us to somewhere around 1 hour which was way less than our requirement.
Slow it down
Per the fine manual (and this is in super old manuals):
“ASCII NUL is escaped to make it easier to view with some pagers.”
!@#()U@!#!!!
We had to write a C program called nullescape to unescape the data. &*(@!#!
Adding this to our pipeline resulted in our servers burning four cores just to unescape NUL bytes. This slowed us down to 1.5 hour to dump all our data. This was still within our requirements and left us a bit of breathing room.
Winning the race against an EOF
A problem with the system was that partial uploads must be prevented. Partial uploads could happen if anything in the pipeline failed. When a Linux program terminates (regardless of how or why), its open file handles will close. If the file handle is to a FIFO, the reader of the FIFO will receive an EOF without any indication of success or failure of the process feeding data into the FIFO.
So, why does this matter? Well, dump queries get killed from time to time, and early versions of nullescape would segfault occasionally. When either happened, the rest of the pipe would think no more data was coming. It was possible to catch the non-zero return status and delete the uploaded data, but that’s kinda racy and eventually the race would be lost.
We talked about it a bunch, and the best solution we came up with was a program that would sit just before s3gof3r in the pipeline. This program would repeat its input from stdin to stdout, but only transmit an EOF if all programs in the pipeline succeeded. This program is called safe_uploader and ended up being very lightweight.
In the beginning there were subtle bugs in safe_uploader that resulted in Zombie and Orphan processes, however once we fixed these, they quit appearing on database servers.
Systemic improvements
Compared to the previous system, this project significantly improved usability of the resulting data and reduced operational issues:
We added support for MySQL binary types. During the backup, rather than using hex encoding for binary columns (which doubled the size of the backup file), we chose to use escaping for some special characters (e.g.
, \t, \r);
Hadoop’s built-in TextInputFormat can’t read the backup with newline characters escaped, so we wrote our own EscapedTextInputFormat for Hadoop/HIVE
We made a fix in Hadoop Streaming side for this special TextInputFormat
We rewrote the CSV parser for our Python clients to read the new backup file
We added consistent data retention policy to all backup files, and we made the auto adjustment on HIVE table to make sure its schema is always in sync with MySQL schema. Since all data is imported into MySQL without significant modification, we now have a secondary backup system. This is useful for small losses of data. Restoring an xtrabackup takes hours, but pulling a single row or a small table from Hive is really fast and, better yet, doesn’t require help from the DBAs! When a failover occurs, a small script run by cron kills running backups. In the past, this would require dropping the MySQL user for the dumper framework. Often, this would also result in the DBA team and Data-Eng paging each other in the wee hours of the morning. Our backups are now fully consistent on the schema level and generally consistent on a replica set within a few seconds. This is a big improvement for cross-shard data consistency checking. An unintended benefit of tracker pushing the slaves servers really, really hard is that we are effectively running a benchmark every night that significantly stresses out our slave servers. From time to time, we’ll remove slower servers from production.
Tracker is now in full production with the capability of moving all our MySQL data into S3 within two hours.
Future work
We’re not stopping here. We realized for some tables, the daily change is actually not big enough to warrant a full snapshot pull, so we’re building an incremental pull pipeline that converts MySQL binary logs into a Kafka stream. This will then be incrementally pushed into S3 and later compacted with the previous snapshot to get the continuously updating snapshots. Stay tuned!
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Henry Cai, Krishna Gade, Vamsi Ponnekanti, Mao Ye and Ernie Souhrada for their invaluable contributions to the Tracker Project.
For Pinterest engineering news and updates, follow our engineering Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. Interested in joining the team? Check out our Careers site. | https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/tracker-ingesting-mysql-data-at-scale-part-2-9c5249e9332a | ['Pinterest Engineering'] | 2017-02-21 20:07:23.540000+00:00 | ['Open Source', 'Big Data', 'Sre', 'MySQL', 'Data Science'] |
Why Manifesting Through Writing Could Change Your Life | Why Manifesting Through Writing Could Change Your Life
Photo by Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash
Manifesting your desired goals can make a huge impact on your journey. You can even manifest money, fame, and anything you want in life if you manifested the right way.
To me, manifesting is going into a deeper state of your mind and giving your mind a complete awareness of your desired goal. So your mind can ask the universe and can visualize your goals to achieve them.
That’s why I like manifesting. But with manifesting your thoughts can be divided if you are not giving all of your attention to it. You can easily catch a random thought and will be following it. That’s where manifesting gets messy and most people will never practice successful manifesting.
But there is a way to do it even when you are not able to do it mentally. You can manifest your dreams through your writing.
Manifesting through your writing is a powerful tool for the mind. If you are a beginner and cannot stop your mind chattering when you are meditating or manifesting, you can simply practice your mind to focus on certain thoughts by your writing.
Most people like to hear some music to relax their minds while manifesting. You can also do the same. Music can relax you but make sure to not start enjoying the music more than focusing on your thoughts.
Here I’m sharing my Manifesting Techniques By Writing. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/why-manifesting-through-writing-could-change-your-life-cf57e3396399 | ['Ghani Mengal'] | 2020-12-18 21:05:28.719000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Mindfulness', 'Meditation', 'Education', 'Education Reform'] |
Advantages of Surgical Steel Hinged Segment Hoop Rings | There are many advantages to using Surgical Steel Hinged Segment Hoop Bands. They’re made from premium material and are easy to insert and remove. Some of these rings even come with gift bags. And since they’re surgically-grade stainless steel, they’re safe to use on your skin. Here are some of their best features: They’re easy to open and close and are safe for most skin types. They also don’t fall off, which is a big plus!
Surgical Steel Hinged Segment Hoops are easy to rotate through your piercing. The segmented ring has a minimal seam and is similar to a segment ring, but without the stress and hassle of segment rings. Unlike captive bead earrings, they can be worn in any piercing. The segment ring is simple to clean and rotate through your piercing. They’re also comfortable and easy to remove.
Seamless hoop rings are definitely worth considering
Hinged Segment Rings are also known as seamless hoop rings, and they give the appearance of a solid hoop going through the piercing. Because they are flexible, they can be worn in any piercing. Their smooth segments are easy to rotate, and they’re comfortable to wear. If you’re considering a piercing, these rings are worth considering.
As a bonus, they’re easy to clean. They have a rounded shape and minimal seams, which mimic segment ring aesthetics. Additionally, you won’t need to worry about the ring falling out or getting stuck in the piercing because it’s so simple to install. A hinged prong snaps into place, which makes the hoop ring a convenient and comfortable option.
A hinged segment ring is designed to be easy to use. Unlike captive bead rings, it uses a ball for closure. The hoop is also easy to clean. A segment ring is a great choice for the tragus piercing. In addition, they’re comfortable to wear and can rotate. It’s also easy to rotate. So, if you’re looking for a piercing stud, go ahead and purchase one of these.
Hoop rings for a smooth and sexy look
These hoop rings are a great choice for people who want to wear them in their ears. They can be worn in any piercing and can be rotated through for a variety of different designs. They are also easy to clean and comfortable to wear. And, they’re made of surgical steel. They’re a great choice if you’re looking for a piercing whoop and want to have a smooth, sexy look. | https://medium.com/@userpierced111/advantages-of-surgical-steel-hinged-segment-hoop-rings-1672a1615cf | [] | 2021-12-23 09:17:33.979000+00:00 | ['Hoop Rings', 'Jewelry', 'Surgical Steel', 'Body Piercing'] |
Spend Analysis : The basics — Part 2 | In the first article we have mainly looked into key foundations for a successful ever lasting spend analysis capability within the organization. In the second article we will be digging deeper into the weeds and share with you best practices but also major traps identified in this area for the last decade.
Cleanse your raw data:
Once you have accessed and scoped your data it’s time to cleans and massage it to maximize the gains. There are thousands of books written only on this specifics topic but to scratch the surface there are couple of key steps to perform:
Identify unique fields: This is where the cross functional and collaboration aspect becomes key — working with data stewards and functional owners of data, it is key to identify and confirm unique data fields — these are going to be used later on to merge data from different data sources. This becomes extremely important if the organization has disparate ERP’s operating in silos.
This is where the cross functional and collaboration aspect becomes key — working with data stewards and functional owners of data, it is key to identify and confirm unique data fields — these are going to be used later on to merge data from different data sources. This becomes extremely important if the organization has disparate ERP’s operating in silos. Make formats homogenous: the basic action here is to make sure all relevant data fields have the same format e.g. dates across all sources , times , numbers.
the basic action here is to make sure all relevant data fields have the same format e.g. dates across all sources , times , numbers. Create key for ambiguous fields: when there are different sources of data multiple ID’s could be confusing e.g. supplier ID and supplier name — one best practice to unique key to identify and map these across all sources — more sophisticated approaches here are creating indexes and parent families for this type of data.
when there are different sources of data multiple ID’s could be confusing e.g. supplier ID and supplier name — one best practice to unique key to identify and map these across all sources — more sophisticated approaches here are creating indexes and parent families for this type of data. Define constants: Data coming from different ERP’s are never complete — if we know that all the spend should be in $ then for the part of data that is missing the spend unit these should be applied.
Data coming from different ERP’s are never complete — if we know that all the spend should be in $ then for the part of data that is missing the spend unit these should be applied. Timing of data: Make sure that all extracts are being made with the same time period — leaving this to data owners across different functions will lead to deviation in timing (finance calendar , versus AP calendar vs. X function calendar — they are all different!)
Make sure that all extracts are being made with the same time period — leaving this to data owners across different functions will lead to deviation in timing (finance calendar , versus AP calendar vs. X function calendar — they are all different!) Perform high level checks: There are more sophisticated methods here but the very basic one is to involve functional owners to review and provide green light on data scope. E.g. If the manufacturing team knows that they spend 30 Mln$ on calibration and data shows 50mln% or 10 Mln$ this is a red flag and needs to be resolved before moving any further.
Pay attention: AP Spend in spend analysis system will be different from the accounting treatment of spend for the same time period — these differences could be many things including: Adjust for depreciation, spends outside of AP transactions, BU exclusions and so forth. Make sure for each data owner you have specific areas to review and provide feedback. There is almost no company that all the spend is captured within AP or even PO’s.
Define the commodity category structure; your spend taxonomy
According to the latest research over 53% across all industries and 88% of best in class companies use an internal — developed spend taxonomy which is useful to communicate the spend as well as use to develop strategies across each of the commodities. This is usually ended up to be supplier sourced driven taking into account historical RFX and components drawings; however, there is no correct abstract answer to this choice. To develop the best in class taxonomy few key questions needs to be answered organizational wide — as this will be foundational for any gains to be achieved from this initiative; here are our recommendations for these key questions:
Guidelines:
Usage case: Is the organization sharing transactional data with other companies or will it be used internally only?
Is the organization sharing transactional data with other companies or will it be used internally only? Right granularity: Define the right level of granularity by setting floor and cap guidelines.
Define the right level of granularity by setting floor and cap guidelines. At lowest level a commodity should be large enough to manage, but not too large. E.g. Procurement team agrees that anything above 0.5Mln should be managed standalone.
Depending on the expected rate of return from the initiative, each commodity group should be allocated to a relevant number of FTE’s aligned with their experience and skills as well as the cost associated with them.
Consistency & flexibility: Spend taxonomy must be consistent across the whole structure (no overlapping / no repetition) and this needs to be forced by good governance. The other piece is that taxonomy is ever evolving together with organization services, products and strategy — therefore spend taxonomy should be flexible enough to satisfy these needs along the way.
Potential trap: One of the big traps for the organizations is to spend too much time trying to get to perfect taxonomy. Our advice is the same for data quality — perfect taxonomy doesn’t exist and never will be there. Start with a reasonable / good one and make sure to improve on it through time. Remember this is a repetitive (continuous improvement) and ever evolving process. Perfection can be never manifested here as it shouldn’t!
Start Classifying your transactions using your taxonomy:
Once you have the right data and taxonomy in place — first you have to recognize achieving such big milestones and celebrate it with your team! remember many companies will bypass these foundations to expedite getting into value not knowing that this will create inefficiencies at its best not to mention it might minimize the gains. Many organizations never reach these milestones due to lack of leadership commitments to the program. so again, once you get here you gotta celebrate as you have managed to pass the most challenging piece.
In the last decade organizations and solution providers have gone experimenting lots of different ways to allocate records to the right bucket (taxonomy level). From manual labor intensive one by one record review to rule based classification and to using AI solutions each expert might have different experience and be biased toward one or multiple. The lessons learned are again no straight answers but pretty good guidelines. If your org scoped transactions are in order of a few thousands probably manual review or simple rule based (rule based classification needs dedicated review and maintenance) method will do the job. However, if the magnitude is in the order of hundreds of thousands our suggestion is to utilize AI to facilitate 80- 90% of records and your teams only review and provide feedback (we will talk about this in much more detail in later posts). In most cases there will be hybrid approaches of manual classification, mass AI auto classification and applying some business rules — getting the best of all worlds!
Pay attention: Reviewing classified records no matter what approach used should be prioritized to where potential value is laying. There are wrong expectations around having 95% or 100% accuracy on the classification — this is a trap! don’t fall into it. Always think about the “WHY” and the aim of these initiatives: capturing value and saving cost for the organization — therefore knowing that all records cannot be reviewed at the same time — it is important to prioritize the review itself and the level of checks aligned with the potential value. A good solution will be facilitating this for the users to deep dive when needed while keeping the overview for the next ronds — this is again an ever evolving process. Don’t stick to perfection — good is more than good enough (pareto holds strongly!)
Define your cube
Once you have classified your records — it’s time for effective reporting aligned with your user community identified earlier. Don’t be afraid of creating 100 cubes, testing and keeping the one that has the most adoption and benefits to the business and business users.
The ultimate goal of spend analysis is to answer WHO is buying WHAT from WHOM, When, in WHAT quantity, WHERE they are being shipped and HOW MUCH are they paying for it. The only question we don’t answer here is WHY assuming there were needs for business for every and each transaction. As part of analysis once the reporting is live: this assumption should be challenged by each of commodity leaders during the review periods described above.
Who: Cost centers / Business unites / function’s name
What: GL Account, Description, existing spend taxonomy
Where: Ship to location
When: Invoice date
How: PO number (ID) & Whom: Vendor name / ID
Analyze, asses , decide and execute
As you have your spend cube in place ready for business to utilize them there are couple of best practices not to forget:
Centralized effort: Make sure there is a centralized team (e.g. COE / Analytics) who owned the tools and processed and maintained/ resolved any obstacles as being identified.
Make sure there is a centralized team (e.g. COE / Analytics) who owned the tools and processed and maintained/ resolved any obstacles as being identified. Getting the business pulse: Constant check in with business and community users is key to improve the infrastructure as well as increase adoption.
Constant check in with business and community users is key to improve the infrastructure as well as increase adoption. Reviews: knowing this is an ever evolving and repetitive process central team should be holding open communication on any changes as well as holding review workshops one or twice a year to assess and understand if any major changes is needed on any of components (does taxonomy needs to go through modification, shall refresh period be modified etc.)
Refresh and Repeat
Last but not least is the ability to stabilize and automate these operations for the next rounds. For a bigger scale organization this usually requires proper data infrastructure to capture, assess, cleans the data and to provide consistent output. consistency (whether right or wrong! ) is key here versus for smaller organizations this might need some basic data flows and ownerships by FTE’s. The refresh cadence should be aligned to companies needs and capabilities in terms of producing these transactions in the first place (e.g. AP data usually have lead times of 90 days before they are fully available). In the recent research over 70% of the companies refresh their data on quarterly basis or monthly but again this needs to satisfy business needs as well as be achievable with the current resource allocated to this activity. The key is not to compromise accuracy and trust in the data to timing and speed. | https://medium.com/@rraoufi/spend-analysis-the-basics-part-2-efec15c0201f | ['Rasa Raoufi'] | 2020-12-13 18:08:35.176000+00:00 | ['Spend Analysis', 'Sourcing', 'Procurement', 'Classification'] |
Tip To Be Healthy: Simple Hack’s to Get in Shape | One key to a healthy diet is balance the energy you consume with the energy you receive every day. Small changes could make an incredible difference — and it wouldn’t even have to impact your lifestyle dramatically.
Small tip to be healthy:
You should also eat a wide range of foods to make sure you’re getting a balanced diet. If you eat or drink more than your body needs, you’ll put on fat, therefor you should give your body all the nutrients from brown rice, potatoes with their skins on, fruit and veggies and oily fish and all things like that.
Everything helps to shift the balance in your favor, by not skipping your breakfast it’ll help you get all the nutrients from that yogurt, sliced fruit and those high in protein nuts and seeds.
Another tip to be healthy is to start drinking more water daily and avoid sugary drinks as large amounts can harm your metabolic health.
As well as eating healthily, regular exercise may help reduce your risk of getting serious health conditions. It’s also important for your overall health and well being. Even just walking gives you a whole many health benefits.
Both physical and mental killers like heart disease and high blood pressure or depression can be improved with more exercise. | https://medium.com/@bogdan.bratulescu89/tip-to-be-healthy-simple-hacks-to-get-in-shape-f7196f41a364 | ['Bogdan Bratulescu'] | 2019-11-21 10:57:42.121000+00:00 | ['Body Image', 'Health', 'Workout', 'Health Foods', 'Body'] |
Build Progressive Web Apps — Chapter 2 | In building PWA, there are several components that must be used. The following is a brief explanation of some of the PWA components that we will learn. There are some mandatory components and there are also optional components. Mandatory components are components that will always be used every time they create PWA, while optional components are components that do not affect PWA performance but can be used to enrich PWA features.
Service Worker
Service Worker is a script that is run by the browser in the background, which is separate from other scripts on the web page of the browser. Service workers are written using the JavaScript programming language but are called in a different way from JavaScript code in general. By using a service worker, we can utilize resources that have been stored in the cache to display even in offline network mode.
Shell App
Application shell or commonly abbreviated as app shell is an application interface framework built by several page components and other assets. They are stored in the cache first so they can appear instantly when the application is opened. Generally, the page components that are part of the shell app are the components that are always there for all pages such as the header, sidebar, and footer. The components of the page content will be loaded dynamically and asynchronously.
Cache
Cache is a local repository used by browsers to store resources to be used again for future calls without sending more requests to the network. There are 2 types of cache in the browser, namely Browser-managed cache and Application-managed cache. The browser-managed cache is a temporary cache for storing browser download files automatically. This type of cache is set by the browser and is not available in offline network mode. The application-managed cache is a cache created by the application using the Cache API and separate from the cache that is managed by the browser. This type of cache that we can use to store resources and can be displayed in offline network mode through the service worker.
Web App Manifest
Web app manifest is a simple JSON file that controls how applications are displayed and run on the user’s side. Generally, this file is named manifest.json. When the application is first opened in the browser, the browser will read the manifest file, download the resource and display the content.
Fetch API
The Fetch API is one of the web APIs that can be used to retrieve resources from servers inside and across networks asynchronously. If you are familiar with AJAX techniques, then you will be very familiar with the fetch API. The Fetch API is the same as using the XMLHttpRequest API but has some better features.
Progressive Enhancement
Progressive enhancement is an approach in web development where we start the development of features that are common in all browsers. Then we gradually increase functionality in accordance with the capabilities of the type of browser used by each user. Every time we use a web API we need to pay attention to whether the API is already supported by the default browser of our application users. We also need to take care when the browser used by users does not yet support the web API features that we use. For example, do a fallback to similar features that have been supported or display a message to update the browser version or urge to always use a modern browser.
PWA Architecture Styles
PWA Architecture Styles means the approach used in building PWA in terms of the back-end technology used and application performance requirements. Some terms related to this include the shell app, server-side rendering, client-side rendering, and so on.
IndexedDB
IndexedDB is a NoSQL-based local storage system in the browser. We can store any data in the user’s browser for application purposes. You can perform a search, update and delete data actions.
Push Notification
Notification is a popup message that appears on the user’s device. Our PWA application supports notification appearing to notify users about certain updates in the application. The PWA application can also accept push events sent by the server and display popup messages even if the user is not opening the application.
Workbox
Workbox is a collection of libraries and tools that we can use to generate worker service files, pre-caching, routing, and runtime-caching. Workbox makes it easy for us to write PWA code with a simpler and easier to manage syntax. | https://medium.com/easyread/build-progressive-web-apps-chapter-2-pwa-components-428295c2d524 | ['Jansutris Apriten Purba'] | 2019-12-09 12:17:42.593000+00:00 | ['Architecture', 'Pwa', 'Components', 'Web Development', 'Pwa Series Jansutris'] |
What will it take to “drastically” reduce our carbon footprint? | The kinds of changes needed to reduce the world’s carbon footprint, we know, will be beneficial in the very long run. This much is clear. I claim, and I’m not alone, that they are beneficial to you right now and in the foreseeable future. I might even go so far to say that when looked at the right way, they aren’t sacrifices at all. The majority of these changes amount to changes in our habits. They may be drastic changes, but ultimately I don’t believe it will hurt much, if at all.
Some say that the drastic steps we would have to take to reduce our carbon output will really hurt the economy. By some estimates, however, our lack of action will result in a loss of 200 years of economic growth. It has already cost the USA hundreds of billions of dollars. The fires in Australia have destroyed over 12 billion acres of land and possibly 1 billion animals (not counting insects and amphibians). I’d say this is pretty drastic, wouldn’t you? Others say that these steps would either not hurt or improve the economy, creating jobs in new sectors, particularly manufacturing and construction jobs, because of all the infrastructure needed.
Even if the changes we make now do hurt growth, at least the changes are voluntary. What’s going on right now in Australia, and what has happened in California, Louisiana, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas are a glimpse of the future pretty much everywhere. If we don’t adjust now, many more and more drastic changes will be forced upon us. Which do you prefer?
How awful is it, really, to make everything more fuel-efficient? A lot of people who complain about waste and inefficiency. So why the pushback on fuel efficiency? I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of the USA meddling in Middle Eastern affairs. The reality is, like it or not, we’re entangled there, and it’s mainly because we depend on Middle East oil. So…let’s stop depending on foreign oil! Seems to me like a move away from gasoline and petrolum products as much as we can, as quickly as possible would only benefit us: we no longer are bound to ally with certain countries just because of their oil resources, no matter how awful their rulers are, or how much they export terrorism.
If we invested heavily in research and became the leader in alternative fuels, fuel cells and bioplastics, how would this hurt us, exactly? Isn’t China totally kicking our butts at the solar cell game? If what we want is more American manufacturing, we have to move into the 21st century and invest in 21st century research, technology, infrastructure and industry, and become the best at these things, like we were only a few decades ago.
According to this US Army report issued in July 2019, our ageing power grids will soon actively be a national security weak point, if not updated and hardened soon. The lack of security combined with ageing infrastructure and network-connected central power grids is a major weakness, and power grids in Ukraine have already been hacked by Russian state-sponsored actors. Russian hackers continue to “probe the US power grid” for weaknesses. The Army pointed to the recent fires and power outages (intentional and not) in California as evidence of what could happen. Microgrids, power grids that independently operate over smaller areas are one solution, and this needs a certain amount of local power generation. This includes not just solar farms and solar covered parking lots, but home solar installation. In any disaster, this power architecture provides additional redudancy and resilience.
At home solar installation, we’re at the individual level of effort. The other things, which anyone can do, basically involve you simply spending less money. Wait, what? That doesn’t hurt you at all, that helps you! In other posts, I will talk about the history of consumerism, how our buying habits are so habitual and conditioned that we don’t even realize how bamboozled we’ve been. This has contributed to unhealthy and impossible economic expectations of continuous, unlimited growth driven by corporate capitalism. Some of you may be thinking, oh no, a socialist, evil! Or even a communist, *gasp*! Nope, I’m not against free enterprise or a work ethic. I’m very much for a strong, healthy nation, but that depends on having a strong, healthy planet. Plus, it’s like people keep forgetting, this is the only home we’ve got. If we burn it down, we have nowhere else to go.
I truly believe that what is needed to drastically reduce our carbon footprint aren’t really sacrifices. We may think of them as sacrifices, but the biggest effort is in changing our habits; after awhile they won’t feel like sacrifices at all. | https://medium.com/@zksnarkz/what-will-it-take-to-drastically-reduce-our-carbon-footprint-516977c8117d | ['Save Our Climate'] | 2020-01-14 17:00:18.843000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Global Warming'] |
The Translucent Divorce | Gravel crunched and popped under hard rubber tires. I woke up to the sound of a Cadillac sedan pulling up next to me. I rubbed my hazy eyes. It was my aunt Liz, and my mother, Jennifer. Jenni, everyone called her. I was only 14, but I can still see the faces and hear the words and feel the emotions of that day — my worst day.
My mother got out of the passenger seat and walked right past me. Sullen. Sullen is the word I’d use to describe her body language. I thought she must have been there to tell Jeremy, my older brother, that he forgot something or didn’t do his chores before he left. But it was also 1995 — there was no such thing as a quick text or call to say, “I love you,” or “Come home honey,” or “You forgot the sleeping bags dummy.”
Jeremy was the strongest of us boys, that was for sure, not just physically, but mentally. He wouldn’t wince or cry when my dad used to discipline us with the paddle. He would just grit his teeth, and I swear half the time Jeremy would smile.
Most of you will think my dad was a bad person. He wasn’t. His childhood, discipline was switches, leather belts, spankings, summer harvests, and 4:00am potato hauling with the ‘Hill Billies’. When my dad got angry at us, he would grab the fraternity paddle and we would scatter like buckshot into a gaggle of geese.
Back then, the paddle meant you had really messed up. Like really, really messed up. But that wasn’t the hard stuff. I didn’t mind the paddle, I usually deserved it. I knew what line I was towing with him. In fact, I thought I had figured out how to beat the paddle. I’d stuff my pants with towels or wear three pairs of underwear, or beg for forgiveness with fake tears. I was always good at talking myself out of the paddle or the occasional spanking.
Jeremy, well, not so much.
In our family, discipline and pain went together like English tea and milk. Anger in my dad built like a tea kettle. He was old school. There was no mental health research on what spanking did. Maybe he’d get arrested today. But I turned out okay. His anger would just build up and spill over and my guess it was because older generations didn’t talk about emotions. About their problems. About their marital issues. About their spirituality. About their financial woes. No, people pretended to live the American dream — angry as fuck.
To be fair, I’d never ask for a different dad, but I would have definitely asked for a different, lighter paddle. Maybe that makes me a martyr, but I can look back with self-awareness and understand why discipline looks different than it used too.
Post traumatic growth syndrome, I think they call it.
To keep up with my dad was foolish. I remember him shoveling all the snow from our 100 yard hill driveway in less than thirty minutes in a big puffy red coat, Wrangler jeans, and a Russian ushanka after a full of work in the city.
“Trevor, you want to shoot baskets?”
“Dadddd,” I’d say, playing Ice Hockey on the Nintendo. “Did Magic used to shoot in the snow?”
“You know the answer to that. He never missed a day.”
“I’ll be right out.”
My dad would shovel and push the snow like a maniac, until the sweat dripped off his nose and he’d unzip his coat, the steam rising from his chest and mouth like a train chugging up the Rocky mountains in the dead of winter. He’d stand there and watch me shoot, smiling. Those were always my best memories of my dad; the ones with him there. Content. Happy.
Now my mom, she was a special woman. She was a tender, loving mother that embodied Sunday peanut butter pancakes, endless trips to my sporting events, and best of all, she always fed me like a king. I loved my mom. But I always knew when she was off. Or upset. I could sense unease in her. She would always scream and yelp at all my soccer and basketball games and would hug me after each one — win or lose.
Mothers should be the definition of unconditional love — and she was. But every family is different. From the outside, a lot of the families I see, there always seems to be a good-cop-bad-cop scenario working itself out. My mom spanked me too, but her spanks weren’t half as bad.
If you were to ask my family what I was like, you’d probably get some funny answers. I was a goofy, introverted, a dreamer — an endless well of ideas and creativity and possibility. | https://medium.com/@trevor-huffman/the-translucent-divorce-612f1da6c0f6 | ['Trevor Huffman'] | 2019-03-26 15:42:20.011000+00:00 | ['Parenting Advice', 'Dads', 'Divorce', 'Parenting', 'Kids'] |
Nurturing Technolab Ranked Among the Top eCommerce Development Companies in Ahmedabad at GoodFirms | Nurturing Technolab’s praiseworthy eCommerce development solutions wins a leading position at GoodFirms, which is an esteemed B2B research and review platform.
About Nurturing Technolab
Nurturing Technolab is a foremost eCommerce service provider in Ahmedabad, which is well known for its innovative solutions. The firm’s perfect blend of productive strategies and tech approach nurtures every client’s business.
With a long-term vision of adding dynamic values to every solution, the agency blossoms by gaining the allegiance of its customers. Moving swiftly with the vision and integration, Nurturing Technolab serves international clients belonging from vivid industries.
Along with holding experience in developing solutions like grocery apps, on-demand apps, food delivery apps, and other similar successful eCommerce applications, the firm also has deeper roots in web development.
GoodFirms Evaluation Parameters
To rank and recognise any service provider, GoodFirms minutely evaluates the services of every agency by using three parameters — Quality, Reliability, and Ability. These parameters are the backbone of GoodFirms’ research because of which the service seekers make quick decisions of hiring a suitable match.
Recently, heading with a similar research methodology, GoodFirms analysed Nurturing Technolab and found that the agency is one of the best contenders for eCommerce development service seekers. Thus, it shines in the list of top eCommerce development companies in Ahmedabad at GoodFirms.
Services of Nurturing Technolab
Majorly, Nurturing Technolab has a service basket, which includes mobile app development, app designing, eCommerce development, and software development. Apart from this, the firm has deep grounds in web development in which it mainly concentrates upon frameworks, languages, and platforms like Laravel, PHP, and Magento.
Not only this, but the web developers adopt themselves as per the client’s requirements, and plant all dedication to foster the productivity of client’s projects. Looking at such advanced practices, the researchers at GoodFirms deems that Nurturing Technolab will soon foster among the world’s best web development companies.
What Clients Affirm About Nurturing Technolab at GoodFirms
Since its foundation, Nurturing Technolab has pioneered in multiple industry verticals wherein it has experience of serving clients belonging from telecommunication, logistics, AR VR, IoT, and on-demand ordering. Thus, the firm has helped hundreds of business entrepreneurs in setting up and growing their businesses. With an extended group of clientele, few of the firm’s clients turned up at GoodFirms and shared their valuable insights about their work-experience with Nurturing Technolab. Below is one of the clients’ snippets:
Nurturing Technolab Performance Evaluation at GoodFirms
With vast familiarity in eCommerce, the agency’s believes that Magento is one of the best platforms, which can help retailers in hassle-free management of their eCommerce retail stores. Therefore, the Magento developers at the firm ensure that they come up with eCommerce apps and websites that are engaging and beautiful. In addition, they are proficient in developing Magento themes with the must-have features.
Nurturing Technolab’s end-to-end Magento solutions includes:
Magento website development
Shopping cart development
Theme development
Custom extensions
Magento migration and integration
Long-term and dedicated support and maintenance
Apart from this, the agency also extends an option for its clients wherein they can hire the Magento experts of Nurturing Technolab. This leads to higher scalability and better customisation.
The technological advancement and such impressive expertise in developing Magento eCommerce sites will soon take Nurturing Technolab among the top Magento development companies at GoodFirms
About GoodFirms
Washington, D.C. based GoodFirms is a maverick B2B research and reviews firm that aligns its efforts in finding the top IT service providing companies delivering unparalleled eCommerce and web development services to its clients. GoodFirms’ extensive research process ranks the companies, boost their online reputation and helps service seekers pick the right technology partner that meets their business needs.
About the Author
Anna Stark is presently working as a Content Writer with GoodFirms — Washington D.C. based B2B Research Company, which bridges the gap between service seekers and service providers. Anna’s current role lingers her to shape every company’s performance and key attributes into words. She firmly believes in the magic of words and equips new strategies that work, always in with ideas, something new to carve, and something original to decorate the firm’s identity. | https://medium.com/@swetketutrivedi/nurturing-technolab-ranked-among-the-top-ecommerce-development-companies-in-ahmedabad-at-goodfirms-55b9cf94382f | ['Swetketu Trivedi'] | 2019-02-25 15:24:02.403000+00:00 | ['Ecommerce Web Development', 'Ecommerce', 'Solutions', 'Webdev', 'Ratings'] |
Amazon Enters Israeli Market with a Bang | For years the Chinese company Alibaba has dominated the e-commerce market in Israel but that appears to be changing. Just prior to the Jewish High holidays Amazon launched its Israeli site and shipping to Israel. Now, in an additional move Amazon has launched its long awaited Hebrew online interface as well as free shipping options to Israel. Alongside the Hebrew language interface and shipping to Israel Amazon added the ability to pay in New Israeli Shekels.
In a surprise move the e-commerce Goliath announced it would ship certain products in Israel for free if the purchase is over 49 USD. There are a few thousand products that fall under this special deal and each one is clearly marker “Free Shipping to Israel”. Last and even more impressive is that Amazon launched a customer service option in Hebrew. This option will allow customers to feel comfortable purchasing products knowing that any issues that may arise can easily be solved in their native language.
An unexpected benefit of Amazon’s recent moves is the accessibility it provides to Hebrew speakers abroad to easily purchase Israeli products. This unforeseen benefit may allow Israeli’s living outside their homeland to remain connected to Israel.
It will be interesting to see how Amazon fairs in the Israeli market with its new interface and various initiatives that are meant to make online commerce easier for the residents of Israel. This may only be the beginning of Amazon’s expansion into the Israeli e-commerce market. It will be interesting to watch the company’s moves in the coming months and years in the region. | https://medium.com/jewish-economic-forum/amazon-enters-israeli-market-with-a-bang-234b1800f665 | ['Gil Rifkin'] | 2019-11-17 14:22:48.618000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'E Commerce Business', 'Israel', 'Amazon', 'Innovation'] |
Almost Anything: Launching Search! | Building a place for all types of Creators and Communities
Find your Bunch now on Bunches Discover!
Today, we’re excited to launch Search on Bunches Discover!
A lot of the questions we get around Bunches are about why we’ve chosen to build an app that serves all types of Creators.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just go for fitness influencers? Gamers? Personal shoppers?
The answer to that question is that yes, it probably would.
Search for any Bunch now on Discover!
But we see a world where Bunches is your hub for all of the Creators and communities you’re a part of. Where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the communities and people you love all can interact with each other in novel ways. (More on this coming soon!)
Building Search into Bunches is the first step on our road to building one of the best discovery engines for Creators and communities, with so much more to come.
Discover new Creators and Communities easily!
We’re beyond excited to have you Discover Bunches, so hop on the app and start searching for your next favorite Creator or community.
We love you Bunches,
The Bunches Team | https://medium.com/@bunches/almost-anything-launching-search-902cbebad713 | [] | 2021-09-06 13:45:57.292000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Apps', 'Tech', 'Consumer', 'Chat'] |
Racism in November — Elections and Reflections | RACISM | BLACK LIVES MATTER
Racism in November — Elections and Reflections
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
It’s hard to believe that I only started writing regularly about anti-racism six months ago. So much has changed since then. I’ve had a paid commission for an anti-racism article, I’ve taught anti-racism workshops and classes, and of course, I’ve continued to publish new articles and highlight anti-racism writers in my newsletter. Here’s what I published in November:
This article talks about the “mistaken identity” that can occur for Black people who aren’t the only one in a given work setting. It’s perplexing and often hurtful.
“There’s underlying racism in seeing all Black people as a homogeneous and interchangeable group. Plus — take it from someone who’s been on the receiving end — it just doesn’t feel good.”
It would be kind of difficult NOT to talk about the election, right? But the result didn’t provide the kind of definitive reassurance we all wanted (but Black people didn’t really expect.)
“ the race went down to the wire, with no early indication of which vision of the future would win: white supremacy and patriarchy, or equity and humane treatment for all. In the end, Biden-Harris prevailed (thank goodness), but it shouldn’t even have been a question.”
There are a lot of things that mystify me in this anti-racism fight. This piece outlines just a few of them.
“Sometimes I can’t believe that advocating for equity and against white supremacy can get you banned on social media, but flip the switch and it’s fair comment. Something’s wrong there, for sure.”
You just never know when the “white is right” brigade are going to flare up, but you’d think Christmas would be safe. But you’d be wrong, as this article about the backlash against a supermarket’s Christmas ad shows.
“Many non-melanated Brits are happy to talk about ending the trade in enslaved Africans, but less happy to talk about the racial power dynamics resulting from colonialism that still affect Black people’s experiences in the country and around the world today.”
Anti-Racism Writer Interviews
During the month, I also interviewed a few more anti-racism writers.
The first piece I read by Catherine Pugh, Esq. made me rethink allyship. Every piece since has given me food for thought.
“we have to get White AND Black folks to stop treating White anti-racism work as White altruism done on our behalf. I am not fighting against Whites. I am fighting against oppression. Whites are not fighting for me. They are fighting against racism.”
Racism affects everything, says Vena Moore. She’s not wrong. Get to know more about Vena in this interview:
“[Fighting racism] involves literally tearing down the institutions that preserve white supremacy and starting anew but too many people don’t want to put in that kind of effort. And by people, I mean white people. Black people should not be responsible for dismantling white supremacy when we didn’t create it.”
Reprints
In addition, I updated and republished a few pieces, originally seen here on Medium. Check out the latest versions below:
And of course I’ve published some updates for paid subscribers (and held a special Meet the Writer event for them), and I’ve shared some of the interesting articles I’ve found via my reading list posts. Thanks for reading.
If you want to support the newsletter, you can do that here — I’d appreciate it.
© Sharon Hurley Hall, 2020
This article was originally published on Medium. If you’re reading it anywhere else, it may be stolen. | https://beingsharon.com/racism-in-november-elections-and-reflections-599a00afd408 | ['Sharon Hurley Hall'] | 2020-12-01 18:24:46.345000+00:00 | ['Equity', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Race', 'Equality', 'Racism'] |
MetSlim Pro: Review the Met Slim Pro Weight Loss Diet Pills | MetSlim Pro is a diet pill that claims to help with weight loss.
By taking MetSlim Pro daily, you can purportedly enjoy powerful weight loss results with limited hard work, exercise, or dieting. The supplement uses ingredients like vitamin E and green tea extract to kickstart your body’s natural weight loss processes.
Obviously, many diet pills make similar claims — and many of them don’t work as advertised. Let’s take a closer look at how MetSlim Pro works to see if it’s the right weight loss aid for you.
What is MetSlim Pro?
MetSlim Pro is a diet pill sold exclusively online through TheMetSlimPro.com.
The diet pill uses herbal extracts, vitamins, and minerals to help you lose weight. You take two capsules of MetSlim Pro daily, then lose weight without significantly changing your diet or exercise habits, according to the official website.
MetSlim Pro is marketed online by a man named James Carr, a weight loss researcher with decades of experience. James used that experience to create MetSlim Pro, and now he wants to share his formula with the world.
Obviously, all diet pills make similar claims — so let’s take a closer look at how MetSlim Pro works.
How Does MetSlim Pro Work?
The makers of MetSlim Pro provide limited information about how the formula works or what the formula does. The supplement claims to use various vitamins and minerals to lose weight — similar to the vitamins and minerals found in any multivitamin supplement.
MetSlim Pro also contains ingredients you won’t find in an average multivitamin, including cat’s claw, green tea extract, stinging nettle, and mushroom extracts (including reishi, shiitake, and maitake mushroom extract).
These ingredients are similar to what we see in other weight loss aids available today. Many of these supplements contain vitamins and minerals mixed with herbal extracts. You take the supplement daily, then lose a significant amount of weight with no changes to your diet or exercise.
Based on the ingredients listed, MetSlim Pro seems like a combination of a detoxification formula and a weight loss aid: most diet pills contain thermogenics (like caffeine) or appetite suppressants (like fiber). MetSlim Pro simply contains herbal extracts that encourage your body to release toxins. These ingredients could help you lose weight, but they work differently than a typical diet pill.
However, the makers of MetSlim Pro claim the supplement doesn’t specifically target weight loss or detoxification: it targets the thyroid, which is the root cause of your weight problems. It’s unclear how MetSlim Pro targets the thyroid or what it does, but the company claims the formula will impact your thyroid in some way.
Without knowing the full list of ingredients or dosages in MetSlim Pro, it’s hard to compare the formula to other diet pills.
Overall, there’s limited information online about how MetSlim Pro works, what’s in the formula, or why it’s better than other diet pills or multivitamins sold online today for a fraction of the price.
The Story Behind MetSlim Pro
As part of a 2020 marketing campaign, the makers of MetSlim Pro share the story of a man named James Carr.
James is a 57-year old man living near Austin, Texas with his wife, Daisy. James has years of experience researching weight loss solutions. Now, nearing the end of his career, James wants to share those solutions with the world.
In a sales page and video, James shares tips for losing weight, then recommends taking MetSlim Pro to accelerate weight loss results.
James has a personal reason for marketing MetSlim Pro, claiming he witnessed significant weight loss results from the formula.
James claims he formulated MetSlim Pro based on strict requirements. He designed the supplement to help anyone lose weight, claiming it’s 100% effective and clinically proven to work as advertised.
MetSlim Pro Ingredients
Let’s take a closer look at the ingredients in MetSlim Pro to see what James Carr created:
Green tea extract
Stinging nettle extract
Mushroom extract (maitake, reishi, and shiitake)
Cat’s claw extract
Vitamin E, vitamin B6, zinc, and selenium
You can get green tea extract and vitamins and minerals from ordinary supplements — including multivitamins or green tea.
However, the other ingredients in MetSlim Pro are more unique, including stinging nettle extract and cat’s claw extract. These plant-based ingredients have been used in traditional medicine for centuries to support various health and wellness benefits.
Unfortunately, MetSlim Pro does not disclose its ingredients label upfront, nor does it list specific dosages of any ingredients. We know MetSlim Pro contains some of the ingredients listed above, but it’s unclear if it contains more ingredients — or at what dosages.
Next, we’ll review the science behind these ingredients.
Scientific Evidence for MetSlim Pro
MetSlim Pro has not completed any clinical trials or scientific studies to verify it helps with weight loss. It’s unclear if the formula is safe or effective, as it has not been tested on any humans or animals.
However, that’s not unusual for nutritional supplements, as most companies don’t invest in clinical testing.
Fortunately, individual ingredients in MetSlim Pro have been tested in various weight loss studies. Some studies show these ingredients could help with weight loss, while others show they’re no better than a placebo.
First, stinging nettle is frequently found in herbal detoxification supplements. People have used stinging nettle for centuries to detoxify the body. Today, some diet pills use stinging nettle to block fat, and Men’s Health even recommends eating nettle soup to lose weight more easily. Most studies suggest using a dosage of 400mg of stinging nettle extract or higher to block fat and lose weight, although there’s limited research overall verifying the weight loss benefits of stinging nettle.
Many people weight loss supplements contain green tea. Green tea is a common fat burner that contains a small, natural dosage of caffeine (typically about 5% to 10% of the caffeine dosage, or less, of an average cup of coffee). Green tea extract is also rich with EGCG, antioxidant-rich compounds that could support healthy inflammation throughout the body.
Some studies have shown green tea has genuine weight loss benefits. This 2014 study published in the Canadian Pharmacists Journal analyzed 14 trials on green tea and weight loss with a total of 1,500+ participants. After analyzing all this evidence, researchers found that the green tea group lost an average of 0.2 to 3.5kg (0.4 to 7.8lbs) more than a placebo, although researchers did not find this different significant.
Similarly, this 2009 study showed that the EGCG and caffeine in green tea “have a small positive effect” on weight loss and weight maintenance.
The mushroom extracts in MetSlim Pro are not commonly found in diet pills. Mushroom extracts are typically used as adaptogens, which means they help your body manage stress. It’s possible the maitake, reishi, and shiitake mushroom extracts in MetSlim Pro help support stress in your body, indirectly helping with weight loss. However, without knowing individual dosages, it’s hard to verify these benefits.
The final ingredient in MetSlim Pro is cat’s claw extract. Cat’s claw is a woody vine that can purportedly support inflammation and detoxify the body. There’s limited specific evidence cat’s claw leads to significant weight loss, although it should be safe to use and could provide small support for various body processes.
The other ingredients in MetSlim Pro, including vitamin E and selenium, could help with various body processes, although the doses seem too low to significantly impact the body. You’re better off getting these ingredients from an ordinary multivitamin.
Overall, MetSlim Pro contains average to low dosages of a small number of common diet pill ingredients. The green tea extract, vitamins, and minerals are the most scientifically proven ingredients within MetSlim Pro, and you can find these ingredients in many cheaper formulas.
MetSlim Pro Pricing
MetSlim Pro is priced at around $70 per bottle, with discounts available when ordering multiple bottles. Here’s how pricing breaks down:
1 Bottle: $69
3 Bottles: $177
6 Bottles: $294
All prices include shipping to the Untied States.
MetSlim Pro Refund Policy
MetSlim Pro comes with a 60 day money back guarantee.
If you don’t lose a significant amount of weight within 60 days of taking MetSlim Pro, then you are entitled to a complete refund.
Who’s Behind MetSlim Pro?
The makers of MetSlim Pro disclose little information about themselves, their manufacturing location, or their ingredient sources online. It’s unclear what type of medical certifications or supplement experience they have — if any.
However, the company claims to make MetSlim Pro in the United States in an FDA-approved and GMP-certified facility.
MetSlim Pro is marketed online by BuyGoods, a health and wellness company offering a range of supplements and PDF health guides.
You can only contact the makers of MetSlim Pro through one method — email form:
Email Form: https://themetslimpro.com/help/contact-us.php
Final Word
MetSlim Pro is a diet pill sold online through TheMetSlimPro.com. The diet pill uses ingredients like green tea extract and vitamin E to support weight loss in various ways — like by targeting your thyroid.
Overall, there are plenty of diet pills available today with transparent dosages and scientific evidence. With limited transparency of scientific evidence supporting the supplement, it’s hard to verify whether or not MetSlim Pro works as advertised, which is unusual given the high price of the supplement.
However, the supplement comes with a 60 day refund policy. If you don’t lose a significant amount of weight within 2 months of taking the supplement, then you can request a complete refund on MetSlim Pro. | https://medium.com/@johnnyrmorris/metslim-pro-review-the-met-slim-pro-weight-loss-diet-pills-61a7c16f154d | ['Johnny R. Morris'] | 2020-12-25 21:05:35.633000+00:00 | ['Metslimpro', 'Diet', 'Weight Loss', 'Diet Pills'] |
How to make Apache services idempotent using ansible? | About apache:
Apache is the most widely used web server software. Developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation, Apache is an open source software available for free. It runs on 67% of all web servers in the world. It is fast, reliable, and secure. It can be highly customized to meet the needs of many different environments by using extensions and modules. Most WordPress hosting providers use Apache as their web server software. However, WordPress can run on other web server software as well.
About ansible
Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy.
What is idempotency in ansible?
Idempotence is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application. This principle enables Ansible to be declarative and yet reliable is idempotence, a concept borrowed from mathematics.
Some prerequisite for the task:
Ansible must be configured in “Controller Node” Ansible inventory must have the IP of the system which we will configure as a web server(i.e. Managed node). Managed Node must have YUM configured
Initially, Apache is not idempotent in nature. This makes apache use more memory and resources every time we run the ansible playbook to configure our web server on the managed node. Because every time we run the ansible playbook it will run the whole process from scratch as it is making it “non-idempotent’’. We can make apache idempotent by using handlers in our ansible playbook in the following manner.
What are Handlers in ansible?
Sometimes you want a task to run only when a change is made on a machine. For example, you may want to restart a service if a task updates the configuration of that service, but not if the configuration is unchanged. Ansible uses handlers to address this use case. Handlers are tasks that only run when notified.
In our case, “httpd” and firewall services will restart only if we will make any changes on the html file or in the ansible inventory.
The below image shows the following output, if we run the playbook after making some changes in any of the html file,
But , now if run the playbook again , this time already the file is present in the specific folder of managed node , so it won’t be copied due to idempotence nature of Ansible. Here no change is made so the handler is not notified , and hence “httpd” is not restarted.
Check out the GitHub to know more about the complete codes used to make apache idempotent: https://github.com/yashraj24/Making-apache-idempotent-using-ansible
Thank you for reading!!… | https://medium.com/@yashrajblogs/how-to-make-apache-services-idempotent-using-ansible-581375f8e3cd | ['Yashraj Panda'] | 2020-12-09 14:32:02.196000+00:00 | ['Ansible', 'Ansible Playbook', 'Linuxworld', 'Apache', 'Automation'] |
Draw a unique barplot using Matplotlib in Python | Matplotlib is the most basic and powerful library for data visualization in Python. It is a 2D plotting library that allows you to create publication-quality figures easily. Another complimentary package that is based on this data visualization library is Seaborn. It can provide a high-level interface to draw statistical graphics.
If you are tired of the bar plot generated by seaborn by default and interested in improving the quality and beauty of your bar chart, this tutorial is made for you.
In this tutorial, we are going to build a customized bar plot using Matplotlib and seaborn. The finished bar chart will look like this.
1. Import libraries
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
%matplotlib inline
2. Create a dataframe for data visualization
Mydict={
‘Province’:[‘Alberta’,’British Columbia’,’Manitoba’,’New Brunswick’,’Newfoundland & Labrador’,
‘Northwest Territories’,’Nova Scotia’,’Nunavut’,’Ontario’,’Prince Edward Island’,
‘Quebec’,’Saskatchewan’,’Yukon’],
‘Province_Code’:[‘AB’,’BC’,’MB’,’NB’,’NL’,’NT’,’NS’,’NU’,’ON’,’PE’,’QC’,’SK’,’YT’],
‘Minimum_Wage’:[‘15.00’,’14.60',’11.65',’11.70',’11.65',’13.46',’12.55',’13.00',’14.00',’12.85',’13.10',’11.32',’13.71']
} df=pd.DataFrame(Mydict) #change the datatype of minimum wage from object to float
df['Minimum_Wage'] = df['Minimum_Wage'].astype(str).astype(float)
print(df.dtypes)
The dataset is very simple. It contains the minimum salaries across all provinces in Canada.
3. Draw a basic bar plot
fig,ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9,6))
sns.barplot(x=’Province_Code’,y=’Minimum_Wage’,data=df,ci=95,ax=ax)
ax.set_title(‘Minimum Wage Comparison across Canada’)
It can be clearly seen that the font of the axis labels on the horizontal and vertical coordinates is a little bit small, It is hard to read. And the scale line is not very helpful in pinpointing the real number for each bar. The first step is to enlarge the font of the axis labels and remove the scale line.
3.1 Remove the tick line
fig,ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9,6))
sns.barplot(x=’Province_Code’,y=’Minimum_Wage’,data=df,ci=95,ax=ax)
ax.set_title(‘Minimum Wage Comparison across Canada’)
# set the font size of labels into 16 and remove the tick line
ax.tick_params(labelsize=16,length=0)
3.2 Remove the borders of the bar chart
# method 1
ax.spines[‘left’].set_visible(False)
ax.spines[‘top’].set_visible(False)
ax.spines[‘right’].set_visible(False)
ax.spines[‘bottom’].set_visible(False) #method 2
plt.box(False)
The chart is getting better already by increase fonts and removing the border lines.
3.3 Reorder the sequence of bars in the chart
fig,ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9,6))
sns.barplot(x=’Province_Code’,y=’Minimum_Wage’,data=df,ci=95,ax=ax,
order = df.sort_values(‘Minimum_Wage’).Province_Code, #reorder bars ) #change the color of bars ax.set_title(‘Minimum Wage Comparison across Canada’)
# set the font size of labels into 16 and remove the tick line
ax.tick_params(labelsize=16,length=0)
plt.box(False) #removing border lines
3.4 Change the color of bars
Matplotlib provides very comprehensive choices for you to choose colors. I am going to use plasma. You can try different color palette such as ‘viridis’, ‘plasma’, ‘inferno’, ‘magma’, ‘cividis’. If you would like to use one color with different shades, you can pass ‘Greys’, ‘Purples’, ‘Blues’, ‘Greens’, ‘Oranges’, ‘Reds’ to palette parameter.
fig,ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9,6))
sns.barplot(x=’Province_Code’,y=’Minimum_Wage’,data=df,ci=95,ax=ax,
order = df.sort_values(‘Minimum_Wage’).Province_Code, palette = ‘plasma’)
ax.set_title(‘Minimum Wage Comparison across Canada’)
ax.tick_params(labelsize=16,length=0)
plt.box(False)
3.5 Add grid lines
Adding grid lines will help audience to pinpoint the height of each bar and have a better understanding of the numbers.
fig,ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9,6))
sns.barplot(x=’Province_Code’,y=’Minimum_Wage’,data=df,ci=95,ax=ax,
order = df.sort_values(‘Minimum_Wage’).Province_Code, palette = ‘plasma’)
ax.set_title(‘Minimum Wage Comparison across Canada’) ax.tick_params(labelsize=16,length=0)
plt.box(False)
# add grid lines for y axis
ax.yaxis.grid(linewidth=0.5,color=’black’)
# put the grid lines below bars
ax.set_axisbelow(True)
By default, the gridlines are solid lines. It can also be changed by pass variables to the parameter linestyle. You can check out more choices at the matplotlib page.
3.6 Beautify title, labels and ticks
In this step, I am going to beautify the title by giving it a background color and changing the font size and font color. Also, I am going to change the ticks and axis labels.
fig,ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12,8))
sns.barplot(x=’Province_Code’,y=’Minimum_Wage’,data=df,ci=95,ax=ax,
order = df.sort_values(‘Minimum_Wage’).Province_Code, palette = ‘plasma’,alpha=0.8)
ax.set_title(‘Minimum Wage Comparison across Canada’,backgroundcolor=’#565656',
fontsize=20, weight=’bold’,color=’white’,style=’italic’,loc=’center’,pad=30)
ax.tick_params(labelsize=16,length=0)
plt.box(False)
ax.yaxis.grid(linewidth=0.5,color=’grey’,linestyle=’-.’)
ax.set_axisbelow(True)
ax.set_xlabel(‘Province’,weight=’bold’,size=15)
ax.set_ylabel(‘Minimum Wage’,weight=’bold’,size=15) plt.yticks(np.arange(0, 18, 4)) #yticks starts from 0 and ends at 18, step is 4
ax.set_yticklabels([“ “,”$4",”$8",’$12',’$16'],color=’#565656')
plt.xticks(rotation=30,color=’#565656')
plt.show()
Now, you get a much more beautify bar chart.
At the very end, let us take a final look at the Before and After charts. The beautified chart is much more clear and and can help audience to read it more easily. Bars are in an ascending order. Labels and title are also informative. Grid lines is helpful in pinpointing the actual numbers of each bars.
If you are interested in making other types of beautiful charts, you may want to check out my other posts. | https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/draw-a-unique-barplot-using-matplotlib-in-python-f6b88b4a6f89 | ['Di Candice'] | 2020-06-30 07:06:27.038000+00:00 | ['Matplotlib', 'Programming', 'Visualization', 'Python', 'Data Visualization'] |
Aug 15th BTC futures trading TA summary | Aug 15th BTC futures trading TA summary
This is a short summary for our fund managers’ technical analysis on Aug 15th.
See the details in the link below:
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/BTCUSD/JALMQQH5-The-Kill-Point-for-Bitcoin/
If you want more information, join us in discord:
(https://discord.gg/V9k6uVj)
Please read carefully the below statements:
EIFUND is not responsible or legally liable whatsoever for any losses that may occur to you by participating in any EIFUND deal.
Any signals given are the pure personal opinion of the managers and do not constitute any financial advice.
You have done your own research before investing and are responsible for your own investment.
There is no guarantee that the signals will bring profit.
Cryptocurrency Margin trading is risky and you may lose everything.
This is not investment advice, legal advice, business advice, financial advice, or advice of any kind.
This is not an investment service, legal service, financial service, or service of any kind.
You are responsible for your own decisions. | https://medium.com/eifund/aug-15th-btc-futures-trading-ta-summary-83e6b8bf1bf2 | [] | 2018-08-15 08:55:09.107000+00:00 | ['Trading Analysis', 'Bitcoin', 'Trading'] |
Skill Chef : A UI/UX Case study. A Masterclass to unleash your inner… | Project Background
Due to the pandemic many entertainment activities such as movies, concerts, and exhibitions are cancelled, home cooking functions as a great time killer.
Remember back in the early days of quarantine when we were all baking bread, cakes and trying out new and trending recipes? Learning to cook a new dish and uploading it online has become popular for people to communicate with friends and family.
For people quarantine cooking is more than just feeding themselves, it has become a way for them to overcome anxiety.
The pandemic has changed every aspect of our daily lives, and that of course includes our food habits.
As the corona virus pandemic continues, consumers have settled into routines that involves home cooking and studies suggests that these habits will continue post-pandemic.
With people gravitated towards cooking and following the trends, professional food related apps are witnessing huge surge in their user bases. | https://uxplanet.org/skill-chef-a-ui-ux-case-study-4cc2d56c50ce | [] | 2021-03-24 06:31:36.882000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'UI Design', 'Product Design', 'Visual Design', 'Voice User Interfaces'] |
Sparrow ERP For Electronics & High Tech Manufacturing | Our ERP offers solutions designed to make your business operations smooth and hassle-free. The entire focus of our solutions is to make your operations faster, better and smarter.
Responding to customer inquiries faster is one of the key activities of a growing business. Electronics manufacturing business involves certain activities that can potentially become the bottleneck for a fast response. Our sales solution removes those bottlenecks by providing automated BOM analysis and pricing features together with a faster quotation interface.
Keeping optimum inventory is critical for smoother assembly operations. Sparrow ERP provides smart features that allow you to keep inventory exclusively for the customer or even orders. A smart interface to manage customer supplied inventory makes the manufacturing process smooth.
A careful design of user interface to take away the complexity of software operation out of way from the shop floor ensures that workforce only concentrates on tasks that need to be done instead of dealing with complex data entry. | https://medium.com/@intellial/sparrow-erp-for-electronics-high-tech-manufacturing-5617c3380a5 | [] | 2019-06-18 10:32:04.814000+00:00 | ['Erp System', 'Erp Solutions', 'Manufacturing', 'Manufacturing Software', 'Erp Software'] |
The Forgiving Type | When he saw a teardrop land on the page, Leo Waters snapped his gaze away from the letter of intent to enact the eminent domain law. He crumpled it up as tightly as possible and hurled it hard. It made an unsatisfying tap against the wall and rolled back across the floor to his feet, mocking him. There was no way out of this. He picked up the paper ball, made a three-point-over-the-shoulder-hook-shot into the wastebasket, then flumped on the sofa.
“Nice shot,” Anna Waters said.
“How can you forgive this?” Leo wanted to know. “My grandparents lived in this house for forty-five years, and we have lived here for twenty-eight. That’s seventy-three years this house has been in our family. This is so unfair. How will I ever be able to forgive the governor for doing this to us? I don’t want to move. This is our home. I love it here.”
“I understand, Lovey,” Anna tried to console her husband. “I love it here, too, but unforgiveness only hurts yourself. Try to accept it. Our sacrifice will serve the community well. Besides, God commands us to forgive. That’s how I can do it, and so can you. I know you’re not feeling it, but pray, and God will help you.”
“I know you’re right, but I’m so angry and disappointed,” Leo pounded his fist against the arm of the sofa. Then surrendering, he slid down to his knees and prayed.
“Dear Heavenly Father, please help me to forgive the people responsible for taking away our home. Help me to let go. I pray, Lord, for Your blessing upon the freeway expansion. I lift up to You all the folks who will be displaced because of it. I pray that You would provide for us all. Thank You, Lord, for Your love and grace. I trust You.” Leo performed the sign of the cross as he ended his prayer, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
Leo sat back down on the sofa and smiled at his wife, “I feel so much better, Anna. It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I’m glad we are in this together.” Leo looked at the clock; it was 5:30 p.m. He picked up the TV remote. “Let’s see if there’s anything about the freeway expansion on the news tonight.” | https://medium.com/ninja-writers/the-forgiving-type-b1a5182978eb | ['Jill Kelley'] | 2020-12-22 22:43:26.156000+00:00 | ['Forgiveness', 'Short Story', 'Christianity', 'Prayer', 'Fiction'] |
Jean Batten Stamp Collection | Jean Batten Stamp Collection
In 1990 the National Library of New Zealand’s Sub-Committee on Strengthening Resources supported MOTAT’s Walsh Memorial Library in purchasing a lot of Jean Batten memorabilia from the Hendon Aircraft Sale at Sotheby’s. This included aero club badges, stamps, first day covers and other ephemera addressed to Batten.
Since March, between the two Covid rāhui, Library and Conservation have been working together to take care of this stamp collection, which numbers over 1000 stamps. Previously housed loose in overfilled envelopes, we have begun the process to put them into stamp stock sheets, making them easily accessible for researchers to view. As part of this process, we will also look to attach a finding aid and create further records for Collections Online.
Based on the work we’ve done so far; it appears the stamps were collected as a result of correspondence sent to Jean Batten and the stamps offer a cursory glance into where she received mail from throughout her life, spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s and 62 countries.
Most of the stamps are used, torn from envelopes. We’ve also noticed a few envelope edges with her name on. And even a half letter, shown on the left.
So far, the stamps have been sorted by country of issue and we are now going back through each country, counting the number of stamps and measuring them to help determine the storage requirements for the collection, as well as recording how many stamps require flattening, or other conservation treatments. Recording how many stamps require each kind of treatment will help us to plan our treatment strategy so that we can work as efficiently as possible. Researchers tend to look out for country and date of issue, so these are our how we will arrange the collection.
Conservation considerations
One of the key early decisions made during the project was not to remove stamps from their envelope backings unless that backing poses a risk to the stamp. Many of the envelope fragments contain contextual information that may be of value to researchers such as: postmarks, cancellations, addresses, air mail markings, and fragments of letters or other writing.
The fact that so many of the stamps are still adhered to envelopes also suggests much about the manner in which they were collected. In cases where the backing conveys no additional information but is not deemed harmful to the stamp, it will be trimmed down for storage, leaving a wide enough border around the stamp to protect the perforations.
Leaving the stamps on their backings also removes the need to expose otherwise stable stamps to the high levels of moisture required to make the gum adhesive soluble. Any stamps requiring treatments commonly achieved via humidification, such as flattening, will require systematic solubility testing before treatment is undertaken. This involves testing every part of the stamp and envelope including: all the colours of ink used to print the stamp, the ink of any cancellations or postmarks, the envelope itself if it is coloured or printed in any way, and the ink of any writing on the envelope. As one envelope fragment may have many different stamps on it, as well as coloured paper, cancellations, postmarks and writing, the testing itself may be a major undertaking. One of the reasons that it is important to test the solubility of the stamp ink is due to the fact that, in the past, some stamps were printed with extremely water-soluble aniline inks. This was done intentionally by postal services in many countries to prevent a stamp being soaked off an envelope and reused for postage. When exposed to moisture, these inks bleed out into the surrounding paper, causing the image to blur or, in extreme cases, wash off the paper entirely.
The sorting process has also given us a chance to trial using the Gunnar Computerised Mat Cutter to create a modular box system to fit within one of our standard-sized boxes. When first sorting the stamps it quickly became apparent that we needed a way to store them between sorting sessions that prevented them becoming mixed up again. We initially assigned each country a small, commercially produced box, however we soon realised that a more bespoke solution was needed as the volume of stamps from countries such as New Zealand and Great Britain quickly exceeded the capacity of these boxes. The commercial boxes also didn’t fit neatly into the larger standard-sized box, leaving gaps that allowed them to shift around inside when the larger box was moved. With no other suitable boxes in stock, we decided to develop a modular box system based on the internal dimensions of the standard-sized storage box already used to house the collection.
Showing the modular boxes temporarily housing the stamps. MOTAT, All rights reserved.
This would allow us to produce boxes in a range of sizes, all of which would fit neatly together within the larger box. Once the dimensions of each box size were determined they were programmed into the Gunnar software and saved as a “nest”. The nesting feature of the Gunnar allows multiple boxes or mats to be cut at once with the software automatically determining the most efficient layout to maximise board yield. Nesting is a great way to use up offcuts from other projects as the software will try to cut as many boxes as possible out of whatever sized board you have. In this case it allowed us to cut all 45 stamp boxes from offcuts. Nests can also be saved so that, should we ever need more boxes of these sizes, they are already in the software ready to go. We are currently exploring how we can use this kind of modular system and the Gunnar to rehouse other small objects.
It seems Jean Batten was consciously collecting these stamps, but little appears to have been done to them before they made their way to MOTAT. We welcome any enquiries about this collection and look forward to making it accessible to researchers in the future once rehoused.
Please feel free to email [email protected] or [email protected] with any enquiries about this collection.
Cite this article
Ross Sheppard, Kasserine & Renshaw, Chelsea. Jean Batten Stamp Collection. First published: 02 November 2020. URL: https://medium.com/motat/jean-batten-stamp-collection-1f3bd6ea3d5c | https://medium.com/motat/jean-batten-stamp-collection-1f3bd6ea3d5c | ['Chelsea Renshaw'] | 2021-07-27 02:16:21.593000+00:00 | ['Heritage', 'Stamp Collecting', 'Conservation', 'Philately', 'Museums'] |
ON KINDNESS | ON KINDNESS
(Being Kind To Every Kind)
A story is told of a man who wanted to jump off a bridge and die. He left a note that if one person smiled at him on the way to jump off the bridge, he wouldn’t jump. Apparently, no one smiled.
The world is starved of kindness, and many people are dying because the weight of their happiness is diminishing with each passing moment. Kindness is not weakness. As luster is to gold, so is kindness to the strong. Kindness is not only giving alms to the poor, it is offering prayers for your enemies, speaking politely to the rude, having time for the downtrodden. It is giving compliments, helping the elderly, making others laugh, putting yourself in others’ shoes, not judging quickly, and doing no harm to others. Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind” (Henry James).
“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see” (Mark Twain). David W. Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics once said; “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane.” “People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centred; forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway” (Mother Theresa). “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world” (Desmond Tutu). God loves you! (Eph. 4:32) ©️ Michael Adarkwah Agyemang | https://medium.com/@michaeladarkwah/on-kindness-de47e3670cd1 | ['Michael Adarkwah'] | 2019-05-10 09:51:38.707000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Disability', 'Kindness', 'Helping Others', 'Love'] |
［人參］外出活動，帶隊老師要做什麼？ | 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/%E8%B8%A2%E4%BB%96%E7%A2%8E%E7%A2%8E%E5%BF%B5/%E4%BA%BA%E5%8F%83-%E5%A4%96%E5%87%BA%E6%B4%BB%E5%8B%95-%E5%B8%B6%E9%9A%8A%E8%80%81%E5%B8%AB%E8%A6%81%E5%81%9A%E4%BB%80%E9%BA%BC-b73d85f3cd3 | ['零加壹 林娘'] | 2020-12-08 11:13:41.111000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Outside School', 'Teachers', 'Activity', 'Education'] |
All About Words | Words are precious.
Hello Everyone — from a toddler to a Ph.D. holder graduates with words.
On the other hand, a writer is someone who nurtures the experience and the understanding on how when, and where to integrate thoughts, emotions, and information so as to best suit the reader.
All the known words and the phrases have evolved with us as humans. The journey of words is a beautiful and fulfilling experience; it leaves behind distinct and often inextricable trail marks, similar to technology and science.
We have been parented, guided, taught, coached and inspired by the influence of words.
From sunlight to moonlight, senseless or meaningful –everything tends to greet us with words, only if we have ears to hear it.
Our day starts with “words” and we will be remembered for the words we share and live by.
We have learned every word in utter patience, but somehow stopped learning new words the moment our “hunger”, “goal” and “achievements” get prioritized. We express our days, moments, and instances with words.
The three magical words “I love you” can make or break a relationship and family tree. Words are the pillars of any agreement whether it’s between two nations or penned by a freelancer.
Writers realize the importance of words only when they are asked to write 500 words for Re 1 per word for which some are even satisfied. We, as God’s creature, matured with word counts, delays in payments and unspoken words.
Real change will happen when we are paid decent and don’t accept low paid gigs — but justice is scarce.To be precise, it has always been the survival instinct for a freelance writer in this marketplace to win a fair opportunity as a freelance content writer.
The issue is to be understood down from the roots rather than ranting just because some have surrendered their soul. There’s always a chance to speak up.
If not today, then when?
Our mind hibernates once we are selected even for the undesirable amount in this Marketplace of “jugaad”.
We use the power of prediction, the instinct of persuasion and the cycle of connection to filter around a humongous chunk of offers just to foot our bills.
Sometimes we overdo and at other times, we become the underdog — but in doing so, we should not forget to focus and breathe in the “pure air” in times when white Rhinos’ are on the verge of extinction and the glaciers are about to touch the seashores.
This situation is worrying, no longer amusing — but it is avoidable only when we “Unite as freelance writers and surmount our inner conflicts.”
Pretending not to give up and still having “peanuts” at breakfast, lunch, and dinner is the real problem.
The market is not absolute nor is the trend. We know our common goals, but compromise with our wisdom which haunts us on every project that we agree to do for “peanuts.”
If you get your protein supplements and minerals by consuming peanuts, then continue doing it else “Unite” and say “No”, thereby bringing solace into your life and network. | https://medium.com/classy-writeups/all-about-words-7aafe03ffd8 | ['Amit Ghosh'] | 2019-01-23 13:11:39.391000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Freelancers', 'Writing', 'Freelance', 'Content Marketing'] |
What Makes Email Scam Hard To Detect ? | CIO Advisor Apac scam news
CIO Advisor apac scam news has been helping enterprise providing a solution against scam and spam in the industry. Nowadays, attackers use advanced techniques to scam organizations to pay them a hefty amount via fake invoicing.
Fremont, CA: Email scammers are becoming sophisticated a day using advanced tactics for stealing from organizations across the planet . Earlier, scammers wont to send an invoice, letter, or invitation to be listed during a bogus trade directory or renew the web site name . Today, however, the attacker’s campaigns revolve around supply chains, espionage, and research. Attackers dupe their victims by injecting themselves into a legitimate email thread about finance. These attacks are difficult to detect, and victims will realize that they need been scammed when their vendor follows up about an unreceived payment.
According to researchers at Agari, email fraud is linked to a cyber-criminal gang operating out of Nigeria. referred to as Silent Starling, the group started in 2015 with romance scams and cheque fraud then later advanced to wire transfer requests and gift card scams. Employing new attacks, the group has duped over 500 companies in 14 countries with the bulk of their victims from the U.S., Canada, and therefore the UK. The group has hacked 700 employee email accounts and stole over 20,000 emails to assist cash-out campaigns successfully.Top Risk and Compliance Solution Companies
The attack begins with the hackers attempting to steal email login credentials using phishing attacks redirecting users to a spoofed version of tools like Office365 and other enterprise software. After gaining the credentials, the attacker’s login and found out a forwarding rule to automatically redirect copies of all the emails to a separate account they control. Further, they inspect the content of the emails to know their victims. Later, email scammers found out alerts for keywords like invoices and payments to collect information like the language employed by the important sender and therefore the times of day they have a tendency to be most active. Further, they gain access to the attachments and links utilized in the e-mail to make a fake invoice that appears completely legitimate.
The invoice requests are precise because the purchasers are going to be expecting an invoice from the seller . the sole detail which is different within the invoice is that the bank details, which redirects the cash to the checking account of the cyber-criminal. These attacks are longer and resource consuming as compared to a daily BEC campaign, but the reward is higher. These attacks are stealthy, and that they can’t be caught. within the meantime, the organizations can cross-check the outgoing payments to guard themselves from these attacks. | https://medium.com/@jackmathew/what-makes-email-scam-hard-to-detect-cio-advisor-apac-9ac4437d8af6 | ['Jack Mathew'] | 2021-06-17 04:35:51.685000+00:00 | ['Scam', 'Email', 'Technews', 'Apac', 'Technology'] |
Deploy Django Project on Heroku | Django, Heroku, Web Development
Deploy Django Project on Heroku
Take your Technical projects to next level.
As we know Django is python based open-source framework which follows MVC(Model View Controller) architectural pattern used in the rapid development of the website with clean design without worrying too much about setting up an environment to start.
I am using python 3.8.3 version and VS code as my text editor. deploying a Django project on Heroku is often difficult. To deploy it with ease some steps are needed to be followed :
Create a Heroku account :
creating a Heroku account is very simple. visit https://dashboard.heroku.com/ so signup as a new account by tapping on signup button located in the top-right corner
After successful signup and login proceed to next step.
2. Create a Django app :
create a fresh Django app using -
or you can use your project make sure you are inside your project folder where manage.py file is present.
3. Create a Virtual Environment and Install required dependencies :
Install basic libraries using pip like pip install Django and most important install gunicorn(WSGI application server) and white noise.
After installation of all libraries run the command :
It creates a new file in the root directory which consists of all libraries used in Django named requirements.txt which helps Heroku to install dependencies before deploying.
4. Create an App on Heroku site :
By clicking on creating new app add the name you want for your app then open settings tabs, tap on add build pack and tap on python to set python as your build pack and save changes.
5. Addition of required files :
Now create two new files runtime.txt in which specify the version of python used and other Procfile with no extension.
here gunicorn in place of vidz you need to enter your project folder name which contains settings.py file
5. Changes in settings.py file
Click on your Heroku project then tap on an open app button present in the top right corner it opens up the link where the project will be deployed. copy the link and paste it in settings.py allowed host section with local server to run it locally and change DEBUG to false as well.
Now add white noise as middleware in Django settings.py middleware section.
Add STATIC_ROOT to configure static files
6. Connect GitHub repository to Heroku :
After changes push the project to Github
In Heroku deploy section connect GitHub repository by tapping on connect to Github.
After completion tap on deploy
Voila, Project is Deployed. | https://medium.com/django-framework-real-world-projects/deploy-django-project-on-heroku-13b191e311b6 | [] | 2020-09-06 04:05:06.350000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Heroku', 'Django', 'Github'] |
Russia’s Red Sea Rising | What do Sudan and Russia have in common? If your answer is a naval logistics base at the southern entrance of the Red Sea, then you are on the money. Whilst this strategic alliance, one that provides Russia with a place to house up to three hundred personnel and four warships, seems like an unusual expression of unity between two culturally distinct countries, the historic relationship of the pair trend way back.
In 1961, the thought of pirog in Port Sudan seemed like a distant concept for the five year old independent nation. Sudan had recently joined the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’, a union of developing nations not aligned to any existing power bloc. It remains one of the largest groupings of states globally, second only to the United Nations. Even as the Cold War began to dominate the political landscape, by which time many countries within the Non-Aligned Movement had in fact aligned to either the United States or the USSR, Sudan enjoyed relative neutrality. That changed when the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, keen to avoid another armed conflict with nearly half a million troops bogged down in Vietnam, ramped up diplomatic support for Sudan’s adversary Israel at the height of the ‘Six Day War’. Khartoum severed relations with Washington in the aftermath, and it would take four years coupled with an attempted communist-led coup for them to warm again. During this interlude, over two thousand Soviet advisers had formed a satellite within the fledgling state.
The ascension of two notorious strongmen, military leader Omar al-Bashir who took office in a 1989 coup that removed Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi’s coalition, along with Vladimir Putin to the Russian Presidency, forged the golden age of Sudanese-Russian relations. Gone was the animosity caused after the Soviets provided aid to rivals Ethiopia in the 70’s. Forgotten too was the Sudanese backing of the Mujahadeen amidst the onset of Moscow’s nine year guerrilla war against the group in Afghanistan. This new era has brought over five thousand Sudanese students to Russian university campuses through state-backed scholarships, increased arms trade with Sudan’s forces now 60% kitted out with either Russian or Soviet Union era military hardware, and economic support that has circumvented international sanctions. Moscow has crucially been able to solidify some of Sudan’s economic foundations at the height of domestic catastrophe when the nation- which generates 50% of budget revenue through its oil sector- lost between 75% to 80% of daily output in the secession of South Sudan in 2011. Russian backed infrastructure, such as a 2018 agreement to construct a refinery with the capacity of 220,000 barrel per day, has helped to shore up Sudan’s ability to process South Sudanese oil exports, whilst a 2015 discovery of large gold deposits in two Sudanese provinces by a Russian company reinforced confidence in the nation’s commodity sector.
Sudan is evidently more dependent upon Russian support than the converse, that will likely come as no surprise given the relative standing of the two nations. So what is behind Russia’s involvement in the region, altruism or strategic necessity? | https://medium.com/@dan-appleby/russias-red-sea-rising-ac2871afa4f1 | ['Daniel Appleby'] | 2020-11-22 08:29:39.941000+00:00 | ['History', 'International Relations', 'Politics', 'Future', 'Analysis'] |
Dealing with cues | As humans, we deal with cues. When the clock strikes six in the evening, it is a cue to wrap up what we are doing at work and go home for the day. When someone finishes their part of the presentation, it is a cue for the next one to go up on stage and share their bit.
These are more overt cues.
However, there are 10x more subtle cues in our lives that shape our daily behaviours. When we receive a little nudge from Headspace in terms of a push notification, it is a cue for sitting down to meditate. When we come across pictures of a friend vacationing, it is a cue for us to sit down and make bookings for our own vacation that we’ve been planning.
Cues are essentially things that we come across that evoke certain actions, feelings or behaviours in us. While it is going against human nature to control how we react to every single cue that we come across throughout or day, we don’t have to completely let our fates be decided by the cues that show up in front of us.
Rather than live reactively, we can take control of positioning our cues to our benefit.
I personally undertake a cleansing ritual every now and then when I remove cues from my life that induce undesirable actions or feelings or behaviours — be it uninstalling apps or unfollowing some people on social media or listening to inspiring podcasts and reading informative books.
Placing running gear by the bed, so that we wake up and take the cue to go for a run, or to stock up on fruits and vegetables in the fridge so that we take the cue to eat healthy are some of the more popular things that people do to shape their cues.
Shaping our behaviours are hard when we do not control the cues. It is much more effective to go to the source and control the cues. | https://medium.com/a-good-life/dealing-with-cues-f9de260b5c3a | ['Kumara Raghavendra'] | 2019-08-02 08:52:19.318000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Habit Building', 'Life Lessons'] |
Flames | Flames
A Brief Respite
Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash
Photo by Stéphane Juban on Unsplash
Winter storm, fireplace
English tea and Madeleines
Blankets and familiarity
Old tomes, new poems
Joni Mitchell on the radio
I kiss you
I drift into you
I lift you — up
Pleasured moments
Heightened senses
I share time and space with you
A rhythm and a pace with you
A knock — at the door
The kids are home — early
We let go of “letting go”
We separate, walls reinstated
We return
To the “every day”
We find our way
To the glorious mundane
Joe Barca | https://medium.com/scrittura/flames-25ab09f8b0ed | ['Joe Barca'] | 2020-12-17 20:35:25.418000+00:00 | ['Safety', 'Poetry', 'Love', 'Passion', 'Trust'] |
Top 5 Deep Learning and Neural Network courses to learn in 2021 | Top 5 Deep Learning and Neural Network courses to learn in 2021 javinpaul Follow Sep 19 · 9 min read
Deep Learning on Coursera by Andrew Ng
Hello guys, if you want to learn Deep learning and neural networks and looking for the best online course then you have come to the right place. Earlier, I have shared the best data science course, and today, I am going to share the best deep learning online courses from Udemy, and Coursera.
Learning Deep learning in-depth? Sounds recursive? No? It is, indeed. There is no doubt that Machine Learning is a tough subject, and in-depth knowledge, in particular, requires a lot of maths and complex terminology and very tough to master.
If the subject matter is that tough, then how do you learn it better? Well, choose a course that can explain this complex topic in simple words. We are actually blessed that we have many excellent instructors like Andrew Ng, @Jeremey Howard’s, and Kirill Eremenko on Udemy around who are not just the expert of deep learning but also excellent instructors and teachers.
I firmly believe that every programmer should learn about Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence, as these two will drive the world in the coming years. Data Science, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning are essential for understanding and using Artificial intelligence in many ways, and that’s why I am spending a lot of my spare time learning these technologies.
My Machine learning journey started a couple of years ago when I come to cross Andrew Ng’s excellent Machine Learning course on Coursera, It also happened to be Coursera’s first course as Andrew Ng is also one of the founders of Coursera.
More than the course, Andrew inspired me to learn about Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence, and ever since that, whenever I read him like on his Deep Learning course launch on Medium, I always get excited to learn more about this field.
Another story that inspired me a lot was of a Japanese farmer who used Google’s TensorFlow and Machine learning to filter and sort Cucumber on his farm, which apparently only his mother could do because of her years of experience.
Stories are compelling; they not just teach but also, inspire and you find them a lot in these excellent courses, which I am going to share with you about deep learning in-depth.
Btw, if you are new to Machine learning then don’t start with these courses, the best starting point is still Andrew Ng’s original Machine Learning course on Coursera. Only after you take that course, you should check these advanced courses to learn neural networks and deep learning in-depth.
5 Best Courses to Learn Deep Learning and Neural Network for Beginners
Without wasting any more of your time, here is my list of best courses to learn Deep learning in-depth. I have chosen courses that are suitable for both beginners and developers with some experience in the field of Machine learning and Deep Learning.
Even though Maths is an integral part of Deep Learning, I have chosen courses where you don’t need to learn complex Maths concepts, whenever something is required, the instructor explains in simple words.
Believe it or not, Coursera is probably the best place to learn about Machine learning and Deep learning online, and a big reason for that is Andrew Ng, who literally made Machine learning popular among developers.
If you don’t know, he is also one of the founders of Coursera, and his classic Machine learning course offered by Stamford is probably the first online course on Coursera.
Apart from that classic course, Andrew has created a couple of more gems like AI For Everyone, which is again I recommend to every programmer and non-tech guys.
AI is not just for programmers but for everyone, and this is the best course to learn AI for all non-technical people like project managers, business analysts, operations, and event management team.
Coming back to Andrew’s Deep Learning Specialization, which is a collection of five courses focused on neural network and deep learning, as shown below:
1. Neural Networks and Deep Learning
2. Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization, and Optimization
3. Structuring Machine Learning Projects
4. Convolutional Neural Networks
5. Sequence Models
Andrew follows a bottom-up approach, which means you will start from the smallest component and move towards building the product. In these five courses, you will learn the foundations of Deep Learning, understand how to build neural networks, and learn how to lead successful machine learning projects.
Here is the link to join this course — Deep Learning Specialization
You will also learn about Convolutional networks, RNNs, LSTM, Adam, Dropout, BatchNorm, Xavier/He initialization, and more. You will work on case studies from healthcare, autonomous driving, sign language reading, music generation, and natural language processing.
The course is not just about boring theories; it’s very hands-on and interactive. You will practice ideas in Python and in TensorFlow, which you will learn on the course.
The best part of the course is that you will hear from many top leaders in Deep Learning, who will share with you their personal stories and give you career advice, which is very inspiring and refreshing.
If you are serious about deep learning, I strongly suggest you join this specialization and complete all five courses. It may take between 3 to 5 months, but it’s completely worth your time and more than 500K learners have already benefited from this specialization. | https://medium.com/javarevisited/top-5-advanced-deep-learning-and-neural-network-courses-to-learn-in-2020-a273f5eddca5 | [] | 2020-12-13 13:28:27.970000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Neural Networks', 'Deep Learning'] |
Stick with what you know | Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash
I trained in theatre and film, but after finishing my degree I ended up working in theatre. I think this was mostly that it was what was more accessible to me at the time; film felt far removed. Perhaps also because I didn’t feel equipped by what I learned in our film course to actually know how to get into that industry. But probably because what I really loved was acting, and directing actors, and theatre was the way I could most easily do that in the shortest time. I worked in theatre professionally as an actor, director, producer and writer. I was quite successful for a time, twice I received nominations for Young Australian Artist of the year, as well as receiving other industry awards and recognitions. But that’s another story.
Later, the interest in film that I had always had refused to stay quiet, and I decided to try to make films. I inherited some money, and bought some film gear, which meant I was free to experiment and try my hand at filmmaking.
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
At this time, however, I told a very dear friend of mine, who was himself a filmmaker, that this was what I was going to do. His immediate response was, “Stick with what you know.” At the time I felt very hurt, even though I guessed that perhaps he was speaking out of his own insecurity. (We were all so young and drew a lot of strength and identity from the way we defined ourselves and our arts practice.) Despite guessing this was his motivation, his words summoned up a huge wave of my own insecurity.
I did still go on to make films, and now, years later, I find myself as a film lecturer. At times in my career I have stuck with what I knew, but most of the time I have pushed the boundaries of the known, learning to know new and different things. Not sticking.
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash
Which brings me to the point of this post. In my work, I teach across a broad range of subjects. Some of them I know reasonably well, some of them I know better than that. Occasionally there is something that I am less familiar with that I still find myself teaching. Out of all the subjects I teach, however, I don’t actually teach any of the things I am most qualified, and most experienced to teach.
I don’t teach directing. I don’t teach acting. (In my main job.) This last week I was reflecting on this with some colleagues; the fact that I teach almost none of the things I consider myself very knowledgeable about. I find this quite heartbreaking. It seems such a strange thing to have secured a job because of my expertise in some area of filmmaking, but then to not be teaching in that area. While my friend’s comment years ago to “stick with what I know” was hurtful, now I find myself craving to do just that.
Sometimes, I voluntarily work with final project groups on directing technique for their films. I usually don’t have an allocation for this, but doing it makes everything else seem worthwhile. I get such an enormous amount of satisfaction both from being able to share something I love so much, and also from watching the knowledge I share make a very strong and lasting difference to students.
I’m not really sure what the point of this post is — or rather what solution I am proposing. I know that I am very privileged to have a job in my field at all, especially at this time in the history of the world. I do not want to be complaining about the exact nature of the subjects I teach. However I find that I am much more able to stay engaged and energised in my work when I have even a little time to teach the things I love. To stick with what I know.
I guess perhaps the solution is to keep trying to find a way to do that, within the situation I have. | https://medium.com/caraflame/stick-with-what-you-know-9dba33877b1c | ['Cara Flame 曲炎灵'] | 2020-12-12 07:04:01.537000+00:00 | ['Passion', 'Educators', 'Acting'] |
© @FULL BOOK © PDF ‘’Chainsaw Man, Vol. 2 (2)’’ [pdf books free] | [pdf Read Online] Chainsaw Man, Vol. 2 (2) ®Full Book [E-pub]
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Product details
Publisher : VIZ Media LLC (December 1, 2020)
VIZ Media LLC (December 1, 2020) Language: : English
English Paperback : 192 pages
192 pages ISBN-10 : 1974709949
1974709949 ISBN-13 : 978–1974709946
978–1974709946 Item Weight : 6 ounces
6 ounces Dimensions : 5 x 0.6 x 7.5 inches
Broke young man + chainsaw dog demon = Chainsaw Man!
Denji’s a poor young man who’ll do anything for money, even hunting down Devils with his pet devil-dog Pochita. But his life gets turned upside down when he’s betrayed by someone he trusts. Now with the power of a Devil inside him, Denji’s become a whole new man — Chainsaw Man!
In order to achieve the greatest goal in human history — to touch a boob — Denji will risk everything in a fight against the dangerous Bat Devil. But will getting what he wants actually make him happy…
Letting go is not a process that comes naturally to us. In a world that teaches us to cling to what we love at all costs, there is an undeniable art to moving on — and it’s one that we are constantly relearning. In this series of honest and poignant essays, Heidi Priebe explores the harsh reality of what it means to let go of the people and situations we love most — often before we are ready to — and how to embrace what comes next.
You can read more books Ready Player Two: A Novel without learning how to speed read.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to read more books Ready Player Two: A Novel in less time.
We’re going to cover the following topics:
What is the average reading speed?
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4 steps to reading a 240-page book Ready Player Two: A Novel in two hours
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Alright, happy reading!
>>>Happy Reading and Enjoy<<<
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Icame to Medium out of frustration. I had read an article in an online “prosumer” magazine that has the air of a serious scientific journal, but which fails to encompass the heart of science — the debate — by disallowing any comments or unsolicited rebuttals/responses to their articles.
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Do you want to publish a book on Medium?
Unfortunately, I had already manifested, through my furiously dancing fingertips, a 2,700 word essay pointing out the ignorance I felt strongly present in the magazine article, only to find there was no way to share it — cue Medium.com.
I was impressed with the response to the article on Medium, which was my first — 26K views, 7K reads, 611 fans, and 500 euros in my pocket to date. And I was even more impressed by the tools that Medium provides an author.
While the interface is as simple as paper, knowing what passages a reader highlights, how many views turn into full reads, how many people follow you after reading something that you write, what their interests are — so that you can see how people coming from different backgrounds engage with your writing — and of course, being able to have detailed responses to your work, are just nothing short of a godsend for an author. And this led me to try publishing a book on Medium.
The book is a big one, nearly 800 pages in paperback format. It’s that big because it is a collection of related writings: a set of meditation practices which are fairly simple, but which require detailed instructions since they are being communicated via text and not one-on-one guidance. However, the practices use an unusual support in place of the breath — which is the more common, but deficient in particular ways, support today. This then necessitates an explanation of the support’s uniqueness, part of which entails detailed quotations from current and ancient writings and related explanations, on this particular meditation support. But these all come from various spiritual traditions, and none of them are framed within our modern mechanistic materialism, thus there is a necessity to explain how things differ from how they are understood today, in order that the reader understand exactly what they are using. So it’s part philosophy, part science, part practice, and part historical documentation.
Why Publish a Book on Medium
You might think this is totally inappropriate for Medium, and there are some shortcomings, but for me the biggest reason to attempt publishing this book here is the potential audience, and the availability that Medium affords me as a writer.
While there are still many physical book readers — myself among them — the option to have a book on a mobile device is just such a no-brainer. And while Ebooks are good for large publishers who can (and do) command a nice bit of change for their product, for a small writer, ebooks don’t offer much of any benefit over what Medium provides. And in fact, the tools that Medium provides, which I mentioned above, are absent from ebooks.
And of course, having an ebook still leaves you searching for an audience.
So the biggest reason for launching a book on Medium has two aspects: availability and readers. Minor writers such as myself just don’t have the ability to make their work available to a very significant audience. My first book, which was self-published, was limited to Amazon’s various country web-stores. Although it enjoyed some limited success — especially for a philosophical work, it was difficult to find outside of Amazon’s universe. With Medium it is different. Anyone can access Medium.com from anywhere on Earth, so my work is widely available — and that was my biggest checkbox. And of course, the potential audience on Medium is not limited to merely members and current readers of Medium, but can be garnered via social media, word of mouth, and friends, all of whom can be directed to the Medium site, with little effort.
There is also the cost and hassle savings of not hosting your own blog, which was another alternative I considered. I still buy the domain names and setup email addresses as appropriate, but I no longer see any reason to host a website.
For many years I have maintained a Wordpress site, and that is a chore I don’t have time for. Such small websites have the same security and hacking worries as the biggest names, and it is all on your shoulders. I never realized just how much of a problem it is until I subscribed to a service available to Wordpress sites via a plugin called Wordfence, which not only scanned my server for hacks on a daily basis, but also monitored all traffic in and out. Once that was installed I could sit and watch the dozens of daily automated login attempts by hackers around the world trying to break into my site in order to hijack it into their botnets. If you have a personal website it is very likely part of a botnet, or even part of a crypto-currency mining operation. Sheesh. For a small writer it makes little sense anymore.
How to Publish a Structured Book on MediumAs for the nuts and bolts of doing it, there are three main issues you have to deal with: Medium is structured to publish “stories” of a limited length, so your work has to be forced into that format; Medium does not provide the kind of navigational tools that are available in an ebook; and readers on Medium don’t expect an article to be part of a larger work.
I’m going to take them in reverse order. It has been my experience, so far, that many Medium users don’t notice that the “story” they are reading is actually part of a larger work, even though it is in a “publication” on medium. I frequently receive responses to a carved-out “story” that is part of a larger section of the book where my reader explains to me all the things I should have said, which I have already said in the preceding and successive “stories” to that one in the book publication. This is a bit frustrating — for both the reader and myself, but hey!, Medium rocks at bringing me readers.
A related problem is that readers will see a “story” featured in one section of Medium and jump into it, while a subsequent part of the same section of the book will not be featured at all, or in some other section of Medium. Thus for the audience, continuity is fragmented.
So it is useful that Medium provides the “follow” mechanism for a publication, but it makes it incumbent upon the writer to release material in a sequential order so that the followers, who still might not realize it is a book — especially if they haven’t read the “About” introduction to it — will follow the text in somewhat of a logical order.
And of course, that workaround is only useful as you are publishing the book. Later, when the whole book is available in Medium, the sequential releasing is no longer in effect.
Given this problem, I have started to make use of the “hidden” story attribute that you can set on and off as needed in order to make sequences of articles only accessible in order, by only allowing the first part of a book section to be publicly announced, for example. The other parts are hyperlinked to the earlier ones.
The downside to that is that such unlisted stories are unavailable for generating income through the Members program of Medium.
Medium does provide a publication header on each story, that a reader can tap to get to the homepage of the publication, but I found it useful to add a standard footer image to each article as well, that provides the same function, as it is more useful — in my opinion — for the reader, after reading an article that they enjoyed, to be able to jump up to the homepage of the publication, rather than having to scroll up to the header.
When I find that I have to break a section of the book down into smaller “stories,” I add a notification below the main image so that the reader knows the “story” is part of a “sequence” of stories. I use the word “sequence” because “series” is a Medium term for a different kind of open-ended series, and “collection” does not have the same ordered sense.
I was not happy though that the only way to add this notification was either as a title/subtitle or as standard text — even with bolding and italicization available. I wanted something that was clearly setoff from my text in a different typeface, but not overshadowing it in any way either. I realized that what I wanted was a font size and style much like that of the attribution found underneath images on Medium.
My solution was to do exactly that, only with a non-visible and diminutive image. I found a 1-pixel transparent gif and I place that where I want the notification to appear. Then I place the hyperlinked text of the notification, usually linking back to the table of contents (I’ll explain shortly) for that sequence of articles, in the attribution area of the image. Voila!
The line “Do you want to publish a book on Medium?” at the top of this story, under the main image, is an example of what it looks like, although I didn’t place a link on it.
Navigation was another problem. Each publication has a navigation bar that appears just below the header of the publication’s homepage — and only there — and this is limited to a single level of story or featured stories pages.
Thus, your menu structure is normally restricted to just a top-level list of sections or groupings, each of which can only have a single story, or a list of stories without any deeper structure — you can only have a collection of stories that share a tag, a single story, or a page of featured stories. That wasn’t going to work for me, and for a while I was stymied about how to have the kind of complex hierarchy that I needed.
The first thing I did was to reproduce the publication’s navigation bar near the top of every story page in the book. I place it just above the start of the text, underneath the title. I did this because my book has a structural flow, and not just a collection of articles. Being able to move back-and-forth between sections makes sense for the kind of book I am publishing, where the reader may want to refer to another part of the text for needed information.
As an added bonus, the navigation bar I created adds a degree of empty space between the title and the body of text which in my opinion looks nicer.
I place the navigation bar in the same way I discussed above, by placing a 1 pixel transparent gif image at the location, and adding my hyperlinked top-level menu sections in the image’s attribution line. This is what the secondary navigation menu for my book looks like.ABOUT | PROEM | PRELIMINARIES | PRACTICES | INSIGHTS | APHORISMS | BACK MATTER
The one problem I was confronted with was that the long urls of each story do not always work in the apps. (I know not why) Instead, you have to use a short url, consisting of only the unique identifier of each article, if you want to create a “table of contents” to directly link to stories. Here is how I do this:
I create a story without tags and no images that will serve as a table of contents for a subsection of the book. The title is the section name, or name of the sequence of “stories” that I have cut a long section of text into. The subtitle is just “Table of Contents.” You can then add hyperlinked titles and optional short descriptions to construct your table of contents.
Note that this “story” should be unlisted so that it doesn’t appear as a story on your profile, and untagged so that it doesn’t show up in any kind of search, in case you decide to have it listed. Of course, your needs will dictate how you decide to do this. There is nothing wrong with having a TOC discoverable in a search, and available for payment under the Medium Partner program.
For example, the “About” story of Tranquillity’s Secret is accessible with this url:
To find the identifier for a story, you look at its url in a browser and copy the identifier, which is a sequence of 12 numbers and letters (a hexadecimal number). When I do this in Safari on my laptop, the url for the “About” story looks like this:
Note the bolded identifier at the end of the url — this is the number you want to append on the short form url, as I did in my example.
A story’s url can take on different forms, so it is not always structured as in the previous example. This is what a friend’s link to the About story looks like:
Note that the story identifier appears just before the question mark “?” appearing in the link. I’ve put it in bold again in the example above. The other longer string of numbers and letters at the end of the url is the bypass token for Medium’s paywall. As an aside, I had to make the About eligible for payment under the Partners program in order for a “friend’s link” to be created.
When you are editing a story, even before publishing it, there is a slightly different url, which looks like this:
Note again that the unique identifier is there just before the “/edit.” Note also, that you can just copy this initial url and truncate that suffix off of it to obtain the short url form directly.
However, you can’t link an unlisted story into the main Navigation bar of a publication, so you first have to create the TOC story, setting it as unlisted, and publish it. This way neither your followers, nor anyone else on Medium will receive a notification/email about its publication, then list it again and tie it into the Navigation bar. Once you’ve done that you can — and probably should — unlist it a final time. It will still be accessible when clicked on the navigation bar.
The final piece of the navigation puzzle is to use another hyperlinked attribution line (as in the above examples) to the next article in sequence within the book at the end of the article. I do this before any footnotes, above the footer for the publication. Here is what it looks like:
Continue on to What is Meditation? 👉The end result of applying these methods is a good usability case for publishing a book on Medium.
In the apps, tapping on any one of these hyperlinks results in a quick overwrite of the present page. Returning to the previous page, in effect, backtracking through your browsing history, is built-in to the Medium apps. Simply tap on the left angle bracket in the top left corner of your display. This will return you to the page you came from. Continuing to tap on this icon will continue to backtrack to previous pages.
In the browser, the effect of clicking on one of the hyperlinks is different — a new browser page for each story opens. It’s not as friction-free as the mobile apps are, but I haven’t found a solution for this yet. You can set the browsers default behavior to opening a new tab, instead of a new window, but you still end up with a lot of tabs or windows, without the ability to retrace your progress through the book in an automated way. Instead, you have to click on the tab or window for the previous story or menu.
Finally, the medium apps allow readers to bookmark a story, and even archive it for later use, both of which are useful in reading your publication as a book.
Closing Thoughts
So far the results of this have been beyond anything I thought would happen. The publication has garnered 50 followers very quickly, and a significantly higher number of visitors each day. It is, in fact, now taking off, as more readers run across it.
But this brings up the last issue with publishing a book such as this on Medium: you are limited to only a certain number of stories published each day. If you exceed that limit — which I did one day trying to gain momentum in the process of publishing the book — you get an error message that your account is locked. Presumably, Medium has that as a protection for spamming.
The only solution to this is to use the scheduling function for publishing your books “stories,” so that the stories are published in an orderly fashion without exceeding the Medium imposed limit.
That’s It so far. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!. | https://medium.com/@vsdvdsbsdb1/full-book-pdf-chainsaw-man-vol-2-2-pdf-books-free-9ffe34c53d03 | [] | 2020-12-26 04:53:41.293000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Book Review'] |
Domain, Subdomain, Bounded Context, Problem/Solution Space in DDD: Clearly Defined | Domain-Driven Design is an approach to designing systems, usually software, that emphasises creating a common language between domain experts and system builders. Famous DDD principles include Use a Ubiquitous Language and Make The Implicit Explicit.
However, some concepts in DDD do not have a clear definition and are highly implicit. Everybody has their own definition of Domain, Subdomain, Problem Space and Solution space. In this article, I’m going to provide working definitions of those concepts and clear them up.
This post is based on a long conversation on github involving many people from the DDD community. Thank you to all involved.
Fuzzy But Not Ambiguous
Before defining each term, I want to emphasise an important point that Kenny Baas-Schwegler makes. He argues that DDD should be fuzzy. By having fuzziness in DDD, we can explore, model and solve new and novel problems because the existing patterns and principles don’t over-constrain our thinking.
By fuzzy I mean that a word can be used to describe different things that are similar in some way but not identical. The word “few” is a good example. In some scenarios it might imply a low range like 2 — 3 and in others it could imply a different range like 5–10. In others it can mean £100s of pounds “can you lend me a few quid?”. The key thing is that the fuzziness should be easily inferred from context (if different people interpret it in significantly different ways, that’s too ambiguous).
If I say a word and I expect that you have the same definition, but you actually have a very different definition, we have false alignment. We think we’re talking about the same thing but we’re not.
Credit: Jeff Patton https://www.jpattonassociates.com/read-this-first/
With DDD, we want to embrace fuzzy, but with shared understanding of how fuzzy each concept can be.
The following definitions are fuzzy, however, we should all be highly-aligned when using these words.
Domains
Domain-Driven Design sticks closely to the Cambridge Dictionary definition of a domain:
an area of interest or an area over which a person has control: She treated the business as her private domain. These documents are in the public domain (= available to everybody).
This definition of a domain is very fuzzy. What is an area of interest? It can be anything. A domain is effectively an arbitrary boundary around some subset of concepts in the universe.
Domains are subjective and they are not mutually exclusive. The same concepts can exist in many different domains. Here’s an example I use in talks and workshops:
How to group these concepts into domains?
If the coloured shapes in the image above represent concepts, how would they be grouped into domains? As you can guess, there are a number of ways to do this.
We can group the square shapes into the Squares domain, and the circles in the Circles domain. But the blue square and the blue circle could also belong to the Blue domain.
The same concepts can belong to different domains
When modelling systems we have to choose the most appropriate domain boundaries with which to align our software and organisational boundaries. Even if we align we align by ‘colour’ the shape domain is still a domain that exists.
Every domain I model and every modelling workshop I run, different people like to slice up systems across different domain boundaries. This is normal, embrace the fuzziness and apply design thinking.
Subdomains
What’s the difference between a domain and a subdomain? This one is easy — subdomain is not a word that exists in the dictionary. The word subdomain is used prominently in the world of web hosting, but what does it mean in DDD?
In DDD, a subdomain is a relative term. Domain and subdomain can be used interchangeably. When we use the word subdomain, we are emphasising that the domain we are talking about is a child of another higher-level domain which we have identified.
Every subdomain is, therefore, a domain, and most domains are a subdomain. The only time I wouldn’t say a domain is also a subdomain is when our model does not contain a higher-level parent domain.
Core, Generic, Supporting (Sub)Domains
People are often confused when they hear that a core domain is actually a subdomain. In his DDD books, Eric Evans refers to them as Core Domains, but he also refers to them as subdomains. Confusing much?
When you view domains and subdomains as fuzzy, and subdomains also as domains, using core domain and core subdomain interchangeably doesn’t really matter. It’s fuzzy but not ambiguous.
Core Domain sounds better, Core Subdomain emphasises that there is a higher-level domain to which this belongs.
Problem Space vs Solution Space: A Better Model For DDD
The most confusing terms are problem space and solution space. Everybody has a different view on what lives in the problem space and what lives in the solution space in the context of Domain-Driven Design.
I think the problem/solution space model is too simplified for what DDD is trying to express. It is too ambiguous and more precision is needed. The elements in Simon Wardley’s Strategy cycle are much more usable in my opinion.
Simon Wardley’s Strategy Cycle
In Wardley’s Strategy Cycle, there are the following elements (with my simplified definitions):
Purpose : what is the problem being solved / goal to be achieved in our domain(s) of interest?
: what is the problem being solved / goal to be achieved in our domain(s) of interest? Landscape : what is the current state of the domain(s) we are interested in
: what is the current state of the domain(s) we are interested in Climate : what forces are acting on the domain(s) and how are they likely to evolve
: what forces are acting on the domain(s) and how are they likely to evolve Doctrine : universally good practices we should apply
: universally good practices we should apply Leadership: what is our solution… what changes are we going to make in existing and new domain(s)
Are Domains/Subdomains Problem or Solution Space?
This question can’t really be answered unless we have a clear definition of problem or solution space. But I’ll have a go anyway.
User needs and problems exist in a (sub)domain(s), the current state of the world has (sub)domains, the solution will involve multiple (sub)domains and it will alter the state of the world (which has domains). Therefore, (sub)domains logically exist in all spaces.
How can a subdomain only exist in the problem space when the design determines which subdomains we need to build solutions in? Ergo, some domains are only relevant to the solution and not the problem.
My understanding of problem and solution space in DDD. There are many other definitions out there.
New solutions create new problems, or in the words of Simon Wardley Higher Order Systems Create New Sources of Worth.
I still recommend avoid using problem/space and instead be more specific about what you actually mean: purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine, leadership, or something else.
Whenever using the terms problem space and solution space, you need to clarify from which perspective you are speaking. Your problem space is someone else’s solution space. It’s your view of the domain.
Domains are Hierarchical
If a domain can contain subdomains, and a subdomain is a domain… then a subdomain can contain more fine-grained subdomains. Domains and subdomains are a hierarchical concept.
When designing socio-technical systems, we often want to show domains at different levels. Leadership of an organisation might want to see the companies 7 top-level domains. Software architects might want to see the domain boundaries for 100 microservices.
The Enterprise Architecture world uses the concept of Business Capabilities at different levels. Business Capabilities can be viewed as domains and subdomains.
Domains are hierarchical and they represent business capabilities
Subdomain vs Bounded Context
This is one of the most confusing things about DDD, but when you have a clear definition of subdomain it’s actually the simplest to explain.
I’ve already established that a (sub)domain is a non-mutually-exclusive, arbitrary subset of concepts in the universe. A bounded context is the boundary of a model that represents those concepts, their relationships, and their rules. The same subdomain could be represented by an infinite number of modelling choices.
A model in DDD can be represented in a variety of formats such as post-it notes or code. Anything that shows domain concepts, relationships, rules, and so on.
Since a bounded context is a boundary for a model, it could include concepts from multiple subdomains. Or a single subdomain could be modelled as multiple bounded contexts.
Subdomains vs Bounded Contexts: Areas of the domain vs boundaries of models of the domain
Agree or Disagree?
Do you agree with these definitions, and are you happy to use them going forward? If not, please leave a comment. I care more about creating a shared understanding in the DDD community than pushing my definitions as the de facto standards. I’m very happy to change my mind… | https://medium.com/nick-tune-tech-strategy-blog/domains-subdomain-problem-solution-space-in-ddd-clearly-defined-e0b49c7b586c | ['Nick Tune'] | 2020-11-28 13:45:08.792000+00:00 | ['Systems Thinking', 'Software Architecture', 'Domain Driven Design'] |
The Best program to unlock your Hip Flexors | The "Hidden Survival Muscle" In Your Body Missed By Modern Physicians That Keep Millions Of Men And Women Defeated By Pain, Frustrated With Belly Fat, And Struggling To Feel Energized Every Day…
While not everyone can have “hips as agile” as Shakira, we can all benefit from strengthening the muscles that support this ball-and-socket joint. Our hips aren’t only responsible for the rocking dance moves we bust out on occasion, but they’re also a vital area for runners, bikers, and nonathletes alike.
Sitting for much of the day — something almost all of us are guilty of — contributes to tight hip flexors. Tight hip flexors can cause lower back pain, hip pain, and injury.
And hip problems don’t stop there. According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, hip replacements are on the rise in the United States. They peak among adults in early middle age.
To ensure that you won’t find yourself busting your body while busting a move — or simply walking down the street — here are nine great hip flexor exercises to keep your hip area strong and flexible.
“Reminder” the stronger your hip flexors are, the better chance you have of keeping them injury-free and off the operating tablet!
There is a great program that is quite simply Done-For-You. 👇
IT'S TIME TO BREATHE NEW LIFE, ENERGY AND STRENGTH INTO YOUR BODY BY UNLOCKING YOUR HIP FLEXORS.
CLAIM YOUR COPY WITH FREE BONUSES NOW
adam husler / Adriene Lopes_2017059.Eletronuclear / Laura Fitton | https://medium.com/@qusaisami101/the-best-program-to-unlock-your-hip-flexors-acf79b94a171 | ['Qusai Sami'] | 2020-12-25 18:09:06.715000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Yoga', 'Stretching', 'Happy', 'Muscles'] |
Establishing a network perimeter | This may seem a little obvious however one of the most important decisions you can make in the design of a k8s system is identifying the need for a system perimeter. All networks have perimeters, including public cloud services, and understanding how the k8s system fits will ensure that the level of security you require will be maintained.
The perimeter is the network boundary where access is controlled to the hosts that reside within. In Enterprises these are often called zones and access to and between these zones is controlled with firewalls. In a non-cloud native environment, those network devices are independently managed, either manually or using network-specific orchestration systems. In a cloud-native system, the k8s system is used for this function.
The most important question is do you need one? If your system is a lab system, is already within an enterprise security zone and access from other zones including the external internet is not required, there are few constraints on your network design. However, if your applications require external or intra-zone access the solution can get significantly more complex, especially if network administration is outside of our control, the choices you have to integrate your k8s system and build a cloud-native infrastructure may be limited.
What access is required?
One of the great things about k8s is that once installed, routine access to the underlying infrastructure is only required by the infra-team.
kubectl. All system users require access to the command line tool kubectl for operation and connecting to a running container to get a shell prompt where necessary. Installed on remote machines it used TLS for all API traffic, with API authorization dependent upon your configuration and API authorization provided by RBAC.
Services. Services are required to expose any POD running in the complex. Services exposed with NodePort require access to the host interface, those exposed via LoadBalancer can be configured to avoid direct access to the hosts as can externalIPs.
Boundary Alternatives
Rely on the existing infrastructure. The existing infrastructure will provide at least the same level of perimeter security that previously existed. Your cloud native workflow will be impacted without some additional work on your behalf. When a service is created to expose an application that requires access from outside the perimeter, firewall rules will need to be adjusted and without some automation will need to be fairly permissive. Creating an operator to manage your external access is an alternative or if you have a BGP capable device a solution like metallb can help although it depends on specific functionality not present in some popular routers. Of course access for kubectl is still required.
Develop a new boundary. A new boundary is the best solution, even if it is contained within the existing infrastructure. A new boundary protects the k8s hosts, provides access to applications controlled by k8s integrated with workflow, and ensures access is controlled by k8s. With a new boundary established, the new boundary devices can be attached to any existing network without security concern.
CNI role in the Perimeter
Many CNI’s have default configurations designed to avoid getting into network administration, these CNI’s default to tunneling. The purpose described by the CNI is to provide connectivity between POD networks on hosts however, there is nothing unique about routing between hosts, just involvement from the networking team is required.
However the CNI can become more important should an existing perimeter be used and the k8s hosts are interspersed with other hosts. As the other hosts may have access to the nodes, host firewall rules are required. Manually implementing these rules is impossible as services are dynamically defined and k8s manages host forwarding. Network policy is included as part of k8s but requires support from the CNI, however not all have this support. Using network policy is good practice anyway in a layered approach to security.
A simple design
A simple design that we have previously uses creates a perimeter around all of the k8s hosts and its required service hosts.
In this design, storage is provided by Ceph and the storage nodes are separated from the k8s system (we didn’t use rook) to reduce fate sharing. The storage system could be used independently of k8s via an s3 gateway. To provide access to kubectl and S3, a number of proxies were deployed using haproxy and TLS was passed though to allow k8s and ceph to control access.
In addition to the k8s and ceph nodes, there are other service hosts deployed inside the perimeter. These included the hosts necessary to install hosts and switches as well as other basic functions such as external DNS and important for ceph, NTP. These hosts required access by the infrastructure team so a VPN gateway was added with access for only the infrastructure team.
Services are exposed using the LoadBalancer mechanism. Within the k8s system there are a number of ingresses including a service mesh. We used MetalLb in BGP to mode allocate and advertise IP addresses for external services and updated the external DNS using ExternalDNS for Kubernetes. This automation enabled a service to be exposed and DNS entries created based upon a service definition.
The specifics of routing will vary based upon your environment. If directly connected to a public service provider, all of the traffic would be routed via the same router used by the services.
Summary
Thinking about the perimeter structure during the development of k8s infrastructure is critical, especially if you are trying to create a similar development experience to public cloud. Getting stuck with legacy firewall and security processes will have your developers quickly moving back to the convenience of public cloud. | https://medium.com/thermokline/establishing-a-network-perimeter-9e1f3e714e38 | ['Adam Dunstan'] | 2020-05-07 12:58:42.093000+00:00 | ['Kubernetes', 'Network Security', 'Networking'] |
Dash Investment Foundation (DFI) Has Invested In Craypay That Will Enable Users To Pay In Dash At 155,000 Merchants Across US | Dash Investment Foundation (DFI) Has Invested In Craypay That Will Enable Users To Pay In Dash At 155,000 Merchants Across US The Crypto Basic Follow Jan 13 · 2 min read
The Dash Investment Foundation (DFI) has invested in CrayPay. This would soon make it possible to pay with Dash at 155,000 retailers in the USA.
Dash and CrayPay want to work together to make the cryptocurrency accessible to thousands of people. CrayPay is a loyalty payment platform that enables users to earn instant savings at a variety of national chains (US). With these discounts or bonus promotions, you get cost benefits at over 155,000 retail stores and can shop on more than 75 US retailer websites.
In coordination with DIF’s investment, Dash Core Group has entered into an agreement to create a White-Label version of CrayPay exclusively for Dash users. The Dash network is perfect for the CrayPay App thanks to the low transaction fees, as payments can be processed quickly.
Dash drives adaptation forward
In addition, users of Dash will receive significant savings through the CrayPay App. The platform supports a variety of locations, and the more you use it, the bigger the discounts you get. Ryan Taylor, CEO, Dash Core Group said:
“CrayPay is the perfect solution to provide Dash users with a convenient method of spending their Dash at a huge number of merchant locations, through an application that delivers a great purchase experience. Not only will users have access to more spending opportunities for their Dash, but they can save significantly more than they could paying with a cash-back credit card, providing a strong incentive for using Dash as often as possible.”
Marshall Greenwald, CEO, CrayPay
“We’re excited to work with the Dash community to bring our loyalty program to Dash users. Dash’s InstantSend technology eliminates chargeback risks, which enables CrayPay to instantly authorize payment to our merchant partners, so Dash really is the best option for instant low-cost payments on our platform.”
Dash user will get many saving opportunities offered in CrayPay App platform, along with a wide number of locations supported, Dash user savings will increase with time as they will achieve different milestones and use the app more. | https://medium.com/the-capital/dash-investment-foundation-dfi-has-invested-in-craypay-that-will-enable-users-to-pay-in-dash-at-67d1157c6559 | ['The Crypto Basic'] | 2021-01-14 02:49:53.395000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency News', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Altcoins', 'Dash'] |
Daily Newsletter — 27th December 2020 | An Autograd library for Javascript, adding AI to your career and a Deep Learning Computer Vision Library in today’s Data Science Daily 📰
AI+X: Adding AI to your Career 🤖
AI may be the most trending career choice right now and we see many professionals and students looking to transition to or start a career in it. But rather than abandoning your current career track to become a data scientist or a machine learning engineer, consider developing AI skills to complement your existing subject matter expertise.
AI+X individuals can hit the ground running, enabling companies to tackle new business opportunities more rapidly. Training a biotech engineer in AI could take months, but training an AI practitioner to understand biotechnologies could take years before meaningful output. A subject matter expert who comes with, or can develop AI skills is a much better investment.
Read more in the article below by Kian Katanforoosh
Article: https://kiankatan.medium.com/ai-x-dont-switch-careers-add-ai-34eff21dd3e1
deepnet.js — Autograd library for Javascript ⚡
deepnet.js is an auto-differentiation library for javascript. it will dynamically build a computational graph while doing the math operations and compute the gradients during the backward pass.
Autograd (Automatic Differentiation) is a technique which uses a computational graph to compute derivatives automatically. In its forward phase it is used to execute the math operation and constructs the computational graph, and In the backward phase, the derivatives are computed automatically.
GitHub: https://github.com/karthiTox/deepnet.js
Glasses: Deep Learning Computer Vision Library 😎
Here’s a compact, concise and customizable deep learning computer vision library by Francesco Saverio Zuppichini
Features
human-readable code, no research code
common components are shared across models
same APIs for all models (you learn them once and they are always the same)
clear and easy to use model customization (see here)
classification and segmentation
Website: https://francescosaveriozuppichini.github.io/glasses-webapp/
Doc: https://francescosaveriozuppichini.github.io/glasses/index.html
GitHub: https://github.com/FrancescoSaverioZuppichini/glasses
Contact Us 📞
Reach out to us on [email protected] to get featured here. Learn data science and machine learning with free hands-on data science courses on Jovian.
Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to stay updated. | https://medium.com/jovianml/daily-newsletter-27th-december-2020-d7e8d2351cdf | ['Hemanth Janesh'] | 2020-12-27 14:53:19.042000+00:00 | ['Newsletter', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning'] |
billboard.js 3.1 release: subchart & data loading enhancements! | This release comes with 6 new features added & 10 bug fixes.
For the detailed release info, please checkout the release note:
https://github.com/naver/billboard.js/releases/tag/3.1.0
What’s New?
Contain inline css props
From this release, some of inline css properties are removed to be set.
Why contain?
Mainly because inline css props interfering user’s style definition to be applied. Before the v3.1 , to overwrite inline css props, needed to specify !important rule on each of affected props.
This worked fine in some extent, but is a tedious and unnecessary.
To improve this, removed those inlined css props where the default behaves same way. The affected list of properties are:
opacity: 1
visibility: “visible”
display: “block”
If these(with corresponding value) aren’t specified(or defined), will behaves same way as specified value. So, basically removing will not affect the current rendering and will make more flexibility to be controlled by user’s own css rule definition.
Inlined ‘opacity:1’ (bottom screenshot) removed from the elements(top screenshot).
subchart.init.range
This new option will make to initialize zoom-in indicated subchart range.
Simply indicate the range, and the initial chart will be rendered as indicated range value.
subchart: {
enabled: true,
init: {
// specify initial range domain selection
range: [2, 4]
}
}
This option will make to visualize the area to emphasize specified data.
Example screenshot of initial subchart range.
subchart.showHandle
Subchart’s selection range is controlled by drag interaction. The selected area is shown during the drag interaction, letting user to recognize easily the amount of area.
After selection range is set, the range can be modified dragging left/right corner of the selection square. This isn’t very noticeable before, because the selection range doesn’t give any perception as modifiable range.
To improve this, added option to visualize a “handler”, where user easily notice controllable range.
subchart: {
show: true,
showHandle: true
}
After specifying subchart.showHandle , will appear a handle control at each edge of the selection range square box.
Data load append option
Dynamic data loading is one of the most used functionality.
One of the most request from the community was the ability to “append” loaded data to the current.
Before the v3.1 , when load API is called,
// Given chart
const chart = bb.generate({
data: {
x: "x",
xFormat: "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S",
columns: [
["x", "2021-01-03T03:00:00", "2021-01-04T12:00:00", "2021-01-05T21:00:00"],
["data1", 36, 30, 24]
]
},
axis: {
x: {
type: "timeseries"
}
}
});
// load new data
chart.load({
columns: [
["x", "2021-01-13T08:00:00", "2021-01-15T08:00:00"],
["data1", 37, 40]
]
1});
The current data was unloaded, and new loaded data was replacing it.
When .load() is called, the current dataset is replaced by the new loaded data.
If want append to the current, it needed to load whole data series’ dataset again. This wasn’t very ideal approach way at all.
From this release, introduced new append option, where just specifying it, will make to append it rather than replacing the current dataset.
// load new data by appending it.
chart.load({
columns: [
// when existing chart has `x` value, should provide
// corresponding 'x' value.
// with 'append' option, the 'data1' will have `[36,30,24,37, 40]`.
["x", "2021-01-13T08:00:00", "2021-01-15T08:00:00"],
["data1", 37, 40]
],
append: true
});
With ‘append’ option, will append the new dataset to the current.
data.onshown/onhidden
These new option will give an alternative option to trigger some connected tasks during dataseries’ visibility changes.
Simply, set callback function for each occasion.
data: {
onshown: function(ids) {
console.log("data shown:", ids);
},
onhidden: function(ids) {
console.log("data hidden:", ids);
},
}
Whenever the visualized dataseries’ visibility changes, will trigger the specified callback function.
data.labels.backgroundColors
This enhancement will make to render data label text background’s color with very simple effort.
To make this possible for svg element, normally it needed to add new element for that purpose. But adding new element for this will make to sacrifice performance.
So, we approached this via filter attribute, not adding any new element to fulfill this.
There’re two ways to apply background colors. Apply for entire texts or specify different color for each dataseries.
Note: If specifies color value using rgba, can control the opacity for background color.
data: {
labels: {
backgroundColors: "yellow", // or specify colors for each dataseries.
backgroundColors: {
data1: "green",
data2: "rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2)"
}
}
}
What’s Next?
The planned next release will be September. As always, we will be working to implement and enhance new functionality to bring ease data visualization on web platform.
Stay tuned for the next release!
See ya~ 😃 | https://medium.com/@netil/billboard-js-3-1-release-subchart-data-loading-enhancements-e98be5eebdcb | ['Jae Sung Park'] | 2021-06-25 06:41:20.737000+00:00 | ['https://github.com/naver/billboard.js/releases/tag/3.1.0', 'D3js', 'Charts', 'JavaScript', 'Data Visualization'] |
Getting Your Product Reimbursed by Payers | Getting Your Product Reimbursed by Payers
A Guide for Health Tech Startups
“I’ll just get a CPT code.” Good luck with that! What does it really take for a payer to reimburse providers for your product? What is the reimbursement decision process that payers use to decide whether to cover a new technology? Coverage, coding, and payment are the three pillars of a reimbursement strategy, and this webinar covers each of these topics so founders can develop a strategic plan early in the product development process to ensure a positive coverage and reimbursement outcome. Hospitals and physicians may love your startup, but public and private payers reimburse, so they set the rules. Startup founders can learn…
How to create a reimbursement strategy
How to use clinical trials to support coverage decisions
How the CMS coverage process differs from the way private payers reimburse
Panelists:
Meghan Fotopoulos | Accenture | Managing Director | @accenture
Sidonia Swarm | Real Dietician | Founder | @sidoniarose
Daniel Brown | IBX | Director, Provider Reimbursement | @IBX | https://medium.com/dreamit-perspectives/getting-your-product-reimbursed-by-payers-98684eddd276 | ['Charles Lacalle'] | 2017-04-12 20:15:27.952000+00:00 | ['Healthcare', 'Digital Health'] |
[Market Info] How much Mining Rewards are there? | This article lists the Mining Rewards and policies from major Defi players in the market, as of 3 Dec 2020. The Mining Rewards exclude: 1) platforms that give out tokens only for staking their own platform tokens or only for trading pairs involving their own platform tokens; 2) platforms that give out only interests and not platform tokens as rewards.
Comprehensive lists are from https://www.coingecko.com/en/yield-farming; https://debank.com/invest; https://coinmarketcap.com/yield-farming/
Below are the results of 24 defi platforms. Over 4 million USD worth of rewards is dished out EVERY DAY. (*Uniswap is yet to be voted but it’s expected to come in mid-Dec.)
We have made a few observations from the table above:
1) The USD value of the rewards is much dependent on the prices of the platform tokens, e.g. the price of SUSHI has a very large bearing on the total rewards as well as the APY of each pool. And as the prices of these tokens are very much faster than the liquidity level, the resultant APY can be misleading (that’s why we did not disclose the APYs).
2) A lot of these platforms are new. A large portions of these platforms have just been created a few months back, if not only weeks. Some do not even have a product yet. There’s question mark on the value proposition of these platforms, and so should every investor be sensible about the execution risks. If you are really defi-enthusiastic, we would rather encourage you to invest a little bit into the platform tokens first, so that your liquidity principal is not at risk; it’s more risky but the exposure is much smaller.
3) The mining rewards are at its peak. Mining rewards are diminishing in the long run. So what you get today might be less tomorrow. It’s not fair to assume that the rewards today to last forever, even it’s announced so, the community governance might change it. So APY is a relatively measure but not an undertaking of your earnings for the year. Mining Rewards is the way, and not the end.
4) Eventually, some platforms will emerge as the new cornerstones of the defi industry, and be of long-term value to the blockchain industry or even the financial industry as a whole. We are moving forward as a meaningful force in the industry, collectively bringing changes. But some projects will perish, some will be proved to be dysfunc, and some will become scams. Only time will tell. If you believe in the platform, be part of it — use it and be involved in the community — and do not just look at the price. What made Ethereum great today is not its price, but the people building it. So true for other projects.
5) Do not assume stablecoins are of the same risks or no risks. Do not assume derivatives of ETH or BTC are the same as ETH and BTC. There are risks in design, security and execution. Understand the risks you are taking, before you take them. Do not underestimate the market efficiency and how smart the other people in this industry are — it’s a jungle as there’s no law other than code.
Follow our twitter as PM if you need the reference links for these above mining reward program’s sources. @serenityfund
(Serenity Team, 4 Dec 2020)
Also, Read | https://medium.com/coinmonks/market-info-how-much-mining-rewards-are-there-e3cc59fc0f3c | ['The Serenity Fund'] | 2020-12-28 13:49:17.616000+00:00 | ['Yield Farming', 'Ethereum', 'Defi', 'Liquidity Mining', 'Farming'] |
Layout Grid Advantages in Figma | Layout Grid Advantages in Figma
I can say that one of the most useful features in Figma in the layout grid.
The designer aims to make a usable design, the software developer aims to code the design in the best way. For the software developer, the most important details are not visible in the design, but invisible. The reason for this is to prepare products compatible with different screens.
I will show a few examples of the layout grid on an app I designed.
Working on Mobile and Web
It is very important to work with the grid system for a codable design. We divide the frames into grids so that all elements are compatible with different screens. For example, the 8-point Grid System is preferred for mobile. For the web, 960 Grid System is mostly preferred.
Working with Layout Grid in bars
We may want to divide the content in bars horizontally by 3 by 4 and sometimes even by 5. The tab bar is a good example of this. In the design I made, I divided the tab bar into 4;
The first question was; how do I adjust the distance between them? Of course, I could set it manually but that’s not a good idea. I used the layout grid system for this. I wanted each icon to be positioned in the middle of its own grid. Of course, there are other features as well. Let’s see how it works;
We need layout gray not only for the tab bar but also for other components. In fact, we can use the layout grid for most components that can stretch horizontally.
I prefer not to use a layout grid in some components. Because sometimes it just complicates the design and there is no need to use it. For example, let’s look at a different navigation bar in the design;
There are 2 icons and a text in a frame. It doesn’t have an auto-layout or layout grid. We know that the text element will be a title or a subtitle. For this reason, the article will not be long enough to overflow the navbar.
I positioned the items in the frame. I also set the text position to align center. And here is the result; | https://uxplanet.org/layout-grid-advantages-in-figma-2c84be5a930c | ['Ali Çorak'] | 2020-11-18 19:41:53.293000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Prototyping', 'UI Design', 'Mobile App Development', 'Figma'] |
Containerize your .NET Core app – the right way | There are millions of use cases out there and that’s why there isn’t a one fits all solution. I would like to introduce you to two different options I use most. You will get all the details to decide which of them works best for you. Let us start with the basics first.
The common way
This is a common example Dockerfile which comes across my way quite often:
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/aspnet:3.1 WORKDIR /app
COPY /app/output . EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", " sample-mvc .dll"]
There is nothing particularly wrong with it. It will work, but it is not tuned or optimized at all. Neither for performance nor for security-related issues and therefore not optimal for a production environment. Some examples are:
containers executing their process as root
an inefficient sorting order that results in slower build times due to invalid image layer caches
an improper image layer management that affects the final image size
slower builds due to missing .dockerignore file
Let’s have a closer look at another Dockerfile example:
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/sdk:3.1 WORKDIR /app
ADD /src .
RUN dotnet publish \
-c Release \
-o ./output EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", " sample-mvc .dll"]
This example uses a containerized build. This means that the application build itself is moved into the Docker build process. Doing this a pretty good pattern that allows you to build in an immutable and isolated build environment with all dependencies build in. But as a downside, you need to build your image based on a bigger SDK image. The SDK image provides the needed dependencies to build the application but wouldn’t be needed to execute it afterward. Luckily, there is a solution that addresses this particular issue.
Multi-stage builds
If you are using a similar version of the above Dockerfiles you might not have heard about a feature called multi-stage build. Multi-stage builds allow us to split our image build process into multiple stages.
The first stage is used to build our application that requires that we need to provide the required dependencies. In the second stage, we are copying the application artifacts into a smaller runtime environment which then is used as our final image. This corresponding Dockerfile could look like this:
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/sdk:3.1 AS build-env WORKDIR /app
ADD /src .
RUN dotnet publish \
-c Release \
-o ./output FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/aspnet:3.1 WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=build-env /app/output . EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", " sample-mvc .dll"]
Let’s take a closer look at the individual steps:
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/sdk:3.1 AS build-env
...
RUN dotnet publish \
-c Release \
-o ./output
...
Our first stage is based on the SDK image which provides all dependencies to build our app.
...
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/aspnet:3.1
...
COPY --from=build-env /app/output .
...
In the second stage, we define a new base image that this time only contains our runtime dependencies. We then copy the application artifacts from the first stage into the second one.
With this in place, we are now able to build a smaller and more secure container image because it only contains the dependencies needed to execute the application. But we still have room for further improvement which we talk about in the next paragraph.
If you like to learn more about Dockerfile best practices I would recommend you check out this page of the official Docker documentation.
You have the choice
As already mentioned above, there isn’t a single best practice. It varies from use case to use case. With the examples below, you will get two blueprints as well as their pros and cons, which you can then use to adapt them according to your needs.
A good starting point
The below Dockerfile is an optimized version of the above multi-stage example and should be a good fit for most scenarios.
ARG VERSION=3.1-alpine3.10 FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/sdk:$VERSION AS build-env WORKDIR /app ADD /src/*.csproj .
RUN dotnet restore ADD /src .
RUN dotnet publish \
-c Release \
-o ./output
RUN adduser \
--disabled-password \
--home /app \
--gecos '' app \
&& chown -R app /app
USER app
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=build-env /app/output .
ENV DOTNET_RUNNING_IN_CONTAINER=true \
ASPNETCORE_URLS= FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/aspnet:$VERSIONRUN adduser \--disabled-password \--home /app \--gecos '' app \&& chown -R app /appUSER appWORKDIR /appCOPY --from=build-env /app/output .ENV DOTNET_RUNNING_IN_CONTAINER=true \ASPNETCORE_URLS= http://+:8080 EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "sample-mvc.dll"]
Again, we take a closer look at the individual steps:
ARG VERSION=3.1-alpine3.10
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/sdk:$VERSION AS build-env
...
We are first defining our base image tag using an ARG instruction. This helps us to easily update the tag instead of changing several lines. As you may have noticed, we use a different tag. The tag 3.1-alpine3.10 states that this image contains the ASPNET version 3.1 and is based on Alpine 3.10.
Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution designed for security, simplicity, and resource efficiency use cases. In this stage, Alpine Linux already can help us to reduce the footprint of our build stage.
...
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/aspnet:$VERSION
...
Because we are using a multi-stage build we also need to define the image used in our final stage. Once again we will use the Alpine based ASPNET runtime as our base image. As already said, building our image based on Alpine allows us to build a smaller and more secure container image.
ADD /src/*.csproj .
RUN dotnet restore ADD /src .
RUN dotnet publish \
-c Release \
-o ./output
Unlike in the above example, we this time splitting the build process into multiple pieces. The dotnet restore command uses NuGet to restore dependencies as well as project-specific tools that are specified in the project file. The dependencies restore is also part of the dotnet pubish command but separating it allows us to build the dependencies into a separate image layer. This shortens the time needed to build the image and reduces the download size since the image layer dependencies are only rebuilt if the dependencies get changed.
...
RUN adduser \
--disabled-password \
--home /app \
--gecos '' app \
&& chown -R app /app
USER app
...
To secure the runtime of our application we need to execute them without any root privileges. Because of this, we are creating a new user and changing the user context using the USER definition.
ENV DOTNET_RUNNING_IN_CONTAINER=true \
ASPNETCORE_URLS=
EXPOSE 8080
... ...ENV DOTNET_RUNNING_IN_CONTAINER=true \ASPNETCORE_URLS= http://+:8080 EXPOSE 8080...
Because we run our app without any root privileges we need to expose it on a port higher 1024. In this example, 8080 was chosen. With the ENV definition, we are exposing further environment variables to our application process. DOTNET_RUNNING_IN_CONTAINER=true is only an informal environment variable to let a developer/application know that the process is running within a container. ASPNETCORE_URLS=http://+:8080 is used to provide the runtime with the information to expose the process on port 8080.
Smaller, smaller, smaller
As already mentioned, the above example should fit for most of the scenarios. The following example describes a way to build the smallest possible container image. A possible use-case might be for IoT Edge use cases or environments that need optimized start times. Unfortunately, we also get some disadvantages which I will talk about in detail below.
ARG VERSION=3.1-alpine3.10 FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/sdk:$VERSION AS build-env WORKDIR /app
ADD /src .
RUN dotnet publish \
--runtime alpine-x64 \
--self-contained true \
/p:PublishTrimmed=true \
/p:PublishSingleFile=true \
-c Release \
-o ./output
RUN adduser \
--disabled-password \
--home /app \
--gecos '' app \
&& chown -R app /app
USER app
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=build-env /app/output .
ENV DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=1 \
DOTNET_RUNNING_IN_CONTAINER=true \
ASPNETCORE_URLS= FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/runtime-deps:$VERSIONRUN adduser \--disabled-password \--home /app \--gecos '' app \&& chown -R app /appUSER appWORKDIR /appCOPY --from=build-env /app/output .ENV DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=1 \DOTNET_RUNNING_IN_CONTAINER=true \ASPNETCORE_URLS= http://+:8080
ENTRYPOINT ["./sample-mvc", "--urls", " EXPOSE 8080ENTRYPOINT ["./sample-mvc", "--urls", " http://0.0.0.0:8080 "]
Once again, we take a closer look at the individual steps:
...
RUN dotnet publish \
--runtime alpine-x64 \
--self-contained true \
/p:PublishTrimmed=true \
/p:PublishSingleFile=true \
-c Release \
-o ./output
...
The big difference to the upper one is that we will build a self-contained application. Providing the parameter --self-contained true will force the build to include all dependencies into the application artifact. Wich includes the .NET Core runtime. Because of this, we also need to define the runtime we would like to execute the binary in. This is done with the --runtime alpine-x64 parameter.
Since the final image should be optimized for size we are defining the /p:PubishTrimmed=true flag that advises the build process to not include any unused libraries. The /p:PublishSingleFile=true flag allows us to speed up the build process itself. As a downside, you will have to define dynamically loaded assemblies upfront to make sure that required libraries aren’t trimmed and therefore not available in the image. More details on this are available here.
A second disadvantage of having a smaller image is that code changes result in a bigger change. This is because the code and runtime are packed together in a single image layer. Every time the code changes the whole image layer needs to rebuild and also redistributed to the system running the code.
...
FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/runtime-deps:$VERSION
...
Because the application artifact is self-contained we do not need to provide a runtime with the image. In this example, I have chosen the runtime-deps image based on Alpine Linux. This image is stripped down to the minimum native dependencies needed to execute the application artifact.
Another image size improvement is to use the globalization invariant mode. This mode is useful for applications that are not globally aware and that can use the formatting conventions, casing conventions, and string comparison and sort order of the invariant culture. The globalization invariant mode is enabled via the DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=1 environment variable. If your application requires globalization you will need to install the ICU library and remove the above environment variable. This will increase your container image size by about 28 MB. You will find more details on the globalization invariant mode here.
For self-contained applications, we need to change the ENTRYPOINT definition to run the binary itself.
The size of this image will be around 73 MB (including my sample application). Let’s compare this to other images:
an image based on a common multi-stage Dockerfile: 250 MB
an image based on the above multi-stage Dockerfile: 124 MB
As already mentioned above: Which Dockerfile is most suitable for you depends on your use case. Smaller is not necessarily better. | https://medium.com/01001101/containerize-your-net-core-app-the-right-way-35c267224a8d | ['Nico Meisenzahl'] | 2020-05-21 16:51:12.527000+00:00 | ['Dotnet Core', 'Containers', 'DevOps', 'Dockerfile', 'Kubernetes'] |
What Does Entrepreneurial Freedom Mean to You? | “Freedom” by rawpixel on Unsplash
For many people, one of the main motivations behind starting their own business is the idea of the freedom it represents. In many ways, this is quite a bizarre concept because most of the small business owners I know are also some of the hardest working people I know. Despite this, I know very few who, once they have made the leap, would go back to the 9 to 5.
Entrepreneurial freedom is about so much more than escaping the same old, same old of the working day. It’s about being the master of your own destiny and reaping the rewards of your own endeavors.
Forget the 9 to 5
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. It might be a bit cliché, but the old saying is true.
When you embrace the life of an entrepreneur, you can forget the 9 to 5 — probably because you’ll be working the 5 to 9. But when you love what you do, your job becomes your passion — and how many hours could you dedicate to something you were truly passionate about?
A Note on Passion
Of course, some jobs might appear to be more open to the concept of “passion” than others. But if you put your heart and soul into any job it’s very easy to become passionate about what you do. Strive to be the best hairdresser, plumber, baker, shopkeeper or guest house owner and your passion will help you reach the top. When you are master of your own destiny, the only thing that can hold you back is your ambition.
Note: Almost every trade has a “celebrity” thought leader. The only difference between the guys at the top of the ladder and those further down the rungs is ambition and opportunity. Opportunities have a habit of presenting themselves to the most ambitious and hardest working.
What About Risk?
Entrepreneurs don’t fear risk, they embrace it. Some months will almost certainly be better than others and the entrepreneur’s ride can be a bumpy one at times — but what job doesn’t have ups and downs?
In fact, I believe the biggest risk in life is regret. If you think you have it in you to become an entrepreneur, you’ll only have one person to blame if you don’t take the risk.
Don’t Quit Your Day Job
If you think the entrepreneurial life is for you, it’s not quite time to quit your day job — at least not yet. The Internet has opened up a vast range of opportunities for wannabe entrepreneurs to dip their toes in the water and test markets.
eBay and Amazon provide the perfect route for start-up retail businesses. Etsy is an amazing platform for craft- and design-based businesses. Upwork can help you sell any professional service, and sites like Udemy and SkillShare provide a valuable resource for entrepreneurs in the education and training industries.
The opportunities to test your market, optimize your strategies and grow accordingly have never been so easy or affordable.
Grab a Slice of Freedom Today
What could you do to help yourself secure a little entrepreneurial freedom? Share your comments below:
This post first appeared on the iContact Email Marketing Blog. | https://john-w-hayes.medium.com/what-does-entrepreneurial-freedom-mean-to-you-a9248b0aec97 | ['John W Hayes'] | 2018-06-30 18:49:16.883000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Work'] |
Episodes 21–26: OF DEATH | The journey across Marinus… of Terror!
TARDIS flies far into the future and Susan decided to go paddling (Radio Times, 1964)
Sounds like a delightful romp!
The TARDIS lands on a remote island, surrounded by a sea of acid. They meet Arbitan, keeper of the Conscience of Marinus who forces the travellers to go in search of five keys. (BBC)
The TARDIS lands on a mysterious island with jagged rocks and a large pyramid. The sea is as still as ice. The model shot is wonderful 😍
Sparkling sand and distant mountains — this shot is perfect!
Inside the TARDIS, our travellers look excitedly at the scanner in anticipation. Well, sort of…
Susan and Babs: Exiting new adventures ahead! The Doctor: Hmmm, yes, well… Ian: I‘m still dressed like a Mongolian man, hehe.
The crew go outside to have a look and they have a very different reaction to this alien planet than they did to Skaro. Ian and Babs have begun settling into the travel lifestyle, Susan is loving having some humans to have fun with, and the Doctor has warmed considerably to his new companions.
SUSAN: It is the sea. It’s beautiful.
IAN: Yes, absolutely calm. Not even a ripple.
BARBARA: It isn’t frozen, is it?
DOCTOR: No, impossible in this temperature. Besides, it’s too warm.
They wander around the mysterious beach, and the more weird things they find the more excited the Doctor gets. From the glass beach to the acid sea, there are answers to be found!
“Glass instead of sand, eh? Intriguing, intriguing, my boy.”
So Babs get’s clumsy, Susan loses her shoes to a pool of acid, Ian lends her his boots, the Doctor gives Ian some sass and we all have a chuckle.
“If you’d had your shoes on, my boy, you could have lent her hers. You mustn’t get sloppy in your habits, you know.”
As Susan is off to the TARDIS for some fresh shoes, the Doctor discovers some suspicious glass torpedoes on the beach. The team go investigate and Barbara finds one with something in it. Back on Skaro, she would have screamed for Ian but here she calmly calls out for the Doctor to come investigate. Babs is certainly more confident with all the weird alien things now. She’s more sure of herself and her impressive powers of deduction. She works out that weird skins in the torpedos are protective suits and that acid must have gotten in an melted whoever was inside. Icky!
I love how the Voords are human-like aliens in rubber suits but we never actually see them out of their suits. It’s a fun twist on a men-in-rubber-suit-alien trope before it was even a Doctor Who trope. The first aliens in rubber suits in Doctor Who were actually canonically in suits!
Meanwhile, back at the TARDIS…
Susan finds some odd footprints and calls after her grandfather but doesn’t hear a response. She decides the best course of action is to follow the footprints (seriously??), but ooooop!
peek-a-boo!
I was genuinely surprised when that Voord poked out behind the rock. This is probably the only hiding place in the whole story that isn’t a completely flat wall and it works really well!
Meanwhile, back at the beach…
The team decide to go find Susan but get distracted by the giant pyramid they’ve only just spotted now for some reason. The Doctor’s now determined to visit the pyramid and find answers to his questions and there’s no resistance at all from Ian and Barbara. They’ve been bitten by the curiosity bug since they last saw a mysterious alien city.
They get to the TARDIS and discover Susan’s missing. So off they go to the pyramid, no questions asked!
Once they get to the walls, Ian and Barbara (especially Barbara), geek out over the stone construction. The kids at home learn some little facts about ancient pyramids and Barbara is so happy she pretty much forgets about Susan.
BARBARA: Look at the joins in the blocks, Ian.
IAN: Yes, no mortar. Must have been built with tremendous accuracy.
BARBARA: Yes, the Egyptians did the same thing. So did the Indians of Central and Southern America.
IAN: A precise distribution of weight, that’s the key, isn’t it?
BARBARA: Yes. Marvellous, isn’t it?
DOCTOR: Yes, now before you two get carried away, I think we’d better go and find Susan, hmm?
BARBARA: Yes, you’re quite right.
Learning!
One-by-one they all get pulled into the mysterious building, starting with the shifty alien in a suit with a shifty knife and a shifty stage hand…
flaaaaaaaaail!
… then Susan…
wooooooooop
…the the Doctor…
seeya
Then Ian and Barbara
helloooooooo
Inside, the single-most confusing scene in Doctor Who happens: Susan walks down a corridor, somehow unable to see the Voord scout standing against the wall. Arbitan comes around the corner and she turns around to look at him, stumbles back into the Voord scout who grabs her and they struggle with their backs against the wall. Then suddenly he lets go and falls to the ground with his own knife in his back. HOW????
Do Arbitan or the Conscience have some kind of telekinetic power? If so, why don’t they use it to defend themselves from the Voord attack later? I’ve watched that sequence like 8 times and the Voord is right against the wall when they’re knifed. I have no idea how the knife got there and am I the only one who’s really annoyed by this?? I NEED ANSWERS!
Susan, the Doctor and Barbara are reunited in the dungeon but Ian is still roaming the corridors. Don’t worry, Ian will save them!
BARBARA: So the men from the glass submarines are intruders, like us.
DOCTOR: Yes, with one difference, which is puzzling but revealing. They died, and we’re only prisoners.
BARBARA: Well maybe we’re to be killed, too.
DOCTOR: I shouldn’t worry too much about that. That young schoolmaster friend of yours is very resourceful. Whilst he’s free, our chance of rescue is still good.
The Doctor has faith in Ian! Awwww, yay!
Back in the hallways, Arbitan is testing Ian. A Voord attacks but Ian comes to his rescue, thus proving Ian and his friends as potential allies.
Ian and Voord dance, Voord ends up down an inexplicable pit…
…Or at least it’s cardboard double does.
He takes them all into the control room and gives the tale of the planet Marinus and it’s fascist AI ruler.
I know we’re supposed to sympathise with Arbitan and see the Conscience of Marinus as a thing of good, but my God it’s a horrific idea! That thing controls peoples minds! No one should be happy about this. I’m with the Voord on this one… ….except for the stabbing. I am not for stabbing.
Still, it is quite a lovely design!
There’s one more freedom fighter left, God speed little Voord!
After sending everyone he knows, including his beloved daughter, Arbitan is desperate to get the keys to the Conscience back and implores our heroes for help.
“Through the years all my friends, all my followers, have gone. They have never returned. Last year I sent my daughter. She has not come back. All I have now to comfort me is the distant echo of her voice, the imagined sound of her footsteps. But now your coming’s brought new hope. Oh yes, yes, you must find the keys for me.”
And after this impassioned speech, our heroes are just like, “nah, fuck that” and fuck off back to the TARDIS. Well Arbitan doesn’t take “nah, fuck that” for an answer (is anyone surprised though, he’s a fascist) and puts a force field around the TARDIS.
The Doctor’s real pissed.
So back they go to Arbitan who gives them his instructions and some super fancy travel dials. The Doctor’s real pissed still, but Ian’s all stoic and just wants to get one with things. The Doctor soon changes his tune when he get’s the travel dial and has a little geek moment.
“This is a perfectly acceptable method of travel. Very compact and very neat, sir, if I may say. Yes. … Oh, how exhilarating!”
They head off to the first destination but Barbara, who popped off first, is no where to be seen, and what’s that? Her travel dial is on the ground and it has blood on it!
The Doctor finds a wish come true and Barbara has a nightmare. (Radio Times, 1964)
Thank you Radio Times, that teaser is 10/10.
In the city of Morphoton, the Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Susan are welcomed as honoured guests and given anything they want. But Barbara soon discovers that paradise is an illusion. (BBC)
The Doctor, Ian and Susan arrive only to find Barbara’s travel dial with blood on it. Ian totally freaks out and there’s no stopping him. He’d claw the walls down with his bare hands to rescue Barbara if he needed to. True love 💕
I’m coming Barbara!!
Inside, our travellers are met with Romanesque luxury and a horrible screeching alarm. Then Babs appears, lounging in a fine gown and eating delicious and exotic food. No one knows how she managed to get a tailored dress made, get changed, had her hair done, meet the host and settle into the society in the seconds she had and no one should care because Barbara is queen. The team is reunited and that’s all that matters.
Now everyone cuddle
Our heroes enjoy the luxury but something is niggling Ian. While the others are completely bought buy the display of wealth, Ian remains sceptical. After meeting our creepy, pantsless host that doesn’t blink, Ian is convinced that something is wrong. Once The Doctor and Susan go to bed, Barbara tries to reassure Ian with her feminine wiles.
There is no way they’re not doing it.
So I have a theory, a feminism theory. Bare with me…
The servers in Morphoton are silent, beautiful women while the “host” is a creepy dude and is the only one our team interacts with. The women serve while the man is the representative for the civilisation. Their luxury based in domesticity with fine foods and clothing expressions of their wealth. The whole civilisation of Morphoton is based in illusion while the goal of the leaders is to distract new victims with their desires so that they can be manipulated into servitude.
When our heroes wake up, Ian, Susan and the Doctor are completely sold on the illusion. Ian’s scepticism is assuaged and all they can see is the perceived luxury that comes as a reward for compliance. What’s this got to do with feminism exactly? Surely this could refer to any sort of manipulative government/leadership/relationship etc.
Because Barbara. (Barbara is queen). When Barbara wakes up she sees the truth. It’s through her eyes that we see the world as it truly is: dirty and oppressive. She is silenced, dismissed and called hysterical.
It’s all for your own good, they say.
This scene reminds ms me so much of the arguments feminists face when they speak up. “You should be appreciative you live in [insert wealthy country name here], in [insert developing country name here] women have it waaaaay worse,” people say, like I should be grateful that I only have to deal with surreptitious, everyday sexism and don’t live in fear of genital mutilation or death by stoning. Wow, thank you society for not brutally murdering me for speaking my mind, THANKS. SO GLAD the consequence for speaking out is ONLY DEATH AND RAPE THREATS from random dudes on the internet and not STATE-SANCTIONED DEATH.
Pictured: A representation of me being real fuckin’ grateful with a small stool.
<authors note: extended feminist rant deleted for sanity and off-topic-ness reasons>.
Would Barbara be happier if she had been successfully brainwashed like her shipmates? Well at first, yes. Blissful ignorance is always nicer… at first. The realisation that she had been duped and that her friends couldn’t see what was really happening was frustrating and terrifying. The POV shots of her friends staring blank-faced at her and Altos coming for her were genuinely terrifying.
Pictured: the face of “You’re being really emotional, I’m just trying to have a friendly debate with you. People would take you more seriously if you weren’t so hysterical.”
Luckily, Barbara gets away before Altos can take her to his masters and she manages to hide behind a slightly protruding pillar.
“Well I don’t know, I’ve looked everywhere for her.”
Cold, tired, scared and alone, Barbara faces certain death for seeing the truth of the society. But she doesn’t give up! All hail Queen B.
MORPHO: She has seen the truth and is beyond control. Find her and destroy her.
Sabetha is thrown in the dungeon for failing to set the hypnotising equipment properly which gives Barbara the opportunity to deprogram her brainwashing. I find it interesting that the writers chose to put Barbara in the dungeon on her own accord. They could have easily had her captured and thrown in the dungeon with Sabetha, but they retained some of her agency by having her escape capture and hide there.
Meanwhile…
We get some comedic relief as we see the Doctor’s glorious laboratory:
Absolutely astonishing!
Full props to the cash-strapped production team for pulling off this fantastic scene!
Can’t afford to stock a prop lab? Just make it a make-believe one!
Distracted by such “opulence” Ian and the Doctor pretty much forget all about Barbara. Morpho is using their power to woo our fam into submission and it’s working… almost…
Morpho wasn’t expecting Barbara’s awesomeness
Sabetha had failed the system and was to be punished for it, but Barbara, seeing her potential, wills her to the cause. Barbara eventually breaks the spell and Sabetha begins to remember who she really is: the daughter of Arbitan and holder of the first key.
Altos appears and finds Barbara but it’s too late for him — Sabetha takes him out with a stool. She’s made her choice and she’s free from the shackles of oppression! With one swift and tropey hit, she smashes the wooden stool of the patriarchy!
Barbara escapes to find Ian but he’s changed. He doesn’t remember her. He has been taken by the patriarchy now and he does it’s evil bidding.
Barbara is betrayed by her beloved, brain-washed Ian 💔💔💔
Surprise, the patriarchy is brains with stalks in jars!
BARBARA: It’s disgusting! Ian, can’t you see how you’re being used?
Because the patriarchy doesn’t just harm women, it hurts everybody!
Just like the toxic masculinity pushes men to kill the women they are supposed to love, Morpho pushes Ian to try to kill his beloved Barbara.
And Babs’s response?
Fuck this, fuck everything!
Morpho, (which I guess is one being with multiple brains? or just the one that speaks? who knows) withers and dies and the illusion is broken. The citizens are free and Barbara has her Ian back. ❤❤❤
💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕
So, freed from slavery by Barbara, the citizens of Morphoton start a violent rebellion (not pictured) and our heroes are just like…
We better get the fuck out of here…
Started a revolution: check!
Made some new friends: check!
Found the first key: check!
All in a days work. Off to the next adventure!
Susan’s not happy with this development….
Ian and Barbara hear the whispers of death. (Radio Times, 1964)
Ian and Barbara find a temple in the middle of a hostile jungle. Inside is the ailing Darrius, keeper of one of the keys. As Darrius dies he gives Ian a clue to find the key. (BBC)
Susan is first to arrive in the jungle and is greeted with the most disturbing ruckus. By the time the others arrive the noise is gone and it just looks like she’s finally having (another) psychotic break.
I know Susan has a history of loosing it, but Ian and Babs are kind of patronising dicks about it.
Yes I know Susan screams a lot, but it’s not like she screams at nothing. When she freaked out on Skaro a Thal had touched her, when she freaked out in the TARDIS the TARDIS consciousness was messing with her, and when she freaks out here she’s hearing the sonic manifestation of unnatural biological entropy. Her young time-lord brain leaves her susceptible to all kinds of psychological terrors, show some empathy people.
Meanwhile, our new friends Sabetha and Altos are a bit.. extra..
SABETHA: This is a dead place.
IAN: Yes, it’s very quiet, isn’t it.
SABETHA: That isn’t quite what I meant.
So dark, so deep
For God’s sake Altos, put on some pants. Children are watching!
Can I just say, Ian is still rocking the Mongolian look and I love it. 10/10 style points for Ian.
Ian and the creepy twins go off to investigate the wall while Babs stays back and baby-sits Susan.
“Now Barbara, don’t go wandering off” Ian says patronisingly. “F off I do what I want” Barbara says as she wanders off…
BARBARA: I do wish Ian wouldn’t treat us like Dresden china.
SUSAN: I think it’s nice the way he looks after us all the time.
BARBARA: Yes, I know, but just once in a while
SUSAN: You rebel.
So just as Barbara is about to wander off when a vine grabs Susan’s leg and she’s cries out to Barbara, thinking it’s a snake. Of course Barbara dismisses her as hysterical, again, but she bashes it with a rock for good measure…
Because she puts on a tough exterior but doesn’t really believe it herself…
The vine couldn’t move on it’s own… could it?
To take their mind off things, Barbara decides to do the opposite of what Ian says because what’s the worse that could happen?
Come here Barbara, Mr. Huggy wants a cuddle
This is probably not the worse that could happen but it isn’t great.
Ian comes back to find his beloved being whisked away by a creepy, grabby statute and he is absolutely beside himself.
ALTOS: At least she found the micro-key.
IAN: Oh, I don’t care about that now. The only thing that matters is getting Barbara out of there.
So, with two keys in tow, the team decides to move onto the next destination while Ian hangs back to find Babs. Luckily, before they go, Sabetha realises that the second key is a fake and that Ian will have to find the real one as well as Barbara.
It’s all up to you now Ian
Inside, Ian finds a courtyard ripe with tropes — I mean very original and not at all predictable booby traps.
Despite beings so damn obvious, Ian is almost chopped in half by a robo-knight.
Luckily Babs is around to save his butt.
Reunited at last 💖💖💖
Ian and Babs have a cuddle then talk about how there are so many booby traps and they’re going to have to be really careful. To bad they’re both captured within seconds.
Seriously guys??
Spurred by the cries of help from Babs, Ian manages to pry himself out of his stupid cage (and make a delightful series of expressions while he’s at it).
Babs is okay tho coz old man found her..
Hmmm, you don’t seem suspicious…
Ian and Babs make a friend
Apparently so exhausted by being almost strangled by murderous plants, Darrius collapses on a bed and dies. Luckily, not without leaving a cryptic clue and an ominous word of warning about the plants. Just enough information to give our pair something to work with but not so much that the plot raps up to quickly — we still have at least 7 minutes of the episode to go after all.
IAN: You must trust us. Tell us, where is the micro-key?
DARRIUS: Closer. D E 3 O 2.
IAN: What do you mean? I don’t understand.
DARRIUS: Quickly, the darkness! The whispering will start.
(He dies)
So we learn that Darrius set up a series of traps and told Arbitan to warn anyone he sent about them. Arbitan forgot I guess? Not even his own damn daughter knew about them. Seriously Arbitan, get your shit together.
10/10 Set design! Love the eccentric biologist vibe!
We also learn Darrius was an eccentric botanist with a cool lab who messed with the fundamental laws of nature and was rewarded with death!
IAN: Biology seems to have been his field as far as I can make out.
BARBARA: Well, judging by the specimens in here, I’d say he was very successful.
IAN: Yes. Last couple of entries are a bit strange. All about the balance of nature and increased destructive forces. Listen to this. Nature has a fixed tempo of destruction. Water dripping on a stone may take a thousand years to produce any sign of wear.
BARBARA: Well, that’s not very original.
IAN: It is if you could speed up everything. The wear on the stone could happen in one day.
BARBARA: But that’s ridiculous.
IAN: Is it? He didn’t seem to think so. He ends up by saying, the growth accelerator has changed nature’s tempo of destruction entirely.
Could this be a clue as to what is happening here? Does it explain the killer vines and the “tapping, and whirring, all mixed up with a screeching” noise that Susan heard? We shall have to wait and see…
TMW you fart but there’s no one else in the room to blame it on…
Before they know it the vines start attacking and I’m a little confused as to why they only attack at night and how they seemed to have gained sentience when Darrius sped up their biological growth but there’s no time to think about that because look! — a vine has grabbed Barbara’s leg and if they don’t escape soon the plants will get them!!!!
Oh no! How scary!!
Luckily, Ian the science teacher spots a chemical formula on a bottle and realises DE3O2 is a chemical! Of course! Babs finds the jar and low and behold the key is inside. | https://medium.com/@splendidchapette/episodes-21-26-of-death-4b33f2ded262 | ['Splendid Chapette'] | 2019-09-04 10:02:01.575000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'TV', 'Recap', 'Doctor Who'] |
Daily Schedule With A Newborn | Having a newly born baby inside the house is not a walk in the park. Unless you have a full-time nanny or a house nurse who will look after the baby the whole day (and night), taking care of a newborn can be challenging for mothers. Thus, it will be best if you establish a daily schedule with a newborn to anticipate what you should do throughout the day.
Whether you’re a new mom or an experienced parent, this sample daily schedule with a newborn can help you make the first few months after your childbirth easier and more bearable.
Morning Routine
Newborn babies tend to sleep more during the day. This is because they still can’t distinguish between day and night. Therefore, it’s best to make your baby’s nursery as conducive, safe, and comfortable for sleeping as you can.
Choose a safe and durable crib or baby nest where she can sleep soundly. Set up proper lighting and temperature. And decorate the nursery with fancy wall stickers, stuffed animals, and personalized wall canvas art. With a homey and comfortable room, your baby is sure to have a long, quiet, and peaceful sleep.
Afternoon Routine
When your newborn baby is awake, which may not be too long in the morning or afternoon, take this opportunity to play with her. Playing with a newborn stimulates her motor, communication, and cognitive development. So when her eyes are open, it’s best to shake those rattle, make her mobile turn, and sing some nursery rhymes to her.
Bedtime Routine
Before bedtime is an ideal time to bathe your baby in warm water. This is to cool and relax her body, helping her fall asleep more easily. Especially after a full feed and a dry nappy, your newborn baby is ready to doze off throughout the night.
Remember that every baby is unique and your daily schedule with a newborn may be different from what was discussed above. The important thing is that you follow a regular routine in order to make it easy for you and your baby to adjust to this new chapter of your life.
This blog is originally posted at LoveandBub. | https://medium.com/@artistsloveandbub/daily-schedule-with-a-newborn-2a0a1b5aff74 | ['William Anderson'] | 2021-06-22 09:56:41.906000+00:00 | ['Baby Boomers', 'Baby Sleep', 'Baby Products', 'Baby Care', 'Baby'] |
Cyberday: 5 días con Insider | 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/reigncl/cyberday-5-d%C3%ADas-con-insider-bf920236e964 | ['Fabián Müller'] | 2020-12-15 11:57:43.391000+00:00 | ['Growth Marketing', 'Reign', 'Insider', 'Ecommerce', 'Growth Hacking'] |
Why I love the Washington Nationals — and why you should, too | My beloved Washington Nationals won the 2019 World Series in thrilling fashion. There’s lots to learn, and not just about baseball, from the World Champions. Here are nine reasons to love the Nats:
Nevertheless, they persisted: That the underdog Nationals won should not have come as a shock; they’re a very good team, and anything can happen in a series of five or seven games. What’s remarkable is how they won. They played so miserably in April and May that, after losing 31 of their first 50 games, FanGraphs gave them a 22 percent of chance of making the playoffs and a 1.6 percent chance of winning the World Series. During the postseason, they played five games in which a loss would have ended their season. They fell behind in all five and still prevailed. That’s unprecedented. It’s worth remembering when pursuing anything that’s hard. Never give up is a cliche. It’s also useful advice.
Immigrants! They get the job done: The Nationals’ season turned around not long after signing Gerardo Parra, a journeyman outfielder from Venezuela who had just been cast off by the San Francisco Giants. Coincidence? I think not. Parra’s on-field performance was unexceptional, but he and Anibal Sanchez, a pitcher and fellow Venezuelan, brought a sense of fun — dugout dance parties, orange sunglasses and, of course, Baby Shark — to the team. “We didn’t start winning until Gerardo Parra came in May. We’re lucky to have these guys here — the Latin guys,” reliever Sean Doolittle told Tom Boswell of The Washington Post. Juan Soto, Victor Robles, Wander Suero (all from the Dominican Republic), Yan Gomes (the first Brazilian-born major leaguer) and Asdrubal Cabrera (another Venezuelan) round out the team’s Latin posse.
They don’t just dance. They hug: These guys really like one another. Importantly, they are not afraid to show it — or say it. While celebrating the World Series victory, Brian Dozier told Brittany Ghiroli of The Athletic that winning the World Series is “not a life changing thing.” Dozier said: When all of this is gone and the champagne fades, what we are going to really remember and hold on to is the chemistry we’ve built here. The camaraderie.” If you think that doesn’t matter, you’ve never worked with a bunch of people you can’t stand.
They value their elders: In a sport and a society that valorizes youth, the Nationals are an exception. With an average age of 31.1, they are the oldest team in the big leagues. Victor Robles, the team’s 22-year-old centerfielder, calls his teammates “Los Viejos” — Spanish for old guys — and the old guys embraced the idea. Fernando Rodney, at 42, is by far the oldest player in the majors. Ryan Zimmerman, Max Scherzer and Aníbal Sánchez are 35. Howie Kendrick, 36, had the best year of his career at the plate, hit game-changing home runs against the Dodgers and Astros and was named MVP of the league championship series against the Cardinals. Viejos, indeed.
They believe in second chances: The Texas Rangers gave infielder Asdrubal Cabrera his release in August. He went on to drive in 40 runs in 38 games with the Nationals. Pitcher Daniel Hudson was given his release by the Los Angeles Angels in spring training, after being dropped by the Dodgers. Hudson latched on with the Blue Jays, was traded to the Nationals and recorded the last three outs of the World Series, retiring, in order, George Springer, Jose Altuve and Michael Brantley. Not everyone will capitalize on a second chance, but too often we give up on people prematurely.
They are family-friendly: This tweet sums it up.
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Sean Doolittle: The lefty bullpen ace and his wife Eireann Dolan may be “baseball’s most ‘woke’ couple,” as Chelsea Janes of The Post wrote last year. They support LGBT rights and raise money for veterans. This season, Doolittle tried to shop at an independent bookstore in every city visited by the Nationals.
Anthony Rendon: He speaks softly and carries a big stick. Good glove, too.
They aren’t the Houston Astros: The Astros are tough to beat and hard to like, as Ben Lindbergh said the other day on the Effectively Wild podcast. It’s not the players who are the problem; it’s the owner and general manager who disgraced themselves. If you missed the story, see this from Ben, this from Jeff Passan, and this from Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein.
Evidently, the baseball gods were watching.
[Photo credit: David J. Phillip/AP] | https://medium.com/@3lotfi.bouani.9s/why-i-love-the-washington-nationals-and-why-you-should-too-7140d6b3cb49 | ['Lotfi Bouani S'] | 2020-12-20 06:16:11.289000+00:00 | ['Babies', 'Health', 'Culture', 'Life', 'Coronavirus'] |
[Leet Code] Longest Continuous Increasing Subsequence | Problem:
Given an unsorted array of integers nums , return the length of the longest continuous increasing subsequence (i.e. subarray). The subsequence must be strictly increasing.
A continuous increasing subsequence is defined by two indices l and r ( l < r ) such that it is [nums[l], nums[l + 1], ..., nums[r - 1], nums[r]] and for each l <= i < r , nums[i] < nums[i + 1] .
Example 1:
Input: nums = [1,3,5,4,7]
Output: 3
Explanation: The longest continuous increasing subsequence is [1,3,5] with length 3.
Even though [1,3,5,7] is an increasing subsequence, it is not continuous as elements 5 and 7 are separated by element
4.
Example 2:
Input: nums = [2,2,2,2,2]
Output: 1
Explanation: The longest continuous increasing subsequence is [2] with length 1. Note that it must be strictly
increasing.
Constraints:
0 <= nums.length <= 104
-109 <= nums[i] <= 109
Solution: | https://medium.com/@matthewboyd123/leet-code-longest-continuous-increasing-subsequence-10740af1ec0f | ['Matthew Boyd'] | 2020-12-23 18:02:39.283000+00:00 | ['Leetcode', 'Data Structures', 'Leetcode Solution', 'Algorithms', 'Leetcode Easy'] |
Good Morning Friends. | Good Morning Friends.
From few days now we all would be celebrating #Christmas 🎅 🎄 .I was marveling whether #Santa Claus would come with mask on his face, distribute sanitizers and keeps distancing while distribute the good gifts,bounties & blessings for all of us against #covid 19 #corona pandemic end thru the vaccines being injected in our bodies coming year
Jingle bells, jingle bells.Jingle all the way Santa Claus is coming to take away all our worries, concerns, troubles with him
Hope #SantaClaus in coming year 2021 would guarantee that #New York the city would never sleeps again.
Santa Claus devotes that #Paris will be back in action as the center of romance
& fashion city.
Santa Claus safeguards that #Switzerland the beautiful romantic city is no more deserted.
Santa Claus assigns #Disney land parks to be back in action & spread its magic on children once again.
Santa Claus insures #India is back in action & becoming emerging country.
Santa Claus enriches that all temples
churches, public visiting places, monuments, stadiums are once again filled back with their devotees & visitors.
Santa Claus guarantees that most dreaded sanitarium's, infirmaries,hospitals and cemeteries are empty & deserted again.
Santa Claus pl secure all sports stadiums,the famous football leagues , the fashion shows, exotic weddings, & festivals are celebrated & commemorated with joy & happiness in coming year once again.
Santa Claus bless us that our business & jobs are back in action in year 2021.
Santa Claus pl secure that sun always shine, moon is cool & calm, our almighty God blessings are conferred on all of us.
It's is said to live in this earth is a pleasure, honour & privilege, we are earth Dharti mata guests, not her owners! Let respect her & bestow her blessings of her as well.🌹🌻🌹🌻🌈#jawaharlalla#@jbl7blogs#jbl7#blogger#writer#christmas#santaclaus.
✍️🍵💐🌹 | https://medium.com/@jawaharlalla2/good-morning-friends-4dbc9cf23c9a | ['Jawahar Lalla'] | 2020-12-19 02:20:53.466000+00:00 | ['Writer', 'Blogger', 'Jawaharlalla', 'Authors', 'Jbl'] |
Inequality — animals, humans, interviews | While strolling around a temple at Yogyakarta, I saw animals:
Elephants — stuck on a tiny island caked with their refuse. Also chained, but makes me wonder if it would stop them at all when push came to shove.
Cassowarries — locked in a little cage with not much to do — just by reclining they already occupy more than half the width of their prison.
Cats — wandering around the temple park, with the occasional human feeding it.
This makes me think — isn’t inequality prevalent in animals? If you were born an elephant or a cassowary, that’s your lot. If you’re a dog or cat, you have a chance of being taken care of and ‘living the good life’.
You might say that dogs and cats could also be eaten or treated poorly (like strays). Then we draw a distinction between intra-animal inequality (like stray dog versus princess dog) and inter-animal inequality (like wandering cat versus inmate elephant).
I wonder, if the proponents of equality ever had pets or visited the zoo. How did they feel then? Would they have fought for the animals’ equality as fervently as they fought for humans’?
Probably not (at least based on the SJWs I see), so here are some possibilities of why not:
One step at a time, Jose. Fight for humans first, then bother about animals later. I suppose there is inequality even in the fight for inequality, namely who should be pushed toward equality first. The irony.
Humans > animals. We can think of inequality and be outraged, but animals can’t. Another way to put this is, because you complain (humans can complain, animals can’t) so we have to pander to you. Else, it’s open season. So he who complains loudest gets special attention.
Another possibility is we can be empathetic to humans, if we see inequality administered (What is inequality, anyway?) we can imagine ourselves in the receiving end and work against it. On the other hand, we can’t imagine the same with animals.
Oh, you can’t? Can you imagine sitting in a cage like a chicken all day, reared for its eggs?
I suppose not, but can you imagine bending your head over and picking food off the ground? A human mind in an animal body will surely lead to unhappiness.
Another possibility is we can be empathetic to humans, if we see inequality administered (What is inequality, anyway?) we can imagine ourselves in the receiving end and work against it. On the other hand, we can’t imagine the same with animals. Oh, you can’t? Can you imagine sitting in a cage like a chicken all day, reared for its eggs? I suppose not, but can you imagine bending your head over and picking food off the ground? A human mind in an animal body will surely lead to unhappiness. Inequality only when it benefits me! The criterion for these on any movement is — what’s in it for me? One should always beware of people who claim psychic harm — when asked to put money where their mouth is, it quickly vanishes.
I knew someone who was strongly against animal cruelty. So much so that apparently by being indifferent to a purring stray cat, I got told off as a cruel person. I asked her why she wasn’t a vegetarian and the response was something along the lines of ‘I can’t do it, but I truly admire the people who can’. Then I asked her why she only cared for cats but not say, elephants and cassowaries. The response — ‘Oh I do care for them and I feel enraged when I see them locked up’. That’s not productive, isn’t it? Did the animals benefit from your rage? At least professing your love for animals while doing diddly about it makes you feel good.
The thing about inequality is, the concept of equal is hard to pin down — everyone has their own ideas of it and what it stands for. However, it is a yahoo word — a word that when said, automatically makes sunshine come out of you (other examples are just, fair, love etc) so it’s used liberally by people to sell their cause, or make themselves feel good.
What is inequality?
When it’s talked about, generally people have two ideas in mind — equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. We’ll take a look at the more naive one first:
Equality of outcome — you’ve seen this very often. There aren’t enough females/blacks/<insert group of interest> in X, therefore something must be wrong! We must restore parity! What’s wrong with this?
Firstly — why do we even think parity is the natural state? Here’s a thought experiment. Jack and Jill are both singers, but Jack is far better than Jill at singing. So Jack sells more records than Jill and the result is not 50–50. In reality how many outcomes are even at parity? Someone has to lose the basketball game.
Secondly — if you would insist that some kind of measure be introduced to siphon Jack’s earnings to Jill’s, Jack may be okay with it because one can’t be good at everything. For example, maybe Jill is better at baking, and Jack is happy to provide a cash transfer in anticipation of some intervention when it comes to baking. Obviously we can’t have too much transfers, or Jack might be discouraged from singing completely and we all don’t get to enjoy his singing anymore. What should be the optimal transfer? We can rely on governments, the most vocal lynch mob, or ask God.
This is a close parallel to taxes, but the point I’m trying to illustrate here is people are diverse, and diverse people naturally lead to unequal outcomes. Diversity or equality — you can’t have both.
Now that we’ve gone through equality of outcome, let’s go for the next interpretation of equality — equality of opportunity. I doubt anyone would be against this in principle — everyone who would like to should have a fair go, yes?
Of course it doesn’t work that way in the real world. How do you know if you didn’t have a fair go? It’s easy to measure inequality if we demand equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity is grey. My thoughts are — stop thinking about it because it’s unproductive.
Adversity (Inequality?) and responses
For the uninitiated — there are broadly two kinds of data scientists — the ones whose background are more mathematical/statistical, and the ones whose background are more CS/Software Engineering. In recent times being good at both is the gold standard but for now just accept there are these two groups, which sets the context for my experience below.
I’ve been rejected from a firm because I couldn’t pass the technical test — the technical test was ostensibly ‘Data science’, but it actually came out as Algorithms (More like CS). So for myself, which is more mathematically/statistically leaning, that tripped me up and I didn’t do well.
The test does suggest that the hiring side has a CS lean for their Data Scientists — perhaps they expect that their Data Scientists should know something about Algorithms. I’m sure I could have set a similar mathematical test and trip up CS-leaning Data Scientists, or bring value to the table by communicating more easily with business (as was the case with my past engagements — mathematical/statistical leans tend to be better at convincing business that the model works).
So did I have equal opportunity? You could say yes, since everyone has to pass through the same technical test. You could say no, since it’s a test that mathematically inclined DSes (let’s just use that term to describe profiles similar to mine) are likelier to fail. The point is, for as long as I harp on it, nothing productive happens.
Knowing that this is my weakness, I can work on it. Complaining that it should have been a more mathematical test does nothing (if anything, it moves all the responsibility away from me — I don’t have to do diddly, it’s them who has to change!) Of course, if I did somehow join that firm in the future, I would do something about the test (which becomes a case of me introducing more diversity or put more politically incorrectly, a case of imposing my own biases), but I would do it only if I joined.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
I’d rather effect change only after going through the gauntlet. What do you think would happen if I kicked up a fuss and under pressure, the firm let me join? How would everyone else in the firm feel? What about those mathematical DSes that worked on Algorithms until they could pass the test?
If you want to see change, implement it when you’ve reached the top. Don’t be one of those morally outraged people, who flaunt their collective outrage as if that were good enough reason to take their demands seriously. How many can consistently apply their beliefs — to animals, to other humans and groups that they are not member to?
They’re just out for themselves. | https://medium.com/@wunengzi/inequality-animals-humans-interviews-1dadf602efa2 | [] | 2020-12-01 23:36:17.343000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Data Science', 'Inequality'] |
Albert Schweitzer — Out of My Life and Thought | By Nobel Foundation — http://nobelprize.org/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9719568
Albert Schweitzer dedicated his life to a strong purpose of empathy towards fellow human beings. One of his biggest contributions — the work at the hospital at Lambarene. He found the concept of “The Reverence For Life”…
In his book, “Out of my life and thought”, Albert talks about the Pauline philosophy — of the three ideals — Faith, Hope and Love. Out of these, love, he (Paul) says is the highest ideal.
Love is the highest ideal
A question arises though — Can love sprout when there is no hope ? I think this is where the concept of Eschatology comes in.
Eschatology is a part of theology concerned with the final events of history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity. This concept is commonly referred to as the “end of the world” or “end times”, when God will provide justice.
Unless there is a faith, a hope in the prevailing of ultimate justice, can love of fellow human beings sustain itself ? | https://medium.com/@prabindh/albert-schweitzer-out-of-my-life-and-thought-f98511340ce3 | ['Prabindh Sundareson'] | 2020-12-21 05:43:23.185000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Empathy', 'Hope', 'Eschatology', 'Faith'] |
Mixin Network: A Top Project for Developers to Watch in 2018 | Mixin Network has done a great job in defining simpleness, security and revolution along with the development of blockchain in 2018. With its Kernel BFT consensus, low latency matters, UTXO model of Bitcoin, Mixin Network guarantees the security, speed and privacy during the transaction.
Mixin Network supports 13 main chains, including BTC, BCH, ETH, EOS, ETC, SC, XRP, XEM, DOGE, DASH, ZEC, LTC and ZEC. It presents all investors one-second free transaction for more than 50,000 cryptocurrencies, and the end-to-end encryption on the ground of signal protocols in the transaction and IM features embedded in Mixin Messenger, the first wallet powered by Mixin Network that supports all cryptocurrencies, stops the messages and transaction info from being leaking. Over 167 M transactions have been completed on Mixin Network so far, which comes from the huge user database consists of more than 3M users worldwide.
Mixin Messenger creates the new era that enables all investors with transaction needs among all kinds of tokens to transfer digital asset to contacts instead of virtual addresses in a totally safe technical environment.
Simple, lightning, free, secure, versatile, powerful and open, all make Mixin Network a top project to incubate all kinds of promising projects and help them gain values on Mixin Network. Till now, various apps/bots/extensions in entertainment, shopping, transaction, etc. have been built on Mixin Network, and made full use of all cryptocurrencies.
Mixin Network is open-minded, and wants to complete and co-host its technical ecosystem with all promising projects to benefit all users and blockchain enthusiasts, thus it is hosting its first global online developer competition to offer a platform for all developers to show their talent. Both beginners and experienced developers are welcomed, there is no limitation for the entries in this competition. Developers are given full play to develop innovation projects using programming languages including but not limited to: Erlang, Java, JS, PHP, Python2.x, Python3.x, Ruby, Go, etc. to compete for 1000XIN, which valued $60,000 to $200,000 fluctuated according the real-time market.
Development dimensions:
Option 1: Transaction solutions based on Mixin Network
Option 2: Applications/bots/extensions with all tokens applied on Mixin Messenger
Option 3: Use cases of digital asset exchanges based on OceanOne
……
Currently, there are 14 open-source projects to be the reference for all developers:
Erlang
Sample1: https://github.com/wenewzhang/wk_bot
Go lang:
Sample 2: https://github.com/crossle/hacker-news-mixin-bot
Sample 3: https://github.com/crossle/bishijie-news-mixin-bot
Sample 4: https://github.com/crossle/imeos-news-mixin-bot
Java:
Sample 5: https://github.com/qige-one/mixin_java_sdk
JS:
Sample 6: https://github.com/virushuo/mixin-node
Sample 7: https://github.com/wangshijun/mixin-node-client
PHP:
Sample 8: https://github.com/ExinOne/mixin-sdk-php
Python2.x
Sample 9: https://github.com/myrual/mixin_client_demo
Sample 10: https://github.com/myrual/opensource_cnb_atm
Sample 11: https://github.com/myrual/mixin_network_api_example
Python3.x
Sample 12: https://github.com/includeleec/mixin-python3-sdk
Sample 13: https://github.com/albertschr/Mixin_EOS_P1_Player/tree/master/Python
Ruby:
Sample 14: https://github.com/an-lee/mixin_bot
Technical document for beginners who are not familiar with Mixin Network: https://mixin-network.gitbook.io/mixin-network-cn
Mixin Network claimed to provide full support to all projects and developers who are interested in being parts of Mixin Network ecosystem. It is for sure that Mixin Network is one of the top projects for all developers to watch in 2018 and the future.
More details about Mixin Network Developer Competition, refer to: https://mixin.one/events/hackathon | https://medium.com/mixinnetwork/mixin-network-a-top-project-for-developers-to-watch-in-2018-9f5b5ca95ac9 | [] | 2018-12-20 11:10:29.179000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain Project', 'Blockchain', 'Crypto', 'Developer'] |
What Agility Really is About | 15 tips to improve your agility.
Technology, globalization, the environment and society are more closely linked than ever before: Technological advances are driving globalization, changing our environment and influencing society which in turn calls for new solutions to these challenges. This cycle is happening at an increasing pace and is making our world ever more complex. The COVID-19 pandemic is just one current example of a change with complex global consequences.
With all this complexity, we personally feel how difficult it is to keep up with the speed of change. It’s easy to feel lost. As change agents we see other people and companies feeling the same way.
That’s why people are looking for ways to better deal with this complexity, to make better use of opportunities, to control risks more effectively and keep or improve their competitiveness. This is where agility comes into play and is on everyone’s lips these days. The Agile Manifesto will soon be 20 years old, and Scrum was first introduced 25 years ago. Yet, many people and companies still struggle to increase their agility. You don’t have to be an Agile Coach to see this, you can see this from just being a normal customer to almost any company. We believe this is a great opportunity to present some tips on how you can increase the agility of your team and organization.
Before that, we’d like to create a common understanding of the term “agility” and demystify this buzzword. We developed this definition, which we think will help us do this.
Agility is the skill to develop customer value from customer needs flexibly, creatively and quickly, while controlling risks in complex environments.
Agility is not an innate talent, but a skill that anyone who is willing to work on themselves can learn and grow. Agility means focusing on customers and their needs, developing solutions for them and as a result creating customer value. The term “develop” is often misunderstood and equated with “IT” or “programming” but really means that a solution will emerge from the process of creating it.
Agile teams are likely to face change during the development of a solution. For example, customer needs, technologies and market conditions may change — or the understanding of them may change. Agile teams react flexibly and quickly and try to use these changes in a way that will increase customer value.
Especially at the beginning of product development, both the solutions and the customer needs may not be fully known and understood. This could be because you’re working on a new solution involving technologies you haven’t worked with before or because customers often only learn what they really need when a product is put into their hands. The sooner agile teams can provide their customers with a usable, potentially valuable solution, the sooner they can learn together with their customers whether that solution really has customer value. That’s why agile teams develop products in short, frequent intervals and deliver increments to their customers early and continuously. That way, they optimize value and control their risk of wasting resources on something that eventually is of little value to the customer.
Whether you already use any agile practices today or you don’t, we’d like to give you 15 tips on how you can increase the agility of your team and organization.
Tips #1–5 for More Agility
Tip #1: Know why
Why do you want to become more agile?
You need a good answer to this question that all participants understand. Because to become more agile, everyone will have to work on themselves, their attitudes and the culture and work environment of their organization. This change will come with uncertainty and maybe even anxiety, so it’s important for everyone to understand why they are doing it.
Answer the following questions together with those affected by this change: Why should we want to become more agile? What might happen if we don’t?
Tip #2: Focus
Focus yourself!
Focus on your customers and their needs. On your most important goal. On fewer goals, projects and tasks at once. This gives you the freedom to develop creative solutions more quickly, to learn earlier what is really valuable for your customers, to react more flexibly to new insights and changes, and to reflect on how you create value and improve that.
Start by creating more focus at a strategic level by setting fewer different goals, so that your entire company can concentrate on fewer initiatives at the same time. Don’t make maxing out your or your employees’ capacity your first goal. This would be as useful as trying to utilize the capacity of roads to 100%. Do we really want our roads maxed out? This will lead to congestion, stress, delays, risks and even accidents. Instead, reduce the number of projects to a level that will allow you to move quickly and flexibly.
Tip #3: Transparency
Create and maintain transparency!
More is unknown than known in complex situations. Since you can’t completely predict a solution and the way to it, you need a high degree of transparency to measure value and progress. Be transparent about what you have already done, what you are currently working on and what you expect to work on next. Deliver a usable part of a product in short, regular cycles and let your customers use it and evaluate it. This is the best way for you and your customers to learn what really is valuable. Visualize what you are currently working on and what you will probably work on next and make this information transparent to your stakeholders. Also, create transparency for you and your stakeholders about what is slowing you down or holding you up. Then work together to overcome these obstacles.
Tip #4: Outcomes over Outputs
Determine progress and success based on customer outcomes!
Many teams and companies measure progress and success by their work results (output), e.g., product features. Whether these features are valuable to customers usually only becomes known later, when customers start to use them. If you only measure your output, you might create an illusion of progress and success where there actually isn’t any because your output might later prove to be of no significant value.
Instead, first ask yourself what outcome you want to achieve for your customers. One example: Your desired outcome is that users of the product x also buy the accessory y. Now think about what output could achieve this outcome. By looking at it this way, you will discover new possibilities and realize that this output may not be the best way to achieve the desired outcome. Create transparency about the big assumptions you make and run experiments to validate them. Ultimately, measure progress and success by observing whether the outcome you want happens.
Tip #5: Deliver and Learn
Learn early and regularly together with your customers about what really is valuable for them!
Most companies and teams develop products for too long in private and deliver them to their customers too late. As a result, they learn only very late whether the product really meets the needs of their customers. This is because customers only learn whether a product really meets their needs when they start using it. This means the developers of the product only know if they created value when the customer uses their product. This in turn means that all the work up to that point is a value assumption. This is a considerable risk, as a lot of time and effort is invested in ideas that may later turn out to not have value.
So, check your assumptions early and continuously by involving your customers early during development and learn from their feedback. This way you reduce your risk and at the same time continuously increase the customer value of your product. We believe this tip is also helpful to many companies and teams that are convinced they are already agile. Although most of these companies develop their product in short cycles, they actually involve their customers too late and thus miss the point of agility.
Tips #6–10:
In our next article we will present five more tips for you about agility.
This doesn’t work for us!
At this point you might think: “That’s not possible with us! We don’t have the time for that! We need a real agile method that helps us!
We get this reaction a lot and our answer is: No matter which agile practice you use — Scrum, Kanban, Design Thinking, Lean Startup etc. — they are just “tools” for more focus, higher transparency, stronger customer focus and better collaboration. They simply show how well you can currently turn customer needs into customer value and give you clues on how to improve. However, these tools don’t do the work for you. They don’t create the necessary environment for you within which agility can grow and teams can thrive. You’ll still have to do this hard work yourself.
Do you need help?
Then let’s talk. In our interactive keynote speech “About Agile & Outcomes” we will give you a deeper understanding of complexity and agility. In our hands-on training “The Agile Experience” you will gain first practical experience with the most important agile strategies, frameworks and practices. | https://medium.com/amazing-outcomes/what-agility-really-is-about-3ba731c10849 | ['Johannes Geske'] | 2020-11-16 07:24:54.568000+00:00 | ['Agile Transformation', 'Agility', 'Agile', 'Agile Methodology', 'Amazing Outcomes'] |
10 Things About Me You Probably Didn’t Know | 10 Things About Me You Probably Didn’t Know
Because alto Tagged Me
Always giggling: Baby Tre. Someone was making me laugh. Probably my dad. Heej loves this photo. Classical Sass
For nineteen years, I was the only girl. My sibling accompanying lineup was five brothers. Then, our sister was born. “Bless" is her name and every single day, she blesses me with her existence.
I am short, 5’2 and 1/2 (you think I’m gonna leave that out? Nope!), but I have a long torso. Go on and marinate on that for a minute.
I am most at peace alone, reading, writing, or listening to music. This has been what most in my family consider “oddball" behavior.
I have four best friends, all extremely different in both race and ethnicity with vastly different personalities, however, they’re my people and I love them all with a love that cannot be fully explained. The Powerhouse, The Outstanding, Sunshine, and Fighter-Firefly. These three women and one man have seen me at my worst, loved me through my best, and have grown with me for over fifteen years. Two, for over twenty.
I can do quite a number of impersonations, some, I’ll even do by request.
People walk up to me and begin full-on conversations about their day, what’s got them down, etc…and guess what? I listen. It’s always been this way. It’s one of the reasons why I was drawn to the medical industry.
I have been in healthcare for fifteen years. The primary focus for eleven years? Medical billing. Now, I am trying my hand at registering patients for various imaging scans in a number of modalities. And, I love it!
I did not think I’d ever want my Mother living in the same State as me again, but as I get older, I find that I do not want it any other way. What we have now is something for which I am beyond grateful. I tell her this as often as I can. She is a flower that cannot stop blooming.
For the first five years of my life, I had seizures — often triggered by high temperatures/fevers. At age two, I ended up getting lead poisoning. How? Eating the paint chips off of my parents’ apartment walls. At that point, my Great-Grandmother told my parents to bring me to her. We ended up staying with my Great-Grandmother for several years. She had a BIG hand in raising me. After all, I had teenage parents who ended up having a sickly child, someone had to take over.
A pet peeve of mine? Loud chewing. It drives me up the wall! | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/10-things-about-me-you-probably-didnt-know-bbc51a4e1a93 | ['Tre L. Loadholt'] | 2018-09-16 13:25:54.176000+00:00 | ['Memories', 'Life', 'Music', 'A Cornered Gurl', 'Nonfiction'] |
Overcoming the challenges of remote working: Motivation | Overcoming the challenges of remote working: Motivation
Mapping out routines in a schedule can help with motivation dips. Photo by fotografierende from Pexels
For all its advantages remote working creates new challenges for organisations, managers, teams and individuals. It requires a shift in the way we communicate, collaborate and cooperate. It is not just about setting up a webcam and virtual meetings, it is a way of working that requires considerable adaptation from everyone to remain engaged and productive. In a series of blogs, we explore some of the big challenges often faced by remote workers and how they can be tackled.
Motivation.
The first week of remote working is great, however this can become challenging as you realise this is the new norm. Some people may find this a more intuitive way of working for them as it allows for an integrated work life balance, but it’s not the case for everyone. Here are a few ways to help maintain a level of motivation or to get it back once it’s dipped.
Make a home office (if you can).
This enables your brain to slip in and out of work mode as you are physically putting yourself into a space that is dedicated to work. As tempting as it is to sleep in and work from your covers, don’t. It can have a counterproductive effect as you are not poised to focus and can actually lead to overworking as the boundary between where you work and where you sleep becomes blurred.
Wake up early.
Without the pressure of being in the office by 8.30am it can be a struggle to rise early. The idea of rolling out of bed and into the home office becomes increasingly appealing. However when motivation comes into question, early risers tend to be the most productive as they start the day with intention. You might find that you are more of a night owl, in which case you might have to split your day differently. For team communication its important that everyone is available during working hours. If you need to flex this have a conversation with the team and manager to see what you can do to make it work for everyone.
Keep regular hours.
Maintaining consistent hours — and communicating these hours — helps others know when you are and aren’t contactable. This isn’t set in stone as circumstances can change, but introducing regularity into your routine helps the body fall into a daily cadence.
Work in sprints.
Deep states of concentration can be hard to maintain especially in disruptive circumstances. Optimising the short pockets of time available to you will enable you to deliver short sharp bits of quality focussed work. Pro Tip: Try the Pomodoro way of working where you work in 25 minute bursts with 5 minute breaks. This is a technique that could be suited around those with caring responsibilities.
Take regular breaks.
Just like you would in the office take micro breaks to break up the day. Take time out to have a phone conversation with a colleague, water the plants, make a cup of tea, anything to get you up and out of your seat to give your body a rest.
Reach out to a colleague.
Breaking your mood by chatting with someone else can sometimes help you re-motivate. They may even be able to help you with a problem you have been mulling over or even have some time to lighten your workload. Hearing someone else’s perspective on a challenge that maybe seemed too daunting to start might help you break it down. We often inflate the enormity of tasks that we don’t want to do which can cause feeling of being overwhelmed and “analysis paralysis”. Talking it over with a colleague can help bring you back down to earth.
Exercise.
Just get it out of your system. All of that listless energy can be distracting, so giving your body a workout to the point where it is grateful to be sat down will help with resting your mind and refocussing. It doesn’t have to be a muscle throbbing body pump, it can be as simple as going for a stroll to reset your mind.
Help someone out.
It’s always easier to work in a group than alone, so don’t be afraid to jump on a video call to bounce ideas around, or work on a shared document you can both access. Helping someone doesn’t need to be limited to your teammates either, it can be something as simple as making an extra effort to help around the house, helping with a next door neighbours shopping or providing your services for mentorship.
Build a community.
Wherever you are, the power of community can never be underestimated. Finding communities either online, locally or within work can provide you with a supportive network that can help kickstart you motivation, keep you going and help maintain focus when it feels like the odds are stacked against you. If you haven’t got one, now is a great time to start. Be the change you want to see and help others become motivated.
Eat the frog
Taken from Brian Tracy’s book, Eat The Frog, he discusses the concept of starting your day by eating the frog, which sounds disgusting and probably the last thing that you want to. Thats the point. By taking a task you dread and getting it out of the way, you can get on with the rest of your day rather than spend that time procrastinating and putting it off. Think about the same task or piece of work that you need to complete that make you feel a bit queasy — you’ve just found your frog, now eat it.
Just start.
Procrastination killed the remote worker. To remedy this, the best advice is to just start. Start with turning on your computer, writing a to do list, opening that application. You will soon find that you will pick up momentum and before you know it an hour passes. If it doesn’t work, take a break then come back to it.
The main takeaway from this is that circumstances are likely to be ever changing when working remotely. Being mindful of this will help you to be kind to yourself when your day doesn’t go to plan or the week feels to be stretching on forever. Turning to your team and support networks at this time can help boost motivation. If anyone else has any more tips on how to boost motivation whilst working remotely, please get in touch I’d love to hear them! | https://medium.com/hippo-digital/overcoming-the-challenges-of-remote-working-motivation-8224e650d979 | ['Justine Middleton'] | 2020-08-10 08:45:18.917000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Hippo Digital', 'Working From Home'] |
‘Click and collect’ high resolution satellite imagery from anywhere on Earth | The announcement comes as a superior offering to Soar’s existing 50cm product launched earlier this year. Soar has committed to the processing and delivery of SkyMap40 imagery as colour corrected, mosaiced images at no additional cost.
“Access to the SkyMap40 product allows Soar to offer a unique and highly innovative product to a wide range of customers in an easy to use platform setting. Fast turn-around times, coupled with competitive pay-as-you-go pricing, makes SkyMap40 imagery comparable to other leading providers such as Maxar”, explained Neil Prentice, Soar’s Chief Operating Officer.
“A ‘click and collect’ approach for pixels from space, users can select a spot on Earth they want the imagery for, confirm their order with a credit card, and the Soar platform does the rest without the need for specialised software,” continued Mr Prentice. “Similar to what you would experience from a private Google Earth feed.”
As to when users can expect SkyMap40 to be available, Soar is set to make an announcement in the near future.
Aside from its SkyMap products, Soar continues to provide global access to NASA’s Landsat (30m per pixel) and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites (10m per pixel), free of charge.
Those interested in finding out more about Soar can access the platform at https://soar.earth from their desktop browser. | https://medium.com/soar-earth/click-and-collect-high-resolution-satellite-imagery-from-anywhere-on-earth-95616aea0c1e | [] | 2020-10-04 12:49:21.746000+00:00 | ['GIS', 'Satellite Imagery', 'Geospatial'] |
Media Company of One | “Whether you like it or not, every person is now a media company. The tools are easy, free, and everywhere. More importantly, producing content is now the BASELINE for all brands and companies. It literally doesn’t matter what business you’re in, what industry you operate in, if you’re not producing content, you basically don’t exist.”
Gary Vaynerchuk wrote this in 2013. In 2020, this is more appropriate than ever. Look at the crazy career arc of super successful folks like Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Tiago Forte, David Perell, Zuby, Hiten Shah, Anthony Pompliano or Eric Siu. They are in completely different industries but have attracted immense followings. I believe they provide a blueprint for how businesses will be built in the future. This is a content and audience-first approach to business building, what I call the “East coast” approach.
This is in contrast to what I call the “West coast” tech startup approach of “Build it & they will come” approach. In other words, the traditional Silicon Valley way of building the product first, then figuring out audience and distribution. This is an approach that when it works, it works well but it is now becoming outdated in my humble opinion.
Some universal lessons that we can take from their success.
They are consistent over a long period of time. Joe Rogan started his podcasts 11 years ago. Tim Ferriss started his 6 years ago. Pomp started on Twitter in 2017. They dominate one audience platform or format initially before moving to start on another one. Pomp started with Twitter in 2017, then a Newsletter in 2018 and then podcasting in 2019 which translated well into Youtube. Tim Ferris and Joe Rogan on podcasting and have predominantly been strong there. They started very small but kept going. They were prolific and regular. David Perell releases 2 newsletters a week consistently (monday and friday btw). Pomp literally tweets several times a day, he writes 5 newsletters a week, releases an interview almost every other day. Tim releases at least a new podcast interview every week. Joe Rogan releases new content every other day. I literally cannot keep with them. How many folks do you know who say they want to tweetstorm more regularly, podcast or blog more regularly? Yet you see them drop off after 5 posts or podcast episodes. This is quite common. You have to keep doing this for a VERY long time. You have to keep at this for at least 2 years in my opinion.
Why Should you do this?
Eric Siu: The benefits of creating a ‘one-man media company’:
- Defensible moat that insulates you from disasters
- Allows you to take shots
- Provides different income opportunities
- Gives you a stable foundation
(Source: https://twitter.com/ericosiu/status/1295372052854054912)
For all entrepreneurs, students and corporate execs, get working on your one person media company! It’s not too late and this will help you in whatever you end up doing. It is your “serendipity machine” as David Perell states. He goes further to say:
“It’s the best way to learn faster, build your resume, and find peers and collaborators who can create job and business opportunities for you.
Content builds on itself. It multiplies and compounds.
Day and night, your content searches the world for people and opportunities. Projects, mentors, speaking gigs, job offers, pitches, investment opportunities, interview requests, podcast appearances, and invitations to special events. It all starts with sharing ideas online.”
Now is the time!
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/ | https://medium.com/@marvinliao/media-company-of-one-737a9a7cef68 | ['Marvin Liao'] | 2020-12-02 09:32:11.220000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Founders', 'Startup Lessons', 'Venture Capital', 'Silicon Valley'] |
15 Best WordPress Plugins For Your Website in 2020 | 15 Best WordPress Plugins For Your Website in 2020
Best WordPress Plugins — With the right suite of plugins incorporated into your backend, you can dramatically (and instantaneously) improve the functionality, aesthetics, and efficiency of your site both for yourself and your viewers.
However, with the myriad of options available to the average webmaster, the challenge of finding the best WordPress plugins can feel all but impossible.
After all, it only takes one janky line of code or installation gone awry to transform your formerly beautiful and sleek website into a jumbled mess of nonsensical code, wonky themes, and broken functionality.
Not to worry.
We’ve done all of the heavy lifting for you, installing and reviewing countless WordPress plugins to determine once and for all which ones are worth your time and which ones aren’t.
So, without any further ado here is our list of the top 12 WordPress plugins for 2020.
Read the full article at : https://www.nrhosting.com/15-best-wordpress-plugins-for-your-website-in-2020 | https://medium.com/@nrhosting/15-best-wordpress-plugins-for-your-website-in-2020-ae02bd8bd6c | ['Nr Hositng Ltd'] | 2020-12-23 15:49:17.671000+00:00 | ['Wordpress Web Development', 'WordPress', 'Wordpress Plugins'] |
Would We Write if We Were Immortal? | I have been thinking a lot about mortality these days, not morbidly, but with curiosity about what it means to live a life with the uncomfortable, sometimes scary, knowledge that it will certainly come to an end. A recent interview in The Sun with Sheldon Solomon, a psychologist who researches death denial, led me to the work of Ernest Becker, author of, most famously, The Denial of Death. Becker believed that the fear of death is the “mainspring of human activity,” in that it shapes, mostly unconsciously, much of what we choose to do in our lives. This fear of annihilation motivates us to do such things as scale Everest, build pyramids, amass capital, and write novels, as ways of managing terror and seeking symbolic immortality.
I can affirm that the certainty of death brings an element of urgency to the act of writing. The writer of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry can stop time, reexamining a moment, amplifying it and assigning it meaning. To write about something is a way of reliving it, or, in the case of a fiction writer, we live the imagined lives we write alongside our real ones. Writing anything at all is a process of amplifying and probing the experience of being alive, thereby giving us the sensation of having more life than we’ve been allotted. Further, writing assures us that our opinions and perceptions might continue to matter even if our bodies will eventually be snuffed out.
What writers love to do — the finding of meaning and the assigning of value — Becker claims are activities that serve as a form of terror management. Is this a cynical point of view, demeaning to what we do as writers? I think not. It’s hard to be a person navigating the world’s chaos. Of course we need to find ways to get through. I can see how I have, over the years, sought writing as a refuge of sorts, a cave I inhabit while observing the world at some remove, giving no thought or purchase for death.
Now that I am looking death directly in the eye and know that I will probably not be around in a few years, I am thinking more about how interwoven life and death naturally are. This couldn’t be more apparent as we try to pretend the pandemic is over while it is still killing large numbers in the U.S. and across the globe. The pandemic has made me acutely aware of myriads of deaths that are closer to home, in the form of dead birds and squirrels — sometimes dead deer — I see on my walks.
I wish we lived in a culture that didn’t ignore and shun death, treating it as a solely private matter, the dying as losers at the game of life, as our former president would say. There must be a better way to operate, a way of living that isn’t primarily driven by the fear and denial of this natural process, fear and denial that makes us run ourselves ragged to achieve things that will supposedly guarantee us long life and maybe immortality, but instead often leave us empty. Wouldn’t it be good to find a way of living which allows the acknowledgement, even the embrace of death, to guide us to more satisfying choices while we’re here?
I am trying to live with a clear eye on death. I like to speculate about how I will die, what the experience will feel like. Having worked as a Hospice volunteer, I know there are many different ways to leave life. Letting go in the final moments often takes work. I have no idea if I will be one of the ones who lets go easily, or if I’ll resist, wanting more — just a little more, please. Meanwhile, having always been a bit of a provocateur, I have come to love the mischief of joking about death, jokes my husband, understandably, does not appreciate. I think it’s likely my family will be welcoming new life around the time I am dying, a thought that is deeply pleasing. A passing of the baton; a new spirit taking over.
Whether or not writing is a form of death denial, I continue to write, not fearful, but still fending off death for as long as I can. | https://caiemmons.medium.com/would-we-write-if-we-were-immortal-e024a074380a | ['Cai Emmons'] | 2021-07-20 17:16:09.876000+00:00 | ['Death', 'Why We Write', 'Immortality', 'Writing', 'Ernest Becker'] |
Inside the Minds of Tech Recruitment | Inside the Minds of Tech Recruitment
And the things they see when on a hiring drive
Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels
Getting a job is one of the hardest things when becoming a developer. Sometimes, you get hit with a Catch 22 of not having enough of the right experience but not being able to get the experience without having the experience.
While there is consistent demand in the industry, résumés seem to go into a deep dark hole known as the submission inbox.
I know because I’ve been on both sides of this mysterious inbox — both as a developer asking for the job and the person making the hiring decision.
These two experiences were during two very distinctive periods in my career. Here is some insider knowledge of what happens inside the hive mind of tech recruitment. | https://medium.com/madhash/inside-the-minds-of-tech-recruitment-7ac83bbef5ad | ['Aphinya Dechalert'] | 2019-10-03 14:45:44.685000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Technology', 'Work', 'Programming', 'Freelancing'] |
Lojong Practice Journal: Don’t talk about injured limbs | The slogan “Don’t talk about injured limbs” is one I’ve understood to mean that we should not gossip about others’ shortcomings but its phrasing bothers me. The implication is that an injured limb is a failing, a fault, an imperfection. This wording is an example of the ableism that runs through many traditional Buddhist teachings. In many translations it’s not remotely subtle. The translation used by Kelsang Gyatso (p.91, Universal Compassion) is written as, “Do not speak about degenerated limbs.” In the case of Dilgo Khyentse’s commentary (p.73, Enlightened Courage), physical disabilities are practically conflated with moral shortcomings and ignorance:
“We should not discuss the handicaps of others. If they cannot see or walk well, if they are not intelligent or even if they have transgressed their vows, we should not call them blind, cripples, idiots, etc.”
You may be wondering why this matters because surely, we shouldn’t gossip about disabilities? And of course we shouldn’t, but this slogan is about wise speech when it comes to how we talk about other people’s imperfections, and disability is not an imperfection. This slogan is a reminder not to talk about the faults of others’ as if we are superior. Sort of the “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” of the Buddhist canon, with “sin” equating to ways we mess up because we are human. The point is that we shouldn’t gossip about others as if our shit doesn’t stink.
I strive to be aware of how the language we use frames the attitudes we have. Words can reinforce systems we have all been born into — systems that consistently rank human worth and value across all levels of society. Pausing to consider a word and its social implication is a significant part of my practice. A year ago, I wouldn’t have noticed the ableist phrasing of this slogan, but now it’s as obvious to me as sexist language in Buddhism has always been.
It speaks volumes about social attitudes and beliefs to equate an injured limb to a fault. And when I say ‘fault’, I mean any of the number of things we humans do as a result of passion, aggression, and ignorance. Faults are prejudiced implicit biases and ill-informed opinions. Faults are fixed ideas of ourselves or others that keep us trapped in habitual patterns of harm. Faults are the edges we work with as complex beings who can be both incredibly compassionate and incredibly cruel. An injured limb is not a fault. That’s just an injured limb. Being abled doesn’t equate to superiority, nor is it an advantaged embodiment for waking up.
It could seem like I am disregarding this slogan with this very commentary. Here I am, pointing out a flaw in the choice of the translator! But again, this slogan isn’t saying we can’t offer constructive criticism or that we should throw our discernment out the window. By naming the ableism in the translations and commentaries on this slogan, I’m not laying blame on any one individual but pointing at the cultural pervasiveness of ableism. We live in an ableist society and so we have all absorbed ableist biases. I’m owning my own growing awareness of ableism, how I’ve absorbed it, and how I’m working to unlearn it.
I did find a translation that wasn’t so problematic in Traleg Kyabgon’s book, The Practice of Lojong: “Don’t talk about others’ weak points.” This is an example of a translation that doesn’t equate an individual’s shortcomings with a disability, and gets to the heart of this slogan’s guidance.
No one is a perfect, flawless being who gets it right all the time — ourselves included. This is why we should examine our motivations before we open our mouths to say something about someone’s shortcomings. Are we pointing to someone else’s flaws so we don’t have to look at our own? Are we about to speak from a place of thinking we are better than someone else, as if we aren’t products of the same conditioning? Are we speaking from a place of condescension, or a place of compassion?
When we focus on and talk about other people’s weak points, we are often doing so in order to give ourselves a sense of superiority. It’s also something we do to put blame on an individual, rather than seeing the reality of systemic and cultural issues. When we fixate on someone as being a “bad” person, it renders us incapable of seeing them as full, complex beings as capable of waking up as anyone else. It also absolved us of looking at the work we have to do as people living in and influenced by the same culture. | https://medium.com/kaitlynschatch/lojong-practice-journal-dont-talk-about-injured-limbs-ab3f9a05716 | ['Kaitlyn S. C. Hatch'] | 2020-11-19 19:53:26.729000+00:00 | ['Ableism', 'Practice', 'Dharma', 'Lojong', 'series of posts'] |
Stream of Consciousness | The past, the present, the future
Stream of Consciousness
it’s a gray day. photo by author.
What today is all about.
It’s about reading Apple News and finding out the Stimulus Package, whatever they want to call it, won’t be enough to stop the evictions.
It’s about knowing we’re safe after spending three years in PTSD-induced poverty. Finally getting compensation from the VA, the Air Force. Finally having more than my social security disability check $775 to live on and being able to breathe and feeling guilty about it because so many people can’t find the money to pay their rent, to buy food and now we can. We almost lost our house, we did lose our car, and life was not a bowl fo cherries, to say the least. The past is gone. Faulkner was wrong, the past is past. Yes, you can argue that point with me if you want to…
https://deadmule.medium.com/southern-neighborhood-living-on-775-a-month-475a64ab861a
That link was supposed to turn into a box with info and link. Oh Medium, ya let me down. Well, the link at the bottom formats correctly.
We donated to 16 charities this year in November and December. We kept most of the money local. Our local Boys and Girls Club, the Food Bank, Veteran’s Christmas fund, Toys for Tots, animal rescue organizations, KIVA, community centers, Feeding America, local arts council (we bought a brick to be inscribed with our name and placed on the sidewalk in front of the building)… it was more fun, more rewarding, I must admit, than buying trivial needs on Amazon. But once I gave the money, I found I wanted to do more. It was like eating popcorn but giving away our disposable income every month is not sustainable because disposable really isn’t. It’s needed by family and friends and there is another story for another day in that fact.
Today is about remembering Christmas when I was a kid. From 1950s through 1960s, my childhood years, it was as magical as it could get. From the decorations to the food to the presents… and then on the 26th we drove through four states to get to Cincinnati, Ohio to see our relatives and we’d spend a joyous week eating Yankee food and visiting with greats and grands. And the cousins!
Today is me publishing the January 2021 issue of the Dead Mule and reflecting upon TWENTY FIVE years of maintaining that website. I’ve managed to publish every month, for the most part, for all of 25 years in 2021. I find such a revelation difficult to comprehend. Honestly, don’t know how that happened, 25 years on. Not sure how to celebrate it. The site averages 500 pages visited a day. A day. The statistics plug-in tells me it’s the front page and then on from there but if we have 150 unique visits (a day!) they’re reading more than the front page. I like the design of the Dead Mule although the “theme” is supposed to be for a store front, the layout for products for sale, not story excerpts. I’ve used it for a couple years and hope to keep it going for quite a few more. I’ve had many iterations of the Mule. This one, while time consuming to format the writing, seems to be the simplest WordPress one so far.
We tried podcasting but it turned out to be not what was expected: the monthly additions aren’t regular but what’s on there now is entertaining and I suggest a listen. Hopefully we’ll get some new stories on their soon.
Today is me remembering. Today is me looking forward because looking back at 2020 is fraught with dismay, isn’t it? I mean, we can all write something about the horrors of the last 365 days. And I don’t just mean politics.
My mom would make oyster stew for my dad on Christmas Eve. She’d make Welsh Rarebit on toast points for my sister, brother and me. When I got old enough to reach the stovetop safely, the rarebit became my responsibility. Daddy would buy Guinness for the rarebit. It’s been 40 years since I’ve had rarebit. I’m not moved to recreate the recipe this year nor have I been for decades. Memories sometimes just should remain so. To recreate a moment can cheapen it, I think. Maybe I’m just jaded because it won’t live up to my expectations — that rarebit. Everyone who enjoyed it is dead. So to try to drum up new support for an old tradition just seems sad.
Christmas Eve gets to be at my daughter’s house with my grandsons and son-in-law. We all have stayed in our houses, no contact, not even with each other, since Thanksgiving in preparation for this event. Only trips to store for necessities, no restaurants, no risky behaviors, always masked, always distant, always washing our hands.
Jane’s doing prime rib, Yorkshire pudding and a Yule Log. We see each other, distant from on another, front porch visits — they live three blocks away but we haven’t shared a meal, been together, in months, as is true of probably everyone reading this. The isolation. I think about that today.
My other daughter, across town, a couple scant miles away, will remain distant. Her 17 year old stepson has what we hope is a cold. His Covid19 test should be in today but since he was previously exposed (daughter/stepdaughter had Covid in May) and had a negative test, I think he’ll be negative again. Just rationalizing here, hoping for the best outcome. He works at grocery store part-time, hangs out with a small group of friends that have been together since last March… probably not the safest person for me to be around these days so we’ll celebrate some gift opening probably with us on their back porch on one side of sliding glass door and them on the other side, inside.
Today is me thinking about what’s good. And getting ready to order groceries “to go” from our local Food Lion grocery store. I’ll pick them up tomorrow, as I’m late with today’s order. I haven’t been in a grocery store in months and I see that as good. I see my dogs, curled up on their blanket on the couch as good. My husband fiddling around with a new MacBook is good. Joseph R Biden will be president next month and that’s glorious.
I don’t write about politics in my blog or my stories, except for when I wrote about how, in 1972, I went to the Republican National Convention as a page and how that experience played out. Man, I was adventurous. I think three years of poverty and one year of a pandemic definitely slow me down. We’d just begun to have a living income when Covid hit. I bought a 2019 Chevy Equinox in May 2019 and have less than 7,000 miles on it, after all this time.
Well, that’s enough about my thoughts, enough of my day. Not publishing this on GiaB, this goes back to personal blogging, back from 2016–2019 Medium posts. | https://medium.com/@deadmule/stream-of-consciousness-dcfa60a1d161 | ['Valerie Macewan'] | 2020-12-21 19:26:17.109000+00:00 | ['Dead Mule', 'Memoir', 'History', 'Gloomy Weather', 'Essay'] |
Good Collaborations Are Art, Great Ones Are Kitsch | Heron Preston’s collaboration with oral care brand MOON sounds like something out of MSCHF factory. Known for its purposefully absurd and random viral stunts, MSCHF is the creator of Nike sneakers filled with Holy Water, toaster-shaped bath bombs, and an app making stock investments based on astrological signs.
While it certainly wouldn’t look out of place next to the squeaky chicken bong popularized by the “factory”, the limited edition stain removal whitening toothpaste in fact dropped on StockX on October 27th. Asking price climbed from $15 to $27 via DropX and the toothpaste came in a limited batch of 350 items.
Collaborations like MOON x Heron Preston, Colgate x Supreme, Aimé Leon Dore x Porsche 964, McDonalds x Travis Scott or White Castle x Telfar are often dismissed as stunt-y, tongue-in-cheek, garish and lowbrow. Be that as it may, most of them aim to be appreciated in an ironic and knowing way.
Good collaborations are art, great collaborations are kitsch. They fit into the definition of kitsch perfectly: a replica that’s purposefully fake, and that’s where the joke is. Take it seriously, and you are a goon.
There are already obvious parallels between collaborations and the world of art (and kitsch): there are auctions, collectors, dealers, critics, resale marketplaces, monographs. Just like art, collaborations aim to shock and surprise. They can’t be criticized, and they strive to reach high prices and cultural immortality.
Power to the Mundane
“You know it’s art when the check clears,” said Andy Warhol. With Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana, Warhol made his way into museums by turning the mundane world into works of art by enriching it with pop references, connotations and associations. Warhol’s art is commercial and his commercials are art (a Warhol ad launched Absolut vodka in 1986).
At the same time, fine art went from museums into fashion, design and pop culture. Elsa Schiaparelli — the original creator of the newspaper print dress — was probably the proto fashion collaborator who featured her Surrealist friends like Salvador Dali on her designs. In the ’80s, New York designer Willi Smith invited artists, performers and graphic designers to join his project of making art part of daily life. In the early 00s, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami and Stephen Spouse joined forces with Louis Vuitton where then creative director Marc Jacobs turned the fashion-art collaboration into global cash cows. Recently, Cindy Sherman collaborated with Undercover and Yoyoi Kusama has just released her new Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame limited-edition bottle and gift box. It retails for $30,000 and comes with a poem.
When someone buys a Cindy Sherman x Undercover, they aren’t actually buying a bag or a t-shirt; they’re buying a legit work of art. When they wear it, a person shows off their knowledge and cultural awareness. They also see themselves through a new lens: not as mere consumers, but as collectors. Done right, collaborations generate collectibles, justify high prices, create cult objects, and initiate brands in the domain of intangibles. Thanks to this newly-acquired timelessness, symbolic authority and post-materialistic form, Undercover isn’t a mere commercial entity, but a shrine of culture and human creativity. Through collaborations, brands ingrain themselves in culture, not in a market segment.
Culture x Commerce
Collaborations transform non-culture into culture. It’s a great business model: collaborations don’t need financial capital, only a strong brand capital. Supreme can put its logo on a brick and collaborate with Colgate as long as its brand equity is attractive.
Moncler, Mini and Aimé Leon Dore made collaborations integral parts of their DNA. With good reason: compressed trend cycles force brands to constantly come up with the new stuff. Consumers today expect physical products at the unattainable speed of Instagram. A quick solve is to riff off already popular and familiar stuff. Cue in the endless Air Jordan and Supreme collaborations. A brand uses Air Jordan or Supreme’s aesthetic just enough to become kitsch, which gives it a new context and an ironic read and turns it into an insider joke.
Collaborations work well in mature markets, where consumers are bored and products are commodified. There are only so many Uniqlo items that a person can own, but not if those items were made by Jun Takashi, Jil Sander or Pharrell. Having the fashion link allows Uniqlo to cultivate “elitism to all:” it can sell a lot of Pharrell t-shirts to a lot of people without diluting its symbolic value. This symbolic value makes a commodity incomparable: a very few people will pick MOON over Crest or Colgate in a pharmacy. But many will select it to add some flex to their bathrooms. Limited editions keep the cultural pioneers interested in the brand, and MOON can enjoy a temporary monopoly by rendering its competition irrelevant: collaborations are hard to replicate.
Hardest to replicate are inconsistent and random collaborations, like Heron Preston x MOON or Steven Alan x Mucinex. Their genius is in that they shun any coherence. Coherence is for suckers, because collaborations aren’t brand extensions. They’re a creative expression of a brand that let it flex its zeitgeist muscles, promote it as a trendsetter and turn its products into brand communication. A Chanel snowboard or IKEA x Craig Green make Chanel and IKEA modern and culturally present and curious. An unexpected collaboration attracts collectors, cultural pioneers and hypebeasts. It becomes the source of a brand’s aspirational power.
Collaborations Trade in Aspiration
For a brand, having aspirational power is everything. In the modern economy, the growth motor isn’t a price. It’s taste, aesthetics, identity and thrill. Economic growth doesn’t come from products, but from the intangible social and cultural capital that a brand creates. Products are just a vehicle for beauty, thrill, identity, transformational experiences and a life aesthetically worth living. Moon toothpaste, in its own words, “is destined to elevate your everyday, oral care routine into a true oral beauty experience.” By collaborating with Heron Preston, MOON puts this mission on steroids. It makes brushing teeth more culturally and socially relevant. Having an orange toothpaste turns everyday hygiene into a creative and inspiring ritual. Every time we brush our teeth with Heron Preston x Moon, we create a social distance between ourselves as those unenlightened enough to use Crest. We also create a link between us and all other cultural pioneers of oral care.
Collaborations aren’t a brand gloss. They’re a strategic transformation of a brand’s operating system. In the aspirational economy, this transformation is a matter of a brand’s long-term renewal and cultural relevance. Strategic collaborations across a brand’s entire value chain are akin to making a safe bet on a brand’s cultural and business future.
At the level of marketing and sales, collaborations protect pricing power, ensure high margins and reframe consumers’ perception of the brand. At the level of a product concept and production, collaborators provide value innovation. At the level of distribution, collaborations expand a brand’s market and renew its customer base. A collaboration between luxury brands and Chinese KOLs give these brands an in with the Chinese customer. A collaboration between Rimowa and streetwear pioneers like Supreme, Bape and Anti Anti Social Club renews brand associations. At the level of merchandising, collaborations give halo to the core collection, re-evaluate brand perception and increase brand consideration. Before Nike launches a new model, it seeds it on runways of its fashion collaborators like Undercover or Sacai. The collaborators add their imprint, making it culturally noteworthy and spurring interest in the model’s later commercial release by Nike.
Collaborations are basically a constant brand re-contextualization: they take it from one context and put it into another one. In that sense, there isn’t a “bad” collaboration: collaborations are calculated cultural and business tests. Some contexts are more fertile than others, but just as evolution constantly mixes stuff up to see what sticks (theropods didn’t), a brand stays alive through remixes. Collaborations are the strategy of brand awareness, market expansion and its fountain of youth.
Through re-contextualization, collaborations:
Allow brands to start trading in exchange value, not in use value. Use value is defined by a product’s functionality. Exchange value is defined by a product’s social appeal. A social hit becomes a market hit. Brands that insert their products in the cultural exchange system and not in a market segment, win.
Give everyday products identity. In a crowded competitive landscape, a brand is the key product differentiator. A brand makes products stand for something more than their function and separates them from commodities. A collaboration enforces brand identity, ensures its continuity, and connects products into a narrative.
Infuse taste and meaning into ordinary consumption. Today, a brand’s products and services do not only fulfill their basic functions. Their job is to aesthetically enrich their buyers’ lives and become social links that signal status, social distinction and belonging.
Collaborations are easier to understand once they’re taken out the domain of brand stunts and into the domain of art. Art is a big business. Art is also a big social and cultural commentator, critic and cynic. It tells us what we need to know about the world we live in and about where the future is going. Collaborations do the same.
This article was originally published on Highsnobiety. | https://medium.com/swlh/good-collaborations-are-art-great-ones-are-kitsch-e583fb2374fb | ['Ana Andjelic'] | 2020-11-23 08:30:18.256000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Art', 'Collaboration', 'Culture', 'Marketing'] |
Bitcoin ATMs: The Good vs. The Bad | Apart from being a public health emergency, Covid-19 exposed and exaggerated many societal, economic, and political issues. The inequality has been exacerbated as those in the “knowledge economy” benefited from access to technology and flexible work arrangements. Investors are also better off with U.S. stock markets sitting at or near all-time highs. On the other end of the spectrum are the minimum wage and blue-collar workers, small businesses and, often, minorities. At the same time, fiscal and monetary response to the pandemic has raised concerns about inflation and potential devaluation of most major currencies. As countries around the world, including the U.S., experience significant economic shocks, many are turning to Bitcoin and crypto platforms.
Investors increasingly view Bitcoin as a safe haven asset, better suited to provide inflation protection than gold. Bill Miller, Paul Tudor Jones and Stan Druckenmiller have all disclosed positions in Bitcoin based on this narrative. Furthermore, Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of fixed income at BlackRock has recently said that Bitcoin has the potential to “replace gold to a large extent.”
For many people, Bitcoin ATMs (BTMs) represent the only opportunity to participate in this evolution of financial services. It’s therefore not surprising that as demand for Bitcoin surged during the pandemic, so did the number of BTM installations. As of November 11, installations rose by 85%, exceeding last year’s 50% rise, according to Coin ATM Radar.
Crypto ATM installations growth
Blockchain and crypto products, including BTMs, are increasingly necessary in today’s world. BTMs, for example, can be found in easily accessible places like convenience stores and gas stations, reducing barriers to entry. Many BTM operators are also using their business for good. CoinFlip, the world’s largest BTM operator, aims to “provide financial services to unbanked or underbanked customers” and its COO, Ben Weiss, believes that the future of crypto is to empower “more people with greater access to services by removing intermediaries.”
The issue of financial inclusion is, without a doubt, one of the most urgent issues we are facing today. In developed and developing economies alike, billions don’t have access to essential financial services. In fact, the most recent data shows that globally, more than 1.7 billion people are unbanked. Even in the U.S., 22% of Americans are either unbanked or underbanked. The cost of financial exclusion often falls on the most vulnerable people, with minorities bearing the brunt of it. Without access to necessary financial products, many struggle to pay bills, insure themselves or invest in the future.
This is where BTMs offer an innovative and effective solution. They are easy to use, convenient and inclusive. They provide an essential service for many Americans who by choice or necessity, still prefer cash over plastic. Most importantly, and this deserves special attention, they offer a cheap way for many unbanked and underbanked to invest and preserve their money.
One of the reasons Bitcoin has done well as an investment is its monetary policy. Only 21 million Bitcoins will ever be created. The current rate of inflation is 1.8%, below 2.5% for gold, and is programmed to decline over time and will eventually reach 0. In comparison, traditional currencies inflate at a much higher rate. $1 in 1800 is now worth more than $20, meaning that the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has gone down substantially over time. This situation is like to get even worse due to substantial monetary and fiscal stimulus to address the Covid-19 pandemic.
$1 in 1800 adjusted for inflation
Bitcoin has plenty of other desirable characteristics that make it an excellent investment. Institutional demand is picking up on the back of the “digital gold” narrative. It’s scarce and can’t be censored. It’s the favorite asset of millennials and generation Z. According to research by Bank of America, income of Gen Z is expected to reach $33 trillion by 2030, an increase of 500%. Furthermore, millennials and Gen Z are likely to inherit nearly $78 trillion of wealth with some of that capital likely flowing into Bitcoin. Using BTMs, the unbanked and underbanked people around the world can participate in this paradigm change.
When it comes to operating Bitcoin ATMs, there are major differences between good and bad operators. Good operators provide a convenient and safe experience, while bad operators can get you in trouble with authorities and steal your money.
In the U.S., operating a BTM requires registering as a Money Service Business (MSB). This means complying with the Bank Secrecy Act and establishing Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols. Daniel Polotsky, CEO of CoinFlip, stated that his company requires AML and KYC for all customers. Other major BTM operators in the U.S., like LibertyX and Coinsource, also emphasize the importance of these checks and balances. LibertyX, for example, requires customers to complete KYC checks on the app, before using their BTMs. They also ask users to provide a wallet address and a verified purchase location.
These measures, while sometimes frustrating, are necessary to protect consumers. CoinFlip’s Ben Weiss recently stated that “creating strong consumer protections will keep bad actors from competing with legitimate products and help the crypto industry gain legitimacy in the general public’s eyes.”
Unfortunately, there are plenty of bad actors in the crypto space, many of whom engage in money-laundering and terrorist financing using BTMs. Just recently, John Fort, Criminal Investigation Chief for IRS, said that IRS is working with law enforcement to investigate illegal usage of cryptocurrencies through BTMs. According to him, BTM operators are “required to abide by the same know-your-customer, anti-money laundering regulations, and we believe some have varying levels of adherence to those regulations.”
This problem is not unique to the U.S. Last year, a criminal gang in Spain used two BTMs to launder cash and pay drug suppliers in Columbia. Just recently, German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, known as BaFin, seized 17 illegally operated and unlicensed BTMs. In its regulatory efforts, BaFin went a step further, making it illegal to provide any service, like broadband connection or electricity, to unlicensed BTM operators.
While most U.S. BTM operators comply with existing rules, the government has been slow to implement progressive regulatory reforms due to the outdated perception that Bitcoin is primarily used for illicit activities. Lack of regulatory clarity is curbing innovation and preventing BTM operators from creating economic opportunities. Instead of streamlined, federal regulatory framework for Bitcoin and other crypto assets, the U.S. still has dozens of state-level regulations. This convoluted framework is simply inadequate, restricting innovation and failing consumers along the way.
Many BTM operators agree. According to Ben Weiss, “the biggest issue with current regulations is a lack of clarity. By developing a straightforward framework, governments encourage investment and industry growth.”
Financial inclusion has always been important, but even more so today. As the Covid-19 pandemic pushes more and more people into poverty, they need access to a fair financial system. Bitcoin ATMs are part of the solution, providing easy access to essential financial services. However, lack of regulatory clarity is weakening consumer protections and limiting the ability of the blockchain industry to innovate. The U.S. government should work with industry leaders, like Ben Weiss of CoinFlip, to develop a more robust regulatory framework. Otherwise, U.S. companies will move overseas, leaving millions of Americans behind, and only widening the wealth and inequality gaps. | https://medium.com/@isla-schultz9/bitcoin-atms-the-good-vs-the-bad-8d099e60a69e | ['Isla Schultz'] | 2020-11-25 14:02:45.074000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin Atms', 'Regulation', 'Bitcoin', 'Finance'] |
Three Secrets for your Job Interview | Let’s start my second story in Medium. Please give me a clap if you think this story is useful for you.
I am writing this topic to share my interview experience to all of you. I have received countless interview experiences this year. Eventually, I got two offers from the public sector and private sector at the same time. I hope that my experience sharing can help you in your upcoming interview in this pandemic situation.
Practice makes perfect. Just like an exam over and over. You have to prepare well and understand what interviewer wanna to ask you.
Secret ONE: Believe in yourself, and stay uniqueness
Everyone tell similar stories and experiences, how can you stand out yourself?
You need to analyze yourself first, what is the most unique selling point that you can tell to interviewers. You can first think about what is your hobby, e.g., drawing, reading, or even playing PS5? What is your achievement you have made for your hobby?
Sharing life story is my hobby. Hence, I keep writing a story every day in medium. Now, I have gained 2,000 claps / story and over 5,000 fans in medium.
Using matrix to support your point of view is the most persuasive way to gain positive impression from interviewers.
Secret TWO: Body language is more important than your content
Your voice, body language is showing your confidence. Sometimes, people will only remember what you make them feel, instead of what you say. First impression, your voice, and your little trick are representing who you are. Your content and what you say can be well prepared. But your confidence and small tricks are the bonus points that show why the interviewer needs to hire you.
Secret THREE: Do more research on the background of interviewer
Know your enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles without defeat.
Finally, show your warm and sincere during the interview and believe YES YOU CAN. | https://medium.com/@zicap/three-secrets-for-your-job-interview-edaf3eb8b725 | [] | 2020-12-26 16:41:07.701000+00:00 | ['Interview Tips', 'Interview', 'Tips', 'Business', 'Work'] |
Java: Block of Code:. Let us try and understand today what… | Block of code: Packages | Classes | Methods
Let us try and understand today what are the basic definitions we should be aware of in order to write a code template in Java. It is very essential to be clear in understanding the syntax of any language given to us. Syntax typically refers to a structured form of code that any computer could interpret. If a user tries to execute a command or say block of code without a proper syntax, it will end up generating syntax error, usually causing the program run to fail. In the most basic terminology I would refer a syntax to be the spelling and grammar of any programming language. Each language defines its own syntactical rules that controls which word could a computer interpret and what punctuation is necessary to be a correctly structured document.
There are three level of syntax which include:
Lexical syntax: they relate to all the basic symbols of any language[i.e. names, operators, etc.]
Concrete syntax: they relate to the context free grammar i.e. they consist of set of rules that define the way the program looks to the programmer.[i.e. expressions, statements, etc.]
Abstract syntax: they relate to the set of trees used to represent programs in implementation i.e. it defines the way program looks to the compiler.
The relation between the abstract and concrete syntax is accomplished by program called reader. The reader takes a piece of text that is expected to suffice the set of rules of the concrete syntax, and if the rules aren't accomplished error is generated. Otherwise, the reader transforms the text meeting the concrete syntax into the tree, meeting the definition of abstract syntax. This tree gives representation to the structure of program.
Hello Comrades,
As the few lines mentioned above gave you a glimpse of what are we going to understand today, I would further brief you on todays article. We today will deeply understand what are packages, classes[along with objects] , methods in Java. So to begin with, let us dive into packages first.
Packages:
The most innovative feature of Java is a package. Encapsulating of group of classes, interfaces, annotations, is termed as Packages in Java. It basically is a mechanism of grouping up similar type of classes, interfaces based on functionalities. Java gives an enormous set of packages to help avoid code redundancy(rewriting of any complex code).
Benefits Packages provide are of re-usability, avoiding name conflicts, obtaining controlled access, data encapsulation and easy maintenance of code.
Re-usability:
It is a mechanism that facilitates to reuse fields or methods of any existing class, when we create any new class. Association and Inheritance are the ways to achieve code re-usability. Association refers to (HAS-A) relationship: i) composition(strong) ii)aggregation(weak), where as Inheritance refers to (IS-A) relationship. Without forming a relation, re-usability is not achievable.
To explain the mentioned above point with a real life example: We know, Car is a vehicle and bike is a vehicle, when we have this IS-A relationship, always prefer inheritance. If a relationship is HAS-A then go for association. Car has an engine and car has a music player. But as we know, if we remove the engine from car, car turns out to be useless, but that is not the case with music player. Hence, relation of car : engine is that of a composition(strong coupling) and car : music player is that of aggregation(weak coupling).
Association is relation between two separate classes which establishes through their Objects. Association can be one-to-one, one-to many, many-to-one, many-to-many.
taking a look at code template:
In coding, we create constructors for strong association and methods for weak association.
if we perform such coding then, class A has a relationship with class B. Association is nothing but creating an object of a class in another class as described above.
Inheritance simply defines itself as child class inheriting property (data members) and functionalities (methods) from parent class. Inheritance is simply a process of defining a new class based on an existing class by extending the common properties and functionalities.
eg: Inheritance in Java
The derived classes(child classes) can inherit all the members and methods that are declared as public or protected in the parent class. If the members or methods are declared as private then derived class cannot access it directly, they will need public getter and setters.
Avoiding name conflicts:
Packages in a way help us to uniquely identify a class. Conceptually consider a package to be equivalent to folders in our system, as we can have same filenames in different folders similarly we can have same class names into different packages in Java, as the class names are qualified with the package names. They make searching, locating and usage of classes, interfaces easier.
eg:
If there is a class name Employee in two packages : sales and marketing then the package name would be as follows: com.sales.Employee
com.marketing.Employee
Controlled access:
Packages offers us access protection such as protected classes, default classes and private classes. As mentioned in above lines, a subclass cannot have an access modifier which are less accessible than the parent class. Also methods or data members that are private cannot be inherited.
eg: if a super class(parent class) has any method or variable declared as public then the sub class (child class) will have access modifier as public only. But if the super class has any variable or method declared as Protected then it can be of access modifier protected or public in sub class.
Data encapsulation:
Encapsulating data means one class must not hold an access to the private members of the other class. The main advantage it provides is : security of a data.
The term encapsulation and data hiding are not similar. In encapsulation data can be public or private, but in data hiding it is mandatory to have data only as private.
Easy maintenance of code:
Using packages we can organize our project better and can easily locate related classes.
Packages are further classified into two types : pre-defined and user-defined packages. Built-in packages or say pre-defined packages are those that come along the JDK to simplify our task as a programmer. They have predefined classes and interfaces that are part of Java APIs. User defined packages are those which are developed by users in order to put together group of related classes, interfaces or sub-packages.
If we don't mention any package statement the class names are put into the default package, which holds no name. It is recommended not to define a class without any package. A class can have only one package statement but it can have more than one import package statement.
Classes[and objects]:
Java being an object oriented language has it heart as Objects and Classes. A class describes the contents of an object that belongs to it. It basically describes an aggregate of data fields(termed as instance variables) and defines operations(termed as methods). Where as an object is an element(refer as instance)of a class. Objects holds behavior of any class. While objects are the actual components of a program, the class specifies how objects (instances) are created and how they behave.
An object is an instance of class. A class has members. Members can be fields, methods or constructors. Class can also contain initializers(instance/ static). Static initializers run only once when the class is loaded, but an instance initializer will run every time an instance(object) is created.
We can simply define a class as a user defined prototype from which objects are created. Its general declarations can include components like modifiers, class keyword, class name, superclass(if any), interfaces(if any), body, constructors, fields and methods.
A class can have access modifier as public or default(when class has no access specifier). We cannot declare class as protected or private. But a nested class(class within a class) can have all the access specifiers. If a class has no modifier (default) it can be accessible only within its own package. If it has access modifier as public, it is accessible where ever its package is. If a class is using abstract as modifier, we cannot instantiate that class(cannot create object of that class). A class using final as a modifier cannot be extended by any other class. Making a class static assigns an inner declared class as a top- level class.
The class keyword helps us create class; followed by a class name(should begin with initial letters). Also if the class has to extend or implement any class or interfaces we can use keywords like extends or implements to call the super class or interface.
The body of a class is surrounded in curly braces{}. Constructors, as we know are used for initializing new objects. A variable (fields) provides the state of the class and its object, where as methods are used to implement the behavior of a class and its objects.
Constructors are not same as methods. Where a method operates on existing objects , a constructor brings a new object to existence. Constructors always are invoked with operator new.
Every class in Java is implicitly a sub class of a predefined class called Object. As mentioned that every class by default extends Object class, so there are few built in behavior that is present in every class [will discuss in brirf about Object class in upcoming article].
Java supports six types of classes namely:
POJO classes:
POJO stands for Plain Old Java Object. It is a class that contains only private variables and setters and getters methods to use those variables. It may not have a no-argument constructor. It holds no implementation to pre-specified interfaces and should not contain pre-defined annotations.
Static classes:
The keyword static typically describes how objects gets managed within a memory. A static object always belongs to the class rather than belonging to the object of the class. A static class can contain only static members and we cannot create any object of the static class directly.
eg: STATIC class
Concrete classes:
Any Java class having implementation to all its methods are termed as concrete classes. They cannot hold any method without an implementation of it. This class can be instantiated.
CONCRETE class example
Abstract classes:
Any class declared using abstract keyword and holding zero or more abstract methods (methods without any implementation written in them) are termed as an abstract class. These classes can have constructors and static and final methods as well.
ABSTRACT class example
Final classes:
Final keyword when used along the class makes the class that cannot be extended by any other classes. Thus making a class immutable. We can achieve class immutability by making the class final, by declaring the variables as private , by not providing any setters, by initializing all the fields via constructors performing deep copy[ we will cover this cloning topic later] and by making all the mutable fields as final so that its value can be assigned only once.
Inner classes [*Nested Inner class |*Method Local Inner class | *Anonymous Inner class | *Static Nested class ]
Inner class in Java is used to enhance encapsulation . An inner class is enclosed within a class.
The nested Inner class has access to all the private member variables of an outer class. These nested inner classes can have access modifiers.
The method Local Inner class is declared inside an outer class method.
Anonymous Inner class is declared inside the outer class and holds no name .
Just like a class has static member variables, similarly a class can have static class as its member.
flow of calls to methods explained in Java class
Methods:
Method is an action that an object is able to perform. A method is block of code which runs only when we call it. Only a main()method is the method that doesn’t require any explicit call. Methods, in Java are also termed as Functions. Java has two types of methods: user-defined and pre-defined.
declaring a method: accessModifier returnType methodname(parameters){
//statements
} eg: public static int addNumbers(int a, int b){
int c = a+b;
return c;
}
/** * public = access modifier
* static = to weather method can be accessed without object or not
* int = the return type(if return type is void, method will not return anything)
*/
A method when declared as final cannot be overridden. An abstract method has no body( no definition/ implementation written inside it), any subclass of it will provide definition to the abstract method. A synchronized method will require a locking before any execution[shall discuss in Multi threading]. A native method is a method whose implementation is not written in Java, but in some [platform dependent way and a static method doesn't apply to any particular instances(object).
Hope this article was beneficial to your knowledge.
That is it on this article from my end. For any queries or suggestions to modify this article or any requests topics you can reach me here.
Until next time…
Peace Out!
Rupam Pawan Jha | https://medium.com/developers-coffee/block-of-code-3b761fa2143b | ['Rupam Pawan Jha'] | 2020-12-19 06:08:15.902000+00:00 | ['Developerscoffee', 'Java8', 'Class', 'Package', 'Java'] |
R.I.P. Juicero — squeezing $120M from Venture Capitalists for a solution no one needed | Photo by Bloomberg Technology
If you don’t know yet — Juiceros main idea was to deliver a convenient cold-press juicing system that makes raw, organic juice with the touch of a button with no need of cutting fruits and veggies. Juiceros downfall can be attributed to many factors of which product-market fit was one of the major contributors. During the early stages of Juiceros development, they should have asked themselves if Juicero is really solving a customer issue and how much they are willing to pay for it.
Those key questions must include:
Is the problem of cutting up fruit and juicing them really a major issue or just an inconvenience for the customer? Are there already solutions that suit the customer just fine?
Product market fit y’all
Sufficient research, including market sizing, customer needs and price should have been clarified during the development phase. As I see it Juicero solved a problem no one had to begin with. They failed to properly evaluate the need for their product before rushing to secure VC capital. A great way to validate the actual customer need for consumer-facing products is crowdfunding. The company will instantly get feedback if people are excited and willing to invest in a product they are both financially and emotionally invested. Moreover, this would also allow for instant feedback during the early development phase as crowdfunding investors are usually very critical of products.
Where was the market research?
Furthermore, the Startup should have evaluated the problem far more thoroughly through qualitative research including extensive interviews, building personas and focus groups. Most importantly, I think that the Startup grossly undelivered in value. During the development phase Juicero should have analysed the major emerging trends in the juice and health industry and examine specific areas where competitors fail to solve problems — and pivoted their product and business model accordingly. While I understand that this product might be seen as a convenient and fast way of making juice, I very much doubt that a sufficient market for Juicero ever existed. I assume that the company severely overestimated the total accessible market for their product. If we guesstimate the total US-market for juice and juice drinks we get to approx. $10 million, not considering the fact that most of those people are mostly “to-go” consumers of fresh-pressed juices at coffee shops and juiceries. It’s very doubtful that those individuals would actually purchase the machine for themselves as it feels like a more expensive and long-term commitment.
Go niche
Juicero should have done more market and customer research in order to figure out if their product would better fit on a niche or mass market. As I see it they aimed for a nice consumer-household-market while overpricing their product for their segment. A juicer might make significantly more sense in snack areas in hip co-working spaces or giant tech companies. I would have suggested to aim for a corporate clientele and offer a “vending machine” approach that allows customers to rent one or multiple juicers and price them according to actual usage including quantity discounts (by that I mean that additionally to the affordable renting fee the customer primarily pays for the juice bags). Alternatively, it would have been clever to design a machine that could not only squeeze fresh juice bags but also frozen ones.
This would have allowed the customer an even more convenient experience, extended shelf and overall more options. Another possibility could be to extend their market to the hospitality industry and supply big hotel chains, which primarily house young professionals who have an active and healthy lifestyle. The Juicero would have made an excellent addition to any breakfast buffet and large hotels certainly have the financial backing to invest in new “hip” technology for their guests. | https://medium.com/@barbara_83963/r-i-p-juicero-how-to-squeeze-120m-from-venture-capitalists-for-a-solution-no-one-needed-9c935f0342b3 | ['Barbara Janczer'] | 2019-09-01 01:55:36.478000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Fail', 'Juicero', 'Venture Capital', 'Startup'] |
10 New Year’s Resolution Ideas | 1. Read more books.
Set a goal to read 1 book a week. Figure out how many pages you need to read daily in order to finish it in 7 days.
2. Start a gratitude journal and write 2–3 things you’re grateful for every morning.
The 5-minute journal is perfect for this. Or, just pick up a notebook and jot down what you’re most grateful for.
3. Pick a new language to learn and dedicate 30 minutes to it M-F.
Not only will this boost your brain power but how cool would it be to learn that language you used to dream of knowing?
4. Before getting upset or angry — take a deep breath and reassess.
Don’t let your emotions control you anymore. You’re in charge of how you react.
5. Get your documents organized in a filing folder.
Do you know where your passport is? Organize yourself this year. Start the year off clean and collected and keep it that way.
6. Create a solid morning routine that involves meditation.
A morning routine has the power to turn your entire day around. It’ll keep you grounded and efficient.
7. Learn to cook incredible and wholesome meals at home.
Bon Appetit is great for this. You don’t always have to go out to fancy restaurants, find ways to create your favorite meals at home.
8. Learn to approach things from a more positive perspective.
How often do you see the glass as half empty rather than half full? Change your mindset.
9. Identify how you can improve your personal relationships.
Have you and your partner been struggling? Maybe a few of your friendships are dwindling? It’s time to rekindle them and focus on strengthening the important relationships in your life.
10. Move your body more.
Whether that be going to the gym or going on walks, choose your poison but just move. Go on a bike ride, explore nature, do stretches every morning. Treat your body better this year.
2021 is your year to improve and get better, leave 2020 in the past and embrace the New Year with a new set of goals and a new you. | https://2madness.com/10-new-years-resolution-ideas-d546a81c1502 | ['Dayana Sabatin'] | 2020-12-10 03:52:52.193000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Self Improvement', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Life', 'Personal Development'] |
Web Notifications, Part 2: Auto-updating | We are also experimenting with an efficient, automatically updating notification that delivers a feed of information to a user’s lockscreen screen in one alert. These work well to convey data over time, like vote results and sports scores. If a user leaves the notification on their lockscreen it will update without any further alert tones, replacing the previous information with more current data. Note: this type of alert is currently only available on Chrome.
This approach eliminates the number of alerts that appear on a user’s screen, and lessens annoyance or burnout from being pinged multiple times by the same organization.
By sending auto-updating alerts straight to the lockscreen, we are trying to give control over the flow of information back to the user, so they can see the latest updates at a glance.
June 7 US presidential primaries
We first tested this notification type on June 7, when we ran auto-updating results for all of the states holding Democratic primaries that day. As the states began reporting, beginning with New Jersey at 8pm, we first sent out a notification like the one below to each subscriber asking them if they would like to receive results notifications for that state.
A tap on either the alert or the “Yes, Add Results” action button added the notification to the lockscreen. As the results came in, users received live results of the vote percentages, precincts reporting, and the raw vote count, all auto-updating off a feed of AP data. At the end of the night, as the Guardian called each state on its interactive results tracker on the website (original home of the beloved 8-bit candidates) we manually sent a final alert declaring a winner.
Above is a lockscreen showing all of the night’s contests updating in real time as well as another type of notification we ran.
When a winner was declared we sent a separate notification with a new icon, as seen below.
Based on feedback from users who received our June 7 primary alerts, we then tested two tweaks in a similar experiment for the DC primary the following week. The first tweak changed the way the vote was displayed; and the second changed the user flow to dismiss an auto-updating alert.
While in the first test we gave greater prominence to the raw number of votes, user feedback suggested it was the percentage that mattered more to them. We created a new line in the DC notification (seen in Version B) and asked users if they felt the presentation was more clear. 57% of our 42 survey respondents said that the new version was more clear, while 31% said the original was more clear and 11% said they were the same.
Additionally, during the June 7 primary, a user who dismissed the alert by swiping it away was sent another notification that asked “Are you sure?” We were not sure if users swiping right to dismiss the alerts — the usual way to get rid of alerts on an Android lockscreen — would realize they would reappear when new results came in, so we wanted to offer a clear opt-out.
Following the June 7 experiment we received feedback that this second alert was not intuitive and was in fact more annoying — exactly what we were trying to avoid. For the DC primary we changed the flow to allow users to dismiss the alert with no follow-up message, but included a way to stop updates in the action buttons (also seen above in Version B).
June 23 EU Referendum
On June 23, for the EU referendum, we again ran an auto-updating notification that self-updated when each of the 382 local authorities reported their results. The notification ran from 9 pm to just after 2 am EST, or 1 am to just after 7 am BST. We maintained the same opt-out format that we used in the US presidential primary experiments.
By the late evening in the US, a Leave victory was certain and news organizations were beginning to announce the result. Following the Guardian app alert, we notified our users of that result in a separate notification. However, we opted to let our live results notification continue to update until all 382 local authorities reported.
We maintained the opt-out format as a way to further test our premise that this was a more intuitive method. That premise was challenged by the results of our follow-up survey, in which we asked “If you had wanted to stop the live results notifications, did you know how to do it?” Of our 2697 survey respondents, 54% said yes, and 46% said no they did not know how, suggesting we may need to further tweak how we make this option clearer.
The auto-updating alert could be used in many different news instances: to follow a sports game, for elections results, even as a mini live blog (?!).
What we’ve learned so far about auto-updating alerts:
Defer to the established Android pattern for dismissing notifications. In our first run at auto-updating notifications we were worried that users would not know how to stop the notifications, or wouldn’t know to expect it to auto-update, so we over-corrected by asking them as they dismissed it “Are you sure?”. This was not the expected behavior after dismissing a notification on Android, and in trying to anticipate user need, we ended up annoying them. For our more recent experiments, we have included a Stop Updates button. Our data suggests that users are still learning how to use it. Newsrooms looking to experiment with auto-updating notifications need to figure out how best to show users how to stop them — we’re still working on this.
In our first run at auto-updating notifications we were worried that users would not know how to stop the notifications, or wouldn’t know to expect it to auto-update, so we over-corrected by asking them as they dismissed it “Are you sure?”. This was not the expected behavior after dismissing a notification on Android, and in trying to anticipate user need, we ended up annoying them. For our more recent experiments, we have included a Stop Updates button. Our data suggests that users are still learning how to use it. Newsrooms looking to experiment with auto-updating notifications need to figure out how best to show users how to stop them — we’re still working on this. Not every alert can be automated. You can run an automated alert but if you think that your audience wants the additional editorial context outside of the pure data (for example, declaring a winner to an election) then that is a separate alert that needs to be sent outside of the auto-updating notification sequence. This has meant some late nights for our developers: In the case of an election, deciding when to end the notification relies on the editorial call from the newsroom that the result is in. It’s a factor for newsrooms to consider as they plan their experiments.
More in this series about web notifications: | https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/web-notifications-part-2-auto-updating-259f45afa39a | ['Madeline Welsh'] | 2016-07-11 23:25:19.979000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Web Notifications', 'Journalism', 'Mobile', 'Innovation'] |
numbers | zero, one, two, three
four, five, six, seven, eight, nine
ten, eleven, twelve | https://medium.com/blueinsight/numbers-f86312b55a45 | ['Isaiah Mccall'] | 2020-12-13 18:40:32.435000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Poetry', 'Mathematics', 'Blue Insights', 'Poem'] |
Our conversation with the Dalai Lama | A group of 85 members from 1880 and their immediate family, including Singaporeans, Americans, Australians, Britishers, Indians, Canadians, Chinese, French, and Swiss, visited His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala on March 27th 2019.
Photo by Tenzin Choejor
As His Holiness entered the room he greeted the entourage, paying particular attention to the children in the front row. He suggested that if people like them, belonging to the 21st century, made an effort to change things through education, a more peaceful and compassionate world might emerge after one generation or so.
He pointed out that young children care little for differences among them and are simply happy to play together. It is often only as they grow older and begin their education that they learn to observe distinctions. Education would do better when it pays more attention to basic human values and cultivates the innate sense of compassion we all have.
He believes that we can all benefit from cultivating warm-heartedness. Those who are more compassionate tend to be more peaceful. “If that’s how you are, even when you receive bad news, it doesn’t upset or irritate you. To maintain peace of mind, we need to tackle our disturbing emotions. Just as we learn to look after our physical health, we have to learn to look after our minds too. If you’re physically fit but your mind is distressed, you will be unhappy. Alongside physical hygiene I recommend we cultivate emotional hygiene as well.”
Photo by Tenzin Choejor
“Since my childhood, I’ve been learning how to tackle my emotions. It is the nature of this world to be full of problems. What really helps is being able to maintain a peace of mind. One way to do this is to be concerned about others and to remember their kindness. I regard my fellow beings as wanting a joyful life on a daily basis as I do. If you think of others as being like you, it’s easy to feel close to whoever you meet. That’s why, as a human being, I’m committed to promoting compassion as a true source of happiness.”
In our journey of understanding happiness, we might contemplate the existence of emptiness within self. When asked how we should relate to that, His Holiness explained that emptiness is not nothingness. When we investigate nothingness, it is a destination. The self is a combination of the physical and the mind, which is a continuation of moments: past, present, and future. Yet, what is “now”? There is a big gap between appearance and reality. The current moment is also relative to the previous second and the next millisecond. When the current moment passes, the present becomes the past. As such, we do not exist independently but are dependent on other factors around us.
Photo by Tenzin Choejor
It is therefore essential for us to remember the oneness of the human race, and of the whole world. Mankind has placed too much emphasis on different nationalities and races. “Among all 7 billion human beings and even among the 85 of you — everyone has a different face, and yet we were all born the same way. We are social animals, just like dogs, or cats… maybe not cats. Individual happiness depends on the community in which we live.”
The Dalai Lama concluded his session by saying, “I dedicate my body, speech, and mind to the welfare of others, so I’m happy if it may have been of benefit to share my thoughts with you.” Perhaps that is how we reconcile being different yet being one. When we respect others with compassion, even with divergent perspectives and beliefs, we start inspiring one another towards personal and communal growth.
Adapted from the original article here.
Watch the livestream here. | https://medium.com/1880singapore/our-conversation-with-the-dalai-lama-f8542e30ef85 | [] | 2019-03-28 09:22:25.229000+00:00 | ['Dalai Lama', 'Contemplation', 'Meditation', 'Conversations', 'Dharamsala'] |
Niftyx Protocol: product pipeline and rollout strategy | Hi Shroomies! As we wrap up this year we’d like to shed some light on what’s coming in early 2022 with our rollout plan, and also show additional sneak peeks of work we’ve done internally.
This past year has been one of transitions, introspection, waiting, planning, and finally all pieces are falling into place. We’ve gone from targeting indie games to doubling-down on AAA-quality titles. From being a pixelated meme to adopting a better brand ready for the mainstream. We have learned that quality takes time, and accepted trade-offs that allow us to not compromise or give up our vision of an open, neutral and community-driven Metaverse.
Just some growing pains! And we did everything to ensure that we end up with a future-proof project. So, here’s what to expect as we enter the new year and in what order…
What to expect — Timeline of Events
Current timeline of events as per best effort estimates
Each of the timeline items will come with a dedicated post in the coming days and weeks, so we will simply go over the overall strategy. There are more items but the general action plan for the first months of the year could be summarised in 3 simple stages.
Liquidity Improvements → Subnet setup → DEX and Game launch
This doesn’t mean that advances for each of these work streams won’t happen in parallel. We have a lot of stuff being cooked in the kitchen at the same time!
SHROOM migration and Liquidity Program.
Drawing inspiration from new algorithmic reserve currencies, we will borrow some of their innovations and apply them to our ecosystem, which already has a compelling use case as NFT trading layer.
Having protocol owned liquidity has undeniable benefits and will ultimately help us solve liquidity issues and slowly build a treasury of risk-free + ecosystem assets that can be deployed to further boost the growth of our protocols.
In the next post we will be announcing the migration plan and the new incentives to attract liquidity as well as honouring the pending rewards as soon as the new GSWAP token is issued in our upcoming subnet.
Gaming Subnet setup
Avalanche Subnets should be feature-complete during Q1, and as you know this is a moment that we’ve been waiting for over a year. Cross-subnet transfer will be the final critical feature that will allow teams to build with confidence without fears of their ecosystems being isolated.
During the Gameswap subnet bootstrapping the new GSWAP token will be issued with renewed tokenomics that we will explain in an upcoming update. The main change will be the introduction of a small inflationary process. Of course the community will need to approve any tokenomic changes.
We remain positive our Subnet will be operational at some point during Q1.
Gameswap DEX release
Following the Subnet launch focus will switch to the Gameswap DEX release, first for beta testers and then for the general public. NFT trading and protocol rewards via staking will be available from the get go.
New staking section
We have been adding additional views such as integrated bridge in the UI, Staking/Farming views, and many more that will be functional on launch day.
A superior bridging experience will help Gameswap attract liquidity to/from other chains
AAA Game dropping during first half of the year!
A lot has been talked about “the game”, and it almost seems like it’s the only topic, but we can’t stress how important it will be for the ecosystem so obviously we should all be very excited.
Not only will it be setting the bar for the quality of the assets that we expect to host on Gameswap, it will also introduce the NFT technology standards that future games will need to adopt there.
The game world is primarily set in an ‘Accretion Class’ asteroid, at geosynchronous orbit in 2126
Gameswap will be betting on new technology and it will be a requirement for listed games to integrate using it. The goal is to progressively build a AAA Metaverse, where true migration of assets from game to game is achieved flawlessly via standard primitives for trading, VFX and SFX.
The development for this game system is designed to be available as a basis for this Metaverse building process, a building block that can help the community build an open system moving forward.
Early Artwork (Q2'2021) of in-game AI (albeit a hacked AI from the Exomarts)
Weapons and characters in the game are expanded by an AI system which adds an extra dimension to the NFT collections, this is along with a number of other features that add a variety of new gameplay experiences are being kept mostly under wraps for now but will be revealed along with the game itself. Achieving composable NFTs across games will unlock new gaming experiences, this is part of a larger system that is built on a standard designed to be beneficial to both players and developers.
There are more than 30 types of weapons and other equipment being built with unparalleled details and most are ready now
The emphasis in this game world is about creating engaging stories with great characters and new, interesting gameplay.. Real quality of immersion is key, blurring the line between the real world and the game world is where the most fun lies.
We have been low-key leaking some details about what’s being built, and who is building it… so there are many reasons to be excited about the 1st upcoming trailer and game reveal in January. And obviously for the playable alpha launch during late Q1'2022 with priority access for the Niftyx community! 🎉
Next steps
The next update will cover details about the SHROOM migration after we discuss and nail down some details with the community.
We don’t want to steal more time from your NYE celebrations. So with this update we want to say thank you for being there supporting us all these past months and we want to give you reasons to believe that 2022 will be a great year for our ecosystem!
Happy Pew Year!!!
Niftyx Team | https://medium.com/@niftyx/niftyx-protocol-product-pipeline-and-rollout-strategy-85d11da38975 | [] | 2022-01-04 17:33:43.523000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Nft', 'Avalanche', 'Metaverse'] |
My Secret Visualisation Technique to Dramatically Improve Your Stories | Do you feel like you’re lost at sea when it comes to telling your stories?
You want to write a novel, short story, or screenplay, but keep drowning in the details. You know what it takes to write a decent story, and you’re in love with the story that you want to tell, but you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. You’re willing to write your ass off, and have written successfully in the past, but you choke at the sight of the blank page.
If you don’t do something about it then you’re going to die with this story inside you.
When you die your untold stories die with you. No-one can tell your stories as well as you can. No-one is coming to rescue you. No-one is going to do it for you. Your ship is sinking fast.
The good news is it doesn’t take much to turn your boat around and steer you in the right direction. You just need to think about story in a different way. Sometimes making a subtle shift in the way that you think is all it takes to stay afloat.
If you use the following visualisation technique it will radically improve your understanding of stories. It’s something that I normally only teach to my creative writing students. You’re welcome.
How to shape your story
What shape is a story? Make that shape with your hands.
Did you make a circle, a triangle, a square?
Some people even draw squiggly lines or try to trace a story arc in the air.
This makes sense — stories have shape and pattern.
Most plots follow the trajectory of an arc but often with twists and turns.
Now I want to show you the true shape of a story.
Make the shape of a bowl with your hands.
Fill your cupped hands with water — I’d advise doing this away from your computer or phone.
Try to hold your hands so that the water doesn’t leak out.
This is your story bowl.
Story Bowls
When readers look at your work they’re not interested in the words so much as the stuff that’s held inside them. No matter how much water you try to hold most of it will slip through your fingers unless your hands maintain a good shape.
That’s how it is with stories. The quality of your story determines how much of the world it can hold.
Visualise your story bowl as you write. Try and see the world in which the story takes place as a handful of water that you’re trying to keep inside the bowl. The words will come — don’t look for them, just focus on whatever it is that you hold in your hands.
You want to make of your story a bowl that can hold the world; and in order for your words to be able to hold the world they must be watertight.
Your story literally needs to hold water. If your story can be picked apart, then you’re going to get wet.
Lao Tzu said that a bowl was useful, not in itself, but because of the empty space and what it could hold. When you write you’re making a space for the world.
A story bowl has the potential to hold any amount of water. Sometimes a novel may only hold a cupful of water, because it is full of holes, whereas a haiku may hold the entire ocean.
It all depends upon the strength of the vessel. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/my-secret-visualisation-technique-to-dramatically-improve-your-stories-8b370ed7a721 | ['James Garside'] | 2020-08-26 02:33:33.260000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Productivity', 'Essay'] |
Setup the Home Theater Effectively with the Right Guidance | With regards to home theater arrangements, there is constantly a progressing debate over which is the best alternative, DIY or an expert installation. For well-informed customers that simply need a couple of little moves up to their media room, a DIY approach is perfect. If things a person pursuing is an experience that adversaries one being received in a business theater, at that point a professional installation is the best approach.
Align Equipment
When having correct speakers, it’s an ideal opportunity to adjust them to space. Most good-quality speakers include room adjustment technology which consequently tunes speakers to room measurements. They additionally might need to change bass settings relying upon family’s opinion. An AV technician can assist in making sense of perfect settings.
Pick Right Speakers
One of the most well-known issues with home theater arrangements is depending on low-quality speakers. It’s a basic issue, yet for some customers, it doesn’t have an especially simple arrangement. With specs that are just commonplace to those that buy into AV magazines, it’s hard to make sense of which to purchase. Expert professionals can be major assistance here. Sonos and Nest are the top quality brands widely used among people. Getting guidance from Google assistants to know how to setup Sonos and Nest speakers will help to get more ideas. For one, they’re acquainted with top sound producers and realize what to search for in a great home theater speaker. They’ll ensure speakers have enough capacity to occupy a room without overpowering it.
Sort out Room Layout
Think about the home theater system as a riddle. From speakers to seating, every part includes its optimal spot inside the room. A person should begin by making sense of where they need their seats to go. They ought to be midway found; if not a contorted sound will be heard as it bobs off walls. When a house owner has chosen where to put seats, it’s an ideal opportunity to get speakers. This is place numerous DIY installations turn out badly. Numerous clients accept a couple of speakers in the back and a couple in front will carry out the responsibility.
Make a Clear Signal Path
To get the most ideal sound, one has to get a great sign from speakers. An AV technician will ensure a person is utilizing media servers, home theater recipients. With a professional installation, an individual can ensure all hardware is appropriately connected with right links so the whole sign makes it unmistakably from source to speaker.
Improve Room Acoustics
Home theater arrangement isn’t just about introducing new hardware and considering it daily. An AV technician will also experience room that has been decided for a theater or assist with finding the best one if a person doesn’t have one at top of the priority list to discover approaches to enhance sound quality. More often, this implies adding a few carpets or drapes to shield waves from resonating all through the room. Sometimes, it might be important to include acoustic boards that help ingest sound.
Website:- Tech Tutor | https://medium.com/@techtutor/setup-the-home-theater-effectively-with-the-right-guidance-c5ccbdc892d8 | ['Tech Tutor'] | 2020-01-06 06:23:32.978000+00:00 | ['Nest', 'Tech Tutor', 'Speakers', 'Sonos', 'Home Theater'] |
4 Ways High Achievers Can Be Even More Productive | Henry Ford once commented, “Improved productivity means less human sweat, not more.” Wouldn’t we all benefit from Ford’s philosophy? Even more, if you are a high achiever, where you are genuinely opportunity seekers and go-getters. When it comes to achieving goals, there’s no stopping a high achiever. However, because of your excessive focus on creating outputs consistently and fast, you end up solely focusing on being efficient and not necessarily productive.
Picture a person whom you know who is very productive. Aargh, that’s you, right? Stupid me! Take a moment to really picture yourself. You may immediately see yourself as a person who is busy all the time. The one who is often using planners, to-do lists, productivity apps, etc. You are constantly pushing tasks, meeting deadlines, taking on more and more work, getting promoted, saying yes to anything and everything, and getting recognized for all your accomplishments and success stories. You are always following the leads for better and bigger opportunities. You don’t like being slowed down. Am I right?
We often associate busyness and efficiency with being productive, but they aren’t the same thing. Efficiency simply means output relative to input. You put in your inputs, you get certain outputs. Author and leadership guru Robin Sharma quotes, “Productivity is less about what you do with your time. And more about how you run your mind.” That’s precisely where we miss out on being genuinely productive. What’s missing from the equation is the element of effectiveness. What I mean by this is that high achievers can be even more productive if they integrate the element of being effective not just in relation to their company’s visions and goals, but also envisioning themselves doing different things in life upholding a mighty vision.
Let’s see what you need to be even more productive in helping you attain everything you want, achieving all that, and more.
Stop Drifting, Set Your Own Sails
With all the success already under your belt, you just can’t think of what you are doing wrong. As a high achiever what you accomplish in a day is much more than what others probably achieve in a week. Projects don’t move until you show up, deals don’t close if you are not around. Your company wants you to be a part of every department, every idea, and every plan. And because you are a high achiever, you simply do it without asking too many questions and you ensure that things get done on time. This drive gives you a feeling of moving forward. You are so keen on availing different chances since you never know how they can benefit you. Paradoxically, that’s where the problem lies. You don’t know what’s going to really benefit you and so you invariably focus on being just efficient and trying harder. If you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there. But will that destination be the place you’d really want to go to? The key to being really productive is to stop drifting around and set your sails and direction. What got you to the level of success you’re at today is saying YES to almost every opportunity. Now it's time to start considering the price of saying YES, tomorrow. What will get you to your next level of success is saying NO to almost everything else that’s not important to you. Start identifying what’s important and meaningful to you and start saying NO to everything else. Then see how your productivity and success soar to the next level.
Focus on Creating Impact, Not Just Getting Things Done
In his recent LinkedIn post, CEO Ryan Roslansky said, “The key to going from good to great is focus. There are always new features you can add or new markets you can enter, but it’s only by saying no that you succeed in the areas that matter.” As an entrepreneur, I admit I’m still working on saying NO. Often my focus drifts solely on doing and creating outcomes, checking things off my list without thinking about the impact it will create for myself, my family, my clients, and my community. There are times when I need to constantly pull myself back. It’s not just about getting things done, it’s about doing the things that matter the most, even if they just appear to be tiny actions at the moment. After studying human behavior for decades, Bill Gates deduced that most people overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in ten years. As high achievers, we exactly do that — focus on the short-term results and outcomes, which invariably sets us up as hamsters on the wheel. The key to the lock lies in shifting your focus from merely creating results and outcomes, to creating impact and meaning in everything you do. If you solely focus on getting things done, they will drain your energy. These activities, projects, habits, and people can be hard to spot because you’ve grown so accustomed to tolerating them. In the book, The One Thing, authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan dive deep into revealing how to master what matters the most to you. They reveal that productivity and success are a result of narrowing your concentration to one thing. When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. You become active and busy, yet you don’t seem to move closer to success, the real success that you want to taste. The tasks you end up doing and the outcomes you end up delivering are often unrelated to productivity. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, he cut Apple’s product lineup from 350 to 10. He shifted the company’s focus from outcomes to creating impact for his customers. And he did that by expiring 340 other Apple products that were existing back then. As long as you are working on your one thing, you’re making sure that when you’re working, you’re doing what’s most important. That’s when you know you are at your productive best.
Know What’s Taking Away Your Attention
As you move through your day, the number of items on your to-do list only keeps increasing. As high achievers, we often feel our obligation towards duties, schedules, and commitments. You juggle multiple balls in your hand.
When it comes to improving productivity, many people assume their attention span just isn’t robust enough. That’s quite true to an extent. Research suggests that human beings have an attention span of mere eight seconds — that’s even less than that of a goldfish! But who’s to blame all this? Our greed for instant results and instant gratification. In order to achieve that, we multitask. Our culture, our schooling, the way we conduct our professions, and our business all encourage multitasking.
When you check your email, read your messages, answer the phone, have a quick conversation, toggle back and forth between two or more tasks, your attention stays with that task even after you’ve moved onto the next. A typical workday often entails switching between several work activities, including projects, tasks, and meetings. Your logical thinking usually goes like “Let me make some progress on this activity, while I wait for some inputs from the previous activity.” And since you are waiting on some inputs from your colleague, your mind is constantly there. You refresh your emails, message her, or simply anticipate what you could expect and unconsciously keep dwelling on the previous task.
Associate Professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Sophie Leroy identified this as attention residue. Having spent over 17 years studying the brain and what allows us to have focused attention and productive behaviors, Dr. Leroy deduced that our brains simply weren’t designed to work on two mentally challenging tasks at once. In an interview, she said, “My research reveals that when we switch between tasks, say from Task A to Task B, you experience attention residue and keep thinking about Task A while working on Task B. It means you have fewer cognitive resources available to perform Task B. The impact? Your performance on Task B is likely to suffer, especially if Task B is cognitively demanding.”
Unaware of this principle, too many of us unconsciously limit our productive focus by weaving small acts of interruption throughout our day. Take on two things at a time, and your attention is divided. Take on the third, and something gets dropped. Be conscious about what’s detrimental to your productivity and substitute them for habits, actions, and environments in tune with your goals.
Take Something Complex and Explain It in a Simple Way
Can you take something complex and explain it in a simple way? Can you make things meaningful and relevant without making them unnecessarily complicated? When you can do that it means you actually understood it yourself. Albert Einstein says, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Those that take simplicity and make it complex nearly always seem to struggle to progress. Simplifying complex tasks and ideas is a rare trait, a common characteristic among ultra-productive people. They have the ability to see complex relationships and simplify them.
We do live in a world where we are pulled in so many different directions. We think productivity is something that’s complex. We look for something striking and complicated. We look to creating these complex systems and tools around us to build our productivity. It doesn’t need to sound complex to be a brilliant idea. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Faced with too much information on a particular topic or task, we see it as more complex than it is. In his book, Living with Complexity, author Donald A. Norman suggests that some complexity is desirable otherwise we start to view things as dull and uneventful. But when faced with two competing hypotheses, we are likely to choose the most complex one. Why? We often find it easier to face a complex problem than a simple one. The more expert we become at any subject, the more complexity we prefer. As high achievers, we automatically start believing that we need to attach complexity to everything we do.
American Jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” American author Andy Benoit said “Most geniuses — especially those who lead others — prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
Simplicity is not something negative. It’s not just simple. It requires some dedicated thought and a lot of insights and planning. And this simplicity comes on the other side of complexity. Any complex system is difficult to manage. As Charlie Munger once said, “Where you have complexity, by nature you can have fraud and mistakes.”
Simplicity leads to focus. Focus leads to clarity. Clarity leads to purpose. Purpose leads to productivity. If you want to take your productivity to the next level, be a simplifier. | https://medium.com/@sanketpai/4-ways-high-achievers-can-be-even-more-productive-ac36b7fdda4 | ['Sanket Pai'] | 2021-04-13 05:33:22.719000+00:00 | ['Simplicity', 'Productivity', 'High Achiever', 'Impact', 'Complexity'] |
Winnie-the-Pooh | Drawn by: Theewari
Who doesn’t love Winnie-the-Pooh? Once upon a time in England, there was a little boy whose name was Christopher Robin Milne. He had a toy bear called Edward Bear. Every day He was playing with this Edward Bear and the rest of his toy animals. One day his father, A. A. Milne saw this and decided Christopher and his toy animals best for a bedtime story. From that day on, they embraced by millions of children and adults. A. A. Milne named that story as Winnie-the-Pooh. After that, Christopher changed the name of his Edward Bear as Winnie.
Today, real Winnie-the-Pooh and four of his best friends — Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger have been living at the main branch of The New York Public Library.
I also have a toy Pooh Bear. He reminded me to draw him. | https://medium.com/illumination/winnie-the-pooh-a6461e59a3cc | ['Theewari Dulandiya'] | 2020-12-11 15:35:54.663000+00:00 | ['Drawing', 'Short Form', 'Non Fiction Story', 'Winnie The Pooh', 'Short Story'] |
Django 3.2 Async Support: What You Need to Know | Since the release of Django 3.0 in December of 2019, the wildly popular web framework has begun the journey to support Async through ASGI. For those new to Async, here is a little more context of ASGI:
ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) is a spiritual successor to WSGI, intended to provide a standard interface between async-capable Python web servers, frameworks, and applications.
But what does this all really mean? As a Django user and web developer, why does this matter to me?
Depending on the specifics of your Django project, async functions could allow you to make database updates or requests while still going about other processes. For many simple Django applications, this will not matter since the code is likely written in a way that does not do complex processes, but for use-cases like messaging services or perhaps a complex dashboard, these async functions can really solve a performance bottleneck.
Let’s take a quick look at this idea in practice:
In the above example, we can see the fetch_listings function is defined using the async keyword which allows that function to be called asyncronously. The function itself is simply retrieving entries from the database so this is one of the main potential use-cases of this async functionality.
Under the hood, any async function is returning a co-routine. This should not make much of a difference since Django takes care of managing this in many cases, but it’s good to be aware of the proverbial magic that is taking place.
Hopefully this gets you excited about the potential of async functions in Django! There are already a ton of amazing resources out there if you want to dive in so I suggest checking out the links below to get started. Happy coding!
Want to read more about Async in Django? Check out these articles: | https://medium.com/@logankilpatrick/django-3-2-async-support-what-you-need-to-know-5864a7b0259c | ['Logan Kilpatrick'] | 2021-07-12 13:07:29.050000+00:00 | ['Asynchronous', 'Python', 'Django', 'Web Development'] |
4 Common Mistakes When Using React to Avoid | 4 Common Mistakes When Using React to Avoid
Photo by Daniela Holzer on Unsplash
React is a great library nowadays. It eases the process to build beautiful and smooth web applications.
But there are some common mistakes if you don’t notice, it will create a burden for your project later.
Without any further ado, let’s dive right in to know what mistakes you should avoid when using React.
1. Create Superman Components
Superman components are components that can do many things.
I once experienced that kind of component from my coworker. He put many unrelated UI blocks into one component. Then he used a property to control the display for each block. Something like if viewId=0 then show view_0 .
class SupermanComponent extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
<div>
/* UI Block 1 */
</div>
<div>
/* UI Block 2 */
</div>
<div>
/* UI Block 3 */
</div>
<div>
/* UI Block 4 */
</div>
</div>
)
}
}
You may think it’s convenient at first. However, when the project grows, it will become a mess soon. Not to mention it will take time to investigate when problems occur.
A component should focus on only one thing. Don’t give it too much power to handle a lot of tasks for the sake of reusability and scalability.
For example, you should restrict NavBarComponent’s ability to navigation bar functionality. Unrelated other features should be removed. By doing that, you can reuse it anywhere you need.
Don’t be lazy by wrapping all features into one single component. Spend time to think what your desired component should look like and design it as unique as possible. These unique components are easier to maintain and work well together in the whole composable system.
BlockOne component:
class BlockOne extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
{ /* Block 1 */ }
</div>
)
}
} export default BlockOne;
BlockTwo component:
class BlockTwo extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
{ /* Block 2 */ }
</div>
)
}
} export default BlockTwo;
BlockThree component:
class BlockThree extends React.Component {
render() {
return (
<div>
{ /* Block 3 */ }
</div>
)
}
} export default BlockThree;
2. Pass Numbers as Strings
Take a look at the component below:
class UserDetails extends React.Component {
printGender() {
if (this.props.gender === 0) {
return ‘Male’;
}
if (this.props.gender === 1) {
return ‘Female’;
}
return ‘Other’;
} render() {
return (
<div>
Gender: {printGender()}
</div>
)
}
}
We’re using gender property as a number to decide the gender. 0 for Male , 1 for Female , and anything that differs from 0 and 1 for Other .
Now, let’s use the UserDetails component somewhere:
<UserDetails gender=“0” />
You expect the gender will be Male but it’s not. Because you pass 0 as a string not a number. So, the actual value will be Other .
To fix it, use curly brackets when passing numbers as props:
<UserDetails gender={0} />
3. Modify The State Directly
One of the most common mistakes that beginners make is modifying the state directly. Like this:
showButton() {
this.state.buttonVisibility = true;
}
You change the state directly and the React system doesn’t know about it. Thus, it might not trigger the re-rendering.
The React state should be immutable. If you try to modify it directly, errors or unexpected behaviors might occur like the UI isn’t re-rendered in the example above.
Instead of changing the state directly, you should use setState() . It will tell React, “Hey dude, I’m about to change something. Please be aware of it.” Then React will prepare everything to serve the change correctly.
showButton() {
this.setState({ buttonVisibility: true });
}
4. Use The State’s Value Right After setState()
showAvatar() {
this.setState({avatarVisibility: true}); if (this.state.avatarVisibility) {
// Do something
}
}
Can you point out the issue of the above snippet?
It’s that avatarVisibility is used right after it’s updated by setState() .
Why is it an issue?
This is a subtle mistake you may not notice but setState() works asynchronously.
It means if you use setState() to update a property, the change may not be applied immediately. That’s why using a property right after the updating can lead to unexpected behaviour.
However, you can solve this problem by using the second parameter of setState()
showAvatar() {
this.setState({avatarVisibility: true}, () => {
if (this.state.avatarVisibility) {
// Do something
}
});
}
By using the callback function, your calculation will work accurately because that callback function will be called after the state is updated.
Conclusion
Above are the common mistakes you probably make when working with React. I hope this article will help you avoid all of them to make sure everything works perfectly. | https://javascript.plainenglish.io/4-common-mistakes-when-using-react-to-avoid-ed9de4307de5 | ['Amy J. Andrews'] | 2020-12-03 08:05:36.332000+00:00 | ['Frontend Development', 'Web Development', 'Javascript Development', 'React', 'JavaScript'] |
What Is Google Ads And How Does It Work? | What Is Google Ads And How Does It Work?
Google Ads(previously known as Google AdWords) is an online advertising service that enables businesses to display ads on Google and its advertising network. It offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, where advertisers only pay when users click on their ads.
The system places targeted ads on web pages based on keywords determined by advertisers.
This system provides advertisers with a means of attaching an ad to specific content so that ads are relevant to the user’s search query or website content.
Advertisers bid for certain keywords with a maximum bid, which is the highest amount they are willing to pay per click for their ad to be shown associated with that keyword. When the user enters their search query, the keyword is matched against all possible ads, and the highest-ranking ad is displayed.
Google AdWords Keyword Tool lets you research specific keywords by determining how many times a keyword has been searched in Google over a period of time.
The Keyword Planner lists suggested keywords related to your original input, without requiring you to enter any information other than what language it should be generated in and how much you want it to be worth. You can also create custom columns in reports.
Google AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising service that is operated by Google. Its system allows advertisers to show their advertisements to users who are searching for certain keywords on Google. It is the main advertising platform for many businesses in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
AdWords funds Google’s entire search engine operations. A large fraction of their $38 billion revenue comes from these ads. AdWords offers options for businesses of all sizes, including options for small businesses that can be paid for by credit card. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution.
Reach your audience with cost-effective digital marketing. This platform helps you set up and run your online advertising campaigns on Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, all in one place.
Adzooma ensures you get the most out of your advertising campaigns and achieve the best results possible, whatever your current level. | https://medium.com/@somchandramong1/what-is-google-ads-and-how-does-it-work-52f4d8bd6a5d | ['Somchandra Gurumayum'] | 2021-12-29 02:59:51.304000+00:00 | ['Marketing Strategies', 'PPC Marketing', 'Google Adwords', 'Ads', 'Google Analytics'] |
Probability: classical, frequency-based and subjective approaches | Probability can be defined as a tool to manage uncertainty. Whenever an event is neither the certain one (with probability=1) nor the impossible one (probability=0), we are facing an uncertain situation, hence we need to attribute our event a likelihood of occurrence, which is, indeed, probability.
In this article, I’m going to present the three approaches to probability, which provide different interpretations of that concept and different assumptions to start with. Those approaches are:
Classical approach
Frequency-based (or empirical) approach
Subjective approach
Let’s dwell on all of them.
Classical approach
This approach traces back to the field where probability was first sistematically employed, which is gambling (flipping coins, tossing dice and so forth). Gambling problems are characterized by random experiments which have n possible outcomes, equally likely to occur. It means that none of them is more or less likely to occur than other ones, hence they are said to be in a symmetrical position.
The idea of the classical approach is that, given a collection of k elements out of n (where 0≤k≤n), the probability of occurrence of the event E represented by that collection is equal to:
To give you the intuition, let’s imagine you are tossing a dice and you want to predict the probability of the following collection of outcomes:
We know that the n possible outcomes are 6. The event “one” is 1 out of 6 outcomes, hence its probability is 1/6. Similarly, the event “five or six or one” (that is, the event in which one of those numbers turns out) represents 3 outcomes out of 6, hence the probability will be 3/6=0.5.
The classical approach is pretty intuitive, nevertheless it suffers from some pitfalls:
The assumption of symmetry is far too strong and irrealistic. Namely, imagine you want to know the probability of the event “tomorrow I will have a car accident”. The possible outcomes of this scenario are two: having a car accident or not having a car accident. Given that k=having a car accident, the probability of that event is 1/2, which, besides being a bit worrying, is not representative of the real likelihood of the event.
In this approach, there is no space for the concept of information, which is strictly related to probability. Let’s think about the previous example of the dice. Imagine you are told this dice is loaded and, instead of having the number “one”, it has two “six” (so the faces will be 2,3,4,5,6,6). Provided with this information, which probability would you attribute to the event “one”? Since it is impossible, the probability is equal to zero and not 1/6. Hence, probability does depend on the available information (the intuition will be clearer in the subjective approach)
Frequency-based (or empirical) approach
This approach was formally introduced in the field of natural science, where the assumption of symmetric position poorly fails. Instead, the idea on which this approach is based is that several experiments can be run under certain conditions considered as equivalent. Each experiment might lead either to success or to an insuccess. Hence, given n random experiments run under equivalent conditions, we define the frequency of “success” (which is an event E) as:
If we consider the “Empirical Law of Change”, which states that the more n increases, the more stable the frequency becomes, we can conclude that the limit of that frequency, for n->infinite, does exist and it is equal to the probability of the event “success”:
Let’s size the difference between the frequency-based and classical approach with the following example. Imagine you want to know the probability of the outcome of your tossed coin being “head”. You start with your classical approach: since the possible n outcomes are two (head or tail), the probability of “head” is 1/2=0.5.
Now you decide to follow the empirical approach, and you start tossing your coin several times, let’s say 100. Out of your attempts, you obtained 55 “head” and 45 “tail”. Hence, the frequency of the event “head” is 55/100=0.55, and it can approximate the probability of the event “head”.
As you can see, we obtained two different probabilities (0.5 vs o.55) for the same event. The key difference is the role of information: after 100 experiments, you gathered empirical evidence that “head” occurred more often than “tail”: it might be that your coin is not perfect, and you can incorporate this information while formulating your conclusions.
This approach is not lacking of criticisms though:
Again, there is one big assumption which is the convergence property of the frequency, whose limit might not exist
Repeating experiments under equivalent conditions might not be possible
There are events extremely rare, for which is impossible to run many simulations (think about extreme natural events like tsunami).
Subjective approach
Developed by probabilist B. de Finetti, this is the most intuitive definition of probability. Indeed, according to that approach, the probability of an event is the degree of belief a person attaches to that event, based on his/her available information. This reasoning holds only under the assumption of rationality, which assumes that people act coherently.
Let’s provide a more specific definition. Imagine a lottery where you can win an amount of money equal to S if event E occurs. To participate, you have to buy one ticket. Now, which is the price you would be willing to pay to participate in the lottery? If you indicate that price as π(E, S), the probability of event E is given by:
Imagine you want to predict the probability that your favorite football team will win the match tomorrow. You have the possibility to participate in a lottery where, if the team wins, you obtain a prize of 1000€, otherwise you gain nothing. Which is the price you would be willing to pay to participate? Let’s say you are very confident about your team capabilities and you are willing to pay 700€. Hence, the probability your team wins the match tomorrow is:
This last approach does not count serious criticisms, since it resolves some pitfalls of the previous approaches (like the impossibility of repeating experiments under equivalent conditions, because of the uniqueness of many events) and, at the same time, does not contrast with other theories. Indeed, the evaluator who has to decide the price of the lottery is not prevented from running experiments, compute the frequency of successes and use this information to propose a price.
Basically, what in other approaches was a rule, in the subjective approach is an option. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/probability-classical-frequentist-and-subjective-approach-3ded266b8845 | ['Valentina Alto'] | 2019-10-14 08:49:05.564000+00:00 | ['Subjective Approach', 'Statistics', 'Gambling', 'Probability', 'Empirical Approach'] |
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